Kategoria BISAC: Science >> History

Queer Feminist Science Studies takes a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to this cutting-edge area of inquiry between women's, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS). The essays here "queer"--or denaturalize and make strange--ideas that are taken for granted in both areas of study. Reimagining the meanings of and relations among queer and feminist theories and a wide range of scientific disciplines, contributors foster new critical and creative knowledge-products that attend to shifting and uneven operations of power,...

Leprosy and colonialism investigates the history of leprosy in Suriname within the context of Dutch colonial power and racial conflict, from the plantation economy and the age of slavery to the modern colonial state. It explores the relationship between the modern stigmatization and exclusion of people affected with leprosy, and the political tensions and racial fears originating in colonial slave society. In the book colonial sources are read from both the perspective of the rulers and of the ruled. By investigating the complex reciprocities between knowledge, attitudes, and...

This book draws on over twenty years' investigation of scientific archives in Europe, Australia, and other former British settler colonies. It explains how and why skulls and other bodily structures of Indigenous Australians became the focus of scientific curiosity about the nature and origins of human diversity from the early years of colonisation in the late eighteenth century to Australia achieving nationhood at the turn of the twentieth century. The last thirty years have seen the world's indigenous peoples seek the return of their ancestors' bodily remains from museums and medical...

In The Foundations of Immunology and their Pertinence to Medicine, Peter Bretscher describes how the few foundational concepts of immunology came about. He traces Jenner's development of safe vaccination against small pox in the 1700's, and how it led to the recognition of infectious disease by Koch and Pasteur in the 1880's, and to the discovery of the Principles of Vaccination. The formulation of the Clonal Selection Theory in the 1950's still provides a foundation for contemporary analysis of the immune system. Peter describes the main, and sometimes conflicting concepts, proposed in...

In The Foundations of Immunology and their Pertinence to Medicine, Peter Bretscher describes how the few foundational concepts of immunology came about. He traces Jenner's development of safe vaccination against small pox in the 1700's, and how it led to the recognition of infectious disease by Koch and Pasteur in the 1880's, and to the discovery of the Principles of Vaccination. The formulation of the Clonal Selection Theory in the 1950's still provides a foundation for contemporary analysis of the immune system. Peter describes the main, and sometimes conflicting concepts, proposed in...

Although astrology was viewed with suspicion by the medieval church, it became a major area of inquiry for the renowned cardinal and scholar Pierre d'Ailly, whose astrological and apocalyptic writings had a significant influence on Christopher Columbus. D'Ailly's writings on the stars, the focus of this book, clearly illustrate the complex relationships among astrology, science, and Christian thinking in the late Middle Ages. Through an examination of his letters, sermons, and philosophical, astrological, and theological treatises, Laura Ackerman Smoller reveals astrology's appeal as a...

Although astrology was viewed with suspicion by the medieval church, it became a major area of inquiry for the renowned cardinal and scholar Pierre d'Ailly, whose astrological and apocalyptic writings had a significant influence on Christopher Columbus. D'Ailly's writings on the stars, the focus of this book, clearly illustrate the complex relationships among astrology, science, and Christian thinking in the late Middle Ages. Through an examination of his letters, sermons, and philosophical, astrological, and theological treatises, Laura Ackerman Smoller reveals astrology's appeal as a...

What can fashionable ideas, blind faith, or pure fantasy possibly have to do with the scientific quest to understand the universe? Surely, theoretical physicists are immune to mere trends, dogmatic beliefs, or flights of fancy? In fact, acclaimed physicist and bestselling author Roger Penrose argues that researchers working at the extreme frontiers of physics are just as susceptible to these forces as anyone else. In this provocative book, he argues that fashion, faith, and fantasy, while sometimes productive and even essential in physics, may be leading today's researchers astray in three...