The Understanding, Prevention and Control of Human Cancer is an account of how a married couple opened understanding of environmental carcinogenesis. Elizabeth Cavert and James A. Miller showed that enzymes of the human body activate and enable otherwise benign organic chemicals to combine with DNA in such a manner that cancer results. Their work is of particular note because cancer causes more loss of life-years than the sum of all other causes of death--and, as the President's (USA) Cancer Panel warned, environmental carcinogenesis is a form of cancer that has been previously...

The sudden appearance of portolan charts, realistic nautical charts of the Mediterranean and Black Sea, at the end of the thirteenth century is one of the most significant occurrences in the history of cartography. Using geodetic and statistical analysis techniques these charts are shown to be mosaics of partial charts that are considerably more accurate than has been assumed. Their accuracy exceeds medieval mapping capabilities. These sub-charts show a remarkably good agreement with the Mercator map projection. It is demonstrated that this map projection can only have been an intentional...

Mental health and madness have been challenging topics for historians. The field has been marked by tension between the study of power, expertise and institutional control of insanity, and the study of patient experiences. This collection contributes to the ongoing discussion on how historians encounter mental ‘crises’. It deals with diagnoses, treatments, experiences and institutions largely outside the mainstream historiography of madness – in what might be described as its peripheries and borderlands (from medieval Europe to Cold War Hungary, from the Atlantic slave coasts to Indian...