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In 2015 Dhruv Raina published Needham's Indian Network: The Search for a Home for the History of Science in India (1950-1970), bringing to light the long-range networks that institutionalized the disciplinary history of science in post-colonial India, and demonstrating the intellectual and infrastructural contributions of Joseph Needham (1900-1995) in this endeavour. This paper takes a different approach and turns to the way that Needham perceived Indian vis-à-vis Chinese civilization, and the role India played in Needham's historiography of science. It turns out that Needham's most sustained engagement with India could be found in his histories of medicine, bodily practices and alchemical traditions. In the first section of the paper, I outline the key concepts of 'Grand Titration' and 'oecumenical science' that animated Needham's historiography, which clarifies why Chinese medicine, especially acupuncture, occupies a privileged status. The second section elaborates on Needham's scholarship and vision of acupuncture, involving the verification of acupuncture's reality and efficacy via Western biomedicine. He thought acupuncture would be China's unique contribution to a new 'universal medicine' in the modern age, but by contrast Needham saw little worth refurbishing in Indian medicine, arguing via an investigation in yoga that Indian practices were generally less 'materialist' and less 'proto-scientific'. In the third section, I turn my attention to Needham's preoccupation with the history of alchemy around the world, and discuss his theorization on transmission and circulation of scientific knowledge. I comment on Needham's commitment to the thesis that European alchemy was a melting pot of Chinese, Indian, Persian, Arabic, Greek, Egyptian and Roman ideas and practices. While Needham reserved his 'deepest love' and 'profoundest desire' for Chinese civilization, India on the other hand often occupied a secondary status in his historical accounts, and in the conclusion I move from a critique of Needham's preconceptions to reflect on the writing of the history of non-Western science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scope and mission of the history of science have been constant objects of reflection and debate within the profession. Recently, Lorraine Daston has called for a shift of focus: from the history of science to the history of knowledge. Such a move is an attempt at broadening the field and ridding it of the contradictions deriving from its modernist myth of origin and principle of demarcation. Taking the move from a pluralistic concept of medicine, the present paper explores the actual and possible contributions that a history of knowledge can offer to the history of medicine in particular. As we will argue, the history of medicine has always been a history of knowledge, but for good reasons has always stuck to the concept of medicine as its object and problem throughout the ages, including the modern, scientific one. We argue that, in the history of medicine, the demarcation between scientific and non‐scientific represents an accident, but is not foundational as in the case of natural science. Furthermore, the history of medicine programmatically played a role in at least two academic domains (history proper and medical education), adjusting historical narratives of medical knowledge to its audience. Accordingly, we underscore that the history of both science and medicine, as traditionally defined, already provides room for almost the whole spectrum of approaches to history. Moreover, their different myths of origin can, and indeed must, be included in the reflexivity of the historical gaze. We argue that the position towards a history of science, medicine, or knowledge is not a question of narrative or theory, rather, it is a question of relevance and awareness of extant contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Berichte zur Wissenschafts-Geschichte is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper explores a little‐known aspect of Norway's ‘closed‐fist’ policy and union history that played a role in the fate of the Union Trade Act during the dissolution of Norway's union with Sweden, namely the controversy over livestock trade. By way of this controversy and the establishment of Norwegian veterinary services the paper points to the way in which statistics and veterinary medicine may act as a form of political technology. In this case it took part in producing a national territory. Hence, science took part in carving a way out of the union. Theoretically, what the paper argues is the importance of studying economic and political history in combination with the history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Over the past 30 years, the international conference on Artificial Intelligence in MEdicine (AIME) has been organized at different venues across Europe every 2 years, establishing a forum for scientific exchange and creating an active research community. The Artificial Intelligence in Medicine journal has published theme issues with extended versions of selected AIME papers since 1998.Objectives: To review the history of AIME conferences, investigate its impact on the wider research field, and identify challenges for its future.Methods: We analyzed a total of 122 session titles to create a taxonomy of research themes and topics. We classified all 734 AIME conference papers published between 1985 and 2013 with this taxonomy. We also analyzed the citations to these conference papers and to 55 special issue papers.Results: We identified 30 research topics across 12 themes. AIME was dominated by knowledge engineering research in its first decade, while machine learning and data mining prevailed thereafter. Together these two themes have contributed about 51% of all papers. There have been eight AIME papers that were cited at least 10 times per year since their publication.Conclusions: There has been a major shift from knowledge-based to data-driven methods while the interest for other research themes such as uncertainty management, image and signal processing, and natural language processing has been stable since the early 1990s. AIME papers relating to guidelines and protocols are among the most highly cited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although sexuality is a theoretical concept not invented until the nineteenth century, sexual matters have of course been discussed in premodern cultures, though under other labels. In the premodern Islamic world, traditional jurisprudence (fiqh) with its inclusion of the thematic fields of ‘marriage’ (nikāh) and ‘ritual purity’ (tahāra) offered an opportunity to speak about the details of sexual life. In addition, premodern Islamic culture had a separate science concerned with sexual intercourse. ‘Ilm al-bāh, as it was called (bāh being the Arabic word for coitus), was a hybrid discipline in which different scientific concepts and literary genres were intermingled. But since all available information on sexual matters has been accumulated under the umbrella of this discipline, it can be considered a precursor to modern sexual science. Whereas most of what has been published about ‘ilm al-bāh in the West until now is limited to mere bibliographical surveys, this paper shall offer a more theoretical appraisal of this field of knowledge which also takes into account the epistemological shifts over the last decades in the historiography of sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses two 'famous' dissections that go into the Black material interior of Victorian era celebrity: Sarah Baartman's dissection by French scientist George Cuvier as it is rehearsed by press of the day and artists, biographers and historians in its aftermath and Mary Seacole's description of her autopsy of a New Grenadian infant, a victim of cholera, in her 1857 Crimean war memoir. Both are infamous events in the spectacle of Black women's celebrity bodies in the nineteenth century, elucidating how this celebrity is undergirded by cultures of death and, more acutely, dissection that haunt the radical rise in the classificatory scientific 'order' of the day. Within a historic culture of public autopsies and the pilfering of Black and poor cadavers from cemeteries to fuel medical education, this essay asks where do these famous dissections and their afterlives fit into the nineteenth-century narratives of race, science and sexuality? What can the fixation on the inside of the body tell us about the intersection of the nineteenth-century cultures of death, racial classification and celebrity? I argue that the racialised, sexualised cadaver and the act of autopsy are objects and authors of nineteenth-century Black women's celebrity as surely as live, visual and print culture representations of the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Uma das maneiras mais profícuas de se pesquisar a história da medicina brasileira na passagem do século XIX para o XX é a investigação da trajetória profissional de determinados médicos que tiveram posições de relevo no processo de mudanças que atingiu o campo médico à época. Neste sentido, este artigo tem por objetivo analisar a carreira acadêmico-profissional de Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, a partir da noção de campo científico de Pierre Bourdieu. Partindo do princípio de que o campo médico é um espaço de confrontos estruturalmente determinado pelos embates passados, onde os médicos buscam monopolizar a autoridade/competência científica, considero que o perfil médico de Nina Rodrigues é um indicador preciso do processo de especialização e concorrência que se desenvolveu naquele momento.One of the most productive ways of investigating the history of Brazilian medical practice at the turn of this century is to focus on the fruitful and ambiguous careers of those physicians that played an important role in the changes affecting the medical field at that time. This paper aims at analyzing the scientific career of physician-anthropologist Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, taking as its conceptual basis Pierrre Bourdieu's notion of "scientific field ". The paper's point of departure is the notion that the medical field is a space of confrontation that is structurally determined by previous conflicts in which physicians try to monopolize claims to scientific authority and competence. Nina Rodrigues' medical profile appears in this context as a precise indicator of the process of specialization and competition that took place during that period.

The article discusses the history of science in Greece. The Greeks gradually became skeptical of the supernatural influence upon their well-being and became more interested in explaining natural phenomena and understanding human nature, life and disease on grounds of rational thought. The existing knowledge of medicine was taken into consideration by Hippocrates, who ultimately changed the course of medical study by becoming the leader of scientific medicine.

This essay shows that early modern practices that used human bodily matter cannot be – as hitherto – explained by the absence of the emotion of disgust nor as being conducted in spite of disgust. Instead, it proposes to read those practices' changing history as part of the history of the 'paradox of disgust'. Four case studies (on anatomy, excrement, mummies and skulls) demonstrate that disgust was highly productive: it attracted fascination, allowed physicians to fashion themselves, and was even believed capable of healing. Over time and for complex reasons, however, the productive side of disgust declined. Combining current approaches in the history of emotions and material culture studies, this essay sets out not only to propose a new narrative for the changing role of disgust in early modern science and societies, but also to explore how variations in settings and human intervention changed the way emotions were used and perceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is focused on Hippocrates’ Anatomia, a short text in his monumental work about medicine. The pages seem to be there just about accidentally, and they incorporate a lot of elements adapted from Democritus. Its singularity offers an interesting point of view about Hippocrates himself and in general about History of Medicine.

Recent work in the history of science has questioned the Eurocentric nature of the field and sought to include a more global approach that would serve to displace center–periphery models in favor of approaches that take seriously local knowledge production. Historians of Iberian colonial science have taken up this approach, which involves reliance on indigenous knowledge traditions of the Americas. These traditions present a number of challenges to modern researchers, including availability and reliability of source material, issues of translation and identification, and lack of systematization. This essay explores the challenges that emerged in the author’s attempt to compile a pre-contact Nahua pharmacopeia, the reasons for these challenges, and the ways they may – or may not – be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A historical assessment of the origin of the dose-response in modern toxicology and its integration as a central concept in biology and medicine is presented. This article provides an overview of how the threshold, linear and biphasic (i.e., hormetic) dose-response models emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and competed for acceptance and dominance. Particular attention is directed to the hormetic model for which a general description and evaluation is provided, including its historical basis, and how it was marginalized by the medical and pharmacology communities in the early decades of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading and discussing classic papers can be an effective way of teaching graduate students how to learn the skills they will need for a career in research, as Indira M Raman explains.

The paper is devoted to the peculiarities of scientific investigation organizing in the Tomsk Medical Institute in the 30th years of XX century. In these years, the Tomsk Medical Institute became self-dependent medical institute of higher education.

Copyright of Dynamis is the property of Dynamis - Facultad de Medicina de la Universidad de Granada and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In thinking of the epistemology of the sciences, experts on Chinese thought have long acknowledged traditions of empirical knowledge there. But until recently interpretation has been shaped by the negative question, 'why didn't modern science arise in China?' made famous by the work of Joseph Needham. This essay brings together the results of several multi-disciplinary conferences on specialist case records in pre-modern China. Named 'an', with roots in bureaucratic record-keeping, casebooks developed as a textual genre in law, medicine, philosophy and religion. The form of the case, based on analogy rather than either deduction or induction, elicits patterns without erasing individuality of particular circumstances. As a 'style of reasoning' claiming validity for a judgment, it points to problem-solving interventions in the world rather than law-like representations of it. The Chinese examples discussed here are about the field-specific expertise needed to find grounds for action in a world of historical contingency. These indigenous Chinese forms of 'thinking with cases' are themselves a 'case' pointing toward the plurality of the sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]