This chapter examines the use of vegetal analogy in late Renaissance physiology through the case of the German physician Daniel Sennert (1572–1637). It is centered on Sennert’s explanation of generation, in particular the transmission of life through the vegetative soul within the seed, as developed in his early works on medicine and alchemy, the…[Read more]

Philology haunts the humanities, through both its defendants and its detractors. This article examines the construction of philology as the premier science of the long nineteenth century in Europe. It aims to bring the history of philology up to date by taking it seriously as a science and giving it the kind of treatment that has dominated the…[Read more]

Medicine has long framed race relations in the Caribbean-that basin where African and European cultures have met from the beginning of the Colonial Period to the twentieth century. Whether Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum and President of the Royal Society of London, who as a physician wrote about African medical beliefs and…[Read more]

Gonzalo Fernós Maldonado (1887-1966) fue uno de los arquitectos más destacados en Puerto Rico durante las primeras dïcadas del siglo XX, cuyos logros y habilidades lamentablemente han quedado en el olvido colectivo. Este libro, escrito por su nieto, trata de resucitar la historia de su vida en un momento histórico muy diferente al con…[Read more]

The Pan-American Scientific Congresses ushered a new scientific era in Latin America. Bringing together scientists, engineers, and medical researchers from both South and North America, they facilitated the exchange of ideas between the two regions at the beginning of the twentieth century. Nobel Prize thinkers such as Albert Michelson and others,…[Read more]

Science and democracy are two of the most cherished values of Western Civilization, so much so that they are often associated with each other. With science, it is held, comes democracy. But, will democracy necessarily blossom with the seed of science? Inversely, does the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory on December 1, 2020 represent a predictor…[Read more]

When the same $9 billion allocated to a nation’s annual budget (Puerto Rico 2015) is spent on a single scientific instrument (Hubble telescope) or to administer a single scientific facility for a year (CERN), we might presume that science is today a monolithic enterprise, akin to what the pyramids of Ancient Egypt had been in their day. Yet when…[Read more]

Los Congresos Científicos Pan-Americanos abrieron una nueva época de intercambio científico no solamente dentro de los pa?ses de América Latina sino entre estos y los Estados Unidos. Figuras importantes como Albert. A. Michelson, ganador del Premio Nobel en 1907, regularmente atendieron estas conferencias, así ayudando a difundir los últimos avanc…[Read more]

Biology and Ethics provides a historian’s perspective of the attempts to ground an ethics within a biological framework. Aside from its analysis of schools as social Darwinism, eugenics, and sociobiology, it attempts to evaluate their veracity using cases as Japan’s Unit 731, the Guatemala Syphilis study, and others. In spite of the much disputed…[Read more]

The purpose of this book is to analyse the role which the development of the German Altertumswissenschaft at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries had (in combination with the English-French intellectual base) on the birth of the Romantic reception of the ancient traditions in Poland.

One of the recurring themes in the public perception of containment policies during the current COVID-19 pandemic are the supposedly uneven and everchanging measures taken up by international, national and local authorities. This is especially the case in countries with a federal structure, like Germany. Not surprisingly, historical containment…[Read more]

This chapter analyses the image production practices of the Goettingen university anatomist and natural historian Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and the Berlin artis Daniel Chodowiecki (1726-1801) when they collaborated on Blumenbach’s Beyträge zur Naturgeschichte (1790). Blumenbach wanted Chodowiecki to produce family scences for each of…[Read more]

The Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville was one of the most widely read works of the early Middle Ages, as is evidenced by the number of surviving manuscripts. August Eduard Anspach’s handlist from the 1940s puts their number at almost 1,200, of which approximately 300 were estimated to have been copied before the year 1000. This article, based on a…[Read more]

Literary journalism offers an important way for explaining the complexity of the scientific world to a lay audience. An analysis of two of Richard Preston’s pieces published by The New Yorker, “The Mountains of Pi” and “Capturing the Unicorn” and how they give emphasize science-in-the-making.

The genesis and growth of minerals, as well as the existence in ore veins of such organic features as ‘seeds’, ‘matrices’, and ‘nourishment’, remained central and recurrent issues for natural philosophers, technicians, alchemists and practitioners throughout early modern Europe. By providing an overview of the main themes, voices, and concurrent…[Read more]

In the history of early modern science, the German physician Andreas Libavius (Halle, Saxony, c.1550–Coburg, Bavaria, 1616) is known for having promoted the institutionalization of alchemy in the academic sphere along with the creation of laboratories and instruments. Libavius was also remarkable for his extended network of scholarly friends and f…[Read more]

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway relies on mutually incompatible grounding gestures, one of which describes the relationality of an always already material-discursive reality, while the other seeks to ground this relation one-sidedly in matter. These two materialisms derive from the gesture she borrows from the New Materialist (and o…[Read more]

The chapter argues that disciplinary memory claims in US American communication research have become smaller, more parochial, and less potent, as their underlying referent—the discipline—has splintered in the wake of the digital in the mid-1990s. For decades after its institutionalization in the 1950s, US communication research had relied on gra…[Read more]

NASA’s Viking probes were launched in 1975. Six years earlier an International Planetary Patrol Network of telescopes was set up to observe Martian surface conditions. Sites were chosen to provide continuous observing, and were located in Hawaii, eastern Australia, India, South Africa, Chile, and central USA. Negotiations for a facility to be s…[Read more]

Focussing the Nasa’s Opportunity Rover, the essay claims the field of creativity as definitively human, supported by Vilém Flusser’s understanding the the “apparatus”.