Abstracts Archive

After the discovery of X rays and radioactive elements in the turn of the 19th century, the deleterious health effects of radiation were greatly ignored. Most experiments regarding the physiological effects of radiation were about the possibilities of their therapeutic use. Radiation widespread appl...

Manuscripts of medical texts composed in medieval and early modern South Asia frequently included glossaries (“farhang”) of technical terminology. These were structured around entries for disease categories in Arabic, with translations in Persian and "hindī" (vernacular South Asian languages). ...

Translation plays a central role in the historiography of Islamic science and medicine. Two episodes of translation bookend the “Golden Age”: the translation from Greek to Arabic, and that from Arabic to Latin. In both processes, translation is understood as a mode of acquisition and/or loss whe...

Eighteenth-century France was marked by distinctly “odored” phenomena. The rise of industry led to the emission of mephitic aerial pollutants while disease outbreaks caused an overcrowding of hospitals, which became noxious institutions in many cities. These smelly realities and the anxieties th...

The Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias occidentales written by the Spanish naturalist and physician Nicolás de Monardes was published in three parts in the 1560s and ‘70s. The book dealt mainly with medical products from the New World and was widely distributed throug...

At the height of the Cold War, Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, one of the most prolific American surgeons of the 20th century, made several trips to China and the USSR to survey the medical landscape on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He toured clinics and medical schools and met with barefoot doctors. ...

The common tale about the “chemical revolution” in psychiatry is that it begins with the introduction of neuroleptics in the 1950s. The latter led, as most historians argue, to the dismantling of mental asylums: patients suffering from mental illnesses were increasingly treated as out-patients. ...

In 1651, John French (1616-1657) offered the English reading public a new handbook: The Art of Distillation. The work represents the fruits of French’s wide-ranging reading and translating practices and includes large sections (with images) extracted from Johann Rudolph Glauber’s (1604-1670) Fur...

In response to a request by the Navy’s Sick and Hurt Board to investigate the recent sickly state of HMS Foudroyant in March 1804, Plymouth Hospital Governor Richard Creyke summarised the best available advice for creating a heathy environment on board ship: “We strongly recommended Whitewashing...