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Of Books and Google Books
In the summer of 1979, I helped to proofread Never at Rest, the biography of Isaac Newton by my graduate advisor Sam Westfall. Being the meticulous scholar he was (a trait I hope he conveyed to me),...
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Sendak and Hoban
Within the past year, two of my favorite authors died, Maurice Sendak and Russell Hoban. Sendak was undoubtedly the better known, author of picture books such as the wonderful Where the Wild Things...
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The Codex is Dead, Long Live the Codex
Yesterday’s New York Times included this paean to MOOCs by Tom Friedman, fan of all things techy even if he does not understand their implications very well. MOOCs (massive open online courses) were...
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Ethical Evolution
Terra, the research magazine of Oregon State University, has just published this article about my book Experimenting with Humans and Animals (Johns Hopkins, 2003) as part of an ongoing series on...
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The work of printing
Last week, while at the massive International Congress of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (ICHSTM) in Manchester, England (more on that in another post), I visited the John Rylands...
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An Ostrich for the New Year
Aristotle had not been entirely certain that the ostrich was a bird, but it took pride of place among the birds in the Versailles menagerie and in the 1676 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle...
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A Sonnet to an Anatomist
Montpellier surgeon Barthélémy Cabrol (1529-1603) first published his Alphabet anatomic in 1594. A series of tables that graphically represented the parts of the body, it was immensely popular, with...
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“Can Cookery,” 1928
28 January 2015 At Powell’s the other day, I picked up a pamphlet-style cookbook from 1928 called The Book of Can Cookery, published by Woman’s World magazine. Not to be confused with the modern...
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Modiano and the Weight of History
I picked up my first novel by Patrick Modiano in a bookstore in Strasbourg last fall. He had just won the Nobel Prize and it was obvious that the bookstore had scrambled to find copies of his books:...
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The biologist in the ashram (with a walk-on by Harpo Marx)
12 September 2015 A week ago I drove up to Portland with my grad student Elizabeth to interview the biologist John Tyler Bonner. John Tyler Bonner, photo from Princeton Alumni Weekly, 2013 We were both...
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The Courtiers’ Anatomists
A long excerpt from The Courtiers’ Anatomists has just appeared on the excellent blog The Learned Pig — see it at: http://www.thelearnedpig.org/the-courtiers-anatomists/3067
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The Witches
This review appears in The Public Historian, vol. 38, no. 2 (May 2016), pp. 98-99 The Witches: Salem 1692 by Stacy Schiff. New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown and Company, 2015. ix + 496 pp.;...
View ArticleVesalius in Wonderland
Last month, artist Lisa Temple-Cox had a residency at Oregon State for two weeks as part of the Horning Series on "The Material Body" that I organized this academic year. Among the numerous talks and...
View ArticleDiscovering Brazil
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 2017 I am sitting in the sun on the roof of my hotel in Rio, looking at the heavily forested hills to the east, the high rise hotels lining the Copacabana to the south, the...
View ArticleTranslation as a Way of Life
My essay on my experiences with translating has just appeared, open access, in Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society.
View ArticleThe Nun with Blue Teeth
I’m always looking for skeleton stories. But it’s not often that I come across an article in the scientific literature that includes references to the ancient Greek physician and herbalist Dioscorides...
View ArticleInstructions for a voyage, 1609
A few weeks ago I looked at some manuscripts of the French intellectual and antiquarian Nicolas-Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France. I describe Peiresc...
View ArticleInterview with the ASECS Grad Caucus
I've been a member of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) for over thirty years. I was recently interviewed for the ASECS Graduate Caucus website. Here's the link:...
View ArticleThe Head of a Roman
For the past few weeks, many news outlets have reported that the skull of Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus, ca. 23-79 CE), the Roman naturalist and statesman who died at Pompeii, has been...
View ArticleThe Dance of Death and the first printed skeleton
The earliest printed image of a human skeleton is this cartoonish image from a German block book from the 1450s. [i] It is one of a series of skeletons in the popular genre known as the danse macabre...
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