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Throughout our history, humans have been captivated by mythic beasts and legendary creatures. Tales of Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness monster are part of our collective experience. This book explores and elucidates the fascinating world of cryptozoology. This is an entertaining, educational, and definitive text on cryptids, presenting the arguments both for and against their existence and systematically challenging the pseudoscience that perpetuates their myths. After examining the nature of science and pseudoscience and their relation to cryptozoology, the book takes on Bigfoot; the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman, and its cross-cultural incarnations; the Loch Ness monster and its highly publicized sightings; the evolution of the Great Sea Serpent; and Mokele Mbembe, or the Congo dinosaur. It concludes with an analysis of the psychology behind the persistent belief in paranormal phenomena, identifying the major players in cryptozoology, discussing the character of its subculture, and considering the challenge it poses to clear and critical thinking in our increasingly complex world.

About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom, and the History of Writing Scientifically is a long-term history of scientists’ methodological discussions about experimentation in the life sciences. It directs attention to working scientists’ methods discourse, its history and meanings, and its functions in scientific publications. The term “methods discourse” comprises all kinds of methods-related statements in scientific writing, including explicit commitments to experimentalism, descriptions of protocols, and justifications of methodological concepts and strategies. The book examines the complex trajectory of methods discourse from the mid-17th to the early 20th century through the history of snake venom research. Because experiments with poisonous snakes were both challenging and controversial, experimenters produced very detailed descriptions and discussions of their approaches, making venom research uniquely suitable for a long-term history of methodological thought and the various factors impinging on its development. The book offers an analytic framework for the study of methods discourse, its history, and the history of how experimenters organized and presented their thoughts about methods in writings about their experiments.

Although General Practice is the commonest career choice for medical graduates, and the majority of encounters between doctors and patients take place in general practice, there was no formal teaching in or about the subject before the start of the NHS in 1948. Nor were there any staff trained in the discipline in a paid university position. This Book traces the revolution in medical education that took place between 1948 and 2000 resulting in every one of the then 31 established medical schools having a professorial appointment in the discipline, and some 15% of the medical curriculum nationally being taught in the general practice setting by general practitioners. Each of the 21 chapters describes how this change came about (the London chapter describes the process across 11 different schools), and captures the struggles of visionary doctors (most but not all of whom were general practitioners) to establish a new discipline against a mix of protectionism, apathy and sometimes hostility from the existing medical establishment. The Book includes a more general analysis of the recurrent themes which were common across the university system, and of the long process of trying to establish the financial parity with existing clinical disciplines which was critical to allowing the new discipline first to survive and more recently to thrive.

Technology demands uniformity from human beings who encounter it. People encountering technology, however, differ from one another. Thinkers in the early twentieth century, observing the awful consequences of interactions between humans and machines—death by automobiles or dismemberment by factory machinery, for example—developed the idea of accident proneness: the tendency of a particular person to have more accidents than most people. In tracing this concept from its birth to its disappearance at the end of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique history of technology focused not on innovations but on their unintended consequences. It shows that as the machine era progressed, the physical and economic impact of accidents coevolved with the rise of the insurance industry and trends in twentieth-century psychology. After World War I, psychologists determined that some people are more accident prone than others. This designation signaled a shift in social strategy toward minimizing accidents by diverting particular people away from dangerous environments. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, the idea of accident proneness gradually declined, and engineers developed new technologies to protect all people, thereby introducing a hidden, but radical, egalitarianism. Lying at the intersection of the history of technology, the history of medicine and psychology, and environmental history, this book is an ambitious intellectual analysis of the birth, growth, and decline of an idea that will interest anyone who wishes to understand how Western societies have grappled with the human costs of modern life.

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. Aesthetic Science revises this interpretation, showing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. Seeking to obtain knowledge of the natural world through their senses, they practiced a science that depended on harnessing the embodied pleasures and pains arising from sensory experience. The book therefore demonstrates that judgments of taste and the pleasures of aesthetic experience had a central role in the emergence of what we now understand as scientific objectivity. It shows that scientists of the later 17th century sought to obtain consensus not only about facts, but also about the pleasures and pains arising from embodied encounters with nature. It thus concludes by calling for a new approach that pays close attention to the role of aesthetic experience in the history of science. Indeed, it argues not only that the sciences of the 17th century had a far more significant role in the emergence of aesthetics and art criticism than has so far been recognized, but also that the conceptual resources of taste and aesthetic judgment can make a major contribution to our understanding of the formation of consensus in scientific communities.

Over the last several decades, paper maps have been gradually displaced by new electronic navigation systems like GPS. For many geographic tasks, the map’s familiar god’s-eye view from nowhere has thus been exchanged for the much more embedded experience of electronic coordinates, with a new focus on geographic points rather than large areas. This book argues that this shift in geographic knowledge should be seen quite broadly as a change in both the macro-politics of territory and the everyday micro-politics of geographic space. It presents the history of the mapping sciences in the twentieth century through three of its most important global projects – the International Map of the World, the Universal Transverse Mercator grid, and the Global Positioning System – and traces a widespread retreat from the authority of representational maps in favor of the pragmatism of GPS and its many predecessors. It also questions the usual understanding of globalization as a battle between national territory and global networks. The advent of GPS does not mean that territory is losing its relevance, but rather that there are now new forms of territory – pointillist, non-exclusive, and provisional – that may or may not align with the sovereign space of states. Conceived narrowly, this book is a deep history of GPS and its relationship to earlier forms of mapping. But more expansively, it is also a cultural and political history of geographic space itself.

We are living in a stressful world. Approximately half of all British employees suffer from workplace stress and over 13 million working days are lost through stress each year, costing the economy over £4 billion per annum. Stress has had a similar impact throughout the modern world: in both developed and developing countries, stress is now the most commonly cited cause of sickness absence from work and stress-related conditions, such as depression, heart disease and cancer, constitute a substantial source of personal ill-health and economic burden. Focusing on the evolution of biological and psychological understandings of stress during the twentieth century, The Age of Stress explores the relationship between scientific formulations and personal experiences of stress, on the one hand, and socio-political and cultural contexts, on the other. The book argues that scientific theories of stress and disease were strongly influenced not only by laboratory studies of homeostasis, but also by wider social, cultural and intellectual currents: the impact of economic depression during the inter-war years; modernist commitments to social reform; concerns about the consequences of military conflict during and after the Second World War; fluctuating global anxieties about political instability and the threat of terrorism during the Cold War; scientific studies of cybernetics; socio-biological accounts of behaviour; and counter-cultural arguments urging consumers to resist the incipient pressures of modern capitalism. The science of stress that emerged in this climate of anxiety was driven and shaped by, and in turn served to structure and direct, the search for individual and collective happiness in a troubled world.

What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men—and occasionally women—who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques, inventions, and cures, these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons, who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time, satirists, artists, and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europe's social and economic ills. Drawing on criminal trial records, contracts, laboratory inventories, satires, and vernacular alchemical treatises, this book situates the everyday alchemists, largely invisible to modern scholars until now, at the center of the development of early modern science and commerce. Reconstructing the workaday world of entrepreneurial alchemists, the author shows how allegations of fraud shaped their practices and prospects. These debates not only reveal enormously diverse understandings of what the “real” alchemy was and who could practice it; they also connect a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about commerce, trust, and intellectual authority in early modern Europe.

What actually took place in the private laboratory of a mid-seventeenth-century alchemist? How did he direct his quest after the secrets of Nature? What instruments and theoretical principles did he employ? Using, as their guide, the previously misunderstood interactions between Robert Boyle, widely known as “the father of chemistry,” and George Starkey, an alchemist and the most prominent American scientific writer before Benjamin Franklin as their guide, the book reveals the hitherto hidden laboratory operations of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy. By analyzing Starkey's extraordinary laboratory notebooks, the book shows how this American “chymist” translated the wildly figurative writings of traditional alchemy into quantitative, carefully reasoned laboratory practice—and then encoded his own work in allegorical, secretive treatises under the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes. The intriguing “mystic” Joan Baptista Van Helmont—a favorite of Starkey, Boyle, and even of Lavoisier—emerges from this study as a surprisingly central figure in seventeenth-century “chymistry.” A common emphasis on quantification, material production, and analysis/synthesis, the book argues, illustrates a continuity of goals and practices from late medieval alchemy down to and beyond the Chemical Revolution.

Commencing in the 1820’s, American scholars took learning in Germany. There they confronted forms of geography in the universities, and learned of the normal school tradition. Upon their return to North America the normal school was introduced and with it came an early and simplistic variety of geography. Gradually courses geographic in nature began to emerge from the geology offering. Binomial departments, geology-geography, began to emerge. Early content of the geographic offering included delimitation of both the physiographic province and the geographic region. Then came study of economic geography, and development of environmentalism. The 14-18 war involved geography and geographers both on the battlefield and in negotiations with other delegations for the terms of peace. Then the AGS completed a map of Hispanic America (1—1 million) prior to 1945. The Society also made an extended study of the pioneer fringe and pioneer belts in the context of establishing a science of settlement, all of which had relevance for the redistribution of displaced persons resultant to World War II. It was in the 1920’s that both ecologic and political factors began earnestly to create individual genres of the geographic, all of which encouraged Bowman, and more especially R. Hartshorne to write books concerning the nature of geography. Substantial numbers of geographers were employed in World War II, largely in OSS. While in Washington DC, many active geographers who were not AAG members felt disenfranchised. Rigorous competitive activity on their part led to amalgamation of two organizations, the Association of American Geographers and the American Society for Professional Geographers. Then came a renewed quest for definition of the field. “Envoi” concludes the work with guidance to a multiplicity of archival holdings, their lodgment, extent and significance.

Illuminations originated in Renaissance Italy and spread to all the courts of Europe more than a century before oil lamps provided the first street lighting. The transition to gas after 1800 and to electricity after 1875 offered new possibilities for public celebrations. Americans rejected monarchical pomp but adapted spectacular lighting to democratic and commercial culture between 1875 and 1915. In the 1880s some cities were evenly lighted by powerful tower arc lights providing the equivalent of bright moonlight. But these towers were soon replaced by more commercial forms of gas and electric lighting. American cities rapidly became the most intensely lighted in the world, as measured by engineers, attested by foreign travellers, and demonstrated at spectacular events such as the Veiled Prophet parades in St. Louis, the Hudson-Fulton celebration, and expositions in New Orleans, Chicago, Omaha, Buffalo, St. Louis, and San Francisco. Yet neither moonlight towers nor world’s fairs provided the model for downtown, where shops, theaters, and dance halls adopted electric signs and corporations spotlighted their skyscrapers. Despite opposition from the City Beautiful movement, a heterotopian landscape emerged that changed its appearance at night. This kaleidoscopic cityscape differed radically from Europe, expressing a culture of individualism, competition, private enterprise, and constant change that soon became naturalized. Photographs and postcards celebrated the cubist skyline, as spectacular lighting became emblematic of American culture’s apparent release from the rhythms of nature. Elements of this commercial culture of illumination were adapted to political campaigns, presidential inaugurations, and the propaganda of World War I.

The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half the story. At worst, it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their stories. The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and consume the changing means of illumination over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed slavery, industrial capitalism, and urban families in profound, often hidden ways. Only by taking the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers, match-manufacturing children and coal miners, night-working seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poor--those American lucifers--as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to go dark. Hulking new buildings overspread blocks, pollution obscured the skies, and glass and smog screened out the health-giving rays of the sun. Doctors fed fears about these new conditions with claims about a rising tide of the “diseases of darkness,” especially rickets and tuberculosis. This book tracks the obsession with sunlight from those bleak days into the twentieth century. Before long, social reformers, medical professionals, scientists, and a growing nudist movement proffered remedies for America's new dark age. Architects, city planners, and politicians made access to sunlight central to public housing and public health, and entrepreneurs, dairymen, and tourism boosters transformed the pursuit of sunlight and its effects into a commodity. Within this historical context, the book examines questions about the commodification of health and nature and makes a contribution to the histories of cities, consumerism, the environment, and medicine.

The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing, or music making, these “Enlightenment automata” have attracted continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized. This book investigates two such automata—both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, and then communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. The author argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation, that these automata were unique masterpieces which illustrated the sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology. She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves and societies had become indistinguishable from machines.

This book explores contemporary worries over eating through the lens of the history of science and medicine. It shows how appetite, once a matter of personal inclination and everyday life, from around 1750 became an object of science, something to be managed by knowledgeable experts. At the same time it traces the disturbing story of how forms of troubled eating once seen as symptomatic of many illnesses emerged as independent diseases called “eating disorders.” The study begins by examining the traditional view, upheld by physicians and philosophers for centuries, that individual appetite was the surest guide to healthy eating. It then shows how investigators in diverse disciplines began arguing that eating and digestion were processes comprehensible and manageable only by science. The study also shows that new claims about the fallibility of appetite and the necessity of scientific guidance of eating choices prompted fierce disputes between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, localists and holists, and instinctivists and anti-instinctivists, struggles over appetite and eating that have never been resolved. The author concludes that, far from solving what many called the “mystery” of appetite, centuries of research into its “normal” and “pathological” functioning have shown that appetite, like love and other deeply human realities, is extraordinarily complex and not readily susceptible to manipulation by self-styled experts. Restoring respect for appetite would help, the study concludes, to allay its proliferating discontents, the eating anxieties that beset ever more individuals in our time.

This book analyzes the conflicting paradigms and interpretations that have governed the study of the emotions from the 1960s to the present. It seems obvious to the majority of today's researchers and commentators that the affects, defined as a limited set of phylogenetically old, indeed universal "basic emotions," are inherently independent of cognition or meaning. They are not "about" objects in the world but rather are reflex-like discharges of "affect programs located subcortically in the brain. Such a claim has underwritten hundreds of experiments and research papers, as well as arguments to the effect that under the right conditions our emotions tend to leak out in the form of characteristic involuntary facial movements. The body does not lie. But what if those claims are erroneous? What if emotional states and actions cannot be segregated experimentally into six or seven "basic emotions" with distinct facial expressions? What if, on the contrary, emotions are meaningful, intentional states that are intrinsically conceptual and cognitive in nature? In short, how sound is the evidence for the existence of the basic emotions and what are the stakes involved in alternative accounts of affective behavior? The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique examines this experimental and interpretive conflict for the light it throws on some of the most fundamental issues not only in the cognitive and neurosciences but also the humanities and social sciences today.

Since the Enlightenment, alchemy has been viewed as a sort of antiscience, disparaged by many historians as a form of lunacy that impeded the development of rational chemistry. But this book exposes the speciousness of these views and challenges widely held beliefs about the origins of the scientific revolution. Tracing the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle's famous mechanical philosophy, the book shows that alchemy contributed to the mechanization of nature, a movement that lay at the very heart of scientific discovery. Boyle and his predecessors—figures like the mysterious medieval Geber or the Lutheran professor Daniel Sennert—provided convincing experimental proof that matter is made up of enduring particles at the microlevel. At the same time, the book argues that alchemists created the operational criterion of an “atomic” element as the last point of analysis, thereby contributing a key feature to the development of later chemistry.

Breastfeeding rates in America fell throughout the 1950s and 1960s before beginning to climb again in the 1970s. This work argues that the development of an ideology of natural motherhood preceded breastfeeding's return. Rooted in psychology and animal studies in the 1930s, the ideology of natural motherhood moved beyond the confines of scientific study as a handful of mothers sought out the experiences of “natural” childbirths and breastfeeding in the 1940s. By the 1950s, a back to the breast movement was firmly established within segments of the white, middle-class, and often college educated, population. Despite the widespread acceptance of formula feeding by the medical community throughout the majority of the twentieth century, a small but vocal minority of mothers pushed back against hospital policies and cultural norms when they insisted on breastfeeding their children. In the 1970s, political tensions within the breastfeeding community erupted over the biological essentialism upon which many early breastfeeding advocates had built their arguments. Despite these rifts, natural motherhood continued to hold personal meaning for women across the political spectrum who sought a connection to a natural maternal identity. By the late 1980s, breastfeeding became increasingly associated with the extraction of breast milk from the breast via a breast pump. In the twenty-first century, natural motherhood remains a powerful draw for women who want to feed their infants “naturally,” even while medical and public health messages about breastfeeding can often obscure the movement's maternalist roots.

This book presents a radically new perspective on the study of early modern science. Instead of the triumph of reason and rationality and the celebration of the discoveries and breakthroughs of the period, they examine science in the context of the baroque, analyzing the tensions, paradoxes, and compromises that shaped the New Science of the seventeenth century and enabled its spectacular success. The authors show how scientists during the seventeenth century turned away from the trust in the acquisition of knowledge through the senses towards a growing reliance on the mediation of artificial instruments, such as lenses and mirrors for observation and mechanical and pneumatic devices for experimentation. Likewise, the mathematical techniques and procedures that allowed the success of mathematical natural philosophy became increasingly obscure and artificial, and in place of divine harmonies they revealed an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and constants. In its attempts to enforce order in the face of threatening chaos, blur the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and mobilize passions in the service of objective knowledge, the New Science is a baroque phenomenon.

Historians of the British Civil Wars are increasingly taking notice of these bloody conflicts as a critical event in the welfare history of Europe. This volume will examine the human costs of the conflict and the ways in which they left lasting physical and mental scars after the cessation of armed hostilities. Its essays examine the effectiveness of medical care and the capacity of the British peoples to endure these traumatic events. During these wars, the Long Parliament’s concern for the ‘commonweal’ led to centralised care for those who had suffered ‘in the State’s service’, including improved medical treatment, permanent military hospitals, and a national pension scheme, that for the first time included widows and orphans. This signified a novel acceptance of the State’s duty of care to its servicemen and their families. These essays explore these developments from a variety of new angles, drawing upon the insights shared at the inaugural conference of the National Civil War Centre in August 2015. This book reaches out to new audiences for military history, broadening its remit and extending its methodological reach.