Medical History 

About: Medical History is an academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Public health & MEDLINE. It has an ISSN identifier of 0025-7273. Over the lifetime, 3460 publications have been published receiving 50551 citations.

Bruno Latour, The pasteurization of France , trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. - Georges Canguilhem, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences , trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95.

Abstract: BRUNO LATOUR, The pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. 273, £23.95. GEORGES CANGUILHEM, Ideology and rationality in the history of the life sciences, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, The MIT Press, 1988, 8vo, pp. xi, 160, £17.95. Bruno Latour has written a wonderfully funny book about himself. It is difficult, however, to summarize a text committed to the view that \"Nothing is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else\", (p. 158). In Latour's opinion, the common view that sociologists of knowledge and scientists are opposed is incorrect. Both groups, according to Latour, are the authors of identical mistakes: reductionism and, relatedly, attempting to conjoin (in the instance of the sociologist) science and society, or (in the instance of the scientist) keeping them apart. For Latour, there are only forces or resistances which different groups encounter and attempt to conquer by forming alliances. These groups, however, are not simply the actors of conventional sociology. They include, for example, microbes, the discovery of the Pasteurians, with which they have populated our world and which we must now take notice of in any encounter or war in which we engage. War is a fundamental metaphor for Latour, since in a war or a battle clashes of armies are later called the \"victory\" of a Napoleon or a Kutuzov. Likewise, he argues, the Pasteurization of France can be viewed as a battle, with its field and its myriad contestants, in which opposing sides attempted to mould and coerce various forces of resistance. Strangely, he points out, the outcome of this huge battle, the labour and struggle of these masses, we attribute to the scientific genius of Pasteur. Pasteur's genius, however, says Latour, lay not in science (for this could be yet another way of making science and society distinct) but as strategist. Pasteur was able to cross disciplinary lines, recruiting allies to laboratory science by persuading them that they were recruiting him. This was possible because, like the armies in battle, they had already done the work of the general. Thus Pasteur's microbiology, which might conventionally be seen as a whole new science, can also be construed as a brilliant reformulation of all that preceded it and made it possible. Hygienists seized on the work of the Pasteurians and the two rapidly became powerful allies because \"The time that they [the hygienists] had made was now working for them\" (p. 52). French physicians, on the other hand, resisted recruitment, since for them it meant enslavement. Finally, however, they recruited the Pasteurians to their enterprise. Pasteurian public health was turned into a triumph of medicine. It is impossible to read this book and not substitute Latour for Pasteur. At the head of his own army, increasingly enlarged by the recruitment of allies, Latour now presents us, in his own language, with something we have made, or at least made possible. The cynic might say, using the old jibe against sociologists, that Latour has explained to us in his own language everything we knew anyway. Retorting thus, however, would be to unselfconsciously make an ally of Latour and miss the point by a narrow margin that might as well be a million miles. Latour says all this much more clearly (and certainly more wittily) than any review. Read it, but beware; in spite of Latour's strictures about irreducibility, the text is not what it seems. This is a recruitment brochure: Bruno needs you. Among the many historians whom Latour convicts by quotation of mistaking the general for the army, Pasteur for all the forces at work in French society, is Georges Canguilhem. Latour uses two quotes from Canguilhem, both taken from the original French version of Ideology and rationality in the life sciences, first published in 1977. Reading Canguilhem after Latour induces a feeling akin to culture shock. Astonishingly, Canguilhem seems almost Anglo-American. Anyone familiar with Canguilhem's epistemological universe would hardly be surprised to discover that Latour finds in it perspectives different from his own. After all, Canguilhem remains committed to the epistemologically distinct entity science or, better still, sciences. Likewise he employs distinctions between science and ideology, as in Spencerian ideology and Darwinian science, which will seem familiar, possibly jaded to English-reading eyes. His text is liberally seeded with unLatourian expressions, including injunctions to distinguish \"between ideology and science\" (p. 39), lamentations that eighteenth-century medicine \"squandered its energy in the erection of systems\" (p. 53), rejoicing that physiology \"liberated itself' from classical anatomy (p. 54), and regret that \"Stahl's influence ... seriously impeded experimental

Leviathan and the air-pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life

Abstract: STEVEN SHAPIN and SIMON SCHAFFER, Leviathan and the air-pump. Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life. Including a translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus physicus de natura aeris, by Simon Schaffer, Princeton University Press, 1985, 8vo, pp. xiv, 440, illus., £43.00. In his History ofthe Royal Society ofLondon, published in 1667 as an explanation and defence ofmen who spent their time weighing the air and anatomizing beetles, Thomas Sprat threw out many striking analogies between contemporary politics and the activities he defended. The Society fitted perfectly with the spirit of reconciliation and tolerance supposed to characterize the Restoration: it forbade discussion of politics or religion; it limited dissent to matters about which agreement could be reached; it stuck to matters of fact; it promoted industry, sobriety, good judgment, and balance; it opposed enthusiasts, dogmatists, radicals, and sinners. Shapin and Schaffer have dilated and developed Sprat's analogies and metaphors with the persistence and prolixity of the Society's cynosure, Robert Boyle. Their argument may be distilled as follows. Boyle wished to set aside a "social space" (the term is theirs) for the cultivation of experimental philosophy; he also wanted to demonstrate to society at large how civic and religious dissent might be managed peacefully and productively; in fact, he wanted both, for, as Shapin and Schaffer claim, "solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order" (p. 332). They discern three "technologies" in Boyle's effort to establish his "experimental language" (p. 49), his "disciplined collective social structure" (p. 78), his "space . . . so securely bounded that dispute could occur safely within [it]" (p. 303), his "experimental form of life" (p. 314). The technologies were: the material, that is, experimental apparatus, of which the air-pump was the exemplar; the literary, or wordy descriptions of experiments performed, of the witnesses present and their reliability, and of the machines themselves; and the social, or rules of engagement in philosophical debate, the pre-eminence of the matter offact, and the down-grading or exclusion ofconjectures or theories about the causes and principles of certified phenomena. Withall, the experimental philosopher must be modest, open and flexible: "Till a man is sure he is infallible", Boyle wrote, "it is not fit for him to be unalterable." These "technologies" drew fire from the plentiful furnace ofThomas Hobbes, whom Shapin and Schaffer use as a detector of the aspects of Boyle's programme offensive to contemporaries who differed from him politically. Hobbes pointed out that the material technology leaked; that the literary technology, at least in respect ofthe testimony ofwitnesses, had no force ("no infinite number of grave and learned men" make certainty, "but authority"); and that the social technology misconstrued the nature of knowledge. By making the matter of fact, and not the underlying principle, the main object of investigation, one forfeits the chance at truth and certainty and has no reliable way to exclude serious and dangerous error. Boyle and his precious air-pump would be an ongoing peril as long as experimental philosophers waffled over the nature of the "vacuum". Hobbes knew from principle that a true void space, being immaterial, could not be; others not so guided, like the noisy Cambridge philosopher Henry More, and the demonstrator of witches, Joseph Glanvil, admitted the void, and imagined that Boyle's experiments proved the existence of spaces for angels and spirits to play in. Hobbes's dogmatism in natural philosophy was of a piece with his concept of the State. In philosophy, the force ofreason, working from sure principles in the style of Euclidean geometry, must compel assent; "who is so stupid", he asked, "as both to mistake in geometry, and also to persist in it, when another detects his error to him?" In the State, the King's authority should prevail over all dissent and dissenters in both civil and religious matters. Just here, loose talk about vacuums threatened the peace. For priests would set up as experts on the immaterial, and construct an independent base ofpower on the strength of their pseudo-knowledge, as they had in the past; and so bring about subversions and rebellions. The method ofcreating and certifying knowledge, and the problem of establishing social order, forced Boyle and Hobbes to sharply

Medicine, rationality, and experience: an anthropological perspective.

Abstract: Inevitably, reading is one of the requirements to be undergone. To improve the performance and quality, someone needs to have something new every day. It will suggest you to have more inspirations, then. However, the needs of inspirations will make you searching for some sources. Even from the other people experience, internet, and many books. Books and internet are the recommended media to help you improving your quality and performance.

Constructing the subject: historical origins of psychological research.

Abstract: effective prevention campaigns. This is the \"lesson of history\" used to argue for a liberal policy approach. The book is not a work of original scholarship. Clark is bringing together a body of historical and current writing about AIDS and epidemic disease, much of which is familiar. Despite his historical analysis of widely different cultures, his focus in the present is almost entirely on the United States and the impact of AIDS in that particular culture. Even within the U.S., he takes no account of more recent disease formulations, such as the \"chronic disease\" model, which has been widely discussed. AIDS, whether rightly or wrongly, is no longer seen within the epidemic model; it would have been helpful to have some consideration of those more recent changes. Outside the U.S., too, AIDS has been a much less powerful force for the reform of health care systems. In the U.K., for example, AIDS funding has been the victim of recent health service changes rather than a driving force for change. The book is therefore of limited relevance to a non-American audience, although it is well produced and illustrated by thirteen full colour plates, ranging from a 1350 representation of Saint Sebastian to the AIDS quilt in the 1990s.