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Known primarily for creating beautiful images of butterflies and flowers, Maria Sibylla Merian (German, 1647–1717) has remained largely unappreciated for her seminal contribution to early modern natural history. Merian was indeed a talented artist, but she clearly thought of herself as a naturalist, and employed both text and images to depict lepidopteran metamorphosis and behavior with unprecedented...
During the first half of the nineteenth century, breeders of livestock in the United States and Germany began to approach animal husbandry in a more systematic manner. Responding to changes in ideas about heredity and economic pressures, they imported large numbers of animals from abroad, especially from Great Britain. With these imported breeds they set out to transform their native specimens to...
Andreas Vesalius reformed anatomical knowledge and teaching in the Renaissance by adopting Galenic methods from the classical past. His careful drawings revealed the human body in unprecedented and realistic detail, but the images of himself were more ambiguous.
In the decades around 1900, industrial anthrax attracted significant attention from medical practitioners, legislators and the general public in Britain. Attempts to reduce the incidence of the disease ranged from basic health measures – preventing workmen from eating inside factories and trialling the use of respirators – through to national legislation making disinfection of dangerous materials...
Doris Grant (1905–2003), a middle-class, British housewife, published numerous books from the 1940s into the 1970s urging her fellow housewives to bake organic, wholemeal bread for their families. This article argues that Grant's arguments defy easy categorization as either ‘conservative’ or ‘progressive’. On the one hand, her targeted appeal to women reflected a traditional, conservative understanding...
According to Enlightenment ideology, knowledge was shared openly in the international Republic of Letters. In reality, the owners of lucrative new technologies were determined to keep their discoveries hidden from industrial spies.
► This study explores the history of horseflesh consumption in modern Britain and France. ► It examines why horsemeat became relatively popular in France, but not Britain. ► These reasons include the active role of scientists, philanthropists, journalists and butchers. ► These figures did not actively promote horsemeat in Britain. ► These factors are as important as cultural and economic ones in explaining...
In the late 1940s, Florence Sabin, a retired professor of medicine, returned to her home in Colorado to launch a massive public health campaign. Seeing “filthy milk” as an important vector of disease, she struggled not just pasteurized milk, but a pasteurized state government that was capable of regulating the milk industry. In the process, she brought managerialism into public health by fighting...
In the early twentieth century, fatigue research marked a site of conflicting scientific, industrial, and cultural understandings of working bodies. Many fatigue researchers understood fatigue to be a physiological fact and allied themselves with Progressive-era reformers in urging industrial regulation. Reformers clashed with advocates of Taylorism, who held that productivity could be perpetually...
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the United States, this article demonstrates how American cheesemakers articulate the work of handcrafting cheese as a balance of ‘art’ and ‘science’, where art refers to aesthetic creativity and an intuitive ability to interpret observable conditions as a guide for contingent practice, while science refers to the accurate measuring of those conditions...
Life expectancy and chronic disease rates both rose dramatically in the United States during the first third of the twentieth century. As a result of this concurrence, Americans in this era increasingly thought about things they could do to extend their own lives, especially eating less, exercising more, and limiting stress, all factors thought to reduce chronic disease. New recognition of the correlation...
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