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Commonplacing was one of the most widely practiced types of paper technology in the early modern period. Yet its place and function in medicine remain largely unexplored. Based on about two dozen manuscripts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in which physicians used commonplacing to record excerpts from their reading as well as personal observations and ideas, this paper offers a first...
The hitherto neglected Pandechion epistemonicon, Ulisse Aldrovandi’s (1522–1605) extant manuscript encyclopaedia, indicates that Renaissance naturalists did not necessarily apply the humanist jack-of-all-trades, the commonplace book, in their own field without considerably altering its form. Over many years the Italian natural historian tested and recombined different techniques to arrive at the form...
What was classification as it first took modern form in the eighteenth century, how did it work, and how did it relate to earlier describing and ordering? We offer new answers to these questions by considering an example less well known than that of botany or zoology, namely medicine, and by reconstructing practice on paper. The first and best-known disease classification is the “nosology” of the...
We provide a detailed description of an interleaved and heavily annotated copy of Florae Berolinensis Prodromus, a flora of Berlin published by the German apothecary and botanist Karl Ludwig Willdenow in 1787, which today is preserved at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. We demonstrate that this is the copy that the author himself used and carried with him during his botanical...
The massive industrialization of World War I resulted in a previously unimaginable number of casualties. The military and civil agencies in Germany that managed the welfare systems for veterans collaborated with companies, engineers and physicians to produce prosthetic arms, hands and legs that would allow disabled former soldiers to re-enter the factory as productive workers. This article focuses...
In spite of having published more than hundred articles and three monographs, the chemist and statistician Alfred James Lotka (1880–1949) is not very well known. Because he had not experienced a conventional academic curriculum, he remained ‚at the margins’ of the scientific community. In 1925 he aimed for a breakthrough with his first monograph Elements of Physical Biology. The basic idea of this...
Laboratory manuals, notebooks and instrumentation from Otto Warburg’s Institute of Cell Physiology have been discovered at the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. Following Warburg’s death in 1970 one of his technicians was transferred from Berlin-Dahlem to the newly founded biochemical institute at Martinsried near Munich, and brought with him these resources, which epitomize the singular position...
This article investigates how much influence consumers could have in the GDR during the 1960s by means of a case study of a patient striving towards an apparently reasonable psychiatric treatment through his actions in- and outside the clinic. The patient tried to obtain an effective therapy by referring to his model socialist work and life. The former patient also subsequently acted as a consumer...
The history of benzodiazepine supply, as negotiated in the GDR following its commercial success in western markets in 1960, demonstrates how patients in East Germany (GDR) influenced drug policies by assuming the role of consumers. This article traces general political discussions on psycho-pharmaceuticals as essential components of a healthcare system that faced grave financial constraints, then...
Similar to “parasitism” and “mutualism”, the concept of commensualism defines a kind of biological association, i.e. the neutral interaction between two different species. This paper shows that “commensualism” was initially defined by the Belgian zoologist and parasitologist Pierre-Joseph van Beneden (1809–1894) as referring to biological associations between organic individuals from different species...
In his lecture course “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics” (1929–1930) Martin Heidegger repeatedly alludes to experiments with insects as examples for the relation of animals to the world. One report deals with a photograph made through the compound eye of a glow worm. By questioning what the glow worm might see, Heidegger separated animal vision from human vision as ontologically incomparable...
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