A new volume in the University of Pittsburgh Press Histories and Ecologies of Health series

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series.In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that marked the emergence of a global modernity—educated landowners, or “gentlemen,” dominated the development of British natural history, utilizing networks of trade and empire to inventory nature and understand events across the world. Specimens, ranging from a Welsh bittern to the plants of Botany Bay, were collected, recorded, and classified, while books were produced in London and copies distributed and used across Britain, Continental Europe, the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Natural history connected a diverse range of individuals, from European landowners to Polynesian priests, incorporating, distributing, synthesizing, and appropriating information collected on a global scale.In Reading the World, Edwin D. Rose positions books, natural history specimens, and people in a close cycle of literary production and consumption. His book reveals new aspects of scientific practice and the specific roles of individuals employed to collect, synthesize, and distribute knowledge—re-evaluating Joseph Banks’s and Daniel Solander’s investigations during James Cook’s Endeavour voyage to the Pacific. Uncovering the range of skills involved in knowledge production, Rose expands our understanding of natural history as a cyclical process, from the initial collection and identification of specimens to the formal publication of descriptions to the eventual printing of sources.

When the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from humanity’s first voyage to the moon in 1969, NASA officials advocated for more ambitious missions. But with the civil rights movement, environmental concerns, the Vietnam War, and other social crises taking up much of the public’s attention, they lacked the support to make those ambitions a reality. Instead, the space agency had to think more modestly and pragmatically, crafting a program that could leverage the excitement of Apollo while promising relevance for average Americans. The resulting initiative, the space shuttle, would become the centerpiece of NASA human space flight activity for forty years, opening opportunities for the public to engage with and participate in space projects in new ways. The People’s Spaceship traces how and why NASA painstakingly connected the vehicle to so many segments of society. Underscoring the successes and challenges endured in the process, Amy Paige Kaminski shares the story of how the space shuttle became an American technological icon.

A new addition to the University of Pittsburgh Press's Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century series.

Human and animal lives intersect, whether through direct physical contact or by inhabiting the same space at a different time. Environmental humanities scholars have begun investigating these relationships through the emerging field of multispecies studies, building on decades of work in animal history, feminist studies, and Indigenous epistemologies. Contributors to this volume consider the entangled human-animal relationships of a complex multispecies world, where domesticated animals, wild animals, and people cross paths, creating hybrid naturecultures. Technology, they argue, structures how animals and humans share spaces. From clothing to cars to computers, technology acts as a mediator and connector of lives across time and space. It facilitates ways of looking at, measuring, moving, and killing, as well as controlling, containing, conserving, and cooperating with animals. Sharing Spaces challenges us to analyze how technology shapes human relationships with the nonhuman world, exploring nonhuman animals as kin, companions, food, transgressors, entertainment, and tools.

The idea that a new technology could challenge human intelligence is as old as the warning from Socrates and Plato that written language eroded memory. With the emergence of generative artificial intelligence programs, we find ourselves once again debating how a new technology might influence human thought and behavior. Researchers, software developers, and “visionary” tech writers even imagine an AI that will equal or surpass human intelligence, adding to a sense of technological determinism where humanity is inexorably shaped by powerful new machines. But among the hundreds of essays, books, and movies that approach the question of AI, few have asked how exactly scientists and philosophers have codified human thought and behavior. Rather than focusing on technical contributions in machine building, The Descent of Artificial Intelligence explores a more diverse cast of thinkers who helped to imagine the very kind of human being that might be challenged by a machine. Kevin Padraic Donnelly argues that what we often think of as the “goal” of AI has in fact been shaped by forgotten and discredited theories about people and human nature as much as it has been by scientific discoveries, mathematical advances, and novel technologies. By looking at the development of artificial intelligence through the lens of social thought, Donnelly deflates the image of artificial intelligence as a technological monolith and reminds readers that we can control the narratives about ourselves.

Public health, housing, poverty, and immigration dominated social and political discourse in early twentieth-century New York, much as they do today. The Lower East Side provided an urban environment where infectious disease and other public health concerns flourished. One city block in particular, known in muckraking circles as “The Lung Block,” housed four thousand first- and second-generation Americans in dilapidated tenements where deadly tuberculosis spread uninhibited. The Lung Block looks at a 1903 reform crusade to demolish this working-class tenement neighborhood and replace it with a park. Progressive reformers aimed to confront the area’s moral and environmental dangers, but their conceptualization of the problem and methods for addressing it placed them into direct conflict with the hand-to-mouth priorities of the residents. The campaign and its eventual failure illuminate the formidable social barriers distancing urban reformers and the marginalized populations they intend to help.

Danish physician and anatomist Thomas Bartholin (1616-1680) was one of the most important anatomists of the 17th century. As a scientist, his greatest achievement was the discovery and naming of the lymphatic vessels, but he was also a pioneer in a number of other areas of medicine.In Denmark, his tireless efforts as head of the Anatomy House in Copenhagen and professor of anatomy and medicine were crucial to the rise of anatomical science in the 17th century. He was a skilled and sought-after teacher and mentor, and his efforts in this area were crucial to his famous student Niels Stensen's (1638-1686) outstanding career as an anatomist and geologist. With his authorship of over 80 comprehensive books, Thomas Bartholin was one of the most diligent and skilful communicators of his time. The book unfolds the entire life and work of Thomas Bartholin and analyses and puts into perspective his significance for contemporaries and posterity in a scientific context. The book is an expanded English version of the author's Danish biography of Thomas Bartholin from 2017, where the new material relates in particular to his importance to Niels Stensen.

The specialization thesis—the idea that nineteenth-century science fragmented into separate forms of knowledge that led to the creation of modern disciplines—has played an integral role in the way historians have described the changing disciplinary map of nineteenth-century British science. This volume critically reevaluates this dominant narrative in the historiography. While new disciplines did emerge during the nineteenth century, the intellectual landscape was far muddier, and in many cases new forms of specialist knowledge continued to cross boundaries while integrating ideas from other areas of study. Through a history of Victorian interdisciplinarity, this volume offers a more complicated and innovative analysis of discipline formation. Harnessing the techniques of cultural and intellectual history, studies of visual culture, Victorian studies, and literary studies, contributors break out of subject-based silos, exposing the tension between the rhetorical push for specialization and the actual practice of knowledge sharing across disciplines during the nineteenth century.

Strategies for the preservation of health and for the prevention and treatment of illness and disease have been discerned in the surviving written records and material remains of most societies since earliest times. Compared to the prehistoric past the evidence for the ancient Greek and Roman periods is comparatively full, though still sparse or lacking in some key areas. Most accounts of the history of Greek and Roman medicine are based on ancient medical texts. As a study of the subject through its material remains, this book will be a unique and major contribution to the understanding of ancient medical implements and surgical instruments, of surgery, and of the history of medicine. In addition to medical instruments, the British Museum collection also includes an important range of objects which help to illustrate the multi-faceted approach to healing in antiquity. They include one of the largest holdings of collyrium-stamps − small inscribed stone tablets which were used to mark sticks of eye medicine; Greek inscriptions honouring public physicians; stone statues, bronze figurines and engraved gemstones depicting the principal healer deities; and marble and terracotta models of body parts (‘anatomical votives’) dedicated to the healer deities by those seeking divine cures. Together with the instrumentation, the publication will show how they encompass most aspects of ancient medicine and represent starting points from which to develop discussions of strategies for health and healing.

The global triumph of Mendelian genetics in the twentieth century was not a foregone conclusion, thanks to the existence of graft hybrids. These chimeral plants and animals are created by grafting tissue from one organism to another with the goal of passing the newly hybridized genetic material on to their offspring. But prevailing genetic theory insisted that heredity was confined to the sex cells and there was no inheritance of characteristics acquired during an organism’s lifetime. Under sustained attacks from geneticists, scientific belief in the existence of graft hybrids slowly began to decline. Yet ordinary horticulturalists and breeders continued to believe in the power of grafting. Matthew Holmes tells the story of these organisms—which include multicolored chickens and black nightshades that grew tomatoes—and their enduring influence on twentieth-century biology. Their creators sought a goal as ambitious as the wildest dreams of genetic engineering today: to smash the barriers between species and freely exchange genes between plants and animals. The Graft Hybrid presents a greater understanding of the controversial history of graft hybrids, offering a crucial intervention in the history of genetics and the future of biological science.

Winner, 2022 Edward Kremers AwardCompound Remedies examines the equipment, books, and remedies of colonial Mexico City’s Herrera pharmacy—natural substances with known healing powers that formed part of the basis for modern-day healing traditions and home remedies in Mexico. Paula S. De Vos traces the evolution of the Galenic pharmaceutical tradition from its foundations in ancient Greece to the physician-philosophers of medieval Islamic empires and the Latin West and eventually through the Spanish Empire to Mexico, offering a global history of the transmission of these materials, knowledges, and techniques. Her detailed inventory of the Herrera pharmacy reveals the many layers of this tradition and how it developed over centuries, providing new perspectives and insight into the development of Western science and medicine: its varied origins, its engagement with and inclusion of multiple knowledge traditions, the ways in which these traditions moved and circulated in relation to imperialism, and its long-term continuities and dramatic transformations. De Vos ultimately reveals the great significance of pharmacy, and of artisanal pursuits more generally, as a cornerstone of ancient, medieval, and early modern epistemologies and philosophies of nature.

“A unique perspective on this time of change” ~Joe Marks, former Vice President & Research Fellow of The Walt Disney Company“Of impressing clarity. The most significant book I read in years” ~Salvatore Sanfilippo, creator of Redis, author of Wohpe.Since their invention, computers have kept revolutionizing the world at a staggering pace. And yet, if on one side this ongoing revolution keeps providing an incessant stream of novel and previously unimaginable technologies, on the other, as with all revolutions, its profound effects threaten to upend much of the previous world order. Facing the many questions that this change is urgently raising will require to acquire a novel and interdisciplinary understanding of the powerful forces that govern this process. Sitting squarely at the crossroads of computer science, history, socioeconomics, ethics, and philosophy, and written by an insider who contributed foundational work to many of the latest and most pervasive technologies this book offers a much-needed reframing of the past, present and future of computing, that goes far beyond the typical chronological record of events and arms us with a uniquely broad and integrated analysis of their complex origins and their numerous side effects.

We live in the Golden Age of space exploration. Humanity’s achievements include the continued operation of the International Space Station, rapid advancements in reusable rockets, and soon, a return to the Moon. Within our lifetime, we might have human outposts on the lunar surface and flags flying on the plains of Mars. These strides are not just about reaching new frontiers. They have profound implications for life on Earth. The data from climate satellites overhead, innovative materials and recycling systems designed for space habitats, and emerging spacebased energy solutions are essential to addressing Earth’s conservation challenges. Space enables the understanding of Earth as much as Earth enables the exploration of space. This bright tomorrow is not assured, however. Space junk, international conflicts and fiscal calamities loom as threats to all that might be accomplished. For the human adventure to continue beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, the time is now to reconsider the nature of sustainability.Space in Our Hands is a comprehensive exploration of critical and sometimes challenging aspects of our space endeavours, including: the evolution of energy technologies, the feasibility of permanent lunar settlements, the potential for extraterrestrial mining, and the challenges posed by space debris, all within the context of current legal frameworks and international agreements. Leading experts in each field offer insights on the deep connection between Earth and space, underscoring that sustainability—whether on our planet or in the cosmos—is integral to success and vital to our future.

When we are born, we are basically sterile. By the time we die, we are more microbe than human. Microscopic organisms are essential to the development of human life. Until Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed his own microbes under a self-made microscope in the seventeenth century, we were not even aware that they existed. Clinician-scientist Fergus Shanahan and graphic design artist Laura Gowers shed light on the microbial world. How can we nurture microbes in the face of the climate emergency? Why do Irish Travellers have a unique microbiome? A remarkable, ground-breaking graphic book.