BJHS Themes « Cambridge Core Blog

BJHS Themes

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Svit Komel · 22 January 2024

William Petty’s survey of Ireland and the role of natural history in the development of statistics

William Petty (1623-1687) is well known as a pioneer of political economy and statistics. He has been often celebrated as an ingenious thinker who was among the first to grasp that certain information, like data on different categories of landowners or the number of births and deaths, could be used to describe trends and tendencies occurring on the level of what he called the ‘political body’ – or what we would nowadays call ‘population phenomena’.…

Thomas Rossetter · 1 February 2023

Anti-voluntarism, natural providence and miracles in Thomas Burnet’s Theory of the Earth

In his Telluris Theoria Sacra and its English translation The Theory of the Earth (1681–90), the English clergyman and schoolmaster Thomas Burnet (c. 1635–1715) constructed a geological history in which he proposed various natural causes to explain biblical events and their effects on the Earth and life on it.

Emmeline Ledgerwood · 11 July 2022

Embedding science scrutiny mechanisms in the UK Parliament

At times during the past few years, evidence sessions of the UK’s House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee have made headline news, for example Dominic Cummings’ account of his time advising the Prime Minister during the COVID-19 pandemic, or controversial witness statements about diversity and inclusion in STEM careers.…

Craig Martin · 17 May 2022

Medicine and the heavens in Padua’s Faculty of Arts, 1570–1630

After over two years of living in a pandemic, most everyone is familiar with COVID-19’s periods of incubation, progression and contagion. Similar issues were of great concern to physicians in early modern Europe.

Michael Worboys · 8 February 2022

Imperial Entomology: Locusts

In the first half of the twentieth century, locust plagues were managed by imperial governments, advised by their scientific institutions.

Nick Hopwood · 27 January 2022

‘The most important time in your life’: quotations in recent science

The history I tell in [my article] exemplifies how indispensable quotations can become... They invoke tradition, generating a sense of belonging and inspiring the young, and are involved in innovation, too.

John McAleer · 25 January 2022

‘The troubles of collecting’: William Henry Harvey and the practicalities of natural history collecting in Britain’s nineteenth-century world

By focusing on the example of William Harvey and his travels, my article explores the difficulties encountered by those involved in collecting, preserving and transporting natural history specimens from the field to the museum or laboratory in the nineteenth century.

Michael F. McGovern · 10 June 2021

Catalogues, Categories, and Computers: Unpacking a ‘Legacy System’ of Human Genetics

My article contributes to this line of inquiry by considering how an information infrastructure for keeping track of human genes was built and changed across the latter decades of the twentieth century.

Michelle Pfeffer · 29 March 2021

The Society of Astrologers (c.1647-1684): Promoting Astrology in Church and in the Pub

People facing plague and quarantine in early modern Europe also turned to astrologers. But rather than being chastised for supporting a ‘pseudoscience’, these people were more likely to be reprimanded for engaging with paganism.

Scott Alan Johnston · 24 March 2021

When Life Interrupts Science: Precarity, Pranks, and Discipline at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich

...the observatory staff, the largest portion of whom were adolescent boys hired to do computational work, had to be managed too. Airy worked hard to deskill their positions, turning the observatory into a sort of factory...

Kersten Hall and more · 23 March 2021

A Quiet Landmark in Biology: How Pus from Discarded Bandages led to DNA

Almost a century before Watson and Crick, Miescher had been working in the freezing cold former kitchen of Tübingen Castle that had now been converted into laboratories for the University, where he was carrying out investigations into the chemical composition of white blood cells...

Marta Hanson 韓嵩 · 26 February 2021

From Under the Elbow to Pointing to the Palm: Learning “medicine by the book” in premodern China

My article thus focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles of Chinese medical books used to convey to potential readers their ‘learning-by-the-book’ contents.

Raf De Bont · 18 June 2020

Eating game: proteins, international conservation and the rebranding of African wildlife, 1955–1965

My article discusses how this approach of ‘conservation by slaughter’ – as one high-profile ecologist called it – managed to gain traction.

John Lidwell-Durnin · 17 June 2020

Cultivating famine: data, experimentation and food security, 1795–1848

In the eighteenth century, the potato was viewed by many European countries as an exotic vegetable, introduced with numerous purposes: as animal feed, as a delicacy, and as a crop suitable for peasants and farm labourers to cultivate in small gardens and allotments.

Adrian Kirwan · 13 January 2020

Sociability, radium and the maintenance of scientific culture and authority in 20th century Ireland: a case study of the Royal Dublin Society

The discovery of radium in 1898 spurred a range of public, industrial and scientific reactions. The public were enthralled by this near mystical element. Its ability to produce its own energy soon gave rise to a ‘radium craze’ in which promises of its health-giving properties were prominent. A range of supposed radium-based products, such as creams and fortified water, were quickly on sale.

Boris Jardine, Emma Kowal and Jenny Bangham · 4 December 2019

How collections end: objects, meaning and loss in laboratories and museums

The open access 2019 issue of BJHS Themes addresses the ‘endings’ of scientific collections, telling stories of dispersal, destruction, absorption, re-purposing and repatriation.

Kristian H. Nielsen and Isabel Zilhão · 7 September 2018

STEM frenzy: teaching science to children and young people, 1830 – 1991

We live in interesting times for those seeking to inspire children and youth to take up science, technology engineering, and mathematics (STEM).…

Lavinia Maddaluno · 1 December 2017

Reproduction in Blade Runner 2049

Reproduction on Film, the recently published special issue of The British Journal for the History of Science, investigates the theme of biological reproduction in the history of cinema, television, and other screen media.…

Ali Fox · 5 August 2016

How to write about China and India

How to write about China and India – Jahnavi Phalkey As BJHS Themes, the new, fully open access, peer-reviewed journal from the British Society for the History of Science, publishes its first issue, one of the volume’s editors, Jahnavi Phalkey, gives her observations on the opportunities and challenges on writing about China and India.…

Jon Agar · 28 January 2015

BJHS Themes – subject of inaugural issue is announced

I’m delighted to be able to announce that the subject of the inaugural issue of the new open access, edited-collection journal of the BSHS, called BJHS Themes, will be: “Intersections: Science and Technology in Twentieth Century China and India” The special issue editors will be Jahnavi Phalkey (King’s College London) and Tong Lam (University of Toronto) In the open competition held to select the issues of BJHS Themes, proposals are judged according to standards of focus, originality, timeliness, and breadth of appeal to readers.…

More and more research is finding inflammation as a potential contributing factor towards to the development of various mental illnesses. A systematic review was conducted to determine the association between parasitic infection and mental illnesses in various African populations. Two parasite groups were evaluated; helminths and protozoans, and four mental illness classifications; depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, schizotypal disorders and unspecified mental illnesses.

In 2012, a Conservative-led coalition implemented austerity measures to restore the UK’s finances. The measures aimed to address the increase in public spending that had occurred during the Great Recession and included significant cuts to public services in the form of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act.…

Journal of Public Policy · 25 July 2023

On time or with a delay? Transposition of EU directives in the Czech Republic in relation to subsidiarity check

National parliaments had been for long time losers of European integration with only very limited competences of information on new EU initiatives and of rubber-stamping transposition law compared to the national governments, which often negotiate EU law at the supranational level and propose its transposition acts at the national level.…

Anna P. Judson · 4 July 2023

Experimenting with tablet-making

At the end of the Greek Bronze Age, between c.1400-1200 BCE, the Mycenaean palaces of Crete and mainland Greece used small clay tablets to keep their accounting documents.

Journal of Public Policy · 19 October 2023

Border clashes: the distributive politics of professional liberalisation in Greece

As Douwe Truijens and Marcel Hanegraaff have recently remarked (Truijens and Hanegraaff 2023), interest groups can play a very large role at the implementation stage of the policy cycle, potentially even reversing decisions made earlier in the cycle.…

Debra L. Martin and more · 31 January 2023

Academic publishing in 2023: what’s front of mind for archaeologists?

With 2023 on the horizon, and the landscape of academic publishing in flux, Cambridge University Press spoke to the Editors of the SAA’s journals to find out what topics and questions are currently front of mind – for archaeologists, researchers and publishers alike.…

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BJHS Themes

William Petty’s survey of Ireland and the role of natural history in the development of statistics

Anti-voluntarism, natural providence and miracles in Thomas Burnet’s Theory of the Earth

Embedding science scrutiny mechanisms in the UK Parliament

Medicine and the heavens in Padua’s Faculty of Arts, 1570–1630

Imperial Entomology: Locusts

‘The most important time in your life’: quotations in recent science

‘The troubles of collecting’: William Henry Harvey and the practicalities of natural history collecting in Britain’s nineteenth-century world

Catalogues, Categories, and Computers: Unpacking a ‘Legacy System’ of Human Genetics

The Society of Astrologers (c.1647-1684): Promoting Astrology in Church and in the Pub

When Life Interrupts Science: Precarity, Pranks, and Discipline at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich

A Quiet Landmark in Biology: How Pus from Discarded Bandages led to DNA

From Under the Elbow to Pointing to the Palm: Learning “medicine by the book” in premodern China

Eating game: proteins, international conservation and the rebranding of African wildlife, 1955–1965

Cultivating famine: data, experimentation and food security, 1795–1848

Sociability, radium and the maintenance of scientific culture and authority in 20th century Ireland: a case study of the Royal Dublin Society

How collections end: objects, meaning and loss in laboratories and museums

STEM frenzy: teaching science to children and young people, 1830 – 1991

Reproduction in Blade Runner 2049

How to write about China and India

BJHS Themes – subject of inaugural issue is announced

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Restless nights when sick: ectoparasite infections alter rest-activity cycles of diurnal fish hosts

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The impact of parasite infection of mental illness

Experimenting with tablet-making

Academic publishing in 2023: what’s front of mind for archaeologists?

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