Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences
University of Chicago Press, 2016. 376 pages.
In a sequel to his 2009 Nationalizing the Body, Projit Bihari Mukharji returns to late-colonial South Asia to investigate the modernization of Ayurvedic science and medicine in Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences. This time, Mukharji plunges …
“Critical Histories, Activist Futures: Science, Medicine and Racial Violence,” a conference hosted by Yale University in February 2017, was a welcome departure from the Anglo-centrism dominating the fields of the History of Science and Medicine (HS&M). Focusing on the history of knowledge production, dissemination, and professionalization using objects, practices, and ideas, these historical subfields too often ignore the politics of …
A Reframed (and Reflexive) Conference Report
Organized and Edited by Tess Lanzarotta and Sarah M. Pickman
After a conference ends – after the last paper coffee cup has been tossed into the trash, after the adaptor cable has been disconnected from the podium laptop, after the speakers have rushed out to catch trains and flights homeward – what then? …
Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa
Paul Wenzel Geissler, Guillaume Lachenal, John Manton, and Noémi Tousignant, editors
Intellect Ltd./University of Chicago Press, 2016, 256 pages, 500 color plates
The first reaction to an encounter with Traces of the Future: An Archaeology of Medical Science in Africa is likely to be …
Broken Hearts: The Tangled History of Cardiac Care
by David S. Jones
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, 336 pages.
My first encounter with David S. Jones’ Broken Hearts was in April of 2016. I had packed it in my carry-on luggage as on-plane entertainment while traveling to Minneapolis, MN for the eighty-ninth annual meeting of the American Association …
For this installment of Top of the Heap, I was delighted to work with Assistant Professor Adia Benton from Northwestern University.
I think it’s probably common for people to talk about how large their book heap is. Mine is no different. I’m at the end of my sabbatical and the beginning of my maternity leave. The former should have left …