Although palpation is a foundational skill for many healthcare disciplines, few resources provide comprehensive anatomical information and relate it to real-world clinical situations. With its detailed descriptions of musculoskeletal anatomy, instructions for palpating anatomical structures, depictions of basic injuries, and correlations with clinical practice, Hands-on Anatomy successfully bridges this gap.

Hands-on Anatomy targets undergraduate or graduate students who have completed an introductory anatomy course and are beginning to apply their anatomical knowledge to the human body, as well as healthcare professionals engaged in patient assessment and treatment. Organized by region of the body, chapters discuss skeletal landmarks, muscles, ligaments, and neurovascular structures, with a focus on how to palpate these structures. Additionally, guides on assessing the range of motion of joints are provided, along with descriptions of common clinical scenarios relating to each body area. The text is supplemented with images of skeletal landmarks and muscular anatomy, photos of surface landmarks and range of motion actives, and end-of-chapter review questions to ensure understanding and retention of what was described.

In Laboratory Epistemologies: A Hands-On Perspective, Jenny Boulboullé examines the significance of hands-on experiences in contemporary life sciences laboratories. Addressing the relationship between contemplation and manipulation in epistemology, Boulboullé combines participant observations in molecular genetics labs and microbiological cleanrooms with a longue durée study of the history and philosophy of science. She radically rereads Descartes’s key epistemological text Meditations on First Philosophy, reframing the philosopher as a hands-on knowledge maker. With this reading, Boulboullé subverts the pervasive modern conception of the disembodied knower and puts the hands-on experimenter at the heart of life sciences research. In so doing, she contributes a theoretical model for understanding how life processes on cellular and molecular levels are manually produced in today’s techno-scientific spaces. By reassessing the Cartesian legacy and arguing that epistemology should be grounded in the standpoint of a hands-on practitioner, Boulboullé offers the philosophical and historical foundation to understand and study contemporary life sciences research as multisensory embodied practices.

In the early twentieth century, a curriculum known as nature study flourished in major city school systems, streetcar suburbs, small towns, and even rural one-room schools. This object-based approach to learning about the natural world marked the first systematic attempt to introduce science into elementary education, and it came at a time when institutions such as zoos, botanical gardens, natural history museums, and national parks were promoting the idea that direct knowledge of nature would benefit an increasingly urban and industrial nation.

The definitive history of this once pervasive nature study movement, TeachingChildren Science emphasizes the scientific, pedagogical, and social incentives that encouraged primarily women teachers to explore nature in and beyond their classrooms. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt brings to vivid life the instructors and reformers who advanced nature study through on-campus schools, summer programs, textbooks, and public speaking.  Within a generation, this highly successful hands-on approach migrated beyond public schools into summer camps, afterschool activities, and the scouting movement. Although the rich diversity of nature study classes eventually lost ground to increasingly standardized curricula, Kohlstedt locates its legacy in the living plants and animals in classrooms and environmental field trips that remain central parts of science education today.