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In Ways of Knowing, John V. Pickstone provides a new and accessible framework for understanding science, technology, and medicine (STM) in the West from the Renaissance to the present. Pickstone's approach has four key features. First, he synthesizes the long-term histories and philosophies of disciplines that are normally studied separately. Second, he dissects STM into specific ways of knowing—natural history, analysis, and experimentalism—with separate but interlinked elements. Third, he explores these ways of knowing as forms of work related to our various technologies for making, mending, and destroying. And finally, he relates scientific and technical knowledges to popular understandings and to politics.

Covering an incredibly wide range of subjects, from minerals and machines to patients and pharmaceuticals, and from experimental physics to genetic engineering, Pickstone's Ways of Knowing challenges the reader to reexamine traditional conceptualizations of the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, technology, and medicine.

For the Yaka of Southwestern Zaire, infertility is a tear in the fabric of life, and the Khita fertility ritual is a trusted way of reweaving the damaged strands. In Weaving the Threads of Life Rene Devisch offers an extended analysis of the Khita cult, which leads to an original account of the workings of ritual healing.

Drawing on many years among urban and rural Yaka, Devisch analyzes their understanding of existence as a fabric of firmly but delicately interwoven threads of nature, body, and society. The fertility healing ritual calls forth forces, feelings, and meanings that allow women to rejoin themselves to the complex pattern of social and cosmic life. These elaborate rites—whether simulating mortal agony and rebirth, gestation and delivery, or flowering and decay; using music and dance, steambath or massage, dream messages or scarification—are not based on symbols of traditional beliefs. Rather, Devisch shows, the rites themselves generate forces and meaning, creating and shaping the cosmic, physical, and social world of their participants.

In contrast to current theoretical methods such as postmodern or symbolical interpretation, Devisch's praxiological approach is unique in also using phenomenological insights into the intent and results of anthropological fieldwork. This innovative work will have ramifications beyond African studies, reaching into the anthropology of medicine and the body, comparative religious history, and women's studies.

•What do I do when a patient talks on and on and I have to leave?
•How do I answer a "why" question?
•What do I say to a patient who believes a miracle will happen to cure them?
•What if I'm not religious? How can I talk about it?

This remarkably ambitious work relates changes in scientific and medical thought during the Scientific Revolution (circa 1500–1700) to the emergence of new principles and practices for interpreting language, texts, and nature. An invaluable history of ideas about the nature of language during this period, The Word of God and the Languages of Man also explores the wider cultural origins and impact of these ideas. Its broad and deeply complex picture of a profound sociocultural and intellectual transformation will alter our definition of the scientific revolution.
    James J. Bono shows how the new interpretive principles and scientific practices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries evolved in response to new views of the relationship between the “Word of God” and the “Languages of Man” fostered by Renaissance Humanism, Neoplatonism, magic, and both the reformed and radical branches of Protestantism. He traces the cultural consequences of these ideas in the thought and work of major and minor actors in the scientific revolution—from Ficino and Paracelsus to Francis Bacon and Descartes. By considering these natural philosophers in light of their own intellectual, religious, philosophical, cultural, linguistic, and especially narrative frameworks, Bono suggests a new way of viewing the sociocultural dynamics of scientific change in the pre–modern period—and ultimately, a new way of understanding the nature and history of scientific thought. The narrative configuration he proposes provides a powerful alternative to the longstanding “revolutionary” metaphor of the history of the scientific revolution.

When did mothers start worrying so much? Why do they keep worrying so? Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre answers these questions by identifying the nineteenth-century rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety, inviting readers to think about worrying not as something individual mothers do but as an affect that since Victorian times has defined middle-class motherhood itself. In this book, Dara Rossman Regaignon offers the first comprehensive study of child-rearing advice literature from early-nineteenth-century Britain and argues that the historical emergence of that genre catalyzed a durable shift in which maternal care was identified as maternal anxiety. Tracing the rhetorical circulation of this affect from advice literature through the memoirs of Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851) and Catharine Tait (1819–1878), as well as fiction by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, and Charlotte Mary Yonge, Regaignon gives maternal anxiety a literary-rhetorical history. She does this by bringing concepts such as uptake and genre ecology into literary studies from rhetorical genre theory, making a case for a mobile and culturally influential notion of genre. Examining specific case studies on child death, paid childcare, and infant doping, among others, Regaignon argues that the ideology of nurturing motherhood was predicated upon the rhetorical cultivation of maternal anxiety—which has had significant consequences for the experience of motherhood and maternal feeling.