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5 books match the query 'Numbers, Ronald L.'

cover of Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins

Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins

Edited by Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers

University of Chicago Press, 2010

Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, the contributors to Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins hope to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future.  

Denis R. Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers bring together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for nonscientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring an essay on eugenics from Edward J. Larson and an examination of the progress of evolution by Michael J. Ruse, Biology and Ideology examines uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today. An accessible survey, this collection will enlighten historians of science, their students, practicing scientists, and anyone interested in the relationship between science and culture.

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cover of Sickness and Health in America: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health

Sickness and Health in America

Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health

Edited by Judith W. Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers

University of Wisconsin Press, 1997

An invaluable resource for students, scholars, and general readers, this highly regarded and widely used social history of medicine and public health in the United States is now available in a third edition. Extensively revised and updated, it includes twenty-one new essays; graphs illustrating the rise in deaths caused by HIV, homicide, and suicide; and a greatly expanded Guide to Further Reading. Entirely new sections on Sickness and Health, Early American Medicine, Therapeutics, the Art of Medicine, and Public Health and Personal Hygiene have been added, supplementing updated sections on the Science of Medicine, Education, the Allied Health Professions, Image and Income, Institutions, Race and Medicine, Epidemics, Public Health Reform, and Public Health and Medical Theory. An introductory essay and a series of historical photographs complement the articles.
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cover of The Scientific Enterprise in America: Readings from Isis

The Scientific Enterprise in America

Readings from Isis

Edited by Ronald L. Numbers and Charles E. Rosenberg

University of Chicago Press, 1996

This collection of sixteen essays on the history of science in America ranges chronologically from the early nineteenth century to the present. The essays reflect the ever-broadening scope of the discipline: from the pursuit of science in elite academic, industrial, and governmental settings to science at home and in the movies. Such timely issues as women and science, the ethics of science, and the bomb are examined.

Contributions include Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, "Parlors, Primers, and Public Schooling: Education for Science in Nineteenth-Century America;" Margaret Rossiter, "'Women's Work' in Science, 1880-1910;" Philip J. Pauly, "The Development of High School Biology: New York City, 1900-1925;" Susan E. Lederer, "Political Animals: The Shaping of Biomedical Research Literature in Twentieth-Century America;" Stanley Goldberg, "Inventing a Climate of Opinion: Vannevar Bush and the Decision to Build the Bomb;" Daniel J. Kevles, "The National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942-1945: A Political Interpretation of Science: The Endless Frontier;" David A. Hollinger, "Science as a Weapon in Kulturkämpfe in the United States During and After World War II;" and others.

These essays originally were published in Isis, a publication of the History of Science Society.
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cover of When Science and Christianity Meet

When Science and Christianity Meet

Edited by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers

University of Chicago Press, 2003

This book, in language accessible to the general reader, investigates twelve of the most notorious, most interesting, and most instructive episodes involving the interaction between science and Christianity, aiming to tell each story in its historical specificity and local particularity.
 
Among the events treated in When Science and Christianity Meet are the Galileo affair, the seventeenth-century clockwork universe, Noah's ark and flood in the development of natural history, struggles over Darwinian evolution, debates about the origin of the human species, and the Scopes trial. Readers will be introduced to St. Augustine, Roger Bacon, Pope Urban VIII, Isaac Newton, Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Sigmund Freud, and many other participants in the historical drama of science and Christianity.
 
“Taken together, these papers provide a comprehensive survey of current thinking on key issues in the relationships between science and religion, pitched—as the editors intended—at just the right level to appeal to students.”—Peter J. Bowler, Isis
 
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cover of Wrestling with Nature: From Omens to Science

Wrestling with Nature

From Omens to Science

Edited by Peter Harrison, Ronald L. Numbers, and Michael H. Shank

University of Chicago Press, 2011

When and where did science begin? Historians have offered different answers to these questions, some pointing to Babylonian observational astronomy, some to the speculations of natural philosophers of ancient Greece. Others have opted for early modern Europe, which saw the triumph of Copernicanism and the birth of experimental science, while yet another view is that the appearance of science was postponed until the nineteenth century.

Rather than posit a modern definition of science and search for evidence of it in the past, the contributors to Wrestling with Nature examine how students of nature themselves, in various cultures and periods of history, have understood and represented their work. The aim of each chapter is to explain the content, goals, methods, practices, and institutions associated with the investigation of nature and to articulate the strengths, limitations, and boundaries of these efforts from the perspective of the researchers themselves. With contributions from experts representing different historical periods and different disciplinary specializations, this volume offers a fresh perspective on the history of science and on what it meant, in other times and places, to wrestle with nature.

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