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Arguing that the early Royal Society moved science toward racialization by giving skin color a new prominence as an object of experiment and observation, Cristina Malcolmson provides the first book-length examination of studies of skin color in the Society. She also brings new light to the relationship between early modern literature, science, and the establishment of scientific racism in the nineteenth century. Malcolmson demonstrates how unstable the idea of race remained in England at the end of the seventeenth century, and yet how extensively the intertwined institutions of government, colonialism, the slave trade, and science were collaborating to usher it into public view. Malcolmson places the genre of the voyage to the moon in the context of early modern discourses about human difference, and argues that Cavendish’s Blazing World and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels satirize the Society’s emphasis on skin color.

This book studies how doctors responded to – and helped shape – deep-seated fears about nervous degeneracy and population decline in France between 1750 and 1850. It uncovers a rich and far-ranging medical debate in which four generations of hygiene activists used biomedical science to transform the self, sexuality and community in order to regenerate a sick and decaying nation; a programme doctors labelled 'physical and moral hygiene'. Moreover, it is shown how doctors imparted biomedical ideas and language that allowed lay people to make sense of often bewildering socio-political changes, thereby giving them a sense of agency and control over these events. Combining a chronological and thematic approach, the six chapters in this book trace how doctors began their medical crusade during the middle of the Enlightenment, how this activism flowered during the French Revolution, and how they then revised their views during the period of post-revolutionary reaction. The study concludes by arguing that medicine acquired an unprecedented political, social and cultural position in French society, with doctors becoming the primary spokesmen for bourgeois values, and thus helped to define the new world that emerged from the post-revolutionary period.

Do women do science differently? This is a history of women in science and a frank assessment of the role of gender in shaping scientific knowledge. Londa Schiebinger looks at how women have fared and performed in both instances.

Exposing Men examines how ideals of masculinity have long skewed our societal--and scientific--understanding of one of the pillars of male identity: reproductive health. Only with the recent public exposure of men's reproductive troubles has the health of the male body been thrown into question, and along with it deeper masculine ideals. Whereas once men's sexual and reproductive abilities were the most taboo of topics, today erectile dysfunction is a multi-billion dollar business, and magazine articles trumpet male reproductive decline with headlines such as "You're Half the Man Your Father Was." Cynthia R. Daniels casts a gimlet eye on our world of plummeting sperm counts, spiking reproductive cancers, sperm banks, and pharmacological cures for impotence in order to assess the true state of male health. What she finds is male reproductive systems damaged by toxins and war, and proof piling up that men through sperm, pass on harm to the children they father. Yet, despite the evidence that men's health, as much as women's, significantly affects the vitality of their offspring, Daniels also sees a society holding on to outdated assumptions, one in which men ignore blatant health risks as they struggle to live up to antiquated ideas of manliness.

Postmodernism and poststructuralism have undermined the assumptions upon which established identities have been constructed, such as the concept of stable bodies and stable selves. Sex, gender, sexuality and race are no longer viewed as merely descriptive aspects of experience but also as constructions of identity. Drawing on current debates in postmodern feminism, feminist philosophy of science, anti-racist/postcolonial studies and queer theory, this book considers the way in which discourse fabricates the ideal' male body, sexual identity and sexual politics. Alan Petersen explores the possibilities of developing new models of identity not so closely linked to the sex/gender system and examines the prospects of creating a new or reconceptualized identity politics.

While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwin’s scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, Martin Priestman situates Darwin’s three major poems - The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) - and Darwin himself within a large, polymathic late-Enlightenment network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Interpreting Darwin’s poetry in terms of Darwin’s broader sense of the poetic text as a material space, he posits a significant shift from the Enlightenment’s emphases on conceptual spaces to the Romantic period’s emphases on historical time. He shows how Darwin’s poetry illuminates his stance toward all the major physical sciences and his well-formulated theories of evolution and materially based psychology. Priestman’s study also offers the first substantial accounts of Darwin’s mythological theories and their links to Enlightenment Rosicrucianism and Freemansonry, and of the reading of history that emerges from the fragment-poem The Progress of Society, a first-ever printed edition of which is included in an appendix. Ultimately, Priestman’s book offers readers a sustained account of Darwin’s polymathic Enlightenment worldview and cognate poetics in a period when texts are too often judged by their adherence to a retrospectively constructed ‘Romanticism’.

Explores historical and philosophical shifts in the depiction of women and virtue in the early years of the Chinese state. Includes an examination of the history of yin-yang theories.

How did science come to have such a central place in Western culture? How did our ways of thinking, and our moral, political, and social values, come to be modelled around scientific values? Stephen Gaukroger traces the story of how these values developed, and how they influenced society and culture from the 19th to the mid-20th century.

If science has the equivalent of a Bloomsbury group, it is the five men born at the turn of the twentieth century in Budapest: Theodore von Kármán, Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller. From Hungary to Germany to the United States, they remained friends and continued to work together and influence each other throughout their lives. As a result, their work was integral to some of the most important scientific and political developments of the twentieth century. István Hargittai tells the story of this remarkable group: Wigner won a Nobel Prize in theoretical physics; Szilard was the first to see that a chain reaction based on neutrons was possible, initiated the Manhattan Project, but left physics to try to restrict nuclear arms; von Neumann could solve difficult problems in his head and developed the modern computer for more complex problems; von Kármán became the first director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, providing the scientific basis for the U.S. Air Force; and Teller was the father of the hydrogen bomb, whose name is now synonymous with the controversial "Star Wars" initiative of the 1980s. Each was fiercely opinionated, politically active, and fought against all forms of totalitarianism. Hargittai, as a young Hungarian physical chemist, was able to get to know some of these great men in their later years, and the depth of information and human interest in The Martians of Science is the result of his personal relationships with the subjects, their families, and their contemporaries.