Papers – Quillets and Quackery

Science and the Construction of Health in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, 1879-1906

July 15, 2018

It is done, and it is online for anyone to read! The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a crisis in therapeutics as scientific developments overturned the theoretical underpinnings of humoral medicine, leaving room for lively and pluralistic discourses of health and healing. This thesis examines the controversies surrounding therapeutics in late nineteenth-century America through … More Science and the Construction of Health in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, 1879-1906

French Paracelsianism on Trial

January 8, 2018

This was my final project for Dr. Rienk Vermij’s 5523 class — Renaissance and Early Modern Science, Fall 2017. I found out in the final stretch of the semester that Hervé Baudry, a French academic, has made a similar argument to the one I attempt, although he uses Roch le Baillif’s more well-known book, Le Demosterion, to … More French Paracelsianism on Trial

Health & Water in the Middle Ages

August 7, 2017

Health and Water in the Middle Ages: A Historiographical Survey As a requirement for life, water has enjoyed an interactive relationship with humanity through the ages, and this is no less true of the medieval era this survey will cover from about the ninth-century to the fifteenth AD. Because of its cleansing properties, symbolic … More Health & Water in the Middle Ages

Disease as Framework

January 12, 2017

Medical historians, medical anthropologists, and other scholars concerned with a plethora of topics have written works centered around specific diseases; what comprises their arguments, evidence, and conclusions, however, varies greatly and begs the question, what exactly is the history of a disease, and how have scholars employed disease as a schema through which they analyze … More Disease as Framework

Science of the Marginalized: Women in the Age of Scientific Authority

January 12, 2017

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have witnessed a transformation in the status of scientific authority. With authority comes power, and with power comes the ability to dictate what is inside the realm of value and acceptability and what lies outside of that constructed space. When scientific disciplines and the respected members of those disciplines began … More Science of the Marginalized: Women in the Age of Scientific Authority

Mechanism and Holism in Modernity

January 12, 2017

A Holistic Approach to Making Sense of the Modern World While science has been an important avenue through which humans have attempted to explore and understand their surroundings since the time of the Greeks, it was not until the late nineteenth-century that its methods, across the increasingly specialized and defined scientific disciplines, began to … More Mechanism and Holism in Modernity

Darwin Demystified

January 12, 2017

Darwin Demystified: Two Constructivist Analyses of the “Revolutionary” Evolutionist Peter J. Bowler’s biography of Charles Darwin betrays its relatively unique approach in its physical appearance before the reader ever opens it. The book itself is small, an irregularity anyone familiar with the Darwin industry would find immediately anomalistic. The cover shows a picture of … More Darwin Demystified

Alchemy in an HSCI Classroom

January 12, 2017

Alchemy in a History of Science Classroom Alchemy has been a contentious space in which historians of science have engaged in the recurrent debate on what exactly constitutes “science,” and because of its spiritual and religious components, alchemy was often placed into the pseudoscientific category. Recent scholarship, however, has reaffirmed its position amongst other Medieval … More Alchemy in an HSCI Classroom