Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s
Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s

Author: Alison Moulds

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-08-10

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 3030743454

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This book examines how the medical profession engaged with print and literary culture to shape its identities between the 1830s and 1910s in Britain and its empire. Moving away from a focus on medical education and professional appointments, the book reorients attention to how medical self-fashioning interacted with other axes of identity, including age, gender, race, and the spaces of practice. Drawing on medical journals and fiction, as well as professional advice guides and popular periodicals, this volume considers how images of medical practice and professionalism were formed in the cultural and medical imagination. Alison Moulds uncovers how medical professionals were involved in textual production and consumption as editors, contributors, correspondents, readers, authors, and reviewers. Ultimately, this book opens up new perspectives on the relationship between literature and medicine, revealing how the profession engaged with a range of textual practices to build communities, air grievances, and augment its cultural authority and status in public life.

Spark from the Deep
Spark from the Deep

Author: William J. Turkel

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM

Published: 2013-07-17

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 1421409941

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How encounters with strongly electric fish informed our grasp of electricity. Spark from the Deep tells the story of how human beings came to understand and use electricity by studying the evolved mechanisms of strongly electric fish. These animals can shock potential prey or would-be predators with high-powered electrical discharges. William J. Turkel asks completely fresh questions about the evolutionary, environmental, and historical aspects of people’s interest in electric fish. Stimulated by painful encounters with electric catfish, torpedos, and electric eels, people learned to harness the power of electric shock for medical therapies and eventually developed technologies to store, transmit, and control electricity. Now we look to these fish as an inspiration for engineering new sensors, computer interfaces, autonomous undersea robots, and energy-efficient batteries. Praise for Spark from the Deep “This beautifully written and exhaustively researched book traces the links between experiments on strongly electric fish and scientific understanding of electricity . . . Turkel’s book is a joy to read; it will entertain and educate scientists, historians, and anyone with an interest in the natural world.” —Choice “Turkel’s book convincingly reminds us that all the laptops and gadgets we surround ourselves with are remixes; altered versions of strongly electric fish. For that strange and insightful observation, this book ought to be widely read and enjoyed.” —Chris Conway, Endeavour “[I]t is refreshing to explore a book which takes seriously ancient encounters with manifestations of natural electricity as precursors to more recent innovations.” —James F. Stark, The British Journal for the History of Science