The Quantification of Life and Health from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century

The Quantification of Life and Health from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century

Author: Simone Guidi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 3031157257

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This edited volume explores the intersection of medicine and philosophy throughout history, calling attention to the role of quantification in understanding the medical body. Retracing current trends and debates to examine the quantification of the body throughout the early modern, modern and early contemporary age, the authors contextualise important issues of both medical and philosophical significance, with chapters focusing on the quantification of temperaments and fluids, complexions, functions of the living body, embryology, and the impact of quantified reasoning on the concepts of health and illness. With insights spanning from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, this book provides a wide-ranging overview of attempts to ‘quantify’ the human body at various points. Arguing that medicine and philosophy have been constantly in dialogue with each other, the authors discuss how this provided a strategic opportunity both for medical thought and philosophy to refine and further develop. Given today’s fascination with the quantification of the body, represented by the growing profusion of self-tracking devices logging one’s sleep, diet or mood, this collection offers an important and timely contribution to an emerging and interdisciplinary field of study.


The Quantification of Life and Health from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century

The Quantification of Life and Health from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century

Author: Simone Guidi

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 2023-11-24

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9783031157240

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This edited volume explores the intersection of medicine and philosophy throughout history, calling attention to the role of quantification in understanding the medical body. Retracing current trends and debates to examine the quantification of the body throughout the early modern, modern and early contemporary age, the authors contextualise important issues of both medical and philosophical significance, with chapters focusing on the quantification of temperaments and fluids, complexions, functions of the living body, embryology, and the impact of quantified reasoning on the concepts of health and illness. With insights spanning from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, this book provides a wide-ranging overview of attempts to ‘quantify’ the human body at various points. Arguing that medicine and philosophy have been constantly in dialogue with each other, the authors discuss how this provided a strategic opportunity both for medical thought and philosophy to refine and further develop. Given today’s fascination with the quantification of the body, represented by the growing profusion of self-tracking devices logging one’s sleep, diet or mood, this collection offers an important and timely contribution to an emerging and interdisciplinary field of study.


The Quantification of Bodies in Health

The Quantification of Bodies in Health

Author: Btihaj Ajana

Publisher: Emerald Group Publishing

Published: 2021-12-06

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1800718837

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The Quantification of Bodies in Health aims to deepen understanding of the quantification of the body and of the role of self-tracking practices in everyday life. It brings together authors working at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, and digital culture.


Neoliberalism, the Security State, and the Quantification of Reality

Neoliberalism, the Security State, and the Quantification of Reality

Author: David R. Lea

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-12-14

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1498520081

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As the security state grows in power and dominance, commercial and financial interests increasingly penetrate our social existence. Neoliberalism, the Security State, and the Quantification of Reality addresses the relationship between these two trends in its discussion of neoliberalism, financialization, and managerialism, with a particular focus on the decline of professionalism, the restructuring of tertiary education, and the university’s abandonment of the humanities. Additionally, David Lea links these developments with the failings of democratic institutions, the growth of the disciplinary society, and the emergence of the security state, which relentlessly governs by extraordinary fiat dividing, disempowering and excluding. Lea identifies one such linkage inthe common form of rationality, which underlies contemporary approaches to reality. Others have noted that one of the most notable political developments of the last thirty years or so has been increasing public and governmental demand for the quantification of social phenomena. Moreover, A.W. Crosby has attributed Europe’s unprecedented imperial success, which began in early European Modernity, to a paradigmatic shift from a qualitative world view grounded in Platonic and Neo-Platonic idealism to a more quantitative world view. Nevertheless, this quantitative approach towards the natural and social worlds alienates humans from other species and even from ourselves and fails to represent life as we actually experience it. While a quantitative world view may have facilitated imperial success and the interlocking exercise of power and authority by the state and the economically empowered, this instrumental form of thinking rationales, strategies and facilitates policies that restrict and vitiate individual autonomy to create a seamless controlled conformity. This form of thinking that relies on the quantification of natural and social phenomena creates a value free equivalency, which at the same time invidiously divides society into the wealthy and the impoverished, the advantaged and the exploited, the politically included and the excluded.


The Transformation of the World

The Transformation of the World

Author: Jürgen Osterhammel

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-09-15

Total Pages: 1192

ISBN-13: 0691169802

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A panoramic global history of the nineteenth century A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition. He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century," taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion, from the perils and promise of Europe's transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet. Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways. He explores the changing relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nation-state, and much more. This is the highly anticipated English edition of the spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed German book, which is also being translated into Chinese, Polish, Russian, and French. Indispensable for any historian, The Transformation of the World sheds important new light on this momentous epoch, showing how the nineteenth century paved the way for the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, yet how it also gave rise to pacifism, liberalism, the trade union, and a host of other crucial developments.


An American Health Dilemma

An American Health Dilemma

Author: W. Michael Byrd

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-10-02

Total Pages: 708

ISBN-13: 1135960488

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At times mirroring and at times shockingly disparate to the rise of traditional white American medicine, the history of African-American health care is a story of traditional healers; root doctors; granny midwives; underappreciated and overworked African-American physicians; scrupulous and unscrupulous white doctors and scientists; governmental support and neglect; epidemics; and poverty. Virtually every part of this story revolves around race. More than 50 years after the publication of An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal's 1944 classic about race relations in the USA, An American Health Dilemma presents a comprehensive and groundbreaking history and social analysis of race, race relations and the African-American medical and public health experience. Beginning with the origins of western medicine and science in Egypt, Greece and Rome the authors explore the relationship between race, medicine, and health care from the precursors of American science and medicine through the days of the slave trade with the harrowing middle passage and equally deadly breaking-in period through the Civil War and the gains of reconstruction and the reversals caused by Jim Crow laws. It offers an extensive examination of the history of intellectual and scientific racism that evolved to give sanction to the mistreatment, medical abuse, and neglect of African Americans and other non-white people. Also included are biographical portraits of black medical pioneers like James McCune Smith, the first African American to earn a degree from a European university, and anecdotal vignettes,like the tragic story of "the Hottentot Venus", which illustrate larger themes. An American Health Dilemma promises to become an irreplaceable and essential look at African-American and medical history and will provide an invaluable baseline for future exploration of race and racism in the American health system.


Improving Global Health

Improving Global Health

Author: Barry B. Hughes

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-11-17

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 1317257766

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Improving Global Health is the third in a series of volumes-Patterns of Potential Human Progress-that uses the International Futures (IFs) simulation model to explore prospects for human development: how development appears to be unfolding globally and locally, how we would like it to evolve, and how better to assure that we move it in desired directions. Earlier volumes addressed the reduction of global poverty and the advance of global education. Volume 3 sets out to tell a story of possible futures for the health of peoples across the world. Questions the volume addresses include: -What health outcomes might we expect given current patterns of human development? -What opportunities exist for intervention and the achievement of alternate health futures? -How might improved health futures affect broader economic, social, and political prospects of countries, regions, and the world?


Diseases of Coral

Diseases of Coral

Author: Cheryl M. Woodley

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-01-26

Total Pages: 613

ISBN-13: 0813824117

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Coral disease is quickly becoming a crisis to the health and management of the world’s coral reefs. There is a great interest from many in preserving coral reefs. Unfortunately, the field of epizootiology is disorganized and lacks a standard vocabulary, methods, and diagnostic techniques, and tropical marine scientists are poorly trained in wildlife pathology, veterinary medicine, and epidemiology. Diseases of Coral will help to rectify this situation.


Trust in Numbers

Trust in Numbers

Author: Theodore M. Porter

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0691210543

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A foundational work on historical and social studies of quantification What accounts for the prestige of quantitative methods? The usual answer is that quantification is desirable in social investigation as a result of its successes in science. Trust in Numbers questions whether such success in the study of stars, molecules, or cells should be an attractive model for research on human societies, and examines why the natural sciences are highly quantitative in the first place. Theodore Porter argues that a better understanding of the attractions of quantification in business, government, and social research brings a fresh perspective to its role in psychology, physics, and medicine. Quantitative rigor is not inherent in science but arises from political and social pressures, and objectivity derives its impetus from cultural contexts. In a new preface, the author sheds light on the current infatuation with quantitative methods, particularly at the intersection of science and bureaucracy.


The Natural and the Human

The Natural and the Human

Author: Stephen Gaukroger

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-01-21

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 0191074861

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Stephen Gaukroger presents an original account of the development of empirical science and the understanding of human behaviour from the mid-eighteenth century. Since the seventeenth century, science in the west has undergone a unique form of cumulative development in which it has been consolidated through integration into and shaping of a culture. But in the eighteenth century, science was cut loose from the legitimating culture in which it had had a public rationale as a fruitful