23/11/22

Library closed on the afternoon of november 25

NOTICE

Friday November 25 the researchers' room and the different services provided by the Biblioteca Historicomèdica will be closed in the afternoon, from 2 p.m. onwards.

The reading room on the first floor will be open as usual.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

21/11/22

NEW ENTRY TO "SABERES EN ACCIÓN" (KNOWLEDGE IN ACTION): "Leviatán y la bombo de vacío" (Leviathan and the vacuum pump) by José Ramón Bertomeu Sánchez (IILP-UV)

Second part of "saberes en acción" (knowledge in action): https://sabersenaccio.iec.cat/. 

Category "Controversies".

Controversies provide insight into crucial features of knowledge in action.

One of the most influential books in the history of science in recent decades was written by a british historian (Simon Schaffer) and an american sociologist (Steven Shapin). It focused on experiments in the second half of the 17th century related to the vacuum pump or pneumatic machine, an apparatus for extracting air from a closed container and contemplating surprising phenomena rarely observed in everyday life. A mid-20th century historian, Alfred Rupert Hall (1920-2009), had dubbed it the "17th century cyclotron" for the role he attributed to it in the birth of experimental science. Shapin and Schaffer's goal was different from the many previous studies. They intended to offer a scheme for thinking historically about the experiments of Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and the polemics generated with his critics, among them Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679). They pointed out three aspects (or "technologies") of the controversy: the material technology (the vacuum pump), the literary (patterns of description of experiments to endow them with credibility and mobility) and the social (implicit and explicit rules to maintain the debate and establish its limits and authoritative voices). Through this scheme, the controversy made it possible to bring into contact works usually considered as crucial in the history of science with others such as Hobbes' Leviathan. Hence the title of the book and also the provocative cover that intermingles the frontispiece of Hobbes's work with a pneumatic machine.

To continue reading:

https://sabersenaccio.iec.cat/leviatan-i-la-bomba-de-buit/

15/11/22

Library closed on the afternoon of november 18

NOTICE

Friday November 18 the researchers' room and the different services provided by the Biblioteca Historicomèdica will be closed in the afternoon, from 2 p.m. onwards.

The reading room on the first floor will be open as usual.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

09/11/22

NEW ENTRY TO "SABERES EN ACCIÓN" (KNOWLEDGE IN ACTION): "Sífilis en primer plano" (Syphilis in the foreground) by Paula Arantzazu Ruiz (University of Castilla-La Mancha)

Second part of "saberes en acción" (knowledge in action): https://sabersenaccio.iec.cat/. 

Category "Visual Cultures".

Poster art and cinematography played a leading role in the anti-venereal fight, at the same time that chemotherapy was advancing.

In the fall of 1909, microbiologist Jean Comandon (1877-1970) presented to the world the first cinematographic images of Treponema pallidum, the etiological agent associated with syphilis. Only four years had passed since Fritz Schaudinn (1871-1906), together with Erich Hoffmann (1869-1959), made the first microscopic observations of this spirochete bacterium in blood samples from patients at the Hospital de La Charité, but Comandon's film achieved a new milestone, albeit of a different scope, in the scientific advancement of this sexually transmitted disease.

Just over three minutes long, the film Spirochaeta Pallida (Agent de la Syphilis) was made using an apparatus consisting of 25 technological elements that roughly combined the ultramicroscope with the film camera. In order to prevent the biological samples from being killed by the heat of the light from the camera, the apparatus consisted of protective components, such as curtains and cooling systems, and was built thanks to funding from the film entrepreneur Charles Pathé (1863-1957). As a result, this technology offered unpublished moving images of the bacterial agent of syphilis, taken from the cornea of a rabbit with syphilitic keratitis, which would help to understand, among other things, its motor behaviour. Moreover, this small film marked the consolidation of a new visual regime of science inaugurated by the daguerreotypes of Alfred Donné (1801-1878), physician, microscopist and pioneer of photomicrography, made in Paris together with his assistant Leon Foucault (1819-1868), which would open the doors to new visual narratives on disease and health.

To continue reading:

https://sabersenaccio.iec.cat/sifilis-en-primer-pla/

03/11/22

Library closed on the afternoon of november 4

NOTICE

Friday November 4 the researchers' room and the different services provided by the Biblioteca Historicomèdica will be closed in the afternoon, from 2 p.m. onwards.

The reading room on the first floor will be open as usual.

We apologize for any inconvenience.