Author: Ad Maas
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The rise and fall of the fact: History of science in times of post-truth and alternative facts
With the boisterous rise of populism in politics and public debate, politicians and the media seem to deal with the truth in an increasingly dubious manner. We have entered—it is said—the era of ‘post-truth’, ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, and ‘fact-free’ politics. In this essay, I argue that history of science can help putting these developments…
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Lezen of niet-lezen, dat is de vraag
Onlangs kreeg ik van iemand die kennelijk wat aan mijn gevestigde opvattingen wilde rammelen het boek van Pierre Bayard kado, How to talk about books you haven’t read (2007). Bayard is Fransman, psychoanalyticus en doceert in Parijs Franse literatuur. Die combinatie belooft meestal niet veel goeds, maar het boek is werkelijk heel leesbaar. Daarmee kon…
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Gerbrandus Jelgersma: een wetenschappelijke (r)evolutie?
Tussen 1900 en 1920 voltrok zich binnen de psychiatrie een transformatie van een overwegend biomedische benadering naar een meer psychologische. Psychiaters in Nederland hadden veel aandacht voor psychologische en in het bijzonder psychoanalytische methoden om geestesziekten te bestuderen. Als één van de eerste Europese hoogleraren psychiatrie die de psychoanalyse omhelsde, was de Leidse psychiater Gerbrandus…
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In Waking Hours: Historical reconstruction, film, and why we need more diversity in academic output
On 6 December 2016 Katrien Vanagt, a historian of science and filmmaker, gave a guest lecture on early modern experiments in anatomy and optics within Prof. Sven Dupré’s Master course “Art and knowledge: Light, Color and Perspective in Art” at University College Utrecht. First, we watched her documentary In Waking Hours, co-produced with film maker…
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Probing the Boundary between Knowledge and Science in the History of Psychology: The Late Antique Roots of Introspection
The period of transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, known as late antiquity, gave rise to some of the elements that have since constituted the identity of the Western self. It also gave rise to new lines of psychological investigation, of which Western psychology is the remote heir. Psychology, however, did not exist…
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What’s on the mind of the psychometrician?
Many of the figures that historians write about died a long time ago. To gain insight into their lives, historians investigate sources that have in fact survived the test of time. But what would it be like to ask Isaac Newton a question in person? And what would you ask him? Isaac Newton has passed…
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Card files of the self
Every generation gets the self-help book it deserves. From the nineteenth-century Marriage Manual to the more recent The 4-hour Work Week (2007), books have been telling us how to cope with life. The promises of these books were—and still are—based on new or recycled knowledge about psychology, health, and business, and on common sense advice…
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A Near Impossible Task
In case of an emergency you call the emergency hotline, and help arrives quickly. This seems so straightforward that one almost forgets it requires a lot of coordination and organization. At the turn of the twentieth century the organizational structure behind emergency medicine developed significantly. Especially fundamental was the introduction of triage during the First…
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Painting a picture of the Modern-Day Amateur Scientist
“There is no such thing as an amateur artist as different from a professional artist. There is only good art and bad art,” said the French Painter Paul Cézanne, tipping his hat to his amateur colleagues. Such an attitude might appear to be on the rise in the world of science as well. In recent…
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The De Glind Conference and the Twilight of Disciplinarity
The History of Science PhD-Conference at De Glind is the successor of the biennial conferences at Rolduc. Two years ago, Hans Schouwenburg noticed a remarkable diversity of topics in his report of the Rolduc gathering. A great variety again characterized this year’s meeting. This was clearly reflected in the different backgrounds of the participants. Though…
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Gossip at the Academic Playground
Thinking about nineteenth-century scholars we tend to picture well-behaved members of polite society. The paintings and pictures of old faculty members that still adorn so many contemporary university halls and lecture rooms show earnest and erudite men who seem to be miles above ordinary pettiness. Some of these men have indeed made extraordinary contributions to…
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The missing history of the ‘laws of nature’
As historians, we historicize. Indeed, it is our firm belief that everything in our world is open to historical analysis and that, in the case of a job well done, the result will invariably be a deeper understanding of the object of our study. In fact, the more timeless and placeless this object appears to…
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Framing Elephant Disease – John Henry Steel’s A Manual of the Diseases of the Elephant and of his Management and Uses (1885)
To nineteenth-century colonial Britons, the elephant was of great importance. Not only were these giants widely used in colonial enterprises such as the army and timber industry. The animal also figured prominently in the visual and literary culture of that time. In the British Raj, the theme of human domination over other animals served to…
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On Hacking’s Emergence of Probability
Ian Hacking’s The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge University Press, 1975), was in many ways the launching pad for history of statistics as a scholarly topic in (but not limited to) history of science. Like its author, the book resists classification. Ian took his graduate training in philosophy at Cambridge, and he preferred simply “philosophy” to…
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Looking Over The Historian’s Shoulder
I first encountered A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich twenty years ago when I was a teaching assistant for a course called Medicine and Society in America.[1] For Professor Allan Brandt, the book was of interest mainly for its content. Based on the diary of an eighteenth century midwife in rural Hallowell, Maine, Ulrich’s…
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SSK.O. ?
The recent discovery of gravitational waves has impressed many people and has caused considerable stir in the community of physicists. Surprisingly this commotion has not spread to the community of historians of science. This is surprising because I believe that the claim to have detected gravitational waves constitutes a serious blow to the stronger versions…
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‘There he is, God, the Father’
In the winter of 1980, during the final months of her nearly 32-year reign, Juliana of the Netherlands received multiple distraught letters from subjects deeply disturbed by a news item making waves in national media.[1] In December, the Dutch Telegraaf had reported that a Leiden internist had taken blood samples from foetuses aborted in the…
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History of science in comic books
Fred de Heij (illustraties), Ad Maas (tekst), Ehrenfest! (Museum Boerhaave, Leiden 2015), 50 pagina’s, € 7,95. Als er één natuurkundige een stripverhaal waardig is, dan is het Ehrenfest. Zijn leven is op zich al bijna een stripverhaal. Deze energieke fysicus wist in een tijd van verwarrende ontwikkelingen de natuurkunde te verlevendigen door deze te vatten…
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How to write a history of the humanities: A report on a colloquium with Rens Bod and James Turner
On the first of February the early modern historical colloquium on the history of the humanities took place in the fully packed Sweelinck room of Utrecht University. For this extended colloquium the university invited Prof. dr. Rens Bod and Prof. dr. James Turner, two authors of seminal publications on the history of the humanities. Rens…