Byline: Chiara Lacroix
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Is writing context-laden intellectual histories possible?
This essay compares two relatively recent works of intellectual history centred on the 18th century, both with an ambitious scope, and both written by established historians of science and medicine: Stephen Gaukroger’s The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 and Suman Seth’s Difference and Disease: medicine, race, and the eighteenth-century…
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The Male Pill: Reflections on Gender and Social Construction
“The Pill” is the most common contraceptive used by women in Western countries, and certainly the most high-profile one.[1] The Pill combines ease of use (daily oral administration of a small capsule) with high contraceptive effectiveness (more than 99% with correct use). In 2010, both scientists and journalists celebrated the fifty years of the Pill,…