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This collection of essays aims to provide a broader overview of the mathematical and statistical methods in the biological sciences, and to explore the use of these with the use of these quantitative technologies in medical and clinical cultures from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries.
With a foreword by Adam Hart-Davis, this book constitutes perhaps the first general survey of the mathematics of the Victorian period. It charts the institutional development of mathematics as a profession, as well as exploring the numerous innovations made during this time, many of which are still familiar today.
From the medicine we take, the treatments we receive, the aptitude and psychometric tests given by employers, the cars we drive, the clothes we wear to even the beer we drink, statistics have given shape to the world we inhabit. For the media, statistics are routinely 'damning', 'horrifying', or, occasionally, 'encouraging'. Yet, for all their ubiquity, most of us really don't know what to make of statistics. Exploring the history, mathematics, philosophy and practical use of statistics, Eileen Magnello - accompanied by Bill Mayblin's intelligent graphic illustration - traces the rise of statistics from the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians and Chinese, to the censuses of Romans and the Greeks,...
Written by leading statisticians and probabilists, this volume consists of 104 biographical articles on eminent contributors to statistical and probabilistic ideas born prior to the 20th Century. Among the statisticians covered are Fermat, Pascal, Huygens, Neumann, Bernoulli, Bayes, Laplace, Legendre, Gauss, Poisson, Pareto, Markov, Bachelier, Borel, and many more.
Ernest Starling (1866-1927) was pre-eminent in the golden age of British Physiology. His name is usually associated with his "Law of the Heart,” but his discovery of secretin (the first hormone whose mode of action was explained) and his work on capillaries were more important contributions. He coined the word 'hormone' one hundred years ago. His analysis of capillary function demonstrated that equal and opposite forces move across the capillary wall--an outward (hydrostatic) force and an inward (osmotic) force derived from plasma proteins.
In 1901 William Bateson, Professor of Biology at Cambridge, published a renewed version of a lecture which he had delivered the year before to the Royal Horticultural Society in London (reprinted in the book as an appendix). In this lecture he recognized the importance of the work completed by Gregor Mendel in 1865, and brought it to the notice of
For fifty years, Theodore Turquet de Mayerne served as a royal physician in France and then in England. Historians have long recognised him as a brilliant practitioner and chemical Galenist, but this book is the first major study of his remarkable Latin casebooks, the 'Ephemerides Morborum' (Diaries of Disease). Interpreting the casebooks in the light of Mayerne's own theoretical writings and of contemporaries such as Jean Fernel, the book is a cultural history of medical perception. It shows how Mayerne crafted a medical portrait for his patients, moving from evaluation, through diagnosis, prognosis, and therapeutics, and focuses on those moments when theory and practice merged to form an integrated medical outlook that served as the basis for action. Convinced that his innovations had the sanction of Galen and Hippocrates, Mayerne added chemical principles to humoral medicine, a greater empiricism to a more rational approach to medicine, and an interventionist therapeutics to a more cautious view of therapy, thus forging a complex synthesis that bore certain structural similarities to baroque culture and art.
Originally published in Great Britain in 2016 with different subtitle: Convergence: the deepest idea in the universe.
This open access book maps a crucial but neglected chapter in the history of psychiatry: how was melancholia transformed in the nineteenth century from traditional melancholy madness into a modern biomedical mood disorder, paving the way for the emergence of clinical depression as a psychiatric illness in the twentieth century? At a time when the prevalence of mood disorders and antidepressant consumption are at an all-time high, the need for a comprehensive historical understanding of how modern depressive illness came into being has never been more urgent. This book addresses a significant gap in existing scholarly literature on melancholia, depression, and mood disorders by offering a contextualised and critical perspective on the history of melancholia in the first decades of psychiatry, from the 1830s until the turn of the twentieth century.
The mathematical genius Alan Turing, now well known for his crucial wartime role in breaking the ENIGMA code, was the first to conceive of the fundamental principle of the modern computer-the idea of controlling a computing machine's operations by means of a program of coded instructions, stored in the machine's 'memory'. In 1945 Turing drew up his revolutionary design for an electronic computing machine-his Automatic Computing Engine ('ACE'). A pilot model of the ACE ran its first program in 1950 and the production version, the 'DEUCE', went on to become a cornerstone of the fledgling British computer industry. The first 'personal' computer was based on Turing's ACE. Alan Turing's Automatic...