NTM最新文献

By taking the work and life of the historian of mathematics Heinrich Wieleitner as an example, this study aims to highlight the many interrelations between the historiography of mathematics, mathematics education, and science communication in mathematics.By integrating aspects of the history of media, this case study also explores mathematical public relations work in the 20th century and draws attention to the important persons, institutions and contents. The focus is on the Weimar period, in which the self-understanding of mathematics was challenged in different ways by far-reaching cultural debates. The article demonstrates that as a consequence of a changing media landscape, Weimar culture turned out to be a suitable environment for the successful self-presentation of mathematics.

The recent discovery of a manuscript has allowed historians to understand the medical routine in a hospital known as the Schneidhaus in Augsburg between the sixteenth and nineteenth century. The context of the manuscript shows that at this institution, non-academic specialists, generally members of the guild of barber-surgeons and barbers, routinely performed surgical cures of intestinal hernia, scrotal swellings, and vesical calculus. The Schneidhaus exclusively admitted patients applying for such specialised treatments and offered no other services. Such a degree of specialisation within medical establishments seems to have only existed in the Holy Roman Empire at this institution founded by the Fugger family in Augsburg. We propose that the Schneidhaus was either itself a model hospital or adopted a model from another site in Europe. In this paper, we investigate the connections of the Schneidhaus to the practice of surgeons in both Italy and Spain. In Italy, a momentous new technique for identifying and removing vesical calculi was first published in 1522. Although surgical treatment was established in Italian hospitals, they tended not to specialise in such surgical treatment exclusively. Moreover, at the time of the hospital's foundation, the Fugger shifted their economic and social focus from Venice to the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, research in the history of medicine is complicated by outdated notions about specialised surgery, not unlike those that were recently still current regarding the Holy Roman Empire. We attempt to disprove these notions and use the exemplary textbook of one academic physician, Francisco Díaz, to approach specialized surgical practice in sixteenth-century Spain. In his work, Díaz describes the new Italian surgical method in detail and recognizes the importance of craftsman surgeons to both its development and application. However, he also argues for an expanded role for academic physicians as supervisors of craftsman surgeons' work. All this is suggestive of a greater network of surgical professionals within which both the methods of the craft and its organisational structures were transported. As such, the Schneidhaus can be seen as a node that embodied the institutionalization of surgical practice as a European phenomenon. Further research is necessary, and we propose how this might be carried out to reveal these historical phenomena in their full complexity.

Inspired by American research on the role of the family environment in the development of schizophrenia, the Scottish psychiatrist Ronald D. Laing, now known as the figurehead of British antipsychiatry, began his own research project with his colleague Aaron Esterson in the late 1950s. In the process, he became convinced that those diagnosed as "schizophrenic" were far more rational than bourgeois families alienated from themselves. Driven by this perspective, Laing pushed harder into the public arena and began to become politically active. This article analyzes Laing's development into an anti-psychiatrist and star of the counterculture in the course of the 1960s and asks about the reasons and conditions of possibility for this transformation from scientist to "scientific political activist".

With the demand for "counter-knowledge" in the social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, "counter-experts" became an integral part of politics. In the field of environmental activism, counter-experts were particularly well represented in regions and agglomerations with high levels of industrial pollution. This essay argues that awareness correlated with a mode of knowledge production that was typical for the environmental sciences in the twentieth century. The history of the environmental sciences throughout that period was shaped by regional epistemologies, often emerging in the context of large-scale infrastructural projects. Many counter-experts therefore had strong ties with the field of the environmental sciences. The article traces three influential counter-experts in the Frankfurt Main region by 1980: the pastor Kurt Oeser; scientific green activist Jutta Ditfurth; and the project of a "social natural science" related to the Darmstadt philosopher Gernot Böhme.