Gerard Mercator: His Life and Works

Oliver Goldsmith. His life and works

Leonhard Euler: His Life, the Man, and His Works

On the occasion of the 300th anniversary (on April 15, 2007) of Euler’s birth, an attempt is made to bring Euler’s genius to the attention of a broad segment of the educated public. The three stations of his life—Basel, St. Petersburg, and Berlin—are sketched and the principal works identified in more or less chronological order. To convey a flavor of his work and its impact on modern science, ...

Gerard Van Swieten and his Time

cold and earache at the Vatican. If his ears had discharged at the Vatican or afterwards at least one of his biographers, or Reynolds himself in his diary, where he carefully recorded his eye symptoms, would have made some mention of it. Hilles quotes many of Reynolds' letters, in some of which he refers to his poor sight, but never to his poor hearing. Thus it would seem that Sir Joshua Reynol...

Humphry Davy: his life, works, and contribution to anesthesiology.

H ISTORY offers us a tool to avoid the condemnation George Santayana (1863–1952) envisioned for those who forget the past. In studying the history of anesthesia, and in particular the singular events that brought anesthesia into the consciousness of the world in Boston in 1845 and 1846, we find much to admire, but even more that we might hope not to repeat. The first public demonstrations of an...

Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680). His Life and Works

This book contains thirty-seven chapters, each a largely self-contained essay on some aspect of the quantitative method in biology and medicine. The first eight of these deal specifically with historical topics and include commentaries, for example, on Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, Mendel's basic theories and experimental findings, immunity against smallpox, the prevention...