"The Laughing Philosopher": Whitman's Comic Repose

Laughing at the obese.

While the phenomenon has been studied mainly among medical students, it is well known that physicians, even seasoned ones, often make derogatory remarks about certain patients – not in the patients’ presence (it is to be hoped) but to each other. The targets of such medical locker-room humour are often the patients who, the doctors think, brought their illnesses upon themselves. In a focus grou...

Thomas Young, Natural Philosopher

Dr. Willmer's second edition of this little book fulfills his stated purpose ... to correlate some of the numerous fragments of scattered data which have so far been obtained and to orientate them in such a way as to illustrate the more fundamental contributions which the method has made to physiological knowledge, and to show the manner in which a change of outlook has already been brought abo...

Condoms no laughing matter.

This multimedia project was as a beer commercial, a lad's night in, an environment that can be used to target the relevant audience. The goal was to deploy a familiar atmosphere and recognisable characters whilst delivering a serious message with humour in a very short space of time.

Joseph Priestley, natural philosopher.

In this two hundredth anniversary year of his death, we are met to celebrate the life and career of Joseph Priestley—and most of us celebrate the wrong man, for the wrong reasons. We celebrate the pneumatic chemist who, in a flurry of random experiments made over a period of five years, isolated and partially identified nine new gases, including oxygen—and the man who spent roughly five times a...

Newton as Philosopher