The abortive attempts of Sir Humphry Davy to introduce modest reforms at the Royal Society of London during his Presidency (1820-27) contrast with his (largely unstudied) earlier experience of administration at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI). Davy's attempts to combat the systemic weaknesses in governance and funding, and his role in effecting changes at the RI, in association with...

The Mexica Empire reached an outstanding social, economic and politic organization among Mesoamerican civilizations. Even though archaeology and history provide substantial information about their past, their biological origin and the demographic consequences of their settlement in the Central Valley of Mexico remain unsolved. Two main hypotheses compete to explain the Mexica origin: a social r...

The concurrent development of political economy and the modern conception of medicine was reflected from the first decades of the seventeenth century by a degree of interdisciplinary borrowing based on analogy between the human body and the body politic. It seemed perfectly feasible that the growing knowledge of the human body and its diseases might inspire new concepts, and vindicate the use o...

In this paper, we explore the emergence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) as an object of political concern in and for countries of the global South. While epidemiologists and public health practitioners and scholars have long expressed concern with the changing global distribution of the burden of NCDs, it is only in more recent years that the aetiology, politics and consequences of these sh...

The birth of a language is a historical process, which develops through almost six stages corresponding to six main properties (genetic distance, geographical isolation, adoption of a writing system, elaboration of a literary koine, national consciousness, official status), which are specific to Western civilization and limited to our concern, i.e. the languages in contemporary Europe. The two ...