Ronald L. Numbers

Caring and curing : health and medicine in the Western religious traditions

Most religious traditions have a rich, if largely forgotten, heritage of involvement in medical issues of life, death, and health. Religious values influence our behavior and attitudes toward sickness, sexuality, and lifestyle, to say nothing of more controversial subjects such as abortion and euthanasia. The essays in this important book illuminate the history of health and medicine within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Bringing together 20 original articles by expert scholars in the fields of the history of religion and the history of medicine, Caring and Curing provides a fascinating and enlightening overview of how religious values have come to affect the practice of medicine and medical care.

Almost Persuaded: American Physicians and Compulsory Health Insurance, 1912-1920

Feel lonely? What about reading books? Book is one of the greatest friends to accompany while in your lonely time. When you have no friends and activities somewhere and sometimes, reading book can be a great choice. This is not only for spending the time, it will increase the knowledge. Of course the b=benefits to take will relate to what kind of book that you are reading. And now, we will concern you to try reading almost persuaded american physicians and compulsory health insurance 1912 1920 as one of the reading material to finish quickly.

Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science

On a December evening in 1869, with memories of civil war still fresh in their minds, a large audience gathered in the great hall of Cooper Union in New York City to hear about another conflict, still taking its toll—“with battles fiercer, with sieges more persistent, with strategy more vigorous than in any of the comparatively petty warfares of Alexander, or Caesar, or Napoleon.” Although waged with pens rather than swords, and for minds rather than empires, this war, too had destroyed lives and reputations. The combatants? Science and Religion.

With Dignity: The Search for Medicare and Medicaid

Thank you very much for reading with dignity the search for medicare and medicaid. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have search numerous times for their chosen novels like this with dignity the search for medicare and medicaid, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they cope with some infectious virus inside their desktop computer.

Defending science education against intelligent design: a call to action

We review here the current political landscape and our own efforts to address the attempts to undermine science education in Wisconsin. To mount an effective response, expertise in evolutionary biology and in the history of the public controversy is useful but not essential. However, entering the fray requires a minimal tool kit of information. Here, we summarize some of the scientific and legal history of this issue and list a series of actions that scientists can take to help facilitate good science education and an improved atmosphere for the scientific enterprise nationally. Finally, we provide some model legislation that has been introduced in Wisconsin to strengthen the teaching of science.

George Frederick Wright: From Christian Darwinist to Fundamentalist

G EORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT (1838-1921), a Congregational clergyman J and amateur geologist, launched his career in science and religion in the 1870s as an advocate of what came to be known as Christian Darwinism. In collaboration with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray (1810-1888), he sought to harmonize Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection with the tenets of orthodox Christianity, an effort that elicited kind words from Darwin himself. A quarter of a century later Wright emerged as the leading scientific authority among early American fundamentalists. He contributed essays to The Fundamentals and, posthumously, received William Jennings Bryans blessing during the notorious Scopes trial. Wrights metamorphosis from advocate of Darwinism into apologist for fundamentalism presents the historian with an enigma. Did he repudiate organic evolution in his last years and revert to the creationism of his youth? If so, an analysis of the factors that prompted him to follow such a course might illuminate the reasons why other evangelical Christians turned their backs on organic evolution. Or did he, as some historians have suggested, remain a Christian Darwinist while serving as a fundamentalist spokesman? In this case we would want to know whether his associates were aware of his opinions and whether they were concerned by them. If they did not care, we might conclude that fundamentalist opposition to evolution, at least during the period before the 1920s, has been greatly exaggerated.

Darwinism in the American South

No region in the world has won greater notoriety for its hostility to Darwinism than the American South. Despite the absence of any systematic study of evolution in the region, historians have insisted that southerners were uniquely resistant to evolutionary ideas. Rarely looking beyond the dismissals of Alexander Winchell from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1870s and James Woodrow from Columbia Theological Seminary Decatur, Georgia, in the 1880s—or the Scopes trial in the 1920s—they have concluded, in the words of Monroe Lee Billington, that “Darwinism as an intellectual movement … bypassed Southerners.” W. J. Cash, in his immensely influential book The Mind of the South, contended that “the overwhelming body of Southern schools either so frowned on [Darwinism] for itself or lived in such terror of popular opinion that possible heretics could not get into their faculties at all or were intimidated into keeping silent by the odds against them.” Darwin’s few southern converts either “took the way of discretion” by moving to northern universities or so qualified their discussions of evolution as to render the theory “almost sterile.”

Creationists and their critics in Australia: an autonomous culture or 'the USA with Kangaroos'?

No country outside the United States has given creationism a warmer reception than Australia, which has spawned an internationally successful creationist ministry and at times even welcomed creation science into the classrooms of state-supported schools. A half-century ago, however, when organized anti-evolutionism first appeared in Australia, it attracted virtually no attention, and for over three decades thereafter it remained isolated on the far margins of Australian society, too obscure and impotent to warrant public concern. As late as 1984 one of the best informed students of Australian fundamentalism predicted that `because of the different national traditions and educational systems, the [creationist] controversy is not likely to become as intense in Australia as in USA?.The following decade proved him a false prophet. The most intense creation-evolution debates in the world have occurred on Australian soil, and Australian creationists have insinuated themselves into the religious, scientific, educational, and political life of the country. In this brief history of creationism and anti-creationism in Australia during the past half-century or so, I highlight two distinctive (though not unique) characteristics of the Australian encounter: the efforts of both sides to tar the other with a `made in America? brush and the contribution of anti-creationists to the success of the creationists. Paradoxically, by hounding and ridiculing creationists, the critics significantly boosted the visibility and viability of creationism in Australia.

The American History of Science Society or the International History of Science Society? The Fate of Cosmopolitanism since George Sarton

Almost since its beginning, the History of Science Society has suffered from dual personalities, simultaneously displaying identities as both the American History of Science Society and the International History of Science Society. This note traces the disorder and its manifestations from the days of George Sarton to the present.

“The Most Important Biblical Discovery of Our Time”: William Henry Green and the Demise of Ussher's Chronology

In 1650 the distinguished church historian Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland announced his meticulously calculated time of the Creation: early Saturday evening, 22 October 4004 B.C.E., a date immortalized in the margins of countless Bibles for nearly three centuries. Among evangelical Protestants who believed in the inerrancy of Scripture this date came to mark the beginning of human history. For some believers it remained a landmark until the late twentieth century; others abandoned it as early as the 1860s. Among American evangelicals no one played a more important role in discrediting Usshers chronology than William Henry Green, an Old Testament scholar at Princeton Theological Seminary. One of Greens Princeton colleagues called his demonstration of Usshers fallacy “the most important biblical discovery of our time.” In some ways it was, although its full impact did not come until the second half of the twentieth century.