Technical Knowledge in American Culture: Science, Technology, and Medicine Since the Early 1800s

This pioneering collection of essays all speak in a remarkably integrated manner to the question of what are the relations between science and society by showing that the technical ideas of science (or technology or medicine) are derived from the unspoken general notions that hold the culture together. In short, they show culture in intellectual history, or the history of ideas. The collection is arranged in a sequence of three eras in American history, and each essay within each cluster illustrates the connections between the ideas of society (how society is organized) and of science (how scientists think science is organized). The essays include case studies of early 19th century mechanics's institutes, of women's diseases that appear and disappear in different eras, of ideas of racial nutrition, and of urban airports, among others, each as a problem in American civilization at a different time and how people "resolve" said problems by finally redefining them out of existence. This is history a la Foucault par excellence!