Historically the Red Cross has created opportunities for women that were otherwise denied to them in their wider society. This role for female Red Cross workers is not a recent thing and is deeply embedded in the past and psyche of the organisation.

In Portuguese Nobel Laureate José Saramago’s As Intermitências da Morte (2005) and in Mahmoud Darwish’s epic poem Mural (2000), the authors contemplate the nothingness that accompanies death, a concern that increasingly permeates their later writings. Although ‘death’ is depicted differently, the authors fear that with death “the universe wo…[Read more]

Lynn Margulis’s writing about symbiosis has profoundly influenced contemporary evolutionary theory, as well as continental and analytic philosophy of science, the materialist turn, and new materialism. Nonetheless, her work, and all symbiosis or evolution, is founded on a paradox: symbiosis fictionalizes customary accounts of the origin and e…[Read more]

This article examines the political role of illness in Émile Zola’s ‘La Faute de l’abbé Mouret’ (‘The Sin of Father Mouret’, 1875) in articulating the difference between a religious and a secular body. Published in the early French Third Republic (1870–1940), this novel shows the Zolian body as the nexus upon which religious and republi…[Read more]

In ‘Degeneration’ (1892), Max Nordau included Émile Zola in his theory that fin-de-siècle artists were a danger to society. According to Nordau, the ‘false science’ in Zola’s Naturalist novels would erode social progress in their alleged preoccupation with disease, sexual deviancy and amorality. This article proposes that degeneration is, how…[Read more]

Im Ayurveda bedarf die Entstehung von Epidemien einer gesonderten Erklärung, da sie nicht mit dem dort gültigen allgemeinen Verständnis der Krankheitsentstehung in Einklang zu bringen ist. Das Grundkonzept sieht vor, dass Menschen je nach Konstitution, Ernährung, Körperkraft, Gewöhnung,
Charakter und Alter für bestimmte Krankheiten anfäll…[Read more]

कोविड महामारी से निपटने के लिए विज्ञान की भूमिका को सर्वोपरि बताया गया। लेकिन विज्ञान के नाम पर अनेक ऐसी चीजें भी हुईं, जिसने इस विभिषिका को निर्मित करने तथा इसे और भयावह बनाने में योगदान किया। इस दौरन सांख्यिकी के आंकड़ों को विज्ञान बनाकर प्रचारित किया गया तथा दुनिया के अधिकांश हिस्से को लॉकडाउन में धकेल दिया गया। ऐसे में सवाल यह…[Read more]

Pramod Ranjan wirft einen Blick aus Indien auf die Coronakrise und das wissenschaftliche Verständnis von der Welt, das oft erwähnt, aber meist ignoriert wird, sowie die Frage, wem das nutzt.

Die übertriebene Angst vor Covid-19 hat die menschliche Zivilisation und Kultur in Gefahr gebracht. Die Richtung, in die sich die Menschheit bewegte, br…[Read more]

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.

Examines the intersection between Chan Buddhism and Neo-Confucianism during the Southern Song dynasty period (1126-1279) in China.

Slides accompanying a talk presented at a joint research meeting of the Sushruta Project and the Classical Āyurveda Text Study Group in Vienna, July 2022.

The chair of chymiatria created at the University of Marburg was among the earliest academic initiatives aiming to integrate chymistry into the medical curriculum. If its practical applications in pharmacy and its relationship with patronage have been examined by historians, the theoretical part of the chymiatria programme still remains to be…[Read more]

Scientific diagrams could and did appear in unexpected places. This essay discusses such an example: the diagrams that the thirteenth- to fourteenth-century scholar George-Gregory Chioniades added to a manuscript of John of Damascus’s Fountain of Knowledge as part of his commentary on the text. I argue that the diagrams were a very important, if…[Read more]

This excel file contains the raw data behind the digital scholarly edition of the glosses to the first book of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville published at: https://db.innovatingknowledge.nl/edition

In this introduction for the special section on “Exclusions in the History of Media Studies,” we begin by calling attention to the constituting role that exclusion has played in the historiography of media studies. Exclusions linked to gender, race, language, colonialism, geopolitical location, and institutionally sanctioned privilege play sub…[Read more]