Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology & Medicine, by John Pickstone

Synopsis: In Ways of Knowing, John V. Pickstone provides a new and accessible framework for understanding science, technology, and medicine (STM) in the West from the Renaissance to the present. Pickstone’s approach has four key features. First, he synthesizes the long-term histories and philosophies of disciplines that are normally studied separately. Second, he dissects STM into specific ways of knowing–natural history, analysis, and experimentalism–with separate but interlinked elements. Third, he explores these ways of knowing as forms of work related to our various technologies for making, mending, and destroying. And finally, he relates scientific and technical knowledges to popular understandings and to politics.

Covering an incredibly wide range of subjects, from minerals and machines to patients and pharmaceuticals, and from experimental physics to genetic engineering, Pickstone’s Ways of Knowing challenges the reader to reexamine traditional conceptualizations of the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, technology, and medicine.

Published: April 2001 | ISBN: 978-0226667959

Mini-bio: John Pickstone was a British historian of science and the Wellcome Research Professor in the Centre for the History of science, Technology and Medicine, in the Faculty of Life Sciences of the University of Manchester. Wikipedia

Social History of Medicine Book Review
Bulletin of the History of Medicine Book Review
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Book Review
Sociology and Philosophy of Science Book Review

Amazon Associates (SBAD gets a % of sales from books sold via these links, to help us do more work for science books)

Paperback Edition: Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine