The invention of artificial fertilization in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

Artificial insemination and other fertilization techniques are today considered central to the history of reproductive medicine. The medical treatment of infertile couples, however, constitutes just a small part of the whole story of artificial fertilization. Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799) in particular, said to have been the inventor of artificial insemination, did not develop this method for medical purposes.

Behavioral Landscapes and Change in Behavioral Landscapes: A Multiple Time-Scale Density Distribution Approach.

In developmental arenas, it is well accepted that multiple observations are needed to obtain a robust characterization of individuals' behavioral tendencies across time and context. In this paper, we fuse core ideas from the study of lifespan development with intraindividual variability based approaches to personality and methods used to characterize the topography of geographic landscapes. We generalize the notion of density distributions into bivariate and multivariate space and draw parallels between the resulting behavioral landscapes and geographic landscapes.

The fluid mechanics of nutrition: Herman Boerhaave's synthesis of seventeenth-century circulation physiology.

This paper investigates the theory of nutrition of Herman Boerhaave, the famous professor of medicine and chemistry at the university of Leyden. Boerhaave's work, which systematized and synthesized the knowledge of the time, represents a shift from a humoral to a hydraulic model of the body in medicine and culture around 1700. This epistemological reconfiguration of early modern physiological thinking is exemplified with respect to the changing meanings of milk.