Parasites, Pepsin, Pus, and Postulates: Jakob Henle's Essay on Miasma, Contagium, and Miasmatic-Contagious Diseases in Its Original Contexts.

The German anatomist and pathologist Jakob Henle's essay on miasma and miasmatic-contagious diseases is considered a medical classic. Nevertheless, it has rarely been analyzed in depth. If at all, it has been read as foreshadowing Robert Koch's "postulates," the famous set of criteria for identifying pathogens.

The place and significance of comparative trials in German agricultural writings around 1800.

This paper discusses the place and significance of comparative trials in German agricultural writings around 1800. In the second half of the eighteenth century, practitioners of agriculture began to discuss the role and design of agricultural trials. The notion of comparative experimentation played a significant role in these discussions, but it could mean quite different things: comparative assessment of treatments in terms of yield, cost-effectiveness, and adequacy for an intended purpose; comparative input variations to explore the multitude of effects of certain causes; and the comparison of something treated with something untreated, to establish the effects of a treatment more securely.

"Exploratory experimentation" as a probe into the relation between historiography and philosophy of science.

This essay utilizes the concept "exploratory experimentation" as a probe into the relation between historiography and philosophy of science. The essay traces the emergence of the historiographical concept "exploratory experimentation" in the late 1990s. The reconstruction of the early discussions about exploratory experimentation shows that the introduction of the concept had unintended consequences: Initially designed to debunk philosophical ideas about theory testing, the concept "exploratory experimentation" quickly exposed the poverty of our conceptual tools for the analysis of experimental practice.

Misperception, illusion and epistemological optimism: vision studies in early nineteenth-century Britain and Germany.

This article compares investigations of the process of vision that were made in early nineteenth-century Britain and the German lands. It is argued that vision studies differed significantly east and west of the North Sea. Most of the German investigators had a medical background and many of them had a firm grasp of contemporary philosophy.