From Physico-Theology to Bio-Technology

For the last half century, Mikuláš Teich has made many eminent contributions to the histories of science, technology, medicine and society. His essentially Marxist historiographical stance has resisted the notion that science is an autonomous entity, and has instead stressed the interplay of the economic, the social and the scientific forces in history. At the same time, particularly in studies of biochemistry, he has emphasized the significance of the role of science and technology in modern economic change.
In a career divided between Czechoslovakia and the UK, he has always been highly internationalist in his historical outlooks, combining what is valuable in Contentinal and British methods.
This volume is to honour him on his eightieth birthday. Examining European developments since the sixteenth century, the essays, many by old friends and colleagues, cluster around themes close to his own personal scholarship and related to volumes which he has edited. The book is divided into sections on Questions of History; Scientific Lives; Disciplines; Natural History, and Science and Disease.

Kurt Bayertz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Münster. His main interests lie in ethics, political philosophy and philosophy of science. Recent publications include articles on evolutionary ethics, on the concept of responsibility, his book GenEthics. Technological Intervention in Huma Reproduction as a Philosophical Problem (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), and as editor The Concept of Moral Consensus (Dordrecht: Springer, 1994), and Solidarity, (Dordrecht: Springer, 1998).

Dr Roy Porter is professor in the Social History of Medicine at the wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. Recent books include Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late Enlightenment England (London: Routledge, 1991), London: A Social History (Hamish Hamilton, 1994), and ‘The Greates Benefit to Mankind’: A Medical History of Humanity (London: HarperCollins, 1997). He is a co-author of The History of Bethlemn (London: Routledge, 1997). He is currently working on a general history of the Enlightenment in Britain. He is interested in eighteenth century medicine, the history of psychiatry and the history of quackery.