This newest annual edition of Osiris brings together a variety of scholars to consider a topic of increasing interest in the history of science: expertise. Focusing specifically on the role expertise has played in the support, legitimation, and growth of the state since early modern times, Expertise and the Early Modern State reveals how scientific expertise and practical knowledge were crucial to the construction of early modern empires and economies. The state, on the other hand, performed a similar function for scientists, giving them much of the status and resources they needed to further their work. A penetrating, multifaceted investigation, Osiris 25 will be required reading for historians of science and early modern political development.

Since the early modern period, science has played an ever-growing role in healthcare, agriculture, the regulation of food and drink trades, and the standardization of nutrition guidelines. Yet until now, few studies had explored the historical processes through which scientific claims of knowledge gained the power to shape food supply chains and consumer choices. This volume of Osiris reveals how sciences of food have been informed by, and helped to shape in turn, an array of institutions, labor regimes, cultural practices, and ethical commitments.

The essays delve into a range of topics, from early modern dietetics and debates about cannibalism to modern ready-to-eat rations and Ayurvedic recipes, from analyses of hungry model organisms to the dining rituals of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their patrons. As Food Matters shows, the history of knowledge about food has always raised debates about the shifting definition and boundaries of expertise: between traditional recipes and experimental protocols; between domestic craft skill and laboratory procedure; between the management and redistribution of resources for the social body on the one hand, and the subjective experiences of individual bodies on the other. At a moment when the authority of science is being questioned by a variety of publics, Food Matters is a timely reminder that such tensions, always present in food-related domains, reflect broader historical developments through which science became a prevalent force in shaping all aspects of public and private life.

This volume of Osiris takes as its point of departure a simple premise: we have yet to fully flesh out the complex historical interplay between medicine and law across the globe. Therapeutic Properties takes an inventive look at the issue, presenting welcome insights on the worldwide ascendancy of biomedicine, the persistence of nonofficial and unorthodox approaches to healing, and the legal contexts that have served to shape these dynamics.

The contributions draw upon source material from the Americas, Africa, Western Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia to trace the influence of penal and civil codes, courts and constitutions, and patents and intellectual properties on not only health practices but also the very foundations of state-sanctioned medicine. The authors explore, too, how institutions of global governance, including those underpinning empires and trade, have historically created feedback loops that enabled laws and regulatory regimes to spread, amplifying their effects and standardizing approaches to diseases, drugs, professions, personhood, and well-being along the way. Highlighting the payoff of interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, this volume adroitly teases apart how different actors fought to write the rules of global health, rendering certain approaches to life and death irrelevant and invisible, others pathological and punishable by law, and others still, normal and natural.

Highlights the importance of translation for the global exchange of medical theories, practices, and materials in the premodern period.

This volume of Osiris turns the analytical lens of translation onto medical knowledge and practices across the premodern world. Understandings of the human body, and of diseases and their cures, were influenced by a range of religious, cultural, environmental, and intellectual factors. As a result, complex systems of translation emerged as people crossed linguistic and territorial boundaries to share not only theories and concepts, but also materials, such as drugs, amulets, and surgical tools. The studies here reveal how instances of translation helped to shape and, in some cases, reimagine these ideas and objects to fit within local frameworks of medical belief.

Translating Medicine across Premodern Worlds features case studies located in geographically and temporally diverse contexts, including ninth-century Baghdad, sixteenth-century Seville, seventeenth-century Cartagena, and nineteenth-century Bengal. Throughout, the contributors explore common themes and divergent experiences associated with a variety of historical endeavors to “translate” knowledge about health and the body across languages, practices, and media. By deconstructing traditional narratives and de-emphasizing well-worn dichotomies, this volume ultimately offers a fresh and innovative approach to histories of knowledge.

Perceptively explores the shifting intersections between algorithmic systems and human practices in the modern era.

How have algorithmic systems and human practices developed in tandem since 1800? This volume of Osiris deftly addresses the question, dispelling along the way the traditional notion of algorithmic “code” and human “craft” as natural opposites. Instead, algorithms and humans have always acted in concert, depending on each other to advance new knowledge and produce social consequences. By shining light on alternative computational imaginaries, Beyond Craft and Code opens fresh space in which to understand algorithmic diversity, its governance, and even its conservation.

The volume contains essays by experts in fields extending from early modern arithmetic to contemporary robotics. Traversing a range of cases and arguments that connect politics, historical epistemology, aesthetics, and artificial intelligence, the contributors collectively propose a novel vocabulary of concepts with which to think about how the history of science can contribute to understanding today’s world. Ultimately, Beyond Craft and Code reconfigures the historiography of science and technology to suggest a new way to approach the questions posed by an algorithmic culture—not only improving our understanding of algorithmic pasts and futures but also unlocking our ability to better govern our present.

Presents a powerful new vision of the history of science through the lens of disability studies.

Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge.

This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai.

Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science.