Books by Ronald Numbers

With a few notable exceptions, historians have tended to ignore the role that science and medicine played in the antebellum American South. The fourteen essays in Science and Medicine in the Old South help to redress that neglect by considering scientific and medical developments in the early nineteenth-century South.

When and where did science begin? Historians have offered different answers to these questions, some pointing to Babylonian observational astronomy. This title examines how students of nature themselves, in various cultures and periods of history, have understood and represented their work.