I had an AMAZING time Steven!! thanks so much for having me — from the warm welcome and fantastic questions and feedback from QUB colleagues to the famous Tara Lodge sausages, I felt very honored to be there!

My biggest claim to fame is probably having had tea with Keanu Reeves's partner, Alexandra Grant.

Hurrah! Well done! Small tech history for the win!!

I'd also like to thank everyone @medicalhistory.bsky.social for a wonderfully thorough, thoughtful, and smooth peer review and publication process!

to that order than others. Why did Cullen think it was acceptable for female-coded bodies to be governed by habit, while suggesting that men should exercise autonomy by resisting habit? And to what extent did new theories of habit make humans into the authors of their own nature? 6/6

in 18th-century thought. As feminist critics such as Mary Wollstonescraft understood, habit - even in its medical manifestations - could be used both to explain why our bodies reflect the demands of a political order, and to justify the suggestion that some people's bodies should be more subject 5/6

habit. Far from being natural, they claimed that menstruation might be an acquired habit. Some even claimed that it was a product of civilization, unknown to humans in their natural state. I show that this and other examples of *periodicity* in the body reveal the political stakes of habit 4/6

and philosophical ideas here, there were big changes too. New ideas about the nervous system led medics such as Cullen to argue that the body had a kind of memory that could internalize patterns of activity and consumption. Strikingly, several of them argued that menstruation was a matter of 3/6

shows how medics of the 18th century used habit to explain how environmental and social conditions came to be inscribed into the body, giving humans something akin to a new nature superseding the one they were born with. Although there were continuities with long traditions of medical, religious 2/6

I guess we need optimism in these times

I mean - doesn’t this depend what the fee is? Six percent of £23000 is £1380 - so it’s a bit of relief but not much?

The 2025 Pfizer Award, awarded annually for an outstanding book in the history of science, is given to Adrian Johns for The Science of Reading: Information, Media & Mind in Modern America.

(Apparently he wrote the entire book in ~8 months during COVID!)

press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo... #HSS2025

I wish I understood what was going on inside Number 10. From the outside, it feels obvious that they could communicate more honestly and clearly. But there's clearly something preventing them. Are they such creatures of the Westminster bubble that they don't see how toxic they look?

Absolutely. And if Reeves wanted to avoid speculation, then there was no need for her to stoke it.