The focus of this topics course is the history of mental therapeutics - how medical practitioners, laypersons, and researchers have attempted to treat mental illness, through the long twentieth-century, through various means. The readings touch on psychiatric institutions, Freud and psychoanalysis, somatic treatments, the psychopharmacological revolution, anti psychiatry, and neuro-enhancement, amongst others. Exploring the treatment of mental illness in key historical moments in the history of psychiatry, will help us understand its force, then and today.

The seminar introduces graduate students to central problems, themes, concepts and methodologies in the history of science and neighboring fields. We explore past and recent developments including the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Actor-Network Theory, the study of practice and experimentation, the role of quantification, the concept of paradigms, gender, sexuality and the body, environmental history of science, the global history of science, and the role of labor and industry, amongst others.

Step by step, this class approaches the history of science, medicine, and technology through the lens of the "recipe." Craft handbooks, books of secrets, and experimental notes, as well as a fast-growing secondary literature, show how recipes generate and test knowledge of substances, practices, and theories about nature, as well as the social and cultural networks that produce them. Drawing on ancient, medieval, and early modern procedures, as well as historical reconstructions of past recipes and experiments, the class investigates how the genre evolved across such diverse fields as pharmacy, alchemy, mining, cookery, and magic.

In this seminar we consider the use of observation and experiment together with reason in early-modern natural philosophy. Possible topics include Bacon's method and actual experimental practice, the conflict between Descartes and Pascal over the vacuum, Galileo's appeal to experience in his theory of motion and his defense of Copernicanism, the conflict between Galileo and Descartes over gravitation and free fall, Boyle, Hobbes and Royal Society experimentation, Cavendish against Hooke and microscopes, the empirical debate in the Royal Society about witches and ghosts, Newton's arguments for universal gravitation, etc.