Fabrizio Bigotti

Il Rinascimento evoca sentimenti di ammirazione, di rimpianto, addirittura un’acuta nostalgia di un momento della storia umana lontano nel tempo, ma non remoto. L’età della Rinascenza soprattutto si vede, ma pure si ascolta e si legge; e anche per questo è sempre presente, confondendosi con il classico che, per sua natura, quasi non ha tempo. Non vi è dubbio che il suo rinnovamento in una cultura nuova, che si lasciava alle spalle un assai lungo Medioevo, è il tratto peculiare dell’epoca, che portò a nuova vita forme, linguaggi, espressioni del passato. Ciò avvenne anche nel discorso politico che, nella Penisola travagliata dalle guerre d’Italia, seppe comprendere quanto stava così drammaticamente avvenendo. Storia e pensiero, lungi dall’appiattirsi su una mera descrizione del presente, si lanciarono in un’ardita interpretazione del tempo presente, alla luce di un modello classico che, solo, poteva suggerire indizi utili alla comprensione di ciò che appariva ai più un mondo mai visto. La riflessione sulla repubblica occupò una parte cospicua dell’intera meditazione politica rinascimentale. Diverse furono le proposte sviluppate tra Venezia e Firenze, che coinvolsero in un ideale confronto gli ordini di Roma o per imitarli o per superarli. Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Giannotti e Contarini furono i protagonisti di tale approfondimento. La rinascita si avvertì forte anche nel mondo della scienza, che azzardò un nuovo paradigma ben visibile nella moderna comprensione del cosmo e nell’importantissima svolta all’interno del sapere anatomico del Cinquecento. Tutto si rinnovò sulla base della medicina antica e del sistema tolemaico, che aveva posto la terra al centro dell’universo.

Between 2015 and 2016 a series of seminars on the history of early modern technology and medicine were held at the Centres for Medical History and Biomedical Modelling and Analysis of the University of Exeter. As a result of that work we laid down the basis for the first historically accurate reconstruction of a seventeenth-century instrument,
the pulsilogium of Sanctorius (1561-1636). Previous copies were in fact either simple models for display or lacked any commitment to historical accuracy. This short contribution explores some of the results we obtained from the recreation of this device and experiments we recreated which shed new light on the early application of the pendulum as a scientific instrument. A fuller and much more detailed account of
these discoveries will be given in a forthcoming contribution edited by Filip Buyse for a special issue of the "Journal of Social and Political Science".

STUDIOLO DIGITAL HUMANITIES LAB
Winter School Series - Humanities for the Future

12-15 February 2024

Registration is now open for Studio Digital Humanities Lab, the new Winter School format designed to meet the needs of those, both inside and outside academia, who are facing the digital revolution.

Its interdisciplinary format allows participants to get a feel for the potential of new media, while acquiring basic coding skills, knowledge of 3D modelling, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and key concepts in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM), as well as tools for communicating with experts in the field.

The possibilities opened up by digital humanities are vast, and worth considering for anyone writing a new project, seeking funding or simply new means of implementing existing ideas.

DEADLINES
12 December 2023 (Early Bird Deadline)
31 January 2024 (Regular Registration)

BURSARIES
Bursaries to attend the winter school are available via the competitive Comèl Grant
https://csmbr.fondazionecomel.org/grants-and-awards/comel-grant/

Comèl Grant Deadline: 15 November

INFO AND REGISTRATION AT:
https://csmbr.fondazionecomel.org/events/studiolo-digital-lab-2024/

As part of the online conference on "Scales, Norms, and Limit Values in Times of (Digital) Change", organised in Wien by Anna Echterhölter and
Dr. Anne-Katrin Ebert, the CSMBR Sponsors a panel on medical history titled EXTREME BODIES: Norm, Excess, and Transgression in Western Medicine"
Long before being measured, the body has been a unit of measurement and a canon in that it defines the norm within which health can be maintained and life can persist. As all in-formal parameters, whose existence and value predate their conceptual manipulation – their apprehension being individual, private, implicit, and prelinguistic – the body canon has defined the range of what is normal and abnormal in terms of excess and defect. However, the existence of different ways to express the normal and the abnormal across societies and cultures, in learned as well as in popular literature, inevitably plays a role in how the body is experienced, generating an array of cultural presuppositions, stereotypes, and expectations. Amongst these, a moral and political component should also be taken into account. Indeed, violating a norm implies an ethical stance towards perfecting, challenging, or transgressing accepted conventions. An example of this is how corpulence and fat have been dealt with across the ages, being used to highlight the belonging to the upper class, or - on the contrary - gluttony, intemperance, and incapability of abiding by shared societal mores. Sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR), this panel presents some of these entanglements, showing how the implications of the ‘nature vs nurture debate’ have been a constant preoccupation in Western medicine and culture more generally.

This Webinar explores the different ways in which medicine developed beyond the traditional boundaries of an academic discipline thereby informing approaches and practices as diverse as pedagogy, magic, the professionalisation of surgeons across the German-speaking countries, as well as early modern visualisations of the body and theories of action at a distance. By drawing on a wide range of sources such as treatises by humanists, travel reports, and close reading of anatomical manuscript notes, speakers will uncover the changing outline of early modern medicine across borders and contexts.

The Centre for the Study of Medicine and the Body in the Renaissance (CSMBR) in cooperation with Fondazione Comel–Institutio Santoriana and Studio Firmano for the History of Medicine and Science is pleased to announce an International Summer School

THE KILN, THE ALEMBIC, AND THE CLOCKWORK
Early Modern Representations of the Body and its Changing Matter
29-31 March 2019
Organisers: Fabrizio Bigotti & Fabiola Zurlini

The summer school will explore how the representation of the body and its functions changed from antiquity to the early modern period and how technology altered the perception of what we are as human animals. By adopting three of the most iconic analogies ever used in the history of medicine to represent the human body, The Kiln, the Alembic, and the Clockwork will explore the early modern imagery of the body, in connection to the methods of investigation and its overlapping with disciplines such as alchemy and astronomy. Particular attention will be devoted to processes such as the combination and the concoction of humours (the kiln), distillation and perspiration (the alembic) and the mechanical action of innate heat (the clockwork) whilst considering, for each analogy, the visual impact it exerted on the Renaissance and early modern representation of human physiology.
The summer school is directed to undergraduates, postgraduates as well as PhDs wishing to deepen their knowledge of history of medicine and its connection to other disciplines of knowledge in the early modern period. Sources and papers will be pre-circulated in order for attendees to engage fruitfully in conversation with speakers in a roundtable at the end of the day.
The Summer School will be held in the outstanding location of DOMVS COMELIANA in Piazza dei Miracoli (Pisa) with the provisional programme available here.

Confirmed Speakers: Vivian Nutton (First Moscow State Medical University)

Hiro Hirai (Radboud University)

Fabrizio Bigotti (University of Exeter)

Fabio Zampieri (University of Padua)

Fabiola Zurlini (Studio Firmano for the History of Medicine and Science)

Registration fee to attend the Summer School is €244 and includes the cost of all breaks and lunches. Payment can be made directly to Fondazione Comel via Bank Transfer with the specification CSMBR 2019 by the registration deadline of Saturday 30th June 2018. For information and details please contact csmbr@fondazionecomel.org or f.bigotti@exeter.ac.uk

Santorio Fellowship 2018
The International Summer School runs along with the 2018 edition of the Santorio Fellowship for Medical Humanities and Science, which will be advertised separately. Selected winners will attend the Summer School for free and will receive a travel grant up to €250. Applicants must send a cover letter, a copy of their CV and a referee letter to santoriofellowship@fondazionecomel.org by the 31st of October 2018. Winners will be notified in early November. For information and details please contact Dr Fabrizio Bigotti at f.bigotti@exeter.ac.uk.

Organized by Simone Guidi and Enrico Pasini at the Institute for the European Intellectual Lexicon and History of Ideas of the National Research Council of Italy, in collaboration with Aristotelica  – A peer-reviewed journal devoted to Aristotle.

Session 1 | 17 October 2023, 3PM CET Time
Christoph Sander • Least Attractive? Aristotelian Presuppositions to Explain Magnetic Movements
Olivier Ribordy • “Nothing New Under the Sun”? Observations of Sunspots and New Views on the World in the Early-modern Period

Session 2 | 7 November 2023, 3PM CET Time
Daniel Di Liscia  • The Notion of impetus in Late Medieval and Early-modern Science
Sylvain Roudaut • The Transformations of Heat in Late Scholastic Natural Philosophy

Session 3 | 14 November 2023, 3PM CET Time
Erik Åkerlund • Matter in Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza
Enrico Pasini • Aristotle Meets Infinity

Session 4 | 28 November 2023, 3PM CET Time
Fabrizio Bigotti • Life is the Capacity to Resist Decay. Medical Adaptations of Potentia and Capacitas from Late Scholasticism to Stahl
Yuan Tao • Elusive “Auditory Species” in Jesuit Theories of Sound

Session 5 | 12 December 2023, 3PM CET Time
Pietro D. Omodeo • Reflections on the Transformation of Cosmological Concepts in Renaissance Naturalism
Iolanda Ventura • Aristotelian Vocabulary in Silvestro Mauro’s Aristotelis Opera

In this lecture, I will examine how 13th-century thinkers treated ‘borderline species’, i.e., living beings which were perceived as halfway between two steps of the so-called scala naturae. Pygmies, with their rudimentary language, and palms, with their partial local movement, challenged the conventional macro-categories, which established neat boundaries between human, animal, and vegetative realms. In fact, palms’ and pygmies’ souls perform activities that usually pertain to the living being of the superior step of the scala naturae. Differently from other plants, the palms exercise the local movement (traditionally ascribed exclusively to animals) in order to fulfill reproductive functions. The pygmies’ ability to communicate basic information and emotional states through a sort of rudimentary language challenges the idea that language is the prerogative of the animal perfectissimum, i.e., the human being. Are these borderline species to be taken as the most 'evolved' of animals and plants kingdom? Are they evidence of a psychological continuity between living beings? What is the nature of their distinctive functions?
Answering these questions, 13th-century authors, such as Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, tried to harmonize ‘borderline species’ within the Christian Neoplatonic outlook by interpreting natural dynamics as degrees of perfection. On the one side, the comparison between human perfection and animal imperfection allowed to determine the boundaries of pygmy’s cognitive skills; on the other side, animal perfection (in relation to plant imperfection) provided a template to investigate plants’ life, and go deeper into the powers of vegetative soul.

Until recently, the name of Santorio Santori (Sanctorius, 1561-1636) was linked to the practice of self-experimentation and weight-watching. Yet the Venetian physician went well beyond that, and can rightly be considered the founding father of evidence-based medicine.

In this lecture we will be exploring the background of his inventions and scientific instruments, including early precision medical devices (pulsimeters, hygrometers, thermometers, anemometers) how they worked and what impact they had on the subsequent generations of physicians and natural philosophers.

Santorio was one of the pioneers of modern experimentation as he experimented daily on himself and other subjects for over twenty five years. Seeking certainty, he devised and constructed new instruments, such as the ‘weighing chair’ (statera medica), the hygrometer, the first graded thermometer, and the ‘pulsilogium’ (an early pulsimeter).

Through these instruments, he managed to assess each of the many parameters involved in the complex calculation of the perspiratio insensibilis (insensible perspiration of the body). Relying on his quantitative experiences, Santorio envisaged the body as a clockwork and explored its main functions by means of mathematical parameters (numero, pondere et mensura) depending in turn on his theory of particles and corpuscles.

By highlighting the importance of these theories and instruments, we shall look at the context of Santorio’s life and works as well as the impact of his legacy on the history of medicine and natural philosophy.

organised by Stefania Buosi Moncunill, this conference explores the historical use of various alchemical processes and remedies within the cultural and intellectual context of pre-modern Europe. It focuses particularly on medical alchemy, whose ultimate goal was to create the elixir, a universal remedy capable of curing all diseases.

The conference features a presentation of Catalan databases on alchemy, emphasises the unity of Western European culture, and delves into the many facets of experimentalism in alchemy and medicine.
Spotlighting recent academic discoveries, it will provide scholars with a platform to deepen their understanding of pre-modern alchemy and potentially uncover new insights into the history of medical alchemy.

Taking measurement of the body is all but standard practice in modern medicine. Indeed, we rely to a great degree on figures such as our body weight and our heart rate to inform us of the state of our health.

This seminar will present how and why the pre-modern body was measured and explore how new methods of measuring, quantifying, and understanding the body affected early modern medical theory and practice. The individual papers presented will all explore how different aspects of the body such as fat, blood, and excreta, were measured using various instruments and research methods.

As such, this seminar will address a myriad of questions, relating to how new instruments and methods of measurements affected medical theory and practice, to what extent they challenged or reinforced existing knowledge, how measurements helped to determine what was healthy and unhealthy, normal and abnormal, and how researching this can help us understand how early modern society understood the relationship between the body and its environment.



Yijie Huang
Expressing the Pulse in Seventeenth-Century England: Idioms, Numbers, & Measurement
Opening Galen’s corpus, one would be impressed by the extensive variations of the quality of the pulse. Big/small, strong/weak, quick/slow, frequent/rare, hard/soft, even/uneven, regular/irregular, gazelling, double-hammer. Many of these descriptions extended into early modern medical treatises, guiding yet also disturbing pulse diagnosis during the period. Between the textual pulse-lore and the hands-on experience of the wrist, early modern medical practitioners sought for ways to justify the perceptibility of traditional pulse idioms and articulate their own pulse perception. This paper examines this process by focussing on the English physician John Floyer’s (1649-1734) The Physician’s Pulse-Watch (1707 & 1710), in which Floyer innovatively used numbers in addition to idioms in explicating diverse types of pulses and their respective physical indications. Some scholarships appreciate Floyer’s numerical analysis of the pulse as a significant shift from the long-lasting old paradigm of pulse diagnosis centred by subjective experience and qualitative rendering. This paper challenges the view by delving into the close interaction between numbers and idioms in Floyer’s pulse study, based on which it further discusses the hybrid episteme of his pulse-counting practice. It will show that by designing the combined form of pulse characteristics, Floyer strove to incorporate earlier philosophical conceptions of health into the recent empirical principle of investigating nature and the body. His deployment of the quantitative renderings contained little intention of questioning or replacing the experiential approach of expressing the pulse. Rather, they revealed notable capacity to reinforce experience as the ultimate standard to organise and make sense of its variety.





Holly Fletcher
Food and Fat: Creating Body Size in Early Modern Germany
Contemporary discussions concerning body size, and particularly fatness, are dominated by questions of food consumption and diet. Today, the relationship between food and fat is so deeply embedded in both medical and cultural perceptions of what determines a person’s body size that other contributing factors are frequently overlooked. In this paper, I examine whether this was similarly the case in early modern Germany. Were perceptions of fatness and thinness dominated by ideas about food? While food played a crucial role in the creation of body size it was far from being the only determining factor. I will explore the important distinction contemporaries made between ‘naturally’ and ‘unnaturally’ fat bodies, which drew on understandings of the four humours and the six non-naturals, thereby discussing the significance of additional factors such as sleep, bathing and the emotions for influencing body size. Finally, I will approach body size from a neo-materialist perspective, to consider how the construction of bodily form could be understood in relation to early modern people’s material entanglements with their physical surroundings. The fattening of human bodies could be understood in close relationship with the fattening of the animals which they consumed and the ‘fatness’ of the land upon which those animals grazed. Body size thus contributed to understandings of the ‘extended’ material early modern body which went far beyond merely food consumption.





Marsha Wubbels
A Weighty Matter: Understanding Santorio’s ‘Healthful Standard’ and Early Modern Body-Weighing Practices
Today, we consider our body weight to be important information of medical significance. At just a glance at the scales, we may categorise ourselves, healthy or unhealthy, underweight, overweight, or obese. The idea that our body weight can inform us on the state of our health is at least as old as the first medically motivated weighing experiment, undertaken by Santorio Santori over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The connection that we make between weight and fatness was not always so intrinsic, however. This paper will discuss early modern concerns with body weight and weight-watching and argue that these concerns differed significantly from our own. It will do so by first exploring Santorio weighing experiment and the aphorisms it wrought. It will assess the extent to which later weight-watching practices were still influenced by these aphorisms and argue that body-weighing practices remained ‘Santorian’ in nature until the late eighteenth century, when the motivations and methods of weight-watchers started to more resemble our own. As will be shown, body weight did not yet play a significant role in the medicalisation of fatness, and early modern English society did not yet share our concept of ‘overweight’. Instead, individuals pursued a perfect balance between their ingesta and excreta and used the balance to monitor this, a balance Santorio referred to as the ‘healthful Standard’.





Alexander Pyrges
Using Big Numbers. The Meaning and Purpose of Weight Indications in Medical Texts on Corpulence, c. 1600-1900
While historians of corpulence commonly regard the twentieth century as the age when quantification began to dominate medical approaches to corpulence, individual weight indications appear in medical texts on corpulence as early as the seventeenth century. The earliest weight indications were imported from outside the medical realm, more precisely, from the public discourse on monstrous bodies. Within medical reasoning, the trademark weight indications of a few publicized prodigies of nature served to underscore both the existence and the nature of corpulence as a pathology. The consequences of entangling the medical discussions on corpulence with the discourse on monsters were far-reaching, however, as it shaped both the approach to and the rhetorical framing of corpulence within medicine for at least two centuries.
As weight indications multiplied during the eighteenth century, physician authors strung them together to form the numerical basis of exceptional weight biographies, first of famous contemporaries but subsequently of common patients as well. Biographically paralleled with medical interventions, series of declining weight indications came to allegorize therapeutic success in a growing number of case descriptions. During the nineteenth century, a handful of authors attempted to expand the medical potential of weight indications beyond the mere observational. They had very limited success in the field of obesity medicine, however, as the majority of experts saw but little therapeutic and no diagnostic merits in weight measurements and indications. Thus, although weight indications were firmly established in the medical literature on corpulence by the late nineteenth century, the measurement of weight existed only in the margins of clinical obesity medicine.

An important part of the contemporary debate on human nature was shaped by debates taking place in early modern Europe in the attempt to remove the animal part of the human mind by turning it into an abstract monad while converting the body into a machine. Humans gained the promise of certain and universal knowledge (mathesis universalis) but began thinking of themselves as automata, bereft of individuality and real agency. Much of the questions raised back then resonate with us still nowadays:



Is human nature something immutable or is it the product of history and social conventions?
Do humans even have a nature? And what does it mean for humans to have a nature and to what extent does biology condition what we are?
Is it desirable to use technology to enhance the desirable characteristics of the human species?
What instruments, images, analogies, models and literary strategies were used to further such a project?
How does the early modern debate on automata and man-machine (homme machine) predates the modern on transhumanism and posthumanism?
How does the debate evolve after the eighteenth century?


The 2022 VivaMente Conference in the History of Ideas aims at exploring such questions from a multidisciplinary approach, bringing together scholars from different fields, interests and periods. The conference is thought to take place as an open debate, with keynote speakers discussing the early modern philosophical and ethical implications of mechanical philosophy and with attendees focusing on the modern and postmodern impact of the early modern debate. By doing so, the conference aims to bring the research about the automata up to date and to connect historians of philosophy, arts and literature with researchers of transhumanism and artificial intelligence. Today, the characteristic tropes and patterns that once defined the course of early modern mechanical philosophy are witnessing an extraordinary resurgence of interest among scientists, scholars and laypeople concerned with the fate of human beings. The reasons are numerous and of various kinds: the outstanding progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the pervasive influence of the Internet of things (IoT) and the combined synergy of neuroscience and nanotechnology, to mention only the most relevant ones. Philosophically speaking, the field of possibilities is growing by the day. If a new La Mettrie were to live today, his Homme-machine would have to cope with the exponential growth of experimental evidence and scientific theorizations.

This edition of the Vivamente Conference in the History of Ideas intends to shed new light on the early modern origins of automata, to discuss the impact of their legacy throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, finally, to ask the fundamental question of how to update our knowledge – in both theoretical and moral terms – concerning automata and automation as we are confronted by a staggering and constantly evolving volume of information and innovations on the subject. Discussions will also address the field of post-human and trans-human speculations. The future is looming with the possibility of increasingly sophisticated mechanical minds in addition to the more familiar – both philosophically and technologically – mechanical bodies.

Thematically, the conference will address four major topics:

Mechanical philosophy and mechanistic thinking (origins, limits, perspectives, applications, ethical challenges);
Transcending the human in medicine, science, philosophy, art, literature, religion, etc.;
Normal, pathological and beyond: monsters, hybrid creatures and transhuman developments;
Images and metaphors of the above.


Conference Format
Hybrid Conference, with the possibility to partake remotely (Zoom).



Publication
Selected papers will be collected and proposed for publication as an edited volume for the series Palgrave Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine (PSMEMM): https://link.springer.com/series/16206.



Application Process
info at: https://csmbr.fondazionecomel.org/events-and-activities/vivamente/vivamente_2022/

This edited volume explores the intersection of medicine and philosophy throughout history, calling attention to the role of quantification in understanding the medical body. Retracing current trends and debates to examine the quantification of the body throughout the early modern, modern and early contemporary age, the authors contextualise important issues of both medical and philosophical significance, with chapters focusing on the quantification of temperaments and fluids, complexions, functions of the living body, embryology, and the impact of quantified reasoning on the concepts of health and illness. With insights spanning from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, this book provides a wide-ranging overview of attempts to ‘quantify’ the human body at various points. Arguing that medicine and philosophy have been constantly in dialogue with each other, the authors discuss how this provided a strategic opportunity both for medical thought and philosophy to refine and further develop. Given today’s fascination with the quantification of the body, represented by the growing profusion of self-tracking devices logging one’s sleep, diet or mood, this collection offers an important and timely contribution to an emerging and interdisciplinary field of study.

This book examines Roger Bacon’s alchemical theories, and explains how he believed that the key to extending life lay not in the curricula as taught in the medical faculties of the universities, but in the study of alchemy. Though twelfth- and thirteenth-century alchemy was generally concerned with the transmutation of metals, Bacon’s alchemy was a much larger area of study, and encompassed the generation and corruption of all material things in the sublunary world. It was this aspect of alchemy, which Bacon referred to as speculative alchemy, that explained how the four elements of fire, air, water, and earth interacted with each other to make the basis of reality as man could know it. Thus, the study of alchemy in conjunction with humoral medicine could explain not only how the human body worked, but how it interacted with the materials around it, illuminating the method of prolonging life to extreme lengths.

This book is the first transcription and extensive commentary on a fascinating but almost entirely overlooked manuscript compilation of medical recipes and letters, which is held in the University of Nottingham. Collected by the Marquess and Marchioness of Newcastle, William and Margaret Cavendish, during the 1640s and 1650s, this manuscript features letters of advice, recipes, and sundry philosophical and medical reflections by some of the most formidable and influential physicians, philosophers, and courtly scholars of the early seventeenth century. These include “Europe’s physician” Theodore de Mayerne, the adventurer and courtier Kenelm Digby, and the natural philosopher, poet, and playwright Margaret Cavendish. While the transcription and accompanying annotations will allow a diverse array of readers to appreciate the manuscript for the first time, the introduction situates the Cavendishes’ recipe collecting habits, medical preoccupations, natural philosophical views, and politics within their social, cultural, and philosophical contexts, and draws out some of the most significant implications of this important document.

This book explores the importance of bodily fluids to the development of medical knowledge in the eighteenth century Reveals the lives and works of the scientists in the Boerhaave School, which grew to become a European-wide community of physicians and chemists Shows how chemical experimentation on bodily fluids allowed doctors to gain a better understanding of physiological processes, reinventing ancient humoral theory This book explores the importance of bodily fluids to the development of medical knowledge in the eighteenth century. While the historiography has focused on the role of anatomy, this study shows that the chemical analyses of bodily fluids in the Dutch Republic radically altered perceptions of the body, propelling forwards a new system of medicine. It examines the new research methods and scientific instruments available at the turn of the eighteenth century that allowed for these developments, taken forward by Herman Boerhaave and his students. Each chapter focuses on a different bodily fluid-saliva, blood, urine, milk, sweat, semen-to investigate how doctors gained new insights into physiological processes through chemical experimentation on these bodily fluids. The book reveals how physicians moved from a humoral theory of medicine to new chemical and mechanical models for understanding the body in the early modern period. In doing so, it uncovers the lives and works of an important group of scientists which grew to become a European-wide community of physicians and chemists.

Sudhoffs Archiv, founded in 1917 as an archive for the history of medicine, is today the world's oldest continuously published journal for the history of science. It is committed to a strictly historiographical perspective and aims to present the history of the natural sciences, mathematics and medicine in a source-related analysis. "Sources" are understood to mean all primarily textual, object-related or oral traditions, the content of which serves to promote knowledge on questions of the history of science.

The journal's approach is international and not limited to one period or one discipline. Works are published in German, English and French. The selection of the contributions follows the criteria of the peer review. Since 1961 the magazine has been accompanied by a series of supplements.