Philip Ball
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Philip Ball isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
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Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another
19 editions
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published
2003
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Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color
32 editions
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published
1999
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Beyond Weird
23 editions
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published
2018
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The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without It
25 editions
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published
2010
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The Water Kingdom
15 editions
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published
2017
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The Elements: A Very Short Introduction
21 editions
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published
2004
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Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water
23 editions
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published
1999
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The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
17 editions
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published
2006
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Patterns in Nature: Why the Natural World Looks the Way It Does
4 editions
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published
2016
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Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything
22 editions
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published
2012
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“It is only rather recently that science has begun to make peace with its magical roots. Until a few decades ago, it was common for histories of science either to commence decorously with Copernicus's heliocentric theory or to laud the rationalism of Aristotelian antiquity and then to leap across the Middle Ages as an age of ignorance and superstition. One could, with care and diligence, find occasional things to praise in the works of Avicenna, William of Ockham, Albertus Magnus, and Roger Bacon, but these sparse gems had to be thoroughly dusted down and scraped clean of unsightly accretions before being inserted into the corners of a frame fashioned in a much later period.”
― The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
― The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
“Hippocrates can be justifiably regarded as the father of Western medicine, and he stands in relation to this science as Aristotle does to physics. Which is to say, he was almost entirely wrong, but he was at least systematic.”
― The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
― The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
“No matter who you were in sixteenth-century Europe, you could be sure of two things: you would be lucky to reach fifty years of age, and you could expect a life of discomfort and pain. Old age tires the body by thirty-five, Erasmus lamented, but half the population did not live beyond the age of twenty. There were doctors and there was medicine, but there does not seem to have been a great deal of healing. Anyone who could afford to seek a doctor's aid did so eagerly, but the doctor was as likely to maim or kill as to cure. His potions were usually noxious and sometimes fatal—but they could not have been as terrible and traumatic as the contemporary surgical methods. The surgeon and the Inquisitor differed only in their motivation: otherwise, their batteries of knives, saws, and tongs for slicing, piercing, burning, and amputating were barely distinguishable. Without any anesthetic other than strong liquor, an operation was as bad as the torments of hell.”
― The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
― The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science
Topics Mentioning This Author
topics | posts | views | last activity | |
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Science Book Club:
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12 | 16 | Oct 07, 2017 01:19AM | |
The Reading For P...: "1000 members challenge" JUST ONE WORD PLEASE... | 66 | 121 | Nov 20, 2017 02:43AM | |
Science and Inquiry:
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21 | 110 | Aug 17, 2018 08:44AM | |
The Lost Challenges: A-Z Series 2018 | 56 | 62 | Jan 03, 2019 08:34PM | |
The Lost Challenges: Most Haunted Places in the United States (Oct to Dec 2018) | 66 | 71 | Jan 07, 2019 12:30AM | |
The History Book ...: MEDIEVAL ARCHITECTURE | 42 | 169 | Jan 24, 2019 01:54PM | |
The Lost Challenges: Words in a Word Game #5 - Holiday | 84 | 68 | Mar 01, 2019 08:28PM |
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