Böcker av Thomas Levenson

"Two out of three soldiers who perished in the Civil War died of infected wounds, typhoid, and other infectious diseases. But no doctor truly understood what was happening to their patients. Twenty years later, the outcome might have been different following one of the most radical intellectual transformations in the history of the world: germ theory, the recognition that the tiniest forms of life have been humankind's greatest killers. It was a discovery centuries in the making that transformed modern life and public health. This revolution has a pre-history. In the late-sixteenth century, scientists and hobbyists used the first microscopes to confirm the existence of living things invisible to the human eye. So why did it take two centuries to make the connection between microbes and disease? As Thomas Levenson reveals in this globe-trotting history, the answer has everything to do with how we see ourselves. For centuries, people in the west, believing themselves to hold God-given dominion over nature, thought too much of humanity and too little of microbes to believe they could take us down. When scientists finally made the connection by the end of the 19th-century, life-saving methods to control infections and contain outbreaks soon followed. The next big break came with the birth of the antibiotic era in the 1930s. And yet, less than a century later, the promise of the antibiotic revolution is already receding from years of overuse. Why? In So Very Small, Thomas Levenson follows the thread of human ingenuity and hubris across centuries--along the way peering into microscopes, spelunking down sewers, traipsing across the battlefield, and more--to show how we came to understand the microbial environment and how little we understand ourselves. He traces how and why ideas are pursued, accepted, or ignored--and hence how human habits of mind can, so often, make it terribly hard to ask the right questions"--

An immersive and epic journey by a masterly historian of science through the history of the fight against bacteria, from pioneering medical breakthroughs to the vital race to stay ahead of their rapid evolution.

A narrative of early capitalism's most famous scandal, a speculative frenzy that nearly bankrupted the British state during the hot summer of 1720 - and paradoxically led to the birth of modern finance.

Already famous throughout Europe for his theories of planetary motion and gravity, Isaac Newton decided to take on the job of running the Royal Mint. And there, Newton became drawn into a battle with William Chaloner, the most skilful of counterfeiters, a man who not only got away with faking His Majesty's coins (a crime that the law equated with treason), but was trying to take over the Mint itself. But Chaloner had no idea who he was taking on. Newton pursued his enemy with the cold, implacable logic that he brought to his scientific research. Set against the backdrop of early eighteenth-century London with its sewers running down the middle of the streets, its fetid rivers, its packed houses, smoke and fog, its industries and its great port, this dark tale of obsession and revenge transforms our image of Britain's greatest scientist.