When the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London was still in existence, it was widely regarded the international flagship of medical history and attracted some of the brightest scholars and students from all around the world. One of the people I met there around a decade ago was Yu-chuan Wu from … Read more
Owing to the ongoing pandemic, we’re all grounded. So while we all have been staying at home to “flatten the curve”, I thought I’d make a new video for you. Please enjoy – and if you did, please remember to share, like and subscribe.
Dr. Joanne Edge specialises in late-medieval and early modern European social and cultural history, with an emphasis on medicine and the ‘occult’ sciences: divination, magic and astrology. She did her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees at the University of London, and held a four-year postdoctoral position as Assistant Editor on the Casebooks Project at the University … Read more
“You don’t want to mess with Mrs. Sidgwick!”. No Victorian has ever written a statement like this, though it is certainly along the lines of what many contemporaries of Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick were thinking. Born on 11 March 1845 into one of the most politically and intellectually influential families in Britain, Nora (as she was … Read more
Christian Jarrett, an editor at Aeon magazine, approached me after reading my response to a Japanese newspaper query on ghost beliefs in the West last year to commission a short article on a similar topic. I was happy to comply, and my Aeon piece on the hidden history of hallucinations and visions went online in … Read more
Nobody knows more about Robert Boyle, a founder of modern experimental science and the Royal Society, than Michael Hunter. Now an Emeritus Professor of History at Birkbeck, Hunter is the author of various essays and books including the award-winning monograph, Boyle: Between God and Science (2009). Apart from producing a catalogue of Boyle’s vast … Read more
There’s certainly no shortage of books on the modern occult produced by academic historians, English literature scholars and other humanities researchers. However, it’s no secret that I feel that much of this literature is characterized by a sadly lax and superficial engagement with primary sources, and methodological aspects of empirical approaches to alleged parapsychological phenomena … Read more
It’s time to announce the next prize for you lovely Forbidden Histories supporters. I’m particularly pleased to be able to offer a copy of Richard Noakes’s new book on the history of the occult entanglements of British physics, of which I posted a pre-release notice with table of contents, a short summary and advance praise … Read more
The latest issue of Aries, the prime academic journal for the study of Western esotericism, includes a comprehensive assessment of Eric Kurlander’s Hitler’s Monsters by Eva Kingsepp at Karlstad University, Sweden. Whereas the first part of my own review here on Forbidden Histories was concerned with Kurlander’s evidence-free depiction of ‘mainstream’ science’s relationship with parapsychology … Read more
I’m very happy to announce our colleague Kyle Falcon in Canada as the winner of the latest Patreon prize draw. As it happens, Kyle, who has won a copy of Alison Winter’s classical study Mesmerized, is a fellow historian working on themes closely related to those covered on Forbidden Histories: His Ph.D. research at Wilfrid … Read more