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
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
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
From its inception in 2013, Forbidden Histories has been a labour of love – I currently receive no funding for my research and pay all expenses to run this website, produce Youtube videos, and promote FH out of my own pocket. (Sadly, ad revenue and Amazon and AbeBooks affiliate commissions do not even begin to … Read more
I’m excited to announce that the long-awaited book by Richard Noakes is now available for pre-order. Scheduled to appear in October 2019 as part of the Science in History series by Cambridge University Press, Physics and Psychics: The Occult and the Sciences in Modern Britain will provide surprising insights into the heterodox preoccupations of many … Read more
An effective way to flag up fundamental difficulties with the often taken-for-granted notion that science has disenchanted the world is to demonstrate that several ‘founding fathers’ of science entertained rather strong interests in the occult. Standard histories of psychology feature William James at Harvard and Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig as founders of the modern psychological … Read more
Given my own specialization in the occult underbelly of the history of modern human sciences, the heretical preoccupations of William James as the ‘founding father’ of modern American psychology are a naturally recurring theme of Forbidden Histories. Some of you might be aware of a recent book by Krister D. Knapp, William James: Psychical Research … Read more
The penultimate pre-print article from the soon to be published Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences special issue on psychical research is now online. Maria Teresa Brancaccio explores and contextualises a hitherto underresearched episode in the history of modern Italian psychology, i.e. the preoccupation of one of its leading early representatives … Read more
Since its foundation in 1882, the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), the first large organisation to scientifically investigate controversial phenomena associated with mesmerism and spiritualism, has boasted a considerable number of notable physical scientists among its members. They included, for example, the discoverer of thallium and president of the Royal Society, William Crookes, the pioneer … Read more