In this article I describe the establishment and early development of an institution that is unique to the history of Chinese medicine – the Imperial Pharmacy (惠 民 藥 局). Established in 1076 during the great reforms of the Song dynasty, the Imperial Pharmacy was a remarkable institution that played different political, social, economic, and medical roles over the years of its existence. Initially it was an economic institution designed to curb the power of plutocrats who were manipulating medicinal drug markets in their favor. A few decades later, I claim, the Imperial Pharmacy became a public-health-oriented institution focusing on selling readymade prescriptions in addition to simples. Various records, including local gazetteers and local maps, indicate that the Imperial Pharmacy expanded about a century after it was established to include dozens of branches throughout the empire. The Pharmacy's impact on the practices of physicians during these years is somewhat vague. It seems, however, to have posed an unwelcome addition to the medical scene, since it enabled uninitiated practitioners who relied on the Pharmacy's formulary to fit patients' symptoms to their own prescriptions and dispense medications with relative ease.

This article examines advertisements for potential solutions to the problem of longitude during the year following the announcement of the maximum £20,000 reward in the summer of 1714. While there have been many studies of the race to determine longitude, advertisements have not received close scrutiny. Little attention has been paid to the commoditization of longitude in the marketplace of public science sold within London's public sphere. Although books and lecture series dominated public science in eighteenth-century England, longitude ads are a unique example of this phenomenon. Unlike lecturers or publishers of natural philosophical tracts who sought audiences for demonstrations or readers for books which contained accounts of nature that were not open to debate, longitude seekers were doing something different. Those who attempted to solve the problem of longitude and advertised their plans to the public sought out witnesses to validate and confirm the effectiveness of their experiments or instruments. In other words, the public sphere became the crucible of judgment for schemes of longitude.

Sociologists and historians of science, such as Richard Whitley and Stephen Hilgartner, identified a culturally dominant discourse of science popularization in the broader society. In this dominant view, a clear distinction is maintained between scientific knowledge and popularized knowledge. Popularization of science is seen as the process of transmitting real science to a lay public. This discourse on science popularization was criticized by Whitley and Hilgartner as an inadequate simplification. Yet, the battered traditional model of popularization remains remarkably resistant to these theoretical attacks. In this paper I will argue, based on research of the output of the Belgian economist Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912), and more specifically, his opinion on the role of government in economic life, that the boundary between science and popularization in political economy is not clear and that the status of scientists fluctuates over time and in different contexts. It is therefore impossible for historians or economists to distinguish science from popularization based on the essential characteristics or intrinsic quality of the work. De Molinari's ideas are followed through the different media of science and journalism. Although de Molinari himself differentiated between his scientific and “popular” work, the boundary between science and popularization proves to be highly permeable, in both directions.

The article is based on the controversies relating to conducting experiments and licensing AIDS treatments in France in the 1980s and 1990s. We have identified two political operators, i.e. two issues around which tensions have grown between the different generations of actors involved in these controversies: 1) the way of thinking about patient autonomy, and 2) the way in which objectivity regarding medical decisions is built. The article shows that there are several regimes of objectivity and autonomy, and that it is at the meeting point of the two dimensions that very different political forms of medicine have developed. In the case of AIDS, the article identifies four of these forms (liberal and conservative clinical traditions and therapeutic modernity – enclosed, then participative) and analyzes the dynamics of their emergence and opposition. We discuss an “objectivity/autonomy” diagram as a conceptual framework which enables us (above and beyond AIDS) to think about changes in contemporary medicine.

In 1922 the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) Council approved a motion to send an invitation to Albert Einstein to visit Argentina and give a course of lectures on his theory of relativity. The motion was proposed by Jorge Duclout (1856–1927), who had been educated at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich (ETH). This proposal was the culmination of a series of initiatives of various Argentine intellectuals interested in the theory of relativity. In a very short time Dr. Mauricio Nirenstein (1877–1935), then the university's administrative secretary, fulfilled all the requirements for the university's invitation to be endorsed and delivered to the sage in Berlin. The visit took place three years later, in March–April 1925.

Honorable Rector, Honorable Professors, and Students of this University: In these times of political and economic struggle and nationalistic fragmentation, it is a particular joy for me to see people assembling here to give their attention exclusively to the highest values that are common to us all. I am glad to be in this blessed land before a small circle of people who are interested in topics of science to speak on those issues that, in essence, are the subject of my own meditations.