David Wootton

David Wootton’s Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates will be published by Oxford in June. He teaches early modern history at the University of York, where he is an Anniversary Professor.

Letter

Bad Medicine

30 November 2006

Steven Shapin says Bad Medicine is ‘not history’, and advises me to ‘consider another way of making a living’ (LRB, 30 November). Are my facts wrong? Is my argument incoherent? Are there gaps in my reading? No. It’s something much worse: I’ve discussed progress. ‘Academic historians of medicine didn’t – with rare exceptions – criticise the idea of medical progress,’ Shapin writes,...
Letter

Where are Gracie and Rosie?

22 July 2004

I was surprised by the tone of Stephen Mulhall’s letter in response to my essay on conjoined twins, and to be told that I had demonstrated ignorance of the philosophical debates on applied ethics, personal identity and the mind-body problem (Letters, 19 August). Fourteen lawyers were in court for the Gracie and Rosie Attard case in September 2000; all recognised they were engaged in a philosophical...
Letter

Where are Gracie and Rosie?

22 August 2002

I was surprised by the tone of Stephen Mulhall’s letter in response to my essay on conjoined twins, and to be told that I had demonstrated ignorance of the philosophical debates on applied ethics, personal identity and the mind-body problem (Letters, 19 August). Fourteen lawyers were in court for the Gracie and Rosie Attard case in September 2000; all recognised they were engaged in a philosophical...
Letter

Brutish Babies

11 November 1999

I would like to thank Ruth Evans (Letters, 25 November 1999) for sending me off to read Dyan Elliott’s Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality and Demonology in the Middle Ages (1999). I sense that Evans was giving voice to the frustration that medievalists often feel at the reluctance of early modernists to look backwards in time (often attributable to their inability to read Latin). On the other hand,...
Letter

The Agathocles Story

22 August 1996

Jeremy Waldron (LRB, 22 August) asks: ‘If Agathocles’ – in Machiavelli’s Prince – ‘is to be condemned as someone who has crossed the line into tyranny, how are we to distinguish him from other apparently unscrupulous princes, like Cesare Borgia, whom Machiavelli praises for their ruthlessness?’ The answer is simple, and evident from Machiavelli’s telling of the story: Agathocles had...

Pieces about David Wootton in the LRB

Such Matters as the Soul: ‘The Invention of Science’

Dmitri Levitin, 22 September 2016

On 11 February​, David Reitze, executive director of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (Ligo) in the US, announced that his team of almost a thousand scientists had...

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The Strangest Piece of News: Galileo

Nick Wilding, 2 June 2011

In the winter of 1609-10, Galileo Galilei made a series of astronomical observations that added to the growing list of anomalies threatening the stability of the earth-centred Ptolemaic cosmos....

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Possessed by the Idols: Does Medicine Work?

Steven Shapin, 30 November 2006

Historical progress is back, even if it was only in some genres of academic history that it ever went away. It’s been some time, certainly, since historians of art saw painting as a...

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