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

Straight Shooter

21 July 1994

Nicholas Denyer (Letters, 4 August) is right to be sceptical of my claim that ‘the Thirty-Nine Articles required all Englishmen to practise archery on Sundays.’ Article 38 states: ‘It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars,’ but it was the state, not the Church, which specifically required archery practice on Sundays. A conscientious...
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...
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

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

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...

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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