Michael Rossi

Michael Rossi is a historian of medicine at the University of Chicago and the author of The Republic of Colour: Science, Perception and the Making of Modern America.

From The Blog
23 April 2020

On the cover of Le Petit Journal of 1 December 1912, cholera was shown as death personified, black-hooded and skeletal, scything soldiers and civilians to the ground as they fled its advance. Depictions of the virus that causes Covid-19 have not had to resort to symbolism. We know what the pathogen looks like: a ball studded with rococo spikes, the ‘crown’ that gives the coronavirus its name. At first glance, this shift looks like progress.

Consider Jack and Oskar: Twin Studies

Michael Rossi, 7 February 2013

In a tongue-in-cheek editorial in the February 1927 issue of the Journal of Educational Research, the psychologist Guy Whipple announced that ‘the age-old perplexity of heredity has been banished; the old riddle of nature versus nurture has been solved.’ For the previous half-century, psychologists, geneticists, pedagogists and eugenicists had been trying to determine how...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences