Ken Bullough: a scientist and a friend

The contributions made by Ken Bullough (1927–1994) to space physics and conflict research are briefly summarised. This brief obituary and review of his scientific contributions is supplemented by a complete list of his publications.     

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes on phrenology: Debunking a fad

ABSTRACT

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (1809–1894) was a Boston physician, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School, and a writer of prose and poetry for general audiences. He was also one of the most famous American wits of the nineteenth century and a celebrity not bashful about exposing costly, absurd, and potentially harmful medical fads. One of his targets was phrenology, and the current article examines how he learned about phrenology during the 1830s as a medical student in Boston and Paris, and his head-reading with Lorenzo Fowler in 1858. It then turns to what he told readers of the Atlantic Monthly (in 1859) and Harvard medical students (in 1861) about phrenology being a pseudoscience and how phrenologists were duping clients. By looking at what Holmes was stating about cranioscopy and practitioners of phrenology in both humorous and more serious ways, historians can more fully appreciate the “bumpy” trajectory of one of the most significant medical and scientific fads of the nineteenth century.     

The Non-Geographer: Overlooked but not forgotten

This paper is concerned with epistemological and attitudinal problems encountered in communicating geographical concepts to non-geographers. It reflects a Canadian context and offers a case study of a group of non-geographers whose special needs are often overlooked: the teachers of social studies. An inductive approach, using systematic geography only as required in order to understand a case study, is found to be effective in building bridges for those new to the subject. The choice of sequence should be from the empirical to the theoretical, in which fieldwork fulfils a point of entry for non-geographers.     

Memories of a time forgotten: the myth of the perennial nation

ABSTRACT. This article questions the persistent view of the Balkans as a place where ethnic and national identities were sustained over centuries of Ottoman and Habsburg rule. It concentrates on the Serbian historical narrative and challenges the picture of the Serbs as an ethnic community who gathered around their bards and priests to cherish memories of their ancient kingdom. Rather, it is argued that we can speak of two competing narratives, one ecclesiastical and the other vernacular, neither of which was even remotely national or historical, and that the Serbs, as we know them today, are not the product of centuries of cultural formation but were carved out of a Slavic mass as were the Croats, relatively recently.