This article explores crossovers from Eastern philosophy and spirituality to contemporary science and medicine in the West. My interest is not so much in specific lines of historical transmission, as in the channels through which they flow. In particular, my argument is that different ontologies – visions of how the world is – either facilitate or block such exchanges. As an example, think about physics. The ontology of mainstream physics is a modern, dualist one, inasmuch as physical thought revolves around a material world from which anything human is absent, and the human leftovers fall to the humanities and social sciences. This ontology, more or less by definition, blocks any resonance with Eastern ideas or practices, and, accordingly, they are almost entirely absent from the history of physics, except, importantly, in lines of work on the foundations of physics, especially quantum mechanics. If one meditates on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, boundaries between the observer and the observed start to unravel, the dualist ontology erodes, and there, indeed, one finds all sorts of resonances with the East, as elaborated in an endless list of books that includes, for example, The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. That is my basic idea: resonances with the East spring forth in Western science whenever modern dualism starts to fray around the edges. But this essay is not about physics, and I turn now to the post-war history of cybernetics in Britain and its rather different non-modern ontology.

Western literature has focused on medical plurality but also on the pervasive existence of quacks who managed to survive from at least the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Focal points of their practices have been their efforts at enrichment and their extensive advertising. In Greece, empirical, untrained healers in the first half of the twentieth century do not fit in with this picture. They did not ask for payment, although they did accept ‘gifts’; they did not advertise their practice; and they had fixed places of residence. Licensed physicians did not undertake a concerted attack against them, as happened in the West against the quacks, and neither did the state. In this paper, it is argued that both the protection offered by their localities to resident popular healers and the healers’ lack of demand for monetary payment were jointly responsible for the lack of prosecutions of popular healers. Moreover, the linking of popular medicine with ancient traditions, as put forward by influential folklore studies, also reduced the likelihood of an aggressive discourse against the popular healers. Although the Greek situation in the early twentieth century contrasts with the historiography on quacks, it is much more in line with that on wise women and cunning-folk. It is thus the identification of these groups of healers in Greece and elsewhere, mostly through the use of oral histories but also through folklore studies, that reveals a different story from that of the aggressive discourse of medical men against quacks.

The physician and sexologist Albert Moll, from Berlin, was one of the main protagonists within the German discourse on the opportunities and dangers of social engineering, by eugenic interventions into human life in general, as well as into reproductive hygiene and healthcare policy in particular. One of the main sexological topics that were discussed intensively during the late-Wilhelminian German Reich and the Weimar Republic was the question of the legalisation of voluntary and compulsory sterilisations on the basis of medical, social, eugenic, economic or criminological indications. As is clear from Moll’s conservative principles of medical ethics, and his conviction that the genetic knowledge required for eugenically indicated sterilisations was not yet sufficiently elaborated, he had doubts and worries about colleagues who were exceedingly zealous about these surgical sterilisations – especially Gustav Boeters from Saxony.

Paul-Louis Simond’s 1898 experiment demonstrating fleas as the vector of plague is today recognised as one of the breakthrough moments in modern epidemiology, as it established the insect-borne transmission of plague. Providing the first exhaustive examination of primary sources from the Institut Pasteur’s 1897–98 ‘India Mission’, including Simond’s notebooks, experiment carnets and correspondence, and cross-examining this material with colonial medical sources from the first years of the third plague pandemic in British India, the article demonstrates that Simond’s engagement with the question of the propagation of plague was much more complex and ambiguous than the teleological story reproduced in established historical works suggests. On the one hand, the article reveals that the famous 1898 experiment was botched, and that Simond’s misreported its ambiguous findings for the Annales de l’Institut Pasteur. On the other hand, the article shows that, in the course of his ‘India Mission’, Simond framed rats as involved in the propagation of plague irreducibly in their relation to other potential sources of infection and not simply in terms of a parasitological mechanism. The article illuminates Simond’s complex epidemiological reasoning about plague transmission, situating it within its proper colonial and epistemological context, and argues for a new historical gaze on the rat as an ‘epidemiological dividual’, which highlights the relational and contingent nature of epidemiological framings of the animal during the third plague pandemic.

This article focuses on the consolidation of naval hygiene practices during the Victorian era, a period of profound medical change that coincided with the fleet’s transition from sail to steam. The ironclads of the mid- to late- nineteenth century offered ample opportunities to improve preventive medicine at sea, and surgeons capitalised on new steam technologies to provide cleaner, dryer, and airier surroundings below decks. Such efforts reflected the sanitarian idealism of naval medicine in this period, inherited from the eighteenth-century pioneers of the discipline. Yet, despite the scientific thrust of Victorian naval medicine, with its emphasis on collecting measurements and collating statistics, consensus about the causes of disease eluded practitioners. It proved almost impossible to eradicate sickness at sea, and the enclosed nature of naval vessels showed the limitations – rather than the promise – of attempting to enforce absolute environmental controls. Nonetheless, sanitarian ideology prevailed throughout the steam age, and the hygienic reforms enacted throughout the fleet showed some of the same successes that attended the public health movement on land. It was thus despite shifting ideas about disease and new methods of investigation that naval medicine remained wedded to its sanitarian roots until the close of the nineteenth century.