Am teaching a course on Pain & the humanities this yr, and I can't stop thinking about this 1950 experiment conducted in New York hospitals and Cornell University hospital, where physicians burned the hands of women in labor (IN LABOR) to create a measure for pain/study pain thresholds. #histmed

I want to throw up now

I've got a chapter in this: www.campus.de/buecher-camp.... I wrote about the history of the idea of music as a form of programming for the psyche.

I'll be talking about "mind control" in Aachen next week. khk.rwth-aachen.de/event/worksh...

Everything that Mike Jay writes is worth your time.

does the bicycle make women cruel

Post-doc position in Boundaries of Drinking project: 2 years, full time, research only. Closing date 1 September 2025. #academicjobs iaepan.edu.pl/konkurs-na-s...

Wellcome-funded 'Between Deception and Dissent' project is recruiting a postdoc working at the interface of medical STS and socio-legal studies, supervised by Martyn Pickersgill @ Edinburgh #STS www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNY639/r...

The diary of 'Lady Hillingham' c. 1912, no location given, cited by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy in The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny 1972, which is (almost) entirely responsible for the 'close your eyes and think of England' line, though I did discover an earlier, 1940s, example.

Some books are here for only a short time after which they outlive their usefulness. Sadly, there are no copies of How To Deprogram Your Valley Girl on MARINet or LINK+, so future generations may be doomed to repeat history. Fortunately, there are over 6.5 million other items to choose from.

Excited to share the *incredible* cover for the Church Committee Report! The first version of the 1975 report on illegal surveillance & the national security state ever published by a mainstream press. Abridged/introduced by @brianhochman.bsky.social and I. Published by W.W. Norton January 2026.

The first time I ever heard the Beach Boys as an adult, was on Hugh Grant's Desert Island Discs. Took me about twenty seconds before I started crying. Listen out for the recorders. And the cut-out to the brothers singing on their own. www.youtube.com/watch?v=71LU...

This is a tale of how the search for the death ray led to something less deadly, but equally useful. In the 1930s, the air minister offered £1,000 to the inventor, "‘who could demonstrate the killing of a sheep at a range of 100 yards" using radio waves. 🧵

Dans l’Europe des Lumières, Mary Ann Davies, 9 ans à peine, fait sensation. Ce n’est pas seulement son talent qui intrigue, mais aussi l’instrument étrange qu’elle fait "chanter" : un harmonica de verre inventé par… Benjamin Franklin. ➡️ https://l.franceculture.fr/xSd

Hello, UK paperback publication day!

I wrote this the day before the Unbound thing broke and we found out they’d taken our money. Now it seems to be about that too.

How the tech capitalists treat us like saloon sex robots. I’ve made the connection, now I can’t unsee it. joelmorris.substack.com/p/are-we-the...

Who am I to say no to taxidermied deer heads formerly owned by David Lynch? www.juliensauctions.com/en/auctions/...

This has *never* been the way successful technology develops. Not at the beginning of the nineteenth-century technological revolution, and not now. I’m currently developing a book pitch on this …..

sshm.org/notices/ Vacancy: Social History of Medicine journal is seeking a Co-Editor. Please consider applying!

🚨 New on Substack, this fine guest post by @benaustwick.bsky.social on the Amsterdam School: Expressionism and Experimentation ... municipaldreams.substack.com/p/the-amster...

A post-it on which someone wrote "Say no to generative AI art. Buy art from real degenerates."

“This debt …should be at the forefront of our minds this Memorial Day….We are being asked not to charge into a hail of …artillery fire but only to speak up and to stand up in the face of foundational threats.” Historian and former Harvard president Drew Faust. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/26/o...

"Electronic Concert Not Very Amusing" -Boston Globe, February 27 1966

CFP: Masculinities, Militaries, and Mass Violence in Transition https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-153382 Potsdam, 22.01.2026-23.01.2026, Prof. Isabelle Deflers / PD Dr. Anke Fischer-Kattner, University of the Bundeswehr Munich; Prof. Christa Hämmerle, University of Vienna; Prof. Karen …

Wound Nationalism: ‘Culture Wars’ and the Politics of ‘The People’ - text of Prof. Joanna Bourke's Alan Graham Memorial Lecture, Trinity Coll., Dublin, 25/04/2025 #skystorians 🗃️#politics www.joannabourke.com/post/wound-n...

Congratulations to Leendert van der Miesen on the publication of his new book "Marin Mersenne and the Study of Harmony: From Sound to Music"! www.aup.nl/en/book/9789... It is the 7th volume to be published in the @amsterdamupress.bsky.social book series Scientiae Studies, www.aup.nl/en/series/sc...

“The whole thing feels like Black Mirror.” “He would listen to the bot over me.” “It gave my husband the title of ‘spark bearer’ because he brought it to life.” Relationships are being destroyed thanks to spiritual mania, supernatural delusions, and arcane prophecy — all fueled by AI chatbots:

Wow futurism.com/spotify-accu... Wonder how long till instagram cracks this. And YouTube. And Reddit. And twitter. Probably mood music is low hanging fruit for ai.

I just had my first experience of seeing students using chapgpt to answer questions in class live.

Miele hatte 1963 übrigens schon den bestmöglichen Slogan für #ChatGPT und Co. im Angebot: „Elektrogehirn im Vollautomaten“. #AI

From a Soviet book on brainwashing

Really looking forward to the “Medicine, Race, and Slavery in the Atlantic World” conference happening in two weeks @kingscollegelondon.bsky.social, featuring yours truly, plus @alltoosuman.bsky.social, @meghankroberts.bsky.social, @claireweeda.bsky.social & so many more. Link to register below!

Peacock-shaped Hand Washing Device: Illustration from The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (Automata) of Inb al-Razza al-Jazari https://clevelandart.org/art/1945.383.a

Henri Michaux’s mescaline drawings at the Courtauld until June courtauld.ac.uk/whats-on/exh...

This is the first known asylum patient art ever printed. It is by Bedlam inmate James Matthews. It shows the range of his delusions - he feared a machine which was powered by the ‘effluvia of dogs’ and which attacked him using ‘lobster-cracking’ and ‘thigh-talking’

You can read the whole incredible story of Matthews' visionary obsession in The Influencing Machine by @mikejay.bsky.social strangeattractor.greedbag.com/buy/the-infl...

Long overdue and thoroughly chilling biography of William Sargant

The edition of Zeitschrift fuer Medienwissenschaft that Bernd Boesel and I put together on mind control is out now. zfmedienwissenschaft.de/heft/archiv/... #mindcontrol #histsci #histmed

It's Jefferson's birthday In 1818 he warned about novel reading "A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels... ...when this poison infects the mind, it destroys it’s tone, & revolts it against wholesome reading" newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/thomas-jef...

One of the things I got up to on the @sshmedicine.bsky.social writing retreat at Ross Priory @unistrathclyde.bsky.social @strathhumanities.bsky.social www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/a-sh...

"... in one of his books he recommended lobotomy, instead of divorce, for unhappy wives." (Content warning for mental illness & inhumane treatment thereof 👇🏻) 📚 www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

“There is in man some great source of greatness, and a great source of wretchedness…. What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction…!” Narcissistic Depressive Technoscience by Thomas Fuchs www.thenewatlantis.com/publications...

May his memory be a blessing for those who knew him. The Audible Past was paradigm shifting for many, but don't sleep on his latest book on impairment phenomenology, DIMINISHED FACULTIES, which is breathtaking in its acuity and grace.

I’d sell my everlasting soul to Satan to fund this episode of The Good Life 👇

Surgeons trying to eliminate pain eventually arrived at anaesthesia – but not before a contest with more unusual therapies. Why was mesmerism so magnetic? ⌛ 𝗟𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗻𝗲𝘄 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗗𝗲𝗯𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲 buff.ly/mK4Vn7J