H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
Belkora on Diaz and Gonzalez and Pullin, 'The Sounds of the Cosmos: Gravitational Waves and the Birth of Multi-Messenger Astronomy' [Review]
Diaz, Mario; Gonzalez, Gabriela; Pullin, Jorge. The Sounds of the Cosmos: Gravitational Waves and the Birth of Multi-Messenger Astronomy. : MIT Press, 2023. 224 pp. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780262544948.
Reviewed by
Leila Belkora (Independent Scholar)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (May, 2026)
Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=62692
More than a decade has passed since the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, made the first-ever direct observations of the ripples in space-time known as gravitational waves. These observations, in 2015, opened up a new way to see the universe, giving us insight into the mergers of black holes and neutron stars. But the nature of the scientific questions probed by LIGO and the other gravitational wave observatories that are now operating, and the technology behind the detectors, are still unfamiliar to many. LIGO’s detectors, in Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana, are called observatories, but their equipment does not resemble traditional astronomical telescopes, which gather electromagnetic waves in the optical, infrared, or ultraviolet wavelength ranges.
The Sounds of the Cosmos: Gravitational Waves and the Birth of Multi-Messenger Astronomy, by Mario Díaz, Gabriela González, and Jorge Pullin provides a lively and succinct introduction to the subject of gravitational waves. The authors are members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. They cover what these waves are, how they relate to Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and how the waves are detected. They explain how LIGO, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, came to be operated by the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The authors relate the exciting moments of the first detections, and highlight the benefits of combining observations of gravitational waves with observations from astronomical telescopes of different kinds. The twelve chapters that make up the book are short, and the book as a whole is roughly half the length, or less, of a comparable popular science trade book on the subject, such as Govert Schilling’s book Ripples in Spacetime: Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and the Future of Astronomy (2017).
The authors have made an effort to reach a broad audience; one sees this in the opening chapters, where they go so far as to define “coordinate system” (p. 38) and “constants” and “variables” in equations (p. 56). However, it must be said that readers new to “coordinate systems” will struggle to understand the more advanced concepts discussed, such as nonspherical distributions of matter or interferometry, despite the authors’ valiant attempts to explain them. Readers without a scientific background who persevere, however, will find much that is interesting to know about the way science is done, such as the fact that a null result can be useful, or that increased sensitivity of the detectors comes at the cost of ever higher complexity of the experimental set-up.
Readers with a background in astrophysics or in science more broadly will enjoy the later chapters. As the authors note, many scientists were initially profoundly skeptical about the value of LIGO when it was proposed, because of both its extraordinarily high cost—it was the most expensive single enterprise in the National Science Foundation’s history—and doubts about the project’s likelihood of success, following early, unsuccessful experiments. Uncertainty about Einstein’s formula for the energy lost in binary systems meant that it wasn’t clear, initially, how sensitive the gravitational wave detectors would need to be. The first detections occasioned an intensive analysis of the data to rule out malicious “hacking” that would have embarrassed the scientific collaboration. Details such as these give the reader a sense of what was at stake before the successful detections put those doubts to rest. Because of the book’s brevity, historians or sociologists of science will find that the narrative points to interesting questions, such as how the gravitational-wave community presented the risks and uncertainties of their projects in funding proposals, rather than providing a case study.
Chapter 9, on the technology of LIGO, is particularly engaging, and is not too technical to be read by a relatively broad audience. From the descriptions of the experimental set-up, and successive refinements to it, one gets a sense of the astounding effort to reduce “noise” in the hardware. A quick online search inspired by the chapter—and one suspects this is the way the authors intended the book to be used, as an overview that can serve as a jumping-off point for further reading—turns up examples of technology transfer from the development of LIGO to advanced laser technology, vacuum systems and manufacturing, new computational algorithms, and more. The reader, however, must locate further reading on their own, as there is no recommended list. The footnotes are occasionally disappointingly sparse; for example, the authors write on page 129 about corrosive soil microbes, carried by rats, degrading the equipment, but there are no endnotes or index entries related to this.
Overall, for the scientifically literate but nonspecialist reader, The Sounds of the Cosmos provides a brief but engaging introduction to gravitational-wave detection, at a time when we expect further growth in the number of gravitational wave “observatories” and new and exciting results. The historian of science will find a guide to the major turning points in the development of this still-young branch of astronomy. As the authors write in their epilogue, the development of gravitational wave astronomy is a “qualitative jump, as when sound was finally incorporated into the silent cinema of the early twentieth century: we can ‘see’ the universe with electromagnetic radiation, and we can ‘hear’ it with gravitational waves” (p. 197). The reader is now equipped to “stay tuned” for more progress.
Citation:
Leila Belkora.
Review of
Diaz, Mario; Gonzalez, Gabriela; Pullin, Jorge.
The Sounds of the Cosmos: Gravitational Waves and the Birth of Multi-Messenger Astronomy.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2026.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62692
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Wathen on Hancock, 'Unmentionable Madness: Gender, Disability, and Shame in the Malaria Treatment of Neurosyphilis' [Review]
Hancock, Christin L.. Unmentionable Madness: Gender, Disability, and Shame in the Malaria Treatment of Neurosyphilis. : University of Illinois Press, 2025. 172 pp. $26.00 (paper), ISBN 9780252088223.
Reviewed by
Emma Wathen (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (May, 2026)
Commissioned by
Kathryn D. Lankford (Arizona State University)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61903
Christin L. Hancock’s historical study of the malaria treatment of neurosyphilis grew out of a family secret: the death of her great-aunt, Mabel Dalton Smith, at Indianapolis’s Central State Hospital for the Insane (CSH) in 1931. For Hancock, the story of Mabel served as a gateway into the experiences of the hundreds of institutionalized disabled people who died during medical researchers’ quest to cure neurosyphilis in the 1920s and 1930s. Their stories have been shrouded by the shame associated with perceived sexual transgressions, institutionalization, and labels of disability.
In Unmentionable Madness, Hancock uncovers a familiar narrative in the history of human subject research, arguing that the medical researchers at CSH, led by Dr. Walter L. Bruetsch, relied on the disabled bodyminds of institutionalized neurosyphilis patients to bolster their careers. She frames malaria therapy as a potential magic bullet that promised a return to normality for those who had transgressed both sexual and able-bodied norms by contracting neurosyphilis. However, the majority of CSH’s institutionalized population who received malaria injections, including Mabel, benefited little from their participation as experimental subjects even as they abetted the soaring reputations of Bruetsch and his colleagues.
This concise monograph is tightly focused on the experiences of Mabel, other institutionalized neurosyphilis patients, and medical researchers at CSH while situating them within national conversations about neurosyphilis, medical experimentation, eugenics, and the gendered policing of sexuality. In chapter 1, Hancock reconstructs the dual stigmatization resulting from Mabel’s sexual deviance (through a premarital tryst) and bodily deviance (through the onset of neurosyphilis-induced insanity almost a decade later) that led to her institutionalization. Chapter 2 explores Bruetsch’s experimental work with malaria therapy as a means of establishing CSH not only as a treatment facility but also as a nationally recognized center for biomedical research. In a standout third chapter about patient experiences of neurosyphilis at CSH, Hancock reveals power inequalities that sustained the institution’s medical research and decision-making processes that prioritized the needs of researchers over their patients. Chapter 4 focuses more closely on the gendered and racialized dimensions of those inequalities, while chapter 5 examines the postmortem practices that contributed to the public erasure of institutionalized people who died from neurosyphilis.
Alongside its intervention of highlighting a rarely discussed experimental treatment and the integral knowledge-making role played by the disabled people who underwent it, Unmentionable Madness calls for the “re-lineating” of disabled ancestors like Mabel into family histories that they have been excised from (p. 4). Hancock contends that the individual shame experienced by Mabel, connected to her perceived sexual impropriety and her neurosyphilis-induced madness, morphed into a collective shame carried by her family and demonstrated through their silencing of her story. Hancock weaves Mabel’s biography into her historical analysis of malaria therapy to model a method of alleviating the shame bestowed on Mabel and others in her position by publicizing their experiences of disability and institutionalization. Hancock’s positionality grants her unique, albeit fragmentary, access to Mabel’s pre-institutional life that offers insight into the experiences of women whose lives were fractured in the historical record by their institutionalization. At the same time, Hancock’s focus on women’s (rather than men’s) experiences of neurosyphilis draws attention to the gendered aspects of this shame that shaped researchers’ understandings of normality and abnormality.
Although Hancock draws heavily from institutional documents created by superintendents, psychiatrists, and medical researchers—including patient files, research notes, medical journals, and death certificates—she attempts to decenter medical perspectives by adopting a feminist disability studies framework. In doing so, she foregrounds CSH patients’ embodied experiences of disability and illness and their interactions with their environments, a central tenet of disability history. In line with feminist disability studies scholarship, Hancock masterfully analyzes both the labels of madness connected to transgressing sexual norms and the embodied experience of madness caused by neurosyphilis.
While Hancock’s analysis of disability and gender is consistently nuanced, her decision to separate her discussions about race and gender in chapter 4 provokes some questions. The idea that malaria treatment reinforced eugenic thinking regarding medical racism while simultaneously demonstrating the potential to “counter the ideas of hereditarianism embedded in eugenics by offering the potential return of patients disabled by neurosyphilis to lives of productive and reproductive labor” is compelling but somewhat underdeveloped (p. 102). The gendered ideas about productivity and reproduction that underlay researchers’ hopes of forging a return to normality were surely also shaped by racial biases. A more explicit intersectional analysis here, along with a brief discussion about acquired disability in the context of hereditarianism and eugenics, would have helped clarify these distinctions.
Ultimately, Hancock describes Unmentionable Madness as “a story of relationships” as much as a history of neurosyphilis and medical experimentation (p. 119). While she is referring to relationships between people, her statement could just as easily apply to the relationships between the fields she writes in, especially history of medicine, disability history, and gender history. In using feminist disability studies and biographical elements to frame the history of malaria treatment, Hancock becomes the latest historian to demonstrate how history of medicine and disability history can complement each other through a nuanced and intersectional analysis of disability, madness, and sexuality.
Citation:
Emma Wathen.
Review of
Hancock, Christin L..
Unmentionable Madness: Gender, Disability, and Shame in the Malaria Treatment of Neurosyphilis.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2026.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61903
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Shmuely on Bolman, 'Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles' [Review]
Bolman, Brad. Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles. : University of Chicago Press, 2025. 368 pp. $115.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780226825533.$32.50 (paper), ISBN 9780226839745.
Reviewed by
Shira Shmuely (Tel Aviv University and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (May, 2026)
Commissioned by
Kathryn D. Lankford (Arizona State University)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=61971
Though the breed originated in the context of the aristocratic British hunting tradition, the beagle as a laboratory animal was an American invention. By the second half of the twentieth century, the beagle had become an international standard in research laboratories. Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles follows beagles' paws down the neon-lit corridors of biomedical research. Tracing these animals allows Brad Bolman to draw unexpected connections between diverse twentieth-century scientific projects: from Cold War radioactivity studies discussed in chapter 2, through regulation and toxicity research in chapter 3, to cigarette-smoking experiments in chapter 4. The fifth chapter lays out the fascinating intersections between Alzheimer's disease research, the development of pet pharmaceuticals, and the comparatively delayed scientific formulation of canine cognition in the late twentieth century. Across the chapters, and with shifting emphasis, emerge the themes of animal trade, cultures of care within laboratory settings, and the unstable analogies drawn between human and canine bodies and minds.
By unpacking the creation of a beagle supply chain, the book contributes substantially to the understudied animal trade in twentieth-century science. Bolman examines the establishment of dog colonies within scientific research centers and the circumstances that triggered the shift toward the services of commercial breeding facilities in undisclosed locations, including the reaction to rising public critique of vivisection. Joining publications examining the trade in nonhuman primate, Lab Dog illuminates how experimental dogs became commodities in global scientific networks.[1] Bolman meticulously traces the internationalization of beagles as laboratory standards, emphasizing the role of post-thalidomide regulation in the US in advancing the use of beagles during the mid-twentieth century. This ultimately impacted French, German, and Japanese pharmaceutical adoption of the breed. The standardization and monopolization of dog breeding perhaps helped smooth the trade in knowledge and drugs, but simultaneously made research highly vulnerable to contamination, as demonstrated in the case of beagle lungworm, which affected experimental research across continents.. This weakness proved instrumental for the tobacco industry in its campaign to delegitimize cancer research.
While anthropologist Michael Lynch convincingly depicted animal experimentation as a process of abstraction and denaturalization, Bolman reties the knots between the familial settings of pet keeping and laboratory use, emphasizing the management of sociability and the emotional needs of dogs-turned-experimental-tools.[2] The establishment of a system of maintenance was essential for keeping the dog colonies healthy and productive. The first guidelines for beagle care included contributions by researchers, veterinarians, and dog club specialists. Bolman complicates the role of veterinarians in mediating between pet industry and humane medicine, compared to the efforts American veterinarians invested in separating the realms of the meat industry and pet culture.[3]
Lab Dog lays out the various needs, constraints, and personal preferences that led to an organism becoming a favorable experimental subject, though the short answer as to why beagles were the initial choice to populate the 1940s dog colonies is that it was arbitrary. Later, however, researchers described the favorable qualities of the breed, which often had more to do with the economy and sustainability of research facilities than with beagles’ similarity to humans. These included physical traits such as beagles’ conveniently medium-sized bodies and behavioral characteristics such as their ability to endure living both in groups and in solitude. In a particularly thought-provoking passage about researchers cracking jokes about radioactive beagles, Bolman shows how both science and humor draw upon the imperfect interchangeability of dogs and humans. At the same time, Lab Dog is a book in the history of science that makes efforts not to leave out the everyday horrors that sustain modern knowledge production. Almost every chapter engages with the reactions of antivivisection societies and the wider public to the described experiments. Bolman reminds readers of “the howls and yelps that lie between the lines of old reports and archived correspondence,” thus encouraging animal studies scholarship to excavate nonverbal communication, emotion, intimacy, and pain from the dullest administrative papers (p. 17).
This book will appeal to historians of medicine and those exploring the role of nonhuman animals in knowledge production. Beyond its historiographical contributions, the book models a methodology that positions the animal as the organizing subject across diverse research contexts, offering a valuable template for future work in animal studies and the history of science.
Notes
[1]. Tone Druglitrø, “Nonhuman Primates in Public Health: Between Biological Standardization, Conservation and Care,” Journal of the History of Biology (Dordrecht) 56, no. 3 (2023): 455–77; Tara Suri, “Between Simians and Cell Lines: Rhesus Monkeys, Polio Research, and the Geopolitics of Tissue Culture (1934–1954),” Journal of the History of Biology (Dordrecht) 55, no. 1 (2022): 115–46.
[2]. Michael E. Lynch, “Sacrifice and the Transformation of the Animal Body into a Scientific Object: Laboratory Culture and Ritual Practice in the Neurosciences,” Social Studies of Science 18, no. 2 (1988): 265–89.
[3]. Susan D. Jones, Valuing Animals: Veterinarians and Their Patients in Modern America, annotated ed. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Citation:
Shira Shmuely.
Review of
Bolman, Brad.
Lab Dog: What Global Science Owes American Beagles.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2026.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=61971
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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