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The view that science and religion are necessarily in conflict has increasingly lost favor among scholars who have sought more nuanced theoretical frameworks for evaluating the configurations of these two bodies of knowledge in modern life. This book situates, for the first time, the modern study of race into scholarly debates concerning whether the conflict thesis is a viable analytic framework for assessing the relations between religion and science. Arguing that the conflict model is thoroughly inadequate, this book shows that the formation of the race concept in the minds of Western European and American scientists grew out of and remained indebted to Christian intellectual history. Religion was not subtracted from nor did it stand in conflict with constructions of race developed across the modern life and health sciences. The argument made in this book is based on a reexamination of paratheological texts and biblical commentaries from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, works in early Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in German ethnology and early nineteenth-century American social science, debates among twentieth-century Progressive Era public health scientists, and contemporary genetic analysis of ancient human DNA. Divine Variations recovers the hidden history of how Euro-American scientists inherited from their Christian ancestors a series of ideas and reasoning strategies about race that profoundly shaped the modern biological construction of human difference.

This book explores how European doctors and scientists worked together across borders to establish the new field of tropical medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book shows that this transnational collaboration in a context of European colonialism, scientific discovery, and internationalism shaped the character of a new medical specialty. Even in an era of intense competition among European states, practitioners of tropical medicine created a transnational scientific community through which they influenced each other and the health care that was introduced to the tropical world. One of the most important developments in the shaping of tropical medicine as a specialty was the major sleeping sickness epidemic that spread across sub-Saharan Africa at the turn of the century. The book describes how scientists and doctors collaborated across borders to control, contain, and find a treatment for the disease. It demonstrates that these medical specialists' shared notions of “Europeanness,” rooted in common beliefs about scientific, technological, and racial superiority, led them to establish a colonial medical practice in Africa that sometimes oppressed the same people it was created to help.

This book provides a survey of the practices of science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires from 1500 to 1800. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of specialists from the United States, Latin America, and Europe, it consists of fifteen chapters, as well as an introduction and an afterword by scholars in the field. The topics discussed include navigation, exploration, cartography, natural sciences, technology, and medicine.