Paper 1: Early History of Science, Medicine and Technology
Also Paper O11 in CLT2 Classical Tripos Part II
You should answer three questions. All questions carry equal weighting.
You should spend no more than three hours on answering all the questions, and a
word limit is set of no more than 1,500 words per answer.
All your answers for this paper should be submitted in one DOC, DOCX or PDF
document. Each answer should be clearly headed with the question number and the
question.
Put your Blind Grade Number (BGN) at the start of the document. Do not put your
name anywhere in the document.
1. Why were there changes in early modern European astronomy?
2. What was the difference between a “rational physician” and a “quack” in early
modern Europe?
3. What was the Black Death, and how has the way in which scholars have
studied it changed over the past three decades?
4. Is it possible to write histories of the experiences of health and healing of
people in the past who did not write things down? Provide at least three
examples.
5. “Images and objects made medicine more ‘objective’.” How true is this of early
modern medical knowledge in Europe?
6. Did new diseases lead doctors and their patients to use new remedies in early
modern Europe?
7. How did specific substances, for example theriac, asafetida, or snakestones,
reflect foreign influences on Chinese medicine in the imperial period?
8. How did changes in the publishing industry in the Ming and Qing dynasties
affect the history of medicine in imperial China?
9. “Early modern collections were reflections of how their owners sought to appear.”
Discuss.
10. How did chemical knowledge transform medical practice in early modern
Europe?
11. What was the significance of travel in the development of Enlightenment
natural knowledge?
12. Explain the significance that automata had for eighteenth-century natural
philosophers.