SECTION A
1. What is the role of experiment in the development of scientific
knowledge?
2. In what ways have the histories of science and medicine contributed to
an understanding of the categories of gender, race and class?
SECTION B
3. What was the relationship between religion and science in the early
modern period?
4. How and why did the study of the natural world change in early modern
Europe?
5. What does the history of early modern anatomical knowledge tell us
about the history of early modern medicine?
6. Why did mechanical philosophers study hidden actions and invisible
spirits?
7. Explain the eighteenth-century reception of Isaac Newton’s natural
philosophy.
8. How did new kinds of instruments affect the development of electricity
and chemistry in the eighteenth century?
9. What made it possible for Charles Darwin to write the Origin of Species?
10. How did transformations in theories of disease causation in the late
nineteenth century depend on work in colonial environments?
11. Was there a second scientific revolution in early nineteenth century
Europe?
12. “中体西用” (Zhongti xiyong) (“Chinese values, Western uses.”) What
does this quote suggest about the history of science in China during the
late Qing Dynasty?
13. Is “big science” primarily a phenomenon of the period since World War
II?
14. What led to the creation of molecular biology as a distinct discipline?
What was the role of the discovery of the structure of DNA?
15. Why was Alfred Wegener’s theory of continental drift widely rejected,
and what led to the acceptance of plate tectonics half a century later?