Artificial Environments in Experimental Biology Available to Purchase

The series of crises—environmental, climatic, and sanitary—that are confronting our contemporary world have placed an increasing importance on understanding the effects of transformed milieux on bodies and ecologies. A growing scientific and clinical emphasis on environmental influences on organisms and diseases can already be seen reverberating in the history of medicine, contributing to a convergence with the history of technology and environmental history. Complementing the historical work on anthropogenic pollution in outdoor environments, a growing number of scholars have turned to artificial places in the built environment—homes, factories, and offices—to examine the intertwined histories of indoor ambient pollution and ecologies, climatic engineering, and medicine and hygiene (especially industrial hygiene).² More recently, Christopher Sellers has argued that the significance of this body of work extends beyond the history of medical and public health specialties. He sees a historiographical opportunity to reread “the past two centuries of medical history in terms...