Eighteenth-century Korea saw an emergence of the medical case history genre, and the most noticeable example of it was Yeoksi manpil 歷試漫筆 (1734), written by Yi Sugi 李壽祺 (1664-c.1750). This paper analyzes Yeoksi manpil to bring to light a new medical landscape of late Joseon Korea, while situating it under the context of the history of science and ideas in Korea. Yi Sugi was a new kind of historical actor, hailing from the group of jung'in 中人 technical officials, a group which was newly emergent in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. As a jung'in medical official, he tried to secure his professional identity, in a way that might enhance his cultural sensitivity toward tools or technology. My argument goes that in the stage of medical practice, Yi Sugi had enacted such tools as pulse (脈), materials (物), circumstance (情) on top of symptoms (症). This kind of activity might be called a medical innovation in practice to the extent that other doctors of the period concerned themselves mostly with symptoms. In conclusion, the medical practice as represented by Yi Sugi and his medical work Yeoksi manpil gives an illustrative example showing that eighteenth-century Korea was a dynamic cultural space in which people, knowledge, tools/technology, materials, and practice were actively being interconnected and culturally redistributed.

Early modern Europe went through two distinct types of revolu-tion ― scientific and military. Military historians have employed the term, Military Revolution, to account for several significant changes in the seventeenth century, such as advent of new weapons, enlargement of military forces, and extension of battle length. Under these circumstances, it is reasonable to assume a certain degree of correlation between the Scientific Revolution and the Military Revolution, both of which took place in the same place at the same time. This paper features Maurits van Nassau and Simon Stevin to show the interactions between two revolutions. They were patron and client in private, and general and officer in public. Maurits is considered to have brought about the Military Revolution, while Stevin is valued highly as a mathematician that invented decimal fraction system and laid the foundation for the new mathematics through innovating traditional number concept. Maurits is well-known for the 'scientific war,' particularly the scientific siege warfare. I suggest that his scientific wars were carried out through systematic deployment of armed forces, detection of the weakest point based on mathematical analysis, calculation of safe attacking routes, and intensive attack on target points. Stevin's publications on the art of war will show how much they influenced on Maurits' strategies and tactics. This shows that the clear correlation between science and war, characterized by goal-driven research for warfare tactics, elevated social status of relevant scientists, and strong recognition of victor nations as the centre of science, already started slowly in the seventeenth century.

This paper examines medical research and sanitary orders of the United States in Europe during World War I. It aims to analyze the relationships between public health and war in terms of epidemics and military interests of the United States. To cope with Serbian typhus fever in 1915, the United States, which had not been directly involved in war, delegated a sanitary commission organized by private agencies. As the characters of typhus fever had been well known at that time, the sanitary commission aimed at curing patients and hindering additional cases by improving hygienic conditions. After the United States determined to enter the war and dispatched troops in 1917, however, the approach to epidemics in Europe changed. To handle the yet unknown trench fever that had undermined Allied military power, the U.S. Army organized the medical corps for scientific investigations. Medical corps conducted experiments on voluntary soldiers, and concluded that trench fever was caused by the bite of louse and could be transmitted through blood. Medical research and sanitary orders to two epidemics during the same war had developed differently according to the characters of each disease and military interests of the United States

This paper analyzes American industrial contributions to wartime R&D efforts during World War II, by examining various R&D works of divisions 16 (Optics and Camouflage) and 17 (Physics) of the National Defense Research Committee. The R&D outcomes of divisions 16 and 17 were “scientific catchall”: there was no coherent research program, no concentration on a single project. Diversity of their research topics and urgency of their tasks led to the active use of reservoirs of industrial research. By investigating R&D processes and division of labor between industry and academia in various R&D works of division 16 and 17, this paper critically examines the effectiveness of the linear model of innovation.