μblog: engineering from the trenches

Adding references, or data from, publications that are over a hundred years old seems to be a popular trend among scientific presentations these days. Sometimes it is to give a false sense of scholarship, however, it is often to remind us that some ‘new’ scientific breakthroughs may be simple re-interpretations of old discoveries. I try to note the references and look them up, when time permits. Here is the first paragraph from the preface of ‘Epilepsy and Its Treatments‘ (1904) by Spratling:

The great progress made in the knowledge of epilepsy and its treatments during the past decade and a half, and in fact that no complete treatise on the subject has appeared in the United States since Echeverria’s work was published thirty-three years ago, was the chief reason that lead to the preparation of this volume.

With the exception of Manuel Echeverria (On Epilepsy: Anatomo-Pathological and Clinical Notes (1870)), the sentence can still be used in a modern book/review of Epilepsy without much alteration. The reason that the 1904 book was cited was to show that, a hundred years ago, physicians were aware that, on very rare occasions, were non-clinical. For example, it was noted that verbal interactions were sometimes enough to bring people out of seizure, something that researchers who seek alternative epilepsy treatments are rediscovering. (On a slight side note, there is an interesting personal account by Feydor Dostoyevsky starting at the bottom of page 466 where he links a pre-seizure state to a state of mental enlightenment.)

This long winded introduction was to present a pair of review articles from the early 1900s that covered what the authors thought were the highest achievements in physics and applied math of the previous century.

1905barus-the-progress-of-phsyics-in-the-nineteenth-century.pdf

1900woodward-the-centurys-progress-in-applied-mathematics.pdf

The image is from the IEEE and is of the Georgetown, CO steam/hydro powerplant.