Hal Cook comes from the American Midwest, although he is now a British as well as US citizen, having devoted almost a decade to his work as Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. He joined the History Department in 2010, having previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard University, and has served the communities of the history of medicine and science, as well as history in general, through various professional society committees and editorial work. He takes an interest in global history, science and capitalism, and the history of medicine, especially in the early modern period, with the aim of exploring how some forms of knowledge-making are transcultural; his research has been mostly on the 17th century, in recent years focusing on the relationships between commerce, medicine, and science in the Dutch Golden Age (his Matters of Exchange, from Yale in 2007, has also been translated into simplified Chinese). A book on The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War, appeared with the University of Chicago Press in 2018, and an edited collection, Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age, with Brill in 2020. He has held several fellowships and has been the recipient of a number of honors and awards, including two book prizes: the Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine (1997) and the Pfizer Prize of the History of Science Society (2009). One of his proudest honors was receiving a President’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Governance in 2022.
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"Santorio Santori and the Emergence of Quantified Medicine, 1614-1790; Essay Review." Galilaeana, vol. 20, 2023, pp. 155-164.
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| Cook, Harold J. "The Dutch Overseas Empire, 1600–1800." The Journal of Modern History, vol. 95, no. 1, 2023, pp. 237-239. |
| Cook, Harold. "Progress in Medicine and Medicines." New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress, 2022, pp. 245-272. |
| Cook, Harold J. "Risking Private Ventures." Regulating Knowledge in an Entangled World, 2022, pp. 169-192. |
| Cook, Harold J. "War, Trade and the State: Anglo-Dutch Conflict, 1652–89. David Ormrod and Gijs Rommelse, eds. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2020. xxii + 324 pp. $39.95." Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 2, 2022, pp. 685-686. |
| Cook, Harold J. "Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis; Andreas Weber; Huib J. Zuidervaart (Editors). Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts. (Knowledge Infrastructure and Knowledge Economy, 6.) xiv + 322 pp., figs., tables, index. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2019. $179 (cloth); ISBN 9789004264878. E-book available." Isis, vol. 112, no. 4, 2021, pp. 820-822. |
| Cook, Harold J. "Princess Elisabeth’s Cautions and Descartes’ Suppression of the Traité de l’Homme." Early Science and Medicine, vol. 26, no. 4, 2021, pp. 289-313. |
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交换之物：荷兰黄金时代的商业、医学与科学, by 柯浩德 [Translation of Matters of Exchange]. CITIC Press Group, 2021.
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| "Augustinian Souls and Epicurean Bodies?." Descartes and the Ingenium , 2020, pp. 113-135. |
| Cook, Harold J., Thorn, Jennifer. "Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Kevin Patrick Siena, and: Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery by Jonathan Lamb." Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 54, no. 1, 2020, pp. 203-206. |
| Cook, Harold J. "The Dutch in the Early Modern World: A History of a Global Power. David Onnekink and Gijs Rommelse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xxii + 294 pp. $29.99." Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3, 2020, pp. 1051-1053. |
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"To Descartes' Ear? Listening in on Heterodox Natural Philosophy in Germany." Galilæana, vol. 17, 2020, pp. 303-307.
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Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age. Brill, 2020.
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"Afterward." Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World, edited by Paula Findlen, London, Routledge, 2019, pp. 378-385.
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"Difference and Disease." Journal of Interdiscipinary History, vol. 50, no. 2, 2019, pp. 274-276.
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"De ontmoeting met niet-westerse tradities [Encounters with non-Western traditions]." Leerboek medische geschiedenis, edited by H.F.P. Hillen, E.S. Houwaart, and F.G. Huisman, Houten, Bohn, Stafleu, van Loghum, 2018, pp. 57-68.
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"Science and Technology." The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age, edited by Helmer Helmers and Geert H. Janssen, Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 350-369.
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| Cook, Harold J. "Sciences and Economies in the Scientific Revolution: Concepts, Materials, and Commensurable Fragments." Osiris, vol. 33, no. 1, 2018, pp. 25-44. |
| Cook, Harold J. The young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War. University of Chicago Press, 2018. |
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"Early Modern Science and Monetized Economies: The Co-Production of Commensurable Materials." Wirtschaft Und Wissen: Expertenkulturen Und Märkte Vom 13. Bis 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Marian Füssel, Philip Knäble, and Nina Elsemann, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017, pp. 97-114.
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| Cook, Harold J. "Problems with the Word Made Flesh: The Great Tradition of the Scientific Revolution in Europe." Journal of Early Modern History, vol. 21, no. 5, 2017, pp. 394-406. |
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"Sharing the Truth of Things: Mistrust, Commerce, and Scientific Information." Eigennutz’ Und,Gute Ordnung’: Ôkonomisierungen Der Welt Im 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Sandra Richter and Guillaume Garner, Weisbaden, Harrassowitz, 2016, pp. 273-291.
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| "Treating of bodies medical and political: Dr. Mandeville’s materialism." Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, vol. 9, 2016, pp. 1-31. |
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"Trading in Medical Simples and Developing the New Science: de Orta and his Contemporaries." Medicine, Trade and Empire: Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) in Context, edited by Palmira Fontes Da Costa, Farnham, Surrey, Ashgate, 2015, pp. 129-146.
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"‘Not Unlike Mermaids’: A Report about the Human and Natural History of Southeast Africa from 1690." Kronos, vol. 41, 2015, pp. 61-84.
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"Commerce, Trade and the Emergence of the New Sciences." Mapping Spaces: Networks of Knowledge in 17th Century Landscape Painting, edited by Ulrike Gehring and Peter Weibel, Karlsruhe, Hirmer, 2014, pp. 220-225.
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"Creative Misunderstandings: Chinese Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Europe." Cultures in Motion, edited by Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman, and Helmut Reimitz, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2014, pp. 215-240.
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| Cook, H. J. "Testing the effects of Jesuit's bark in the Chinese Emperor's court." Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol. 107, no. 8, 2014, pp. 326-327. |
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Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge. edited by Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook, University of Michigan Press, 2014.
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| Assessing the Truth: Correspondence and Information at the End of the Golden Age. Primavera Pers, 2013. |
| Cook, H. J., Walker, T. D. "Circulation of Medicine in the Early Modern Atlantic World." Social History of Medicine, vol. 26, no. 3, 2013, pp. 337-351. |
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Global Movements, Local Concerns: Medicine and Health in Southeast Asia. edited by Laurence Monnais and Harold J. Cook, NUS Press, 2012.
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"Handel in Kennis: natuurlijke historie als de ‘Big Science’ van de zeventiende eeuw." Bloeiende Kennis: Groene Ontdekkingen in de Gouden Eeuw, edited by Esther van Gelder, Hilversum, Verloren, 2012, pp. 23-34.
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| Cook, Harold J. "Moving About and Finding Things Out: Economies and Sciences in the Period of the Scientific Revolution." Osiris, vol. 27, no. 1, 2012, pp. 101-132. |
| "Science as Culture: An American Viewpoint." Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, vol. 42, 2012, pp. 491-495. |
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Translating Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries. edited by Harold J. Cook and Sven Dupré, LIT Verlag, 2012.
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"Conveying Chinese medicine to seventeenth-century Europe." Science Between Europe and Asia: Historical Studies on the Transmission, Adoption and Adaptation of Knowledge, edited by Feza Günergun and Dhruv Raina, New York, Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, Springer, 2011, pp. 209-232.
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| Cook, Harold J. "Markets and Cultures: Medical Specifics and the Reconfiguration of the Body in Early Modern Europe." Trans. R. Hist. Soc., vol. 21, 2011, pp. 123-145. |
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"Medicine in Western Europe." Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, edited by Mark Jackson, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 190-207.
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| Cook, Harold J. "The History of Medicine and the Scientific Revolution." Isis, vol. 102, no. 1, 2011, pp. 102-108. |
| Cook HJ. "The history of medicine and the scientific revolution." Isis, vol. 102, no. 1, 2011, pp. 102-8. |
| Cook, H. J. "Borderlands: a historian's perspective on medical humanities in the US and the UK." Medical Humanities, vol. 36, no. 1, 2010, pp. 3-4. |
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"Victories for Empiricism, Failures for Theory: Medicine and Science in the Seventeenth Century." The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, edited by Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal, Dordrecht, Springer, 2010, pp. 9-32.
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| Cook HJ. "Health and medicine in Hapsburg Spain: agents, practices, representations. Introduction." Medical history. Supplement, no. 29, 2009, pp. 1-6. |
| "Amsterdam, Entrepôt des Saviors au XVIIe siècle." Revue d'histoire moderne & contemporaine, 2008, pp. 19-42. |
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"Lastanosa as an Example of His Time: Natural History and Medicine." The Gentleman, the Virtuoso, the Inquirer: Vincencio Juan de Lastanosa and the Art of Collecting in Early Modern Spain, edited by Mar Rey-Bueno and Miguel López-Pérez, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp. 1-14.
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Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. Yale University Press, 2007.
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"Roy Porter and the persons of history." Medicine, Madness and Social History: Essays in Honour of Roy Porter, edited by Roberta Bivins and John V. Pickstone, Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007, pp. 14-21.
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"Das Wissen von den Sachen." Seine Welt Wissen. Enzyklopädien in der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Ulrich Johannes Schneider, Darmstadt, WBG, 2006, pp. 81-124.
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"Medicine." The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, edited by Katherine Park and Loraine Daston, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 407-434.
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"The Decline of Alchemy." Alquimia: Ciencia y pensamiento a través de los libros, Madrid and Seville, 2006, pp. 68-81.
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| Cook, H. J. "What stays constant at the heart of medicine." BMJ, vol. 333, no. 7582, 2006, pp. 1281-1282. |
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"Global Economies and Local Knowledge in the East Indies: Jacobus Bontius Learns the Facts of Nature." Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World,, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, pp. 299-302.
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| Cook, Harold J, Hardy, Anne. "Into the Twenty-First Century: Medical History Goes Online." Medical History, vol. 49, no. 03, 2005, pp. 249. |
| Cook, Harold. "Health." The Lancet, vol. 364, no. 9444, 2004, pp. 1481. |
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"Medical Communication in the First Global Age: Willem Ten Rhijne in Japan, 1674-1676." Disquisitions on the Past & Present, 2004, pp. 16-36.
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"‘Against Common Right and Reason’: The College of Physicians Against Dr. Thomas Bonham." Law, Liberty, and Parliament: Selected Essays on the Writings of Sir Edward Coke, edited by Alan D. Boyer, Indianapolis, Liberty Fund, 2004, pp. 127-149.
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"Bernard Mandeville." A Companion to early modern Philosophy, edited by Steven Nadler, Blackwell, 2002, pp. 469-482.
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| "Body and Passions: Materialism and the Early Modern State." vol. 17, 2002, pp. 25-48. |
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"Time's Bodies: Crafting the Preparation and Preservation of Naturalia." Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Pamela H, Smith and Paula Findlen, London, Routledge, 2002, pp. 223-247.
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"From the Scientific Revolution to the Germ Theory." Western Medicine: An Illustrated History, edited by Irvine Loudon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 80-101.
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| "Boerhaave and the Flight From Reason in Medicine." Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 74, 2000, pp. 221-240. |
| "Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of the ‘Clever Politician’." vol. 60, 1999, pp. 101-124. |
| Harold J. Cook David S. Lux. "Closed Circles or Open Networks? Communicating at a Distance During the Scientific Revolution." vol. 36, 1998, pp. 179-211. |
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"From the Scientific Revolution to the germ theory." Western Medicine An Illustrated History, edited by Irvine Loudon, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 80-101.
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"Institutional Structures and Personal Belief in the London College of Physicians." Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, Scolar, 1996, pp. 91-114.
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"Natural History and Seventeenth-Century Dutch and English Medicine." The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands 1450-1800, edited by Hilary Marland, and Margaret Pelling, Rotterdam, Erasumus Publishing, 1996, pp. 253-270.
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"Physicians and Natural History." Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 1996, pp. 91-105.
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"The Moral Economy of Natural History and Medicine in the Dutch Golden Age." Contemporary Explorations in the Culture of the Low Countries, edited by William Z. Shetter and Inge van der Cruysse, 1996, pp. 39-47.
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"Medical Ethics, History of: IV. Europe: B. Renaissance and Enlightenment." Encyclopedia of bioethics, edited by Warren T. Reich, Macmillan Library Reference, 1995, pp. 1537-1543.
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| "Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional Authority of Early Modern English Physicians." Journal of British Studies, 1994, pp. 1-31. |
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"Medicine." Encyclopedia of Social History, edited by Peter N. Stearns, New York, Garland, 1994, pp. 459-462.
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Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
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"Physical Methods." Companion Encyclopedia of the History of Medicine, edited by W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter, London, Routledge, 1993, pp. 939-960.
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"The Cutting Edge of a Revolution? Medicine and Natural History Near the Shores of the North Sea." Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, edited by J.V. Field, and Frank A.J.L. James, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 45-61.
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"The new philosophy in the low countries." The Scientific Revolution in National Context,, edited by Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 115-149.
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"Living in Revolutionary Times: Medical Change under William and Mary." Patronage and Institutions: Science, Technology and Medicine At the European Court, 1500-1750, edited by Bruce T. Moran, Woodbridge, Boydell, 1991, pp. 111-135.
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"Physick and Natural History in Seventeenth-Century England." Revolution and Continuity: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Early Modern Science, edited by Peter Barker and Roger Ariew, Washington DC, The Catholic University Press of America, 1991, pp. 63-80.
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"Charles Wesbter's Analysis of Puritanism and Science." Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis, edited by I. Bernard Cohen, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 265-300.
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| "Medical Innovation or Medical Malpractice? Or, a Dutch Physician in London: The Case of Joannes Groenevelt, 1694-1700." Tractrix, vol. 2, 1990, pp. 63-91. |
| "Practical Medicine and the British Armed Forces After the ‘Glorious Revolution’." Medical History, vol. 34, 1990, pp. 1-26. |
| "Sir John Colbatch and Augustan Medicine: Experimentalism, Character and Entrepreneurialism." Annals of Science, 1990, pp. 475-505. |
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"The New Philosophy and Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England." Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, edited by David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 397-436.
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| "The Rose Case Reconsidered: Physicians, Apothecaries, and the Law in Augustan England." Journal of the History of Medicine, 1990, pp. 527-555. |
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"Physicians and the New Philosophy: Henry Stubbe and the Virtuosi-Physicians." Medical Revolution in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Roger French and Andrew Wear, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 246-271.
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| "Policing the Health of London: The College of Physicians and the Early Stuart Monarchy." Social History of Medicine, vol. 2, 1989, pp. 1-33. |
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"The Medical Profession in London." The Age of William III and Mary II: Power, Politics and Patronage, 1688-1702, edited by Martha Hamilton-Phillips and Robert P. Maccubbin, Williamsburg, William and Mary, 1989, pp. 186-194.
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| "The Society of Chemical Physicians, the New Philosophy, and the Restoration Court." Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 61, 1987, pp. 61-77. |
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The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London. Cornell University Press, 1986.
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| "‘Against Common Right and Reason’: The College of Physicians Against Dr. Thomas Bonham." American Journal of Legal History, vol. 29, 1985, pp. 301-322. |
| Steneck, Nicholas Vander, Arthur Kane, Gordon Cook, Harold J. "Early Research on the Biological Effects of Microwave Radiation, 1940-1960." Annals of Science, vol. 37, 1980, pp. 323-51. |
| Steneck, Nicholas Vander, Arthur Kane, Gordon Cook, Harold J. "The Origins of U.S. Safety Standards for Microwave Radiation." Science, vol. 248, no. 13 June, 1980, pp. 1230-1237. |
| "Ancient Wisdom, the Golden Age, and Atlantis: The New World in Sixteenth-Century Cosmography." Terrae Incognitae, vol. 10, 1978, pp. 25-43. |
Hal Cook's research interests are in the early modern period with special attention to changes in the seventeenth century. He writes about the History of Medicine, Global Knowledge Exchanges and Appropriations, the Scientific Revolution, Science and Commerce, the Politics of Knowledge, the Dutch Golden Age and, most recently, Descartes's World.
I have investigated the "rise of modern science" in early modern Europe, especially as viewed through the eyes of medical practitioners, first by looking at London and England, then at a Dutch doctor who emigrated to London and was tried for malpractice there in the 1690s, and then by looking into medicine and natural history in The Netherlands and wherever the Dutch entangled themselves in the larger world. I have helped to pioneer the use of the medical marketplace as a historical tool of investigation, encouraged attention not only to medical concepts but to practices, substances, and people, and pressed for a better understanding of the slipperiness and stickiness of knowledge exchanges across borders. Many of these historical interests can be put under the general heading of the subject of transcultural medicine and political economy, an aspect of which is science and capitalism. My recent study of the early life of Descartes -- when he was moving through most of Europe, in armies and on the fringes of princely courts -- situates one of the most recognisable philosophers in those kinds of relationships, too. Descartes was no more a disembodied mind than anyone else, which helps us glimpse the multiple strands of causation at work in the development of "modern science."
2019-21: US sponsor of EU Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Fellowship project “MAT-MED in Transit,” held by Sabrina Minuzzi of Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
2017-18: Visiting Fellow, project on Creating a Knowledge Society in a Globalizing World, 1450-1800, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) (in residence May-June 2018)
2016-17: Professeur invité à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (in residence March 2017)
2014-15: Fund from the Humanities Initiative, Brown University, for sponsoring activities on the subject of “translation”
2012-13: KB Fellowship (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, in cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study)
2011-12: Brown University Faculty Fellowship, Cogut Center for the Humanities
2008 (June): inaugural Visiting Fellow, Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of the Science and Humanities, Utrecht University
2008 (Spring): inaugural Queen Wilhelmina Visiting Professor, Columbia University
2007-10: Wellcome Project Grant (Research Resources) for Alison Walker, "Sloane Printed Books"
2007 (Fall): Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
2006-9: Post-graduate Fellowship for Erin Sullivan, Wellcome Trust, "Physicke for Mind, Body & Soul: The Diagnosis, Treatment and Experience of Melancholy in Early Modern England"
2005-10: Core Grant for Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL (£8.6 million)
2005-6: Project on behalf of Roy Church, "History of Burroughs Wellcome & Co 1940-1995," funded by Burroughs Wellcome Fund (USA)
2005-6: Post-doctoral fellowship from Associated Medical Services, Canada, for Wendy Churchill, "Themes in the Practice of Medical Ethics in Early Modern Britain, 1600-1800"
2001-10: PI (sponsor) for Wellcome Post-doctoral Fellowships for: Fay Bound, Carmen Caballero-Navas, Lucia Dacome, Hormoz Ebrahimejad, Lindsey Fitzharris, Louise Gray, and several others
2000-05: Core Grant for Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL (£12.6 million)
2001: NIH and NSF Grants (withdrawn)
2001 (Spring): Fellowship, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (declined)
1999 (Fall): Sabbatical leave from UW System
1989-91: National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant
1990 (Summer): National Library of Medicine Research Grant
1990 (Spring): Graduate School Research Salary, University of Wisconsin-Madison
1989 (Autumn): Fulbright Research Fellowship, The Netherlands
1987 (Spring): Graduate School Research Salary, University of Wisconsin-Madison
1984: Clark Fund, Harvard University
1983: Milton Fund, Harvard University
1982: Clark Fund, Harvard University
1980: Augustus Hindleman Fellowship, Department of History, University Michigan
1979: Award from Graduate Student Research Fund, U.M.
“Progress in Medicine and Medicines: Moving from Qualitative Experience to Commensurable Materialism,” in New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress, ed. Yafeng Shan (London: Routledge Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2023), pp. 245-272; doi.org/10.4324/9781003165859-16.
“Risking Private Ventures: The Instructive Failure of a Well-Travelled Artist, Cornelis de Bruyn,” in Regulating Knowledge in an Entangled World, ed. Fokko Jan Dijkstershuis (London: Routledge, 2022), pp. 169-192; doi.org/10.4324/9780429279928-13.
“Wetenschap en technologie,” in De Zeventiende Eeuw, ed. Helmer J. Helmers, Geert H. Janssen en Judith F.J. Noorman (Leiden: University of Leiden Press, 2021), pp. 437-457
“Princess Elisabeth’s Cautions and Descartes’ Suppression of the Traité de l’Homme,” Early Science and Medicine, 26 (2021): 289-313; doi:10.1163/15733823-02630020.
“Augustinian Souls and Epicurean Bodies? Descartes’ Corporeal Mind in Motion,” in Descartes and the Ingenium: The Embodied Soul in Cartesianism, edited by Raphaële Garrod and Alexander Marr (Leiden: Brill, 2020). pp. 113-135.
Editor, Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age (Leiden: Brill, 2020).
The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
“Afterward,” for Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World, ed. Paula Findlen (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 378-385.
“Sciences and Economies in the Scientific Revolution: Concepts, Materials, and Commensurable Fragments,” Osiris, 33 (2018): 25-44.
“Science and Technology,” for The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age, ed. Helmer Helmers and Geert H. Janssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 350-369.
“De ontmoeting met niet-westerse tradities,” in Leerboek medische geschiedenis [“Encounters with Non-Western Medical Traditions," in Textbook of Medical History, transl. Frank Huisman], ed. H.F.P. Hillen, E.S. Houwaart, and F.G. Huisman (Houten: Bohn, Stafleu, van Loghum, 2018), pp. 57-68.
“Early Modern Science and Monetized Economies: The Co-Production of Commensurable Materials,” in Wirtschaft und Wissen: Expertenkulturen und Märkte vom 13. bis 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Marian Füssel, Philip Knäble, and Nina Elsemann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), pp. 97-114.
"Problems with the Word Made Flesh: The Great Tradition of the Scientific Revolution in Europe,” Journal of Early Modern History , 21 (2017): 394-406.
“Treating of Bodies Medical and Political: Dr. Mandeville’s Materialism,” Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics, 9 (2016): 1-31.
“Sharing the Truth of Things: Mistrust, Commerce, and Scientific Information in the 17th Century,” in “Eigennutz” und “gute Ordnung,” Ökonomisierungen der Welt im 17. Jahrhundert, Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung Bd. 54, ed. Sandra Richter and Guillaume Garner (2016), pp. 273-291.
“‘Not Unlike Mermaids’: A Report about the Human and Natural History of Southeast Africa from 1690,” in special issue on “The Micro-Politics of Knowledge Production in Southern Africa,” Kronos: South African Histories, 41 (2015): 61-84.
“Trading in Medical Simples and Developing the New Science: de Orta and his Contemporaries,” in Medicine, Trade and Empire: Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) in Context, edited by Palmira Fontes Da Costa (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 129-146.
With Pamela Smith, “Introduction,” in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, ed. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), pp. 1-16.
“The Preservation of Specimens and the Take-off in Anatomical Knowledge,” in Ways of Making and Knowing: The Material Culture of Empirical Knowledge, ed. Pamela H. Smith, Amy R. W. Meyers, and Harold J. Cook (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), pp. 302-329.
“Creative Misunderstandings: Chinese Medicine in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” in Cultures in Motion, ed. Daniel T. Rodgers, Bhavani Raman, and Helmut Reimitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 215–40.
Koninklijke Bibliotheek blogs: blog.kb.nl/haroldcook/the-ruins-of-palmyra-still-speak; blog.kb.nl/harold-cook/linnaeuss-dutch-legacy; http://blog.kb.nl/haroldcook/importance-numismatics; http://blog.kb.nl/haroldcook/humans-apes-and-skin-color
Harold J. Cook and Sven Dupré, eds. Translating Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries (Zurich: Lit Verlag, 2013).
Harold J. Cook and Timothy D. Walker, eds., special issue on "Circulation of Medicine in the Early Modern Atlantic World," Social History of Medicine, 2013.
Assessing the Truth: Correspondence and Information at the End of the Golden Age (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2013) (also at: http://www.nias.knaw.nl/Content/NIAS/Publicaties/KB Lectures/KB Lecture 9 Cook.pdf)
"Moving About and Finding Things Out: Economies and Sciences in the Period of the Scientific Revolution," Osiris 27 (2012): 101-132.
Laurence Monnais and Harold J. Cook, eds. Global Movements, Local Concerns: Medicine and Health in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2012).
"Conveying Chinese Medicine to Seventeenth-Century Europe," in Science Between Europe and Asia, ed. Feza Günergun and Dhruv Raina, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 2011, Vol 275, Part 4, pp. 209-232.
"Medicine in Western Europe," in Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, ed. Mark Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 190-207.
"The History of Medicine and the Scientific Revolution," Isis, 102 (2011): 102-108.
"Markets and Cultures: Medical Specifics and the Reconfiguration of the Body in Early Modern Europe," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 21 (2011): 123-145.
"Borderlands: A Historian's Perspective on Medical Humanities in the US and the UK," Editorial, Medical Humanities, 36 (2010): 3-4.
Harold J. Cook, Sanjoy Bhattacharya, and Anne Hardy, eds. History of the Social Determinants of Health: Global Histories, Contemporary Debates (Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2009).
Teresa Huguet-Termes, Jon Arrizabalaga, and Harold J. Cook, eds. Health and Medicine in Hapsburg Spain: Agents, Practices, Representations; Supplement No. 29, Medical History (London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, 2009).
"Amsterdam, entrepôt des saviors au XVIIe siècle," Revue d'histoire moderne & contemporaine, 55 (2008): 19-42 (trans. into French by Loïc Marcou).
Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007; paperback, 2008); another edition published in India by Orient Longman, 2007: Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Age of Empire.
"Medicine," in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katherine Park and Loraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 407-434.
"Global Economies and Local Knowledge in the East Indies: Jacobus Bontius Learns the Facts of Nature," in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Claudia Swan and Londa Schiebinger (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 2005), pp. 100-118, 299-302.
"Bernard Mandeville," in A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), pp. 469-482.
"Body and Passions: Materialism and the Early Modern State," Osiris, 17 (2002): 25-48.
"Time's Bodies: Crafting the Preparation and Preservation of Naturalia," for Merchants and Marvels, ed. Paula Findlen and Pamela Smith (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 223-247.
"Boerhaave and the Flight from Reason in Medicine," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74 (2000): 221-240.
"Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of the 'Clever Politician'," Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999): 101-124.
"Closed Circles or Open Networks?: Communicating at a Distance During the Scientific Revolution," with David S. Lux, History of Science, 36 (1998): 179-211.
"Physicians and Natural History," in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James Secord, and Emma Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 91-105.
"Medical Ethics, History of: IV. Europe: B. Renaissance and Enlightenment," in Encyclopedia of Bioethics, revised edition, Warren T. Reich, editor-in-chief (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1995), vol. 3, pp. 1537-1543.
"Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional Authority of Early Modern English Physicians," Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994): 1-31.
Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
"The Cutting Edge of a Revolution? Medicine and Natural History near the Shores of the North Sea," in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J.V. Field and Frank A.J.L. James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 45-61.
"The New Philosophy in the Low Countries," in The Scientific Revolution in National Context, ed. Roy Porter & Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 115-149.
"Practical Medicine and the British Armed Forces After the 'Glorious Revolution'," Medical History, 34 (1990): 1-26.
"Sir John Colbatch and Augustan Medicine: Experimentalism, Character and Entrepreneurialism," Annals of Science, 47 (1990): 475-505.
"The New Philosophy and Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England," in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 397-436.
"The Rose Case Reconsidered: Physic and the Law in Augustan England," Journal of the History of Medicine, 45 (1990): 527-555.
"Physicians and the New Philosophy: Henry Stubbe and the Virtuosi-Physicians," in Medical Revolution in the 17th Century, Roger French and Andrew Wear eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 246-271.
"Policing the Health of London: The College of Physicians and the Early Stuart Monarchy," Social History of Medicine, 2 (1989): 1-33.
"The Society of Chemical Physicians, The New Philosophy, and the Restoration Court," Bull. Hist. Medicine 61 (1987): 61-77.
The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
"'Against Common Right and Reason': The College of Physicians Against Dr. Thomas Bonham," Am. J. Legal Hist., 29 (1985): 301-24; abstract publ. in Law Review Digest, 35 [1986]: 28-29.)
"Ancient Wisdom, The Golden Age, and Atlantis: The New World in Sixteenth-Century Cosmography," Terrae Incognitae, 10 (1978): 25-43.
| Year | Degree | Institution |
|---|---|---|
| 1981 | PhD | University of Michigan |
| 1975 | MA | University of Michigan |
| 1974 | BA | Cornell College |
2022: President’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Governance, Brown University
2017-18: Visiting Fellow, project on Creating a Knowledge Society in a Globalizing World, 1450-1800, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS) and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) (in residence May-June 2018)
2016-17: Professeur invité à l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (in residence March 2017)
2012-13: KB Fellowship (Koninklijke Bibliotheek, in cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study)
2009: Pfizer Prize, History of Science Society
2008: Gold medal winner of the 2007 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year for History; Cundill International Prize in History, "Recognition of Excellence" (2nd place); commendation in "Basis of Medicine" category, 2008 British Medical Association book awards
1997: Welch Medal, American Association of the History of Medicine
1973: Lane Prize for Poetry, Cornell College
Fellow, Royal College of Physicians, London (Hon.)
Fellow, Linnean Society of London
American Association for the History of Medicine
American Association of University Professors
American Historical Association
British Society for the History of Science
European Association for the History of Medicine and Health
History of Science Society
International Academy of the History of Science, corresponding member
Renaissance Society of America
Society for the History of Natural History
Society for the Social History of Medicine
| Professor. Brown University, 2010- |
| Professor of the History of Medicine. UCL, 2000-2010 |
| Director. UCL, 2000-2009 |
| Professor. University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1993-2000 |
| Associate Professor. University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1988-1993 |
| Assistant Professor. University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1985-1988 |
| Assistant Professor/Head Tutor. Harvard University, 1982-1985 |
| Visiting Assistant Professor. University of Oklahoma, 1981-1982 |
History of Medicine
The History of Foods and Drugs
Dutch Golden Age
War and Medicine
The Scientific Revolution
History of Natural History
History of Science to 1700
Early Modern Europe
| HIAA 0630 - Cultural History of the Netherlands in a Golden Age and a Global Age |
| HIST 0150H - Foods and Drugs in History |
| HIST 0286A - History of Medicine I: Medical Traditions in the Old World Before 1700 |
| HIST 0286B - History of Medicine II: The Development of Scientific Medicine in Europe and the World |
| HIST 0522G - An Empire and Republic: The Dutch Golden Age |
| HIST 1264M - Cultural History of the Netherlands in a Golden Age and a Global Age |
| HIST 1825H - Science, Medicine and Technology in the 17th Century |
| HIST 1964K - Descartes' World |
| HIST 1977J - War and Medicine since the Renaissance |
| HIST 2970E - Early Modern Continental Europe - Reading |
| HIST 2981F - The Politics of Knowledge |
| HMAN 2400X - Premodern Art-Science, or the Work of Knowing in Europe before 1800 |
