The disciplines of the history of science, medicine, and technology are rethinking themselves in global terms. In order to widen the scope of both subject matter and scholarly discussion, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science has been working since 2015 on a three-volume, multi-language History of Science Reader. The first volume—now published with the academic publishing house Zhejiang University Press—features Chinese translations of 12 influential historical articles and book chapters on science, technology, and medicine published in English since 1990 on various topics and epochs.

Candidate publications were crowdsourced from an international selection committee including representatives from six other societies—the American Association for the History of Medicine, the British Society for the History of Science, the Division of the History of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, the European Society for the History of Science, the Society for the History of Technology, and the Society for the Social History of Medicine.

Articles Selected

• Anderson, W. 2000. “The Possession of Kuru: Medical Science and Biocolonial Exchange.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 42, 713–744.
• Blair, A. 2003. “Reading Strategies for Coping With Information Overload ca. 1550–1700.” Journal of the History of Ideas 64, 11–28.
• Bray, F. 1998. “Technics and Civilization in Late Imperial China: An Essay in the Cultural History of Technology.” Osiris 13, 11–33.
• Galison, P. 2003. “The Collective Author.” In Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property, edited by M. Biagioli and P. Galison, 325–353. New York: Routledge.
• Green, M.H. 2008. “Gendering the History of Women’s Healthcare.” Gender & History 20, 487–518.
• Harwood, J. 2009. “Peasant Friendly Plant Breeding and the Early Years of the Green Revolution in Mexico.” Agricultural History 83, 384–410.
• Hecht, G. 1994. “Political Designs: Nuclear Reactors and National Policy.” Technology and Culture 35, 657–685.
• Kohler, R.E. 1999. “Moral Economy, Material Culture and Community in Drosophila Genetics.” In Science Studies Reader, edited by M. Biagioli, 243–257. New York: Routledge.
• Long, P.O. 1991. “The Openness of Knowledge: An Ideal and Its Context in 16th-Century Writings on Mining and Metallurgy.” Technology and Culture 32, 318–355.
• Netz, R. 1998. “Deuteronomic Texts: Late Antiquity and the History of Mathematics.” Revue d’histoire des Mathématiques 4, 261–288.
• Rosenberg, C.E. 1992. “Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History.” In Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine, edited by C.E. Rosenberg, 305–318. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Secord, J.A. 2004. “Knowledge in Transit.” Isis 95, 654–672.

The companion volume of seven of the original English articles, History of Science in a World of Readers, will be published by  Edition Open Access (upcoming 2019) and will be available both online and by print on demand. A third volume will translate into English an analogous selection of articles in Chinese chosen by our colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS). If this trial project is successful, we hope to expand it to include other regions and languages.