Project MUSE®: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 163 (2019) through current issueLatest Articles: Proceedings of the American Philosophical SocietyTWOProject MUSE®Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society2326-92430003-049XLatest articles in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Feed provided by Project MUSE®In Memory of Clyde F. Barker
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985695
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We dedicate the year’s first issue of Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society to the life and accomplishments of Clyde F. Barker, the thirty-sixth president of the American Philosophical Society (2011–2017). As a member (APS 1997), vice president, and, finally, president of the Society, Barker actively participated in Meetings, programming, and publications. This issue publishes four pieces by Barker (one coauthored with his friend and fellow surgeon Tom Starlz), a mere drop in an enormous sea of research and writing Barker produced. As Ron Fairman’s biographical memoir attests, Barker lived a life of enormous accomplishments as a tennis player and a surgeon—specifically, in his work on immunology and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallIn Memory of Clyde F. Barker2026-03-19text/htmlen-USIn Memory of Clyde F. Barker2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®41752026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19Thomas Eakins and His Medical Clinics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985696
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HISTORIANS tell us that the fourteen-year period between Thomas Eakins’s paintings of two operating room scenes, the so-called Gross Clinic of 1875 and The Agnew Clinic of 1889, brackets the transition to modern surgery.2 In a narrow sense this may be true, but there is a whole lot more to the story of Eakins’s medical clinics. It’s the story of three nineteenth-century Philadelphians, two doctors, famous and beloved in their day, but now forgotten, and the artist who painted them, ignored or vilified by his contemporaries but now famous and revered as a martyred hero. It’s a story filled with the delicious elements that make it gripping: violence, scandal, incest, suicide, murder, discovery of long-lost documents
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallThomas Eakins and His Medical Clinics2026-03-19text/htmlen-USThomas Eakins and His Medical Clinics2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®1502792026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19The Shared Trail of Organ, Limb, and Face Transplantation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985697
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TRANSPLANTATION OF A LIMB or face has been a logical extension of organ transplantation. The feasibility of transplanting organ allografts2 was demonstrated for the first time with kidneys in 1959. During the preceding 15 years, it had been established that rejection of skin allografts in experimental animals (1) and humans (2) is an immunologic response and that analogous events cause destruction of canine (3,4) and human kidney allografts. The only exception was with identical twins, between whom tissues and organs (isografts) can be freely exchanged (5,6).Before 1959, most of the human kidney allografts were transplanted to non-immunosuppressed recipients.3 The kidneys were obtained from recently deceased
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallThe Shared Trail of Organ, Limb, and Face Transplantation2026-03-19text/htmlen-USThe Shared Trail of Organ, Limb, and Face Transplantation2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®682982026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19Tom Starzl and the Evolution of Transplantation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985698
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The evolution of transplantation is one of medicine’s great stories and much of it was written by Tom Starzl. And while there have been other contributors, there are few instances in which a single individual has been so predominantly responsible for establishing an important new field.While growing up in Le Mars, a small town in Iowa, Tom enjoyed the usual boyhood activities—Boy Scouts, high school basketball and football, playing trumpet in the jazz band. But there was another experience that was an uncommon one: working as a reporter for the town’s newspaper, which was owned and published by his father. And this may have given him a start toward being a gifted writer who would one day become the most highly
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallTom Starzl and the Evolution of Transplantation2026-03-19text/htmlen-USTom Starzl and the Evolution of Transplantation2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®226382026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19The Many Faces of Benjamin Rush
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985699
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The Susan (Susie) O. Montgomery Lecture Series honors a remarkable Friend of the American Philosophical Society and a great champion of Benjamin Franklin’s founding mission of “promoting useful knowledge.”The author John McPhee said that in an essay or book, the title is the most important thing, representing the essence of the piece. I struggled with this title because, in Benjamin Rush’s case, his essence is diffuse. As titles, I considered “Rush: Beloved Healer” or “Serial Killer” or “Heroic Savior of the City” or “Savant with No Common Sense” or “Rush: Founder of American Medicine.” Any of these would have been suitable. He was certainly the most versatile, the most controversial, and perhaps the most
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallThe Many Faces of Benjamin Rush2026-03-19text/htmlen-USThe Many Faces of Benjamin Rush2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®258502026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19Clyde F. Barker
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985700
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16 August 1932–2 October 2025When recently writing a book chapter about Clyde Barker as Chairman of Surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, I came across some correspondence from American Philosophical Society member Dr. Tom Starzl to the American College of Physicians regarding the John Phillips Memorial Award for Outstanding Work in Clinical Medicine, dated April 25, 2011. Starzl wrote, “Dr. Clyde Barker’s contributions to clinical medicine over the last 50 years have been so consistently innovative (and sustained over time) that he has emerged as the prototypical physician-investigator envisioned by Claude Bernard, the nineteenth-century father of experimental medicine.” Furthermore “the immune tolerance of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallClyde F. Barker2026-03-19text/htmlen-USClyde F. Barker2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®290682026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19A New World Symphony and Penn’s Peculiar Practices, 1945–1970
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985701
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Almost eighty years ago, the modern age began—with a very big BANG. The Trinity nuclear test, at Alamogordo in July 1945, announced America’s assumption of world leadership in politics, economy, and power. Proving the point with determination and anger, the United States rapidly dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. World War II abruptly ended. The creation of the far more powerful hydrogen bomb dramatically increased the volume of the overture in what may be called the New World Symphony of American leadership—a symphony that has now drawn rapidly to its close.The role of the United States in developing the academic discipline of the history of science, from 1945 to 1970, is best understood against this background.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallA New World Symphony and Penn’s Peculiar Practices, 1945–19702026-03-19text/htmlen-USA New World Symphony and Penn’s Peculiar Practices, 1945–19702026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®601292026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19New Bio-inspired Materials: When Biology Meets Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, and Design
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985702
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Today, I will argue that many sciences these days should come together and create new and useful knowledge (in line with the APS mission), because there are so many things we can do when we are not restricted by the boundaries of our own research and instead promote exchange among our sciences and our knowledge. I will give some examples of combining the concepts from biology, chemistry, engineering, and design, and then show how this convergence may help us make new and better materials, better structures, better architectures.2To begin, let’s say we want to dream and imagine new materials and technologies that we want to have in our life but don’t have today (Figure 1). We would want them to harvest energy, we
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallNew Bio-inspired Materials: When Biology Meets Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, and Design2026-03-19text/htmlen-USNew Bio-inspired Materials: When Biology Meets Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, and Design2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®273082026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19Behind Their Screens: Reframing the Current Conversation on Teens and Tech
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985703
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Screens and their impact on adolescent mental health and well-being is a topic of current debate and, at times, explicit controversy. A sampling of relevant news headlines from the past few years are illustrative:“Social Media Is Taking a Dangerous Toll on Teenage Girls”“Social Media Is Driving Teen Mental Health Crisis, Surgeon General Warns”“Screens Are Poisoning Kids’ Minds”Headlines like these suggest that the verdict is in: technologies like social media and smartphones are key drivers of the adolescent mental health crisis. But is the science really settled? It actually depends on whom you ask.Where researchers who study teens and screens mostly agree is that adolescent mental health is an urgent issue, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallBehind Their Screens: Reframing the Current Conversation on Teens and Tech2026-03-19text/htmlen-USBehind Their Screens: Reframing the Current Conversation on Teens and Tech2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®585132026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19Size Matters
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985704
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Of erections how few are domed like Saint Peter’s! Of creatures, how few as vast as the whale!Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.Matters of size, both literal and figurative, play an inevitable role in the responses of many contemporary artists channeling the spirit of Herman Melville. Whether the effort involves Trisha Lowe’s fifty-two-foot-long sculpture of inflatable woolen fabric, Mocha Dick (2009), which mirrors the average size of a sperm whale, or Sharon L. Butler’s exhibition Moby-Dick, Used (2005), where bookshelves overflow with used copies of the novel in multiple editions, or Samuel Hunter’s play The Whale
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallSize Matters2026-03-19text/htmlen-USSize Matters2026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®769112026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19George Alexander Kennedy: 26 November 1928–28 July 2022
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985705
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George Kennedy was an authoritative and prolific scholar of the history of rhetoric from the Homeric period through the Middle Ages.1 His accounts are notable for being written in a style that makes primary sources, often neglected or obscure, available not only to specialists in the ancient world, but also to students of rhetoric for whom these sources and histories were previously inaccessible. An achievement almost equal to his scholarship is his brilliant administration of several departments at the University of North Carolina. He brought to it the same intelligence, patience, goodwill, rich humor, and seemingly indefatigable energy to devote to the task at hand that set him apart. He managed to lead national
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallGeorge Alexander Kennedy: 26 November 1928–28 July 20222026-03-19text/htmlen-USGeorge Alexander Kennedy: 26 November 1928–28 July 20222026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®256852026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19William Kelly Simpson: 3 January 1928–24 March 2017
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985706
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One of the most distinguished Egyptologists of his generation, William Kelly Simpson left a major impact on his field, and on American Egyptology in particular. His father, Kenneth Simpson, served New York City as assistant district attorney and briefly as congressman for Manhattan. On his mother’s side, Kelly (as he referred to himself) was descended from the Knickerbockers of upstate New York. Born in New York City on January 3, 1928, Kelly started his education at the Dalton School and Phillips Academy, Andover; he earned degrees at Yale University, with a B.A. in 1947, an M.A. in 1948 (both in English), and a Ph.D. in 1954. He married Marilyn Milton, granddaughter of John D. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/869/image/coversmallWilliam Kelly Simpson: 3 January 1928–24 March 20172026-03-19text/htmlen-USWilliam Kelly Simpson: 3 January 1928–24 March 20172026-03-192026TWOProject MUSE®135132026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002026-03-19