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Isabel Davis

@drbeldavis.bsky.social

Historian @ Natural History Museum, research on repro history, nat history, collections. https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/people/isabel-davis.html Book: Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past & Present MIT Press. 🐁 lover (someone's got to be).

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Richard Fallon@richardfallon.bsky.social · 7mo ago

Patrick Morgan on Contesting Earth's History in the Review of English Studies: 'beautifully detailed, intricately researched, and compelling'. What more could you wish for? The review, for those with access: academic.oup.com/res/advance-...

Richard Fallon. Contesting Earth’s History in Transatlantic Literary Culture, 1860–1935: Believers and Visionaries on the Borderlines of Geology and Palaeontology

What if humans could tell the story of Earth’s history without rocks, or at least without an over attachment to the rock record as interpreted by palaeosci

academic.oup.com

Isabel Davis@drbeldavis.bsky.social · last yr.

Everybody medievally inclined in cent. London - Friday is a great day. Check out the Birkbeck Medieval Seminar. Followed by: www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event... Followed by the Matthews Lecture on the Medieval & Modern Fertility industry Free, but book. See you there! #medievalresearchseminars

Birkbeck Medieval Seminar 2025: "Medieval Economic Imaginaries"

Join us for the 2025 Birkbeck Medieval Seminar for a discussion of Medieval Economic Imaginaries.

bbk.ac.uk

Isabel Davis@drbeldavis.bsky.social · last yr.

Yes! And I emailed your mother because I really enjoyed reading Edward Elkan's memoir in the @wellcomecollection.bsky.social and writing about it in my book 'Conceiving Histories' (the subject of the @lrb.co.uk review). We waved at each other from each side of the 'pond'.

Joseph Howley@illdottore.bsky.social · last yr.

Proud of my mother who is published in the London Review of Books today with this chapter from our family's history! www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Worth Trying Erin Maglaque mentions the use of the frog Xenopus laevis in pregnancy testing (LRB, 17 April). The introduction of this technique in London was the work of my great-uncle, the physician and herpetologist Edward Elkan (1895-1983). A refugee from Nazi Germany, he retrained as a doctor and went into practice just before the beginning of the Second World War. In his unpublished memoir, he describes reading about the discovery of this use of the frog by Lancelot Hogben in South Africa. He decided it was worth trying in England because the existing test was ‘cumbersome, expensive and needed hecatombs of young mice’. He ordered his first hundred frogs from South Africa and set them up in an aquarium on his balcony, where they thrived on emulsified liver from the butcher. But when the war broke out, he like many other Jewish refugees was interned, and the frogs were sent to other homes. After the war, he reclaimed the frogs. In the memoir he writes that the test had become quite acceptable in medical practice, and that he had a substantial clientele. In 1970 the Department of Health took over pregnancy diagnosis and the frogs were transferred to a laboratory at what was then called Shrodell’s Hospital in Watford. Elkan took on a part-time position overseeing the laboratory; at its peak there were about five thousand frogs there. Nora L. Howley Silver Spring, Maryland
Richard Fallon@richardfallon.bsky.social · last yr.

Turns out my article on 'Imaginary Megalosaurs in Nineteenth-Century Literature', part of a starry special issue on the bicentenary of the naming of this 'first' dinosaur, came out last week in Earth Sciences History: doi.org/10.17704/194...

IMAGINARY MEGALOSAURS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

ABSTRACT. This paper tracks both famous and previously overlooked appearances of the premiere predatory dinosaur—Megalosaurus—in nineteenth-century imaginative literature, especially fiction. In so do...

doi.org