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The study of science in human civilisations has a complex history. In ancient India much was learnt from Greece and new contributions were made. The Islamic civilisation added much to what Greece had contributed in science and medicine. The advances in Europe from fifteenth century onwards left the whole world behind; and science was duly utilised to serve the interests of the colonial regime. Now, there is need to develop a comprehensive History of Science, Technology Environment and Medicine (HISTEM). A combination of these fields does not mean that the distinction between them, for example, between science and technology is overlooked. Nor can HISTEM be divorced from the general history of the country concerned, India in the present case.

The speech introducing the session on the history of science at a 1983 colloquium on the history of ideas in Oxford, England, is presented. The main concerns of scientific thought in the West are outlined, from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present, focusing on landmark ideas such as those of the eighteenth-century French philosophers & of Charles Darwin. The process by which scientific ideas are absorbed by a society & interact with its existing beliefs is examined. C. Waters

The first attempt to bring together the historians of science from the Baltic States took place in Riga in 1958. Prof. Pauls Stradiņš (1896–1958) initiated and organised a joint meeting for historians of science from Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania under the supervision of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. A program for future joint activities was developed, and the tradition of joint conferences—the Baltic Conference on History of Science (BCHS)—in each country followed. In 1991, the Baltic Association of the History and Philosophy of Science (BAHPS), uniting historians and philosophers of science of independent Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, took over organising the BCHS. The article aims to present an overview of the published results of the conference, which is partly based on the annotated bibliography (1958–1985) of the conference. The authors analyse the subject, dissemination and tradition of the BCHS, and discuss the role of academic institutions in organising the events. Since the overview was inspired by a decision to gather a complete set of books of conference abstracts, it also resulted in recommendations for conference organisers. Between 1958 and 2019, twenty-nine conferences were organised and 2,880 papers were presented. The next conference will take place in Finland in 2022. The main ideas of the article were presented at the 26th International Congress on History and Philosophy of Science in Prague in 2021.

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