Originally developed by social scientists, meta-analysis is now one of the central methods of evidence-based medicine. This paper offers an account of the emergence of meta-analysis in social science in the 1970s, its adoption in medicine in the 80s, and the birth of the closely related format of systematic reviews in the early 1990s. The paper investigates the extent to which medical meta-analysis relied on previous work by social scientists, as well as the manner in which systematic reviews grew out of these developments. Throughout the exposition, attention is paid to the formalization of the procedures involved in synthesizing research.

This study investigates the changes in the body image that occurred in the crucial cultural transformations that took place at the outset of Western rational thought in the transition from Archaic age to Classical age Greece. It does so from the delimited perspective that is offered by the group of medical writings known as the Hippocratic Corpus (specifically works on prognostics, dietetics, and surgery) that were contemporary with the early Classical age, but it also suggests parallel changes occurring in other cultural realms. The body images for that period are found to be diverse but yet all colored by the general transition from a ritual and praxis based experience of the world to one tempered by contemplative and dogmatic speculation. General observations are also made upon the use of the “body image” as a means of historical analysis in periods of cultural transformation.