In January 1979, Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe delivered a lecture detailing the ten-year clinical and scientific research programme that led to the birth of Louise Brown, the first baby born utilising IVF. This thoroughly-researched book provides both a full annotated transcript of the lecture as well as recorded reminiscences from those who attended, detailing the contemporary understandings of the event. An essay on the lecture's historical context adds fresh insight into the biographies of Edwards and Steptoe and highlights sources from print and broadcast media that have received scant attention in earlier publications. Current and future implications of the advances in IVF since the first procedure are also explored, examining future medical and scientific possibilities as well as ethical issues that may arise. A foreword by Louise Brown herself places this remarkable leap of science in a personal context, one that so many families have since experienced themselves.

This interdisciplinary collection examines musical culture in urban centres in Renaissance Europe and the New World. Although musicologists have indeed already investigated such topics, lack of familiarity with (urban) historical methodologies has often resulted in failure to explore fully the ways in which the urban environment had an impact on musical activity of all kinds; neither is this question adequately addressed by urban historians. This book thus aims to integrate musicological and urban-historical approaches. To urban historians it shows the range of work undertaken by music historians; to musicologists it presents some different approaches, questions and perspectives which suggest new lines of enquiry for future investigations. Not only does this book contribute to musicology, but it also adds considerably to urban history scholarship.