This book reports a study inspired by a survey that had taken place in Berlin, in 1869, about what children knew when entering schools. Stanley Hall, the North American educationalist of the Child Study Movement, decided to apply the same experiment in Boston, USA, in 1880. For that, “a list of questions suitable for obtaining an inventory of the contents of the minds of children of average intelligence on entering the primary schools of that city” was prepared.

The Macy conferences were a series of interdisciplinary scientific meetings held in New York between 1941 and 1960. Interdisciplinarity was in itself one of the major objectives of conferences that brought together scientists from different areas to break down disciplinary boundaries. Medicine would occupy an important place, not only because of the sponsor dedicated to health, Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, as well as the isolation felt as a discipline in the face of the need to relate to areas such as, for example, nuclear physics or society (p. vii).