History of Science Society

 

Mazi Allen, Saint Mary’s College of California

Attitude musulman maghrébine devant la folie and Le phénomène de l’agitation en milieu psychiatrique: An Extended Critique of Psychiatry in the West.

Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), originally from Martinique, was a psychiatrist who became involved with the Algerian Independence movement through his clinical practice in Algeria (and later Tunisia.) Despite his involvement in the movement, he nonetheless maintained an active clinical practice until shortly before his death. This paper will examine two of his articles, both published in medical journals during the late 1950s: “Attitude musulman maghrebine devant la folie” (1956) and “Le phenomene de l’agitation en milieu psychiatrique” (1957). Drawing upon his experience in Algeria, the first article consisted of a comparative study of psychiatric treatment in traditional North African societies and the West. The second was a clinically based study on agitation in a psychiatric setting. Read together, I will argue, both of these papers constitute an extended critique of the often inhumane practices of Western psychiatry during the 1950s. Although Fanon is now primarily known as a “postcolonial” literary figure, hopefully this paper will shed more light on his role as a clinical psychiatrist practicing during the decolonization era.

 

Warren Allmon, Cornell University

Of Babies and Bathwater: Osborn, Gould, the Synthesis and Paleontology

Much of the “internalist” evolutionary mechanisms advocated by Henry Fairfield Osborn in the first three decades of the twentieth century was discarded after his death with the triumph of the Modern Synthesis in the 1940s. Stephen Jay Gould repeatedly criticized what he called the “hardening” of the Synthesis around natural selection to the exclusion of more internal factors. Gould never defended Osborn explicitly, however, largely because he despised Osborn’s racism and support for eugenics. Yet Osborn’s and Gould’s views of the evolutionary process have much in common. They were both paleontologists who focused on structural regularities in the ontogeny and phylogeny of taxa as biasing factors in determining evolutionary direction, and both were highly skeptical of the hegemony of selection. As was true of Osborn, many evolutionary biologists discount much of Gould’s work, their “internalist” perspectives have much in common with the patterns being detected by modern evo-devo and are not as easily rejected as they might seem.

 

Thomas Anderson, Binghamton University

Globalizing the Strange: The Science of 19th Century Madagascar

Madagascar’s unique ecosystem placed it in the middle of some of the most important scientific debates of the nineteenth century, from Darwinism and race theory to biogeography and human origins. The island’s peculiar faun and flora captivated the interest of naturalists, missionaries, and explorers who referenced their findings to a global experience and knowledge that prized universality. This meant that the debate over Madagascar concentrated not just in explaining its peculiar nature, but also in a way that made sense to global theories and contemporary notions. This paper explores how Madagascar was globalized during the nineteenth by exploring the interplay between the discovery of strange species and how they were placed into a global framework. In the end, peculiar features were often minimized to stress the commonality of Madagascar’s fauna and flora with the world

 

Katharine Anderson, York University

The scientist and the reef: coral and the nature of ocean life

This paper examines research into coral organisms and coral formations at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century by British and American scientists: J.Stanley Gardiner, C.M. Yonge, and T.Wayland Vaughan. It considers how attention to aesthetic concerns can help us understand the shifts in the history of the marine sciences at this time. Many of the successes of this period – in both biological and physical marine sciences – were associated with quantitative methods and a break with the style and reputation of natural history. Aesthetics seem accordingly to have little place in the modern scientific literature: its concerns are a part of ordinary observation, in distinction to scientific observation. Yet this intellectual framework – encompassing nature as spectacle, the repulsive or beautiful qualities of the natural subject – had a particularly strong history in the study of coral, and I will argue that it continued to be significant for scientists. Amongst other things, it contributed to claims about the necessarily inter-disciplinary style of marine science, and to research methods which sought to relate organism and environment.

 

Rachel Ankeny, University of Adelaide

Cases as ‘Fact Carriers’ in Contemporary Medicine

Medical cases, whether individual case reports, studies, or even case series, are thought to be unscientific, anecdotal, and clearly inferior to other forms of evidence, due to their focus on individual patients. Cases have traditionally been held in disrepute, a trend which is associated with the historical shift toward more scientific, reductionistic explanations of disease. Despite these trends, the case still is exceedingly popular: it is estimated that 40, 000 new case report publications are entered into Medline each year, with the core 120 clinical journals on average having 13.5% of their references devoted to case reports. This paper presents a series of examples of medical cases from the mid-20th century to the present day in order to develop a typology of cases with particular focus on how cases bring together what might otherwise be viewed as discrete or isolated facts, and thus how they become a form of evidence. It traces the evolution of each of these cases and the disposition of the facts that they carry in order to explore how cases serve “fact carriers.” It also assesses what may be lost (or gained) in the process of the constitutive facts being grouped together in a case, as well as when they travel into new domains beyond that of the original, index case.

 

Melinda Baldwin, Princeton University

Nature’s contributors and the changing of the scientific guard, 1869-1900

Although Nature is arguably the world’s leading scientific publication, little historical work has been done on the journal’s history or how it ascended to a position of such importance within the scientific community. This paper argues that Nature’s establishment as a central institution of British science in the late nineteenth century was linked to the rise of a new generation of British men of science. Nature’s editor, Norman Lockyer, who founded the journal in 1869, initially advertised the publication as a popular journal aimed largely at lay readers. As a result, men such as John Tyndall, Herbert Spencer, Alfred Russel Wallace and William Thomson did not see Nature as a desirable place to publicize their original research, preferring more established venues such as the Philosophical Transactions or the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In contrast, younger men like George J. Romanes, E. Ray Lankester, and John Perry adopted Nature as a forum where they could quickly make their important findings public and debate the most important scientific questions of the day before a knowledgeable readership. The contributions of this younger generation established Nature as essential reading for British men of science in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Ellen Bales, University of California, Berkeley

Nuclear Images, Nuclear Imaginaries, Nuclear Fears: Cultural History Beyond “The Public”

Since its publication in 1988, Nuclear Fear, Weart’s cultural history of images, has suggested to historians of science that nuclear imagery should neither be read merely as an indicator of what “the public” knew (and when they knew it) nor as a simple measure of relative degrees of nuclear enthusiasm. Instead the multidirectional mobilization of powerful and allusive imagery had both intended and unintended consequences in the realms of public policy, politics, safety, and personal and collective risk decisions. Reading through the lens of Weart’s work, this paper will explore three 20th-century American “nuclear imaginaries”-systems of images mobilized around a particular nuclear question-each related to some aspect of the production of nuclear weapons or to potentially hazardous radiation exposures. Generated by government agencies, the media, business concerns, and interested members of the public, these nuclear imaginaries drew not only on traditional nuclear imagery but embedded it in metaphorical spaces that had their own constellation of associations, e.g., “the natural, “ “the Old West, “ “the home.” These new combinations of imagery suggest a direction in which to develop an extension of Weart’s ideas; that is, towards an understanding of the strong and unforeseen responses elicited by potent nuclear images that were themselves located within an imaginary space with its own historical and metaphorical undertow.

 

Grant Barkley, Kent State University

 Joseph C. Arthur [1850-1942]: First Proof Of Bacteria As The Cause Of Plant Disease.

In 1884 Joseph C. Arthur, during his tenure as a Station Botanist at the NY Agricultural Experiment Station, was the first experimentalist to offer definitive proof of a bacterium as the cause of a specific plant disease. Early in 1884, Arthur began work on orchard diseases including “pear blight.” Working from a suggestion made by T.J. Burrill in 1883 that a species of Micrococcus, specified as [M. amylovorus was associated with pear blight, Arthur produced a series of experiments which took Burrill’s suggestion to conclusive proof. Arthur, in his carefully kept notebooks, recorded a series of inoculations made to trees of Flemish Beauty pear. Arthur’s Experiment 84 was an inoculation made on 26 July 1884 from an infusion of blight of apple secured from Atwood’s nurseries. The following year, Arthur used a “very small fragment of wood” from his field Experiment 84 to produce inoculum. Arthur, using the last dilution in a series of six serial transfers with sterilized corn meal, was successful in producing infection in a ripe Bartlett pear. He further demonstrated, using filtration, that the filtrate was not the cause of the disease. This work, published in the Botanical Gazette, Sept.- Oct. 1885, was acknowledged as the first definitive proof that bacteria could be a source of plant diseases. In 1887, Arthur published his methodology, which became established proof that suspected bacterium was the cause of a specific plant disease. His criteria, used in 1885, was produced simultaneously with, but independent from, the publication of Koch’s Postulates.

 

Megan Barnhart, University of Minnesota

Turning “Ordinary Housewives” into “Opinion Makers”: The Scientists’ Movement, the NCAI, and the Nascent Public

In the aftermath of World War II, feeling it their duty to educate the American people about atomic energy, groups of scientists began to form at laboratories across the nation, eventually coalescing into the Federation of American Scientists (FAS). The FAS developed the National Committee on Atomic Information (NCAI) as the primary mechanism to promote its educational agenda. The FAS wanted to work with the NCAI to educate the American people and create “opinion makers” out of “ordinary housewives.” When the American public began to respond to their call for action, however, FAS scientists and their colleagues leading the NCAI did not know quite how to respond. Letters poured into the NCAI from individuals across the country who were concerned about the future of their world and who wanted to know how they could help to further the scientists’ cause. For a time, this nascent public was ready and willing to be led by scientists in a movement focused on the issue of atomic energy control. However, because the FAS and the NCAI had no clear notion of what kind of activism they wanted from the public, they were unable to realize the potential of the “ordinary housewife.” This paper examines the efforts of scientists to forge a tentative relationship with the American public through the NCAI, and argues that the ultimate collapse of the NCAI resulted at least in part from scientists’ fears over losing their professional objectivity.

 

Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Colgate University,

Local Experts, Imperial Agents, and Experience as Common Ground: The Sixteenth-Century Science of the Atlantic World

This paper discusses the role of local experts and imperial agents in the sixteenth century emergence of empirical practices in the Atlantic World context. Local experts and imperial agents met in houses, villages, hospitals, workshops, ships, gardens, and courts (to name a few sites) where they shared, borrowed, incorporated, and adapted each other practices and ideas–these common-ground sites became, thus, sites of knowledge. In the process, local practitioners and imperial agents transformed their practices. Thus, European physicians learned to use American medicinal plants from “Indian doctors” in Tenochtitlan-Mexico; Indian doctors learned to work in European hospitals. In the process, empirical methods emerged, in part, as a way to validate knowledge provided by Indians, artisans, and imperial agents interacting with each other. In this paper, I discuss reporting and questionnaires as they reflect the emergence of empirical methods to validate personal information and knowledge.

 

Cynthia Bennet, Iowa State University

Bridging the Gap: Science Service, Scientists, and the Press

In 1921, Edward W. Scripps, founder of the Scripps-Howard newspaper syndicate, and William Emerson Ritter, who was a biologist and director at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla, California, established Science Service as an organization dedicated to bridging the gap between the scientific community and the public. By gathering science information and disseminating it to newspapers and other periodicals, Science Service responded to the growing public excitement about science and helped scientists gain public support for their research and development endeavors. The directors and editors at Science Service soon became aware that a serious communication gap existed between scientists and the journalists who were supposed to write about their work. Numerous specific complaints from both sides illustrated a lack of understanding, trust, cooperation, and appreciation for the challenges both scientists and journalists faced. This left both sides frustrated and prevented them from accomplishing their goals. Science Service facilitated efforts to close the gap as the science news market expanded. Through the 1920s to the 1940s, the relationship between scientists and journalists improved, only to suffer setbacks in the Cold War period of the 1950s and 1960s, when scientists grew suspicious of the relationship between the press and advertisers, and the press thought scientists were becoming secretive and inaccessible. Science Service continued to facilitate communication between the two groups for the benefit of the public.

Avner Ben-Zaken, Harvard University

Object in Motion: Networks, Trust and Science in the Eastern Mediterranean

My subject is the cross-cultural circulation of Copernican astronomy in the eastern Mediterranean, and the period I have studied is the sixteenth and seventeenth century, whose records tell us little about manifestations of trust. My departure point was that astronomy is replicated either through mathematics or observation; consequently the need for corroborating observational data and the reliance on astronomical tables, from other locales, demands a sort of trust. However, as a result of various historical circumstances, European and Near Eastern cultures apparently were hostile to each other, and networks of trust rarely existed between them. Under this condition how could science cross-culturally circulated? In this paper I present three cultural mechanisms – exchanges in overlapping networks, communication through common mythological sources and naive encounter with objects - that facilitates our historical investigation concerning cross-cultural exchanges between distrusted cultures.

 

Marlous Blankesteijn, University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Political Science

Changing bodies of knowledge, policy implementation and legitimacy in Dutch regional Water Management 1970- 2000: Water Boards and their quest for sustainable development

What is the role of different bodies of knowledge, such as tacit, local and (inter-)disciplinary knowledge, in implementing policies aiming at sustainable regional water management? How does a changing constellation of these bodies of knowledge affect the legitimacy of the interventions in the regional water system that are based on these policies? Tacit and local knowledge (Polanyi, 1967; Yanow, 2000) have always played an eminent role in the famous ‘fight’ of the Dutch against water; particularly within the now 27 Water Boards that manage water at a regional scale. Since the end of the nineteen seventies however, the discourse shifted from an emphasis on fighting water to an emphasis on living with water. A range of national policies invoked these regional developments, most notably the policy of Integrated Water Management introduced in 1985. A consequence of these policies was not only that the autonomy of Water Boards formally decreased, but also that a process of professionalization of their bodies of knowledge was set into motion. Tacit and local knowledge, based on experience and knowledge of the characteristics of the local water system and the socio-political configuration, were now deemed to be less important than abstract knowledge of, for example, the environmental sciences. This particularly affected the legitimacy of interventions in regional water systems. In this paper, I will present an analysis of the changing constellation of the different bodies of knowledge within Dutch water management, within the context of new policy paradigms, professionalization of bodies of knowledge and the discussion of the legitimacy of Water Boards and their interventions. I base this argument on two case studies, based on in- depth interviewing, studying archival material and previous historical research on regional Dutch water management.

 

Daniela Bleichmar, University of Southern California

The Geography of Observation: Natural History, Place, and Visibility in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire

This paper explores questions of place, visibility, and mobility in the history of scientific observation. It focuses on eighteenth-century natural history expeditions in the Spanish empire and the ways in which bodies and information traversed distances. Traveling naturalists followed carefully articulated practices of observation and representation that defined epistemologies, methodologies, and communities of practitioners. Visual specificity was countered by, if not predicated on, geographic unspecificity. Natural historians aimed to follow the same protocols of investigation in the Pyrenees or the Andes, in the Spanish countryside or the South American rain forest; they trained their eyes to observe through common procedures that should operate in identical fashion regardless of location. The visual culture of natural history insisted that place did not, or should not, matter. Scientific statements, textual or visual, needed to be true anywhere and to anyone with the skills necessary to interpret them. Rather than depicting specimens, scientific illustration sedimented, incarnated, and transported observations, participating in the erasure of geography.

 

Christian Bonahirist, University of Strasbourg 1

From arrow poison to IV drug: African plant seeds, C.F. Boehringer Co and the question of standard drugs, 1900-1930

Paul Ehrlich’s 1897 practice of Wertbestimmung (evaluation/standardization) referred to the physiological testing of the effects of ill-defined diphtheria antitoxins. This concept of standardization was subsequently widely extended in terms of its pharmaceutical and economic meaning, being adopted, inter alia, for therapeutic agents produced from plants by a variety of industrial entrepreneurs. The present analysis concerns Strophantin, a product closely related to digitalis. This therapeutic agent has never acquired the status of a “magic bullet” in the annals of pharmaceutical invention, but is interesting for its “normality” in terms of the tradition of drugs in the occidental pharmacopoeia. Strophantin, like digitalis, belongs to a classic group of substances first empirically employed in their “unpurified” form as plant extracts with synthesis impossible before WWII. In the meantime, evaluation/standardization of industrially produced preparations required procedures for monitoring the quality of the product. The generalization of the idea and practice of drug standardization will be analyzed in detail and contextualized in their wider political and economic settings in Europe between 1900 and 1938. Two responses to demands for uniformity in the product (maintaining levels of compatibility and similarity) will be considered: stringent control of plant collection and quality control of the end product. Standardization is interpreted as a continual networking process with the central feature that the pragmatic final therapeutic judgment – Strophanthin therapy is safe and works – is as strong and resistant to criticism as the weakest of the connections established in the overall Strophanthin-network that guarantees its clinical use.

 

 

Robert Brain, University of British Columbia

From Acoustic Image to Sacred Vibrations: Experimental Phonetics and the Invention of Free Verse Poetry in Fin de Siècle France

Recent scholarship has demonstrated the importance of physiological aesthetics in nineteenth-century visual arts. I examine similar physiological experiments in vocalization to put poetry on radically new foundations. Poet Gustave Kahn reconceptualized poetry with the “scientific aesthetic” of Charles Henry. Like Seurat and Signac, who used Henry’s physiological aesthetics to conceptualize painting on media of line and color, Kahn defined versification through acoustics of phonation. Kahn undertook experiments in spoken verse in the Collége de France experimental phonetics lab of Abbé Rousselot. Rousselot, famous for graphical recording apparatus and studies of French patois, began experiments in phonetics of verse with French alexandrine form. Experiments in poetic phonation followed with Kahn and linguists/poets de la Grasserie and de Souza. Graphical recordings of vocalization examined rhythmic pulse as a function of syllabic values and accent, rather than syllabism. Poets could abandon prefabricated structures of fixed metric forms in favor of verse around the accent and its intensities, duration of sentiments evoked, or sensation rendered. Poems were constructed out of internal rhythmic or periodic impulse, free movement of acoustic kinships and affinities. Theoretically, free verse allied with ideo-motor theories in psycho-physiology, and Wagner’s multi-tonal music, which built leitmotiv out of atomic units of expressive sound. These examples suggest that features of modernism in the arts, including formalism and the ideal of the total work of art, relied on physiological instruments.

 

Ingo Brigandt, University of Alberta

Continuity in Scientific Concept Use: Homology in the 19th Century Before and After Darwin

The conventional wisdom about the notion of homology in 19th century biology is that evolutionary theory introduced a novel concept, a post-Darwinian “phylogenetic” homology concept, distinct from the pre-Darwinian “idealistic” homology concept. This idea has been supported philosophically by the tenet that the nature of scientific concepts resides in theoretical definitions, and historically by the (nowadays extensively criticized) assumption that pre-Darwinian biology was in the grip of essentialism. Against the conventional wisdom, the present paper points to important continuities in the use of the homology concept during the 19th century, while at the same using some of these stable features of concept use as a basis for understanding the adoption of post-Darwinian accounts and definitions of homology. Homology was used in actual research practice in quite similar ways throughout the 19th century, in terms of how homologies were established and how knowledge about homologies was used in morphological, embryological, and taxonomic work. Moreover, before and after Darwin the homology concept was used to pursue largely the same scientific goals, namely the morphological comparison of structures and the classification of species. This historical study of the homology concept motivates some philosophical ideas about concepts. The identity of a concept does not boil down to a theoretical definition, but consists in several aspects (some of which may change in history), including features of practical concept use and the scientific goal pursued by a concept’s use. This latter notion accounts for why novel theoretical definitions are adopted (semantic change).

 

Janet Browne, Harvard University

Seeing the Gorilla

Tracing the history of the gorilla in popular culture invites consideration of the ways that humans have projected their hopes, fears and assumptions on to various animal species. This paper draws on representations of gorillas in Anglo-American culture since they first became known in the West. Special attention is paid to Carl Akeley, the pioneering museum curator who led safari and collecting expeditions to Africa in the first decades of the 20th century. Akeley’s ideas about human ancestry, gender and behavior were important in shifting the focus of attention away from ferocity to intellect and mildness.

 

David Burke, Auburn University

Southern Devices: Atomic Testing In Mississippi, 1964-1966.

This paper examines the two underground atomic tests conducted in the Tatum Salt Dome near Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1964 and 1966. The tests were the only two nuclear explosions conducted east of the Mississippi River by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Advanced Research Projects Administration (ARPA). The program that these tests were part of, Project Vela Uniform, was designed to develop methods of teleseismically detecting underground Soviet nuclear tests - a technology that was crucial in insuring that treaties intended to limit the yield of underground nuclear weapons tests were being followed. The choice of Mississippi as a Cold War laboratory was due to the presence of enormous subterranean salt formations known as salt domes. These domes offered the possibility of containing the blast, heat and radioactivity of the devices. The test series, site excavation and preparation plans changed dynamically during the development of the test program. The tests themselves were not kept secret - on the contrary, the specific data concerning each test was made public, and the tests were monitored in Soviet block countries, including Czechoslovakia. Despite some minor site contamination, the Mississippi tests contrasted greatly with atmospheric tests conducted in Nevada and the Pacific in that widespread contamination was avoided. The increased standardization and refinement of seismic apparatus resulting from Vela allowed for the accuracy required to pinpoint natural earthquakes as well as nuclear tests, resulting in an improved understanding of geology, in addition to verifying new treaties between the superpowers.

 

Conor Burns, York University

Between science and history: Archaeological conceptions of the past in nineteenth century America.

This paper will survey some ways in which a developing science of archaeology shaped perceptions of history and structured narratives about the human past of North America at a time when the nature of science and its relation to broader society was itself undergoing substantial transformation. By the end of the nineteenth century in the United States, a deep rift opened between the academic disciplines of history and anthropology. Partly, this involved the positioning of scientific archaeology as one of four “official” sub-disciplines of anthropology, along with the formalization of “prehistoric” as both the time prior to the arrival of Columbus and also as the stage of development attained by extant native peoples. And yet, throughout the century, some individuals saw archaeology as a critical link between science and history, one with the potential to unite these disparate realms of intellectual inquiry into a continuous whole. Other practitioners viewed the archaeological record as a chronicle of land-use and occupation to which Euro-Americans were only the most recent entrants, a mode of thinking that challenged idealizations of wilderness so dominant within the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny. Archaeology was thus considered capable of imposing notions of continuity onto the past – and our ways of knowing the past – just as much as it was of imposing discontinuity. By specifying precisely how, my goal is to explicate relationships between the human and historical sciences and broader cultural constructions of the past.

 

Elizabeth Burns, University of Toronto

Perspective in Ptolemy’s Almagest and Planetary Hypotheses

Claudius Ptolemy, the second century A.D. astronomer, describes the motion of the Sun, Moon and Planets using a different frame of reference in the Almagest than he does in his later work, the Planetary Hypotheses. In the Almagest Ptolemy describes the motion of each planet by breaking it down into two different mathematical components: the motion of the epicycle around its eccentric circle and the motion of the planet around its epicycle. Conversely, in the Planetary Hypotheses, Ptolemy changes his frame of reference and presents the motion of the planet around its epicycle and the motion of the epicycle around its eccentric circle as one combined motion. According to this second approach, Ptolemy calculates the planetary motions and combines them into one single movement. This forces Ptolemy to take the numbers from the Almagest and readjust and recalculate them for the Planetary Hypotheses. In this paper I will discuss the two different reference points Ptolemy uses and explore the benefits of each, as well as offer explanations for Ptolemy’s change in approach. In addition I will examine how each approach conforms to the objectives of Ptolemy’s works in order to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of both the Almagest and the Planetary Hypotheses.

 

Jason Byron, University of Pittsburgh

Holism in Early Sexology: Biological and Philosophical Contexts

Sexology emerged as a field of medicine during the first half of the 20th century. In 1913, three professional societies were formed for the scientific study of sex, two in Berlin and one in London. The following year, the first sexology journal began publication, and in 1919 Magnus Hirschfeld opened the first institute for sex research. Between 1921 and 1932, seven international conferences were convened across Europe. By 1933, little trace of the thriving field remained. Hirschfeld was dead, his associates sent to death camps, and his institute burned. Examining the rise and precipitous decline of German sexology reveals much about medical practice in the Weimar Republic. During this period, experimental physiology and public health began institutionally separating themselves from clinical medicine. While physiology explicitly adopted mechanistic experimental protocols from physics starting in the late nineteenth century (from Hermann Helmholtz, for example), public health allied itself with the Frankfort Institute for Social Research and its more dialectical approach. Sexology found itself within the interstices of this yawning divide -- bridging eugenics, pathology, epidemiology, and social anthropology while at the same time appropriating the moral authority of traditional clinical medicine. In my talk, I argue that it was precisely the “holistic gaze” of German physicians, that is, their non-mechanistic modes of understanding, that gave early sex researchers their epistemic, moral, and political authority and that presented a growing threat to the agendas of National Socialism.

 

Kristian Camilleri, University of Melbourne

Heisenberg and quantum mechanics in cultural context: the search for a new Weltanschauung

By the 1930s physicists such as Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, and Jordan had begun to give lectures and papers on what they saw as the philosophical consequences of the new quantum mechanics. Many of these physicists now saw the transformation brought about by modern physics as part of a wider intellectual shift. In doing so, physicists, particularly in the German-speaking world, took up the task of painting a new Weltanschauung for the new epoch which dispensed with the mechanistic view which had dominated the nineteenth century. In this paper I examine Heisenberg’s own historical-philosophical vision which was most clearly articulated in his 1942 manuscript. As with many of his contemporaries, Heisenberg was convinced that the dramatic transformation that had taken place in modern physics could not be entirely separated from the cultural crisis which lay at the heart of the rapidly transforming social and political world of his time. While at times reluctant about assuming the mantle of Kulturtrager, Heisenberg did, on many occasions, speak of modern physics as an expression of the Zeitgeist. Here I argue that Heisenberg’s efforts to give an interpretation of quantum mechanics from the 1930s onwards cannot be entirely separated from the task he set himself in the 1942 manuscript – to understand the broader historical-intellectual transformation of the twentieth century. Reading Heisenberg’s writings against the background of these wider concerns may also shed new light on his reluctance to ever seriously consider the new interpretations of quantum mechanics which emerged in the 1950s and 1960s.

 

Jimena Canales, Harvard University

An Eye for and Eye: On Cinematographic Morality

We frequently ask how the cinematographic camera affects our conception of reality, but can we ask instead how it affects our conception of morality? What shape can discussions on the ethics of this and other technologies take? This essay addresses these questions beyond the usual focus on “use”, that is, beyond focusing on ethical or unethical applications of technology. In its place, it investigates the philosophy of technology advocated by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson’s famous statements on the cinematographic camera are considered in the context of his broader discussion of the technology. They are also analyzed as part of his much larger work on other technologies, including clocks, chronographs, telegraphs, automobiles and steam engines. By looking at Bergson’s work through this perspective, this essay analyzes the relation between ethics and technology by connecting it to current debates in the history and philosophy of technology.

 

John Carson, University of Michigan

Cries of “Crisis” in Turn-of-the-Century French Psychology

By the turn of the twentieth century, French high culture in general and French psychology in specific seemed to many to be in turmoil. Celebration of the positivistic and scientistic that had characterized the early Third Republic was now strongly criticized by those proclaiming the “bankruptcy of science” and promoting reliance instead on the personal and arational. From Paul Bourget’s Le Disciple (1889) to Maurice Blondel’s L’Action (1893) to Ferdinand Brunetiere’s La Science et la religion (1895), alternative approaches to knowledge, society, and mind challenging the primacy of cold reason and objective science in favor of action, faith, and the spiritual flourished. It was in this context that Nikolai Kostyleff announced in 1911 that there was a crisis in French experimental psychology. In his La crise de la psychologie expérimentale, Kostyleff attacked much of the work in French experimental psychology for the previous thirty years as fragmentary and overly concerned with individual capacities at the expense of mental phenomena themselves. After the interruption of scientific research occasioned by World War I, the shift in direction to which Kostyleff pointed became clearly visible within a number of areas of French experimental psychology during the postwar period. In this paper I examine what it was about French experimental psychology that seemed so troubling, both to Kostyleff and to numerous other psychologists. How had the laboratory, which at one point was deemed the guarantor of objective scientific knowledge, especially within psychology, become a suspect site for the understanding of human mental processes?

Cathryn Carson, University of California, Berkeley

Was Heisenberg Really Unphilosophical? Reflections from Practice and Theory

Wolfgang Pauli famously labeled Heisenberg “unphilosophical”; Martin Heidegger did the same. Of late, most Heisenberg scholarship has followed suit. Without denying that Heisenberg scarcely lived up to Pauli’s or Heidegger’s standards, it is still useful to reclaim a “philosophical” concern in some of his work. We can look at two domains: in practice and in theory. In his practice there is a philosophical thread that even Pauli recognized, in the form of reflections on the correspondence principle (Anschaulichkeit and the classical-nonclassical boundary). This thread is persistent; it runs through his most imaginative physical work from the 1920s until at least the Second World War. On the side of theory, his fixation on the subject-object divide drew strength from the preoccupations of late neo-Kantianism. This philosophical discourse, remote from that which interested Pauli, brought him into interesting conversations, the most salient of them being his decades-long, on-and-off exchange with Heidegger. It bears remembering, then, that the label “unphilosophical” is always relative to particular philosophical concerns.

 

David Cassidy, Hofstra University

Revisiting Heisenberg, Uncertainty, and Quantum History

During the decades since the completion of the project Sources for History of Quantum Physics in 1967, a large number of historical studies have focused on the fertile period of transition to the new quantum mechanics. Most of these studies appeared during the years ending around 1980, when the history of quantum physics attained a certain level of maturity. Subsequent years brought encyclopedic contributions, studies of quantum philosophy, and a trickle of book-length accounts, among them my biography of Heisenberg. A new era of quantum history may now be emerging with the development of new historical approaches to science history, the wider accessibility of primary papers and letters, and a new generation of historians and projects, such as the international effort recently initiated by the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. In light of these developments and the preparation of a new edition of Uncertainty, this paper will explore the prospects for a richer, deeper history of quantum mechanics, with a special look at Heisenberg as both an individual and an element of the social, cultural, scientific matrix of physicists that brought about the new quantum mechanics.

 

Pratik Chakrabarti, University of Kent at Canterbury

“Living versus Dead?”: The Making of the Semple Anti-rabic Vaccine?’

This paper analyses the evolution of the Semple anti-rabic vaccine, developed by David Semple in India in 1911. Semple introduced a peculiarly British approach within the Pasteurian tradition by using carbolised dead virus; a method he adopted from his tutor Almroth Wright’s work on opsonins and vaccine therapy. Pasteur and his pupils, on the other hand, used “living” attenuated vaccine, often associated with the “heroic” vaccination campaigns of late nineteenth century. In 1927, the International Rabies Conference in Paris accepted Semple’s vaccine as the safest and most effective anti-rabies vaccine. The dead vaccine seemed almost free from the neurological side-effects that plagued live vaccines in Europe. It also appeared ideal for tropical climates and for the decentralisation of rabies vaccination in India. However, scientists in India, particularly John Cunningham, had continued extensive research on live etherised vaccine, following the works of Hempt and Alivisatos. Cunningham cited the high incidence of rabies in India and the severity of cases to stress the need for a live vaccine, rather than one which was safe and climatically suited, revoking some of the earlier values associated with live vaccines. The paper studies this unique phase of vaccine research in colonial India, focussing on laboratory experiments on poor patients, moralities and rationalities of dead and living vaccines, balancing of severity of bites, quantities of brain matter in vaccines and risks of paralysis, as well as domestic and international factors, in defining the final configurations of the Semple vaccine, subsequently adopted widely in India and elsewhere.

 

Kevin Chang, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

Languages, Circulation and Authorship: Publication and Translation of Albrecht von Haller’s Dissertation on Irritability

Albrecht von Haller first introduced his theory of irritability in a dissertation defended by his student Johann Georg Zimmermann in 1751. This dissertation quickly received great attention across Europe and enticed numerous scholarly responses, in large part thanks to Samuel Auguste Tissot’s French translation (1755). The title page of that dissertation suggests that its author was Zimmermann, whereas we have come to identify Haller as the author of the irritability theory. Who was the author of this text, and who was considered the righteous author by their contemporaries? This paper will sort out the questions on its authorship by studying Haller’s follow-up writings on irritability, Tissot’s writings and his correspondence with Haller and Zimmermann, as well as contemporaries authors’ responses. The early modern practice on the authorship of a dissertation betrays our modern conception of authorship in many regards. This paper aims to elucidate that complicated practice.

 

Hasok Chang, University College London

Electrolysis before the Modern Ionic Theory: Underdetermination, Closure and Pluralism

Using 19th-century electrolysis as an illustrative example, I argue against historians’ preoccupation with closure in scientific debates. The electrolysis of water was initially hailed as a novel and decisive confirmation of Lavoisier’s idea that water was a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. However, soon an obvious difficulty emerged: if electricity breaks down each particle of water, why does oxygen emerge from one electrode, and hydrogen from the other, at macroscopically separated locations? Various theories were proposed (invisible transfer, undetectable imbalance, chains of molecules, etc.), none of which commanded a consensus. Ritter and others argued that electrolysis was actually synthesis and water was an element (water + positive electricity = oxygen; water + negative electricity = hydrogen). No closure on this question came until the idea of free ionic dissociation was established around 1900. Thus, a whole century of electrochemistry developed without the resolution of a key foundational debate. Historians tend to gloss over this messy period, focusing on the eventual emergence of consensus. In contrast, I argue that there is much to be gained from more attention to such pluralistic phases of science (neither “normal” nor “revolutionary” in Kuhnian terms). These benefits include the recovery of lost connections (e.g., how electrochemical debates helped sustain chemical atomism), and insights on the process of scientific development (e.g., Ostwald’s view that a repeated “melting down” was necessary to isolate new ideas from older contexts). All in all, we can reach an appreciation of different kinds of work as valid and valuable science.

 

Temitope Charlton, Harvard University

The Power of Places: Ethnogeography in Thirteenth Century Dominican and Franciscan Missions Accounts

Learned medieval thinkers saw variations in climate and geography as accounting in part for differences between human populations. Writers in a variety of intellectual and literary traditions drew on contemporary geographical knowledge in their portrayals of encounters, both factual and fictive, with peoples and places beyond the limits of Christian Europe. This paper explores understandings and portrayals of human diversity in religious sources. Geographical knowledge played a significant role in religious representations and perceptions of “other” peoples and places; conversely, religious sources such as exegetical literature, missions writings, and Christian legends also produced new knowledge and ideas about human geography. This paper focuses in particular on thirteenth century missions-oriented travel writings authored by Dominican and Franciscan missionaries to Asia. Such accounts powerfully shaped the geographical imaginations of medieval readers and writers who would otherwise have had no access these worlds. These sources are not, as earlier generations of historians have suggested, examples of a bounded category of “geography” which we might think of as distinctly or essentially medieval. Rather, the numerous medieval sources pertaining to understandings of human diversity are best understood as responses to the particular historical, religious, political, and intellectual contexts in which they were produced.

 

Tobias Cheung, Humboldt-University Berlin

Playing Music On a Weaving Machine: the relation between nature, science, and technique in Charles Bonnet’s statue of organized bodies

In this paper, I focus on the relation between the order of living bodies, weaving machines, and organs (in French: orgues) in Charles Bonnets germ-fibres-models of organized bodies. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Girolamo Fabrizio discovered that the microstructures of muscles are similar to artificially produced cloth because they form “tissues”(telae) through interlaced vertical and horizontal fibers. After Fabrizio, Marcello Malpighi, Robert Hooke, and Louis Bourguet also refer to weaving processes and patterns to explain organic tissues. Within the conceptual framework of preformationism and germ theories, Charles Bonnet combines in the second third of the eighteenth century the model of the soul (that plays on the body like a pianist on an organ) with the production process of weaving machines. First, I will highlight some aspects of the transformation and of the epistemological status of different machine models to which naturalists refer in order to explain the phenomena of living beings. Then I discuss the specific role and combination of Bonnet’s two major machines through which he distinguishes the natural and the artificial as well as the living and the non- living.

 

Tricia Close-Koenig, Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg

Classifying cancers, standardizing practice.

Dissecting classificatory frameworks highlights how classifications standardize biomedical entities: the systems encode knowledge and coordinate practice. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star emphasize the invisibility of classification systems once they are naturalized and integrated into routines (Bowker and Star 1999). Tracing the historical construction of classification schemes can reveal the political and semantic negotiations involved. By focusing on classification of cancers in the early to mid-twentieth century, this paper will bring to light dynamics of standardizing biomedical research and practice. The first truly international system for classifying tumours dates to 1987 and the unification of the UICC (International Union Against Cancer) and the AJCC (American Joint Committee for Cancer) TNM classifications. Nevertheless, the founding of the UICC in 1933 marks the beginning of an international effort to exchange knowledge concerning cancer prevention and control. At this time there were, incidentally, a number of local and national schemes in place. Amongst them figures the “Atlas du Cancer” published in 10 volumes between 1921 and 1931 in France. The research work of Pierre Masson, author of the 3rd and 4th volumes of this Atlas, and the routine practices of cancer diagnosis performed at the institute he directed in Strasbourg are indicative of his approach to classification. Here I will align practices in Masson’s laboratory and early negotiations for an international classification scheme.

 

Deborah Coen, Barnard College, Columbia University

The “Social Discovery” of Global Warming

Spencer Weart’s Discovery of Global Warming is a revolutionary solution to an awkward problem. The problem is to portray recent climate science in a way that captures the genuine complexity of the interactions among researchers, publics, and objects of study, without producing so baroque an account that a reader might lose sight of the reality of climate change behind the web of competing interests. The solution is an interactive, evolving, hypertext Web site with a narrative that grows just as complex as the reader allows. The result is a highly effective example of the application of the history of science to the public understanding of science, one that bears comparison with other recent portraits of the dynamics of climate research (by Naomi Oreskes, Jim Fleming, and others). Discovery is also an explicit invitation to further research, opening the door to a broader view of the history of climate science, including its transnational and pre-1945 dimensions. I will show how Discovery has laid the groundwork for a thriving field of climate history, which engages in dialogues with popular and scientific audiences without falling prey to Whiggism.

 

Nathaniel Comfort, Johns Hopkins

Why is Victor McKusick considered the “father of medical genetics”?

Google “father of medical genetics” and the first seven hits – and 25 of the first 30 – will refer to the Johns Hopkins physician Victor McKusick. The epithet appears in textbooks and historical articles, often preceded by phrases such as “widely considered to be,” or “universally known as.” Yet McKusick has made no Nobel- winning discovery. He has invented no breakthrough technique. The diseases he studied have been for the most part rare and of limited medical impact. Why is he considered the “father of medical genetics”? I suggest that McKusick’s importance to medical genetics is social as much as intellectual. He was a “hub,” a central figure in an expanding social network, at a critical juncture in the growth of the field. A born cataloguer, a tireless organizer, a natural leader, an unselfconscious self-promoter, and a bureaucratic visionary, he had the skills and the resources that connected other researchers to one another. I will use McKusick’s research and professional activities in the 1950s and 1960s to illustrate some aspects of the growth of medical genetics and to reflect on the kinds of activities and personal qualities that make a hub. This paper will combine social network analysis with close reading of published literature, archival research, and oral histories. My goal is not just to analyze but also to explain the creation of the social network that laid the foundation for the Human Genome Project.

 

 

Sondra Cooney, Kent State University

Did the Land Rise or the Seas Recede? Robert Chambers’s Ancient Sea-Margins: Its Contribution to 19th C. Scientific Controversy

Thanks to the Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Robert Chambers’s contribution to nineteenth-century scientific discussions is well known. Less well known is his Ancient Sea-Margins, As Memorials of Changes in the Relative Level of Sea and Land (1848) and its place in another of the century’s scientific controversies. Victorian geologists disagreed about how surface features of the earth were formed. Some claimed they were shaped when land was thrust up from under the seas; others said they were revealed as waters receded. Chambers was among the early geologists who were particularly intrigued by the Parallel Roads of Glen Roy in the Scottish Highlands. His studies of them were central to Ancient Sea Margins. As he collected data and worked out his theories for this book, he took issue with and departed from the explanations of both Charles Darwin and David Milne-Home. Darwin thought they were produced by upthrusting land; Milne-Home by receding waters. Thanks to Chambers’s journals, his correspondence with Darwin, Milne-Home, and others interested in geology, we can assess the contribution Ancient Sea -Margins made to Victorian geological debates. Initially attacked for depending upon the same kind of questionable science as the Vestiges, Ancient Sea-Margins, the value of its data and of Chambers’s insights, would not be recognized until the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries.

 

Angela Creager, Princeton University

Artificial Radioisotopes and Cancer: Experimental Therapies, Diagnostic Methods, and Risk in the Atomic Age

This paper addresses the initiatives of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in the late 1940s and 1950s aimed at supporting cancer research, diagnosis, and therapy. From the founding of the agency, cancer was of concern to the AEC because the double-edged nature of radiation, which could both cause and cure (or at least constrain) human cancer. The AEC’s cancer program was thus both a way to address occupational safety issues at the nation’s atomic energy facilities and a way to promote civilian benefits of the Manhattan Project. The government propagated hopes articulated in the 1930s by E. O. Lawrence and others that artificial radioisotopes would transform the treatment of cancer, even as growing clinical evidence pointed to the greater utility of radioisotopes in diagnosis rather than therapy. Moreover, the AEC’s message that radioisotopes could be used to fight cancer was undercut in the 1950s by growing concern over fallout, which the agency tried unsuccessfully to counter and then contain. New knowledge about the genetic effects of radiation (much of it funded by the AEC) brought to light the potential drawbacks of clinical uses of radioisotopes. In the end, the emergence of nuclear medicine in the 1950s developed against a growing background of public concern – and medical concern as well – about the hazards of environmental, occupational, and even clinical exposure to radioactivity.

 

Alex Csiszar, Harvard University

Centralizing the Scientific Machine: Bibliographical Controversies at the End of the Nineteenth Century

The late nineteenth century constituted a marked period of anxiety and dissatisfaction over the organization of science in Europe; the locus of these concerns often came to rest on publication practices and the coordination of authors and readers. One response to this anxiety resulted in the proliferation of specialized indexes, abstracts, and bibliographies for diverse types of professional periodical literature. In 1895 two competing international movements emerged promising to restore order and unity: the Royal Society’s International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, and the Répertoire Bibliographique Universel (based in Brussels). This presentation will consider these two projects as contrasting visions for what it could mean to bring order to scientific knowledge production at this historical moment. The one (RBU) envisioned a grand classification scheme that would lay the foundation for a universal tabulation of scientific knowledge, administered via a decentralized network of independent bibliographical organizations. The other (ICSL) eschewed claims to the unity of knowledge per se, and instead envisioned unity as stemming from the administrative centralization of publishing decisions, filtering and imposing strict (though conventional) bounds on what constituted an “original contribution to science.” These debates between scientific practitioners over the unity and disunity of science anticipated in more concrete terms later, more philosophical, unity projects beginning in the 1930s. They also suggest that scientific practitioners during this period were at least very aware that certain kinds of disunity were not only a present reality of scientific life, but likely a fundamental aspect of the social structure of science.

 

Thomas Cunningham, University of Pittsburgh

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane’s Intellectual Heritage

John Burdon Sanderson (J. B. S.) Haldane was a celebrated scientist for his accomplishments in evolutionary theory and for his popular scientific writings. Recently, John Maynard Smith and Sahotra Sarkar have separately suggested Haldane underwent a fundamental shift in his philosophical thinking over his lifetime, and that understanding this allows for an increased appreciation of his public scientific and political publications. In this presentation I challenge these contentions by reassessing J. B. S. Haldane’s intellectual heritage. My charge is that we cannot assess the dynamics of Haldane’s intellectual commitments without a richer appreciation of his writings and the formative context of his philosophical outlook. Gaining this assessment requires rethinking his father, John Scott (J. S.) Haldane’s, philosophical positions as well as J.B.S.’ assessment of them. After reconsidering many of J. B. S.’ public statements concerning his philosophical beliefs as well as his relationship with his father’s views, I conclude that J.B.S.’ philosophical perspective exhibited far more continuity than has been claimed by others, and that he never underwent any fundamental changes in his philosophical outlook. Furthermore, I complicate the view that Haldane exhibited a commitment to the metaphysics of Marxism. Instead, I argue that he was an agnostic monist, explain what this means, and how it affects our understanding of this great biologist

 

Taika Dahlbom, University of Turku, Finland

Specimen, née Example: Zoological Objects of Inquiry since 1655

The bodies of animals have been used in the production of knowledge about animals since Renaissance curiosity cabinets. What these bodies are understood as, has, however, changed alongside the changing methods of zoological inquiry. What could generally be called “specimens” today have been understood as “examples of creation,” “examples of species,” “individuals of species,” and “samples of a population,” for example. Such changes in the conceptualization of the object of zoological inquiry are indicative of how and why knowledge is produced by using zoological objects. In order to look into the changing processes of knowledge production in zoology in relation to the conceptualization of the object of inquiry, I will follow the accumulation of objects of inquiry of a particular fish species and the significations attached these objects from the 17th century to the 20th century in the zoological collections of Copenhagen from Museum Wormianum to the current Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen.

Dane Daniel, Wright State University

Complementary Cosmogonies: Paracelsus on the Creations by God the Father and God the Son

Despite the preeminence of his unique Biblical exegesis in the entirety of his thought, and despite the fact that thousands of physicians and philosophers called themselves “Paracelsians” during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – and even proclaimed that they offered a Christian alternative to the “paganism” of the university curriculum steeped in the teachings of such ancients as Aristotle and Galen – the theology of Paracelsus continues to receive scant attention. When it comes to the subject of Paracelsus’ theory of creation, however, the whole of his oeuvre – including his understudied explicitly theological works – deserves in-depth investigation. For example, in the unpublished Ex Psalterio Declaratio Coene dominj Theophrasti Liber and the published De genealogia Christi, Paracelsus differentiates between the creation by the Father and the creation by the Son. It is impossible to understand Paracelsus’ understanding of cosmology and the nature of the human being without recognizing the differing but complementary contributions of the Father and the Son to the fabric of the universe. The Father’s creations, i.e. the elemental and sidereal bodies, are mortal, destined for ultimate and permanent destruction. The creation by God the Son, on the other hand, is eternal. Paracelsus, drawing heavily from 1st Corinthians, calls this new creation by the Son the eternal body, and also the spiritual body. I will examine how Paracelsus parallels the two creation stories, focusing on his exegeses concerning “creation by fiat” as well as the types of Father-created and Son-created material realities which operate in the world.

 

Deepanwita Dasgupta, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

William Jones and S. N. Bose: Scientific Consensus, Intellectual Authority and the Dynamics of Scientific Knowledge-Making in Colonial India

This paper makes the observation that scientific communities can be classified into two types: metropolitan scientific communities in various Euro-American centers, and peripheral scientific communities situated (mostly) in various non-western locations. Once this distinction is made, the question arises how a scientific consensus is produced when a particular research effort is spread between a center and a periphery. Since scientific consensus is essential for the growth of scientific knowledge, through what kinds of interactions a consensus is achieved between these two? Most models of scientific knowledge assume that consensus is a matter of equal collaboration between communities that results into equal intellectual authority for all communities. In contrast, I argue that the history of the peripheral scientific communities shows us the opposite: interaction between a center and a periphery is mostly non-uniform, and scientific collaborations between two such communities rarely result into an intellectual authority for the peripheral side. The rest of the paper develops this theme through two case studies in colonial India: the botanical researches of Sir William Jones in the 19th century, who employed many Indian artists and collaborators to produce a complete catalog of Indian plants, and the development of Bose-Einstein statistics in 1924, when a young Indian scientist named S.N. Bose solved the long-standing problem of black-Body radiation by proposing a new proof of Planck’s law. Both these episodes, I argue, show us that while scientific knowledge may grow through collaborations between a metropolis and a periphery, it is the mostly the metropolitan side that holds the key to intellectual authority.

 

Lorraine Daston, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Collective Observation in Early Modern Europe

In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “observation” emerged as a central epistemic category in the pursuit of knowledge about nature and society. Although individual observers cultivated their skills and observations were increasingly authored, most such activities were understood as part of a collective enterprise. Some phenomena, such as stellar positions or global wind patterns, required networks of observers dispersed over time and space. But even the phenomena of anatomy, medicine, physics, and natural history came to be seen during this period as objects of multiple observations conducted in a series, in order to establish the range of variability and to eliminate the workings of chance. Collective observation posed social, logistical, and epistemological challenges: how to recruit observers, especially on a voluntary basis; how to channel their attention and standardize their instruments and descriptions; how to coordinate their often disparate reports into a stable result; how to construct series for rare phenomena that could not be subjected to repeated scrutiny? The methods for solving these problems ranged from the questionnaire distributed to travelers to standardized forms for weather-watching, from the creation of epistolary communities to the homogenization of observation reports. Tools included the pre-printed table, the notebook, and the library – all ways of collecting, correlating, and comparing observations, past and present. The aim was to forge a single, stable, robust observation out of many fleeting, variable, individual observations: to meld many pairs of eyes into a single Argos-like super- observer.

 

Joseph Dauben, Graduate Center, CUNY

Western Mathematics in the Middle Kingdom: Elite versus Grass Roots Strategies

When Western science was first introduced to China in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, it was largely through efforts of the Jesuits and other Catholic orders. As is well-known, figures like Matteo Ricci targeted the elite of the imperial court and high administrative officials, believing that if they could convince them of the superiority of western science, the superiority of western religion would follow. To some extent they were successful in this venture until the rites controversy eventually resulted in a prohibition by the emperor Kang Xi in 1721of any further missionary activity in China. When western missionaries returned in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was largely Protestants who sought to convert the populace at large, and they did so by establishing schools and writing textbooks, some offering systematic introductions to the sciences, including mathematics. This presentation will focus on the specific examples that the history of mathematics in China can offer to explain how these different strategies affected the development of a new and revitalized mathematics in modern China. Its basic argument is that the “grass roots” approach – spurred by western influences in the late nineteenth century – was crucial to the creation of a new class, literally, of Chinese mathematicians who helped spearhead the transformation of Chinese society, largely through education and the emergence of a professionalized cadre of mathematicians. Such a transformation could never have been achieved through an “elite” approach to the subject like that advocated in the seventeenth century.

 

 

Raf De Bont, University of Leuven

‘So full of Romance, so Unspoiled, Rough, Rugged and Primitive’: The Bird Observatory in Rossitten and ‘experimental’ field culture

In 1901, the former theologian Johannes Thienemann founded the bird observatory of Rossitten at the Kurish Spit, East Prussia. The station was the first of its kind in the world. Just like the foundation of marine laboratories (from the 1870s onwards) and hydrobiological stations (since the 1890s), the establishment of ornithological stations would trigger important changes in the research questions and the concrete practices of field biology. In my paper, I want to address these changes by focussing on Rossitten. Thienemann’s objectives were manifold. He wanted to study the behavior and migration patterns of the many birds that traversed the Kurish Spit; he wanted to establish a bird collection and procure material for neighbouring research institutes; he wanted to study the protection of birds and their economic value. Furthermore, he wanted to ‘civilize’ the backward region in which he worked and to undergo the romantic thrill of its ruggedness. Although attracted by the ‘wild’ character of the Kurish Spit, Thienemann manipulated the nature in which he worked in many ways. He conducted tests with artificial nesting and purposive hunting; he ringed birds and worked out release experiments; he put up observatories and attracted naturalists and tourists. Although he romanticized the loneliness of his workplace, Thienemann mobilized an unseen number of amateur collaborators for his ornithological project. In my paper, I want to throw light on these various activities, which were all part of a plan to master the extended habitats of the highly volatile research objects under scrutiny.

 

Soraya de Chadarevian, University of California Los Angeles

Genetics and public health in the 1960s

The development of new methods for visualizing and analyzing human chromosomes in the 1950s and 1960s did not only lead to the introduction of new diagnostic techniques in the clinic, but went hand in hand with expanding projects aimed at investigating the genetic make up of human populations. In Britain this work was spearheaded by the radiologist and medical researcher Michael Court Brown. Following his work with the epidemiologist Richard Doll on the leukemia-inducing effect of radiation treatment based on the review of 14 000 patients he employed cytogenetics techniques to investigate the chromosomal constitution of the general population as well as for epidemiological studies aimed at correlating specific karyotypes with specific clinical pictures and to investigate the chromosome damaging effects of certain agents. With the same aims in mind he also promoted the establishment of a National Register of Abnormal Karyotypes, an initiative that introduced many clinicians to the new techniques of karyotyping. The paper will deal with the techniques and the aims that propelled these studies and with the controversies that surrounded them. It will also discuss the place of these studies in the broader context of postwar biomedicine.

 

Fabio De Sio, Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn, Napoli

Western science and the octopus. The unkept promises of a laboratory animal

Since Aristotle, Octopus has been object of much interest from Western naturalists. From Pliny to contemporary scientists, observations and speculations on its aesthetic qualities and impressive behavioral capacities have followed one another, building up the image of an animal too smart for its phylogenetic status. Since the late XIX Century, the simple report of curiosities has been supplanted by attempts to give an objective account of its abilities. I will try to reconstruct the career of Octopus as a wonder mollusc, especially considering the debates on its behavioral capacities and their presumed incoherence with the animal’s mode of life. I wish to focus here on the attempt to use the octopus as an “objective” model for the study of the material substrates of behavior, based on its presumedly contradictory nature of “invertebrate with a vertebrate behavior” (Boycott and Young, 1950). I will argue that the failure in making the octopus a model for a reductionist account of complex behavior (i.e. the impossibility of isolating any “pure” memory mechanism in its brain) resulted not only from technical difficulties, but also from its being at the same time, amenable to experimental treatment (“simple” organism) and resistant to any reductionistic account (“complex” behavior). Such resistance, in the long run, led researchers to acknowledge the heuristic importance of a biographical approach, i.e. of coupling observation and experimentation, and framing the account within the domain of natural history. The animal, in such a context, exceeded the technology, becoming an active agent within the experimental system.

 

Richard Delisle, The University of Chicago

Humanity’s Uncertain Boundaries Until the 1930s: A Late Consensus on Slow Zoological and Paleontological Surveys

It is perhaps not sufficiently realized that the currently accepted zoological and phylogenetic boundaries of the human condition were only arrived at during a fairly recent historical period. Indeed, one has to wait until the 1930s for the naturalists and the anthropologists to reach a consensus on the broad contour of these boundaries, thus putting an end to several centuries of uncertainties accompanying the naturalization process of the worldview. Whereas Linnaeus recognized in the mid-eighteenth century two distinct human species living in contemporaneity, some scholars were still expecting in the 1920s and 1930s the possible discovery of human- like primates in the least known regions of the globe. Furthermore, human phylogenetic debates starting in the 1860s turned out to be another source of uncertainty about humanity’s boundaries, especially since the polyphyletic thesis which was held by perhaps as much as twenty different scholars between 1860 and 1930 threatened to enlarge humanity to the point of incorporating a significant portion of the Primate Order within its confines. The unity of the human species as narrowly conceived today is a recent scientific event. This much had to be established before ethical issues, among others, could profitably be tackled.

 

Eli Diamond, Dalhousie University

Aristotle’s Account of Vision as Instrumental to his Account of Thinking in De Anima.

In De Anima III.5, Aristotle famously compares the active intellect with light, a comparison which demands that the reader consider the analysis of mind in relation to his earlier analysis of vision and light. By juxtaposing De Anima II.7 on vision and light with his chapter on the active mind, I show that every single detail of Aristotle’s analysis of vision has an exact analogue in his analysis of thinking. Reading II.7 on vision and III.5 on active intellect together in this rigorous way makes sense of why Aristotle included precisely the details he did in his examination of the role of light in seeing, an examination which might otherwise appear somewhat unorganized and confusing. To bring out how his analysis of light and vision in II.7 is determined by the metaphysical and theological concerns at the heart of De Anima, I will compare this chapter to the more empirical account of vision and light in De Sensu. In doing so I hope to bring further clarity to the difference between the theoretical interest of De Anima and the more empirical orientation of the other biological works.

 

John DiMoia, National University of Singapore, Department of History

“Let’s Have the Proper Number of Children and Bring Them Up Well!”: Family Planning, Biomedicine, and Nation-Building in South Korea, 1961-1968

This paper looks at the formation of a South Korean national health network by focusing on the introduction of an ambitious National Family Planning (FP) Program under President Park Chung Hee (1961- 1968). The program, influenced in part by the model of its neighbor, Taiwan (Taichung), saw two pilot studies carried out in Koyang (rural) and Sundong-gu (Seoul metropolitan area), before being carried to rural areas. If the program bore numerous echoes with Japanese colonial practice, it was mobilized specifically in terms of the emerging South Korean state and its relationship to the welfare of the individual family unit. Using a range of Korean and English-language sources, I will illustrate how the FP effort handled these uncomfortable traces of the recent past (e.g., the Ota ring, introduced by Japanese doctors in the 1930’s, versus the “modern” Lippes loop). With the contributions of international actors, South Korean public health officials would create one of the world’s most effective population programs – here defined in terms of reduction of the birth rate – by the late 1970s. At the same time, however, the program’s legacy carried with it a deeply ambivalent record, particularly as the South Korean case resulted in a strengthening of the state’s claim over the bodies of its citizens.

 

Peter Distelzweig, University of Pittsburgh, History and Philosophy of Science

De Artificio Mechanico Musculorum: The Mechanical Problems in William Harvey’s De motu locali animalium

Most scholarly attention given William Harvey has centered on the De Motu Cordis of 1628 and its reception. This focus is not without reason, as it is to this work that his near contemporaries gave most attention and (eventually) praise. Disproportionately little attention has been given to his other, much more massive publication on the generation of animals; and even less still has been given to his various unpublished notes. Among these latter is a collection of notes on the local motion of animals and the anatomy of the motive organs, particularly muscle; it was edited and translated by Gwenneth Whitteridge and published as De Motu Locali Animalium, 1627(MLA) in 1959. Though generally overlooked in the limited literature on these notes, Harvey displays here a significant preoccupation with mechanics and the role of mechanical reasoning in anatomy. In these notes we find a number of more (and sometimes less) obvious allusions to the pseudo- Aristotelian Mechanical Problems and a clear sketch of the nature of mechanics and its place in the study of the anatomy of muscles. In this paper I examine this feature of MLA, focusing particularly on how Harvey conceptualizes the place of mechanics in anatomical explanation. Besides its intrinsic interest, this work sheds some light on the complicated interaction between Harvey’s Aristotelian project in anatomy and the developing mechanical philosophy by pointing to an underappreciated element of the situation: Harvey’s familiarity with the sixteenth and seventeenth century tradition of pseudo-Aristotelian mechanics.

 

Meghan Doherty, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Faithorne’s The Art of Graveing, a Language of Accuracy and the Royal Society

This paper argues that over the course of the seventeenth century engraving and etching came to be accepted as providing transparent representations of the natural world for the visual communication of science in the circle surrounding the Royal Society in London. London in the 1660s served as the primary location for this change. Collaboration between artists and members of the Royal Society helped to break down the stigmas surrounding the use of printed images in natural history, in particular. William Faithorne and his wide array of printed output are the foci of this discussion. Faithorne was an important node in the networks of individuals involved with the myriad activities of the Royal Society from its founding in 1660 to his death in 1691. Faithorne is an apt case to study because in addition to engraving many portraits of well-known intellectuals and members of the royal family, he also engraved the illustrations for a number of books published by members of the Royal Society and the images in his own treatise on the art of engraving. In 1662 Faithorne published The Art of Graveing and Etching, which outlines the best practices for creating an engraving or an etching. It is this book, I argue, that works to make engraving a scientific endeavor by systematizing the method for producing intaglio prints and working with a language of accuracy.

 

Matthias Dorries, Universite Louis Pasteur

‘Nuclear winter’ and global climatic change

This paper proposes to revisit the nuclear winter debate within the context of the last years of the Cold War. Recent research in the history of science has shown how greatly research in the environmental sciences depended on military funding from the 1950s on. Still, until the 1980s, potentially severe environmental consequences of nuclear war were largely accepted as unfortunate byproducts of necessary military build-up, a worthwhile price for peace. The debate about nuclear winter brought a new twist by challenging this argument, turning it against itself. Nuclear war was no longer about the unprecedented in scale though ultimately local destruction of cities and military installations, but about the possibility of global long-term destruction of the whole earth’s climate. Among scientists, the detractors of this kind of environmentalism pointed to ‘nuclear winter’s’ shaky scientific foundations, denigrating it as a mere distraction from keeping pace with the enemy, a danger to peace and rational thinking. After 1989, both parties claimed victory. The article explores the history leading to these claims of victory: Was the ‘nuclear war debate’ the beginning of the end of the Cold War (as some scientists claim), or was it rather a lively but ultimately unimportant sideshow carried on by a few scientists? Or was it the first hint of a new age of global environmental concerns that could only reach full bloom after 1989, within a ‘new world order’?

 

Heather Douglas, University of Tennessee

The Philosophy of Science Association as an Interdisciplinary Society

Although the subject of philosophy of science had been of interest to philosophers in North America for more than a generation by the end of World War II, what the boundaries should be for that subject and who was a legitimate practitioner was far from settled. In the 1947 by-laws of the Philosophy of Science Association and editorials published in its journal, PSA was defended as a society open to multiple approaches and definitions of philosophy of science. The practices of the organization reflected this ecumenical view. For example, the PSA met annually as part of the AAAS throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, meetings that often involved other societies as well. On the governing board for the PSA and the editorial board for the journal, scientists were heavily involved in the running of the society. And the topics covered in the journal, Philosophy of Science, reflected this broad view of what counted as philosophy of science. By the late 1950s, however, arguments had been voiced that philosophy of science as a subject should be more narrowly construed. The PSA became a more professional society partly as a response to a demand for more consistent quality in the journal, partly through more stringent vetting of membership applications, and partly through a marginalization of the voices calling for continued openness and interdiscplinarity. This talk will examine the nature of PSA prior to 1960 and the pressures that would push the PSA to become a more inwardly focused disciplinary organization.

Otniel Dror, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Cultures of Adrenaline

“This is hallelujah day! De la Paz and I get clear evidence of emotional production of adrenalin in cat.” [Walter B. Cannon, Diary entry for Jan 16, 1911] On or about January 16, 1911, human character changed. This play of words on Virginia Wolff’s famous hyperbole, in which Wolff encapsulated the radical changes in Western culture “from Protestant salvation in the next world to therapeutic self-realization in this one” captures the contemporaneous and no less significant shift from the era of the “blush” to the era of “adrenaline” and of “excitements.” Adrenaline emerged during the early twentieth century at a most opportune historical moment. It was the essence in which a materialist culture invested its spiritual energies. It was the liquid, which encapsulated the emerging critiques of the “pleasure economy.” And it was an (evolutionarily) archaic source of energy in the modern body. Adrenaline also embodied--at first only insidiously--the anti-hedonistic pleasures of engaging in masculine endeavors, like sports, wars, and fear-seeking activities. In this presentation I will study four different dimensions of adrenaline, as these emerged during the first several decades of the twentieth century: 1-- the shift from blush to adrenaline; 2--Cultures of Adrenaline; 3--Man the Machine: Fatigue and Adrenaline; 4--The Pleasure of Adrenaline Pain. My ultimate aim will be to exemplify the cultural and biological potencies of adrenaline, and its progressive presence in--and domination of--a wide spectrum of private and public realms in Western culture.

 

Matt Dunn,Indiana University

 Dobzhansky’s Evolutionary Genetics: Natural Populations or Mirroring Morgan?

Dobzhansky’s break with the Morgan lab was driven by a shift in interest from the mechanisms of inheritance to the relationship between genetics and evolution. Kohler (1994) argues that the Morgan group was interested in eliminating and controlling genetic variation in order to study inheritance whereas Dobzhansky was interested in “carefully preserving” genetic variation from natural populations in order to study how it was shaped by evolutionary processes. Gannett and Griesemer (2004) agree that patterns in natural variation were the focus of Dobzhansky’s work and argue that these data were used to test claims about the “causal mechanisms” of evolution. While I agree that much of Dobzhansky’s work can be characterized following these authors, his work also closely mirrored Morgan’s in important ways not previously appreciated. I argue that once D. pseudoobscura “invaded” Dobzhansky’s lab, he began making use of the experimental resources it provided by tinkering with various geographical races to construct artificial flies purpose-built to address specific evolutionary questions about, for example, the founder effect. In some of his work, he did “carefully preserve” natural variation, but in other experiments he pruned and manipulated that variation to suit his needs. Moreover, I argue that the experiments with these constructed flies are more obviously tests of the “causal mechanisms” of evolutionary theory than are the patterns of geographic variation discussed by Gannett and Griesemer.

 

Matthew Eddy, Durham University

The Grammar of Anthropology: Hugh Blair, Print Culture and Human Origins

During the Enlightenment the University of Edinburgh trained a numerous naturalists who went on to have a profound affect on the language used to create systems of natural history published in Britain and its colonies. Until recently, the curriculum used to teach such students was addressed in relation to books that were the domain of professors lecturing in the medical faculty. While this has helped create an informative picture of how binomial nomenclature and notions of species infiltrated lectures of professors like William Cullen, Joseph Black and Alexander Monro Secundus, the textual tools of description and ordering provided by the courses of Arts faculty professors have received little attention. This paper fills part of this lacuna by focusing on the lectures of Hugh Blair, the university’s professor of Belle Lettres and Rhetoric. I suggest that his thoughts on the history of language and literacy provided a helpful rubric for anthropologically orientated observations taken by medical students sitting in his course who eventually obtained commissions in the British navy that took them to posts in North America, Africa and Asia. More specifically, I concentrate on his belief that language was intimately linked to the operations of the human mind and how this led him to present a detailed system that accounted for the origins and meanings of the languages and texts of Europeans and cultures that were located in contemporary colonial settings.

 

Michael Egan, McMaster University

Vernacular Knowledge and Expertise: The Center for the Biology of Natural Systems and the Science of the Environmental Crisis

During the 1960s, in response to the growing number and severity of perceived threats to the environment and public health, a new scientific praxis was developed that highlighted the popular feeling that environmental decline was an objective feature of the era. This paper investigates the development of a public or vernacular science after World War II, which constituted a blending of scientific expertise and political activism to address these environmental threats. This account rests on two postulates: first, that this new form of scientific activism played a critical role in redirecting American environmentalism during the 1960s and 1970s, and, second, that the dissemination of vernacular science transformed relationships between experts and publics as well as relationships between different communities of experts. My vehicle for this account is the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information (SIPI), an umbrella organization whose organizing platform was to provide “information unencumbered by political or moral judgments” that was “freely available to all.” SIPI was founded in 1963 by some of the more politically engaged scientists of the post- war era—Margaret Mead, René Dubos, and Barry Commoner were among its founders—who acknowledged the public and political nature of scientific information and sought to produce accessible knowledge to encourage non-experts to participate in environmental debates.

 

Josh Ellenbogen, University of Pittsburgh

Impressed Images

My paper examines late nineteenth-century concepts of sense-impression, above all as these were developed around particular practices in scientific photography (Francis Galton, William Abney, E.J. Marey, Alphonse Bertillon). What warrants bringing this group of investigators together is the shared idea of “impression” that underwrote their endeavors, an idea that gave a temporal component to seeing. That is, all these commentators took seeing to consist in what Galton described as “a series of infinitesimally short impressions constantly being made on the eye through time, so that what we see at any moment consists in the cumulative effect of sub- units of impression, as these have collected on the eye during the previous tenth of a second.” What is most instructive about this strange way of construing vision is not just that a very large number of influential investigators adhered to it, but that it was modeled on particular techniques in scientific photography from the time. My paper, thus, will also examine the forms of reciprocity that obtained between concepts of seeing and material imaging practices.

James Elwick, York University

A ‘certain compulsion upon the authorities’: 19th century competitive written examinations, objectivity, and educational reform

From the 1850s on, competitive written examinations spread rapidly through English education, and historians of science from Roy MacLeod to Andrew Warwick have looked at how they changed the teaching of science and mathematics. This paper discusses how marginalized groups used such exams to enter the formal system of science schooling in England and elsewhere. For instance, those seeking university degrees for women used exams to their advantage - educational reformer Emily Davies (1830-1921) thought that the anonymity of written exams gave women the chance to be assessed by the same standard as men. This paper uses research on objectivity by HPS/STS scholars to understand Davies’s point and the claims of other campaigners. It argues that the explicit rules that governed written exams were used to hold educational institutions to account. The very format of written exams allowed women who scored just as well as men to clearly demonstrate their achievement, and thus make a moral claim on an educational institution for equal treatment. Indeed new perspectives on objectivity may shed some light on a more general historical phenomenon: why written exams were so closely linked to the ‘reform’ of nineteenth-century educational institutions.

 

Richard England, Salisbury University

Beyond Christian Darwinism: The Rev. John Gulick on Science, Religion and the Limits of Language

John Gulick (1832-1923) was a missionary to Japan and China, but is best remembered as an evolutionary theorist. George Romanes called him the most important living author on Darwinian topics, and his work on the role of isolation influenced Sewall Wright. Gulick held that behavioral evolution shapes biological changes, and was an early champion of the Baldwin effect. He is still hailed by biologists as a prescient theorist. Gulick’s writings are generally technical, but what little he wrote on the wider implications of evolutionary theory show how he held science, religion and morality in a unified worldview. All three were aspects of the reason which pervaded nature: ultimately, he considered even religion as explicable in natural terms, and yet he did so in a way that was not entirely naturalistic. A theme in Gulick’s biological work is the careful definition of terms, and his theological ideas are also shaped by his concern for the meaning and limits of language. While Gulick’s interpretations of particular issues verged on a reverent agnosticism, he held that the central facts of Christianity remained unchanged in the face of science. Historians often consider Darwinian evolution the most naturalistic challenge to religious commentators, but in this case, an ordained evolutionist promoted another naturalistic vision of evolution which went beyond natural selection, and, through an analysis rooted in careful definition of terms, remained committed to his faith. Drawing on manuscript and published sources, this study locates Gulick’s views in their historical (and historiographical) context.

 

Jonathon Erlen, University of Pittsburgh

History of Science and Technology Materials in the European Union Library and Archives

The European Union (EU) has been deeply involved in promoting and funding history of science and technology research for the past half century. This involvement has been carefully documented in the EU Library and Archives that contains over 16, 500, 000 unique pages of primary documents. This treasure trove, previously housed in the EU Embassy in Washington, DC, has been transferred to the Hillman Library of the University of Pittsburgh and is available for researchers. This poster will highlight some of the major history of science and technology areas covered by this material, focusing on the following major fields: medicine/public health; atomic energy; biotechnology; aeronautics; agriculture; environmental concerns; information technology; and energy. Selected titles pertaining to each of these fields will demonstrate the breadth and scope of this collection. Potential researchers will be directed to contact the collection’s curator, Dr. Phil Wilkin.

 

Kristina Espmark, Umeå University, Sweden

When Science is Paradise: Research and Boundaries in Astrid Cleve von Euler’s Scientific Career

In 1902, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences conferred an award on young Ph.D. Astrid Cleve (1875-1968) for her work on the rare earth element ytterbium. A botanist as well as chemist, Cleve also did extensive work on diatoms for which she was made professor honoris causa in 1955. In 1962, she claimed to have found the worldly location of the biblical Paradise in a northern part of present Germany. Astrid Cleve (married von Euler) became Sweden’s first female doctor of science in 1898 and was determined to pursue a scientific career. For various reasons, however, she failed to secure a place in institutionalised science and continued as an independent researcher throughout her life. With varying success she worked within chemistry, botany, Quaternary geology, archaeology and anthropology, and though her critics differed in opinion, she considered her work and method scientific. Nonetheless, with limited access to academic resources, her work developed under different conditions than research within institutionalised science. This paper – which is a summary of my forthcoming Ph.D. thesis on Cleve’s life and science – explores how Cleve’s research developed over time in relation to both her life in general and to institutionalised science. Furthermore, I interpret that development by using Thomas F. Gieryn’s concept of boundary-work, thus aiming to gain further understanding of Cleve’s scientific career in particular and of the relationship between non-institutional research and recognized science in general.

 

James Evans, University of Puget Sound

Students as Weapons: The Lyon Theses On Le Sage’s Theory of Gravitation (1770)

Like many good Newtonians, Georges-Louis Le Sage (1724-1803) of Geneva was an atomist, but he went further than most, for he believed that even gravity could be explained by the collisions of atoms. Le Sage imagines that the observable universe is bathed in a sea of ultramundane corpuscles. Two bodies that appear to pull on one another are actually pushed together by the rain of corpuscles from outside. By 1770 Le Sage’s theory was well enough known in France to be the subject of a disputation at Lyon. There, a student named Charcot defended some theses under the presidency of Professor P.-F. Champion, and the theses were published in broadsheet. But Charcot’s theses were actually composed by the abbé Pierre Sigorgne (1719-1809), who used Charcot to publically examine Le Sage’s theory. This led, naturally enough, to dispute and recrimination. Sigorgne was a well known popularizer of both Newton and Leibniz who had taught at the Collége du Plessis until he was accused of writing satirical poems mocking the court. For his role in the “Affair of the 14,” he was stripped of his job and banished from Paris. The Affair of the 14 was the subject of an interesting treatment by Robert Darnton; but the Lyon episode has never been studied. In this talk, I will unpack the episode and work out the behind-the-scenes relationships of the figures involved. This will shed some light on the conduct of academic disputes in eighteenth-century France.

 

Zach Falck, Independent Scholar

Advocating Ecological Practices as Environmental Activism: Frank Egler and Rights-of-way Management in the 1950s and 1960s

The post-World War II environmental movement in the United States gathered force as talented and energetic scientists explained the environmental problems of American life and persuaded many Americans to be concerned with them. Historians have analyzed how Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner and Paul Ehrlich commanded public attention and stimulated the nation’s environmental consciousness. For many other scientists, however, environmental activism involved beseeching colleagues and competitors to think ecologically rather than reaching out to mass audiences. These scientists advanced conservation ideals and were committed to shaping environmental management policies and practices among public and private actors, entities, and organizations. This paper will examine ecologist Frank Egler’s relationships with businesspeople, agricultural and biological research scientists, rights-of-way managers, and public officials – managers, technicians, and professionals who lacked knowledge of or training in plant ecology. Throughout the 1950s, Egler promoted the utility of ecological knowledge in the management of transportation, communication and power transmission corridors and advocated these strategies on behalf of the public. Egler’s struggles to convince policymakers and scientists to adopt new methods reveal how the limitations and obstacles constraining scientists working inside organizations and among experts and decision makers exposed environmental problems. While he continued working to influence rights-of-way management, Egler also studied how organizations that resisted reworking their seemingly ecologically-destructive practices produced knowledge, attempted to shape public attitudes and formed networks to undermine the environmental movement. Egler’s career permits further historical investigation of the boundaries between scientific communication and activism.

 

Fa-Ti Fan, Suny-Binghamton

An American Entomology in China: J. G. Needham and His Chinese Colleagues

This paper examines the Cornell entomologist J. G. Needham’s connections with Chinese biologists in the 1920s and 30s. At Cornell, Needham trained a number of Chinese students who would later play a major role in the development of biology in China. Needham himself visited China in 1927-28 and, with the help of his Chinese colleagues, he wrote a monograph on the dragonflies of China. In examining the case of Needham and his Chinese colleagues, this paper considers two aspects of modern science in national and inter/transnational contexts; they are (1) the translation of scientific practice and knowledge from one society to another (in this case, from the US to China and vice versa) and (2) science in the intersection of nationalism and internationalism.

 

Uljana Feest, Technische Universität Berlin

Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of Philosophy

In 1936, the philosopher Edmund Husserl published his article, “The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.” The article was based on several lectures that he had given the previous year, one of which was entitled, “The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology”, another “Philosophy and the Crisis of European Mankind.” In this work, he laid out what he took to be the crisis of science, i.e., that its progress relies on the elimination of subjectivity, thereby failing to be relevant to human life. My paper has several aims: (1) to use Husserl’s analysis of crisis to throw light on the works of other authors concerned about the crisis of psychology; (2) to place both Husserl’s and other authors’ analyses within the broader context of early 20th century discourse of crisis and reconstruction; and (3) to show that while Husserl’s diagnosis of the state of philosophy and the sciences remains unchanged from 1900 to the mid 1930s, the word “crisis” only appears in the 1930s. I argue that while Husserl early on viewed philosophy as having taken a wrong turn (failing to provide an adequate treatment of human subjectivity, science, and rationality), this conviction reached a climax towards the end of his life, when his own life became deeply affected by the rise of Nazism. I conclude with a discussion of the relationship between crisis as an actor’s term, and the historical circumstances in which it was employed.

 

Suzanne Fischer, University of Minnesota

Apologia for Quackery: Medical Entrepreneurship and the Problem of Efficacy

Is “quackery” a useful analytical category for understanding the history of medicine? Medical practitioners who have engaged less than reluctantly in market activities such as advertising have often been categorically tagged “quack.” Despite the embededness of medicine in market activities, medical entrepreneurship has been treated differently in the historiography than other medical practices. In particular, the historiography of quackery suffers from a double standard defined by a focus on efficacy. My research on “men’s doctors” who treated syphilis in the 1910s illustrates a diversity of medical business practices as well contemporary contestations around medical legitimacy. Using the example of men’s specialist quacks’ advertisements for syphilis treatment, both before and after Salvarsan, I demonstrate the historiographical use of the concept of efficacy to dismiss fringe practitioners. Further, I argue that the negative connotations around “quackery” and its lack of clear definition call for a more robust analysis of medical business.

 

Donald Forsdyke, Queen’s University, Canada

William Bateson’s unacknowledged debt to Charles Darwin’s research associate George Romanes

That geographically isolated races could become distinct “species” had long been known. Edmund Catchpool noted (1884) that, although anatomically differentiated, such races often remained reproductively compatible and so were not species. If the barrier were removed the races might cross to produce fertile offspring. True reproductive isolation would usually require anatomical (or physiological) differentiations over long periods. But “races” occupying the same ground could be reproductively isolated (i.e. they were distinct species) even when anatomical differences were minimal (or even absent). Catchpool’s proposal that isolation had been achieved by unspecified internal mechanisms was independently advanced in 1886 at the Linnean Society by George Romanes (1848-94). With knowledge of Michael Guyer’s observations on the chromosomes of sterile hybrids (1900), Bateson proposed an internal mechanism for speciation and (with prompting from C. R. Crowther) agreed that many small differences between homologous chromosomes might cumulate to prevent their meiotic pairing, so generating hybrid sterility (i.e. reproductive isolation). Although reminded by Joseph Cunningham of Romanes’ work, Bateson dismissed him as a “paper philosopher.” Romanes’ Linnean lecture had been given while Bateson was on an Asian expedition without access to journals. However, a letter to his sister, Anna, shows that he received copies of Nature containing the lecture and supported Romanes’ views. Like Romanes, he read, but failed to understand Samuel Butler, who with Ewald Hering, first saw heredity in informational terms (see: “Treasure Your Exceptions.” The Life and Science of William Bateson by A. G. Cock & D. R. Forsdyke, Springer, NY. 2008).

 

Michael Fournier, Dalhousie University

Boethius and the Consolatio quadrivii

Although Boethius wrote on all four mathematical sciences, we have only his De musica and Institutio arithmetica. While these works provide hints about his understanding of the relation that obtains between the sciences, I consider the evidence from the Consolatio to shed new light on how Boethius understood the quadrivium. The sciences appear in the Consolatio as various forms of the orbis (circle or sphere). The presentation of the sciences in this context provides a concrete example of how they are for Boethius a ladder which leads from the sensible to the intelligible. Astronomy is considered in the first book, where the circle of the stars is the key to the Prisoner’s recovery of sensation. Music is considered in the second book’s famous presentation of the wheel of Fortune to the Prisoner’s ailing imagination. Geometry is considered in books three and four in accounts of the circle of creation and the circle of Fate. The former is exemplified in the mythico-rational central poem, which owes much to Plato’s Timaeus and Proclus’s commentary on it. The later moves from a consideration of mathematicals as the principles of the sensible to a consideration of geometrical form (specifically the relation of circle and center) as an image of a higher reality. Finally, arithmetic, and in particular the way that in it the multiplicity of number and in fact the principles of all the sciences are contained in unity itself, is coordinated with the account of the simultaneous presence of all time to eternity.

 

Alan Gabbey, Barnard College, Columbia University

Hamlet and Other Machines

Hamlet signs off his letter to Ophelia (Act 2, Scene 2) with these curious words, “Adieu. Thine evermore, most dear Lady, whilst this Machine is to him, Hamlet.” According to the OED, this is the first appearance in printed English (1604) of “machine” in the sense of a living body, especially the human body. Does Hamlet really see his body in a proto-Cartesian light, rather than as a piece of lowly stage machinery, or as an instrument in the mechanics of the plot? These questions reflect the early modern historian’s problem in dealing with the “machine” concept. One line of attack is to ask: what kinds of machine would have been thought of then as “natural kinds”, and in what senses? Hamlet the human being belongs to a natural kind, as do the Cartesian machines that constitutes human and animal bodies. What about those artifactual machines that serve as paradigms of explanation in mechanical philosophy? If they belong to natural kinds, are they products of nature after all, and what therefore explains their own actions and properties? If they do not belong to natural kinds, how can they as artifactual structures explain “natural” phenomena?

 

Marilyn Gaull, Boston University

Romantic Climates: “A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice”

In the common conversation of art and science during the Romantic period, climate was visualized as shifting either to heat or to cold with similarly dire Malthusian consequences, plague, starvation, conflict, and death. The solutions, many believed, lay in altering human behavior either morally, if one were religious, or through inventions if one were scientific, micro-climates from parasols to steam engines, heat and energy-producing machines which powered the Industrial Revolution. All gradations and responses were recorded in poetry and art, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, Turner, but, above all, Erasmus Darwin.

 

Sander Gliboff, Indiana University

Morphology strikes back: Richard Semon and a counter-revolt against genetics and experimentalism

Classic accounts of biology around 1900 depict an almost Kuhnian “revolt against morphology,” and even though this picture has been much revised and qualified, it still captures the perspective of evolutionary morphologists like Richard Semon (1859-1918), who saw himself as defending an old order against experimental Entwicklungsmechanik and genetics. Semon is now best known to historians of psychology for his Mneme theory of organic memory, but he actually began his career as an acolyte of Ernst Haeckel’s, a tropical traveler and collector, and author of a landmark work on the morphology of the Australian fauna. Following a scandalous elopement with the young wife of a senior professor in 1897, his academic job prospects and access to laboratory space dwindled, so he took up theoretical work--just in time to counter the revolt that was threatening to make his previous research obsolete. In a series of books, he argued that the new experimentalism made unwarranted generalizations that ignored variation, history, and the uniqueness of every individual. His Mneme theory was as much a contribution to biology as psychology, and was intended as an alternative account of all the same phenomena as Entwicklungsmechanik and Mendelian genetics. It would dispense with hypothetical hereditary particles and mysterious processes of mutation, and save as much as possible of Haeckel’s older synthesis of evolution, development, and heredity.

 

Benjamin Goldberg, University of Pittsburgh

De Generatione Animalium and the New Science

De Generatione Animalium (1651) represents more than twenty years of anatomical investigation and philosophical speculation on the part of William Harvey. Yet the work has generally been ignored by both philosophers and historians of science though De Generatione is a tour-de-force of methodological and philosophical sophistication. First, I discuss Harvey’s argument for epigenesis and put it in historical and intellectual context. Harvey’s epigenesis has three main elements: (1) development of form over time, part by part; (2) a teleological character, that is, the parts are for the organism as a whole; (3) the insistence that there is no pre-existing matter upon which the embryo is formed, and that, as a corollary the processes of nutrition and generation are identical. The third element of Harvey’s theory also relies upon his postulation of a novel theoretical entity, namely, the ovum. Next, I argue that Harvey’s Aristotelianism provided a better initial home for the project of reconfiguring physiology and medicine than early mechanism. Finally, I will discuss the fact that though historians contrast preformation with epigenesis, this is not Harvey’s contrast. As a result of his postulation of ova in vivipara and his observations of fetal development, this comparison is a non-starter for Harvey. Rather, he contrasts epigenesis with metamorphosis, which we shall see is much closer to spontaneous generation. The contrast in Harvey’s work is not between epigenetic and preformationist theories of generation, but between epigenetic and morphogenetic processes of generation, both of which occur in nature but in different sorts of organisms.

 

 

Mirjam Goller, Humboldt University of Berlin

Cybernetics as Model in Russian Philosophy from the Modernist Age to Nowadays Thinking

My paper will show the specific and productive combination of mathematics and philosophy in Russian thinking that can be described in terms of cybernetics. Prominent Russian and Soviet thinkers deal with the idea of a dialectical and processual unity of physical and metaphysical aspects. This idea is virulent from the modernist – symbolistic – age to contemporary philosophy. The concept of the symbol and the all-unity (vse-edinstvo) in Solov’ev and – earlier – in the philosophical mathematics of Nikolai Bugaev influenced the following generation of philosophers as well as the aesthetic development of the Russian avantgarde. Pavel Florenskii and Aleksei Losev, tried to combine religious and scientific explorations of the world as a productive and complementing unity. Merab Mamardashvili and Aleksandr Piatigorskii, protagonists of the Moscow methodological circle from the late fifties and early sixties on, designed a theory of thinking, which include the individual sphere as well as a collective, the linguistic as well as the bodily, the immanent as well as the transcendent, without dropping these dichotomic terms of Western philosophy. I will probe the basic concepts of the named philosophers in respecting different cybernetic models.

 

Graeme Gooday, University of Leeds

Purity vs Property? The Patenting context of constructing “pure” and “applied” electricity 1880-1920.

Historians have long noted the problems raised by attempts since the mid nineteenth century to differentiate between “pure” and “applied” science. Ronald Kline (1995) rightly concludes that uses of this mooted demarcation were typically value-laden, partisan and above all rhetorical. Unsurprisingly then, historians tend to appeal instead to Thomas Hughes (1986) notion of a “seamless web” of science, technology and society that undercuts any such bifurcating distinction. Yet refined historiographical sensibilities do not help us explain either the broad discursive resilience of the pure/applied dichotomy from the 1880s, notably by Henry Rowland (USA) and Oliver Lodge (UK), or the rejection of it by such eminent figures as William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). This paper explores one contemporaneous development that helps to explain the bipartisan intensity of such concerns in this period: the huge rise of patent claims (and associated litigation) that characterized the rise of the electrical industries of telephony, lighting and power. While Rowland, Lodge and Thomson all took out patents in electrical technology, only the lattermost was comfortable with funding his physical researches from the royalties thereof. We thus explored how Rowland and Lodge both made characteristic pleas (following the 1870 call of London chemist Alexander Williamson) for an independently funded “pure science” that would spare them from this ruthless - and thus ungentlemanly - pursuit of intellectual property. This paper thus shows how an understanding of this phenomenon helps us to some extent to explain how a “pure physics” eventually emerged in the twentieth century, seemingly disentangled from both its electro-technical premises and applications.

 

Matthew Goodrum, Virginia Tech

Defending Australopithecus as a Human Ancestor: Raymond Dart, the Osteodontokeratic, and Tool-use as a Criterion for Establishing the Phylogenetic Status of Hominids.

When Raymond Dart described the first Australopithecus fossils in 1925 there was general scepticism about his assertion that the specimen represented a human ancestor. The anatomy of the fossil and its geological age were too poorly known to convince sceptical anthropologists that Dart’s interpretation of it was correct. However, between 1945 and 1960 Dart discovered more Australopithecus fossils at a site called Makapansgat, along with a substantial number of animal bones. Soon Dart became convinced that many of the animal bones found at Makapansgat showed marks of having been modified to be used as tools. On the basis of these observations Dart proposed that Australopithecus had used bone, teeth, and horn tools. Since only humans use tools Dart argued that this “osteodontokeratic” culture of Australopithecus proved that they were well on the way to becoming human and were a direct ancestor. This raises issues about the criteria used by paleoanthropologists to determine the phylogenetic status of new hominid fossils.

 

Melinda Gormley, Oregon State University

German Émigré Geneticists in America, 1930s & 1940s

As demonstrated by the rich scholarly literature on physicists’ relocations during the 1930s, historians recognize the important role in these immigrations of international scientific networks and an individual scientist’s reputation. Refugee literature often focuses on scientists whose lives tell a success story. The Manhattan Project, in particular, received sizeable financial support, provided many refugees with jobs, and its employees were considered important to the war effort. Thus, the experiences of these refugees should be viewed as unique. In contrast I will explore some biologists’ personal and professional experiences. Four German biologists who had a smooth transition in America cultivated ties to their homeland by remaining in close contact and looking out for one another. They were Richard Goldschmidt, Curt Stern, Ernst Caspari, and Joachim Werner Braun. One geneticist who did not have a positive experience was Victor Jollos. The American geneticist L.C. Dunn served on two refugee committees, the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars and Columbia University’s Faculty Fellowship Fund. His role in assisting his émigré geneticist colleagues is an important element in this story.

 

Christopher Green, York University

The Mind in the Urban Jungle: Chicago’s Psychology in the 1890s

It has become popular to study the impact on the character of a scientific endeavor of its having developed in a certain location. The impact of a particular place on the development of psychology may have been nowhere more significant than in Chicago in the 1890s, where labor strife, immigration tensions, and class struggle threatened the city itself. The Railroad Strike of 1877, the Haymarket bombing of 1886, the Pullman boycott of 1894, led to fears that civil war was at hand. The University of Chicago opened its doors in 1892. Its philosophy department centered on John Dewey, and three of his junior protTgTs, James Hayden Tufts James Rowland Angell and George Herbert Mead. Dewey and Angell would founding the first indigenous American school of psychology, Functionalism, which was grounded, in part, in the Darwin-inspired psychological writings of William James. More than that, however, Chicago Functionalism constituted an effort to make academic psychology relevant to the profound social and economic problems the city was facing. As Tufts put it, in ethics texts, “little if any attention was given to the economic problems which the nineties were disclosing. I felt the necessity of a method of viewing the moral life that would show its deep routes in human nature and social situations.” Concrete urban concerns were the cradle not only for Dewey’s famed “laboratory school” and educational theory, but also for Angell’s psychological teachings, Mead’s “social behaviorism,” and Tufts’ ethical writings. This presentation will examine those connections in more detail.

Elizabeth Green Musselman, Southwestern University

Breaking Through: Meteors and Universal Knowledge in Colonial South Africa

This paper explores how colonial and metropolitan astronomers transformed local astronomical phenomena (like meteors) into material that could enter the scientific record. More importantly, it will explore how and why colonial and metropolitan astronomers found Africans’ (Khoekhoe, San, Xhosa, Tswana) notions of the heavens lacking the quality of universal knowledge. I will argue that the “missing” pieces in African technique were mathematical calculation and what educated Europeans would recognize as a theoretical vision of the cosmos. I will further explain what the documentary and material records tell us about southern Africans’ alternate conceptions of universal knowledge.

 

Julie Grissom, University of Oklahoma

Homo vermiculosus: Nicolas Andry and 18th Century Parasitology

The advent of widespread use of the compound microscope for scientific investigation in the mid-seventeenth century led to a flourishing of research into parasitic organisms, especially worms, and their role in disease. Although historians of medicine have written about the history of parasitology, almost all of these studies begin with the formal establishment of parasitology as a scientific discipline in the latter half of the 19th century. The preceding two centuries of parasitological research remain relatively unexamined. In this talk I argue that parasites, especially worms, were important explanatory mechanisms for a wide range of diseases in the 18th century. Thus the neglect of 18th-century parasitology by historians of medicine means that we’ve missed a crucial aspect of medical theory in this period. My focus in this talk is on the work of the French physician Nicolas Andry du Bois-regard (1658-1742), who, referred to as “homo vermiculosus” by his peers, provides an excellent starting point for a discussion of parasitology in this period. Andry’s practical helminthology text, An account of the Breeding of Worms in Human Bodies (1701), is illustrative of the importance of worms in eighteenth century medical theory as the potential source of a remarkable number of diseases. I argue that not only does this work demonstrate the extensive production of parasitological knowledge, particularly through microscopic investigation, but also that Andry’s numerous references to the experiences of other physicians, through the inclusion of their illustrations, case histories, and letters, provide evidence of contemporary widespread interest in parasitology.

 

Katja Guenther, Harvard University

A Body Made of Nerves: Early 20th-Century Neuroscience and the Rise of Cerebrocentrism

In modern neuroscience, the prime object of inquiry is the brain. This interest is reflected in broader culture, where the self is often located within the brain’s physically defined limits, from “brain in a vat” philosophies to brain death. But the brain has not always been the main focus of attention. In the early 20th century, an important but now much-neglected clinical tradition considered the brain to be part of a larger whole. It was the nervous system in its entirety that elicited contemporary interest - the disembodied brain was an inconceivable abstraction. This paper studies the case of Breslau neurosurgeon Otfrid Foerster and his work on the neural axis. Foerster’s procedure of surgically removing the anterior roots of the spinal cord was widely used across Europe in the early decades of the 20th century as a treatment of last resort against intractable pain and spastic paralysis. The success of the operation is impressively documented in photographs taken in Foerster’s clinic at Breslau, and in a film from 1910 by his Belgian colleague Arthur van Gehuchten, one of the earliest neurological films in history. After WWI, Foerster used a similar technique on the brains of patients with post- traumatic epilepsy because he saw the brain as an extension of the spinal cord. But ironically, these procedures on the brain, which assumed the continuity between brain and body, have informed the cerebrocentric tradition that asserts their division.

 

Vincent Guillin, College de France

Five Ways of Being a Scientific Phallocrat: Auguste Comte’s Biological Arguments for the Subjection of Women.

In recent years, Comtian scholarship has insisted on the crucial role Auguste Comte, the founder of modern positivism, ascribed to women in the moral regeneration of modern societies. However, Comte’s acknowledgment of women’s social role never extended to a belief in the reality, or even the possibility, of sexual equality. As far as he was concerned, the patriarchal order was built to last, for women’s intellectual inferiority was a natural fact that nothing could undo. And by nature, Comte here understood the biological nature of the female sex. In my paper, I will review the various biological arguments adduced by Comte in support of his belief in the natural intellectual inferiority of women, paying particular attention to the way they appeared in Comte’s correspondence with one of the most eloquent voices of 19th century women’s rights movement, namely John Stuart Mill. My paper intends to show that, despite Comte’s reliance on classical biological and medical arguments for women’s intellectual inferiority (drawn from anatomy, physiology, developmental analysis and inter-specific analysis), what is characteristic of his sexism is its commitment to phrenology: whereas generations of physicians used to maintain that ‘’Total mulier in utero’’, the new ‘’cerebral physiology’’ of Gall and his associates claimed that ‘’Tota mulier in cerebro’’. That was exactly the core of Comte’s ‘’scientific phallocratism’’.

 

Cai Guise-Richardson, Iowa State University

Neurotic Dogs, Drunken Cats: Jules Masserman, Horsley Gantt, and the Development of Animal Models of Neurosis, 1930-60

Animal models of mental illness, developed in the mid-20th century, informed the rapid development of psychopharmaceuticals after 1950. Understanding the models’ rationale illuminates mid-century concepts of mental illness, particularly anxiety and neurosis. These models were part of an attempt to understand the nature, cause, and cure of maladaptive behaviors. Rooted in contemporary understandings of psychology and psychiatry, animal neurosis researchers merged neurologic and psychologic models of mental illness. Animals were taught conditioned responses, and anxiety produced by conflicting signals or altering expected stimulus response patterns, thereby setting up conflicts between past and current experience. Jules H. Masserman and Horsley Gantt were pioneers in developing animal models of neuroses. Working with various mammals, including monkeys, dogs, and cats, they built on the work of Pavlov and modified it to fit mid-20th century theories and issues. Masserman’s animal models of neurosis played an important role in the mid-20th century psychosomatic interpretation of health, in which neuroses had and could prolong physiological problems through psychosomatic feedback. Gantt worked more openly within a psychodynamic interpretation of neurosis development, arguing neuroses involved internal frustration and conflict, the mental life of the animal. Although their experiments with neurotic dogs and drunken cats appear bizarre in hindsight, they illustrate the profound differences between mid-20th century and early 21st century interpretations of mental illness and psychosomatics. These models help explain development of anti-neurotic drugs, such as Valium, and the rationale for their widespread use in the 1950s and 1960s.

 

Matt Gunterman, Yale University

The Germ in the Chalice: A Case When Science Met the Sacred

In this paper I examine the religious artifact both as an expression of scientific understanding and as a mediator of emergent scientific knowledge within religious communities. I do so by analyzing the controversy that erupted in the late nineteenth century among American Protestants as proponents of the germ theory of disease began their challenge of the sanitary quality of the traditional shared communion chalice. My specific concern here is a discussion of the material culture produced through their efforts to impose sanitary reform on the traditional communion ceremony. The designs of these sanitary communion forms, which are recorded in patent applications, advertisements, and in surviving specimens, fell into two categories: those that centered on the use of individual cups by communicants and those that featured a chalice so modified as to conform in some sense to sanitary standards. The scriptural legitimacy and use of individual communion cups, which proved to be the more popular and commercially successful sanitary reform, was justified in light of germ theory through a shift in emphasis from the communion ritual as a moment for the sharing of the substance of the wine to one of the sharing of experience, which was the act of communing. The modified chalice, however, reflected a desire to protect communicants from one another’s germs while preserving the traditional communion pattern and the appearance of shared substance. Finally these modified chalices provide a means to engage how their makers understood the implications of germ theory around 1900.

 

Sanem Guvenc-Salgirli, State University Of New York At Binghamton

From Public Health to Eugenics: The 1937 Typhus Epidemic in Istanbul

The outbreak of typhus epidemic was not an extraordinary phenomenon for Istanbul. The city had lived through many of such episodes throughout its history. Yet, in 1937 typhus created an unprecedented panic among the public, the city chroniclers, newspaper columnists, and municipality. Over the course of three months, from June till September 1937, approximately one thousand cats and dogs were exterminated; porters and beggars were banned from traveling within the confines of public spaces; public baths were closed down; street vendors were forced to be vaccinated; owners of the grocery stores were forced to do health check-ups and strict rules were enforced by the municipality concerning the order of the streets. This paper seeks to discuss the uniqueness of this situation, and the diversity of the public health measures to annihilate typhus. It argues that one of the reasons for the panic was the concentration of the virus to poorest quarters of the city, accompanied by fear of the poor as the main carriers of the disease. Equally important was the social context of the 1930s, in which the debates on eugenics were heightened and its practice gained a widespread acceptance from the public. This paper suggests that the typhus epidemic of 1937 was not an isolated, but an important case where the boundaries between public heath and eugenics were transgressed.

 

Paul Halpern, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia

The Tragic Final Years of Paul Ehrenfest

Physicist Paul Ehrenfest had extraordinary talents as a teacher, mentor and original thinker. At Leiden University during the 1920s, he hosted an impressive array of visitors, served as an important sounding board for Einstein, advised Samuel Goudsmit and George Uhlenbeck as they developed the theory of spin, and stimulated important discourse in general about quantum and statistical physics. Ehrenfest’s final years, however, from 1930 to 1933, were marked by severe self-doubt and depression, culminating in suicide. Through an analysis of his correspondence with family members, including his older brother Hugo, an esteemed obstetrician working in St. Louis, we will detail his desperate attempts to grapple with emerging physical theories, find a new position in the United States, and deal with a dire economical situation and pressing family matters including finding care for his son Wassik who had Down Syndrome.

 

Orit Halpern, New School for Social Research

Architectures of Communication: Cybernetics, Temporality, and Perception in Post-War American Design

This paper will examine historical transformations in the relationship between the image, time, and knowledge after the war. One site to investigate these changes in representation is at the locus of science, design, and architecture in the works of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes for the Center for Advanced Visual Study at MIT and in the interests of science education. In these works the nature of the image, the materiality of vision, and the relationship between documentation and communication was aggressively being rethought. All of these projects were deeply invested in the emergent terms of cybernetics and electronic media. Ontology, documentation, and representation were seemingly replaced by discourses of communication, performance, and modularity. The world as interface for the mediation of on-going, lively communicative exchanges. In their work we can find evidence of a more global reformulation of the work of the document, the relationship between abstraction and materiality, and between science, aesthetics, and visuality.

 

Vivien Hamilton, University of Toronto

Physics in use: Models of electricity in 19th century electrotherapy textbooks

Electrotherapy, the popular 19th century practice of applying various types of electricity to the body for medical benefit, occupies only a small corner of standard medical histories, and fails altogether to appear in most histories of physics. Indeed, textbooks outlining the principles of electrotherapy for the practicing physician may seem to be an obscure resource for a historian of physics, but they prove extremely helpful in developing a picture of the state of physics knowledge as it existed beyond the professional boundaries of the physics community. Those who practiced electrotherapy often appealed to physical principles of electricity in their struggle for professional legitimacy. An understanding of the nature of electrical phenomenon separated legitimate practitioners from quacks. In their widely read treatise on electrotherapy, the American physicians George Beard and A. D. Rockwell declare, “No one can be a master in electrotherapeutics without also being a master in electrophysics,” and the 1881 edition of their book begins with an 80 page introduction to the physics of electricity necessary for the successful operation of electro-medical devices. This paper takes a close look at the physics in Beard and Rockwell’s textbook, examining in particular the relationship between the physical models in the book and contemporary theories in physics. Echoing recent work on popular science, we find that the physics in the book is not merely a passive simplification of contemporary electrical theory, but a creative and autonomous knowledge system, shaped by the particular practical concerns of the practicing physician.

 

 

Kimberly Hamlin, Miami University (Ohio)

Bearded Ladies, Hypertrichosis, and Evolutionary Anxieties about Gender, 1878-1900

In 1878, at the very first meeting of the American Dermatological Society, the doctors coined a term for a disease that afflicted scores of their female patients: “hypertrichosis, “ the disease of excessive hairiness. Previously tolerated as normal or at least inevitable, female facial and body hair was now a disease to be combated. What accounted for this shift? In this paper, I place hypertrichosis in the context of the reception of Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) and The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872) and argue that the disease was a manifestation of American’s anxiety about evolutionary theory and its implication that humans and animals evolved from common ancestors. Among the most controversial elements of The Descent was Darwin’s explanation of the loss of female body hair. Darwin suggested that, over time, women had selected mates with beards, while men had chosen the least hairy mates, which explained why the two sexes differed so greatly with regard to body hair. Compared to other animals that varied widely in appearance according to sex, facial and body hair were among the few visible signs separating men from women and, thus, important markers of gender and evolutionary advancement. Hairy women, then, were not only less female than their smooth-skinned sisters but also more closely related to their primate cousins. In discussions of hypertrichosis, then, doctors, patients, and the public were also puzzling over what it meant to be human, animal, male, and female.

 

Gary Hardcastle, Bloomsburg University

A “Coalition Dominated by the Unorthodox”: The Beginning of the Philosophy of Science Association

Philosophy of Science debuted in January of 1934 as the self-described “organ” of the newly-formed Philosophy of Science Association. Its initial eleven-member editorial board included some well-known philosophers of science – Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, L. Susan Stebbing, and Morris Raphael Cohen – and others whose presence is rather surprising, like the mathematicians E. T. Bell, Dirk Struik, and Alexander Weinstein, the physicist-turned-legal scholar Walter Wheeler Cook, the geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller, and the psychologist Karl Lashley. Matters are much the same regarding the Journal’s Advisory Board, in which the names of scientists and mathematicians usually dissociated from the philosophy of science outnumber philosophers ten-to-one. It was a “coalition dominated by the unorthodox,” wrote the journal’s first editor, William Malisoff. Perhaps this eclecticism reflects nothing more than the youth of the discipline of philosophy of science and a corresponding strategy of having prominent scientists to lend their names to the new journal. But perhaps not. This talk examines whether the Philosophy of Science Association and its journal were indeed created to reify and advance a particular discipline or profession, the philosophy of science. I’ll be interested particularly in laying out the early history of the Association and its journal on the basis of archival materials and in uncovering the motivation and vision of those who created it.

 

Laura Harkewicz, University of California, San Diego

“Selective Illumination:” Using the Scientific Uncertainty of the Bravo Medical Program to Establish “Changed Circumstances”

“Selective illumination” is the use of knowledge based on the user’s relationship to it. It is apparent in the way uncertainty related to knowledge about the fallout exposure of citizens of the Marshall Islands from the 1954 Bravo thermonuclear test has been mobilized in Marshallese claims for increased compensation for damages from the U.S. Nuclear Testing Program in the Pacific (1946 – 1958). On-going compensation claims rest in part on the concept of “changed circumstances,” which provides for renegotiation of compensation should evidence emerge suggesting that knowledge about environmental or medical conditions have changed. How and why has the knowledge changed? Classified documents released in the mid-1990s revealed information about government-sponsored human radiation research, including the medical histories of the Marshallese. These documents contain data that continue to be analyzed resulting in a multiplicity of conclusions. Much of this data were collected by scientists of the “Bravo Medical Program,” which was conducted for over 40 years and had the dual purpose to provide medical care to the exposed as well as produce knowledge about the biological effects of exposure to radioactive fallout. I argue that the Program’s dual goals were a major cause of tensions that developed between the Marshallese and Program scientists, and that these tensions are evident in the changed circumstances debate. This paper explores how scientific uncertainty about Bravo evidence prevented closure to the debate and supported the selective illumination of knowledge.

 

Steven Harris, Harvard University

Trading Zone or Battleground? Power, Knowledge, and ‘Nature’ in 17th-century New France

Jesuit missionaries and indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes Region met in a “middle ground” where they bartered knowledge and beliefs as well as pelts and beads. Like their trade in material objects, exchange of knowledge was without common currency and never between equals. I propose to approach the question of asymmetric power relations in Jesuit appropriation of indigenous knowledge by examining two seemingly unrelated fields: the cartography of the Great Lakes and materia medica from the same geographical region. By juxtaposing indigenous (principally Algonquian) knowledge of landscapes and curing practices with Jesuit accounts of the same, I hope to show that, like the physical territory itself, the human body was a battleground. For Jesuit missionaries, what was at stake was not so much “possession” of an individual district, body, or soul, but the establishment and promulgation of a conception of “Nature” that segregated the “natural” from the “supernatural” (e.g., natural versus spiritual cures), permitted its uncircumscribed use for human ends (natural resources versus sacred gift), and yet insisted on its subservience to the absolute monarchy of a Euro- Christian god. The Jesuits’ taxonomy not only stood in stark contrast to the highly individualized, phenomenological character of Algonquian cosmology, it structured Jesuits’ assault on virtually every aspect of that cosmology. This case study suggests that, with regard to conceptualizations of the physical body and its environment, the metaphors of “trading zone” and “middle ground” fail to capture the contentiousness of knowledge appropriation along cultural frontiers.

 

 

Peter Harrison, University of Oxford

God and Early Modern Natural Philosophy

The identity of natural philosophy has been a major preoccupation of historians of science in recent years. Claims that natural philosophy is significantly different from modern science have focused on such questions as the role of religious considerations in natural philosophy, the balance between theory and practice, the relative priority of action and contemplation, and the status of mathematics. In many of these discussions attention has been focused on disciplinary boundaries as they were understood in the past, and on the content of the relevant disciplines. This paper sets out a different perspective on these questions by proposing that we think about medieval and early modern disciplines not only in terms how they divided intellectual territory, but also in terms of how they were understood as contributing to different aspects of moral and intellectual formation. Such an approach enables us to frame the question of the relationship between science and religion in the early modern period in a new and potentially fruitful way. It also leads to the conclusion that both Medieval and early modern natural philosophy could be “about God,” albeit in rather different ways.

 

Gary Hatfield, University of Pennsylvania

Koehler, Koffka, and the “Crisis” in Psychology

During the 1920s and 1930s, Koehler and Koffka each responded to the perception of a “crisis” in psychology. In reviewing Driesch’s 1926 book, Koffka affirmed a crisis in psychology’s handling of meaning. He rejected Driesch’s solution based in vitalism and reanalyzed the problem in familiar Gestalt terms: previous psychology was caught up in “machine theory” that construed the primary data of psychology as meaningless “sensory elements, “ whereas the Gestaltists recognized as basic phenomena of human experience organized wholes imbued with meaning. Koffka and Koehler emphasized that any psychological solution to the problem of meaning must come through natural scientific methods and theories, and they insisted that meaning and value could be objects of natural scientific psychology. Koffka, who had moved to the US in 1927, later explained that in introducing Gestalt psychology to an American audience he portrayed a different “crisis” than he would have for a European audience. In America, he emphasized basic scientific failings in previous psychological theory; in Europe, he would have emphasized the problems of meaning, value, and culture -- or meaning writ large. I compare these two strategies of emphasis in the writings of Koffka and Koehler.

 

Amy Hay, University of Texas -- Pan American

‘The Quickening Conscience’: Scientists Protest Agent Orange

In December of 1969, the American Association for the Advancement of Science Board announced its intent to investigate the possible ecological harm caused by the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam. A number of scientists attending the 1969 meeting expressed their support of the Council’s decision. While some worried about the ill effects caused by other kinds of technology throughout the world, not just in Vietnam, or thought there was little chance that scientists’ objections could affect war policy, some viewed the AAAS decision as “the quickening conscience of the American scientific community.” Scientific protest about the herbicide campaign specifically, and about biological and chemical warfare more generally in the 1960s and 70s, focused on the harm done to the environment and people of Vietnam, and has received little historical examination. The concerns prompted controversy, as the scientific community was as divided as the general American public over whether Americans should be fighting in Vietnam. Using government documents, published writings, journal articles, and interviews, this paper examines the genesis of scientific protest, major actors, and their efforts to stop what would be later called the “ecocide of Indochina.” It argues that scientists? objections composed a significant sector of Americans protesting the war, and these scientists represent an important presence in a scientific community often condemned as unthinking collaborators in an unjust war.

 

David Hecht, Bowdoin College

Scientific Americans: Nuclear Physics and Nationalism after Hiroshima

This paper explores cultural conceptions of “science” and “the scientist” in the early Cold War. It begins with a rhetorical analysis of the work of Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” whose public discourse after World War II was significantly constructed around hallowed American names and traditions; Oppenheimer cited Thomas Jefferson to advance idealized notions of science’s virtues and Abraham Lincoln to defend the wisdom of eschewing short-term needs in favor of long-term political vision. He also regularly harkened back to Enlightenment ideals, using them to link the promise of scientific progress with the founding principles of the United States. Not all prominent nuclear scientists used such patriotic imagery, but dozens of like-minded scientist-activists shared and clearly articulated a political vision that melded American democratic ideals with a scientific version of secular humanism. Though the policy goals of such activists usually met with only limited success, their rhetorical and ideological choices had a significant cultural reach outside of the realm of direct political advocacy. Many Americans rejected scientists’ more radical political suggestions, while simultaneously adopting and recasting the admiration for traditional scientific and national glory that suffused the rhetoric of Oppenheimer and others. This paper explores the ways that scientist-activists and the public adapted similarly idealized visions of science in very different ways – to celebrate, challenge, and complicate the cultural place of science and scientists.

 

John Henry, University of Edinburgh

Isaac Newton: Biblicist or Deist?

The late Professor R. S. Westfall suggested in a number of essays that Isaac Newton was effectively a deist. This view has either been specifically rejected, or silently dismissed, in more recent studies of Newton’s religion. This response seems to be based on the assumption that it makes no sense to consider someone who spent as much time and energy as Newton did in studying Holy Scripture to be a deist. Deists, after all, rejected the role of revelation in religion in favour of reason. But this assumption is by no means unassailable, as Professor Westfall’s conclusion shows. Westfall knew as much about Newton’s obsessive study of Scripture as anyone, and yet he still saw Newton, albeit perhaps in spite of himself, as a deist. This paper will reconsider and reassess Westfall’s claims, with a view to determining what Westfall meant by suggesting Newton was a deist, and whether he was correct.

 

 

Ellen Herman, University of Oregon

“At Risk”: Why Childhood Matters for History of Science

The calculation and management of dangers – from morbidity and mortality to unemployment and climate change – have been inextricably linked to the progress of quantitative methods, as historians of science and technology have frequently noted. Historians of gender and family in twentieth-century U.S. history have emphasized the centrality of women and children to social welfare programs designed to protect citizens from harm, while intellectual and cultural historians have interpreted the rise of a “therapeutic ethos” as a development central to modernity and the spread of consumer capitalism. This paper engages these fundamental insights from three different areas of scholarship in order to trace the history of risk. First, it will ask why children have served historically as the prototypical “at risk” population, uniquely vulnerable to a host of “risk factors” that have been subject to both measurement and multiplication over time. Second, it will briefly consider the case of child sexual abuse after 1945. When and why did this issue, so often shrouded in secrecy and shame, become a compelling subject of research in the human sciences and biomedicine? How did clinical and empirical inquiries shape legislation and policy related to preventing child sexual abuse as well as promoting novel interventions designed to help children and families recover from trauma? What can it teach us about the cultural authority that science has exerted over definitions of selfhood, citizenship, and government in the modern United States?

 

Volker Hess, Charité Berlin

Standardizing values - the value of standardization. Implementation of serotherapy as model of modern drug regulation in France and Germany, 1894-1900

Serotherapy was developed as a treatment against diphtheria between 1890 and 1894 in Berlin and in Paris. The treatment for a widespread disease that issued from innovative research in microbiology represented both one of the first industrially produced pharmaceutical products as well as a challenge for the existing regulatory processes. Pharmacists were not in a position to certify the purity and concentration of the drugs, and at this time there was no administrative procedure in place for the monitoring of industrial manufacturing either. The evaluation that Ehrlich developed in Germany and that in an altered form came into use on the other side of the Rhine, was intended to solve these problems. In Germany it combined the control of an industrial process along with a state guarantee of therapeutic validity. In France on the other hand the production and supervision of the antitoxin was first left to science and organized corporatively The established standardizing procedures anticipated the central aspect of modern drug regulation. Their comparison demonstrates the technologies of trust with which the introduction of standardization into medicine negotiated therapeutic as well as moral values.

 

Bruce Hevly, University of Washington

Taking Aim at Physics: The Ballistic Pendulum, Physics Concepts and Rifle Marksmanship

This paper reports on part of a project to examine the target rifle as a mediating machine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States. Rifle ranges, as well-defined spaces characterized by social and physical discipline, peculiar technologies (including targets, marking and scoring systems, and the rifles themselves), and specialized practices, became associated with conceptual products reflecting these features. For example, the rifle appears as a central metaphor in Balfour Stewart’s 1874 treatise on the conservation of energy, which came out just as an American target shooting culture was being defined by the National Rifle Association at its new Creedmoor Range on Long Island. Here I argue that some of the ideas instantiated in target shooting -- promoted by the New York Times as a suitable national sport for the United States -- carried over into the main ideas advanced as a part of physics education in the US, via one artifact in particular: the ballistic pendulum. Described by Benjamin Robins in a 1742 publication, by the end of the nineteenth century the instrument had undergone a change in associations, from gunnery to laboratory demonstration. The meanings associated with it can be understood in part by reference to the significance of a new marksmanship culture in the United States, particularly one associated with student shooters.

 

Danian Hu, The City College of New York

One Doctrine, Two Different Consequences: the contentions of relativity in China and the Soviet Union

I have pointed out elsewhere that the criticism of relativity and Einstein in China began to emerge under the influence of dialectical materialism imported from the Soviet Union during the 1950s. That Marxist doctrine, mutually shared by many in both the U.S.S.R. and the P.R.C., however, led to two opposite developments in the 1960s. Whereas radical Chinese ideologues sponsored organized campaigns against relativity during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Soviet philosophers not only “withdrew their earlier accusations against Einstein” but also “tried to demonstrate the essential affinity of Einstein’s theories with Marxist ideology.” In this paper, I would like to compare the apparently dichotomic fates of relativity in these two Communist countries and explore the nature of the events.

 

Patti Hunter, Westmont College

Gertrude Cox in Africa: A Case Study in Science Patronage and International Statistics Education in the Cold War

Gertrude M. Cox (1900-1978), first chair of North Carolina State University’s Department of Experimental Statistics, worked in the 1960s to establish university statistics training programs in Africa and the Middle East. As a member of the governing board of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), she led that organization’s efforts to supply universities in so-called developing countries with prominent statisticians who could advise the universities as they created their own programs. Cox obtained some of the financial resources for these efforts from the United Nations, from agencies of the United States government, and from major American philanthropic foundations such as Ford and Rockefeller, each of which had its own agendas. This talk will provide examples of transnational scientific exchanges that had as their specific goal the strengthening of particular national scientific communities, but which occurred in the context of other national and international agendas – in particular, the Cold War foreign policy of the United States and the UN’s efforts to address issues of economic development. The talk will argue that while the strategy of tying their goals to these other agendas enabled statisticians to obtain some resources for their efforts to strengthen their professional communities, it also limited their success by forcing them to take into account interests that competed with, or at least stood in tension with their own

 

J. Benjamin Hurlbut, Harvard University

Confusing Deliberation: what “cloning” means for democracy

This paper will examine some American efforts to shift the terminology of public deliberations over human cloning away from the term “cloning.” While proponents of these terminological shifts have generally argued that a chief virtue of their favored terms is truth-to-nature, this paper will examine a subset which have sought further justification through reference to democratic norms. Terminological accuracy is essential, proponents have maintained, for fostering robust democratic deliberation over those matters which properly belong to the non-expert public: the social, the religious and the ethical. Proponents of these approaches have attempted to take what they see as inappropriately politicized objects (such as the SCNT-derived stem cell) out of politics so that they can reenter in a newly stabilized and uncontested way. In this way the traditional gatekeepers of fact also claim the role of guardians of democratic deliberation, or at least of the conditions for the possibility of it. These efforts to structure public discourse have been described as efforts to mitigate confusion and to control for ideological biases preexisting in the public understanding of the relevant science, thus expanding rather than narrowing the conceptual space for democratic dialogue. This paper will examine some of the contexts in which these custodial duties have been described and undertaken.

 

Joel Isaac, University of London

The Ecumenical Moment: Philosophy of Science, Scientific Philosophy, and Philosophical Science in Interwar America

The discipline of the philosophy of science can today claim a catholic range of interests and an impressive degree of technical sophistication. Philosophers of science concern themselves with fields as diverse as biology, mathematical logic, and the social sciences, and they bring to bear in their researches an impressive array of analytical tools. Strikingly, however, the philosophy of science is no longer an enterprise to which most non-philosophers – even those whose disciplines are the subject of philosophical thematization – feel competent to contribute. This situation stands in stark contrast to the epoch between the two World Wars, when the productive ferment both of philosophy and of the special sciences in the United States encouraged a remarkable set of social scientists, linguists, psychologists, natural scientists, and philosophers to carry on a multidisciplinary discussion about the nature of scientific knowledge, human understanding, and the unity (or disunity) of the sciences. In this paper, I assess one key node in this ecumenical interwar discourse on the philosophy of science, and offer some explanations for its emergence. My subject is the peculiar intellectual culture of Harvard University in the 1920s and 1930s. I shall discuss the key venues where exponents of various disciplines came to exchange views and formulate treatises on knowledge-making in the sciences. Among the representative texts I shall examine are Lawrence Joseph Henderson’s Pareto’s General Sociology (1935), Talcott Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action (1937), and Susanne Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1932).

 

Kenji Ito, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai)

Pedagogical Structure and Failure of Knowledge Transmission: Marginalization of the History of Science in Japan

Development of a certain discipline in, or its dissemination to, a given national context depends on various factors. One of them is pedagogical: the national education system affects development of a discipline at least in two ways. First, training of new generations of researchers depends on the educational system; second, academic employment possibilities of young researchers are largely determined by the system of higher education. The present paper aims to illuminate some aspects of transmission of a scientific discipline, or its failure, in the case of the history of science in Japan, by focusing on some characteristics of its educational structure. One might notice that Japanese scholars’ contribution to the international community of the history of science and technology has been less than expected considering, for example, the overall success of Japanese science and technology. There have been several historians of science trained overseas who attempted to establish the history of science in Japan, but their efforts have not yet turned out very fruitful. This issue appears even more puzzling because Japan has a relatively long tradition of the history of science, starting in the 1930s. This paper attempts to solve this question by analyzing the Japanese system of education, mainly higher education. In addition to continuous problems since the Meiji Restoration for humanities in general, I claim that various educational reforms implemented after World War II left little room for the history of science to develop as a discipline in Japan.

 

H. M. Iftekhar Jaim, Bangladesh University of Engineering and Techonology ; Co-author Jasmine Jaim, Eastern University, Bangladesh

Indian War Rocket: A World Class Technology by Local Artisans

The stunning success of the British during the Nepoleonic War and the War against US (1812-14) was led by the Congreve Rocket, a British military weapon. The admiration of this rocket is lucidly articulated in the U.S. national anthem: “the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air.” According to rocket historians including Willy Ley, F. H. Winter and John H. Lienhard, Congreve Rocket was rooted back by solid propelled rocket weapon of Tipu Sultan, ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, India. As remarked by Roddam Narasimha in Nature (Volume 400 Number 6740 pp 123) these Indian rockets made by the craftsmen were considered to be the best rockets in the world. Interestingly, the success of the rockets lies in the designing and superb metallurgical skills of the artisans. However, the production of rockets came to an end for the global impacts of the industrial revolution and British colonial rule. And this technology became extinct due to the non-scientific approach and caste based social system of the artisans. Therefore, this paper is to bring out some salient features of the socio-economic and some other perspectives of the local artisans that led to development, nourishment and finally eradication of this advanced technology. Besides, the research will also inquire on the geographical factors that gave rise to the necessity of such war rocket in that politically vulnerable region.

 

 

Vladimir Jankovic, University of Manchester

Climatological Citizenship: The Many Lives of a Modern Fetish

Historians have often argued that the origins of modern environmental thinking can be traced back to the “saddle period” in Western history (ca. 1750) during which time the European and American publics acquiesced to the view that political theorizing, social action and national characterology ought in some measure to draw upon environmental factors. At this time, European and American societies promoted themselves into “socio-climatological polities” by granting their subjects rights which they could invoke in situations in which their livelihoods suffered from external stress (disease, pollution, industrialization, disasters, poor hygiene, urban infrastructure). The paper will outline the causal attribution that informed this “triumph of environmentalism” (Olson, 2003) in the eighteenth-century human sciences. It will explore the reasoning behind the idea that civic identity and governmental responsibility ought to be related to the contingency of soil, water and climate. One of the questions will ask how the nineteenth century European states and US defined their welfare agendas around projects such as climate monitoring, weather modification, public health engineering, pollution control, climatotherapy, climatic labor-migration, and management of small-scale airs. I will suggest that in their attempts to render their subjects immune to environmental contingency, modern states have elevated climate into a “fetish” which occurs when ”the mind ceases to realize that it has itself created the outward images or things to which subsequently it posits itself as in some sort of subservient relation” (Simpson, 1982).

 

E. Jessee, Montana State University, Bozeman

“The Greatest Laboratory Experiment of History”: Operation Crossroads, Bikini Atoll, and the Geography of Science during the Early-Postwar Period

On the advent of nuclear weapons testing by the United States in 1946, scientists within the Atomic Energy Commission perceived that the greatest risk to the public from fallout came from direct and external bodily exposure to gamma radiation. Since the dose from external forms of radiation produced during nuclear weapons tests seemed relatively small and amenable to the control of scientists charged with radiation safety, the dangers from nuclear weapons testing appeared negligible. Yet as mounting evidence began to accumulate pointing to the complex interaction of specific weapons-produced radionuclides and human health, scientists became concerned with the role of the environment in mediating exposure to human bodies. By the late 1950s, scientists began to understand the body/environment interaction in nascent ecological terms: the pathways through which radiation could enter the body were manifold, complex, indirect, and tortuous. Ingestion of radioactive material that migrated and bioaccumulated through the food chain, either through root uptake in plants or via foraging animals, became the primary source of concern rather than exposure to external radiation. This emerging ecological framework enabled scientists to see the ways that substantial quantities of radiation could enter the body. Faced with such complexity and the concomitant rethinking of the risks associated with nuclear weapons testing, the AEC in the mid-1960s began to spend considerable energy and funding on ecosystems ecology to rationalize and thus better manage the interaction between these complex radioactive environments and human bodies.

 

David Jones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Representation and Intervention: Visualizing the Pathogenesis of Myocardial Infarction, 1970-1990

By 1960 coronary artery disease (CAD) caused one-third of all deaths in the United States. Its ascent left physicians in an embarrassing position: decades of research had not provided a definitive explanation of heart attacks, CAD’s most dreaded complication. The most basic question, whether coronary thrombi were the cause or consequence of myocardial infarction, remained contested. Since autopsies were confounded by changes that took place between infarction and death, researchers needed to study the events inside living arteries that transformed chronic atherosclerosis into acute infarction. To do so, cardiologists and engineers adapted technologies as varied as angiography, radioisotopes, MRI, and intravascular angioscopy, ultrasound, and thermal imaging. The proliferation of imaging modalities between 1970 and 1990 deepened uncertainty. The problem was not simply assessing the objectivity of a technique. Because of the near impossibility of actually observing the moment of infarction, researchers had to determine which modality provided the most informative representation of relevant proxies of infarction. The ensuing multiplicity of practices and representations did not co-exist peacefully, each within a bounded discipline. Instead, they were contested actively by pathologists, radiologists, cardiologists, and surgeons. At stake were the massive resources allocated for prevention and treatment of the nation’s leading cause of death. The etiologic debates generated many treatments, from bypass surgery to angioplasty, thrombolysis, and cholesterol reduction. The outcomes of each of these interventions, in turn, generated new knowledge about what the underlying pathophysiology might be. Therapeutic practice thus produced yet another mode of representation of the puzzles of CAD.

 

Kathleen Jones, Virginia Tech

“Unnatural and Monstrous”: Creating “Child Suicide” in the Nineteenth Century

Suicide did heavy cultural work in the nineteenth century, helping to sort and prioritize nations, races, religions, genders, and ages. The association of the highest rates of suicide with industrialized trans-Atlantic cultures (with “civilization”) gave pause to Euro-American claims of moral and social superiority, but a diagnosis of psychic fatigue helped to adjust statistics to preconceived notions of social hierarchy. The child, too, carried a heavy cultural burden. The locus of innocence and purity, the child was also a “savage, “ in need of education and discipline. The status and treatment accorded the child was a marker of civilization and contributed to judgments about social hierarchy. Incidents of child suicide, in contrast, challenged notions of both adulthood and civilization. I will examine how the perplexing incidents of child suicide were incorporated into a social Darwinian universe. Suicide experts, psychiatric practitioners, and child developmentalists defined child suicide as “rarity, “ with “trivial” motives. The child who did not commit suicide was acting childlike, but, ironically, so was the child suicide. The immaturity of the child’s mind accounted for those few children who died by their own hands. By the end of the nineteenth century, child and adult suicide had been effectively separated as two distinct social problems, with suicide a privilege of adulthood. Differentiating by age is part of a pattern of specialization in medical science; by examining the construction of child suicide, this paper points to the significance of age for our understanding of late nineteenth-century scientific thought.

 

 

Matthew Jones, Columbia University

Formalism and its Discontents: The Danger of Frivolous Mathematics in the Mid-Enlightenment

For all their advocacy of mathematics, enlightenment savants worried precisely about the epistemological and moral dangers should mathematics become too disconnected from the real world. In the Enlightenment, mathematics at once exemplified proper knowledge and baroque play. Certain? Yes. Amusing? To be sure. Instructing? Not always. To many critics, such as Denis Diderot or Daniel Bernoulli, formal linguistic procedures – despite their certainty – too easily led mathematicians into an autonomous game, disconnected from the world and natural things, fit only for the speculation of barbarous pedants or devious tricksters, appropriate neither for civilizing nor educating. Bad mathematics was like bad language: it lacked reference and precluded knowledge. This paper uses the mid century dispute about solutions to the vibrating string problem to illuminate disputes about the role of formal language for enlightenment.

 

Edward Jurkowitz, Illinois Insitute of Technology

Planck’s Unification of Physics with/in German Liberal Culture

This paper presents a new interpretation of Max Planck’s scientific research. By locating his efforts within the context of contemporaneous methodological discussions, I argue that Planck, following Hermann von Helmholtz, pursued an empiricist approach to framing physical laws and toward organizing science in general, one characteristic of German liberal scholars. Planck’s research, from his earliest works onward, consistently expressed this methodology, while his discovery of the blackbody law resulted from consistently using it to explore the micro-world. In the final section I argue that Planck’s research work expressed the essential characteristics of, and contributed to a wider stream of German scholarship, one running through legal studies and many Geisteswissenschaften and built around a particular strategy for achieving intellectual and cultural unity.

 

Abdul Nassser Kaadan, Aleppo University

The Achievements of Albucasis in Neurosurgery

Albucasis has lived in Andalus (Spain), and died there in 1013. He is considered one of the most celebrated surgeons during the Middle Ages. The influence of his book (Kitab al-Tasrif) in the field of surgery development in general and neurosurgery in particular was tremendous. Guy de Chauliac, the “restorer of Surgery” quotes Albucasis more than 200 times. The arrangement of the work, the clear diction, and lucid explanations, all contributed to its great success. It soon became an authority quoted by medieval European physicians and surgeons more frequently than Galen himself. Albucasis describes some neurosurgical operative procedures and instruments which do not appear in extant classical writings and which may be regarded as his own. In the chapter related to Hydrocephalus treatment, Albucasis says: “If the humidity is beneath the bone, and the sign of that is that you will see the sutures of the skull gaping on all sides, you should make three incisions in the middle of the head, in this pattern. After incising, drew out all the humidity, then bind up the incision with pads and bandages, and over the bandages foment with wine and oil till the fifth day” The aim of this paper is to shed light on Albucasis neurosurgery, to reveal his accomplishment and contribution in this field of surgery.

 

Despina Kakoudaki, American University

Deep Frame: Picturing the Body in Early Cinema

This paper focuses on the technological and epistemological implications of depicting the human body on film, by tracing modes and experiments from the first ten years of cinema. For inventors and artists of the era, the body functioned as both subject and site for negotiating and defining the capacities of this new medium. Close study of examples, from the first camera experiments of the 1880s to the first cinematic special effects in films made from 1900 to 1907, allows us to see that despite their general adherence to the legacies of photographic realism, early filmmakers also developed a rubric for a wider phenomenological investigation of film. In their work the two dimensional cinematic frame is often imagined as a deep space of infinite possibility, while the body is in contrast a spectral and often elusive entity that occasionally “bubbles up” from such imagined technological depths. These narrative and technological responses offer valuable insight for the ways in which new media, new technologies and new modes of visual representation affect and even define the limits of the real.

 

Allison Kavey, CUNY John Jay College

“The Mistriss of her own operation”: The relationship between the divine and the natural and the potential for practitioners in Agrippa’s cosmogony

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Netteheim’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy was printed for the first time in 1531. Over the next 150 years, it was re-printed in four languages and as many countries, and it is one of the few books from the early 16th century to have remained an important force in natural philosophy during the years of upheaval and intellectual reappraisal known as the Scientific Revolution. One of the reasons that Agrippa’s book was so successful was its approach to natural philosophy, which flipped upside down traditional understandings of the relationship between the divine, the natural world to offer much more potential for practitioners to cause change in the world around them. This was part of a larger world-building exercise, in which the constructs of intelligence, passion, and knowledge played a crucial part. This paper will discuss the building blocks of Agrippa’s world and describe the ways in which these pieces helped to place practitioners at the center of an elegant and powerful system of natural change that responded to their will, knowledge, passion, and imagination as defining forces.

 

Vera Keller, McGill University

The Desiderata List: Collecting the Future in the Early Modern Past

Several recent studies emphasize the desire for and commerce of objects as agents in the growth of empirical natural philosophy. I study the early modern bookkeeping techniques used to direct and control desire. In the proliferation and diversification of desiderata (wish) lists in the period, we see individuals explicitly framing the search for a future in terms of enumerated desires. The desiderata list offered both a rhetoric and a research tool for philosophers envisioning what they considered a radical reform of learning. According to a period association of status and reason, social superiors (and thus the rational) balanced the books, directing the insatiable avarice of men toward the advancement of new endeavors, while keeping the desires of the marketplace in check with competing lists of impossibilities. Economic theorists and natural philosophers alike such as Jakob Bornitz, Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, William Petty, Samuel Hartlib, J. J. Becher, and G. W. Leibniz employed lists of deperdita (lost things), desiderata (wanted things), nova inventa (new inventions), and impossibilia (impossibilities) to organize socially differentiated programs of economic and philosophical reform. The most desirable objects were those liable to move unpredictably between the depths of folly and the heights of invention, and between lists of desiderata and those of impossibilia. Such lists show us the landscape of seventeenth century discovery as a quicksand of shifting knowledge covered with a haze of possible promise.

Meegan Kennedy, Florida State University

Adulteration and the Microscope: The Limits of Revelation

Popular and even professional Victorian texts on the microscope often lauded its powers in phrases that evoke sensational, nearly miraculous revelations. Other than forensic discourse, the field in which the microscope’s abilities were most fervently applauded was probably that of food safety. Arthur Hill Hassall argued in 1857 that he had introduced the microscope in the study of food adulteration, “the most practical and important use which has ever been made of that instrument.” The topic continued to hold readers’ attention through the end of the century. This paper will examine the discourse of adulteration and its discovery in texts by both well-known and little-known Victorians (William Houghton, Edwin Lankester, Frank J. Wethered, J. H. Wythe, John MacDonald, and others). But these treatises on the microscope must present not only inspiring tales of revelation but also incessant cautions about the difficulties of using the instrument. As Jutta Schickore and others have shown, microscopists were well aware of the challenges to accurate vision, due to problems with human perception, the technological limitations of the microscope, and sheer human error. As a result, even the treatises that most fervently sing the praises of microscopes as a revelatory instrument also exhort their readers that the evidence of the microscope is never certain. Indeed, this paper will show that the arguments proposed by such treatises are inherently unstable: that these texts must uneasily negotiate the fact that the revelations made possible by the microscope are themselves “adulterated” and unreliable.

 

Daniel Kennefick, University of Arkansas

“Not Only Because of Theory”: Eddington and his theory testing bias in the 1919 eclipse expedition.

Recent debates on the famous 1919 eclipse expedition to test Einstein’s prediction of the bending of starlight have focused on the apparent bias of Arthur Stanley Eddington, one of the leaders of the expedition. Eddington allegedly schemed to confirm Einstein’s prediction over the so-called “Newtonian” prediction. My talk looks at two aspects of this issue. First, I will show that the other leader of the expedition, Frank Watson Dyson, made many of the key data analyses but did not share Eddington’s apparent bias. Modern re-analysis of the expedition’s plates seems to justify Dyson’s decisions as scientifically appropriate. Second, I will examine why Eddington was biased in favor of Einstein’s general relativity, leading to his eagerness to frame the observations as a test between the new theory against the old Newtonian theory. As John Earman and Clark Glymour have noted, it was historically dubious to label one of the two predictions “Newtonian” since it too was made by Einstein. They argue that Eddington framed the theory testing in such a way as to dramatise his preferred narrative of a triumph of general relativity over Newtonian gravity. So it is of interest to discuss what Eddington’s motivations tell us about the circumstances in which the reception of general relativity occurred.

 

Randy Kidd, Bradley University

“Language of the Heart: The Mingling of Metaphoric and Literal References to the Heart and Blood in the Writings of Harvey and His Contemporaries”

This paper analyzes the impact that Harvey and some of The Oxford Group’s findings with respect to the nature of the heart and blood, had on language. We still speak of “knowing something by heart, “ “living with one’s heart” and “believing with one’s heart”. Given the discoveries of the circulation and the compound nature of blood, one might expect that language would more closely parallel our physiological knowledge. This paper focuses primarily upon the writings of 17th century natural philosophers-- some working within the mechanistic world-picture, some whose philosophy more closely paralleled Harvey’s own “vitalism”-- and argues that we find a surprising mingling of literal and metaphoric heart and blood references, sometimes in the span of a single paragraph. By looking at citations from Harvey, Boyle, Locke, Lower (and some biblical and classical references for context) we will see that one of the ways we integrated the new knowledge about the heart and blood was by moving, when speaking about our bodies, in and out of metaphor; this allowed Early Modern thinkers to accommodate the new physiology to longstanding views about the centrality of the heart and blood. This practice of mingling the literal and metaphoric with respect to our hearts and blood, persists in powerful ways.

 

Yoshiyuki Kikuchi, Sokendai, The Graduate Institute for Advanced Studies

Chemical Heritage Foundation, Anglo-Japanese Chemistry Contacts in Action: The English Model of Chemical Education in Meiji Japan

Japan underwent a process of institutionalization of scientific and technological education in many fields during the Meiji period (1868-1912) as a part of its industrialization process. The key persons in this process were hired foreigners and overseas students, and in the particular case of chemistry and the chemical industry they were either English chemists working in Japan or their Japanese students and successors who completed their studies in England. The following questions need to be considered: 1) did their experiences in England help to shape their ideas of how to teach chemistry at the higher level and how to organize and run chemical research laboratories? 2) If so, how and by what mechanisms did they translate, select, modify and reconfigure this “English model”? 3) How did intercultural personal relationships between British chemists and their Japanese students affect the above “transfer” process? To answer these questions, I elaborate the concept of “transculturation” in “contact zones” in Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) by drawing on recent sociological studies on classroom dynamics in pedagogy and intercultural communication in multinational workplaces, and my own case study on the structures and dynamics of contact zones such as classrooms, laboratories, and other socializing spaces where intercultural communication between English chemists and their Japanese students took place. I argue that the people at the heart of the structure of contact zones, who are often not senior professors but junior assistants, are decisive factors in Anglo-Japanese bilateral transfer of educational models.

 

Mi Gyung Kim, North Carolina State University

The Balloon Spectator

When the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon ascension caused a “fermentation” in the public sphere, the Journal de Paris became the central clearing house for the balloon news. It suppressed much of the vulgar enthusiasm and curiosity to present the balloon ascension as a scientific experiment rather than a marvelous spectacle. The public identity of this material actor and its theatrical relation with mass spectators had to be carefully monitored and scripted to circumscribe its moral, civic and political meaning. Inscribing the balloon spectacle/experiment required imagining and disciplining the attitude and the behavior of present and future spectators. To this end, the Journal co-opted the textual figure of the spectator that had been shaped in opposition to the theatrical polity of the ancien regime to configure the balloon spectator as a rational observer of the spectacle/experiment with disciplined curiosity on its scientific performance and with aesthetic appreciation of the scenery it uncovered. The strong consensus in the “public transcript” on ballooning, expressed in numeral and cartographic precision, indicates the tight control the scientific and administrative elites pursued on this subject and the potential danger they perceived should such a control of popular opinion and the crowd fail.

Joel Klein, Indiana University

Thomas Willis’s Experimental Chemical Anatomy

Thomas Willis (1621-1675), the Oxonian physician, has been primarily understood within the context of the history of medicine and anatomy, and while his major discoveries are aptly categorized under those rubrics, his earliest publications and interests were in chymistry. In fact, many of his later ideas cannot be fully understood unless we consider them in this chymical context. Willis explained most actions in the natural world according to various fermentations, which themselves are explicable according to five fundamental, chymical principles –  spirit, sulphur, salt, water, and earth – which are naturally those principle substances revealed to the senses by distillation. The use of this “sensible-chymical” analytical method places Willis in a long tradition of chymists and alchemists that stretches back to the Middle Ages, and similarly, it demonstrates a commitment to a quasi- Baconian empiricism. Moreover, it is clear from correspondence in the mid-1650s that Willis enjoyed some form of professional relationship with the prominent Oxford chymist, Robert Boyle (1627-1691). Upon comparison of their works, several aspects of Willis’s experimental program appear strikingly similar to Boyle’s. For instance, in the second edition of Willis’s first publication, Diatribae Duae Medico- Philosophicae (1660), Willis discussed several redintegration experiments which are very similar to those Boyle detailed in later publications. While Boyle used these experiments to argue for a more mechanistic conception of matter, Willis used them to support his alternative system of the five fundamental, chymical principles.

 

Judy Klein, Mary Baldwin College

The Cold War Modeling Nexus of Economics, Operations Research, and Control Engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology

Starting in 1950 the United States Air Force Project SCOOP (Scientific Computation of Optimum Programs) and the Office of Naval Research awarded contracts to establish and maintain a research center for the Planning and Control of Industrial Operations at the Graduate School of Industrial Administration of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. The center brought together professors and graduate students from control engineering, business administration, and economics for formalization and quantification of rules of action amenable to electronic computation for logistics, production smoothing and inventory control in firms and military units. The terms of the contract were such that the researchers experimented with their models and computer algorithms on the Philadelphia Gulf Oil Refinery and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company after which they perfected their models for reports to the military and further generalized their formulations for publications in academic journals such as Econometrica. The military projects initiated a research strategy that the participants called “applications driven theory.” This strategy generated new optimization techniques (including modeling computable linear decision rules with quadratic criterion functions and modeling expectations with exponential smoothing), a reappraisal of what constituted management science, canonical theoretical articles on time series analysis, and novel concepts for three Nobel Prizes in Economics. Material from the archives of the GSIA at Carnegie Mellon University illuminates this military-industrial-academic complex engaged for over a decade in research on planning and control for the free-market side in the Cold War.

 

Krister Knapp, Washington University in St. Louis

A Fact-in-Waiting: William James and Experimental Telepathy

During the late nineteenth century a small group of transatlantic intellectuals at the British and American Societies for Psychical Research attempted to employ modern scientific method, statistics and the probability calculus to try to prove the soul survives bodily death. They investigated many topics, but their first and most thorough one was telepathy, or what they called “thought-transference.” If thought could be “transferred” from one living mind to the next (they reasoned), then it could be done between a terrestrial soul and one that had passed on to the “other world.” The SPR and ASPR employed a series of tests, such as card guessing, that sought to establish telepathy as a fact through the collection of large aggregates of outcomes occurring at rates higher than what random chance otherwise dictated. However, William James, a prominent member of both societies, while not denouncing that method, downplayed the importance of sample populations and instead emphasized the case-study approach. James believed that if a few, select individuals with a predilection for telepathy could be located, then a thorough testing of their abilities might yield better results than the aggregate approach. This paper compares these two methods in the context of the search to scientifically establish telepathy as a fact. It argues that while James’s method ran counter to the success of the sample population one in the natural sciences, it demonstrated his commitment to proving telepathy through rigorous testing that adhered to valid experimental protocols without foregoing the subjective experience of individuals.

 

Hylarie Kochiras, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Gravity & Newton’s Substance Counting Problem

Can two things be in the same place at the same time? Newton thinks they might if they are substances of different kinds, and I argue that this is the reason that Newton cannot solve his problem about gravity’s physical cause. His gravitational theory raises the spectre of matter acting at a distance, with sun and planets attracting one another across empty space. Since he considers unmediated action between material bodies absurd, he hopes to discover some immaterial substance, such as an aether, that might fill space and possess active powers to produce gravitational attraction. Yet any effort to locate such a medium or to associate active properties with it rather than with matter founders upon what I call ‘Newton’s ‘Substance Counting Problem’. If an immaterial substance could co-occupy the places occupied by material bodies, then we cannot use material bodies to try to confine the substance. Thus we cannot determine how many substances are present in a given location – the Substance Counting Problem – and if we knew how many substances were present, we would have no basis for associating active powers with the immaterial substance rather than with matter.

 

Alexei Kojevnikov, University of British Columbia

“More is Different, “ or “the transition from quantity to quality”

From his early years as a historian of science, Spencer Weart paid special attention to those aspects of modern physics which, however huge and important, are not the most publicly visible. In “Out of the Crystal Maze” and several related publications, he analyzed the professional physics community’s largest segment, scientists working in the fields of solid state, condensed matter, or material science. In oral history projects and in cataloguing archival sources for the history of physics, he insisted on making these endeavors as truly international as possible, defying the usual Anglo-centrist focus and extending the scope to include, in particular, sources related to Soviet physics. This paper will discuss how such uncommon broadening of historical analysis actually changes our understanding of what the overall business of physics was and has become in the course of the twentieth century.

 

Richard Kremer, Dartmouth College

Reading Artifacts: On Teaching with Historic Scientific Instruments

In a pedagogical and scholarly world that privileges texts, how might we introduce students to the material objects of earlier sciences? What types of stories might such artifacts tell us about the history of science, its pedagogical and laboratory practices, its values and ethics, its relations to commercial instrument makers and other technologies, and its links to earlier cultures of design, materials, and craft? I will introduce a research and writing seminar that I developed with David Pantalony, in which students explore these issues with objects from Dartmouth’s King Collection of Historic Scientific Instruments and some concepts for analyzing material culture developed by the Winterthur Museum. In addition to working with individual instruments, the students develop, research and install a small exhibit around a theme of their own choosing. This year’s exhibit, “Colonel Mustard in the Library with a Galvanometer: Finding Clues in Historic Scientific Instruments,” used the framework of the 1949 Parker Brothers board game to help visitors “learn to look” at unfamiliar objects.

 

Ulrich Krohs, University of Hamburg

The Roots of Organismic Thinking in Systems Biology

Genomics, the paradigm of data-rich biology, is generally regarded as a reductionistic (and by many also as a simplistic) research program. Systems biology relies on the high troughput methods developed within genomics and other omic disciplines, but claims to overcome the reductionism of these disciplines by bringing back the organism into data-rich biology. My paper asks for the sources of the organismic perspective of systems biology and for the changes that organismic thinking underwent. Systems biology has roots not only in genomics, but also in research programs that flourished in the mid of the 20th century, like biological cybernetics and pathway modeling. Several concepts of organismic wholeness where developed within those research programs. It turns out that systems biology does not yet fully incorporate any of the earlier concepts of wholeness. Simplified and ad hoc concepts prevail in the research papers of the new field. While some achievements of the older research programs like modeling techniques where adopted by the new field, the tradition of organismic thinking seems to be interrupted. The new, simple concepts of wholeness do nevertheless have their place within systems biology. I shall inquire whether this reflects a deficiency of systems biology or rather a changed notion of holism in comparison to older research programs. I shall also discuss recent attempts of bridging the interrupted tradition by integrating approaches to organismic wholeness that were developed the 1970ies into systems biology.

 

Gary Kroll, SUNY Plattsburgh

Cultivating a Sense of Wonder: William Beebe, Rachel Carson and 20th Century Oceanic Natural History

The history of traffic engineers offers much promise for bringing together environmental history and the history of science and technology. Moreover, the topic provides a strong crowbar into the complicated relationship between the modernist vision of the state (attempting to enhance friction-free movement of people and products) and the wider American public (with its creative ability to challenge and destroy those systems of control). Between the two stands the traffic engineer who responds to the “traffic accident” by using the power of science and technology to re-engineer environments to restore the order and flow of safe and speedy movement. This paper will demonstrate the value of this approach through an examination of the efforts to rationalize harbor traffic on the New York/New Jersey waterfront between 1880 and the establishment of the Port Authority in 1921. Between that those years, New York City’s status as an entropot and the modernization of the merchant fleet stressed the port’s ability to deal with the increased volume and speed of the traffic. New York, New Jersey, and federal engineers thus reshaped the environment and traffic systems to restore order--until the next accident, at least.

 

Julia Kursell, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

Tracing Beauty: A Pianist’s Collection of Fingerprints in Experimental Psychology around 1900

Pianist Marie Jaëll has left a strange heritage to posterity: a huge collection of fingerprints taken from pianists as they played. Some famous personalities such as Albert Schweitzer who took piano lessons with Jaëll or Elisabeth Caland, one of the leading Pedagogues of her time, but mostly Jaëll herself and a great number of pupils left their traces on Jaëll’s paper keyboards. Jaëll was obsessed by the question of why the most beautiful sound in the playing of a pianist like Franz Liszt also seemed to be the most natural movement. She decided to explore the laws of a physiology of beauty. After extensive readings of French and German philosophy and science she published a manual on piano touch. Charles Féré took notice of this publication and invited Jaëll into his laboratory at the Paris hospital Bicetre, which was then headed by Féré. From this encounter resulted a collaboration that was to continue until0 Féré’s death in 1907 and that brought forth a number of common publications in scientific journals. This presentation aims to reconstruct their common experimental work. I suggest that Jaëll uses her finger print collection as literally indexical signs of sonorous beauty and correct movement. I will discuss, on the one hand, how these signs were supposed to relate to piano playing as a complex situation and, on the other hand, what experimental psychology expected from piano playing as an object of study.

 

Cornelia Lambert, University of Oklahoma

Empiricism and Empire: Robert Owen’s Scotland in the Romantic Age

Around 1800 Robert Owen (1771-1858) established an experimental community at his factory on the outskirts of Glasgow. At New Lanark workers lived in prescribed housing, worked in specially-designed factories, and sent their children to schools with particular curricula. This paper puts these and other social technologies employed at Robert Owen’s New Lanark experiment (1816-1828) into the context of contemporary claims about the primitive nature of rural Scottish society, the vogue for travel to Scotland, and what Christopher Fox calls the “spectacle of science” common to the development of the human sciences. These elements support my claim that Owen’s work should be interpreted in light of a Romantic strain of empiricism. As early supporter Joseph Smith wrote to Owen: “We must do all we can at this time to establish a community to enable us to say ‘Come & see, Come & see!’”

 

Roger Launius, Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum

Venus-Earth-Mars: Comparative Climatology and the Search for Life in the Solar System

Both Venus and Mars have captured the human imagination during the twentieth century as possible abodes of life. Venus had long enchanted humans – all the more so after astronomers realized it was shrouded in a mysterious cloak of clouds permanently hiding the surface from view. It was also the closest planet to Earth, with nearly the same size and surface gravity. These attributes brought myriad speculations about the nature of Venus, its climate, and the possibility of life existing there in some form. Mars also harbored interest as a place where life had or might still exist. Seasonal changes on Mars were interpreted as due to the possible spread and retreat of ice caps and lichen-like vegetation. A core element of this belief rested with the climatology of these two planets, as observed by astronomers, but these ideas were significantly altered, if not dashed during the space age. Missions to Venus and Mars, revealed strikingly different worlds. The high temperatures and pressures found on Venus supported a “runaway greenhouse theory,” and Mars harbored an apparently lifeless landscape similar to the surface of the Moon. While hopes for Venus as an abode of life ended, the search for evidence of past life on Mars, possibly microbial, remains a central theme in space exploration. This survey explores the evolution of thinking about the climates of Venus and Mars as life-support systems, in comparison to Earth.

 

Chia-Hua Lee, The University of Tokyo

Beyond Changing Symbols: The Transmission of the Calculus to China and Japan in the Nineteenth Century

The calculus was introduced as a new branch of Western mathematics to both China and Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century. This paper addresses the differences in the process of transmission through the lens of similarity and dissimilarity. It is within this process that a triangular relationship between the West, China and Japan developed, particularly via the circulation of books. Moreover, a close connection between China and Japan was built through the usage and the making of translations and textbooks on the calculus. In order to show how this subject was studied and how translated works were circulated and reproduced, the mistakes and corrections of textbook contents are considered, including changes in symbols and terminologies, and the use of reference sources available in China and Japan are investigated. In addition, on the related issue of participation, I analyze how and why specific groups of intellectuals, the assistance of Westerners, institutions and their instruction, and governmental policies were involved in the transmission and dissemination of the calculus. Finally, this paper attempts to answer the question of changes by looking at the transformation of mathematical symbols in these texts. Particularly, in addition to the changes made to symbols which were first transformed from Western style into an unique formula in Chinese translations but eventually revised back to their original form in Japanese texts, I discuss what changes have occurred in mathematical content in relation to previous mathematical traditions, the attitude of scholars toward the calculus, and the purpose of introducing this mathematical subject.

 

Don Leggett, John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress/University of Kent

Our “doubts” in fact appear to me as sacred”: William Froude, test tanks and Victorian doubt

In 1871 William Froude built an experimental test tank: a laboratory for the study of hydrodynamics. It was paid for by the British Admiralty, and shaped the ships of the empire and the study of hydrodynamics for the remainder of the nineteenth-century. Utilising recent scholarship on “object histories” I explore the culture and concerns embodied in this technological system of modelling machinery and precision measuring instruments. I locate Froude, an “experimental mathematician,” in a social network of Victorian intellectuals with James Anthony Froude and John Newman, and the scientists William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), W.J. Macquorn Rankine and Charles Lyell. I then use Froude’s correspondence to explore his test tank technology as a response to the intellectual and spiritual crises of faith (Victorian Doubt) suffered broadly by Victorians and specifically by his social network of intellectuals and engineers. This approach to naval architecture challenges the predominantly deterministic framework through which the subject of ships and their design have been traditionally viewed. I investigate how Froude’s “mechanical” treatment of hydrodynamics resonated with the work of physicists and engineers on thermodynamics, and the broader Victorian vocabulary of mechanical thought. And I use Froude’s correspondence with Newman, the leader of the Oxford Movement and later a convert to Roman Catholicism, to compare how theologians and scientists responded to doubt, dogma, knowledge and religion. By locating naval architecture in a host of scientific and cultural contexts it is possible to contextualise the production of “trustworthy” scientific knowledge in the British navy.

 

Rebecca Lemov, Harvard University

Database of Dreams: Toward A Postwar American Science of Subjectivity

Whereas social science surveyors in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concentrated on gathering records of the material aspects of culture and society (tools, ritual objects, rites of passage, decorative items), mid-century modernists turned their efforts to attempt to collect the fleeting and insubstantial: people’s dreams, hopes, fears, evanescent desires, states of madness, and inchoate beliefs. Researchers turned to collect the stuff of subjectivity, as manifested or materialized in psychological test results, life histories, and records of jokes, invective, and strong sentiments. Among various efforts in the 1940s and 1950s to collect, catalog, and store – in short, to file – those parts of human inner life most resistant to being so treated, none was more ambitious than the “Database of Dreams” assembled in 1956. Funded by the National Research Council, run by a cadre of psychologists and anthropologists, and accessing decades of ethnographic and documentary research, “Primary Records in Culture and Personality” attempted to map the scope of all such collections, and to write a strategy for preserving and circulating them. This pre-digital, Microform-based encyclopedic device played a part in the movement to found a postwar American science of subjectivity, pursued through objectivist methods. The aim of this paper is to reassess the early Cold War human sciences’ twin pursuit of “innerness” and of masses of data. How did this approach to the “challenge of data” contribute to an interweaving of minds and machines that only accelerates today?

 

 

Deborah Levine, Washington Unviersity in St. Louis

Marketing Measurement: Anthropometric Technologies in the American Marketplace

The numbers that a bathroom scale displays, though conceivably nothing more than an abstracted and invisible reference point, have come to signify something specific about the identity of the person on the scale. When did this begin? When did one’s weight become a significant thing to know about oneself, and what was the impetus behind people beginning to weigh themselves in the first place? The answers to these questions reveal a co-production of medical measurement and its marketing by scale companies, physicians, and life insurance executives. In this paper I trace the technological innovations and the history of the meaning of a person’s weight from the mid-nineteenth century, when an average adult would likely not have had any idea of their exact weight, and follow these developments to the turn of the twentieth century, when the number of pounds a person weighed would have been a common piece of individual knowledge for nearly all adults in the United States. This project examines the myriad anthropometric technologies employed by physicians and their patients to weigh the body and thereby construe a determination about health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing especially on the history of one such technology, the bathroom scale, my aim is to explore the role of the medical marketplace in the historical linking between maintaining “normal” weight and health that began to take hold in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. .

 

Philip Loring, Harvard University

From Johnny to Chomsky

The controversial 1955 bestseller Why Johnny Can’t Read warned Americans that their children were slipping behind. Wedded to psychological research that approached reading as a process of word-recognition, textbooks introduced a limited number of new words each school year, and teachers seldom prompted students to “sound out” unfamiliar words from their spelling. This effectively limited students’ reading repertoire to the dull distillations found in the textbooks. As an alternative, Why Johnny Can’t Read advocated “phonics,” an approach informed less by psychology than by linguistics. Phonics focused on the sounds of letters and promised children the ability to decode unfamiliar words and thus read independently sooner. Celebrated in the popular press yet roundly criticized by educators and psychologists, the book nonetheless found a welcome reception among American linguists, who were eager to leverage Cold War concerns into a more prominent role for their own special sort of scientific expertise. This paper examines how a work of popularization like Why Johnny Can’t Read affected debates within linguistics in the late 1950s, at the time when a young linguist named Chomsky began to shake up the profession. Situating Chomsky’s early work in the context of the phonics debates allows us to chart intersections between expert and political discourses on proper English, and reframes the significance of the Chomskyan revolution in the history of the Cold War human sciences.

 

Paul Lucier, Independent Scholar

Mining Science and Mining Law on the Comstock Lode

In 1865, Nevada tired to appoint a State Geologist. According to a western newspaper, the geologist’s duties would include: 1. Calculating all eclipses of the sun and moon; 2. Foretelling cloudbursts; 3. Guarding against “irruptions” of grasshoppers; and 4. Discovering earthquakes, book-agents, erysipelas, and corn doctors and providing suitable means to exterminate. Western miners generally did not have very exalted opinions of geologists. But at the Comstock in the 1860s, those opinions changed, especially among capitalists and companies who ran the mines. The reasons had as much to do with the “nature” of the ore -- it was difficult to find -- as it did with the people who wanted to find it. Mining could be done on one’s own property or on one’s neighbor’s, depending on whose vein was richer and on who had the better legal team. The Comstock was thus as famous for its silver -- the West’s largest lode -- as for its endless litigation over who owned what. Geologists were central to both claims to fame. This paper will present the first analysis of the great battles over “courtroom geology” from the perspective of the scientific experts. It will show how important such court cases were to the development of theories about the origin of metallic ores as well as to the codification in 1874 of the US Mining Statutes and the infamous Apex Law, which allowed the owner of the surface outcrop of a mineral vein to follow that vein anywhere it went, including across a neighbor’s claim.

 

Michael Lynn, Agnes Scott College

Controlling Spectacle and the Policing of Aeronautics in Europe at the End of the Eighteenth Century

Aeronautical experiments proved enormously popular much to the advantage of those using subscriptions to fund their work, but much to the chagrin of savants hoping to use balloons for scientific research. In either case, however, access to launches was very hard to control. Once the balloon reached a certain height, men and women from all social, economic, and educational backgrounds could witness the aeronautical experiments. This helps explain the importance of controlling access to the workshops where aeronauts manufactured their balloons as well as the desire of the local and state authorities to police the practice of ballooning. This paper will explore the myriad methods used to control access to launches (including fences, hiring guards, and keeping the location of launches a secret). In addition, I will analyze the reasons why different groups, including savants, state authorities, and balloonists, tried to set limits on who could attend launches and when it was acceptable to launch a balloon. Last, I will discuss the different attitudes of balloonists and others to the various social groups who viewed launches. Since the audience might perform the task of witnessing, help fund the launch, or, from the negative side, riot and destroy the balloon if the launch did not go as planned, the balloonists’ relationship with his or her audience was a crucial and tense zone of scientific popularization.

 

EunJeong Ma, Cornell University

What is “Colonial” about Colonial Medicine and Science?

In contemporary Korea there exist two parallel medical systems with distinct educational, clinical, and administrative systems: Western biomedicine (WM) and Korean Oriental medicine (OM). In this paper I discuss the colonial origins of the co-existence of the two forms of medicine, with particular attention to intellectual debate over scientific medicine in the 1930s. I ask what is “colonial” about colonial medicine and science. In the late nineteenth century, the importation of WM took place through two major channels: Christian missionaries and Japanese colonial agents. During the colonial period (1910-1945), the Japanese imperial government used WM as a tool to colonize Korea and the Korean people by advocating that WM was scientific and modern as opposed to obsolete and pre-modern indigenous medicine, OM. It devalued the epistemic foundations and practices of OM and implanted “modern,” “scientific” Western medical education in hospitals and public health policies. In the 1930s when the colonization of Korea was deepened, colonial elites began to reflect critically on the status of the modern knowledge that had been implanted by the Japanese empire. They explored the place and role of “West” and “science” in the construction of Western and Oriental medicine in Korea.

Harro Maas, University of Amsterdam

Sorting Things Out: The economist as an armchair observer

It is commonly held that (political) economists, from the days of Ricardo until well after the Second World War, were considered the kind of scientist who relied too much on observations contrived in the comfort of the armchair. Rather than joining the chorus of those who condemn and condemned this practice, this paper will trace its peculiarities back to the days when political economists first generalized the paradoxical experiences of an emerging market economy into explanatory principles. These generalisations were made by confronting conflicting observational reports from histories, travel journals, governmental reports, and personal experiences and observations, or by contrasting similar resources with fictional societies (utopias). Just like a cabinet naturalist arranged and organised specimens that were sent from all over the world, so did the political economist sort things out by comparing and rearranging the available evidence at his disposal. This was done in discussion with friends and colleagues, and in the confines of one’s study. With field research and quantitative methods taking hold in the social sciences at the end of the nineteenth century, such stationary practices were looked at with growing suspicion from within the (social) science community. Once econometrics set the standards for empirical research in economics, a formely ordinary observational practice came to be referred to as mere “armchair theorising”.

 

Geerdt Magiels, VUB Free University Bruissels

Why Did Nobody Ever Discover Photosynthesis? Dr IngenHousz and the discovery of photosynthesis

Very few people know who discovered photosynthesis, the story of which spans two centuries. A pivotal role was played by Jan IngenHousz, whose name, life and works have been forgotten. The tale of his scientific endeavour shows science in action. It opens up an undisclosed chapter of the history of science and shines some light on the processes of the development of science. Jan IngenHousz (1730-1799) led a travelling life between Breda, Vienna, London, Paris, Milan and Bath. A medical doctor with broad scientific interest, IngenHousz was appointed as Imperial Physician after successfully inoculating Maria Theresia’s family against smallpox. He befriended John Pringle, Joseph Priestley and Benjamin Franklin and kept close contacts with Lavoisier, Herschel, Van Swieten, Senebier and many others. He reported lucidly on 500 crucial experiments in his Experiments upon vegetables. Its publication in 1770 and subsequent articles, books and correspondence indicate him as the first to describe photosynthesis and its significance for life on earth. This hardly researched case of enquiry is a representative example of science as a messy but pragmatic method for acquiring trustworthy knowledge. His works offer a privileged and hardly known starting point for a philosophical enquiry into the history of biology as well as the dynamics of science in general, based on as yet unstudied letters and documents and a reconstruction of his experimental method. A multidimensional and historical perspective on his research may also explain why he disappeared in the mists of time and why nobody can claim the discovery of photosynthesis.

 

Christine Manganaro, University of Minnesota

Race Crossing in Hawai‘i: Harry L. Shapiro and the Chinese-Hawaiian Project, 1926-1936

Beginning in the late 1910s, physical anthropologists framed Hawai’i as an ideal site to investigate the consequences of miscegenation. Race mixing received special attention during the interwar period, when race was widely understood as a biological phenomenon while also at the center of debate over the role of environment in creating human differences. This paper examines Harry L. Shapiro’s physical anthropological research on approximately 8000 Chinese immigrants, their relatives remaining in China, their children, and Chinese-Hawaiian “hybrids.” I investigate the presumptions and design of this project commissioned by the University of Hawaii and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The study promised general, practical scientific knowledge about heredity and race as well as specific information about the qualities of the racially mixed population of Hawai’i, which the United States officially colonized in 1898. The study was never published, however, and has received minimal attention in biographies of Shapiro and histories of anthropological work in the Pacific. Correspondence and interviews with subjects reveal subject noncompliance with Shapiro’s research assistants, demonstrating theoretical differences between researchers and subjects’ conceptions of race as well as resistance to racialization. In addition to detailing this physical anthropological work during the interwar period, a time of profound changes in the field of American anthropology, my paper illuminates an episode in the history of colonial Hawai’i and U.S. history when scientific experts and colonized people engaged in dialogue about what race was and who determined the categories.

 

Amy Margaris, Oberlin College

Arctic Exploration & Ethnological Collecting in Historical and Contemporary Perspective

The convening of the Fourth International Polar Year (2007-2009) provides an opportunity to examine the impact of 19th century scientific exploration on the development of ethnological collecting in arctic regions by famed Smithsonian Institution naturalists like Murdoch, Ray, Turner and Nelson. The rediscovery of a small arctic collection, obtained by Oberlin College in 1889 through a Smithsonian exchange, opens a window on this period and provides an opportunity to assess a new era of international partnership with explicit focus on both climate change and Native northern peoples. Many objects in the Oberlin collection were acquired by Edward W. Nelson whose 1877-1881 Alaska work coincided with the preparation and launch of the First International Polar Year (1881-1884), a grand scheme of collaborative circumpolar climate research conceived by Austrian explorer Karl Weyprecht. Nelson collected an astounding 10, 000 ethnological specimens, from ivory dolls to fish skin bags, and challenged Smithsonian practice by insisting that his collections not be scattered through donations or trades. The early collectors of arctic material culture employed rigorous standards for specimen documentation allowing us to reconstruct collection practices, including how ethnological specimens were obtained, the types of materials sought, and their disposition in later years. We discuss the relatively small portion of the Nelson material that was dispersed, including the surprising Oberlin component. Our research reveals many details about the historical circumstances surrounding the acquisition of these materials during the 19th century that will be of interest to scholars and First Peoples alike.

 

Daniel Margocsy, Harvard University

Encyclopedias and the long-distance exchange of specimens

This paper investigates how encyclopedias facilitated the long-distance exchange of specimens of natural history in the early 18th century. It explores how natural historians developed a common system of identification for plants and seashells before the introduction of Linnaeus’ binomial system. This communicative system was necessary for the development of a complex, long-distance commerce of specimens. Otherwise, a natural historian in Russia would not have been able to specify what particular species they wanted to order from their correspondent in England. This system of identification was based on the widespread availability of encyclopedias. Specimens were not identified by a proper name, but by reference to such an encyclopedia. For instance, if a natural historian wanted to acquire an English plant, he or she could open Parkinson’s Flower Garden and find the description of that particular species on a certain page. S/he could then send this page number to a correspondent in England. The English correspondent would open the Flower Garden, find the description on the right page and then select and send the corresponding plant from their garden. This coding system was mutually comprehensible as long as correspondents owned the same works of natural history. My paper thus hopes to show that the late 17th-century taxonomical turn of natural history was driven as much by practical, commercial needs as by a desire to discover the hidden order of nature.

 

Harry Mark, Independent Scholar

The common view of Michelson’s experiment

The null results of Michelson’s ether-drift experiment were so astounding that many authors felt obliged to interpret them to other scientists and the public at large. It was often done in connection with the Theory of Relativity. The interpretations compared the paths of light in the experiment to the motions of swimmers or boats in a flowing river. The poster depicts them by line drawings accompanied by short explanatory texts. The similaritiess and contradictions to the actual experiment are thereby explored.

 

Alberto Martinez, University of Texas at Austin

From Ampère’s kinematics to Einstein‘s relativity

In 1834, owing to an interest in how engineers described machines, André-Marie Ampére defined kinematics as the study of motion as it appears to observation. He construed it as the fundamental physical science, prior to statics and dynamics. Yet some physicists misconstrued kinematics as the pure geometry of motion, independent of empirical knowledge. The fledging science of kinematics was pulled in various directions by physics, mathematics, philosophy, engineering, and psychology. My talk will outline the branching evolution of kinematics, as a case study of how one would-be science splintered repeatedly into various sciences, giving particular attention to how the competing trends contributed to the emergence of Einstein’s kinematics in his special relativity of 1905.

 

Janet Martin-Nielsen, University of Toronto

Private Words, Private Actions: The “MIT Space” and Chomskyan Linguistics, 1957-1968

In 1957, Noam Chomsky – working at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics – revolutionized American linguistics with the introduction of Transformational Grammar. Transformational Grammar differs radically from earlier schools of linguistics: whereas earlier schools held a behaviorist and empiricist view of language, Transformational Grammar assumes a rationalist, mentalist, and realist outlook. By 1968, Transformational Grammar was the prevailing paradigm in American academic linguistics. In this paper, I focus on the impact of the “MIT space” on the rise of Transformational Grammar. I argue that the historical, physical, and intellectual manifestations of the “MIT space” had three key effects on the development and eventual dominance of Transformational Grammar: (1) MIT’s World War II legacy enabled Chomsky to secure funding and attract good graduate students to his conception of linguistics at a time when academic linguistics in America was in a pre-professional stage; (2) The intellectual spirit at the Research Laboratory of Electronics fostered a culture of underground literature which granted those with close connections to the institution privileged access to new research; and (3) The shared attitudes of MIT faculty and students towards the Vietnam War created a rallying point for MIT linguists, strengthening the cohesion and solidarity of the group on both political and academic fronts. I conclude that the private words and private actions of the Cold War “MIT space” played a vital role in the rise of Transformational Grammar between 1957 and 1968.

 

Christina Matta, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Finding a stable species: Physiology and specificity in Ferdinand Cohn’s bacterial taxonomy

In 1872, botanist Ferdinand Cohn published “Untersuchungen über Bakterien,” in which he presented his four- part taxonomy of bacteria. He drew extensively upon his background in plant physiology, and, unlike his predecessors (notably Christian von Ehrenberg), he used pigmentation, fermentation, and pathogenicity, not morphology, as the criteria by which genera and species should be assigned. These characteristics, he argued, were products of an organism’s physiological properties and processes and thus could be used as stable identifiers because they did not vary even under different experimental conditions. Historiographically, Cohn is best known for his role in Robert Koch’s research on Bacillus anthracis. Yet by the time Koch first approached him in 1876, Cohn had already developed a taxonomic system based on physiology rather than morphology – a distinction that proved important to medical bacteriology and claims of disease specificity. In this paper, I will argue that Cohn’s research into bacterial physiology demonstrates the strong connections between experimental plant physiology, medicine, and chemistry. Interpreting nineteenth-century bacteriology as physiological offers an alternative to the pathogenic paradigm, and, by acknowledging interdisciplinary debts, demonstrates bacteriology’s debt to nineteenth-century botany and plant physiology.

 

 

Aaron Mauck, Harvard University

Pricing Thrifty Genes: Chronic Disease and the Thrifty Gene Controversy, 1962-1989

During the twentieth century hereditary mechanisms were often proposed to account for increasing chronic disease rates. Prominent among these was the thrifty gene hypothesis, proposed by James Neel in 1962 to explain high rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes among Native American populations. This hypothesis held that traditional diets resulted in an adaptation allowing these populations to store fat in times of plenty for ensuing times of want. As these were replaced by modern diets, this selective advantage became a genetic liability. In the decades following its initial formulation, this explanation became a mainstay in the discussion of obesity and diabetes. It was also a source of significant controversy: As an account of pathogenesis, it appealed to those interested in assessing the biological consequences of socioeconomic change. But the emphasis on genetic foundations also gave rise to misgivings, as the search for thrifty genes appeared to pathologize an apparently normal adaptation to environmental circumstances. Rather than appealing to genetics, critics of the hypothesis suggested that emphasis be placed on socioeconomic disparities and cultural preferences as the primary factors involved in pathogenesis. This paper charts the history of this controversy from the initial proposal of the hypothesis to its rejection by Neel himself in 1989. During this period geneticists and health care professionals engaged in a widespread exploration of the interaction between genes and environment in chronic disease, and also employed an adumbrated form the hypothesis to inform social and medical assessments of the potential pitfalls of global economic development.

 

Grischa Metlay, Harvard University

Risky Drinking: Conceptions of Risk in Debates about Prohibition, 1900-1920

I examine expert debates about the scientific bases American Prohibition, arguing that they exemplify a unique moment in the history of risk and risk perceptions. Previous work has identified distinctly modern elements in conceptions of “risk” (e.g., appeals to scientific or quantitative precision, and prevention through improvement) that distinguish it from earlier notions of “dangerousness” (e.g., emotive appeals to fear, and prevention through avoidance). Given the strong links between American Progressivism and the ideology of science, this period is a promising place to look emergent notions of risk. My work examines the aims and bases of Progressive strategies to prevent, or at least minimize, the negative effects of moderate drinking on the body and the body politic. It suggests that national alcohol policy was their favored strategy for affecting individual drinking practices. And they studied the risks of moderate drinking by conceptually dividing the work into causal (in this case, physiological) and statistical (in this case, mortality rates) components. However, Progressive experts on alcohol encountered technical and conceptual hurdles that stymied consolidation behind a consensus position. Faced, then, with intractable scientific uncertainty, experts fell back into idioms better suited to notions of dangerousness dominant in the nineteenth century. For example, Wet and Dry physiologists responded by abandoning scientific precision in favor of common sense and prudent asceticism, respectively. Overall, Progressive alcohol experts were unable to solve the problems that they posed, but they appreciated the promise of risk as a public health tool, setting the foundation for future research.

 

Sally Metzler, Independent Scholar

The Emperor and the Alchemist: Habsburg Patronage of alchemy and Its Impact on the Arts

During the Renaissance the pursuit of alchemy, namely transmuting base metals into gold, was a noble quest in terms of patronage and goals. Royalty was seduced by the alchemist’s promise of abundant treasuries, while scholars of alchemic philosophy insisted on alchemy’s attainment of eternal wisdom. But alchemy played a much larger role than financial gain and spiritual wisdom. The Habsburgs, including Emperor Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II, embraced alchemy, favoring not only its practitioners, but also doctors, metalurgists, and artists who incorporated alchemy into their endeavors. My paper will address the rarely considered impact that alchemy had on these seemingly disparate disciplines, particularly focusing on the visual arts during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Through my examination of Habsburg patronage of alchemy, I examine figures such as Paracelsus and Leonard Thurneysser (1530-1596), who published “Magna Alchemia,” a work that included sections on Bohemian and Hungarian mining. Endeavors of mining and gemology were similar to alchemy in that the pursuit was financial as well as spiritual. A major consideration will be the nexus of alchemy and visual art, focusing on the Prague chamber of wonders of Rudolf II (1552-1612). I posit a new interpretation of Rudolf’s collection, demonstrating how alchemic philosophy permeated artistic goals of the major Prague court artists of the day. Sally Metzler, Ph.D. Chicago

 

Michal Meyer, University of Florida

Conducting Science: The Different Roles of Physical Geography

Physical geography – the study of the earth and its inhabitants – was a quintessential nineteenth-century science. Those who wrote for a scientifically inclined general audience found in the subject a suitable vehicle for discussing nature, empire, and progress. In this paper I wish to focus on the notion of “conduct.” There are two senses in which such a focus can be helpful - conduct in terms of the authors’ function as a guide to their subject, and conduct or behavior of those doing the science that appears in the text. This metascientific level sheds light on the relationships found among nature, empire, religion, and progress and their connection to species extinction. Two well-known British writers on the subject of physical geography sprang from different backgrounds. Mary Somerville (1780-1872), who published her first edition of Physical Geography in 1848, occupied an elite position in the scientific world: recognized as a mathematician, provided with a government pension, awarded memberships in various scientific societies, and enjoyed personal friendship with many of the leading scientific thinkers of the day. Whereas Rosina Zornlin (1794?-1859) the author of Recreations in Physical Geography, or the Earth as it is, which first appeared in 1840, was the invalid daughter of a wealthy broker who wrote elementary books on many scientific subjects. Somerville and Zornlin each produced a book different in tone, scope, and assumptions about the role of science, and a comparison of the two highlights the differing didactic styles that science popularizers took.

 

 

Victoria Meyer, University of Virginia

Giving the Pox: A Case of Medicine and Polemic in Enlightenment France

This paper examines the relationships between Enlightenment philosophy, medicine, and public opinion in eighteenth-century France through the lens of counter-Enlightenment journalist Elie-Catherine Freron’s unexpected defense of inoculation against smallpox. From 1745 until 1775, Freron greatly influenced public opinion in France through his various periodicals, such as l ‘Annee Litterraire. During this period, he often became embroiled in disputes over various reform measures and inventions. The most intriguing cause adopted by Freron, however, was his fierce promotion of the controversial inoculation of smallpox. Inoculation of smallpox is a medical procedure whereby a healthy patient is purposefully infected by the insertion of a small amount of smallpox pus into incisions in order to protect the patient from smallpox. Historians have attributed the introduction of inoculation in France to Enlightenment philosophes in the 1750s, when in actuality inoculation was first discussed in France in 1714 when reports of the procedure arrived from Constantinople. Scholars have directly linked the increasing concern over mounting smallpox deaths in the eighteenth century and the philosophes’ program of reform. The historiography has focused thus on a view of inoculation as philosophe propaganda and as the Enlightenment’s greatest medical invention. The virulently anti-Enlightenment Freron’s ardent defense of inoculation in the public sphere in collusion with philosophes demonstrates, however, that this portrayal is oversimplified. It also raises questions of authority in the public sphere, particularly concerning issues of health and medicine, and the changing conceptions of proof, all which will be discussed in this paper.

 

Erika Milam, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

The problem with beauty: aesthetics, rationality, and female “choice”

Why does beauty exist in the natural world? When scientists in the first decades of the twentieth-century struggled to explain beauty within a naturalistic framework, they faced two problems. The first problem was how to explain the extravagant beauty of animals, especially as evidenced by courtship displays, if animals possessed no aesthetic sensibility. As humans, we might appreciate the beauty of a peacock’s tail, but claims that the peahen chose her mate based on the brilliance of his display struck many scientists as inappropriately anthropomorphic. The second problem was to explain cultural variations in the determination of what constituted beauty in humans. In addressing these issues, scientists and sexologists linked animal and human courtship behavior in two very different ways. They either framed animal courtship as an evolutionary forerunner to marriage choice in humans, or described animal courtship as a physical process akin to each act individual act of human “love-making.” Whereas female choice of partners in animals implied comparison and aesthetic appreciation on the part of the participants, a physiological description of courtship painted animal (and human) actions as non-cognitive and instinctual. In both cases, courtship and mating habits could act to increase the beauty and reproductive success of the inevitable offspring, but biologists and sexologists reserved rational choice as an evolutionary spur solely for humans. The history of mate choice reflects a careful negotiation of the implied aesthetics and rationality of choice-based behavior in humans and other animals.

 

Mara Mills, University of Pennsylvania

Signal and Noise: The History of the Audiogram

In 1922, Bell Laboratories engineer Raymond Wegel collaborated with otologist Edmund Prince Fowler to develop the first commercial, vacuum tube audiometer. They proposed that an “audiogram,” a plot of minimal audibility per frequency, replace other charts of hearing acuity. Hoping to use speech and hearing norms as a mold for the design of efficient telephone apparatus, AT&T began working with the New York League for the Hard of Hearing to screen the ears of children in state schools (and later measure the hearing of adults at the 1939 World’s Fairs). The United States Health Survey of 1935 used the AT&T audiometer, and the assistance of Bell engineers, to test thousands of ears across the nation. These surveys set the “reference zero” for a new kind of audiogram – one that measured hearing loss, or the deviation from a national norm. A noise panic of sorts resulted. Millions of American schoolchildren, and almost all adults over the age of 30, were believed to have hearing loss. Communication engineering – the manufacture of equipment and the processing of signals– experienced a similar obsession. Audiometry became a means for measuring the “deafening effect” of noise in rooms and on telephone lines. This paper narrates the emergence of the “normal” hearing standard, its application to equipment design, and its eventual contestation by laboratory-based studies. I will argue that deafness became a “communicable disease” in the first half of the twentieth century; anyone’s hearing could be disrupted by the environment, by equipment, or by other people.

 

Sarah Mitchell, University of Southampton

Science or Spectacle: The Tale of a False Dichotomy

Recent controversies over the public display of bodies, such as that generated by Gunter Von Hagens’s plastinated bodies exhibits, get at the larger issue of whether or not such displays of human anatomy are scientific or spectacular; educational or entertaining. Implicit in these comparisons are the assumptions that scientific and educational are more valid and that the two categories are mutually exclusive. This paper situates this ongoing, contemporary controversy in historical context through examples of the ways in which live humans on display in the mid-19th century were perceived at the time by both the general public and by scientific/medical communities. I provide a brief overview of the varieties of human display that were prevalent at the time, then focus specifically on the public exhibition of enslaved American sisters Millie and Christine McKoy (1851-1912), also known as “The Two Headed Nightingale.” Why did these types of displays that were largely unopposed in the mid-19th century become so unacceptable in the mid-20th century? What role did the professionalizing sciences play in shaping public opinion? Why have academics been so vested in dismissing the popular, the entertaining and the spectacular? This paper suggests that there is much to be gained by a new approach to the “science or spectacle” debate and proposes a potentially more constructive view of the relationship between them that moves the focus from the object or individual in question to the individual or group doing the observing. The relationship between the two is historically contingent.

 

 

Hiromi Mizuno, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Scientific Nationalism in Japan

My paper explores the history of scientific nationalism in Japan, a kind of nationalism that emphasizes the development of science for the sake of the nation. It will do so by examining the politics behind the Japanese term, kagaku gijutsu (science-technology). This term is most widely used in Japan to refer to the general fields of science and technology; so widely used that its origin has been forgotten. It was coined by technocrats in 1941 to promote military technology at the sacrifice of basic science and social sciences. By redefining science in such a specific way, these technocrats schemed to take control over science policy away from the hands of the ministry of education. While the term “science-technology” after WWII lost the initial technocratic message, my paper argues that it is important to look back the wartime politics behind the term “science-technology” now. The Japanese government has been promoting the vigorous science-technology policy in the past fifteen years, and I have found the discourse around the current science-technology policy to be very similar to that of wartime Japan: most notably the discourse that designates the survival of the nation in the competitive world directly to the need for science and technology to be planned, managed, and controlled by the central government. While I discuss such discourse as that of Japanese scientific nationalism, my discussion is relevant to Korea, Taiwan, and China as “science-technology” has been translated into Korean and Chinese and shaped discourses and policies in those nations from the early 1940s onward.

 

Georgina Montgomery, Michigan State University