Paper and Poster Abstracts for 2015 History of Science Society

Transcription

Paper and Poster Abstracts for 2015 History
of Science Society Meeting
Abstracts are sorted by the last name of the primary author.
Author: Will Abberley
Title: Darwinian Mimicry, Maladaptation and Narrative Uncertainty
Session: Roundtable: Darwinian Loose Ends: Evolution, Narrative and Maladaptation (Saturday,
November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: This presentation will discuss the uncertain narrative trajectories of the theories of protective mimicry
described by Darwin and his supporters, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace. The tendency of some
organisms to resemble other, inedible species, and thus avoid being eaten, was celebrated as a vivid example of
organisms adapting to their environments. Yet this mimicry was also maladaptive, as it enabled weak forms to
survive by parasitically hiding behind other species’ defences. Will argues Darwin, Bates and Wallace equivocated
in their narrations of mimicry as an evolutionary phenomenon. Sometimes they suggested such ‘degenerate’ mimics
were doomed to extinction by the efficient mechanism of natural selection; other times they rejected this teleology,
presenting natural selection as the author rather than the foe of maladaptive mimics.
Author: Charlotte Abney Salomon
Title: A Mineralogical Geography: Chemists, Geologists, and Mapmakers in EighteenthCentury Sweden
Session: Chemistry in (Practical) Context: Connecting Eighteenth-Century
Chemistry to its Uses (Friday, November 20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In the conventionally accepted history of geological mapmaking, formulated by Martin Rudwick, its
techniques developed from two general scientific perspectives in France and England, that of what he calls "mineral
geographers” and “traveller-naturalists,” with cartographic conventions from disparate traditions of the former
coalescing with the latter to form a unified visual language within the Geological Society of London around 1820.
Seldom mentioned are the several Swedish chemical mineralogists who created geological maps of their own prior
to this time, whose work confounds this scheme at several points.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Swedish mineralogists had been exploring and interpreting the earth below
them for centuries in the service of the mining sector. In this paper, I demonstrate that Swedish geological mapping
developed within Swedish geology in a scientific environment that was internally vibrant and innovative. Swedish
geologists built their work on systems developed both within Sweden and abroad, but it seems that published
scientific interpretation of Swedish land during the development of geological mapping was conducted by Swedes
alone until at least the 1830s. Additionally, the makers of early Swedish geological maps demonstrate the clear
influence of an existing internal Swedish tradition of earth science and description.
Author: Miruna Achim
Title: Writing Lessons in the History of Antiquarianism: Mexico City, ca 1800s
HSS 2015 Paper Abstracts
Session: Collecting Science: Antiquities and Materia Medica in 18th and 19thCentury Mexico (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: This talk takes as its point of departure the manuscripts produced during the Royal Antiquarian
Expeditions of New Spain (1805-1808), sponsored by the Spanish crown with the aim of studying pre-Conquest
ruins in Mexico. Fragments of these manuscripts were published in the 19th century, most notably in Paris and
London, and these luxury editions contributed to making antiquities into the objects of a science of America’s
ancient past, with its own disciplined methods for collecting and studying antiquities, and with its own set of
questions concerning the essence of New World civilizations and their relation to those of the Old World
civilizations. The manuscripts produced by the Royal Antiquarian Expeditions, on the other hand, are seldom seen.
The drafts, scraps of drawings, disorganized lists and inventories, taken together, tell a different story of American
antiquarianism: far from making universal and objective claims, knowledge about antiquities was produced in a
dispersed way, at many sites, where determining factors were specific configurations of persons, material, cultural
modes, and political trends. The picture I draw here captures American antiquarianism in its rich and complex
moment of undiscipline, when antiquities did not yet have the (economic, symbolic, or historical) values with which
they acquired in the course of the 19th century, and addresses more general questions about the emergence of
cultural and scientific objects and about the formation of scientific collections.
Author: Antony Adler
Title: Prince of Science: Albert Ist of Monaco (1848–1922)
Session: Internationalism (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Prince Albert Ist of Monaco, who once described himself as uniting in one mind “ideas and will,” is a
towering figure in the history of oceanography. Yet, his unique position as both a scientist and head of state poses
several historiographical challenges. Scientists lionized the Prince for his contributions to marine science and,
perhaps most importantly, for his work as a scientific patron. Yet, Albert was also the subjected to frequent
mockery, as his small principality’s reliance on gambling revenue was an easy target for condemnation by the
popular press. This paper evaluates Prince Albert’s contribution to the development of the marine sciences in the
late nineteenth century. I argue that Prince Albert must be included in any account of the development of the marine
sciences because his efforts to meld oceanographic work with political internationalism helped forge transnational
cooperative programs in marine science beyond the scope of fisheries research. Furthermore, the institutions he
founded, the oceanographic museum at Monaco and the Oceanographic Institute in Paris, bolstered the French
marine science program in the absence of government support, and melded physical and biological studies under a
humanist program for marine research. The dependence of Albert’s oceanographic program on his own dynastic
lineage proved, however, to be its greatest weakness. The downscaling of his institutions’ scientific output in the
aftermath of his death (and in the wake of World War I) reveals the inherent flaw in a program dependent upon a
single individual
Author: Gerard Alberts
Title: The Purification of Mathematics and its Consequences
Session: Re-periodizing the History of Mathematics (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Modern mathematics: 1800 by stark consensus appears as the beginning of a new era of mathematics. The
gist of the Gaussian or Lagrangean transition was that mathematics emerged as an autonomous discipline, liberated
from its ties with the outside world and concerned with rigor. Dirk Struik characterizes the emergence of modern
mathematics as an emancipation. Let us call it a purification. Nineteenth Century pure mathematics was the outcome
of a process of purification.
The notion of pure mathematics was not new, but the appearance of the other mathematical practices as application
thereof was. Historians were most active in this reinvention. Our forebears created the genealogy of mathematics:
they gave mathematics a history and started reading older works as the sources and designated these sources as
heritage.
Modernism: The stronger interpretation allows further periodization of the next episodes. First, modernism is more
specific than “modern mathematics.” Depending on the characterization of modernism, one may wish to give it a
start at Dedekind and Cantor in the 1870s, or rather emphasize Hilbert and start later, or even wait until Van der
Waerden’s Moderne Algebra of 1930-31.
Hybrid: The emergence of mathematical modeling in the 1950s fundamentally changed the idea of applying
mathematics. The present hybridization towards the plural mathematical sciences foreseen for 2025, puts an end to
the purification of two centuries ago. By consequence, within the history of mathematics, late modernity, 18002000, may be called the era of pure mathematics.
Author: Statman Alexander
Title: The Tarot of Yu the Great: Enlightenment Theories of Civilization's Oriental Origins
Session: Prisca Scientia: Paradoxes of Progress in History and the Sciences, 1500-1800
(Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: During the late 1770s, there was one thing about Chinese civilization that all Europeans could agree on: it
was very old. Voltaire, who had once championed China as a model for Europe, came to view it as static or even
regressive. Meanwhile, others began to praise Chinese culture for the very reasons for which many of the
philosophes rejected it. French scholars who challenged the emerging Enlightenment theory of progress became
aligned with those interested in China, extending their quest for universal truth to include other knowledge traditions
distant from their own in time and space. The Protestant minister Antoine Court de Gébelin and the astronomer
Jean-Sylvain Bailly following in his footsteps sought the wisdom of the ancients in the East. Did the Chinese
inscription on the Stele of Yu the Great express the same cosmology as the ancient Egyptian game of Tarot? Was a
legendary outcropping of stones at a Buddhist site in Xinjiang actually evidence of the pan-Eurasian flourishing of
the lost civilization of Atlantis? To investigate, savants in Paris turned to the ex-Jesuit missionary in Beijing, JosephMarie Amiot. Reading their books and letters, Amiot learned what China was really good for in late-Enlightenment
France. He became a self-described “disciple” of Court de Gébelin and Bailly and offered proof from the Chinese
tradition in support of their anti-progress views. Amiot’s studies of Chinese history and philosophy contributed to a
distinctively late-Enlightenment theory of the prisca scientia while also painting an increasingly ideological picture
of China in Europe.
Author: Bethany Anderson
Title: Situating Data in the Archives: Facilitating Scientific Reuse, Humanistic Study, and the
Preservation of a Future Record of Science
Session: Managing Information, Analyzing Systems (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Emerging technologies and new modes of scholarly communication are rapidly changing the information
landscape. Scientists, in particular, have at their disposal powerful means by which to create and analyze data. The
current information climate has yielded more than just an explosion of scientific research and data: the scale and
complexity of data has led to new terminologies and concepts (i.e. 'big data' and 'Fourth Paradigm'), while
information mandates and open access movements have emerged as responses to management and accessibility
issues created by such vast amounts of data. Most significantly, however, e-Science has led to the development of a
set of practices and methods to manage data. While data management has been conceived as an essential mechanism
for scientists to facilitate their own research as well as to prepare data for future archiving, archival literature on
scientific archives has recognized the importance of preserving and archiving related documentation such as
laboratory notebooks and correspondence. But scholarly communication occurs spans digital networks and
platforms. Scientists produce data and develop ideas in complex information ecosystems; the content they create
sheds light on the context in which they develop ideas and generate research materials. While data management
facilitates funding agency compliance, capturing the research archives within which data are enmeshed can
potentially yield a richer record of scientific research. This paper will explore why data, by themselves, are an
incomplete record of science, and that they, like other forms of archival documentation, require documentary
context to be interpreted, understood, and reused
Author: Noam Andrews
Title: Formfitting: Solidifying Bodies in 16th Century Europe
Session: Form and Formalism (Friday, November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: The new geometrical diagrams in the first printed edition of Euclid’s Elements (1482) inspired an intense
reinvestment in the potential of geometrical representation on either side of the Alps, particularly in regards to the
platonic solids or “regular bodies,” which were considered to be the most conceptually challenging of Euclid’s
geometries. Departing from the solids as base motifs, polyhedra flourished in early 16th century Italy, most notably
in the lavish drawings of Luca Pacioli’s De divina proportione (1509) and in geometrical intarsia, appearing also in
prints by Ugo da Carpi, Jacopo Caraglio, and others. In Germany, the conduit for geometrical knowledge was
Albrecht Dürer and his often overlooked treatise on geometry the Underweysung der Messung (1525). Based upon a
Euclidean model, the Underweysung’s expressed and ultimately successful purpose was to make geometry and
precision measurement accessible to a new generation of German artists. Central to this pedagogical philosophy was
the transformation of polyhedra into cheap and easy “unfolded” polyhedral nets that could be printed, cut out, and
glued together to create quick copies of the solids. These copies enabled a radically tactile and playful relationship to
what had been inviolable classical geometry, heralding a new era of abstract experimentation by later 16th century
German artists such as Erhard Schön, Augustin Hirschvogel, Lorenz Stöer, and Wenzel Jamnitzer.
Author: Rachel A. Ankeny, Sabina Leonelli
Title: Exploring MODs Culture and Communication: A History of Model Organism Databases
(MODs) in Genomics Research
Session: Technologies, Data and DNA: Contemporary Histories of Genomics (Friday,
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Model organism databases (MODs) have played critical roles in the history of recent genomics via their
collection and organization of data gathered on model organisms for retrieval and re-use both for research on the
particular focal organism as well as comparative research. This paper focuses on five databases selected because of
their relatively long histories, prominence, and popularity and traces their evolution in the period 1990-2010: the
Saccharomyces Genome Database; FlyBase, used for the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster; Mouse Genome
Informatics; WormBase, used for the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans; and The Arabidopsis Information Resource
(TAIR) used for the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. We investigate the standards embedded in these databases for what
counts as reliable evidence, acceptable terminology, appropriate experimental set-ups, and underlying research
ethos. We also explore how these databases are designed to simultaneously serve their main communities of users as
well as those seeking to do comparative research, with particular focus on the skills required for such users. We
argue that the increasing reliance on databases as vehicles to circulate data and the ability to do comparative
research via these databases have had major impacts on how genomics researchers communicate which differs
significantly from previous forms of communication within these communities.
Author: Patrick Anthony
Title: From “Views of Nature” to Views of Justice: Mapping the Evolution of Alexander von
Humboldt’s Weltbürgertum
Session: HSS Poster Session and Reception (Friday, November 20, 7:30 – 8:30 PM)
Abstract: The Prussian-born naturalist Alexander von Humboldt found in nature a single harmonious system bound
by the confluence of diverse and interconnected forces. As part of the greater organic whole, Humboldt believed
humankind’s moral sentiments and social institutions ought to accord with the inherent harmony of the universe.
Human beings were, for Humboldt, free and equal “citizens of the world.” I argue that mapping Humboldt’s
conception of justice makes it possible to understand its intellectual continuities more accurately as lived
experiences and place lived experiences in physical environments. To this end, my poster examines the co-evolution
of Humboldt’s social and scientific thought during two formative phases of his life: an excursion to England with
Georg Forster in 1790 and a voyage through the Americas from 1799 to 1804. By mapping these travels, my poster
makes visible the Weltbürgerlich (world-citizen and cosmopolitan) ideal of the naturalist modeled by Forster and
embodied by Humboldt. At the same time, a cartographic history of Humboldt invites us to think about the power of
place in the formation of his ideas about nature and justice. Maps, isolines, and tableaux have all come to symbolize
Humboldtian Science. But maps can also be used to explore the human element of that science. In doing so, they
provide images of Humboldt’s Weltbürgertum as both a cosmopolitan identity and a humanitarian concept.
Author: Thomas Apel
Title: "Americanizing Lavoisier: 'French Chemistry,' Class, and the Making of American
Science, 1797-1799"
Session: Rethinking Place and Space (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: From 1797 to 1799 a controversy played out on the pages of the Medical Repository, the United States’
first scientific journal. At its center was the well-known feud between Lavoisierian chemists and Joseph Priestley,
the lone and beleaguered supporter of the phlogiston model, but the controversy in the Medical Repository took on
profoundly different dimensions from the episode in Europe. The American chemists—Samuel Latham Mitchill and
Benjamin Woodhouse—who defended Priestley did not endorse his science. Rather, they castigated his opponents,
especially Princeton’s John Maclean, who rudely dismissed Priestley’s objections to the Lavoisierian model. The
American chemists’ debate addressed the manner in which scientific discourses were to proceed. Using the
Repository to settle the issue, Mitchill and Woodhouse sought to mold a uniquely American knowledge culture—a
framework in which knowledge claims were to be proposed, questioned, and accepted. This framework negotiated
the knowledge cultures associated with Priestley and the English, which privileged social status too much to satisfy
the more egalitarian Americans, and that of the “French chemists,” whom they admired for their chemical ideas, but
reviled for their deism and authoritarianism. This paper about French chemistry in the early United States is a story
about knowledge-makers in a devout, postcolonial republic trying to mold a national scientific culture, and how in
doing so they were led to redefine their relationships with foreign scientific communities, to rethink assumptions
about the role of class in knowledge production, and finally to reformulate elements of the Lavoisierian model.
Author: Marcelo Aranda
Title: Best Practices for Using Digital History to Study Early-Modern Networks
Session: Roundtable: Computational Methods in Network Analysis for the History of Science
(Friday, November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Marcelo Aranda will present on best practices for using digital history to study early-modern networks,
drawing on examples from his work on Mapping the Republic of Letters, and his Spanish Science Database.
Author: Tal Arbel
Title: Self-Government for the Fittest: Stuart C. Dodd and the Internationalization of Public
Opinion Research
Abstract: In 1954, The Scientific Monthly published an article proposing a measurement instrument designed to
test the readiness of colonized people for self-government. Properly applied, this sociometric instrument would
make sure that a democratic concern for the welfare of the governed rather than international power politics or
imperial interests determined the schedule for independence. “If fitness can be defined and measured and degrees of
it set as goals,” the article stated, “the trusteeship system is likely to work with less friction and probability of
bloodshed in the future.” The man behind the proposal was Stuart C. Dodd, an American social scientist and pioneer
of scientific polling techniques who had spent the 1930s and 1940s in the colonial Near East, conducting the first
opinion and attitude field studies in the region as professor of sociology in the American University of Beirut. In the
aftermath of the war, Dodd returned to the U.S. and became a vigorous exponent of the expansion of social scientific
mechanisms and tools for international governance: from the use of public opinion polling as “barometer for
international security” to the organization of an international association of pollsters. By inquiring into the role of
social research in the governing and regulation of the mandate state, this paper also speaks to a broader
historiography on social science as the new basis and standard of intelligibility for administrative practice in the
second half of the twentieth century.
Author: Etienne Aucouturier
Title: Auguste Trillat and the Foundations of the French Biological and Chemical Weapons
Program
Session: After Ypres: The Integration of Science into War. Part I: Chemistry and Chemists
through War (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In the second half of the 19th century, the French chemist, engineer and biologist Auguste Trillat patented
a chemical compound of formaldehyde known as formol. In 1905, Trillat became head of the Pasteur Institute’s
applied hygiene research department, in Paris. His main engineering activities consisted in producing chemical
disinfection devices. His concern for hygiene, which contributed to a great extent to his success, led him to create an
original epidemiological theory of aerosols. He claimed that microbial agents could behave as cores of micro
droplets, and that this property enhanced the propagation of diseases through air. This theory and his studies on the
dynamics of epidemics led him to improve the methods of epidemiology, by showing that various parameters,
among which but not exclusively the pathogenic properties of the microbial agents themselves, had to be taken into
account in order to understand the course of an epidemic, its seriousness and extension. His theory’s success, his
technical skills and devices, and his researches regarding the weaponization of biological and chemical agents
before and during World War I, led Trillat to play a founding role, after the war, in the creation and development of
the first French State program for biological and chemical weapons. Auguste Trillat is exemplary of the early XXth
century interconnection between science, engineering and modern warfare, as his role was jointly political and
scientific. Through an historical account of his works, we will address the consequences of this dual role on his
scientific and political career.
Author: Zeke Baker
Title: From Appropriation to Biopolitics: Climate Knowledge as a Practice of Government
Session: Health and Wealth through Better Weather: The History of Meteorology and the
Improvement of Nations (Friday, November 20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: This study introduces a longitudinal case-comparative approach that explores the ways in which climate
knowledge articulates with modern state-making and thereby co-produces practices of government. The study
focuses on government, in Foucault’s (1991, 2008) sense, as a unique form of power ordered diffusely through
knowledge and the formation of social categories, populations and territory amenable to security, management, and
discipline. Three cases are chosen based on major inflection points in the form of climate knowledge and associated
expertise: (1) U.S. meteorology and colonial/frontier expansion in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; (2) the rise
of numerical weather prediction (NWP) and atmospheric modeling from 1940-1960 in the U.S.; and (3) a recent turn
in U.S. climate expertise and policy towards predicting and governing the social effects of climate change. These
three periods mark major transformations in both climate knowledge and forms of government, yet in existing
literature the relationship between these transformations are unclear both within—and especially across—the cases.
To gain some analytic leverage on these relationships, the study uses three major concepts: translation as a
mechanism of stabilizing power-knowledge; articulation as the co-production of science and the state; and
appropriation as a consistent outcome of governmental practice.
Author: Ana Barahona
Title: Human Genetics in Cold War Mexico and Transnational Science: Human Population
Genetics in the Work of Rubén Lisker and Alfonso León de Garay
Session: Genetics and Eugenics (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: After WWII human genetics as a medical field developed new techniques and practices intended not only
to characterize but also to understand variation differences among populations and their relation to the presence of
certain diseases, and it was transformed from a medical backwater to an appealing medical research frontier. It was
precisely during the Cold War that scientists hosted, disseminated and consolidated the emerging model of human
genetics in the clinic and in the field. This paper studies the emergence of human genetics in post-war Mexico
(1945-1970), emphasizing the transnational circulation of knowledge, people and practices, and the institutions
involved that enabled its consolidation in the country. The study of population genetics was the first branch of
human genetics that was developed in Mexico. The first study on the distribution of genetic markers in the Mexican
Mestizo and Indian population in 1950s was followed, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, by studies to characterize
the genetic composition of the Mexican population by the groups headed by Mexican physicians Rubén Lisker at the
National Institute of Nutrition, and Alfonso León de Garay at the National Commission of Nuclear Energy. These
studies were aligned with other laboratories in other parts of the world using molecular tracers and more up-to-date
electrophoresis techniques to measure the genetic variability of Mexican indigenous populations. Following the
1960s trend and technologies, they focused on enzymes and other blood components, like the deficiency of the
Glucose-6-Phosphate-Dehydrogenase (D6PD) and the presence of abnormal hemoglobins and albumins in Mexican
indigenous population.
Author: Michael J. Barany
Title: Anticipation, Collection, Review, and the Hybrid Time of Modern Mathematics
Abstract: At first blush, few pursuits seem further than mathematics from what Lorraine Daston has recently
characterized as the “sciences of the archive.” Mathematicians rarely collect or use empirical data, and their
methods, proofs, and theorems are typically presented as timeless. Yet mathematicians, especially in the twentieth
century, have been voracious assemblers of sprawling libraries, and their sometimes-distinctive uses of books and
journals in their research and disciplinary infrastructure have largely escaped historical inquiry. I examine
mathematicians’ practices of publication and collection since the mid-nineteenth century, including their production
and use of collected works by famous scholars and of review journals for assembling, sorting, and accessing
research. By situating mathematical work in mathematicians’ archival practices, I offer an account of such features
as anticipation, continuity, and universality in modern mathematics.
Where Joan Richards, for instance, has marked the transition from a prevailing historical and humanistic genre of
mathematics in the eighteenth century to one in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries dominated by successive
attempts at deracinated and self-contained rigor, I here argue that mathematicians in the latter period manufactured
what Leo Corry has characterized as mathematics’ distinctive image of eternal mathematical truth through an altered
relationship to mathematical archives that in many ways intensified, rather than eliminated, particular kinds of
attention to historical genealogies. I conclude with a consideration of mathematics as a science of the arXiv, a
massive online preprint database founded in 1991 that has further transformed mathematicians’ relationship to time
and history.
Author: Lydia Barnett
Title: Fieldwork and Fieldworkers: Labor and Expertise in the Enlightened Earth Sciences
Session: Expertise in the Age of Enlightenment (Sunday, November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: This paper’s theme is the visible and invisible labor that went into the production of scientific knowledge
in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, I explore the role of various kinds of people –
servants, family members, agricultural laborers, and mercenary fossil-hunters – whose labor was crucial to the
making of knowledge about the earth and the environment but was usually not acknowledged either publically or
directly. However, private references to their necessary assistance abounds in scientific correspondence, and their
work was often indirectly acknowledged in scientific illustrations of field sites and expeditions even if it went
uncredited in the text and on the title page. Focusing on case studies from Italy and England, I show how classed and
gendered ideas about labor, especially manual labor, played into the construction of scientific expertise in the early
Enlightenment. Looking at the ways in which non-elite and non-expert labor was co-opted, represented, and
occluded allows us to revisit the meaning and rhetoric of empiricism in the era of the gentleman-naturalist.
Author: William Bausman
Title: Telling the Origins of the Neutral Theory of Ecology
Session: Historical Narratives (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: The neutral theory of biodiversity is both controversial and a lasting presence in community ecology. One
persistent epistemological question asks how the neutral theory can be useful given its 'obviously false' assumption
that all individuals in a community are functionally equivalent. This question is prompted the origin story that
Stephen Hubbell, the chief innovator, tells. In this way, the philosophy of the neutral theory has been founded upon
its history. But that history is not the only one available. Different epistemological questions and different answers
to these questions can be prompted by different narratives of the origin and development of the theory. I use
Hubbell's origin story as the jumping off point for telling the origins of the neutral theory. I critique his origin story
considered as a historical claim by outlining three different but interrelated narratives of how the neutral theory of
ecology grows out of the history of community ecology after 1950. The first narrative foregrounds the construction
of formal models of biodiversity patterns. The second narrative foregrounds empirical and theoretical work on
whether tropical communities are in taxonomic equilibrium. And the third narrative foregrounds the existence of
Kimura's neutral theory, the MBL model in paleobiology, and the debates over the proper role of "null hypotheses"
in biology. A very different historical picture of the origins of the theory emerges from these narratives than from
the origin story. And a different epistemic picture of the usefulness of the neutral theory follows from these different
origins.
Author: Emily Beck
Title: Teaching Undergraduates: Scientific Communication and Leonhart Fuchs
Abstract: Using original primary sources in undergraduate teaching brings the stories and context of historical
actors to life for students. The physicality of a 500-year old book can teach students about the value of paper, the
difficulty of creating images, the wealth that was necessary to buy the book, and the length of time that it was used
by its owners. Unfortunately, teaching early history of science to undergraduates with primary resources can often
be difficult because they lack the language and paleography skills necessary to read the documents. Carefully
selecting images from primary sources is a powerful way to overcome this barrier and teach students about scientific
communication in the early modern time period. This poster will focus on teaching with the Wangensteen Historical
Library of Biology and Medicine’s (University of Minnesota) copy of Leonhart Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpum
stirpium commentarii insignes (1542) in history of science and medicine courses. Written in Latin, this copy of the
book is annotated throughout in several hands, in different languages and time periods. The images have been handcolored and many include manuscript adjustments to the images, such as adding leaves or drawings of seeds. On
their own, Fuchs’s woodcuts of materia medica teach students how closely connected medicine and plant studies
were, as well as the importance of naturalism in scientific representations. By using written and drawn marginalia as
a kind of image, early modern scientific debates and discussions become more recognizable.
Author: Nadia Berenstein
Title: “Taste Panel as Laboratory Instrument, 1935-1950”
Session: The Sciences of Taste (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: The "taste panel" — a small group of selected, trained individuals performing sensory evaluations in
controlled settings — first appeared in agricultural research and food industry laboratories in the 1930s; by 1950, it
had become the primary tool used to measure, compare, and evaluate the sensory qualities of foods. More than just a
transitory record of individual preferences, taste panels were experimental instruments, expected to produce reliable
and reproducible information about food qualities. This paper considers the taste panel as a complex instrumental
assemblage, composed of specially designed rooms that excluded both atmospheric and social contaminants,
stringently controlled inputs and outputs, odorless utensils, as well as sensible human bodies. Operating a taste panel
meant coordinating, managing, and maintaining these different components, which entailed a series of negotiations
and accommodations. This paper takes on a trio of case studies to examine how taste panels were assembled and
operated in contrasting institutional settings — a USDA agricultural research station, the US Army Quartermaster
Institute, and a distillery quality control laboratory. In particular, I attend to the ways experimenters grappled with
the challenges of managing individual tasters — who were trained, tested, but, crucially, not "experts." I show that
although taste panels were devised to measure the sensory qualities of foods, they also incidentally and unavoidably
produced a record of the sensory performance of human bodies. This paper sheds light on the construction of flavor
as a scientific object during this period, illuminating key moments in the development of "the sciences of
subjectivity."
Author: James H. Bergman
Title: Drawing the Boundaries of Climate: Zones of Climatic Risk and Land Use Planning in the
Great Depression
Session: Roundtable: Histories of Meteorology and Climatology (Saturday, November 21, 12:00
– 1:15 PM)
Abstract: “Climate stabilization” is one of the key words in climate change policy today. But what, exactly, does it
mean to have a “stable” climate? My portion of the roundtable will explore efforts to answer this question in the
United States in the 1930s, and the importance of this question for the economic and political order of the period.
Although weather has colloquially been associated with constant change and unpredictability, and climate with
constancy and stability, a group of geographers in the 1920s and 1930s began challenging this idea of “climatic
stability.”
The talk will focus, in particular, on efforts in the 1930s by the climatologist C.W. Thornthwaite to identify “zones
of climatic risk,” areas where the boundaries between climatic zones were subject to “recurrent dislocations” that
were often disastrous for agriculture. Even before the infamous Dust Bowl, policymakers sought to address, and
possibly guide, the seemingly chaotic migrations spurred by the Great Depression and determine the most
appropriate use of land in different regions. Thornthwaite and his colleagues argued that climate served as an
important basis for identifying land that was suitable for agriculture, and land that was “marginal” or “submarginal.”
In doing so, they furthered a conception of climate that was not based so much on “average weather” as on the
dynamic movements of the atmosphere. In other words, not only were the boundaries between climatic regions in
constant flux; the boundaries between meteorology and climatology were as well.
Author: Carin Berkowitz
Title: Public or Private? London Medical Lectures and the Journals that Printed Them, 1820-40
Session: Openness and its Discontents in the History of Scientific Information (Friday,
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In 1825, the surgeon John Abernethy brought a lawsuit alleging violation of copyright against the radical
founder of the Lancet, Thomas Wakley. Wakley had begun to fill the pages of his new weekly journal with the
contents of London's medical lectures, and Abernethy, who was one of the lecturers featured, took exception.
Medical men depended on student fees to support themselves, and often waited until they had retired from the
classroom to publish their lectures in books from which they themselves might profit. Thus, they regarded their
lectures as a form of private property. Wakley, on the other hand, argued that such lectures were public because they
were given by Abernethy in his capacity as surgeon to a public charity. The ambiguously public/private character of
London's medical classrooms, in fact, seemed to be made more complex by the tendency of British medical lecturers
to depend on their private school lectures in public hospitals to establish priority of discovery in the classroom. The
judge in Abernethy's case decided in favor of Wakley. By the time of Wakley's death, medical periodicals celebrated
that decision as one that aided the freedom of the medical press and its dispersal of information in the dispelling of
ignorance, but the dispute between Wakley and London's medical lecturers was active over the first half of the
nineteenth century. This paper explores debates surrounding the public-private nature of medical knowledge
generated in hospitals, taught in private classrooms, and circulated in the new medical weeklies.
Author: Luc Berlivet
Title: Pooling Data: Corrado Gini’s Field Investigations and the Quest to Weight Heredity
against Environment
Session: Heredity Data: Documenting Human Inheritance from the Rise of Eugenics to the
Second World War (Saturday, November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Exploring the respective influence of heredity and environment in shaping the attributes of individuals
and populations alike was crucial to Italian anthropologists, physicians and criminologists since the heyday of the
“positivist” movement, at the end of the nineteenth century. At stake were both the ability for favourable social and
physical environmental factors to offset deleterious atavisms, and the possible inheritance of acquired
characteristics. Such questions gained renewed importance during the Fascist era, when the prominent statistician,
demographer and eugenicist, Corrado Gini, turned it into a massive research program. With the collaboration of
interdisciplinary teams working under his guidance, he led no less than ten fieldwork investigations into populations
scattered over three continents. In order to accurately weight the different influences that bore on human evolution,
these investigations undertook to compare populations in geographical and/or social isolation with those undergoing
a process of “racial admixture”. Fulfilling their scientific aims depended chiefly on pooling and interweaving a wide
range of standardized demographic, anthropological and medical data collected directly on the field. Gini thus
elaborated a series of extremely detailed charts, questionnaires and guidelines that allowed for the systematic
recording of both numerical and qualitative information. He then built on the mass of data gathered during these
expeditions to highlight the plasticity of individual and racial constitutions, and in so doing provided the emerging
international movement known as “Latin eugenics” with a distinctive scientific style of thinking.
Author: Dominic Berry
Title: Potato
Session: Roundtable: Why objects? (Friday, November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: A focus on bio-objects can be liberating, particularly if one has spent too long researching institutions that
turn them into models, or businesses that treat them as commodities, or policy makers who use them as boundary
objects, or consumers who make them into decorations, medicine, or food. But a feeling of liberation can also be a
cause for concern. We feel liberated because we get to refresh ourselves with a little of nature’s naturalness. Away
from the artificial archive we instead follow little natural bundles through the world, humbly noting when they coproduce social or epistemological agendas. I am uneasy about things that are valued for their naturalness and so will
explore this potential historiographical dependence. Is it a necessary feature of becoming bio-object focused? Is this
actually a misplaced concern? Is being bio-object focused very much different to other methodologies? Consider the
potato. It is a good bio-object. Firstly, when washed, nothing has ever looked cleaner. Secondly it has an
innumerable number of uses and meanings to as wide a variety of communities as you could hope to find. Thirdly, it
has already been the subject – over 50 years ago – of an object focused study. Redcliffe Salaman’s The History and
Social Influence of the Potato has received some attention but has not been reviewed from the perspective of this
roundtable. Inspired by Paolo Palladino I begin with Salaman as scientist and historian, moving through the
twentieth century, and ending with the ambitions of contemporary plant synthetic biology.
Author: Mario Biagioli
Title: Intellectual Property as Technology
Session: Roundtable: The New Historiography of Science, Technology, and Intellectual Property
Law (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Economic and business historians, as well as social historians of technology, have often displayed an
“externalist” approach to patenting. Patents were either treated as what some inventors did after they invented
something, or as indicators of innovation—things to be counted and analyzed in their macroscopic trends and
distributions. However, in recent years, historians of science and STS practitioners have engaged more directly with
the law itself and with how it construes and transforms its objects. This has opened the possibility to treat
intellectual property as something that is not just about technology, but is itself a technology. We now have case
studies of the long processes through which an invention may become a patent, and of the equally complex
processes of patent litigation. These studies unable us to grasp the complex interactions among scientists, engineers,
attorneys, the patent office, and their negotiations between different types of knowledge, expertise, and professional
cultures. The next phase, which I strongly advocate, would not be one in which we simply write the history of the
interaction between the technosciences and intellectual property or privilege litigation and courtroom drama.
Instead, it would be one in which we do the history of intellectual property as a technology. This is distinct from
traditional legal history. Instead of focusing exclusively on changing doctrines and procedures, this history (like the
history of science) would study the role of materialities—models, depositories, systems of classification,
representational standards, and technical language—in the production of the objects of intellectual property.
Author: Geoff Bil
Title: Enlightenment Ethnobotany: Plants, Print and Practice in the Late-Eighteenth-Century
Pacific
Session: Tracing Scientific Actors (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: The delocalizing, expropriatory intent behind the Linnaean taxonomical enterprise is well known. Among
other things, Linnaeus rejected indigenous plant names in favor of names that decontextualized plants and reinserted
them into a European classificatory framework for the purposes of categorizing, acclimatizing and exploiting them.
What has been largely overlooked, however, is the extent to which late-Enlightenment Linnaean botanists
themselves continued not only to rely on indigenous knowledge and guidance in their colonial fieldwork, but also to
actively cultivate a knowledge of indigenous languages – especially indigenous plant names – for themselves. One
reason for this omission, I suggest, is that historians of botany have formed a more or less totalizing impression of
the discipline’s late eighteenth-century cultural significance from published flora and other writings in which
Linnaean binomial species names predominate. My own line of inquiry, on the other hand, contrasts the marginality
of indigenous plant names in published texts with their far greater prominence in unpublished materials. For the
purposes of this paper I draw particularly on Daniel Solander’s Plantae Otaheitensis, a manuscript virtually ignored
by historians. The intention is threefold: to draw attention to a heretofore underutilized resource for Cook voyage
historians; to augment a growing scholarly awareness of indigenous knowledge-making contributions to
Enlightenment botany; and finally, in highlighting the disjuncture between exoteric print conventions and esoteric
plant-collecting practices, to shed further light on the oft-observed correlation between botany and early Romantic
epistemology.
Author: Carla Bittel
Title: Tools of the Phrenological Trade: Gender, Paper, and Practices in Antebellum America
Session: Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge (Friday,
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: This presentation examines how phrenological practices depended on paper, or rather, a system of paper.
While scholars have studied phrenology as a form of knowledge, less attention has been paid to the materials of
phrenology, and how paper allowed for the documentation, transmission, and uses of phrenological knowledge.
Considered a science by many in the early nineteenth-century, phrenology measured the skull and localized faculties
to analyze the brain as the “organ of the mind.” “Practical phrenology” thrived in the antebellum United States
amidst growing health reform movements and a flourishing consumer and print culture. While phrenology books
abounded, paper charts, individual analyses, notebooks, lecture notes, broadsides, receipts, stationary, and traced
profiles worked in tandem to constitute an accessible, transportable, marketable science. And, on paper, phrenology
sorted people into categories, and made normative certain physical and mental characteristics, delineating
differences of race, gender, ability and disability. This study explores how phrenological paper tools of the trade
served in measuring, documenting, and evaluating cranial characteristics, particularly in relation to gender. It shows
how gender expectations and negotiations were built into phrenological charts, and how gender shaped practices
with paper. Printed notices and testimonials, charts and illustrations bearing the phrenologist’s name and specialties,
served mostly male, itinerant phrenologists, but paper was also utilized by women practitioners and accessible to
women users, when some other materials of science were not. Phrenologists inscribed their knowledge and skills on
paper, but also made their paper tools accessible to users, blurring the boundaries of expertise itself.
Author: Alexander Blum
Title: A Farewell to Unification: How the Failure of Quantum Gravity Research Drove the
Renaissance of Relativity
Session: Back with a Flourish: Social and Epistemic Factors in the Postwar Renaissance of
General Relativity (Friday, November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Almost from its inception, Einstein's general theory of relativity pointed beyond itself: A case in point are
the attempts by Einstein himself and others to extend general relativity to a unified field theory, which would also
incorporate the electromagnetic field and possibly matter as well. Another attempt to incorporate general relativity
with the rest of physics was based on a quantization of Einstein's theory, in order to bring it into the conceptual
framework of the developing quantum field theories of the electromagnetic and nuclear interactions. It was even
hoped by some involved in this endeavor, which took off in the 1950s, that a quantum theory of gravity might
actually help improve that framework, which was still highly problematic at the time. While these attempts
encountered diverse problems and the search for a quantum theory of gravity continues to this day, the research on
quantum gravity uncovered many unanswered problems within the classical theory of general relativity. In my talk I
will discuss how this realization led many young physicists away from the ambitious unifying programs, instead to
pursue problems within general relativity proper, thereby providing both the manpower and the driving questions for
the renaissance of relativity in the 1950s and 1960s.
Author: Binyamin Blum
Title: What Bones Won’t Tell: Linking Skeletal Maturity to Moral Responsibility in Criminal
Trials in the British Empire
Session: Blood and Bones, Spaces and Traces: Crime Scenes, Laboratories and Modern Forensic
Cultures (Sunday, November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: This paper focuses on the 1932 murder trial of Hassan Abu Sa’adah, a Bedouin charged with the murder
of his sister’s abductor. The facts of the case were undisputed since the defendant confessed his deeds. The trial
instead focused on an x-ray of Hassan’s left wrist, which would indicate whether or not the defendant had reached
the age 18 and could therefore be sentenced to death. Building on the Abu Sa’adah case, this paper explores the use
of the nascent science of skeletal maturity in colonial courtrooms. Developed to help pediatricians determine
whether children of a known chronological age would continue growing, skeletal maturation was used in the
colonies in a reverse and problematic fashion: to determine the chronological age of criminal defendants based on
bone ossification. Beyond the questionable science applied in such cases, this paper uses Abu Sa’adah’s case to
explore juvenile criminal responsibility in the colonies and the substitution of physiological development for moral
maturity.
Author: Cecilia Bognon
Title: Uncovering Laws of Vital Organization with Chemistry? The Case of Nutrition in the 19th
Century
Session: Developing Disciplines (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: I question the definition of life and the demarcation between living and non-living through the study of
the emergence of organic chemistry at the turn of the 19. Century. I therefore ask: 1) While biology and organic
chemistry emerged as separate disciplines (1) (2), how was the living/non-living difference conceptualized? To what
extent did chemical analysis’ results affect the hypothesis of a specific organic matter responsible for the vital
phenomena? 2) How can one explain the emergence of vital organization out of brute matter and purely physicochemical processes? Rather than focusing on organisms as goal-oriented wholes, I focus on the physico-chemical
processes supposedly responsible for biological organization. This highlights questions that have been relatively
overlooked in the literature: first, about the nature of this organization and its types (i.e. how to characterize plants,
animals etc.); second, about the reasons and effects of this organization (i.e. to what extent is it responsible for the
vital phenomena of interest?). I focus here on nutrition and investigate the conceptual basis of the relationship
between nutrition and biological organization in the 19th c. Nutrition will be considered as both an organic synthesis
(chemically understood) and an organizing synthesis (acting in morphogenesis and conservation) playing a major
role in the scenarios of abiogenesis (e.g. in Lamarck (3), Johannes Müller (4), Claude Bernard (5)). I show that
nutrition proved fundamental in distinguishing between living and non-living, and contributed to shift biologists’
focus from the study of organic matter to the study of the processes of organization.
Author: Luisa Bonolis
Title: From Dense Matter to Gravitational Collapse: Preparing the Emergence of Relativistic
Astrophysics
Abstract: Astrophysics and General Relativity influenced each other very little up to the end of the 1950s.
However, it can be shown how questions arising from the study of stellar evolution and from the ultimate fate of
massive stars, established since the 1920s an interchange between the study of dense matter and stars as “physical
laboratories”, leading at the end of the 1930s to pioneering works by Oppenheimer and collaborators applying GR to
discuss the equation of state of theoretical objects like massive neutron stars. Only during the 1950s, some physicists
involved in research on fission and thermonuclear fusion, as well as in quantum theory -- notably, Wheeler and later
Zel'dovich -- were led by the study of superdense matter to reconsider the role which GR must play in resolving
such issues as the end point of stellar evolution and the importance of gravitational collapse as a source of energy. In
parallel with these developments, following major advances in the techniques of radio and optical astronomy, it was
recognized that exceedingly high energies of unknown origin were released within strong radio sources, providing a
new compelling evidence of violent events in the Universe. In 1963, some theorists suggested that such energies
could be supplied through the gravitational collapse of a superstar, a belief immediately strengthened by the
intriguing discovery of quasars -- a new class of radio objects. A brand new discipline combining astrophysics with
GR thus emerged from these different research paths, and the term relativistic astrophysics was coined.
Author: Francesca Bordogna
Title: The "Doctrine of Fascism" and Psychological Pragmatism
Session: Psychologies of Belief: Pragmatism and Action in the Fin de Siècle (Friday, November
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In 1926 Benito Mussolini famously claimed that William James’s pragmatism had been “of great use” to
him in his “political career.” Leading pragmatism historians have often dismissed this claim, arguing that
pragmatism is incompatible with fascism, while historians of fascism have yet to provide a full-fledged account of
how pragmatism intersected with fascism. I revisit these questions by focusing on a form of “psychological”
pragmatism, which emerged in early 20th-century Florence, and provided the link between James’s pragmatism and
fascism. I suggests that, drawing on James’s psychological theories and self-experiments, the Italian self“psychological pragmatists” reconfigured pragmatism as a way of life, one marked by a wide range of psychological
practices, including techniques for engineering sense perceptions and exercises for cultivating beliefs and other
“dynamogenic” mental states. In their hands pragmatism became a practical “method” for regenerating one’s self
and the world, by converting thought into truth-making and reality-changing action. Mussolini, I argue, was
attracted precisely to that aspect of pragmatism, both when he was still a revolutionary socialist and later on, when
he worked to reconfigure fascism as a spiritual discipline, by practicing which one could regenerate one’s self and
contribute to regenerating Italy. Similarly, I suggest that a group of self-styled “fascist mystics” resorted to
psychological pragmatism in order to make core fascist “principles” come true, through reality-changing action that
would bring the Fascist “revolution” to fruition. The “doctrine of fascism” emerges as a way of life deeply steeped
in modernist psychology and physiology.
Author: Kurt Boughan
Title: Tommaso Del Garbo on Conception: A Reappraisal
Session: Textual Studies (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Fourteenth-century Italian scholastic philosopher-physicians like Tommaso Del Garbo (d. 1370)
commonly tackled problems of embryogenesis by way of commentaries on Avicenna’s _De generatione embrionis_
(_Canon_ 3.21.1.2). Tommaso himself is known to have written one brief _De generatione embrionis_ commentary.
Since this text tackles no controversial questions, not even whether Galen's “female sperm” has active formative
power, scholarship has concluded that Tommaso's contribution to scholastic debate about conception was marginal.
But this text is not Tommaso’s only _De generatione embrionis_ commentary. There is another, longer one that
includes *questiones* on core controversial issues. Its content, moreover, shows that Tommaso’s contribution to
debate was not marginal, but transformative. Attributed with hesitation to Tommaso's father, Dino, by its sixteenthcentury editor, historians of medicine have long considered its authorship uncertain. Comparison of its content both
to the short commentary and to embryological passages in Tommaso’s Summa medicinalis, however, shows that it
is surely Tommaso’s work. If so, then Tommaso is the first scholastic physician – or at least, one of the first -- to
incorporate into embryological debate the authentic _De semine_ of Galen in the translation of Niccolo da Reggio.
Galen’s _De semine_ attacks Aristotle’s denials of the Hippocratic two-seed conception theory, even as Galen’s
own embryology broadly depends on Aristotelian biology and metaphysics. With direct access to Galen’s own
objections to Aristotle’s one-seed theory, Tommaso’s longer _De generatione embrionis_ commentary advances a
theory of conception that is a radical Galenic alternative to the consensus Aristotelian view of his father’s
generation.
Author: Dan Bouk
Title: Metropolitan Life’s Spinning Discs
Session: Roundtable: Economies, More than Moral, and the History of Science (Friday,
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Alfred Lotka, in his capacity as director of mathematical research for Metropolitan Life in the 1930s,
constructed a series of remarkable paper discs that he and his assistants used to simulate future transformations of
the American population—in Monte Carlo-style before Monte Carlo methods found their footing. These paper tools
embody the use of private capital and public data to model and manage human populations. In my presentation, I
will “spin” out the story these discs present of 1) the role science has played in creating and imagining the future for
states and markets; 2) the centrality of science to evolving forms of biopolitics and governance; and 3) how
commerce creates unexpected or nontraditional sites for scientific research. I will also literally spin out a tiny
population using a set of reconstructed discs.
Author: Jenny Boulboullé
Title: Wax
Abstract: For this roundtable, I will suggest that our object-oriented histories show how apparently obvious
distinctions between natural things and man-made artifacts become untenable. Or perhaps we could better say that
instead of grouping objects into mutually exclusive categories, we have become much more interested in exploring
the fluidity of concepts defining objects as ‘naturally grown’ or ‘man-made’ and in tracing how objects oscillate
between these two poles. Studying beeswax and its role in early modern knowledge making, I will claim that an
object-oriented history raises not only questions about the historical agency of things, but also about the agency of
materials shaping objects of historical, scientific and epistemological interest that connect academic and popular
histories. I will trace how wax gave shape to epistemic objects that attracted public attention and that migrated to the
center of early modern scientific and philosophical debates. I will focus on three cases: 'Kunstkammer' objects such
as immensely popular life casts in sixteenth century cabinets of curiosities, Descartes’ famous epistemological
investigation of a wax ball (Meditations 1641), and lifelike anatomical specimens. The latter were made with
innovative techniques of wax injections that were greatly improved by Dutch anatomists in the late seventeenth
century. We will see how wax turns dead specimens into contentious objects, adored by the public for their uncanny
and vivid naturalness, and hotly debated in scientific circles where wax injected specimens were hailed as emblems
of the ‘new sciences’ or dismissed as mere artifacts.
Author: Bradford Bouley
Title: Papal Anatomy in the News: the Circulation of Anatomical Evidence in the Early Modern
Catholic World
Session: Topographies and Geographies of the Body: Circulation and Locality in Early Modern
Anatomical Knowledge (Friday, November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: From the late Middle Ages onward, the body of nearly every pope was opened after death for the purpose
of embalming. However, beginning in the latter part of the sixteenth century, the details of what was found in the
papal body began to circulate throughout the Catholic world. A variety of printed and handwritten reports—
including medical treatises, early modern newssheets, and hagiography—incorporated these anatomical details to
produce a political or spiritual message. Anatomy was suddenly a major topic of discussion in the papal capital and
abroad. Although many of these documents dwelt in detail on specific anatomical observations, the meaning that
was attached to such evidence was not static. Rather, anatomy could take on different significance based on who
was writing and what the intended audience was. This paper will, in particular, look at several cases—including
those of Pius V, Urban VIII, and Innocent X—for which multiple meanings were attached to the same anatomical
discoveries inside the pope’s body. In examining these cases, this study attempts to show how circulation of
anatomical evidence could dramatically alter both the content and the interpretation of what was found inside human
cadavers.
Author: James Brannon
Title: Teaching Astronomy in Medieval Western Europe: The Dragmaticon as Predecessor to De
Sphaera
Abstract: Scholars have long cast Sacrobosco’s De Sphaera (ca. 1225) as the authoritative introductory work on
medieval astronomy, due to its concise presentation and centuries-long use in European universities. Yet
approximately eighty years prior to De Sphaera, William of Conches composed the heuristic Dragmaticon (ca. 1145)
as an encyclopedia of natural philosophy. Its tour-de-force presentation of astronomy masterfully depicted both the
culmination of a thousand-year Latin tradition and a harbinger for the new Arabic/Greco cosmology that would soon
supersede its Latin predecessor. While the Dragmaticon and De Sphaera possessed clear differences in style and
format (i.e., dialogic narrative versus student textbook), those contrasts belie their topical similarities and common
pedagogic purpose. By providing detailed comparisons of three topics found in both works – Roman poetic
astronomy, the order of the planets, and planetary retrogression - this paper argues that the Dragmaticon, like De
Sphaera, wove together the old and new cosmologies, and in the process served to adumbrate what Sacrobosco
would later compile. Nevertheless, De Sphaera achieved a degree of use and fame that eluded the Dragmaticon. Did
De Sphaera’s authority result from its facile intelligibility and topic selection, or was it more reflective of the era and
institutional setting of its author? This paper concludes by addressing this question, and arguing that the fivehundred year longevity of De Sphaera’s classroom use resulted from several causes. Primary among these were its
association with the University of Paris, its succinct textbook format, and its identification with Arabic/Greco
astronomy.
Author: Benjamin Breen
Title: “An Extremely Rare Book”: Print Culture, Tropical Drugs, and Vernacular Knowledge in
the Portuguese Empire
Session: Controlling Science in Print: Case Studies from the Early Modern World (Sunday,
November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: In 2002, the John Carter Brown library purchased one of the only remaining copies a 1711 book called
The Culture and Opulence of Brazil from its Drugs and Mines (Cultura e Opulencia do Brasil, por suas Drogas e
Minas). An eighteenth-century flyleaf inscription in the JCB’s copy noted that this was “this is an extremely rare
book because King Don João V ordered all remaining examples to be gathered up out of fear of Foreigners getting a
taste of the opulence of Brasil.” The King was quite successful in his attempt to suppress knowledge of Brazil’s
drugs and mines: today, the book is among the rarest of all Portuguese imprints. By the eighteenth century, Brazil
was becoming the commercial, political and intellectual center of the Portuguese empire. Indeed, in 1807, the
Portuguese court officially moved to Rio de Janeiro, becoming the only European imperial government in history to
shift its capital to a colonial city. Yet while the printing press spread quickly to colonial centers in rival empires,
printing in Portuguese America is not attested until the shipment of a press to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. Because
Portuguese power relied so heavily on secrets related to drugs, spices and gems, natural knowledge gained from the
expeditions of missionaries and sertanejos (backwoodsman) and from interactions with indigenous experts was
exceptionally valuable and carefully controlled. This talk explores the role that tropical drugs and mineral wealth
played in shaping the distinctively restricted print culture of the early modern Portuguese empire.
Author: Darryl Brock
Title: China’s Model for the Developing World: Western Scientists Endorsed Chairman Mao’s
Socialist Science?
Session: Science and the State: Public Policy, Promotion, and State Support for Science in the
Twentieth Century (Sunday, November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: Many seek to understand the rise of China as a technologically-based power, yet the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s provides unexpected insights. Despite the widespread verdict of the Cultural
Revolution as an unmitigated disaster for China, a number of recent scholars—both in China and in the West—have
called for re-examining Maoist science. Interrogation of that era’s Peking Review reveals significant attention to
science and technology, with wide reporting of S&T socialist achievements. The contemporaneous Western
scientific press validated many of those reports. Those same European and American scientific observers endorsed
many of Mao’s initiatives, finding in them pro-environmental approaches that might well serve as a model for Third
World nations. In short, one time Western observers found much to admire in Chairman Mao’s mass science, his
egalitarian effort to take science out of the ivory tower and place it in the hands of the disenfranchised peasant, the
loyal worker and the patriot soldier. Despite the tragic legacy of the Cultural Revolution, it may be argued that
Chairman Mao’s science policy did provide benefits to scientific innovation and advanced the broader state. That is,
the relatively uneducated rural population—the vast mass line—emerged better prepared to meet a technological
future in the final decades of the twentieth century. Henry Kissinger now admits that perhaps Mao raised an
important question, while others assert it more boldly that Mao’s initiatives paved the way for Deng Xiaoping’s later
reforms, leading to the rise of modern China.
Author: Sophie Brockmann
Title: Geographical Knowledge and the Geography of Knowledge in Central America, c.17801840
Session: Knowledge in Motion (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: This paper examines the relationship between the creation of geographical knowledge and pathways of
communication as defined by roads, trade routes and correspondence networks in Central America at the end of the
colonial period and in the first decades after independence from Spain. Scholars, merchants and administrators
routinely complained not just about the bad quality of roads and other transportation in the region, but also the lack
of accurate information on the topography and landscape of the region available to them. Projects for ‘improvement’
and ‘progress’ through technology and the creation of geographical knowledge were a priority of governments
throughout this period. The arrival of foreign engineers and investors after independence in 1821 further spurred
these debates and projects.
Through the documents surrounding these projects (engineers’ surveys, newspaper articles, administrative reports
and the traces of local informants’ work) this paper defines the spaces in which geographical knowledge was
created, and follows the transmission of such knowledge through individuals’ travel as well as correspondence
networks. I focus in particular on geographical descriptions of spaces and regions that were considered ‘unexplored’
and ‘wild’: from the sites of potential new settlements and planned harbours to mountains or volcanoes that were
hitherto considered inaccessible despite their physical proximity to trade-routes and towns. Focusing on the spatial
aspect of knowledge creation allows us to trace competing local conceptions of geography and mapping, and
demonstrates the importance of local ‘imagined’ and ‘lived’ landscapes in the process of creating ‘scientific’
geographical knowledge.
Author: Stephen Brogan
Title: The Healing Touch of the Stuart kings: Debating the Royal Touch during the Restoration,
1660-85
Session: Touch in Early Modern Science and Medicine (Saturday, November 21, 9:00 – 11:45
AM)
Abstract: The royal touch was the healing ceremony at which the monarch stroked the sores on the faces and necks
of people who had scrofula in order to heal them in imitation of Christ. The rite was practised by all the Tudor and
Stuart sovereigns apart from William III, reaching its zenith during the Restoration when some 100,000 people were
touched by Charles II and James II. The extraordinary enthusiasm for the royal touch during the Restoration period
was due in part to the widespread belief that it was an ideal antidote to the recent trauma of the Civil Wars, regicide
and Interregnum. It was usual at this time to think that those who had scrofula bore the weight of the collective sins
of the nation, and by healing scrofula the king was thought to heal the body politic and bring about national
redemption. Yet not everybody believed that tactile contact with the king could heal scrofula. Religious dissenters
sometimes argued that the ceremony was superstitious, and so Roman Catholic. This related to the controversy
concerning the cessation of miracles: Protestant polemic maintained that miracles had ceased and that Roman
Catholic miracles were fraudulent. Others objected that although the royal touch might cure some people, this was
due to natural rather than supernatural means – it was the result of the power of suggestion. This paper analyses the
debate concerning the efficacy of the royal touch during its Restoration hey-day, examining the differences of
opinion concerning the touch of the sovereign.
Author: Robert Brown
Title: The International Atomic Energy Agency and the Development of International Political
authority
Session: Roundtable: Why Should We Care about the History of the IAEA? Negotiating Science
in a Techno-Political International Organization (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Why do states comply with international organizations? This project argues international organizations
can acquire political authority when they successfully supply outcomes demanded by states that are otherwise
impeded by persistent policy and behavioral uncertainty. By analyzing variation over time in the demand for
political authority on nuclear nonproliferation and its supply by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), I
find the IAEA has political authority because it has acquired the power to issues rules and commands on nuclear
nonproliferation with which states expect they must comply: states complying when it defines “nonproliferation,”
defines its implementation in “safeguards,” and judges state compliance with international nonproliferation treaties.
Further, “authority” accounts for the observed accommodation and compliance better than explanations relying on
limited (or conditional) delegation, hegemonic influence, legitimacy, or norms. These results have important
implications for the design of international organizations generally and for the nuclear nonproliferation, safety, and
security regimes specifically.
Author: Mirjam Brusius
Title: Modernity, Science, Archaeology: Challenging a Narrative
Abstract: Political interests have often motivated archaeology in the Middle East. Yet its history has hitherto failed
to help us understand how today’s display of Middle Eastern archaeological finds in some of the most famous
museum collections in Europe is the result of a complex transfer in which objects and cultures moved from one
canonical space to another, not without facing semantic difficulties. This paper investigates the role of
archaeological finds between the excavation site in ancient Mesopotamia and attempts to shift and incorporate them
into European canonical traditions in the long 19th century. Research on the excavations has mostly drawn a picture
of a well-organised, purposive and logical enterprise in which finding and excavating objects had a clear purpose.
Little attention has been paid to the fact, that the excavated items were initially objects without a clear status. In
revisiting both the field and the museum, this paper will scrutinize teleological approaches to the topic and shed light
on a shady and undefined time period between two apparently stable components in the historiography of these
expeditions. By challenging narratives, which retrospectively deny the uncertainty involved in these events, the
paper is an intervention of the current link between modernity, science and archaeology that has long dominated the
history of archaeology. Furthermore, a history of science ‘from below’ takes into account not only scientific,
institutionalized and professionalized knowledge but also local interventions and practices. Such approaches
challenge the colonial underpinnings of the foundation of archaeology as an institutionalized science.
Author: Robert Bud
Title: Blowing Gas across Discourses about Science in 1920s Britain
Session: After Ypres: The Integration of Science into War. Part II: Reactions to the Integration
of Science into War (Sunday, November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: This paper deals with the reaction of public opinion to this integration of science into war and its
aftermath in Britain. It is concerned with the way that poison gas became emblematic of the wartime deployment,
and during the early 1920s served as the template within which the use of atomic bombs was contemplated. The
paper will deal with the circulation and consequent enrichment of the concept of science as a mode of destruction
across separate discourses, such as the evils of unemployment and its roots in science, civilization and the nature of
man in modernity, the educational curricula for a new age and the need for propaganda for science. It will deal also
with attempts to mitigate the barbaric image of science, including the development of the Museum of History of
Science in Oxford and of the discipline of history of science. The paper will deal also with the mechanism by which
the concern about science and gas was circulated between diverse discourses. It will look at the role of H G Wells
who had become a brand by the 1920s, and of the popular press which publicized both him and a counter-narrative
of science having reached beyond man who now had to catch up. The special meaning of the perceived origins of
gas warfare lying in the discipline of chemistry will be discussed. This fitted the model of destruction following
directly from science rather than from the alternative category of technology.
Author: Shawn Bullock
Title: Sir Oliver Lodge: Physicist and Public Educationist
Session: Science Pedagogy and Education (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Sir Oliver Lodge was a prominent member of the Maxwellians, the group of physicists who set about the
task of describing and interpreting Maxwell’s Treatise in the late Victorian Era. Lodge was also a thoughtful
pedagogue who became what we might call an educationist – someone who is publicly called upon to speak about
matters of science education and the structure and purpose of education more generally. In this paper I will trace
Lodge’s career as an educationist following his election as first Professor of Physics at the University of Liverpool
in 1881 through his term as the first Principal of the newly formed University of Birmingham in 1900. Lodge’s
views about educational reform, in particular the role of science in the education of young people, will be set within
the larger backdrop of the education reform movement in England at the time. I will discuss the ways in which
Lodge felt that introductory physics material needed to be organized through an analysis of his lecture notes from
Liverpool, with particular attention to the ways in which he shifted his physics curriculum over the years. I will then
analyze some of Lodge’s actions as Principal to see how, in the words of John H. Poynting, the University
developed and engaged in educational reform under Lodge’s leadership. The paper will conclude with a discussion
of the changing nature of Lodge’s public identity, from popular lecturer on electricity to educationist and social
reformer.
Author: Marie Burks
Title: Inside the “Problem-Solving Workshop”: Defining a New Role for the Social Scientist in
International Conflict Resolution
Session: Rationality Unbound: New Perspectives on the Postwar Human and Social Sciences
(Saturday, November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: After WWII, international conflict became a proving ground for the new field of the behavioral sciences,
from which novel programs of research emerged to challenge more traditional approaches to international relations
(IR). This paper brings to light one such program, developed in the mid-1960s by the Australian-born diplomatcum-academic John Burton and his colleagues at University College London (UCL). In the mid-1950s, after
distinguishing himself as a public servant in Australia, Burton embarked on an academic career, and began
formalizing his theories of peace and conflict. While he was a lecturer at UCL (1963-68), Burton sought alternatives
to the realist approach to IR. He and his colleagues worked out a model for “controlled communication,” or the
“problem-solving workshop”: Representatives of parties to a conflict would be invited to participate in private faceto-face discussions, facilitated by a panel of social scientists. Under the aegis of UCL’s newly established Center for
the Analysis of Conflict—backed by the UK Social Science Research Council and several foundations—the group
ran a workshop in the fall of 1966 for the embattled Greek and Turkish communities of Cyprus. The purpose of such
workshops was twofold: to make progress toward the settlement of international disputes, and to contribute to
theoretical and empirical studies of conflict and its resolution. Burton’s problem-solving workshop was designed to
bridge the gap between theory and practice in IR, and it opened up a new role for the social scientist as a scholarpractitioner in the realm of international conflict resolution.
Author: Ian Burney
Title: ‘The House of Murder’: The Christie Investigation and the Emergence of the Forensic
‘Team’ in Postwar England
Abstract: This talk uses the notorious case of the serial murderer John Christie (1953) to explore the contours of
English homicide investigation at mid-century. The paper will focus on the variety of sites and agents of knowledge
production and the way that these interacted in order to delineate the broader “forensic culture” within which
Christie investigation unfolded. Crucial to the Christie story is the way that forensic pathology and forensic science
operated in a relationship of mutual dependence, and how this reflected an effort on the part of participants to forge
a new culture of “team-driven” forensic investigation as a self-conscious corrective to a prior model based on
individual “virtuosity”. In particular, the Christie case enables an examination of the ways that English murder
investigation was shaped by new approaches to the crime scene and by developments in lab-based analysis of crime
scene objects which reconfigured the relationship between bodies, spaces, and traces. Led by the pathologist Francis
Camps, the investigation transformed Christie’s home at 10 Rillington Place into a macabre excavation site, the
stage for a prolonged, meticulous, and intensely public search for forensically actionable evidence of the murders
committed within it.
Author: Andy Byford
Title: The Politics of “Development” in 1920s-30s USSR: Imperial Normativities and Sciences
of the Child
Session: Empire in Evolution: The Ambiguities of Human Diversity in Imperial Russia and the
Soviet Union (Friday, November 20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: The bio-psycho-social sciences of child development were strongly supported by the new Soviet state in
the 1920s, principally under the disciplinary umbrella-term “pedology.” The pedology network was actively
mobilized into the Soviet modernization project, which went beyond the strategies of “sheer” social engineering,
assuming the need for, and the possibility of, transforming human development in a more fundamental way. Radical
social reformism intersected here with an imperial-like civilizing mission, but both were expected to be grounded in
the scientific mastery of the laws of human evolution, ontogenesis and history alike. This paper will focus on the
role that the pedology network played in the efforts of the Soviet state at the turn of the 1920s-30s to incorporate
“backward” minority populations living in more remote parts of the Union into a new, normatively conceptualized,
Soviet body politic. It will look at both the empirical research practice of the “pedology of national minorities”
(which arose as a subfield at this juncture) and the more theoretical anthropological and psychological discourse on
human development articulated in this context. In particular, the paper will seek to identify the ambiguities of
normativity that one finds in the diverse co-existent conceptualizations of “development” in this context –
ambiguities that in no small measure contributed to the demise of Soviet pedology in the political upheavals of the
Stalinist 1930s.
Author: Angelo Matteo Caglioti
Title: Abundant Data, Missing Evidence: The Quest for Hereditary Traits and the Method of the
Italian Positivist School
Abstract: The identification of hereditary traits revealing the relationship between human behavior and physical
features was a crucial goal of the Italian positivist school of criminology. Inspired by Cesare Lombroso (18351909), researchers in the positivist school collected a wide range of materials in order to develop and defend his
ideas. By examining the panoply of data and research practices assembled in positivist investigations, this paper
shows how anthropometric measurements, ethnographic fieldwork, and public statistics were mobilized in the
pursuit of social-scientific “objectivity.” In particular, I reflect on the role of the quantification and visualization of
data at the time of the birth of the social sciences. A key move in positivist inquiries was to have a broad conception
of “heredity” - thereby allowing them to borrow data from anthropology, psychology and statistics. However, this
approach came at a dear price. First, the frontier of positivist research became the quantification of “qualitative
data”, such as intelligence, language, and criminality, whose hereditary characteristics proved much harder to
demonstrate than expected. Second, as their critics often charged, the accumulation of observations that made their
reports so vivid did not necessarily translate into a through explanation of social-hereditary mechanisms. Third, the
heterogeneity of their data made it harder to build an approving scientific community around them. Finally, it
remains to be considered to what extent this same heterogeneity also hindered the reception of their publications by
the Italian political elite of the time and, ultimately, led to the demise of the positivist school of criminology.
Author: Angelo Matteo Caglioti
Title: Scientific Practices, Imperial Goals: The Separation of Italian Climatology and
Meteorology
– 1:15 PM)
Abstract: At the beginning of twentieth century, the Italian Central Meteorological Office (C.M.O.) was a typical
institution of European climate sciences. Like similar agencies created in the previous century, the C.M.O. dealt at
the same time with agricultural climatology, weather forecasts, and geophysics. Additionally, the C.M.O. provided
instruments for the collection of weather and climate data in the establishment of Italy’s colonies in Eritrea, Libya,
Somalia and Ethiopia. While the intellectual boundaries between meteorology and climatology remained blurred, the
practices of their observations were considered parts of the same scientific enterprise. How did they move apart
from each other?
This paper suggests that imperialism had a crucial role in the separation between meteorology and climatology in
Italy. By analyzing the goals and activities of meteorologists in Italy’s colonial empire between the late-nineteenth
and the mid-twentieth century, I show that the results of Italian climate sciences were deeply shaped by the
objectives of colonialism. Whether the intent of data collection was the development of agriculture or aerial warfare,
imperialism altered the practices of Italian meteorologists and their institutional affiliation. In particular, the creation
of a meteorological network for the conquest of Ethiopia produced a rift between meteorologists involved in weather
forecasting at the new Aeronautical Meteorological Service and those linked to the old C.M.O., thus anticipating on
a smaller scale the break between military meteorology and climatology that took place as a legacy of World War II.
Author: David Cahan
Title: Historiographical Advantages of Biography: Helmholtz as Example
Session: Biography as Historiographical Genre: Examples from Nineteenth Century Germany
(Friday, November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: There are, broadly speaking, three basic (if often admixed) historiographical genres in the history of
science: knowledge-oriented, institutional, and biographical. This presentation uses aspects of and examples from
the life and career of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-94) to make three points or arguments in favor of biographical
over knowledge-oriented and institutional studies. First, it argues that biography was the basic social unit of science
until the mid-nineteenth century. Second, it argues that, although Helmholtz’s career was extraordinary in terms of
its number of publications as well as their scientific significance and range, those extraordinary qualities bring the
biographer and her/his readers into contact with a wide range of other scientists and their respective disciplines.
Thus, Helmholtz’s biography, it is argued, gives scholars a better sense of the broad range of scientists, their career
paths, their scientific issues, and their disciplines than perhaps might otherwise be gained through intellectual or
institutional studies. This holds to one extent or another for all biographical studies. Finally, the presentation argues
that the biographical study of Helmholtz’s career—like that of many such studies—provides modern scholars with a
natural way of overcoming if not avoiding altogether what for some has become the problem of how to move
beyond local studies of scientific practice.
Author: Nancy Campbell
Title: The Science and Politics of Opiate Overdose: Narcotic Antagonism as Conceptual
Technology
Session: Multiplying Histories of the Psychoactive Technosciences (Sunday, November 22, 9:00
– 11:00 AM)
Abstract: In the 1990s and early 2000s, members of an overdose prevention movement formed a global social
movement that sprang up around a technology that has been known to reverse overdose since the early 1960s. This
paper examines the prehistory of the narcotic antagonist naloxone, which has been used to reverse opioid overdose
in medical settings since the early 1960s. Yet a movement designed to place naloxone in the hands of drug users
themselves or those close to them was not catalyzed until the 1990s. The role of cultural fictions representing
overdose as an acute and inevitably fatal event understood only within the narrow confines of drug-using
communities is examined in this paper, which comprises part of an ongoing historical study of how overdose has
been responded to politically, scientifically, and clinically since the mid-20th century.
Author: Luis Campos
Title: Synthetic Biology and the Ghost of Asilomar
Session: Roundtable: Asilomar at 40: History and Memory (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30
PM)
Abstract: The ghost of Asilomar haunts contemporary synthetic biology. Synthetic biologists frequently (and
increasingly) refer to Asilomar as a touchstone for contemporary issues (debating whether Asilomar was a good
thing or not, debating the history of who did what and what it meant, and might mean, for the development of
synthetic biology today; and whether "another Asilomar" meeting is necessary to deal with contemporary
developments). In short, memories and folk histories are deployed and interpreted by contemporary actors building
and contesting the emergence of synthetic biology. I will explore the interesting resonances between the historical
Asilomar as a future-directed event, and synthetic biologists' past-directed reflections on the putative "lessons of
Asilomar" for contemporary biotech.
Author: Beatriz Carrillo
Title: What is Social Medicine? A Chilean Experience of Medicine and Politics
Session: The Uses of Science and Medicine in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Latin America
(Sunday, November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: During the early twentieth century Chilean doctors took a different approach to the relation between
medicine and politics; they did not only publicly claim the need for a Ministry of Health but they got involved in
legislation. Doctors in Chile took the medical expertise they had learned while practicing their trade and moved into
the congress, helping to promote and create new laws that would help socialize medicine. Through this paper, I will
try to explain why the Chilean case allowed for the doctors’ direct involvement in politics, how their medical
experience influenced their work in politics, and how party politics was not what motivated these men to try to
improve the welfare of the Chilean population.
Author: Laura Caso Barrera
Title: Medical Recipes Written in Spanish Using Maya Pharmacopoeia, in Eighteenth Century,
Yucatán, México
Session: Collecting Science: Antiquities and Materia Medica in 18th and 19th-Century Mexico
Abstract: This paper seeks to analyze medical prescription books written in Spanish by Europeans living in
Yucatan, using Maya pharmacopoeia. The authors of such works praise the healing properties of plants native to
Yucatan and in some cases compare them with European equivalents. These documents are compared with medical
prescriptions written in Maya in the Chilam Balam of Ixil, an indigenous manuscript of the eighteenth century. In
this way we attempt to find if there exists similar approaches - or not, in the therapeutic use of plants, animals and
minerals. Among the various compilations of medical recipes that use native plants, animals as well as European
therapeutic elements, there is the so-called Book of the Jew, a manuscript attributed to Juan Francisco Mayoli,- also
known by the pseudonym of Ricardo Ossado- a Roman doctor resident in Valladolid, Yucatan in the XVIII century.
A sundry of the medical texts that use native and European pharmacopoeias were known in general terms as the
Books of the Jew (Libros del Judío), many of which refer directly to the work of Ricardo Ossado, the renowned
doctor. In the case of Yucatan it is important to mention the paramount influence that the Maya culture and
language, have upon the people of Spanish and Criollo background, settled in the peninsula. This influence also
permeated the medical concepts as well as the use of native medicinal plants, animals and minerals.
Author: Anne-Laurence Caudano
Title: The Astronomical Compendia of John Chortasmenos (c. 1404-1414), Patriarchal Notary,
Teacher and Copyist
Session: The Materiality of Early Science (Friday, November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 PM)
Abstract: The patriarchal notary John Chortasmenos (c. 1370 – 1431) is behind the copy and compilation of two
Byzantine collections of astronomical texts and calculations, the Vaticanus graecus 1059 and the Urbinas graecus 80
(c. 1404-1414). Not an author of scientific treatises as such, he was instead a practitioner of astronomy – writing
marginal commentaries and applying his knowledge in a variety of exercises, notably the calculation of eclipses and
syzygies. Chortasmenos’ attention to the book and its organization is visible in the way in which he copied and
structured folios for his astronomical calculations and, more famously, in the restoration and rebinding of the Julia
Anicia Codex (Vienna Dioscorides). Just as he had assembled his textbooks on logic, the care with which
Chortasmenos’ astronomical codices are put together may also indicate that these manuscripts, and particularly the
Vaticanus graecus 1059, may have been manuals destined to the teaching of astronomy. Yet, nothing in the
description of his career indicates that he taught at this level. Indeed, he expressly sent two of his pupils to George
Gemisthos Plethon to complete their education in this subject: Mark Eugenikos, who adapted the Jewish tables of
Jacob ben David Yom Tob, and Cardinal Bessarion, who advocated for Ptolemaic astronomy in the humanistic
circles of Peuerbach and Regiomontanus.
Author: Tamara Caulkins
Title: Movement Notation Systems in the Encyclopédie
Session: Roundtable: Diagrammatic Notation Systems (Friday, November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: My research into concepts of human and animal movement in early modern France examines notation
systems for dance, military drill, and dressage in the Encyclopédie as a way to engage with questions of historical
epistemology, identity, and status. The development of movement notation systems such as those featured in the
Encyclopédie paralleled the rise of an aspiring elite class that sought to attain the physical skills, posture, and poise
that hitherto had been reserved for the aristocracy. How were these notations used? How did they circulate? How did
movement—as people danced with each other or moved together in military formations or rode horses in stylized
patterns—inform relationships between people and develop their spatial awareness? My consideration of the “body
on the page” through diagrammatic notations found in the Encyclopédie is also driven by a curiosity about the
relationship between print and action and the physicality of Enlightenment as an embodied, not just intellectual,
endeavor.
Author: Pratik Chakrabarti
Title: Inscriptions of Nature: Discovering the Indian Gondwanaland
Session: The Other Side of Tethys: Asia and the Making of Modern Geology (Friday, November
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: This paper deconstructs the conventional narratives of the history of the making of the Gondawanaland
theory, which is centred on the works of Eduard Suess and other Continental geologists. It relocates this history to
its geographical origin; a densely forested region in Central India, known as Gondwana. The paper narrates a history
of the nineteenth-century discovery of fossils, particularly the glossopteris flora, in the coalmines of Raniganj and
Talchir. These paleontological discoveries were deeply punctuated by simultaneous British ethnological encounters
with the tribe, Gonds (from whom the name was derived). The term ‘Gondwana’, was never ‘coined’ in India by
geologists at any precise moment. The British adopted the term from local languages and pre-colonial Mughal texts
and it become part of a common parlance used by geologists, ethnologists and archaeologists. The paper traces this
transmission between Indian and global geology and identifies a land that is at the same time real and imagined. In
analysing geological formations in terms of anthropological insights, the paper makes a case for the broader
approaches needed in writing the history of geology, particularly beyond Europe and North America.
Author: Melissa Charenko
Title: The Scale of Change: Paleoecologists and Discussions of Global Change Science
Session: Time and Temporality (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: When deciding on the spatial or temporal scale for their work, many scientists choose the scale that
allows them to answer questions relevant to their research. However, as scientists came together under large-scale,
interdisciplinary projects in the 1980s, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) or the
International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), they had to work out ways to bring their disparate findings
together in order to create a picture of global change. This was not a straight-forward process, and scientists from
many fields began to explicitly call for more attention to scale around the same time. They wanted to know if the
earth's processes were hierarchical; for example, if global vegetation changes could be discerned from simply
scaling up the small-scale processes described in an ecological quadrat. Many worried, however, that new processes
might emerge as the time or temporal scale increased, and that any decision about scale made certain processes
visible while obscuring others. My talk examines these discussions about scale through the eyes of paleoecologists,
who saw themselves in a position to bridge the gap between the geosciences and biological sciences because of their
work studying vegetation across multiple scales. I suggest that historians of science need to be better attuned to
questions of scale as they examine collaboration across scientific disciplines.
Author: Karine Chemla
Title: Comparisons in Early Historiographies of Mathematics in Ancient China
Session: Historical and Theoretical Approaches to Comparison in the History of Ancient Science
Abstract: Edouard Biot (1803-1850) was probably the first professional sinologist outside East Asia to devote
several articles and memoirs to mathematics and astral sciences in ancient China. He was soon followed by
Protestant missionary Alexander Wylie (1815-1887), whose English publications on the topic had a significant
impact in Europe. By contrast with the former, who had no opportunity to travel to China, the latter was based in
Shanghai and had close contacts with Chinese scholars actively involved in the historical analysis of Chinese
mathematical documents from a past that had been recovered only a few decades earlier. A few decades later,
Mikami Yoshio (三上義夫, 1875-1950), who cooperated with David Eugene Smith (1860-1944), and the Jesuit
Louis Van Hée (1873-1951) both published extensively on the history of mathematics in ancient China. These
various scholars had entirely different backgrounds, and they all played major roles in shaping images of
mathematics in ancient China that became widespread in East Asia, Europe and North America. The purpose of this
presentation is to show the various ways in which comparison informed their historical writing about mathematics in
ancient China. I examine, in particular, how comparison is at play in the topics they emphasize and in their tools of
analysis of Chinese sources. I also describe the types of comparanda each of them considered, how their writings
dealt with these comparanda, and how these facets are correlated with the nature of the conclusion they drew.
Author: Raz Chen-Morris
Title: Refracting Light, Projecting Shafdows: the Telescope and the Transformation of Kepler's
Optics
Abstract: Johannes Kepler's reaction on hearing of Galileo's telescopic observations was a mixture of exhilaration
over the new discoveries and disconcertment concerning the disparity between Galileo's telescope and some of the
basic assumptions of Kepler's own theory of optics set forward in his Astronomiae pars optica (1604). My paper will
concentrate on the way in which Kepler answered this challenge in his Dioptrice (1611). In this treatise Kepler
rethinks the foundations of optics and through a poignant critique of Jean Pena's De usu Optices praefatio of 1557
proceeding to reestablish the science of optics on refraction of light as the fundamental phenomenon instead of the
direct flow of rays of light. A major part of the treatise is dedicated to translating the projection of shadows onto the
screen within a camera obscura to a new mode of refracting rays of light through lenses. Kepler's analysis of lenses
and refraction has major epistemological repercussions for the early stages of the New Science of the 17th century in
rethinking the notion of a mathematical science and in refashioning new modes for acquiring knowledge replacing
the passive measurement of shadows within the camera obscura into an active manipulation of rays of light through
the lenses of the telescope.
Author: Michell Chresfield
Title: The Genealogy of the Concept "Tri-Racial"
Session: The Complex Genealogies of Race: Genetics and Anthropology in the Post-World War
II United States (Sunday, November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: This paper is a study of two moments in the history of the term “tri-racial,” and is part of a dissertation
project that excavates the modern geneaologies of mixed-race identity and traces concepts of racial mixture before
the bi- and multi-racial identity movements of the 1970s cohered and gained political and social legibility. The first
moment is 1935, when anthropologist Melville Herskovits published “The Social History of the Negro,” an essay
arguing that the “American Negro” represented a “tri-racial” amalgam of Anglo, indigenous, and African elements.
Yet, instead of challenging the dominant racial typologies of his day, Herkovits viewed the American Negro as a
new racial “subtype” that could continue to be classified as “Negro.” Twenty years later understandings of race had
changed sufficiently, such that demographer Calvin Beale easily accepted the racial legitimacy of “tri-racial”
peoples. Based at the federal Agriculture Department, Beale coined the term “tri-racial isolate” to identity some
77,000 persons of Native American, African-American, and Anglo-American ancestry living in both geographical
and reproductive isolation in the eastern United States. What both troubled and intrigued Beale about these
populations was not their genetic difference but their social and genetic isolation. Beale anticipated difficulties
integrating “tri-racial” communities into America’s “biracial” society, yet he viewed this group of “isolates” as
possessing a high enough degree of genetic homogeneity to function as research subjects in the scientific search for
knowledge of human evolution.
Author: Frederic Clark
Title: Humanist Historia Literaria and the Contested Historicity of Antiquity’s Distant Past
Abstract: Early modern humanists borrowed schemes for thinking about the historicity of the deep past from
antiquity itself. For instance, humanist scholars often repeated the Roman antiquary Varro’s tidy division of all time
into three periods. Varro deemed his first age “uncertain,” and his second phase “mythic.” It was only time’s third
and final period—beginning with the First Olympiad in 776 BCE—that Varro judged properly “historical,” since its
events were preserved “in true histories.” Thanks in part to Varro and other ancient Greco-Roman authors who used
the emergence of historicity to divide historical time, early modern scholars faced a paradox. Although they
proclaimed the exemplarity of the so-called prisca scientia, many simultaneously acknowledged that antiquity’s own
antiquity contained more myth and fable than verifiable historia. In the seventeenth century, this paradox was
explored by exponents of the new historia literaria, the history of letters and learning, pursued in bibliographies and
classroom lectures across the Republic of Letters. Championed in abstract terms by Francis Bacon and taken up in
earnest by Latin pedagogues like G.J. Vossius, Petrus Lambecius, Jacob Perizonius and others, historia literaria
advanced stagist accounts of cultural change long before Enlightenment stadial history came into vogue. As such
humanists showed, moderns could divide time according to the history of historical thought, just as the ancients had
done. This paper will offer a brief survey of how historia literaria weighed the historical fides of deep antiquity,
examining the surprising ways that such debates informed narratives of modernity’s origins.
Author: Deborah Coen
Title: Towards a History of Scaling
Session: Roundtable: Spatial Histories of Science (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: The discipline of history today is increasingly fractured by debates over the appropriate scale of historical
analysis. Proponents of “global,” “big,” or “deep” history argue that an understanding of large-scale historical
processes is essential to political and environmental decision-making in the twenty-first century. Others fear that
such syntheses are at odds with the pluralism and open-endedness of history as a humanistic form of inquiry. These
skeptics doubt that it is possible to write history on the scale of the entire human species without losing a sense of
individual agency and of the intrinsic value of human difference at the level of individuals and cultures. In this vein,
claims have been made for the “incommensurability” of the human and the global scales. Historians of science can
help negotiate this impasse by historicizing it. To this end, I will argue for the value of what I call histories of
scaling, that is, histories of the process of mediating between different systems of measurement, formal or informal,
designed to apply to different slices of the phenomenal world. Of greatest interest are historical cases in which
different views of space and time have been mapped onto each other in ways that produced a superposition of
reference systems, rather than an occlusion of one by the other.
Author: Bridget Collins
Title: “He ain't sick. He's just got the ager”: The Role of Medical Geography in the Decline of
Malaria in the Upper Mississippi River Valley
Abstract: In his definitive historical study on malaria in the American Midwest, the 1945 monograph “Malaria in
the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1789-1900,” Erwin Ackerknecht made the persuasive argument that a variety of
technological factors, including railroad construction and the growth of dairy farming, contributed to the decline of
malaria in the upper Mississippi River Valley. Ackerknecht relied heavily on medical geography, the science of
correlating geography, climate, and health, as a source for these claims. He did not, however, consider medical
geography itself as a factor in the decline of malaria. Settlers did not simply accept the insalubrious climates they
lived in. With the help of the data in medical geography texts they could choose where to live, how to improve their
land, and determine what was typical for their region. While the railroad and dairy farming unintentionally
decreased the effect of malaria on the region, settlers actively chose where to farm, whether to drain swamps, to
build homes on high land, and to correctly diagnosis endemic diseases. Just as much as technological advances, the
process of putting medical geography into practice helped nineteenth century settlers colonize the Midwest.
Author: Gerardo Con Diaz
Title: The Many Natures of Software as an Intellectual Property
Abstract: In the 1960s, patents for computer programs were becoming an increasingly popular alternative to trade
secrecy, and programmers and their attorneys were also starting to rely on copyright law to protect new computer
programs. By the end of the decade, the very idea that programs were eligible for intellectual property protections
had started to become a very contentious subject. Programmers, lawyers, judges, and federal agents started to
become entangled in a struggle to answer a question for which everyone seemed to have a different answer: what is
software? This talk showcases the many conceptions of natures of software that these historical actors advanced
from the early 1960s to the mid-1970s. I argue that programmers, attorneys, and judges juggled a collection of
unstable, manifold, and mutually contradictory conceptions of the nature of software. A program could be a
mathematical algorithm, a text, a new kind of process, or a machine. It could be some of these things, or none of
them at all. Drawn from my doctoral dissertation, this argument shows how intellectual property has served as a
ground on which historical actors grappled with the philosophical considerations borne out of the development of
new sciences and technologies. The intellectual property protection of computer programs was not the only high
stake in this process. On the contrary, the establishment of computer science as an academic discipline, computer
programming as a profession, and computer programs as inventions all required an effort to determine what software
is.
Author: Gerardo Con Diaz
Title: The Math in the Machine: Spectrometry at Mobil Oil and the History of Software
Patenting, 1961-1972
Session: Before the Law: Points of Origin in Encounters Between Law & Science (Saturday,
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In 1961, two engineers at Mobil Oil, Charles Prater and James Wei, submitted a patent application called
“Reduction of Data from Spectral Analysis.” Their invention encompassed a computer and a program designed to
perform spectrometry—that is, to identify the chemical composition of a given sample. The Patent Office ruled that
this invention was ineligible for a patent because it amounted to mathematical computations. In fact, it took Mobil’s
attorneys eight years of work to counter the Office’s statements about the invention’s nature, function, and patenteligibility. Since then, the application has become a landmark document in the history and law of software patenting.
The Math in the Machine shows how Prater and Wei’s struggles with the patent system entangled the histories of
mathematics, scientific instrumentation, and computer programming. The talk argues that Mobil’s efforts to patent
its scientific instruments during the 1960s shaped both the common law and the public policies on software
patenting that the Patent Office enforced until the mid-1970s. Drawn from my doctoral dissertation, this argument
offers a new way of thinking historically about the philosophical underpinnings of the law of software.
Traditionally, historical and legal scholarship has portrayed the history of software patenting as one that began when
software firms started to secure patents for their products in the mid-1960s. In contrast, The Math in the Machine
demonstrates that Mobil Oil played a crucial role in the history of software patenting well before software firms
began to seek patents of their own.
Author: Cindy Connolly
Title: Preventing Pediatric Poisoning or Profits?: “Safety Caps” for Children, 1948-1973
Session: The Child as Biomedical Problem in Twentieth Century America (Friday, November
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: This paper explores the unintended consequences of the postwar creation, distribution, and marketing of
acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) in a small-dose formulation flavored to appeal to children’s palate--the resulting 500%
increase in aspirin poisoning. The solution, the child safety cap, is widely remembered as a successful public-private
collaboration between pediatricians, government, and industry. This paper challenges that narrative, arguing that
there was a great deal more conflict and negotiations than has been previously recognized. The science of child
development and new research regarding best to protect young children was interpreted in very different ways by
child advocacy groups and pharmaceutical companies.
Author: Harold J. Cook
Title: The Introduction of “Chinese Medicine” in seventeenth-century Europe
Session: Roundtable: Translation as an Epistemic Tool in the History of Science (Friday,
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Any attempt to understand how medical knowledge moves from its sites of local production into wider
circulation necessarily entails questions about the transforming effects of “translation.” In that process, the making
of analogies and metaphors—“this is like that”—is crucial in giving a sense of familiarity to the unfamiliar. It is the
interests of the person working to bring meaning into a target language that predominate. The introduction of
“Chinese medicine” to Europe in the 17th century is a good example for exploring how even attempts to be
completely faithful to the original sources necessarily created something both familiar and novel.
Author: Zane Cooper
Title: Raw Data: The Geopolitical History of Hard Drive Technology, 1978-1995
Abstract: At both the academic and popular levels, scholars of the history of computing have studied the
development and proliferation of specific technologies (i.e. computer languages, internet protocols, and the
microprocessor), the great people that made these technologies possible, as well as the history of the entrepreneurial
and business culture that first gave birth to the modern Silicon Valley. However, in studying the history of
computing, a majority of scholars have neglected the history of data, and the rapid construction of the infrastructure
needed to support the ever-growing swaths of data we create and consume. This infrastructure is large and
complicated, so in order to begin to address its history, this paper will focus specifically on the mass production of a
small but essential component of the personal computer hard drive: The NdFeB (Neodymium-Iron=-Boron) magnet.
The invention and universal standardization of this magnetic material has roots in Cold War policies, civil unrest in
Africa, and is closely tied to China’s rise to economic power in the 1990s. By investigating the history of the
production, implementation, and continued acquisition of this magnetic material, this study will show that the
personal computer revolution, the miniaturization of hard drives, and eventually the proliferation of cloud
computing are chained inextricably to a dense geopolitical history of violence, military strategies, and industrial
infrastructures. It will reveal the beginnings and continuing struggles of the resource war constantly waging
underneath innovations in digital storage, a war in which the neodymium magnet is currently at the center.
Author: Owen Cornwall
Title: Alexander/Iskander: Memorializing Ancient Science in Medieval India
Session: Knowing “Nature” in the Ancient World (Friday, November 20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: My paper investigates the relationship between the idea of nature, its mediation through material culture
and the imagination of Alexander the Great in the medieval Islamic world from 950-1450 CE. To many medieval
Muslims, Alexander the Great was a world-conqueror and prophet of Islam. During the tenth century, the Persian
epic tradition began to represent Alexander (Iskandar) as a philosopher-king, who devised technology for his
astounding feats of conquest. At the heart of my inquiry is an analysis of an object: the astrolabe, and how it was
used in medieval India to mediate the meaning of nature in ancient historical past through its association with
Alexander. The astrolabe, an astronomical instrument brought to India by Muslim scientists, became a potent
symbol of Islamic empire in which correct knowledge of the cosmos authorized control over the polis. Through the
astrolabe, the Delhi Sultans told a history of their past that tied their imperial legitimacy to the conquest of India by
Alexander the Great, who invented the astrolabe according to the Persian romance tradition.
Author: Bruce Coughran
Title: Science in the Theater: A New Way of Examining the History of Science
Abstract: The great success of Michael Frayn’s play 'Copenhagen' in 1998-1999 inspired a new interest in how
theatrical productions can explore historical events and figures in science. The play not only inspired a renewed
debate about the 1941 meeting between Heisenberg and Bohr around which the play revolves (including several
international meetings and at least one volume of academic essays), but also became the inspiration for other
playwrights to use the form of theater to explore significant events and characters in the history of science. This
poster will explore the ways that these plays have been successful in exploring and communicating about science
and scientists, as well as the challenges involved. It will also explore some of the strategies of various playwrights,
directors, and productions in meeting these challenges, and some ideas about ways to measure the success of these
plays in reaching both a specialty and a general audience with information and insights into what science is, and
what scientists do.
Author: Matthew James Crawford
Title: Andean Healers under Spanish Colonial Rule: Cinchona Bark in the Early Atlantic World
Session: Mobile Medicines: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in the Colonial Americas (Friday,
November 20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In the seventeenth century, Spanish missionaries in the Viceroyalty of Peru often branded indigenous
healers as agents of the devil. A century later, writing in the learned journal the Mercurio Peruano, Hipólito Unanue
declared indigenous healers the “fathers” of botany in Peru. This paper explores the experience of Andean healers
under Spanish colonial rule in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Using evidence from modern
anthropological studies of ethnomedicine as well as historical sources on Andean healing, it argues that the Andean
World constituted an important center of medical knowledge within the Spanish Empire and the Atlantic World.
With this in mind, this paper also shows how the history of cinchona bark – one of the most important medical
commodities in the early modern Atlantic World – is enriched by greater attention to Andean medicine as a
sophisticated system of healing knowledge that exerted influence beyond the Andes Mountains. Finally, this
evidence suggests how this history of science and medicine of the colonial Americas might be revised in order to
cast indigenous healers as much more than informants or purveyors of empirical observations to Europeans but as
representatives of bodies of knowledge that rivaled early modern European science and medicine in complexity and
theoretical subtlety.
Author: Robert Crease
Title: Science, Technology, and Industry at the National Synchrotron Light Source
Session: Technological Systems Large and Small: Physics and Industry in Postwar America
Abstract: The National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS, 1982-2014) at Brookhaven National Laboratory was one
of the world’s most widely used and interdisciplinary scientific facilities. The first true “second generation”
synchrotron radiation facility, it was designed and built specifically for producing and exploiting synchrotron
radiation. Its construction was a key episode in Brookhaven’s history, in the transition of synchrotron radiation from
a novelty to a commodity, and in the transition of synchrotron-radiation scientists from parasitic to autonomous
researchers. Its operation coincided with a phase shift in the kind of large-scale science that was being carried out at
Brookhaven and elsewhere -- into the "New Big Science," when large-scale materials science accelerators rather
than high-energy physics accelerators became marquee projects at most major basic research laboratories in the
post-Cold War era. This article will outline symptoms of that phase transition -- which involved not ever-bigger
machines and collaborations (the "Old Big Science") but more complex interactions between science, industry, and
applied research -- at the NSLS. I will suggest that keeping track of these interactions will require the crafting of
new historical methods.
Author: Alex Csiszar
Title: Access Fantasies at the Fin de Siècle
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Today, debates surrounding access to scientific information are matters of high scientific politics.
Questions of access have long been political, at least since Hobbes objected to the disingenuous public claims of the
Royal Society of London; since then, attacks on scientific elites have often taken aim at restrictions on access to
knowledge. There is nevertheless something distinctive in twentieth-century articulations of this idea, insofar as
ready access to the scientific literature, imagined as a kind of archive (whether without walls or an institutional
library), might be deemed a condition of possibility for being a contributor and thus an active scientist. This paper
follows one constitutive moment for this modern archival idea of access. Toward the end of the nineteenth century,
democratizing access to the scientific literature was at the heart of two rival projects to catalog knowledge: the
International Catalogue of Scientific Literature (London) and the Répertoire Bibliographique Universel (Brussels).
Supporters of both projects were responding to the relatively novel idea that scientific literature, imagined then to be
constituted largely by certain special periodicals, ought to be available in a systematic way to all scientific workers.
But they disagreed sharply about what access really meant in practice, and just how far and to whom such access
should extend. The ensuing debate, preserved through correspondence and the detailed proceedings of several
international meetings, sheds light on the tensions motivating later controversies over open-access scientific
publishing and even the open data movement.
Author: Patrick Luiz De Oliveira
Title: From Trivial Amusement to Heroic Science: French Ballooning in the Wake of the
Franco-Prussian War
Session: State and Nation (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Following the Franco-Prussian War, the balloon, which during the Second Empire had been associated
with frivolous carnivals and lavish imperial ceremonies, acquired a new kind of respectability and became the
symbol of a heroic Republican science. My paper traces this peculiar shift in the cultural perceptions of balloons by
analyzing the 1875 Zénith campaign to study the atmosphere, which culminated with a high-altitude ascent that
killed two French balloonists — Joseph Crocé-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel. The Zénith voyages were organized by
the Société Française de Navigation Aérienne, France’s leading aeronautical society. The SFNA emerged from the
war with a renewed sense of purpose to pursue the solution to flight and to rigorously study the atmosphere, seeing
in ballooning an avenue through which the French could foster national regeneration and regain ground in the
scientific race against Bismarck. The death of Crocé-Spinelli and Sivel had deep reverberations that went beyond the
scientific community, and through popular acclaim they quickly became the Third Republic’s first scientific
martyrs, anticipating the eventual apotheoses of figures like LouisPasteur. The contention of this paper is that thanks
to its liminal position between spectacle and science, the balloon could be used to turn a man of science into a hero
of progress. I advance this argument by incorporating details uncovered in unexplored French and American
archives and a close reading of accounts from the popular and specialized press.
Author: Paula De Vos
Title: Nahua Materia Medica and the Formation of Patriotic Pharmacopeia in Colonial and Early
National Mexico
Session: Collecting Science: Antiquities and Materia Medica in 18th and 19th-Century Mexico
Abstract: Throughout its colonial history, Mexico's rich biodiversity was of great interest to the imperial Spanish
state, particularly with regard to the availability of new and potentially miraculous medicines that could be
uncovered, marketed, and exploited. The crown organized a number of expeditions to gather information and
specimens throughout central Mexico which were supplemented by a series of local and religious endeavors
similarly to document Nahua/Aztec medicines and medical practices, the results of which were effectively codified
into a collection of known Nahua materia medica. Once Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, Mexican
botanists and pharmacologists used this information to assemble a series of national pharmacopoeia published
throughout the nineteenth century. These formularies differed from the traditional standardized pharmacopoeia of
the Spanish Empire in that they strongly privileged these native medicines, attributing them scientific status and
taking great pride in their healing abilities. These medicines thus served to consolidate a national patriotic narrative
as well as provide an alternative to reliance on European products. Historians have traced the history of this
collection of material medica at various points of its history - the individual expeditions and collecting efforts, the
publication of the pharmacopoeia - but to date none have traced its entire history nor the ways that nineteenthcentury patriots sought to put it to political as well as pharmaceutical use.
Author: Lina Del Castillo
Title: Mapping Out Gran Colombia's Place in an American Hemisphere
Abstract: This paper demonstrates how the Republic of Colombia, a national state form that brought together the
former Captaincy General of Venezuela with the former New Granada Viceroyalty starting in 1819, emerged from
and played a key cartographic role in contributing to an ideal of a shared hemispheric destiny. As such the paper
points to the limits and obfuscations engendered by the long-dominant and ready-made framework of Manifest
Destiny for understanding the history of relations among nations in the hemisphere. Instead, by turning to the social,
economic, and political histories that converged to produce the atlases and nautical charts printed in Philadelphia
and Mexico City on the eve of the Panama Congress of 1826, the paper highlights how an early 19th century
Colombian Republic helped create a common sense of political kinship and commercial exchange among all
republics in the American hemisphere. As such, this paper is less about the power of a specific state to map its
territory and population. Instead, it considers the transnational production, exchange, and popularization of
cartographic images at a time when republican national identities were emerging from and enmeshed in the
production of contested regional political identities.
Author: David Depew
Title: The Changing Ideological Context of the Synthesis
Session: Roundtable: Revising the History of Evolutionary Synthesis: The Sixties (Friday,
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: This paper will discuss the changing ideological context in which the ES was expanded to include
molecular genetics, ecology, and behavior. The ES was formed with great attention to the biology of race. The
disciplines we are considering in this roundtable entered the ES during the Cold War. A case study will be given of
the New Physical Anthropology of Sherwood Washburn, who had ties to original founders of the ES such as
Simpson and carried the same racially egalitarian messages to the public, and the approach to animal behavior of the
1960s, which was sometimes seen as too insensitive to these issue, culminating in the Sociology Debate of the
1970s. A similar pattern can be seen in how representatives of the Synthesis of the 40s viewed the integration of the
molecular gene and ecology.
Author: Barbara Di Gennaro
Title: Alpini's Balsam: Natural Knowledge across the Eastern Mediterranean
Abstract: After three years in Egypt as physician to the Venetian consul, Prospero Alpini returned to Italy and in
1591 published De balsamo dialogus. A sought-after medical plant charged with religious meanings, balsam was at
the center of the botanical debate in Europe. The dialogue between the Christian Alpini, a Muslim physician, and a
Jewish one, established where “true” balsam came from. In contrasting and comparing the indigenous knowledge of
Egyptian physicians and laypeople versus classical and contemporary botanical texts on the Old and New Worlds,
Alpini gave authority to the former. Religious differences were not a barrier to Alpini; furthermore, “true”
knowledge on materia medica was presented as the fruit of a common endeavour, as the result of cross-cultural
interaction. I argue that by giving authority to the Egyptians Alpini implicitly reaffirmed and defended a set of wellestablished cultural, religious, and commercial practices between Christians, Muslims, and Jews. These centurieslong links were distilled in balsam: a symbol of cross-cultural Mediterranean relationships. Alpini was also
intercepting an international ongoing debate on religious tolerance, already present in European culture and refueled
by the Reformation. De balsamo was Alpini’s answer to the anxieties of his own time, when consolidated
Mediterranean patterns of trade and knowledge were threatened. De balsamo reaffirmed an integrated and tolerant
view of the Mediterranean where religious differences did not constitute an obstacle to assess knowledge, and in
which common plants and ancient authors could be discussed in a civil conversation among scholars of the three
religions of the Book.
Author: Julio Diaz
Title: "To Live as Reptiles in our Desert of Mapimi": From Revolutionary Science to the New
Cosmopolitan Biology of Conservation in Twentieth Century Mexico
Abstract: As some scholars have noted, by the 1940’s Mexico led in protected areas for natural conservation in the
world. The institutional prototype for these areas was the national park, and the dominant science was forestry. The
personality behind this great feat was Miguel Ángel de Quevedo, a former supporter of Porfirio Díaz in nineteenth
century, and after the Mexican Revolution, an important scientist and bureaucrat for the most progressive
government in modern Mexico under president Lázaro Cárdenas. During the period from 1936 to 1940, Mexico
protected more than two million acres of land. But by the end of 1960’s, the National Parks were neglected and
faced serious problems of deforestation. By this time, forestry was replaced by biology in governmental institutions
for conservation. Ecology begins to provide some key concepts to renovate the scientific landscape in this topic. A
young biologist, Gonzalo Halffter and his work team, launched a new model for conservation: the biosphere reserve,
getting the support of the UNESCO. Curiously enough, Halffter was working in Mapimí, a desert area that Quevedo
many times used as a metaphor for the environmental apocalypses that deforestation was able to cause. This is the
story of how behind the changing metaphor from desert-as-purgatory to desert-as-opportunity, conceals a
transformation of spatial scientific conceptions of conservation. This transition reflects the interplay and contesting
tools of forestry, biology, and ecology. But these scientific imaginaries for conservation also produced its own
conceptions of citizenship in a country in search for democracy.
Author: Stephanie Dick
Title: Encoding and Intervening
Session: Roundtable: Writing Histories of Data (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: This presentation will emphasize data structures and memory management concerns more generally as
crucial, albeit low level, dimensions for understanding the significance of introducing computers to knowledge
production. It will propose that implementation concerns are, in fact, epistemological issues for history of science.
Low level encodings born out of implementation efforts are an under-studied site at which the objects and practices
of knowledge-making are transformed in the context of computing. I will suggest that we should not talk about
software only at high-levels of description or at the level of algorithm only because in doing so we miss the
epistemological interest of that low level work, where “data” gets its form.
Author: Michelle DiMeo
Title: Robert Boyle’s Medical Recipes: Efficacy, Trials, and Experimentation
Session: Panaceas, Preparations, Poison, and Proof: Universal Remedies in Early Modern
Europe (Saturday, November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Boyle’s posthumously published Medicinal Experiments (1692), the public successor to his smaller
privately circulated collection of recipes, offered the results of his experimental recipe trials and an ABC ranking
system for reliability. While Boyle often interchanged the words “experiment” and “receipt”, this paper reflects on
the tensions between his efficacy trials for recipes and his methodology for his larger program in experimental
philosophy. Boyle believed that certain remedies could be beneficial for treating discrete ailments, but he also
argued that the variances between peoples’ bodies could result in the same remedy working differently for different
people. For example, when introducing “specific medicines”, Boyle clarified that he did not believe any could “cure
the disease it is good for Infallibly, and in all Persons that take it, for I confess I never yet met with any such
remedy” (Boyle Works, Vol. 10, p. 360). Because the medicinal experiment was being performed on a range of
human bodies that were all unique, Boyle could not confirm a successful recipe trial as “proof” in the same way as
he could identify how gases operated in a controlled environment like the air pump. That said, Boyle encouraged his
readers to compare his medical recipes with one of his recent philosophical publications, arguing that they could
serve as demonstrable support of his theoretical arguments for the corpuscular philosophy. By exploring Boyle’s
complex negotiation between efficacy, trials and reproducibility, this paper forges further connections between early
modern recipes and the experimental process.
Author: Steffi Dippold
Title: A Mohawk Vomiting Stick: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object
November 20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: A Mohawk vomiting stick is among the earliest Native North American items collected in the British
Museum. 32 inches long and not even an inch wide, the smooth stick is about as long as a small umbrella, though
wider at its snake shaped handle than at its narrowing bottom. The vomiting stick came to London in 1710 when the
“Four Mohawk Kings” visited Queen Anne. Sir Hans Sloane, the avid collector, natural historian, and physician to
the Queen listed the stick as part of his collection as a prong like instrument and “a remedy for cleaning the stomach
used by the Indians of America.” Exploring both the native culture that produced the stick and the Dutch and
English cultures that collected it, this paper traces descriptions of cathartic practices among indigenous tribes and
within Europe, linking the interest in Native vomiting cures (and sticks) to early modern medical tracts, the
prominence of therapeutic purging, and ultimately to a transatlantic medical, spiritual, and economic critique of
unwanted surplus on both sides of the Atlantic.
Author: Thomas Dodman
Title: The Deadly Time of Nostalgia in Early-Modern Europe
Session: Pathologies of Perception: Nostalgia, Distraction and Other Elasticities of Time and
Space, 1688 to the present (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: People once died of nostalgia. Technically, they started doing so in 1688, when a nineteen-year-old
medical student from the free town of Mulhouse coined the diagnosis to define a new disease. Combining insights
from treatises on melancholia, the so-called “passions of the soul,” and post-humoral physiology, Johannes Hofer
described nostalgia as a severe form of homesickness (Heimweh) caused by corruption of the imagination and
deregulation of the animal spirits. Although he never quite made it into the annals of medical history, his neologism
stuck and went on to attract much attention across eighteenth-century Europe, especially because of its effects in the
ever larger and ever more regulated armies of the time. By the turn of the century, it was blamed for as many as one
in every twenty deaths during the Napoleonic wars, and physicians scrambled to come to terms with this first
codified form of war trauma. What was this condition, and why did it “come into being” as an object of scientific
interest then and there (only to quietly disappear later in the 1800s)? This paper offers a contextual grounding of the
nostalgia diagnosis as a “transient mental illness” (Ian Hacking) in the age of sensationalist psychology. To do so it
explores both the social conditions that gave rise to a new form of mental disorder — including new forms of
mobility and war mobilization — and the intellectual debates that framed it as a problem of perception tied to
changing regimes of time and space.
Author: Maria Pia Donato
Title: Putting Medical Dissection in its Place: Sites, Spaces, and Knowledge
Abstract: Scholars of different disciplines have dedicated much attention to the rise of ‘natural’ or ‘normal’
anatomy, unravelling why, where and how it flourished in late Medieval and Renaissance Europe. In contrast, early
modern practices of dissection for legal or medico-practical purposes are still somewhat overlooked. One reason for
such neglect is the elusive status of medical dissection. Indeed, anatomia practica was not easily comprehended
within the established partitions of early modern academic medicine as the philosophical categories underpinning
theoretical and practical medicine had not really established a place for it. Also problematic was its social status, as
it was commonly practiced by both physicians and surgeons. Last but not least, medical dissection was practiced in a
variety of places that are not easily charted, especially hospitals. Geography also influenced each of these issues,
since dissection was not evenly fostered everywhere in early modern Europe, depending on a variety of institutional
and social circumstances. The paper aims at locating early modern practices of dissection for medical purposes, or
anatomia practica, epistemologically, spatially, and socially. While addressing the theoretical justifications of the
various kinds of dissections, it explores the sites where these took place and the practitioners involved. It further
seeks to offer a first tentative map of the development of such practices throughout seventeenth-century Europe.
Author: Christopher Donohue
Title: Beyond Ethics: The Scientific and Technological Development of the International
HapMap Project 1998 to 2005
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In 2002, the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) formally launched the International
HapMap project, an ambitious international project to the connections between sequence variation in the human
genome and disease. My presentation will underscore how nearly every aspect of the HapMap project was the
subject of negotiation and incremental advance with a significant and complex prehistory. Using archival materials
and oral histories with key participants, I show how throughout the late 1990s and until the publication of the
landmark HapMap phase I (5kb map) paper in 2005, Francis Collins and others at the NHGRI as well as scientists at
MIT’s Broad Institute, the Welcome Trust, and international partners in Canada, Nigeria, China and Japan, worked
out the highly technical and contentious issues essential to the HapMap project. My presentation illustrates that
human variation research in all of its aspects (technology development, quality control and quality assessment of
data, database development, definitions of what constituted a “finished” haplotype map, and even community
consultation and the ethics of human variation research) was less the product of ideology or governing assumptions
and much more the result of pragmatic rules of thumb and the result of swift, constant negotiations between a
centralized administrative authority, a series of aligned collaborating centers, and engaged researchers and
investigators in the field, all of whom often pursued their own goals.
Author: Connemara Doran
Title: Lorentz’s Ether, Poincare’s Amorphous Continuum, and Einstein’s Rejected-Redefined
‘Ether’-Spacetime: Einstein’s Revolutionary Physical Universe in a Revolutionizing
Mathematical World
Session: New Perspectives on the Ether in Early Twentieth-Century Physics and Art (Saturday,
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In 1905, Einstein famously rejected the luminiferous ether as either a conceptual tool or a physical reality.
Yet in correspondence and publications from 1916 on, Einstein at times interpreted his curved four-dimensional
space-time as a new “ether” with very different properties from the late-19th-century mechanical ether. Einstein’s
use of the word “ether” was certainly an homage to the aging Lorentz, but Einstein was also emphasizing the
physical properties of space itself. In the midst of revolutionary developments in experimental physics in the 1890s
(Hertzian waves, negative tests of motion with respect to the ether) and concomitant theoretical transformations in
the first decades of the 20th century (special and general relativity, quantum theory), deep interconnections with the
new mathematical constructs (the higher-dimensional amorphous continuum), interpretations, and even disciplines
(Poincare’s Analysis Situs or algebraic topology) came to the fore. These long-developing mathematical innovations
had a distinctive “creative virtue” that was not static and could not be reduced to the demands of physical
application. Instead, I argue, these mathematical developments were “revolutionizing” both pure mathematics and
physical intuition in a novel way. A central theme explores how the mutual embeddedness of mathematical and
physical intuition enabled a critical turn in the understanding of “space,” and relatedly “ether,” in this period.
Author: Ariane Dröscher
Title: Diversity or unity? The reception of Mohl's and Schleiden's cell studies in Italy in the
1830s and 1840s
Session: The Quest for Universality: National and Transnational Perspectives on NineteenthCentury Cell and Reproduction Research (Saturday, November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In spite of Italy's longstanding traditions in microscopy and fine anatomy, and in spite of the frequent
participations of H.F. Link, H. Dutrochet, F.-C. Mirbel, C.-F. Morren, H. von Mohl and other pioneers of cytology
at the national Italian science meetings, Italian researchers almost completely ignored the Schleiden-Schwann cell
theory. Scientific, political and institutional reasons are to be charged for this phenomenon. There were some
outstanding scholars, like Mauro Rusconi, Giovanni Battista Amici, Guglielmo Gasparrini and Giuseppe Meneghini.
Rusconi was in 1826 the first to observe the segmentation of frog eggs, Amici is best known for his improvements
of optical instruments and for his polemics with Matthias Schleiden about the origin of the plant embryo, Gasparrini
made important studies on the reproduction of ferns, and Meneghini was in 1838 one of the first to describe cell
division. The talk will follow their work and their professional career, in order to explain why cell studies did not
find a fertile ground in Italy.
Author: Greg Eghigian
Title: The Cold War and the Making of the Flying Saucer Era
Session: Imagining Science and Technology in the Shadow of the Cold War (Saturday,
November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: The so-called "flying saucer age" is generally credited with beginning in 1946/1947 with reports from
Sweden and the U.S. of odd, disk- and rocket-like objects flying overhead. Over the next fifty years, claims of
unidentified flying objects from space, encounters with aliens, and ancient astronauts inspired amateur research
(ufology) and extraterrestrial contact support networks, government investigations, scientific and clinical research,
bestselling works of fiction and non-fiction, news coverage, television shows, and films. Based on both archival and
published sources from multiple countries, this paper discusses how different aspects of the cold war helped give
shape and sustain the UFO phenomenon over time and argues that scholars’ emphasis on conspiracy theory is overly
reductive. Instead, evidence from the records and personal papers of ufologists shows that, with the United States
acting as the primary vector, sightings and reports quickly spread throughout the rest of the world most often by
following existing commercial and political alliance pathways. Successfully channeling a wide range of cold war
concerns, aspirations, and developments – space exploration, nuclear war, limits on power and authority, secrecy
and surveillance, social emancipation, the peace movement, trauma and the growth of psychotherapy, the
telecommunications revolution – ufology and alien abduction support groups represented interventions designed to
cope with the unsettling uncanniness and uncertainties that seemed to haunt the contemporary world. More than
simply an expression of a cold war paranoia, then, the UFO and alien contact phenomenon proved effective in
capturing a polyvalent state of suspense many experienced during this time.
Author: Karin Ekholm
Title: The Power of Touch, the Power to Feel: Tactile Sensation in Harvey’s Account of Animal
Generation
AM)
Abstract: William Harvey declared that females acquire a formative power when the uterus is merely touched by
seminal fluid. He observed that the similar texture of the brain and uterus suggest that they conceive in analogous
ways and prodded the first pulsing point of blood in eggs to determine when a chick fetus obtains an animal soul. He
also drew on his experiences with hands-on medical procedures to explain normal generative anatomy and fetal
formation. While scholars have often noted Harvey’s fundamental Aristotelianism, his work on generation seems to
conflict with the peripatetic view of touch at the bottom of the hierarchy of senses and even with his own famous
exhortation of anatomists to follow his method of ‘ocular inspection’ to explain the structure and function of bodies.
Sight was of limited use when it came to investigating conception and the early stages of fetal formation, and the
lower senses, in particular touch, played an important role in these efforts. Harvey formulated his account of
generation in response to, although not in sympathy with, Aristotle. This paper explores how he negotiated between
Aristotle and the tactile sensations he experienced himself and observed in fetuses and female patients. In particular,
I examine how Harvey attributes various powers to touch and sensation and the different roles these play in his
account of animal generation.
Author: Mark Elam
Title: Treating or Disarming Nicotine Addiction: The Multiple Worlds of Nicotine Replacement
from Nicorette Gum to the E-cigarette
– 11:00 AM)
Abstract: Nicotine replacement technology emerged in Sweden in the early 1970s informed by two closely
entangled scripts of innovation. On the one hand, it was envisioned as medical technology treating tobacco smoking
as a disease of addiction. On the other hand, it was presented as dedicated to righting the wrongful drug delivery of
the cigarette and disarming what had been shown to be an unprecedentedly harmful mode of drug use. However, not
only were these two innovation scripts more or less incompatible with each other, they were also both highly
controversial as tobacco smoking had yet to be scientifically and politically confirmed as a drug problem. In
addition, as Swedish oral tobacco served as the template for pharmaceutical product development, so the regulatory
identity of nicorette chewing gum became the subject of intense and prolonged conflict after its invention. During
this conflict the gum was not only advanced as a medical product undergoing clinical testing, but also a ‘good
alternative to smoking’ best commercialized by the still state-owned Swedish Tobacco Company. As regulatory
conflict gave way to a situation where the market launch of nicorette gum as a medicine or non-medicine was
effectively blocked in Sweden, so the eventual global success of the product as a therapeutic device came to depend
on international involvement in its further clinical testing. In this way the early history of nicotine replacement
technology can be seen as having much to say in relation to current controversy over the hazards and virtues of ecigarettes.
Author: Jim Endersby
Title: Orchid
Abstract: Studying orchids reveals a strange fact: in the late nineteenth century they suddenly began to turn on their
cultivators, killing (and occasionally eating) them. Fortunately, these attacks only occurred in fiction, but they reveal
an unexpected series of connections (e.g. between imperial orchid-mania, Charles Darwin and his various
popularisers, and the first impacts of Victorian feminism), that changed the ways people imagined plants. Killer
orchids are just one example of the ways in which plants were transformed from dull, unresponsive vegetables into
active creatures, who might prove to be crafty, lethal, sexy or even moral. As a result of this reimagining, earlytwentieth-century naturalists were able to understand a mystery that had perplexed Darwin; how orchids that
produce no nectar (but mimic insects) were nevertheless pollinated, by luring short-sighted (and over-enthusiastic)
male wasps and bees into attempting copulation with the flowers. Orchids reveals a series of curious connections
that run from imperial trading networks to science, via early science fiction, to the wider public and then back to the
scientific world again; I will argue that it is only by following the orchids themselves that we can appreciate just
how complex the making of scientific knowledge is and just how varied are the uses to which it can be put.
Author: Cindy Eric
Title: Hammer and File: Robert Hooke's Sound Development of Congruity and Incongruity
Session: Early Modern Music and Acoustics (Friday, November 20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Hooke’s fascination with music and vibrations, which he cultivated throughout his career, has been
largely overlooked. And yet music was a soundboard for Hooke’s motivation to know the universe, to go beyond the
senses, and build better instruments and resources in accordance with the Royal Society’s version of Francis
Bacon’s rhetoric. I argue that a common thread thrums throughout Hooke’s allegedly haphazard repertoire: his
unique theory of congruity and incongruity, or how consonant and dissonant vibrational frequencies interact with
matter—a theory of everything. I offer a new interpretation of the theory by focusing on its creation as an
explanation for capillary action, and its development into “all manner of sonorous or springing Bodies”, as well as
its harmonizing effect on Hooke’s science and philosophy.
Author: Paul Erickson
Title: Tragic Commons and Rational Actors: Theory and Practice in Common Pool Resource
Studies, 1930s-1990s
Abstract: Recent work in the history of the postwar human sciences has called attention to the multifaceted role of
“theory” in these fields. Theories—emerging from cybernetics, systems theory, information theory, or game theory,
for example—could serve as “models” or collections of propositions about social behavior, to be tested against
experimental or observational data. But frequently, theories served more to provide “tools” for social and behavioral
scientists that permitted them to elicit new phenomena, or to code and standardize data in particularly useful or
ergonomic ways. My paper examines this function of theory in research on common pool resources (CPRs) between
the 1930s and the 1990s. The displacement of market equilibrium models by non-cooperative game theory in this
period coincided with the emergence of major cross-disciplinary research programs aimed at studying institutions of
resource governance. Here, by providing a standard terminology and set of taxonomies, game theory facilitated the
comparison of social phenomena that were initially studied by very different disciplines. This style of inquiry, I
suggest, was one strategy of producing “big social science” in the years following the Second World War, as
researchers in the social and behavioral sciences sought to scale up their research to take advantage of new funding
opportunities and to serve new patrons.
Author: Eduardo Escobar
Title: The Morphology of “Natural” Materials in Ancient Babylonia
Abstract: Substances and properties, understood as descriptors of matter, belong to a long intellectual history of
physis and natura, one that begins properly in the Classical World. But well before the Western tradition of natural
philosophy was established, the world and its diverse materials had already been organized and described by
cuneiform scribes. This talk will review a select number of cuneiform sources that describe the material world in
order to investigate the ways in which natural properties are represented. Special attention will be given to
descriptions of the external appearance and the internal properties of plants and stones. I will argue that cuneiform
scribes took a logomorphic view of the material/natural world, one that was mediated by internal relationships
between cuneiform signs rather than an aim towards explicit naturalism. I propose that what was at stake for
cuneiform scribes in ancient Babylonia was not the investigation of matter via substances, but rather, a
comprehensive inventory of the morphology of materials; in this view, plants varieties, for example, are unified not
only by their external appearance (or morphology), but also by the shape, or morphology of the cuneiform signs
with which they were represented.
Author: Fa-ti Fan
Title: Shifting Grounds: Seismic Zoning in Early Communist China
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: This paper examines the national project of seismic zoning in China in the 1950s. After the communist
revolution, China received large-scale scientific training and assistance from the Soviet Union. One of the projects
of this international collaboration was to map and divide China into different seismic zones based on degrees of
seismic hazard. In an earthquake-prone country of planned economy, seismic hazard was deemed to be an important
parameter for economic planning, construction design, cost estimation, urban planning, and local and regional
industrial development. In this, China followed the lead of the Soviet Union. However, China quickly revised the
Soviet model and devised its own principles of seismic zoning. By tracing the process of introducing, developing,
and implementing seismic zoning in China, this paper considers the questions of science and nation-state building
and of science and hazard assessment in international contexts.
Author: Gregory Ferguson-Cradler
Title: Collapse of State and Science: Soviet Marine Science before and after 1991
Abstract: This paper analyzes the role of marine sciences within the Soviet and Russian states before and after the
collapse of the Soviet Union. Marine research, particularly in fisheries biology, played a fundamental and unusually
prominent role in Soviet state planning and diplomacy. Scientists and institutions of scientific research provided the
backbone of the Soviet Ministry of Fisheries and biologists usually led Soviet diplomatic delegations tasked with
negotiating fishing and other maritime treaties. In the 1980s and the era of perestroika, however, expectations from
the state and, crucially, funding patterns changed rapidly. While the collapse of state funding, impoverishment and
widespread emigration of Soviet scientists – particularly in the so-called “basic” sciences such as physics and
mathematics – after 1991 is well known, this paper considers how already during perestroika the role science was
expected to play in society and as an adjunct to state power was changing radically. These shifts were closely
connected with fundamental reconceptualization of the role the state should play in society and the economy. Thus,
in order to understand the changing role and nature of science in the post-Soviet sphere we must look closely at the
broader crisis of state power in the period before, as well as after, the final collapse of the USSR.
Author: Gabriel Finkelstein
Title: Scientific Celebrity: The Paradoxical Case of Emil du Bois-Reymond
Abstract: Once lauded as “the foremost naturalist of Europe,” “the last of the encyclopedists,” and “one of the
greatest scientists Germany ever produced,” the neurophysiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond (1818-1896) has suffered
a terrible decline in celebrity. Unlike Charles Darwin and Claude Bernard, who endure as heroes in England and
France, du Bois-Reymond is generally forgotten in Germany—no streets bear his name, no stamps portray his
image, no celebrations are held in his honor, and no collections of his essays remain in print. I want to use du BoisReymond’s curious example to address two historical questions: first, how did German scientists become famous in
the nineteenth-century? And second, how have their reputations been maintained today? My contention is that du
Bois-Reymond fell victim to his very success.
Author: Andy Fiss
Title: Performing Trigonometry: Scientific Parody and Women’s Mathematical Abilities in
Late-Nineteenth-Century America
Session: Scientific Representation (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: American women could do college-level mathematics because they could make fun of it, claimed reams
of student newspapers in 1886. That year, the Harvard Crimson and the Cornell Daily Sun, among others, reviewed
a new student production at Vassar “Female” College: the Mathematikado. An original parody, it set trigonometric
jokes to select songs from Gilbert & Sullivan’s recent opera, The Mikado, and, in doing so, it displayed the female
performers’ mastery of the language of formulas, curves, and applications. While the subject of trigonometry had
been taught at certain women’s institutions for decades, many Americans still doubted women’s abilities to learn
mathematics at such a high level, and the 1870s saw popularized arguments that women’s institutions should not
claim to be colleges, since they could not hope to have sufficiently advanced courses. The Mathematikado’s
reception in men’s colleges and coeducational universities therefore breached the controversial question of women’s
educational abilities through cheers that Vassar students were similar to “nearly all college students,” in the words of
the Harvard Crimson. Male students at Harvard and elsewhere ritually burned their mathematics textbooks, and
Vassar students expanded on this tradition. In Vassar’s “ceremonies,” as in earlier “burials,” incorporating advanced
mathematical allusions served as a way to display privileged, collegiate knowledge in student-led spectacles. This
paper uses the Mathematikado and its reception as a case study in late-nineteenth-century debates about gendered
mathematical skills. For Vassar students in particular and American women broadly, performing trigonometric
parodies subtly argued that women could learn college-level mathematics.
Author: Adam Fix
Title: A Science Superior to Music: Joseph Sauveur and the Estrangement of Music and
Acoustics
Abstract: The Scientific Revolution saw a shift from the natural philosophy of music to the science of acoustics.
Joseph Sauveur (1653-1716), an early pioneer in acoustics, determined that science as understood in the eighteenth
century could not address the fundamental questions, namely the problem of consonance, that had defined music
since antiquity. Building off of Descartes, Mersenne, and Huygens especially, Sauveur drew a sharp divide between
sound and music, recognizing the former as a physical phenomenon obeying mechanical and mathematical
principles and the latter as an inescapably subjective and unquantifiable perception. While acoustics grew prominent
in the Académie des sciences music largely fell out of the scientific discourse, becoming primarily a practical art
rather than a natural philosophy. This study illuminates what was considered proper science at the dawn of the
Enlightenment and why one particular branch of natural philosophy—music—did not make the cut.
Author: James Fleming
Title: Cutting the Gordian Knot of Meteorology: New Theories, New Technologies, and
New Knots
– 1:15 PM)
Abstract: Atmospheric researchers have long attempted to untie the Gordian Knot of meteorology — that
intractable and intertwined tangle of observational imprecision, theoretical uncertainties, and non-linear influences
— that, if unraveled, would provide perfect prevision of the weather for ten days, of seasonal conditions for next
year, and of climatic conditions for a decade, a century, a millennium, or longer. In the 1890s Vilhelm Bjerknes
initiated a neo-Laplacian program — to measure atmospheric conditions with sufficient accuracy, and to calculate
the future state of the weather with sufficient precision using the equations of hydrodynamics and thermodynamics.
Falling short of analytic solutions to the non-linear equations of atmospheric motion, he founded the Bergen school
of meteorology, where graphical methods prevailed. His protégé Carl-Gustaf Rossby, worked to bring the Bergen
methods to United States and identified upper-air planetary waves as the keys to long-range forecasting, treating
them as idealized cases suitable for computation by digital computers. Rossby’s student Harry Wexler and his
colleagues introduced a number of transformative technologies into meteorology including radar, nuclear tracers,
digital computers, sounding rockets, and weather satellites, that helped cut into, if not through, the Gordian Knot. In
1960, using a simple computer and a simple non-linear model, Edward Lorenz introduced chaos theory into
meteorology and demonstrated that the forecasting “knot,” if it even existed, could never be untied, at least not by
mortals. The atmospheric sciences are still coming to terms with this limitation.
Author: Bretton Fosbrook
Title: Beyond 'Predict and Control': Scenario Planning’s Alternative Futures Histories and the
Human Sciences
Abstract: Starting in the early 1970s, scenario planning—a type of futures studies consisting of techniques for
managing the uncertainties of the future—was embraced and reformulated by a growing network of business leaders
and intellectuals in the human sciences seeking to transform stagnant corporate planning practices. This talk
investigates the aspirations of these late-twentieth century scenario planners. Inspired by diverse fields in the human
sciences, these intellectuals were invested in the problem of how to move beyond the atomism and dehumanization
of the modern human sciences and the mechanistic calculations that dominated postwar futures studies. At Stanford
Research Institute in California, social scientist Willis Harman led the futures research program in efforts to
combine methods from systems theory with insights from humanistic psychology and consciousness-altering
research. Concurrently, at the Group Planning department at Royal Dutch Shell in London, businessman Pierre
Wack joined Kahn’s modernist scenario planning practices with the mystical teachings he acquired from the
philosopher George Gurdjieff in Paris during WWII. This paper examines scenario planners’ inspirations from
scientific, philosophical and psychological movements which are seeking a return to ecological holism, a demand
for a science of lived experience and an assertion of the transformative potentials of self-actualization. It
demonstrates how scenario planners’ aspirations, though situated as a break from modern human sciences, were
bound to problems plaguing the modern human sciences that they were attempting to avoid.
Author: Sietske Fransen
Title: Johan Baptista van Helmont: His Rejection of Aristotelian Logic and Galenic Medicine
Session: Why and How Logic Matters For Medicine (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In the same period that Francis Bacon (1561-1626) wrote his Novum organum, in which he suggests a
reorganization of the sciences, Johan Baptista van Helmont (1570-1644) also expresses his frustration with the
university system of the time. In his Ortus medicinae Van Helmont not only describes his own disappointing
experiences at university, but he also comes up with a system of learning separate from Aristotelian logic. In his
treatise 'Logic is useless’ Van Helmont explains that one cannot acquire new knowledge with the use of logic, but
instead only through a divine gift or (non-logical) invention. In this paper I will discuss how Van Helmont rejected
Aristotelian logic, and equally traditional Galenic medicine. What alternative was there, according to Van Helmont,
and how did this play out through his entire medical teachings? By analyzing Van Helmont’s rebelling treatises
against the teaching system of his time and by comparing them to other works on the reorganization of sciences,
such as Bacon’s, this paper will show that this lingering frustration and the myriad of potential solutions paved the
way for ways of learning. What is more, Van Helmont sketches a new hierarchy between art and science, especially
between old and new knowledge. These new ideas about how to acquire knowledge – observation, experiment, and
a new role of imaginatio, logica and ratio - would become pivotal to the scientific revolution only a few decades
later.
Author: Sietske Fransen
Title: Multilingualism in Early Modern Europe
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Early modern Europe knew a very high number of translations of scientific texts – between vernaculars
and Latin, as well as between vernaculars. Most scholars at the time were bi- if not multilingual. How did this
abundance of available languages influence the written expression of science? And what can we – as historians of
science – expect to discover and understand about the transformation of knowledge by directing our attention to the
contexts in which past scholars and translators developed and employed their vocabulary and terminology of
science?
Author: Jennifer Fraser
Title: "Know Your Risk": Otto Schaefer’s Epidemiologic Investigations into Native-Canadian
Cancer, 1953-1985
Session: Diseases, Disorders, Disabilities (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: The notion that cancer disproportionately affects Indigenous populations is everywhere in Canadian
health-science literature. In fact, it is hard to find an Aboriginal health article that does not comment on cancer and
its differential impact on Native-Canadian populations. It is strange that this statistical phenomenon is so pervasive
amongst Canadian medical communities, especially since research stretching back almost fifty years has
problematized the idea of the Aboriginal body as a natural site for cancer catalyzation. Since no national data exists,
attempts to calculate the overall incidence rate of cervical cancer for Canada’s Indigenous population has been
piecemeal at best, relying exclusively upon regional data which is often highly variable. This conflicting statistical
data raises a number of important questions: How did certain cancer types become linked to Aboriginal ancestry and
why do these indices of Aboriginal health continue to be cited in the face of contrary statistical evidence? In order to
provide a detailed examination of the historical antecedents underpinning current knowledge claims about the health
status of Aboriginal peoples, this paper will explore the epidemiologic investigations of Dr. Otto Schaefer—a
German Canadian physician, that undertook a series of epidemiological studies in Canada’s Eastern Arctic during
the mid-twentieth century (1953-1985). By uncovering some of the earliest attempts to measure cancer incidence in
Northern Native-Canadian communities, this paper will explain how certain types of cancer came to be associated
with Aboriginality, and will discuss how these statistical artifacts have become embedded within medical discourse
over time.
Author: Dana Freiburger
Title: “If Well Conducted” - Teaching Science to Survive in Early Nineteenth-Century
American Catholic Colleges
Session: Doing Science Education ‘Right’ (Friday, November 20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In 1792 when Georgetown first opened its doors in Washington, D.C., John Carroll, Prefect-Apostolic of
the Catholic mission in America and principal supporter of this school, wrote that “if well conducted” Georgetown
would be of “great service” to Catholics. However the school was not always well conducted in fulfilling his
objective of “communicating science” and, as a result, Georgetown struggled to survive for some years, prompting
Carroll to lament that it had “sunk to the lowest degree of discredit.” In addition to Georgetown, I will consider two
other Catholic institutions that did in fact fail – one in Kentucky and one in Missouri – where an insufficient concern
with teaching science played a part in their demise. Teaching science remains historiographically a little studied
motivation not simply when it came to the founding of early nineteenth-century American Catholic colleges, but as I
will argue, to their early survival. My talk will describe how survival came much more easily to Catholic institutions
that found a pragmatic balance between teaching science and espousing religion within the conventional liberal arts
curriculum of the day as both course elements proved productive at bringing students into the classroom. These
histories invite us to consider science less an inert component in the early American Catholic higher education
enterprise and more as one of its key features.
Author: Yulia Frumer
Title: Searching for Unknown: Thermometers in Early 19th century Japanese Astronomy
Session: Thermometers Incorporated (Friday, November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: When European thermometers were brought to Japan in the eighteenth century, they were dubbed “Heat
and Cold Measuring Devices.” Yet experience showed that what they measured was not exactly heat and cold, at
least not in the human perceptual sense. Weather that felt different for humans appeared as a similar measurement
on the thermometer, and vice versa. The sense that perhaps thermometers register something that humans cannot
feel was especially troubling for early nineteenth-century Japanese astronomers. Even without thermometers they
noticed that changes in heat and cold affected the number of oscillations measured by the pendulum clock, and were
thus prone to introduce errors into calculations. But was there some additional factor that thermometers could
identify? For early nineteenth-century Japanese astronomers, the idea that there could be new, previously
unaccounted for factors was not at all earthshaking. As a rule, astronomical enterprise was always concerned with
finding more and more parameters that could influence astronomical calculation, and the beginning of the century
had seen several such momentous realizations. So what were the hidden phenomena that could potentially be
unmasked with the help of a thermometer? By focusing on the process of integration of thermometers into already
well-established astronomical practice in early nineteenth-century Japan, this talk explores how Japanese
astronomers conceptualized the phenomena measured by the thermometer, and how astronomers imagined the
possible role of this device in the computational outcomes of their endeavors.
Author: Maki Fukuoka
Title: Translation, Pictorialisation, and the Practice of Medicine in 19th Century Owari, Japan
Session: Translation as Process: Border-Crossing Knowledge, Materialities, and Concepts in the
History of Science in Asia (and Beyond) (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: My contribution explores the Shōhyaku-sha, a local collective group of medical practitioners based in the
town of Owari, and their various translation activities related to materia medica and medical practices in 19th
century Japan. As the group aimed to stabilize the configuration and the content of medical knowledge by
synthesizing texts from Chinese, Japanese, and Dutch publications — resources that fundamentally required an
ability to translate —, the act of observation and the production of pictorial representations came to play pivotal
roles in both challenging and concretizing the very knowledge they were construing. Drawing on specific examples
from their archive, this presentation aims to unpack the ways in pictorializing the knowledge came to rest on the
concept of shashin (“transposition of the real”).
Author: Courtney Fullilove
Title: White Paper, Gray Literature
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: I’ll discuss knowledge production in non-governmental organizations and international public
organizations, dedicating my remarks to a close reading of a white paper published by the Consultative Group on
International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) entitled “Healing Wounds: How the International Centers of the
CGIAR Help Rebuild Agriculture in Countries Affected by Conflicts and Natural Disasters.” White papers,
generally freely available on the Internet in .pdf form, are primary vehicles of information dissemination,
argumentation, and policymaking. While these publications traffic in scientific research supporting particular policy
recommendations, they often reflect relaxed norms for citation, review, and data access. Funders for associated
development projects consist of national governments, philanthropic and private foundations, and for-profit
corporations: a public-private collaboration typical of late 20th and early 2st century research and development. The
development projects these bodies support require us to look beyond old frameworks of national history and area
studies towards new geographies that recognize networks of research capital as primary. The generation of scientific
knowledge across these networks through the production of gray literature presents thorny issues of accountability,
verifiability, and power.
Author: Isabel Gabel
Title: Animal Environments and the Philosophy of History in France
Session: Ideas of Environment (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: In the nineteen-fifties, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote that history was the “milieu of life.”
He also argued for an understanding of nature in which there was an “indivision” between the animal and its milieu.
These claims were part of a larger shift in his thought away from Marxist humanism and towards a post-humanist
account of nature and history. In the same period, Georges Canguilhem was developing his epistemology of life,
using the concept of milieu to argue for the centrality of the individual organism. Like Merleau-Ponty, he argued for
an understanding of milieu that went beyond the flatly spatialized concept of “surroundings.” My remarks will
investigate the significance of the biological understand of animal milieu in the evolution of the philosophy of
history in twentieth-century France.
Author: Caitjan Gainty
Title: An Optic for All Time: Film, Science and Evangelism in the Atomic Age
Space, 1688 to the Present (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In 1957, The Mystery of Time invited viewers inside the Moody Bible College’s Institute of Science.
Written, produced and hosted by Irwin Moon as part of the Institute’s film series, the film ushered viewers into the
Moody Lab, where the more usual accoutrements of scientific inquiry were replaced by instruments of perspectival
manipulation – time lapse and high-speed cameras, here posing as “time microscopes” and “time compressors.” But
after an arrow slowly shatters an egg, and a rose blossoms and dies in quick order, the lesson in temporal perspective
shifts to the far grander scale of relativity. With a special Panavision lens, Moon seems to bend and compress space
and time, relishing in their interconnected elasticity and their resultant condemnation of human perception as
incomplete, imperfect. So profound is this exercise that it is almost unsurprising when Moon clarifies that we have
just witnessed proof of divine omniscience and omnipresence. In his demonstration of the effects of lightspeed
travel, Moon turns the lens on himself to offer a scientific glimpse of the eternal soul. His voice slows and distorts.
“My heart would cease to beat,” he tells us, “and I wouldn’t die.” This talk examines The Mystery of Time in the
larger context of Moon and his Institute. It offers reflection on the nexus of religion and science as it was uniquely
made visible via the perspectival possibilities of the camera, locating a key role for film in the formulation of both
the science and evangelism of the “atomic age.”
Author: Karl Galle
Title: The Koran and Copernicus in Nuremberg, 1543: Linguistics, Censorship, and Europe's
Eastward Gaze on the Eve of the Scientific Revolution
Abstract: During the same year when Nicholas Copernicus's De revolutionibus was rolling off the presses at
Johannes Petreius's ambitious workshop in Nuremberg, a smaller but more immediately controversial publication
appeared from one of the city's newer printing houses. The latter work, a Latin edition of excerpts from the Koran,
was edited by Johannes Widmanstetter, a scholar of Near Eastern languages who had been rewarded by pope
Clement VII ten years previously for explaining Copernicus's ideas on the motion of the Earth to an audience in the
Vatican gardens. Widmanstetter's multifaceted interests, as well as the fact that his book but not Copernicus's
appears to have attracted the attention of Nuremberg's censors, illustrate the degree to which efforts to trace possible
Islamic antecedents to mathematical techniques employed by Copernicus and his contemporaries are bound up with
a wider range of scholarly, political, and theological interests that Central Europeans had in Ottoman and Asian
territories to the east. Fear of the Turk, exemplified in some of the fiery sermons that were also printed in Petreius's
shop by Andreas Osiander, the author of De revolutionibus's infamous anonymous preface, competed with
pragmatic adaptations of scholarly texts and a fascination with Eastern customs and rumored connections to ancient
wisdom. This talk will focus on Widmanstetter's case as seen through the lens of an ongoing biographical project on
Copernicus.
Author: Lisa Gannett
Title: Group Categories in Population Genomics: How Well Do They Travel?
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: The paper will examine tensions between the local and global demands that are placed on group
categories in population genomics. Tensions arise for several reasons: because group categories are expected to
serve a wide range of theoretical and practical ends; because cultural understandings of group affiliation vary across
place and time; because there is international divergence from the hegemony created by US-centred systems of
group classification; and because evolutionary processes themselves are limited in space and time. The paper will
draw on published and archival materials to focus on the efforts that have been made to negotiate these tensions by
administrators and researchers associated with several projects that have been undertaken in whole or part under the
auspices of the National Human Genome Research Institute, such as the International HapMap Project, The SNP
Consortium, and the DNA Polymorphism Discovery Resource. The paper will argue that a pragmatic philosophy of
science best prepares scientists to tackle the epistemic and ethical challenges that are involved in constituting groups
in population genomics, while at the same time recognizing that this approach requires extensive restructuring at the
institutional level if local norms of practice are to substitute for global ones.
Author: Rodolfo Garau
Title: Epistemological Subtleties. How the Reference to the Extremely Small could Count as an
Explanation in Early Modern Natural Philosophy.
Session: Thinking Small in the Early Modern Period (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: For many early modern inquirers, the emphasis on the realm of the extremely small was at the same time
a powerful explanatory device and a threatening epistemological limit. Indeed, they often appealed to corpuscles,
atoms, and imperceptibly small movements, in an effort to account for a number of different natural phenomena.
Applied to different domain of investigation, such heuristics could provide non-qualitative explanations, and thus
resulted decisive in replacing Aristotelian hylomorphism with more fertile aetiologies. At the same time, the
unobservability of such postulated, microscopic entities threatened the soundness of this widespread explanatory
model. While the diffusion of the microscope opened up new possibilities of observing what lay under the surface of
things, it also suggested that most part of this newly disclosed-world was irretrievably hidden. Aim of this paper is
to explore the mental models and argumentative strategies that made these appeals to the realm of the extremely
small capable of being considered (at that time) as valid explanations of natural phenomena. Through three case
studies based on Descartes, Hobbes, and Boyle, I show that there were at least three models that were used to
legitimate the explanatory potential of the appeal to the realm of the extremely small: the analogy with macroscopic
phenomena, the deduction from more general postulates, and the hypothetical reasoning. I argue that these three
models were not understood as mutually exclusive, but were rather concurrent argumentative tools often used by the
same author.
Author: Vivette García Deister
Title: Changing Practices of Race Science in 20th Century Mexico
Session: Race Science in the Latin World in the Twentieth-Century (Saturday, November 21,
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: As objects of study of 20th century race science, Indian and mestizo bodies endured changing disciplinary
agendas and scientific practices in Mexico. Biotypological obsession with characterizing the country’s population
gave way to an Indian/mestizo analytic axis. Mexican anthropology focused on the Indian body, whereas the
mestizo posed a challenge to essentialism and typological thinking. Considered to be physically and culturally
intermediate beings, mestizos lost specificity, local color, and singularity. Their anthropometry was also less
interesting and possibly less scientifically rewarding. This situation changed when (1) anthropologists and
physicians turned their attention to the new majority population groups identified in the 1940 census and thereafter,
(2) in the name of science, UNESCO declarations tried to remove racism from scientific observation of human
diversity, and to reject derogatory visions of admixture between groups, and (3) new molecular techniques for
arriving at detailed, differential descriptions of Indian and mestizo bodies, became available. These changing
practices and shifting focus between the Indian and the mestizo offer a particular expression of race science linked
to concepts of nation. However, more recently, the dislocation of mestizoness and nationality in favor of
supranational or regional identities complicates the geographical and temporal limits of “Latin race science”.
Author: Bernd Gausemeier
Title: Fishing for Probands. Approaches to Human Heredity in Interwar Germany
Abstract: During the 1920s, the study of human heredity experienced a considerable methodological diversification
and sophistication. Germany, where the eugenics movement succeeded in building a strong institutional basis, offers
especially interesting examples in this respect. My talk will outline the research strategies of the country’s three
leading institutes concerned with human heredity: the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institutes for Psychiatry (KWIP), for
Anthropology (KWIA), and for Brain Research (KWIBR). At the KWIP, Ernst Rüdin assembled extensive regional
surveys on the occurence of mental diseases in order to analyse their frequencies, their correlations, and their
possible Mendelian inheritance. His colleague Oskar Vogt at the KWIBR, in contrast, concentrated on the study of
families for which detailed clinical records and, if possible, post-mortem examinations were available. At the
KWIA, Otmar von Verschuer established twin studies as a way for demonstrating the heritability of diseases and
normal traits. Each of these ways of data acquisition had its specific advantages and limitations: Rüdin’s statistical
surveys provided a large material suitable for quantitative analysis, but required a high administrative effort,
whereas twin studies and family pathologies allowed for a closer examination of individual probands, but were often
restricted by the problems to find a sufficient number of evaluable cases. I will discuss how researchers sought to
overcome these inherent problems, how they modified their respective strategies of data acquisition and their ways
of interpreting their data, and finally, how their views on human heredity were shaped by the structure of their
material.
Author: Jean-Francois Gauvin
Title: The Next Level of Play: Scientific Research and the Gamification of Techne
Session: From the Example of the Exploratorium towards a History of Interactivity (Saturday,
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: What do video games and basic scientific research have in common? While the question may, upon first
thought, seem utterly absurd, it has in fact in the course of the past several years become central to a fascinating
extension of epistemological boundaries. With the advent of the Internet, participatory science – often now called
citizen science – means that anyone who wishes can contribute to the development of knowledge, so breaching
previously immutable barriers between lay people and scientists. The most effective technological interface and one
which allows for flexible scientific practice adapted to the greatest number of people, is that of the video game ˗ a
choice that is fully in line with changing consumer habits. Hence the concept of the gamification of techne. In
museums of science and technology, where game-playing is already integral to their educational and didactic role,
the introduction of game-based interfaces with real scientific impact is a way to give visitors opportunities to
themselves become citizen experts, knowledgeable not only about the latest advances in scientific research, but also
about the ethical, social and environmental issues that this research inevitably raises.
Author: Jean Gayon
Title: Bibliometric History of the Modern Synthesis
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: His presentation will frame the issues in terms of research he has been conducting using bibliometric
methods to identify phases in the development, articulation, and diffusion of the ES. His presentation will focus on
which disciplines were included and presumptively integrated at various stages. The original disciplines were
population genetics, systematics, and paleontology. There are saddles in the bioliometric record during and after the
putative inclusion of molecular genetics, ecology, and behavior.
Author: Arunabh Ghosh
Title: South-South Scientific Exchanges during the Cold War: Chinese Irrigation and Soil
Conservancy through Indian Eyes, 1959
Session: Transnational Science and Politics in Modern Asia (Saturday, November 21, 9:00 –
11:45 AM)
Abstract: Early in 1959, at the height of the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), a three-man team from the Indian
Ministry of Food and Agriculture arrived in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Their objective was to study
minor irrigation and the agronomical and engineering aspects of soil conservation. Over the ensuing forty days, the
team traveled 3,000 miles, visiting the provinces of Hebei, Henan, Hunan, Hubei, and Guangdong. In each province,
they met with experts and technicians working in a wide variety of fields such as water conservancy, agriculture,
irrigation, and construction. In this paper, I unpack the details of this six-week visit and pursue two related strands of
enquiry. First, I explore how the visit and the report it generated contribute to our understanding of science and
technology, in particular irrigation work and dam-building, during a tumultuous period in the early history of the
PRC. Second, I discuss how the visit provides a window onto the possibilities of south-south scientific exchange
during an era normally understood as dominated by scientific dissemination that originated in either of the two Cold
War metropoles: the United States or the Soviet Union.
Author: Fred Gibbs
Title: The Universals and Particulars of Poison in the Sixteenth Century
Abstract: Physicians since the late thirteenth century vigorously debated the theoretical and practical differences
between medicine and poison across a wide range of medical literature, an effort fueled by the natural and wellknown dangers of many medicinal substances. Over the course of the sixteenth century, however, physicians
fundamentally reframed their debates about the nature of poison and formulated new ways of discussing it in
medical (which should also be seen as toxicological) literature dedicated to poison (venenum). While some
physicians continued to argue that some drugs should be labeled as unequivocal and universal poisons—defined by
some kind of material substance or spiritual essence that was fundamentally opposed to the human body and should
therefore be off-limits to medical practice—most physicians writing about poison focused their attention not on
philosophical distinctions between medicine and poison, but rather on the conditions under which something might
be considered a poison—the particulars of poison, we might say. Drawing from a wide range of medical literature,
this paper illustrates how physicians came to argue that it was impossible to understand poison as either a universal
or particular phenomenon without accounting for both perspectives simultaneously. Consequently, physicians
reshaped their medical and toxicological works to reflect this multi-faceted view of poison by crafting a new concept
of venenum defined dually: one axiomatically by its universal ability to harm the human body (and thus curable
through universal remedies); the other by emphasizing the particular classes, properties, natures of various poisons.
Author: Susannah Gibson
Title: Eighteenth-Century Sensation: Touch, Sensibility and Irritability in Natural History
AM)
Abstract: In the 1750s, the Swiss scholar Albrecht von Haller re-defined the concept of ‘irritability’. This separated
the sense of touch into two distinct realms: sensibility, which was linked to nerves and the brain; and reflexive,
mindless irritability. The ability to feel had long been considered an animal property, and a sense of touch had been
used to classify natural objects into their proper kingdoms – animals could feel, and plants could not. If Haller was
right, and some instances of apparent sensation were due to irritability, would this confer a measure of sensation of
some members of the vegetable kingdom? This paper examines several experiments on plants and animals by Haller
and other naturalists to determine how the sense of touch manifested itself in the different kingdoms, to find out if
some plants might have a nervous system, and to ascertain if a sense of touch should really be considered a defining
characteristic of the animal kingdom.
Author: Thomas Krendl Gilbert and Andrew Loveridge
Title: A Comparative Social Morphology of Scientific Judgment in Theoretical Physics
Session: Cultures and Communities (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: For the past forty years, high energy physics has become increasingly divorced from experimental tests,
threatening its status as a scientific enterprise. Currently, this community is divided between two opposed
formulations of quantum gravity: string theory (ST) and loop quantum gravity (LQG). Based on historical
comparison of their formation and in-depth interviews conducted with their leading practitioners, this paper argues
that the rival conceptual aesthetics of these communities—e.g. their opposed epistemic priorities and theoretical
tastes—are both based in and expressed through the distinctive social trajectories of their members. ST’s inheritance
of the pragmatic epistemic culture of American particle physics has permitted it to become a dominant aesthetics, in
which “thought experiments” are interpreted as objectively deductive and in accord with the scientific method.
LQG, meanwhile, has been relegated to a dominated aesthetics on the academic periphery, with its followers
respecting the dominance of ST while insisting on the goal of direct experimental inquiry. These rival forms of
scientific judgment comprise a struggle over the preferred institutional form of science when falsifiability is no
longer a realistic goal—a struggle also rooted in the state’s ambivalence about funding physics as a particularly high
status but no longer lucrative research enterprise. This paper offers a structuralist account for theoretical physics
building on previous ethnographic work conducted by Knorr-Cetina and Collins. In so doing, we combine Daston
and Galison’s depiction of “trained judgment” as a distinctive contemporary epistemic virtue with Bourdieu’s
portrayal of judgment as an act of social positioning.
Author: Sebastián Gil-Riaño
Title: Latinizing Modernization: Neo-Lamarckism and the Human Sciences in the Andean
Indian Mission during the 1950s
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In their 2011 study of Latin Eugenics, Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette suggest that “Neo-Lamarckism
emphasized the transformative power of education, assimilation, and spiritual renovation; interference in
reproduction was not necessary to evolve a better race.” In 1952, the International Labour Organization (ILO)
assembled an international team of scientists to initiate a project of indigenous modernization in the Andes also
guided by a belief in the transformative power of education and assimilation and with little concern for interfering in
reproductive practices. Though most actors involved in the mission were indigenista scholars from Latin America,
the director was Ernest Beaglehole – an ethnopsychologist from New Zealand who helped draft the 1950 UNESCO
Statement on Race. Prior to his involvement with the ILO, Beaglehole had no connections to the “Latin world” and
most of his research was based on Māori communities in New Zealand and on indigenous groups in the South
Pacific islands. He was included in this project because he was considered an international expert on the
psychological adjustment of indigenous groups to modernity. This paper examines Beaglehole’s career leading up to
the “Andean Indian Mission” and his involvement in the project’s first field mission to Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador in
order to interrogate the geographic, chronological, and disciplinary boundaries of race science and its demise in the
so-called Latin nations. By examining the continuities between Latin eugenics and international projects of
indigenous improvement this paper asks, did Latin “Neo-Lamarckism” become the governing model for
international development projects after 1945?
Author: Luca Gili
Title: Galenic and Alexandrian Approaches to Medicine: A History of Opposition and Harmony
Abstract: Galen (ca. 129-200 CE) and the Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. 200 CE) were
near-contemporaries and yet they represent two opposed approaches to medicine. Galen grounds the practice of
medicine in a theoretical understanding of human physiology but does not conceive of medicine as a science.
Accordingly, doctors practice their art based on the determinism of human physiology which ensures certainty.
Logic is merely a tool that ties together the theoretical truths of physiology, whereas the doctor’s empeiria applies
these truths to concrete cases. In contrast, Alexander grounds medicine in modal logic thus conceiving of it as a
quasi-science. For Alexander medicine is not only structured like a science, but its conclusions are syllogistically
derived from a finite set of axioms including theoretical truths and empirical observations. In contrast to Galen, then,
Alexander maintains that medicine can logically infer contingent conclusions from axiomatic principles. Yet despite
this initial opposition, the subsequent history of Galen’s and Alexander’s approaches has an entirely different story
to tell: it is driven by a forceful quest for harmonisation. But how could this be achieved? The purpose of this paper
is two-fold. First, I show how and why Galen and Alexander establish two seemingly incompatible approaches to
medicine by fleshing out their divergent methods and conceptual differences. Second, I discuss how the history of
these two approaches of medicine, particularly in late antiquity and the Arabic world, harmonises both approaches
by merging particular theoretical elements—an approach that would feature prominently in medieval debates.
Author: Molly Girard Dorsey
Title: In Fear of Science: Lay and Diplomatic Doubt about the Geneva Gas Protocol and Efforts
to Ban Gas Effectively in the Interwar and World War II
Abstract: During the interwar period, popular and official opinion in the West held that gas would be used again in
the next war, and the weapon would be more devastating than it had been in World War I. Stanley Baldwin’s
famous the “bomber would always get through” speech includes visions of gas dropped from the air and on
civilians, as well as on soldier. This attitude encouraged grassroots and political struggles over whether to ban
chemical weapons. The most successful result of these efforts was the Geneva Gas Protocol, a treaty signed in 1925
and ratified by dozens of countries in the years afterwards. However, there was almost no confidence at any level,
especially in Britain, that the Protocol would protect anyone. In many nations, people felt that science had unleashed
something that could not be restrained by a treaty or by technology. This fear led to continued efforts internationally
to prevent, or at least prepare, for gas wars, whether by bolstering the Geneva Gas Protocol or by instituting gas
defense measures such as drills and gas mask distribution. These are well-documented in the popular literature and
diplomatic negotiations after 1925 and into World War II. Lay perception of the potential catastrophic nature of
future gas warfare led the public and diplomats to obstruct the use of this recent scientific invention; the threats from
developments in chemistry in World War I would only grow in the future.
Author: Mathias Girel
Title: Peirce, Clifford, Dispositions and Scientific Practice
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In the late 1870s Charles S. Peirce claimed that pragmatism was a “corollary” of British psychologist
Alexander Bain’s definition of beliefs as dispositions to act in certain ways. Peirce’s own distinctive contribution to
pragmatism was to show how the meaning of abstract terms, including key terms in physics and mathematics, might
be clarified through a description of these dispositions. Now, other “men of science” in the 1870s were applying
Alexander Bain’s formula while also offering theories about the meaning of scientific terms, effectively building
into their scientific activities the practices Peirce subsequently used in order to determine the meaning of scientific
terms. These scientists would qualify as pragmatists according to the criterion implied by Peirce. Most surprising
among them was British mathematician and physician William Kingdon Clifford. It might seem strange indeed to
describe Clifford as a “fellow traveller” with the pragmatists. William James portrayed him in unsympathetic ways,
while subsequent commentators have argued that Clifford’s stress on justification was the symptom of an
interesting, if belated, form of positivism, prone to skepticism concerning religion, and likely to be individualist
concerning knowledge. This common assumption is misleading. I argue that Clifford, before Peirce, adopted a
contextualist theory of meaning involving reference to practical bearings and used it as a practical technique for
clarifying the meaning of physical and philosophical abstract terms such as “exact”, “explanation”, “cause”, and
“force.” I thus show that the “pragmatist method,” as Peirce later labeled it, permeated scientific activity and
writings of the 1870s.
Author: Tal Golan
Title: Causation in Late Modernity
Session: Suffering Made Global? Science and Law in a Toxic World (Friday, November 20,
3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: My talk will discuss the intertwining scientific and legal quests for true causes in late-modernity, when
true causes are hard to find, no single explanatory factor is sufficient, and neither the scientific expert nor the lay
person are trusted to decide the facts.
Author: Janet Golden
Title: Resisting Scientific Mothering: Folk Practices, Medicine Men, and Old Ladies
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: The pathway to scientific motherhood—laid down by public health officials, paediatricians, visiting
nurses and government agencies—helped lower infant mortality rates in the first half of the twentieth century and to
transform household practices. This story has been well told by many scholars. What about the story of resistance to
the biomedical imperatives and the rejection of expert knowledge? This paper offers a view of what might be called
medicalization and its discontents. Using the records of field nurses from the Bureau of Infant Affairs, folklore
collections, ethnographies, memoirs, and autobiographies, I explore the everyday practices that ran counter to the
emerging biomedical advice. I also look at the reasons people gave for rejecting the help of medical professionals.
The history of infant care in the first half of the twentieth century, I argue, must incorporate findings about
resistance to science and about the ways in which medical and public health experts both fought and accommodated
the beliefs of those who were skeptical of their treatments and practices.
Author: Dena Goodman
Title: Expertise, Amateurism, and Scientific Sociability in Postrevolutionary France
Abstract: In postrevolutionary France, the rise of scientific professionalism based on expertise was matched by an
explosion of enthusiasm for science among a broad swath of French men, manifested especially in scientific
sociability. Carol Harrison has explained this phenomenon as a means by which bourgeois men made claims to
citizenship. In this paper I argue that such claims were not just a strategic choice of foolish men without talent,
property, or a true vocation for science but a response to initiatives at the heart of the new French state. Many of
these initiatives can be attributed to Augustin-François Silvestre (1762-1851). Silvestre was director of educational
programs for the Agence des Mines (1794-1801) and then head of the Bureau of Agriculture in the Interior Ministry
(1801-1819). He was also co-founder of the Société Philomatique (1788), the Société centrale d’agriculture (1798),
the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale (1801), and the Société d’horticulture (1827). As head of the
Bureau of Agriculture he drew on his experience in the independent Société Philomatique to promote the
establishment of societies of agriculture throughout France, both for the transfer of scientific and technical
knowledge from experts to ordinary citizens, and to engage those citizens in a national project of economic reform
based on Enlightenment scientific ideals of progress and collaboration. A closer look at Silvestre’s life and career
illuminates a complex, dynamic relationship between expertise, amateurism, and sociability in postrevolutionary
France.
Author: Michael Gordin
Title: Twentieth-Century Scholars and Their Attitude towards Anglophone Science
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Over the course of the twentieth century, translation has not just been a topic of interest to literary
scholars and (increasingly) historians, but it was a central question for scientists themselves — at least up until the
point when English became so dominant that the translation question was transformed into a question of how to
educate non-Anglophones in foreign languages. How did scientists and translators approach questions of translation
— at conferences, in journal publications, in joint projects on machine translation? Some of the approaches drawn
from translation studies help orient how historians of science can approach the epistemic issues of translation.
Author: Jeremy Green
Title: Mercurial Communications: on the Historical Conjunction of Telephone and Thermometer
Abstract: Historians of science and technology have approached the thermometer chiefly as an instrument for
metrology and inscription in laboratory, field, and factory, while historians of medicine have approached it largely
as a diagnostic technology in the hospital or clinic. This paper traces a different history of the thermometer as a
communications technology, a home medical device which took its form not as a stand-alone entity but as part of a
larger technological system developed in conjunction with the introduction of the telephone. Less than a decade
separated Wunderlich’s 1868 landmark paper on clinical thermometry (establishing the mean human body
temperature at 98.6°F) from Alexander Graham Bell’s 1876 demonstration of the telephone. By the early 20th
century, as both technologies diffused into middle-class homes in Europe and North America, both were seen by
physicians and patients alike as a conjoined means for potentiating the practice of medicine at a distance. As the
home clinical thermometer--coupled with the home telephone—allowed patients to convey quantitative as well as
qualitative assessments of their bodies to their physicians, it also became a site of anxiety over the dangers of selfdiagnosis and technologically-mediated medicine. Drawing from a range of materials from the 1880s to the 1980s,
this paper traces the broad arc of the thermometer as a networked information technology to pose new questions at
the conjunction of history of medicine and history of technology.
Author: Carmine Grimaldi
Title: Televising Psyche: The Hippies, Cybernetics and the Birth of Video Psychotherapy
Session: The Well-Tempered Self (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: This paper discusses an unremarked moment in the history of the moving image and of psychology—the
development of video psychotherapy in 1960s America. During this time, various universities, psychiatric institutes,
and individual practitioners turned to video technology as a revolutionary new cure, a possible panacea to correct the
modern psyche through televised self-confrontation. (And it was hardly limited to the elite: one could also read
about the new techniques in TV Guide.) Its absence from histories is peculiar, considering how explicitly it brings
into relief the mingling of technology and the self, media and the psyche.
To better understand the origin of this technique, and why it took such firm hold of the public imagination, my paper
looks at San Francisco’s Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute, which had a clinic popularly known as ‘The
Hippy Ward,’ where a group of cinephile doctors experimented with video on adolescents supposedly burnt out on
LSD and modern anomie. Within the archives of its director, as well as the popular writings at the time, we can
begin to discern the cultural assumptions that both gave meaning to the method and ensured it fertile soil to take
root. The paper traces the generative mingling of the hippy counterculture, cybernetics, popular beliefs about
television, and the neurological theories that all contributed to the construction of this technique. Those interested in
the history of the human sciences, countercultural science, and the relations between the moving image and science
will hopefully find this an insightful and unexpected contribution.
Author: Jean-Baptiste Grodwohl
Title: Integrating Behavior into the Synthesis
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: .G. Simpson in 1958 acknowledged, with the approval of ethologists, that there is no distinct “theory” of
behavior; there was a variety of specific theories and generalizations, but no unified theory that would need
integrating with the ES. But the history of the study of behavior after this date was characterized by the building of
an evolutionary theory of behavior unified by the principle of natural selection as understood by the ES. It is not
surprising, accordingly, that apparent conceptual unity hid the presence of different and competing lines of research
and methodologies in the study of animal behaviour when they coalesced, in the late 1970s, under the flag of
“behavioral ecology.” These differences have resurfaced ever since.
Author: Jean De Groot
Title: Triumph and Forgetfulness: The Historiography of Ancient Mathematics
Abstract: The ancient period in the history of mathematics is lauded for the development of proof and the
separation of mathematical objects at a level of reality apart from sensible things. This celebratory interpretation of
ancient mathematics turns on the achievements of Plato and Euclid, and it became established doctrine even in
antiquity during the long hegemony of Middle and Neo-Platonism. This definition of mathematics, however, leaves
pre-Platonic mathematics a blank and submerges its later history by dividing it into different branches of
mathematics. Lacking treatises from the 5th or early 4th centuries BC, we have little direct information about the
level of probative force in mathematical argumentation of this time. The forms in which mathematical knowledge
has survived are passed by as techniques or analogies of limited value. Questions in writing the history of early
mathematics, then, are what constitutes evidence and how to read the evidence.
By reference to Archytas and Eudoxus, I show the character of the early mathêmata (plural), which their
practitioners recognized as involving a specialized way of thinking while also including movement and explaining
sensible things. Drawing on new approaches to what mathematics is, I question the received view that to be
mathematical, natural science must be quantified, i.e., use numbers and calculate. I focus instead on mathematical
ideas, delineating in early mathematics the uses of sameness of ratio and the idea of invariance. These mathematical
ideas bear comparison to modern developments like least action and knot theory.
Author: Benjamin Gross
Title: Nobel Prizes and the Construction of Innovation Narratives: The Case of the Blue LED
Abstract: In October 2014, the Nobel Committee bestowed that year’s physics prize upon a trio of Japanese
scientists for inventing the blue light-emitting diode (LED). While the economic and environmental significance of
an efficient solid-state replacement for the incandescent lightbulb is undeniable, the announcement provoked
questions about the function of the Nobel Prize. After all, the winners were not the first to observe solid-state light
emission, explain its theoretical underpinnings, or assemble a functional blue LED prototype. Instead, their work
transformed the blue LED into a commercial product, an aspect of industrial research which rarely receives
recognition from the scientific community. Yet as I will argue in this paper, the Nobel Committee’s efforts to call
attention to the challenges of technology transfer reinforced an innovation narrative that did not reflect the
collaborative, transnational character of the modern electronics industry. This account, echoed in the popular press,
served to conceal the shortcomings of applying an early 20th century award system to the complex landscape of 21st
century R&D.
Author: Walter Grunden
Title: The Rabbits of Okunoshima: Public Memory and the Legacies of Chemical Warfare in
Japan
Abstract: Preparation for Chemical Warfare (CW) in Japan did not require the mass mobilization of chemists from
the civilian sector. Rather, in the case of Japan, the majority of research, development, and production of chemical
weapons was undertaken by the military services within their own institutions, including laboratories, training
schools, and arsenals. No new structures, connections, or managerial hierarchies were necessarily required for
wartime mobilization as these were largely in place before the outbreak of the Pacific War (1941-1945). Thus, after
the war, demobilization was a matter of shuttering military institutions and production facilities, such as the factory
on Okunoshima Island, and there was comparatively less disentangling of the military from civilian aspects of the
work. This essay argues that, because of the wartime structure of Japan’s CW program and its general separation
from the civilian sector, in the postwar period it was easier to compartmentalize the controversial production and use
of chemical weapons as a facet of a defeated militarist government. Japanese civilian chemists largely did not have
to grapple with the same sort (or level) of moral and ethical issues faced by fellow scientists who may have worked
on nuclear weapons, electronic weapons, or biological weapons. Chemists in uniform could also shed their former
identity and find employment in private industry. Thus, Japan’s wartime CW history could fade more easily in
public memory, that is, until the environmental legacy of CW became an unavoidable issue of public health in the
latter twentieth century.
Author: Anita Guerrini
Title: Skeletons, Provenance, and Identity, 1650-1800
Abstract: The human skeleton, ubiquitous and yet invisible, became revealed to view as never before in early
modern Europe. A crafted object as well as a natural one, its making and use occupied both artists and anatomists.
Although skeletons frequently appeared in anatomical illustrations, cabinets and collections reveal little evidence of
skeletons or even individual bones before the mid-seventeenth century. From then onward, a vigorous skeleton trade
flourished across Europe, and they often appear in auction catalogues alongside books, works of art, and scientific
instruments. Unlike books or instruments, however, skeletons originated with human bodies. Crafting a skeleton
involved several levels of violation of the body, from obtaining a corpse to removing flesh and reassembling the
bones. Beginning with Vesalius, detailed instructions for making a skeleton appeared in many anatomical texts and
manuals. While such a process would seem to confer anonymity on the finished skeleton, provenance and even
identity often clung to the bones. Most skeletons were of executed criminals, some of them widely known.
Widespread demand and changing scientific contexts expanded the market for skeletons (as well as skulls) beyond
Europe to encompass much of the known world by the mid-eighteenth century. Catalogues, account books,
advertisements, and illustrations reveal a worldwide commerce in skeletons with, at the same time, considerable
local variation in their display, particularly in relation to other body parts and to animals.
Author: Nils Güttler
Title: The Colorists: Hand-coloring Maps in Modern Cartography
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Situated at the intersection of semiotics, aesthetics and economics, color has become a boundary material
in modern cartography. Since the early 19th-century cartographers have used it as a symbol and reading aid. Apart
from making maps more meaningful and legible, color has also been applied to increase their aesthetic and
economic value. Thus, the use of color in modern map-making reflects the rise of maps as scientific media and
market commodities. Little attention however has been paid to the question who actually gave maps their color.
Before the advent of lithography, and even beyond, map coloring was nearly exclusively a female business, carried
out by teenagers and young women. Over the course of the 19th century hand-coloring manufactures emerged all
over Europe. The colorists accumulated a tremendous knowledge and expertise on the application of color to maps
and its mass reproduction for popular and scientific markets. By concentrating on the color departments of two
major cartographical publishing companies in Great Britain and Germany, the paper traces the history of hand
coloring in modern cartography. Why has this practice been so exclusively performed by women? Answers to this
question reach from social to cultural history, and gender discourses in particular. But what about adding an
ontological dimension to the history of the colorists, by borrowing anthropologist Michael Taussig’s notion of color
as being “bodily unconscious”? What features of color in modern cartography have been “suppressed” by forgetting
the female dimension of this paper practice?
Author: Kim Hajek
Title: Representing Hypnotism between Science and Literature in Late Nineteenth-Century
France.
Abstract: What makes a particular representation of phenomena a scientific activity? What if a “scientific” account
invites an imaginative response, when this is considered inappropriate in scientific communication? Does that make
the representation literary, or make the topic discussed less of a science? In addressing such questions, hypnotism
research in France in the 1880s constitutes a valuable case study. Hypnotism enjoyed unprecedented medicoscientific legitimacy at this time, but it was a legitimacy rendered always fragile by public association of hypnotism
with its nominal precursor, the discredited magnétisme animal. Magnétisme was notably disparaged for its
astonishing stage performances and wondrous phenomena. To mark hypnotism’s scientificity, by contrast,
researchers guided their readers away from imaginative responses like astonishment and wonder, and toward the
impersonal, demystified orientation proper to positivist science. There is a tension, however, between presenting
hypnotism impersonally and representing it at all, for many phenomena, particularly those of suggestion, are
fundamentally invisible. How then could scientific texts attest to their reality? A major way they did so was to
mobilise their readers’ imaginations through literary modes of representation. Here, I will unpack various techniques
which functioned to provide readers with imaginative witness to both the substance and the reality of suggestive
phenomena. Hypnotism texts thus blur the boundaries between scientific and literary representations, on the one
hand, and modes of reading, on the other. What does this overlap mean for what it meant to think hypnotism as
science, or to think science in general, at the end of the nineteenth century?
Author: Piers Hale
Title: Charles Kingsley, “An Excellent Darwinian”
Session: The Darwinian Revolution in Victorian Literature (Friday, November 20, 9:00 – 11:45
AM)
Abstract: Recent historiography on the popularisation of nineteenth-century science has emphasised the prevalence
of ‘non-Darwinian’ conceptions of evolution. In this paper I argue that Kingsley, at least, cannot be accurately
described in this way. Not only did he publically identify himself as being a disciple of Darwin, others recognised
him as such. There is something to be said for recognising the significance of the label that Kingsley embraced and
popularised in addition to looking in detail at the range of often-contested ideas that went under this banner that goes
beyond semantics. Not only was it Darwin’s name and fame that captured the public imagination, but Kingsley
actually was Darwinian ۛ deeply and thoroughly ۛ, which we can see most clearly in his children’s fairy story,
Water Babies. It has long been recognised that Darwin’s own conception of evolution was progressive, teleological,
and betrayed an abiding debt to natural theology. So too was Kingsley’s, and this alongside a determined embrace of
natural and sexual selection. Further, throughout the 1860s Kingsley fully appreciated the contingent nature of
natural history, a point that Darwin was later to argue with the Harvard botanist Asa Gray. Of course, there were
differences too, differences that grew and led to a rupture, of sorts, following the publication of Descent of Man, but
even then, Kingsley still referred to himself as a Darwinian.
Author: Karl Hall
Title: Archimandrite Theophanes Reads Kant’s Anthropology: Entangled Concepts of Race in
the Russian Empire
Abstract: Racial categories were both more widely discussed and assimilated earlier in Russia than previous
scholarship has acknowledged. The natural histories of Buffon and Blumenbach provided obvious points of
mediation, but race was not readily “biologized,” for the poorly-differentiated disciplinary landscape of Russian
“thick journals” offered competing claimants from history and elsewhere, highlighting the constant problem of
“translating” ill-formed European scientific ideas into this “mixed” intellectual milieu. A wide-ranging intellectual
commitment to an ontology of Slavic tribe and Caucasian race nevertheless underwrote a Janus-faced discourse of
internal imperial assimilation and European belonging, with Russians as occasionally ambivalent mediators.
Author: Jacob Hamblin
Title: Beyond the Nuclear Watchdog: Survival Strategies at the International Atomic Energy
Agency
Abstract: The IAEA has a reputation as being the UN’s nuclear “watchdog” but it historically has been
uncomfortable with that role. Instead its directors-general have routinely pointed out that their goal is to promote the
use of nuclear technology, not to regulate it. As an international agency, the IAEA occupies a unique place in that it
seeks to promote a particular solution, rather than address a particular problem. That has brought it into conflict with
other agencies such as the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization. In the 1960s, the
IAEA (like national atomic energy agencies) developed a siege mentality that led it to adopt strategies to protect its
programs and to defend the scientific merits of atomic applications. As an example, mutation breeders in the 1960s
hoped to use atomic energy to speed up mutation rates in plants in order to develop new crop varieties, for the
benefit of all people. Skepticism slowed this work in the United States, but the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) nurtured the scientific field and its community of experts. The IAEA acted as a center of dissemination and
support for experts and ideas even when they had fallen from favor elsewhere, and even as critics within the UN
system called into question the ethics of IAEA programs. This roundtable contribution discusses the machinations of
officials within the IAEA in the 1960s to carve out a lasting niche within the UN system of specialized agencies.
Author: Aimi Hamraie
Title: Environmental Knowing and the Making of Social Justice in Architectural Space
Abstract: In the late-1960s, two epistemological milieus emerged at the intersections of knowledge production,
environmental design, and social justice. First, the field of environmental design research (EDR) brought together
anthropologists, environmental psychologists, rehabilitation specialists, human factors researchers, and humanistic
architects whose work focused on users more so than the aesthetics or form of built environments. EDR introduced a
scientific concept of “evidence”—particularly evidence about human bodily and mental diversity—into architectural
practices as a design resource. It positioned evidence-based design as an alternative to architects’ intuition about
human users and exposed architectural making as itself a way of “environmental knowing.” Concurrently, activists
in movements produced a second epistemological milieu dedicated to racial desegregation, disability access, and
gender equality in built environments. These activists posited their own embodied knowledge as (what I call)
“access-knowledge,” a form of environmental knowing premised upon the user as an authoritative source of
evidence about environmental design. Access-knowledge extended epistemological critiques of medical paternalism
to architects and asserted, like EDR, that (non-disabled) architects’ intuitive design methods did not capture the
diverse needs of human users. I focus on these concurrent developments within and outside of the architecture
profession to talk about epistemology as a tool and tactic of accountable and inclusive environmental design, and to
posit that the history and sociology of science offer useful conceptual and methodological opportunities for
investigating these intersections.
Author: Kristine Harper
Title: Weather by the Numbers? Yes... Climate? Not 'til Later
– 1:15 PM)
Abstract: From the time of the Bergen School in the early twentieth century, a subset of the meteorology
community sought to advance the cause of prediction through the use of so-called primitive equations that define
atmospheric motion. The problem: they were non-linear and therefore did not have a simple solution. Indeed, the
only solution was to solve them using newly created numerical analysis techniques, and even those techniques were
not useful for the timely prediction of the next day's weather, much less predicting weather years in advance. The
development of electronic digital computing enabled numerical modeling the atmosphere--initially used for weather
prediction--and the follow-on creation of ways to model the general atmospheric circulation, which in turn led to
today's climate models. But the initial desire to predict the weather had nothing to do with climate, nor was climate
even mentioned. While the public often cannot discern the difference between weather and climate, meteorologists
and climatologists were left to create their own disciplinary spaces and later to negotiate where one's turf ended and
the other began.
Author: Jenna Healey
Title: Geriatric Generation: The Infertility Industry and the Biology of Reproductive Aging
Session: Temporalities of Life (Saturday, November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: When in vitro fertilization (IVF) was first introduced into clinical practice in 1978, thousands of patients
flocked to fertility clinics to try the procedure. Due to a cultural trend towards delayed parenthood, many of these
patients were older (over the age of 30) and hoping to have a child before it was “too late.” In turn, this patient
population provided physicians with an unprecedented opportunity to study the relationship between aging and
fertility. This paper examines the interplay between the emergence of the infertility industry during the 1980s and
the development of biological knowledge about aging, fertility, and the human reproductive system. I argue that the
expansion of the commercial IVF industry, especially in the United States, provided physicians with both a patient
population suitable for studying reproductive aging as well as the technical means to do so. Technologies such as
embryo cryopreservation, human embryo transfer, and oocyte donation allowed researchers to separate the age of
the reproductive cell from the age of the body, producing new hypotheses about how aging impacts human fertility.
Although these technologies were not originally developed to combat reproductive aging, the combination of patient
demand and the potential for profit led to experimentation within the unregulated industry. By the early 1990s,
oocyte donation was being used with success in women up to 50 years old, sparking a debate about the ethics of
using reproductive technologies to extend reproductive life.
Author: Nadin Heé
Title: East Asian Impacts on the Globalization of Ocean Studies during the Cold War
11:45 AM)
Abstract: As John Krige has convincingly argued, American hegemony in Cold War science was coproduced by
European countries, each of which had divergent interests and reasons to cooperate. While Krige focuses on
American-European interactions I will examine the roles and impacts of East Asia—a much under-studied subject—
in Cold War science. Specifically I explore the transnational processes that led to collaborations between Asian
nations—often unwilling to cooperate in military matters—in the fields of fishery science and oceanography. I seek
to show how during the Cold War American fishery researchers and oceanographers relied deeply on scientific
research conducted by Japanese scientists. But this was not only a story of unilateral knowledge transfer: first,
mainland Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese scientists who worked in research institutions of the Japanese Empire also
contributed to the production of scientific knowledge. Second, there are continuities and imperial legacies crucial for
the analysis of regional scientific cooperation in East Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. Third, investigating practices of
science shows that a diverse group of actors, including individuals, national or supranational institutions, produced
knowledge and different forms of knowledge were important in the globalization of knowledge in ocean studies,
including local, non-scientific knowledge such as fishing techniques. Finally, the paper will address the overarching
question of how to connect the local with the national and global and to illustrate their reciprocal conditionality.
Author: Linda Dalrymple Henderson
Title: Italian Futurism and the Ether: Umberto Boccioni’s Elasticity and Unique Forms of
Continuity in Space
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: At the conclusion of his 1914 book Pittura scultura futuriste Umberto Boccioni declares, “We want to
model the atmosphere, to denote the forces of objects, their reciprocal influences, the unique form of continuity in
space,” equating these goals with the “materialization of the etherial fluid, the imponderable . . . .” Yet the absence
of translations of Boccioni’s full treatise, combined with general lack of knowledge of the ether physics still
dominant for the public in the early 20th century, has obscured this central theme of Boccioni’s art and theory.
Pittura scultura futuriste is, in fact, filled with references to contemporary science, including X-rays, Hertzian
waves, electrons, and “the electric theory of matter.” The latter reference suggests his specific awareness of Oliver
Lodge, whose ideas and writings were well known in Italy—in both popular scientific and occult sources. Indeed,
for the Futurists, like so many others in the early 20th century, occultism (including spiritualism) and science
seemed to be two equally valid routes for exploring the unknown. Lodge’s openness to spiritualist materializations
made him a highly sympathetic figure, and his writings about an elastic, energy-filled, matter-producing ether were
surely the stimulus for Boccioni’s fall 1912 painting Elasticity. In this work the artist “models the atmosphere” or
ether, creating what he terms “force forms,” expressed as folds and “shears” of ether. As this paper will demonstrate,
by later 1912 Boccioni was seeking in both painting and sculpture to give form to—and even “sculpt”—the ether as
ultimate sign of continuity.
Author: Marieke Hendriksen
Title: Boerhaave's Mineral Chemistry and Its Influence on Eighteenth-Century Pharmacy in the
Northern Netherlands
Session: Chemistry in Action (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In the eighteenth century, the use of mineral or fossil substances - including metals, earths, salts, and
(gem) stones - was common in European medicine and pharmacy. However, this period also saw profound changes
in ideas about the nomenclature, chemistry, and curative properties of minerals. Jonathan Simon has recently argued
that an increasing orientation toward the mineral kingdom and the chemical transformation of nonorganic materials,
and a rise in the number of mineral preparations demanded of the pharmacist, were characteristic for eighteenthcentury chemistry within pharmacy. Although this might be true for France, in the northern Netherlands an opposite
pattern is visible: although there certainly was a strong interest in the mineral kingdom and the chemical
transformation of nonorganic materials, this led to a strong decrease in mineral-based pharmaceutical preparations.
This paper argues that the changing ideas about minerals of Leiden professor Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738),
'teacher of Europe', were crucial in the decline of this 'mineral medicine' in the eighteenth-century northern
Netherlands. It also analyses several factors that may have contributed to this remarkable contrast between France
and the Netherlands. John Powers has convincingly shown that Boerhaave restructured and reinterpreted various
practices from diverse chemical traditions into a coherent organizational structure and philosophical foundation for
an academic chemistry. However, this paper takes the argument a step further by showing that Boerhaave not just
founded an academic chemistry; he and his students also profoundly changed practical medicine and pharmacy with
a new chemical understanding of minerals, at least in the northern Netherlands.
Author: Pamela Henson
Title: Are You Sure? How Historical Images Can Shake Up Text-Based Narratives
Abstract: In researching our planned book, Images of American Science, we have found many intriguing historical
photographs that reveal information about the production of science, relationships between scientists, and who-doeswhat in science that conflict with traditional accounts. Studying (and incorporating evidence from) images makes
for a more complex story in history of science. Photographs of work in scientific labs reveals the roles of minorities,
such as women and African Americans, whose names do not appear on published articles or biographies of wellknown scientists. Photos of scientists in the field reveal very different relationships than found in written accounts –
not only in early twentieth century dinosaur digs in Wyoming but also in Cold War field work, where stresses
between scientists from different nations are emphasized in written accounts but photographic evidence reveals
casual and friendly relationships in non-work hours. Scientific portraits often follow conventions and symbols of
traditional portraiture, but other times can be quite revealing. Photographs can reveal cohesion or lack of it in or
between groups, such as group photos of two Lamont Geological Observatory research groups during the Cold War
– one with conservative geochemist J. Lawrence Kulp and the other with the more relaxed German national Georg
Wüst. Oral history interviews confirmed their internal cohesion and between group differences. We will present
photographs that challenge traditional accounts – both contemporary accounts and by historians – and discuss how
to integrate conflicting and suggestive visual evidence into research that captures the complexity of how science was
actually done.
Author: Diana Heredia
Title: How to Disappear 150 Years and Not Be Forgotten: Lessons from the Visual Culture of
the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain (1787-1803)
Abstract: The visual culture of the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain (1787-1803) comprises not only the
1989 watercolors from the Torner Collection that had been lost for most part of the 19th and 20th centuries, but also
smaller collections housed in Madrid, and several replicas made during the 19th century. Before their disappearance
in 1820, the watercolors had already travelled to Madrid, Montpellier, and Geneva, where they were examined by
leading figures in botany at the time. However the long sought publication of these illustrations and other materials
from the expedition remained unfinished until 2010.
This poster aims to show a broad picture of how the visual culture of this expedition continued its circulation for
more than one hundred years despite its fragmentation. This work will include images from the expedition that
illustrate four points about the visual culture of the present case: 1) Images became a central element in making
reliable histories of the New World; 2) In colonial contexts, scientific illustrations not only required a large
mobilization of practices, people, and instruments but also a very close collaboration with local people and their
traditions; 3) Copies, replicas and print culture associated with the original visual culture must be taken into account
in order to explain its fragmentation; 4) The scientific naming of several plants along with its biological types reveal
the asymmetries that enabled the circulation of the visual culture after its loss.
Author: David Herzberg
Title: The Medicalized Drug War: Physicians and Pharmacists in the Punitive Era of Drug
Control
– 11:00 AM)
Abstract: Addiction to legal medicines has consistently dwarfed street drug use throughout the 20th century, but
historians usually follow drug warriors in focusing on heroin, cocaine, or marijuana. Such scholarship can
unintentionally reinforce the historical association of drug problems with urban racial minorities (who have indeed
suffered the most harm from their use and policing). It also ignores a much larger historical laboratory of drug use
and drug policy: the vast markets for prescription sedatives, stimulants, and narcotics open to those with the
ambiguous social privilege of access to them. These markets are typically studied by pharmaceutical historians, who
see them as just one more example of the raw cultural and political power of the drug industry. Physicians and
pharmacists are surprisingly marginal figures in both historiographies. In the former, their role is to lose a halfhearted struggle with the state for authority over addiction; in the latter, to be manipulated or coopted by the drug
industry. And yet physicians and pharmacists had practical and formal authority over the vast majority of licit and
illicit commerce in sedatives, stimulants, and narcotics. My paper draws on records of the Complaint and
Investigation files of Wisconsin's state Medical and Pharmacy Boards to explore the role of physicians and
pharmacists as drug regulators. Their regulation of addicted physicians and of physician prescribing, I argue,
sustained a coherent, medicalized view of addiction that was sympathetic yet inegalitarian, prefiguring the
problematic triumph of medicalized drug policy in the 1960s and 1970s.
Author: Ian Hesketh
Title: Darwin and the Historians
AM)
Abstract: Very little has been written about the role Darwinian evolution played in shaping the writing of English
history in Victorian Britain. This is because it is largely assumed, as argued most recently by the chief proponent of
“Big History,” David Christian, that as history was becoming a profession at this time, historians increasingly
narrowed their subject matter while embracing an extreme empiricism that fetishized the written records contained
in national archives while eschewing any overarching theoretical framework. The long tradition of “universal
history” was, according to this view, “repressed.” This paper seeks to challenge this assumption arguing that not
only was universal history alive and well in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was in fact rejuvenated by
the expanded timeframe associated with the Darwinian Revolution. Historians as philosophically and
methodologically diverse as Henry Thomas Buckle, James Anthony Froude, and Edward Freeman each set out to
write particular histories of England that were situated in grand historical frameworks that stretched beyond the
prehistory–history divide. While it is true that these historians did not explicitly engage with Darwin or evolution
more generally, I am less concerned with direct influence and more so with what George Levine would refer to as
the “cultural absorption” of Darwinian evolution, which is apparent in these histories that present the English nation
as the product of historical laws of dynamic development operating just beyond the control of their historical
protagonists.
Author: Matthew Hoffarth
Title: Organized Projections: David C. McClelland and the Business of the Thematic
Apperception Test, 1963-1989
Session: Tests and Standards (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: This paper investigates psychologist David McClelland’s use of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)
in studies of motivation and achievement among business managers from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. In
particular, I detail the ways in which McClelland positioned the problem of motivation as one that spanned a
continuum from individual to organization to nation, and the way his more restricted use of the TAT to investigate
business management provided him with a universal model of reform for bodies of all types, be they people,
corporations, or states.
This paper details McClelland’s founding of the McBer Consulting Company in 1963 and his attempts at
commodifying and making proprietary the Thematic Apperception Test for use in management consulting. Based on
his use of the TAT in personality testing since the 1940s, McClelland’s tripartite model of the motivational needs of
managers (needs for power, achievement, and affiliation) became a widespread and influential theory of
management in large part through the activities of McBer Consulting and its dissemination and distribution of the
TAT. I explore how the expanded use of the TAT to understand not just individual personalities but larger
formations tapped into postwar beliefs about how to harmonize individuals with collectives, and who would and
could benefit from such attempts. In this way, McClelland’s theory of motivation became influential and farreaching because it drew upon and reflected the interests of social scientists, business organizations, and the public
in such topics as group dynamics, systems theory, and the self.
Author: Michelle Hoffman
Title: Science Education as Civic Education: Clear Thinking and the Problem of Transfer, 19001945
Abstract: The distinctive role of science in disciplining young minds and instilling clear thinking has long been
invoked as a rationale for its place on the curriculum. The thinking skills credited to the study of science were
frequently assumed to carry over into civic life and conflated with virtues necessary for democratic citizenship:
equanimity, integrity, resistance to propaganda, and sound judgment. The chemist Ira Remsen exemplified this
optimism when he argued, in 1902, that the “scientific habit of mind,” enabled its possessor “to see through the mere
talker, through the shams,” while the unscientific mind yielded to superstition and deceit. In the early decades of the
twentieth century, however, research on transfer of training eroded this optimism. Experiments by American
psychologist E. L. Thorndike suggested that learning in one subject did not reliably create thinking skills that
transferred to other domains. Educators in Britain, Canada, and the United States increasingly expressed concern
that mathematics and science, as they were taught, were too unambiguous to train minds for the murky problems of
civic life. This paper examines how science educators grappled with the implications of the problem of transfer
between 1900 and 1945. Drawing on education journals, transfer research, and an expanding literature on how to
teach “clear thinking,” I argue that the problem of transfer presented a quandary for science educators, prompting
them to propose new models of science education done “right.” Rather than relinquishing civic aspirations,
educators refashioned a more “useful” science curriculum that championed science’s relevance to democratic
citizenship.
Author: Andrew Hogan
Title: One Elephant in the Room: Genetic and Social Aspects of Naming in Biomedicine
Abstract: Over the past 50 years, improvements in the resolution of human genome analysis have facilitated the
identification of many new markers for genetic disorders. This has led to both the ‘lumping’ and ‘splitting’ of
disease categories, as clinical patterns of abnormality come to be associated with particular genetic mutations.
Postwar biomedicine has been strongly shaped by a one mutation-one disorder ideal of genetic disease, which
maintains that disorders are ontologically the same if they are caused by the same mutation, and different if they are
not. While medical geneticists have largely accepted the priority of genetic mutations in disease diagnosis and
nosology, genomic categorization sometimes does not seamlessly translate to the social groupings that have been
built around disorders.
This paper examines the history of DiGeorge and Velo-Cardio-Facial syndromes, historically distinct disorders,
which in the 1990s were shown to result from the same mutation. Though the medical professionals interested in
these disorders have largely accepted the idea that they are ontologically the same, they have remained unable to
agree on a common name for the resulting disorder. In this paper, I draw up primary biomedical literature,
interviews, and archival sources to examine the ‘biosocial’ delineation and naming of disease. Over the past two
decades, Paul Rabinow’s influential concept of ‘biosociality’ has been put to the test by a variety of genetic findings.
I argue that in the genomic era of biomedicine, the social identities that develop around genetic disorders remain
complex and fluid despite the reductive gaze of molecular medicine.
Author: Joseph Horan
Title: Climate, Weather, and Cotton: Meteorology and Acclimatization in Napoleonic France
and Italy
Abstract: In 1807 Napoleon initiated a concerted effort to promote experiments with cotton cultivation across the
south of France and the areas of Italy that had recently fallen under French control, in order to facilitate the
development of the French cotton industry and advance Napoleon’s grand design for mastery of Europe. The
Napoleonic regime sought to profit from the expanded understanding of global weather patterns that had emerged in
Europe during the “age of Enlightenment.” In order to promote experiments with cotton cultivation in France and
Italy, Napoleon’s government relied upon extensive examination of climate and weather on the part of French
savants and officials, who were asked to study the ideal meteorological conditions for the crop and determine if
these conditions could be found in the areas under their control. This effort to use the meteorology to facilitate a
rapid acclimatization of cotton to France and Italy ultimately struggled against actual weather conditions. In some
cases, the weather encountered by the farmers and landowners who participated in the experiments matched the
general climate models developed by the central government and its supporters in the savant community. However,
many other participants experienced meteorological conditions that frustrated their efforts, an outcome they
recorded in detail in their correspondence with the government. This episode reveals the extent to which the rise of
modern meteorology encouraged an expanded confidence in the human capacity to exercise control over natural
phenomena, while also demonstrating the challenges that accompanied efforts to transform scientific knowledge into
practical innovation.
Author: Hansun Hsiung
Title: The Transfer of Scientific Illustrations from Nineteenth-Century Europe to East Asia
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: The history of science has of late witnessed a growing turn toward the analysis of images as loci of
epistemic attitudes. But what happens when images travel – when they are copied, appropriated, and reproduced
across contexts that are at times radically divergent? In short, what information do images translate, and what
happens when those images are in turn translated? My provocation seeks to scrutinize existing models of text-centric
translation by examining scientific illustrations as the latter roamed from Europe to East Asia during the nineteenth
century. On the one hand, the nineteenth century was a time when efforts to resist Western imperialism made the
acquisition and dissemination of European scientific knowledge an urgent state need in China and Japan. On the
other hand, it was also a time for the proliferation of new technologies of reproduction, such as lithography and
stereotyping, that blurred boundaries between text and image, while at the same time enabling parallels to traditional
East Asian woodblock printing. Attention to the global circulation of scientific and technical images across this
period thus allows us to conceive of translation as something more than a problem of language. Rather, the problem
is both one of the broader visual codes that govern page-bound materializations of knowledge, as well as of the
technologies that structured that materialization.
Author: Danian Hu
Title: A British Physicist as Diplomat and Agent: William Band’s Wartime Association with
Chinese Communists and Its Impact
11:45 AM)
Abstract: Having earned his M.Sc. in physics at University of Liverpool in 1927, William Band (1906-1993) went
to China and taught at Yenching University, an American funded mission college in Peking, two years later. At
Yenching, Band established his professional career as a theoretical physicist and nurtured many leading Chinese
scientists. The Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor ended Band’s ten-year tenure as the department chair and forced
him to flee from Peking. Thereafter Band spent more than two years with Chinese Communists in their guerrilla
bases, including Yan’an, the Communist headquarter, where he carefully observed political organizations, military
forces, and interviewed with many top leaders like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. It was this unique experience of
Band’s that made his arrival in Chongqing, China’s wartime capital, in February 1944 a sensational event. At the
request of the British Ambassador in China, Band submitted a confidential report concerning the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP), a document that not only demonstrated Band’s political foresight but also played a
significant role in shaping Britain’s China policy in the aftermath of World War II. My presentation will introduce
Band’s experience in the CCP bases and discuss its impact on Ambassador Sir Horace Seymour, the Foreign Office,
and eventually the British policy toward the CCP and its takeover of the national power in China.
Author: Lily Huang
Title: Distraction Post-Darwin: the Uses and Disuses of the Past in French Psychology, 18801900
Space, 1688 to the present (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Like nostalgia, distraction is a benign modern affliction with a pernicious past. In late nineteenth-century
France, distraction was an acute symptom of a whole spectrum of maladies: mania, hysteria, psychological
dissolution or weakness, and the neuroses of fixed ideas. Though some of these have exactly contrary natures—-an
inability to pay attention versus an attention riveted by obsession—-in this period they have one character in
common: ill-adaptiveness. This paper examines the new urgency of distraction as a threat to the psyche in the
evolutionist era of French psychology. It explores how, in France, to alter the meaning of distraction was to change
the character of psychological discourse and even the structure of the psyche. For in a psychological tradition with a
long fascination with hypnotic suggestion, distraction was uniquely situated at the boundary between normal and
pathological conditions of the intellect, between the province of the will and the reign of automatisms. The language
of adaptation reorients the landscape of mental pathology, most prominently in the writings of Théodule Ribot. In
1889, an evolutionary hierarchy of psychological processes emerges in Pierre Janet’s AUTOMATISME
PSYCHOLOGIQUE. What happens to distraction in this shift? Distraction acquires a temporal dimension: its state
of detachment from the present now leaves it susceptible to intrusions of the past. The expansion of distraction to
encompass the involuntary incursions of memory is fully evident in Henri Bergson’s challenge to Ribot and Janet on
their own grounds, his defense of INattentiveness precisely because it has no use.
Author: Hieke Huistra
Title: From Fat to Weight: Fatness as a Health Risk in Dutch Newspaper Ads, 1890–1940
Abstract: This talk investigates the construction and dissemination of ideas on fatness, body weight and health in
the first half of the twentieth century — in particular the idea that body weight is a meaningful measurement for
both fatness and health. Throughout the twentieth century, fatness (also known as corpulence, obesity, plumpness
and overweight, depending on period and discourse) was considered a health risk not only in the medical but also in
the public sphere. This idea circulated in the public sphere through different means of communication, but, at least
in the first half of the century, especially through newspaper advertising campaigns for products like slimming
drugs, diet books, bathroom scales and special foods. Until recently, the study of such campaigns was complicated
and time-consuming, but large-scale digitization of newspapers has changed this. In this talk, I use the digital
newspaper database of the Dutch National Library to study the construction and circulation of the idea of fatness as
a health risk in the Netherlands between 1890 and 1940. I analyze the period’s largest advertisement campaigns, and
show how the focus of these campaigns shifted from fat to weight — two things that might seem interchangeable to
us now, but that, I argue, most certainly were not back then.
Author: Samuel Huneke
Title: Mathematics Education under the Nazis
Abstract: When Hitler became chancellor of the German Republic in 1933, mathematicians knew they had a
problem — Nazi ideology, anti-intellectual in the extreme, had little use for most sciences outside of biology and
medicine. In this study, however, I seek to delineate and assess the ways in which math education became a vehicle
for Nazi propaganda. I argue that mathematicians did not merely conform to an ideology imposed from above, but
eagerly Nazified both the form and content of their discipline in a multi-pronged effort. At the most superficial level,
authors and textbook publishers changed word problems to reflect the new priorities of the Nazi regime. Attempts to
construct a singularly German history of mathematics also arose in textbooks and other publications of the era.
Finally, many pedagogues claimed that the German soul required a specific type of mathematical training. These
thinkers asserted that Germans, with their irrational and intuitive natures, had a propensity for the spatially grounded
field of geometry. Drawing on a philosophical tradition originating in Immanuel Kant’s epistemology, they argued
that geometry must be taught as the foundation of mathematics. This paper thus traces the reasons behind the
propagandistic instrumentalization of mathematics under the Nazis and the means by which it was carried out. In so
doing, it provides a richer understanding of the Nazis’ own epistemologies and the imprint that ideological
dictatorships can leave on even ostensibly objective disciplines.
Author: Philippe Huneman
Title: Ecology and the Modern Synthesis
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: This paper will review the routes by which methodology and concepts of the ES found their way into,
ecology, with an emphasis on key figures such as Elton, Hutchinson, and McArthur, and how in turn, methods and
concept developed in ecology entered into the tool kit of the ES. There was a constriction both methodologically and
conceptually in doing this.
Author: Jaehwan Hyun
Title: On the ‘Americanization’ of Postwar Korean Science: Yung-sun Kang and the Origin of
Human Population Genetics in South Korea
Abstract: In this paper, I investigate the origin of genetic research on Korean populations during the 1950s. In
recent years, the research foci of historians in biology have extended to the origin of human genetics after WWII.
This scholarship exploring the origin of human genetics dealt with European and American cases, and in most of
these studies, Asian situations have been unexamined. Further, previous studies on the history of human genetics
have highlighted the role of this scientific discipline in the making of a national identity without consideration of
Asian cases.
I will examine the history of postwar Korean population genetics as seen through the early career of Yung-sun Kang
(1917-1995) —a leading figure in the development of genetics in Korea. By scrutinizing the initiation of human
population genetics in Korea by Kang after his research study in 1954 with Curt Stern of the University of California
at Berkeley, I will show that Kang's introduction of this research program into Korea was closely linked to Korean
scientists’ endeavors to resolve intellectual, political, and economic tensions of the postwar period. While previous
studies on the history of science in postwar Korea have usually depicted it as an outdated colonial Japanese version
simply being replaced by advanced American science ideas, this case study will reveal that the transition was more
subtle and complex; it was neither a radical shift from “old” to “new,” nor an unchanged continuance of the “old.”
Author: Kenji Ito
Title: Yukawa Hideki and Self-Orientalism
Session: Historiography of Cultural Diversity in the History of Science (Sunday, November 22,
9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: One of well-known problems in studying and writing different cultures is the problem of Orientalism.
Orientalism reinforces the tendency to essentialize cultural differences, fabricate a culture or cultural traits, and
neglect internal diversity within. What I call self-Orientalism here is the tendency to present one’s culture (or what is
claimed to be one’s own culture) in a way to satisfy Orientalistic expectations of others. It is a problem because
when a historical actor leaves self-Orientalistic accounts, later historians can use them as historical evidence for their
Orientalistic claims. In the history of modern physics, Yukawa Hideki’s writing in English provides good examples
of such self-Orientalism. This paper examines Yukawa’s self-Orientalism in his book, Creativity and Intuition and
discusses how this book has affected historiography of the history of modern physics in Japan. Then, it turns to more
recent examples of self-Orientalism in the history of science in Japan, and discusses their relevance to contemporary
social issues.
Author: Catherine Jackson
Title: Chemists' Histories and the History of Chemistry
Abstract: Nineteenth-century chemists were prolific historians of their discipline and their histories have served as
key sources for the history of chemistry ever since. The status of eminent chemist historians such as Adolf Baeyer,
Albert Ladenburg and Carl Graebe has led many later historians of chemistry to suppose these histories provide a
reliable account of the development of chemistry. But, as this talk will show, nineteenth-century chemists’ histories
were written to serve a range of purposes and reach a variety of audiences – factors that were of considerable
importance in shaping their content as well as their style. Examining chemists’ histories with this in mind reveals the
origin of existing accounts that emphasize the theoretical basis and productivity of early organic synthesis. It also
provides evidence for the essential role of chemical practice in driving the development of theory. Understanding
chemists’ histories in their disciplinary context shows that history of chemistry is more than history of theory and
application. As a result, it raises some important questions. What could nineteenth-century chemists do? What did
they know? And how do the answers to those questions change our view of science around 1900?
Author: Matthew James
Title: Collecting Evolution: The 1905-06 Galápagos Expedition from the California Academy of
Sciences
Abstract: 70 years after Darwin's visit on HMS Beagle, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco
assembled an expedition party of eight sailor-scientists to spend a full year collecting in the Galápagos Islands. The
immediate goal was museum collection building and the eventual outcome was vindication of Darwin through the
78,000 specimens collected during the 17-month expedition, the largest Galápagos collection ever. Each man had
his scientific collecting specialty: birds, reptiles, plants, insects, fossils, rocks, mammals, and seashells. The
vigorous intellectual debate that followed publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 only strengthened the
allure of the Galápagos. One could read the book and vicariously partake in the controversy, or one could go visit
the Galápagos and participate in the controversy first hand. The Academy decided to both read and visit. The
Academy curators were acting on the well-founded fear that species in the Galápagos, especially the archipelago’s
namesake giant tortoises, were fast disappearing due to human depredation. The iconic bird group called Darwin's
Finches was advanced to prominence by the large Academy 1905-06 collection studied by David Lack in 1939,
elucidating these now-textbook examples of natural selection. Institutional history of the Academy was profoundly
altered by its complete destruction in the April 18, 1906 earthquake and fire, and its present-day salvation was
afforded by the 1905-06 expedition collection, which returned to San Francisco post-earthquake. The enduring
significance of this expedition resides in the Academy being center of specimen-based scientific studies of
Galápagos organisms.
Author: Anna Jerratsch
Title: The Marginalization of Astrology in the Early-modern Discourse on Causation and
Meaning of Comets
Session: The Marginalization of Astrology in Early Modern Science (Saturday, November 21,
3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: German vernacular pamphlets on comets of the 16th and 17th centuries offer a unique insight into a
multifaceted discourse, in which natural philosophy, astrology and theology were closely interconnected. In what I
call an “integrated image” of comets, astrology was crucial as a linking element: Observable parameters of comets
were interpreted using astrological techniques. Additionally, astrology supported the view that the origin, existence
and effects of comets could be explained by natural causes. Moreover, comets were theologically conceptualized as
divine signs. Therefore, astrology was used to decipher the exact meaning of God’s message. From the mid-17th
century onwards this integrated image was dissolved through a gradual differentiation of the cometary discourse.
The determination of the causes and meaning of comets became the exclusive but complementary competence of
natural philosophy and theology, respectively. In this epistemological shift, astrology progressively lost its function
as a support to both dimensions and therefore was gradually marginalized. I will show some important reasons for
this process of marginalization of astrology through a selection of German vernacular pamphlets on comets. In the
16th century, the astrological view that comets are causes of negative effects was seen as compatible with their
understanding as divine signs indicating these events. Later, the causal viewpoint to which astrology was linked was
gradually dismissed. In particular, the meaning of prodigious phenomena such as comets was restricted solely to a
framework of theological reasoning, while the legitimacy of astrology was casted into doubt from a naturalphilosophical perspective.
Author: Paul Jobin
Title: Industrial Hazards and Public Health Sciences in Contemporary Japan, Taiwan and Korea:
a Tentative Analytical Framework
3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Since Japan’s Minamata disaster in the 1950s, East Asia has become a region where rapid
industrialization keeps bringing new health hazards to large populations. This paper explores some major
developments in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea in recent years, and discusses how the production of scientific
knowledge—in particular epidemiology and other public-health sciences—intersects with social debates in toxic tort
litigation in the East Asian context, and how such controversies bring changes in the legal, scientific, medical, and
other professional fields. The first part of the paper will explore the role of epidemiology and other public health
sciences in two prominent occupational—hazard lawsuits against electronic companies—the RCA (Radio
Corporation of America) cancer case in Taiwan since 1998 and the Samsung Semiconductor leukemia case in South
Korea since 2006. The second part will focus on the evolution of epidemiology in Japan, from Minamata disease to
Fukushima nuclear disaster, raising the possibility of a shift from conventional symptomology to epidemiology. We
will discuss in particular why the Japanese tradition of epidemiology (ekigaku) gave birth in the 1970s to a set of
judicial rules of evidence distinct from that of the conservative Daubert standards in the US.
Author: Eric Johnson
Title: Darwin's Russian Defender: Peter Kropotkin's Struggle Against Neo-Darwinism and
Eugenics
Session: Exploring Human/Animal and Biological/Social Boundaries in Twentieth-Century
Science (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Peter Alexeyevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) is most known both as the father of revolutionary anarchism
and for his contributions to evolutionary theory in the form of his 1902 book Mutual Aid that challenged the
individualist social Darwinism of the nineteenth-century. However, his most extensive biological writings were
published in the last decade of his life and have received only limited attention from historians. Between 1910 and
1919 Kropotkin published seven papers that challenged the "preformationist" theory of heredity advocated by the
German biologist August Weismann. In place of this "hard" view of inheritance, Kropotkin argued for an
"epigenetic" understanding of hereditary transmission that combined natural selection, environmental plasticity, and
the inheritance of acquired characteristics. In doing so, Kropotkin believed that he was defending Darwin's work
from the "Neo-Darwinists" who were intent on separating development from heredity. Kropotkin saw an inherent
danger in such a separation should this conceptualization of inheritance cross the boundary from biological to social
theory in the form of eugenics. Kropotkin’s robust defense of Lamarckian principles, utilizing extensive citations of
German, French and Russian research that was otherwise unknown in Britain, underscores the culturally mediated
discourse that framed the debate over heredity at the dawn of the genetic age.
Author: Jeffrey Johnson
Title: On the Social Responsibility of the Scientist in Wartime: Should Fritz Haber have been
Tried as a War Criminal?
Abstract: This paper will critically examine Fritz Haber’s role as the scientific leader of the German chemical
warfare effort within several broader contexts: the prewar context of international law in regard to chemical warfare,
the unraveling of scientific internationalism under the impact of war, the wartime work of academic and industrial
scientists including Haber, the conduct of the war by both German and Allied political and military leaders, and the
postwar settlement including the chemical-warfare provisions of the Versailles Treaty and the impact of the Allied
arms-control regime. That treaty specified, but for various reasons the Allies did not convene, an international warcrimes tribunal including “use of deleterious and asphyxiating gases” in its accusations. The paper will then consider
the counterfactual case, supposing that the tribunal had in fact been convened in 1920 with Haber as one of those
indicted. The paper’s “tribunal” will therefore call upon several “witnesses” – Haber himself, his colleagues,
associates, military leaders, and other contemporary observers, as well as participants in other applications of
science to war, to reflect on Haber’s role in particular, and the broader question of the integration of scientists into
modern warfare. Moreover, the paper will consider the possible long-term implications if the outcome had been in
1920 to effectively ban a scientist’s participation in certain forms of “unconventional” warfare that formally violated
international law.
Author: Elizabeth Jones
Title: A History of Ancient DNA Research: A History of Celebrity Science
Abstract: I argue that the history of ancient DNA (aDNA) research is a history of celebrity science. aDNA research
– the search for DNA in fossils – is a set of contemporary, interdisciplinary, and controversial scientific and
technological practices. It emerged from the interface of paleontology, archeology, and molecular biology in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Over the last thirty years, aDNA research has evolved as a professional
discipline under the influence of public interest and media exposure. I argue that celebrity science is a type of
science that has constant news value which results in consistent and intense attention from media. Celebrity science
is a distinctive category of science. Its presence in the media is so substantial that the science and scientists respond,
positively or negatively, to the attention and even reinvent their reputation accordingly. I show evidence for the
interplay between science and media and how this relationship has driven and directed the formation of aDNA
research as a technoscientific practice, especially in the 1990s. The search for the most ancient DNA from the most
iconic fossils was inspired by evolutionary interests in professional science but encouraged by productions of
popular science, like Jurassic Park. I argue that aDNA research is a case study of a celebrity science, and I suggest to
historians of science the opportunity to use this argument as a framework for asking questions and finding answers
about the development of other sciences under persistent publicity and pressures of media.
Author: Mark Jones
Title: Interpreting Oral Histories in Studies of Contemporary Science: The Case of Recombinant
DNA Technology
Abstract: As historical documents, individual oral histories have limited utility. They are not objective accounts of
historical fact, but rather post hoc recollections. They are inescapably subjective, interested, prejudiced, and
susceptible to hindsight bias. However, problems of reliability diminish when scholars have access to multiple
firsthand accounts. When descriptions and explanations of events or sets of facts cohere, or when they conflict and
reveal patterned disagreements, oral history collections become resources for reconstructing histories of personal
relationships, organizations, and institutions, documenting the cultural dimensions of scientific work in particular
times and places, and locating individual and collective actions in broader social, economic, and political processes.
To illustrate, I examine testimonies of witnesses to the invention of recombinant DNA technology. This record is
rife with conflicting accounts of basic facts, claims to priority and recognition, and the motives and ends of central
actors. It does not support definitive conclusions regarding what happened and how, but it affords understandings of
the episode that are otherwise unavailable. This review of the evidence takes up issues in oral history methodology
raised by historians of contemporary science including Soraya de Chadarevian, Lillian Hoddeson, and Thomas
Söderqvist. It employs analytical resources developed by twentieth century sociologists Erving Goffman and C.
Wright Mills to demonstrate the value of oral histories in studies of contemporary science.
Author: Matthew Jones
Title: Data, Materiality, History
Abstract: The constraints of computing technologies are essential for the path of computational sciences in recent
years. The ideational history of computing must thus pay close attention to its materiality and social forms, and the
materialist history of computing must pay attention to its algorithmic ingenuity in the face of material constraint.
Bad history has mattered within recent history: too ideational a conception of computational science has impaired, in
some ways, the development of a data-driven computation science.
Author: Fredrik Jonsson
Title: Scaling the Environment
Abstract: My talk will investigate the place of nested systems of scale in different ideas of the environment.
Perceiving scale requires practice and technology. Scale then is not simply the ratio of a distance in a model or a
map, but a form of thought and labor specific to different societies and times.
Author: David Kaiser
Title: Coordinated Blasts: H-Bomb Simulations and the Origins of Numerical Relativity
Abstract: Unlike many successful theories in physics, the field equations of Einstein's general theory of relativity
are nonlinear: the gravitational field, as described by relativity, can act on itself and not just on other objects, making
analytic solutions especially difficult to calculate. Over the past half-century, physicists have therefore worked hard
to develop reliable routines to simulate strong gravitational systems on computers, that is, to craft "numerical
relativity." One of the earliest efforts in this area was led by Bryce DeWitt. DeWitt was particularly well-placed to
help invent numerical relativity: soon after earning his Ph.D. he worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in
California in the mid-1950s, where his main task was to develop some of the first 2-dimensional numerical
simulations for hydrogen bombs. That experience -- forged when large electronic computing resources were scarce
outside of massive weapons projects -- enabled DeWitt to work out clever uses of special coordinates, the so-called
"Lagrangian" coordinates rather than the more familiar "Eulerian" set. With that choice of coordinates, the top-secret
bomb simulations ran successfully and kept the relevant physical phenomena in focus. After he left Livermore,
DeWitt and his students elevated this nonstandard choice of coordinates to the center of their efforts in numerical
relativity. The origins of numerical relativity thus point to a deep continuity with research on nuclear weapons: not
just a transfer of knowledge about nuclear reactions that occur in bombs and in stars, but a transfer of specific tools
of calculation.
Author: Abram Kaplan
Title: Progress or Return? Leibniz and Newton Historicize the Calculus
Abstract: “I am the best disposed of all to do justice to the moderns,” insisted Leibniz, “yet I find that they have
carried their reform too far.” The first clause seems odd coming from the philosopher who touted his restoration of
substantial forms, the second from the mathematician whose symbolic calculus traditionalists at the Royal Academy
of Sciences in Paris opposed. Cartesians who only a generation earlier had been natural philosophy’s most fervid
innovators opposed mathematical innovations by both Newton and Leibniz. The radical Cartesians become the
establishment without relinquishing their claims to revolutionary modernity. By contrast, both Newton and Leibniz
insisted that the history of learning was crucial in determining the course of progress. They used history to defend
the innovative calculus, but they understood both history and progress in different ways. Leibniz situated his
infinitesimal analysis directly within contemporary philosophical discussions. As in Leibniz’s religious appeals to
the truly catholic church of all believers, contemporary opinion, understood as present tradition, furnished standards
for its own transformation. But Newton saw his contemporaries’ preference for algebra over geometry as a sign of
decay in public taste and mathematical principle. By extending synthetic demonstration to problems others solved
with symbolic analysis, Newton aimed to restore mathematics to its proper role as a source of epistemological
temperance and a tool for scholarly criticism of eschatology. My paper shows how these mathematicians used the
past in vastly different ways as a resource for tempering modernity’s fervor while transforming the sciences.
Author: Richard Kaye
Title: The Invention of Empathy: Darwin, Aesthetics, and the Problem of Others
November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Richard will address current debates over whether Darwin gave credence to notions of the ‘sympathetic’
or ‘empathetic’ in nature. Considering the emergence of empathy as a concept in aesthetics and then psychoanalysis
at the turn of the century, the presentation will explore Darwin’s ideas about emotional projection. Such projection
had the potential to complicate the dynamics of natural and sexual selection, and expose the epistemological
uncertainties involved in Darwin’s speculations. Richard will suggest Darwin would have been very conflicted about
– and probably would have rejected – the sentimental anthropomorphic assumptions entailed in the contemporary
projection of empathy onto non-human creatures.
Author: Terence Keel
Title: Beyond the Charge of Pseudoscience: New Directions for the Study of Race and the
History of Science
Session: Roundtable: How Should the History of Science Engage with Political Activism and
Social Justice? (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Within contemporary scientific research we are witnessing the re-commitment of scientists to the practice
of racial classification with the emergence of new genetic technologies for researching diseases across “ethnic”
populations, increased use of racial ancestry for medical practice, pharmaceutical research, and criminology.
Historians of science interested in race and human difference have an important contribution to make in
documenting the consequences and risks of this recommitment to racial classification by present day scientists. This
is particularly true, given how the race concept has been contested and challenged by scientists since the early 20th
century. Early works about race within the history of science—written largely by historians of evolutionary thought
and the history of medicine—have tended to see racial thinking as driven largely by political and ideological
interests of scientists, or by faulting logic and reasoning. This approach however, ill equips historians for explaining
the continued appeal of racial ideas within contemporary scientific research. Thus, in this paper I reevaluate the
usefulness of the category “pseudoscience” for historians interested in documenting the link between past and
present day iterations of the race concept across the behavioral, genetic, and bio-medical sciences.
Author: Melanie Keene
Title: The Elephant in the Room: Presence, Performance and Pedagogy in Nineteenth-Century
Object Lessons
Abstract: Throughout the nineteenth century, object lessons had been celebrated as the most novel and effective
way of entraining young minds and bodies with vital scientific skills and knowledge. Basing educational
experiences around particular artefacts, it was argued, provided unparalleled opportunities for visual appeal, sensory
investigations, and cohesive storytelling. By the last decades of the century, ‘object-teaching’ became a standard
part of school curricula around the globe; yet with its expansion in scope and topics the approach was a victim of its
own success: inspectors bemoaned the farcical recital of properties that accompanied the presentation of each object;
government circulars denounced ‘information lessons’ which privileged storing the memory with ‘interesting facts’
over ‘firsthand’ knowledge. In this talk I will use surviving lesson guides, reports, and material artefacts, to explore
the promises and problems of this type of pedagogy as it entered the classroom. By taking as my focus the elephant,
I will reveal the limitations of teaching all subjects through object lessons (the elephant in the room was the fact that
there was no elephant in the room at all); the visual, metonymic, and imaginative strategies deployed by teachers
and authors to circumvent such limitations; and how wider natural historical and imperial meanings were put to
work, connecting classroom practice to developments in science and society.
Author: Agathe Keller
Title: Reclaiming Diversity: the Paradoxes of « Vedic Mathematics »
9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: Bhārata Kṛṣṇa Tīrthajī's "Vedic Mathematics" has come to the public eye fifteen years ago through highly
polemical attempts in India (and the United States) to have it taught in primary schools. Against a curriculum
perceived as simultaneously boring and western, the proponents of Vedic mathematics insist that its algorithms are
not only « fun » but deeply different: holy, ancient, originating from the Indian subcontinent. In this communication
we will trace the history of the book, its emergence in a religious and politicized context, and its popularization in
the wider landscape of non-academic discourses on the history of science.
Author: Maximilian Kemeny
Title: A Certain Correspondence: Pendulums and Musical Harmonies in Galileo's Two New
Sciences
Abstract: In the Two New Sciences, Galileo posited a substantive connection between pendulums and musical
harmonies. Galileo posited a similar connection between other phenomena and objects, such as projectile trajectories
and hanging chains, a connection which he referred to as a “correspondence” between the phenomena. I argue that
Galileo's program focused heavily on the demonstration of the reality of these correspondences, which revolved
around the isochronism of the pendulum. The Galilean program in the Two New Sciences is best understood within
the context of Galileo's belief in the reality of these correspondences. They were not mere curiosities, but crucial
motivating and unifying factors in his research. I examine Galileo's treatment of the vibration of strings, how it was
related to his interest in pendulum motion, and how these considerations fit into the broader Galilean program.
Author: Meegan Kennedy
Title: Darwin and the Eye
AM)
Abstract: If, as Jonathan Crary argues, the camera obscura during the nineteenth century represented both the old,
transparent model of vision and a more skeptical model, the physiology of the human eye—so often described as
both natural and supernatural, beautiful and functional, marvelous and flawed—comes to function as a similarly
charged metaphor, representing both evidence of a watchmaker God and proof of his absence, or his absentmindedness. The eye is, during this period, still insistently compared to an optical instrument, as it had been in
earlier decades, but the meaning of the Victorian eye, like the meaning of the camera obscura, is unstable. This
tension is insistent, for example, in popular and scientific texts on the microscope, which promised extraordinary
vision despite the limitations of optics and strains on human perception. The notion that the eye is a beautiful yet
imperfect mechanism also drives a crucial point in the Origin of Species and becomes an overdetermined signifier in
the discussions about natural selection. The eye’s “beautiful crystalline lens” prompts Darwin’s meditation on the
uses of metaphor in science, where he protests against having to imagine the eye as an optical instrument even as he
concludes that it is a “superior” one. This passage has long intrigued scholars. By reading it against the vexed
tradition of Victorian writing on the eye, we can see how “the eye” allows Darwin to demonstrate his skill in besting
Paley’s telescope, Paley’s metaphor, and Paley’s version of imagination with his own superior narrative.
Author: Emily Kern
Title: Calculating Carbon: Interdisciplinary Science, Radiometric Dating and Evolutionary
Time, 1900-1952.
Abstract: In 1951, the Society for American Anthropology published the pamphlet “Radiocarbon Dating,”
describing the efforts of a group of geographically dispersed and disciplinarily diverse scientists to establish a better
method of counting time. The new process described in the pamphlet built on the work of physicist Willard F. Libby
on naturally occurring radiation, and was authored by two anthropologists, an archaeologist, and a geologist, in
addition to Libby himself. The implications of this technique for evolutionary biology were clear: samples of
formerly living material could now be directly dated to an increasingly precise degree. Carbon-14 dating was only
the latest development in a half-century of radiometric dating techniques, which greatly expanded estimates of the
total age of the earth, and, in consequence, the time available for evolutionary change to take place. This expansion
in timescale, I argue, played a critical role in the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Furthermore,
radiocarbon dating also came to represent an alternative and peaceful application of radioactivity in biology in a
post-Hiroshima world. In this paper, I consider the interrelationship between the growth of physics and evolutionary
biology by tracing changing understandings of geological time, paying particular attention to the emergence of
distinct disciplines, institutions, and experimental practices within and between these fields. Additionally, I consider
the popular and scientific framing of radiocarbon dating in archaeology and the historical biological sciences in the
context of Libby’s work for the Atomic Energy Commission and the postwar search for peaceful international
applications of nuclear science.
Author: Yoshiyuki Kikuchi
Title: International Science in Japanese Eyes: Joji Sakurai, the International Research Council
and the Pacific Science Association after the First World War
Abstract: This paper critically analyzes the development of international cooperation for Japanese science during
the interwar period and the political and linguistic challenges it faced. For international science, one of the major
outcomes of the First World War was the establishment of the International Research Council (IRC) after the
Armistice in 1918. As part of the war-winning entente, Japan enthusiastically embraced the IRC, with Joji Sakurai
(1858-1939), a Japanese chemist trained in Britain, as its champion. However, the operations of the IRC proved
difficult. The one factor is the political problem caused by its early divisive German exclusion policy and the
question of how to treat membership applications from the scientific communities of former neutral countries, which
also divided the Japanese scientific community. The other no small issue arose from the use of multiple languages
(the "Babel" effect), especially French as the de facto official language. Mostly trained in one Western language
(predominantly in English or German) with just a reading knowledge of another, many Japanese scientists found
themselves at a loss in conference proceedings. Frustrated with both problems and encouraged by the growing
strategic importance of the Pacific Rim, they gradually turned to more regional organizations, such as the Pacific
Science Association (PSA), which was founded in 1926 by Sakurai and other scientists in this area, with English as
its sole official language. This ‘Pacific turn’ in the interwar period formed an essential part of the anglicization of
lingua franca for Japanese international science that gained momentum in this period.
Author: Clare Kim
Title: Sensing Theory and Crafting Proof: The History of a Twentieth-Century Mathematics
Problem
Session: Epistemic Practices (Thursday, November 19, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In 1966, mathematician Mark Kac posed the following question in The American Mathematical Monthly:
“Can one hear the shape of the drum?” Mathematically, he was questioning whether one could deduce the shape of a
plane region by determining the eigenvalues of the Laplace operator. More intuitively, he was asking whether one
could infer the shape of a vibrating membrane, such as a drumhead, given knowledge of all the frequencies at which
the membrane vibrated. This paper picks up on Kac’s question and explores sensuality and proof making as a craft
practice in twentieth-century mathematics. Drawing material from archival sources and published articles, I track
mathematicians’ attempts to answer Kac’s question and produce a proof. To that end, I examine the senses they
seemingly or unseemingly deployed in addition to the mathematical formalisms they had in place to potentially
arrive at a solution. While the auditory metaphors Kac drew from illustrated an instance in which mathematicians
extended beyond standard discursive language to apprehend and conceptualize theory, I suggest mathematicians’
sensory language obfuscated what they did in practice. The ultimate solution to the problem required a leveraging
not of the aural, but of the visual: the production of physical graphs that answered Kac’s question in the negative.
Author: David Kirby
Title: Science, Movie Censorship and the Sanctity of the Soul on the Silver Screen
Abstract: From 1930 to 1968 movie studios sent their screenplays to Hollywood's official censorship body the
Production Code Administration (also known as the "Hays Office") and the Catholic Church's Legion of Decency
for approval and recommendations for revision. This paper uses material from the archives of these organizations to
investigate how filmmakers tried to craft stories about science and how religious groups attempted to control these
scientific narratives through censorship. In particular, I examine how movie censors evaluated the theological
implications of scientific research in these cinematic stories including any attempts by fictional scientists to
manipulate, explain the nature of, or disprove the existence of the human soul. I show that censors' feared any
demonstration of a success with these types of scientific interventions –even in fictional settings– because they
legitimated a perception that scientists were capable of manipulating or understanding the human soul and, thus, that
the soul had a materiality. Anxiety over the materiality of the soul was reflected in the Legion of Decency's rigid
censure of any cinematic plots involving transmigration of souls. I also argue that censors' reactions to fictional
stories involving brain transplants represent some of the earliest religious responses to the notion of "brain death." In
addition, I will demonstrate how movie censors' responses to the emerging field of psychiatry reflected their
concerns about how this science impacted society's beliefs about the human soul. Films to be discussed include Man
With Two Lives (1942), Captive Wild Woman (1943), Bewitched (1945) and People Will Talk (1951).
Author: Joel Klein
Title: Rivers Run Potable Gold: Skepticism, Credulity, and the Legacy of Experimental Failure
Abstract: Following his failed attempt to fill a hen’s belly with silver eggs by feeding a bird precious metal during
astrologically propitious times, the Wittenberg professor of medicine Daniel Sennert (1572-1637) was publicly
chagrined. In his personal correspondence, Sennert cited this failure as a cause of his partially increased skepticism
about the power of noble metals to act as nearly-universal medicines, and he wrote that he wished he had never
encountered the experiment. The so-called “philosophical hen,” however, would continue to haunt Sennert and his
legacy, even after the physician was long dead. This paper explores this experiment in the context of the
seventeenth-century obsession with universal and potable golden remedies. In short, the philosophical hen had an
ambiguous afterlife and was used for diverse purposes by different groups. Certain Galenists challenged the idea in
principle that metals could augment the body’s innate heat, while others actually carried out Sennert’s experiment
again in order to contest experimental details and conclusions. The experiment was likewise used as leverage in
debates between physicians about the nature of potable gold – for instance, to support the synthesis of the medicine
through tincturing rather than merely reducing gold per minima in a corrosive solvent. In effect, there were varying
conceptions of skepticism, and charges of credulity were leveled from many different sources. Some chymists were
bold enough to label golden universal remedies as non entia, but those in favor of such medicines had sundry other
theories, observations, and experiments to support their continued use.
Author: Cynthia Klestinec
Title: Vesalius’s Skeletons and Vernacular Anatomy
Abstract: To explore questions of circulation and the geographies of the history of medicine, this paper returns to
Vesalius’s skeletons, which appeared in the Six Tables (1538) and were immediately copied for anatomical atlases
in Latin and various vernaculars (1538-1543) in Frankfurt, Marburg, Strasbourg, Paris, and London. If this indicates
an initial encounter between learned anatomy and vernacular medical cultures, the publication in 1558 of an Italian
edition of The most useful and necessary practice of surgery by Giovanni de Vigo (1450-1525) suggests a second.
This edition contained Vesalius’s skeletons in the chapter devoted not to anatomy, as we might expect, but to
fractures and dislocations. The edition adapted learned anatomy by situating it in a practical setting that resonated
with Hippocratic texts on fractures and dislocations and with Vesalius’ Fabrica. The edition influenced subsequent
publications on fractures and dislocations; and for the printer Valgrisio, it helped him to conceptualize the demand
in the print market for vernacular medical texts (and wider audiences of medical practitioners and elite readers).
Author: Katja Krause
Title: Albert the Great on the Discipline of Medicine: Why Every Physician Ought to Be a
Philosopher First
Abstract: With his fresh reading of Aristotle’s philosophical works, Albert the Great (ca. 1200-1280) bequeathed to
the Latin West an unprecedented classification of all sciences. Despite this global success, Albert’s specific
classification of the discipline of medicine is yet to be explored, not least because it appears to be as ambiguous as
Aristotle’s. While some contexts suggest that Albert describes medicine in terms of a ‘science’ and of an ‘art’,
others suggest a purely practical conception. Indeed, Albert identifies medicine as a mechanical art based on its
purpose, the restoration of health by human action. What is more, Albert transfers discussions of key theoretical
themes of medicine to the natural sciences, discussing for instance, the Galenic theory of complexion and the
Avicennian theory of anatomy in his De animalibus. Particularly this transference of theoretical medical themes to
the natural sciences appears to suggest a deep Aristotelian commitment in Albert: only the natural sciences offer the
correct methodology for securing the causes of medical subject matter, since they are known to rely on principles
(natural finality and suppositional necessity) that ground quia demonstrations resulting in the sought-after
universals. Yet if medicine relies on the natural sciences for its causal explanations, does Albert maintain that every
physician ought to be a philosopher first? The aim of this paper is three-fold: it analyses Albert’s classification of
medicine, it discusses its reliance on the natural sciences, and it uncovers the wider implications of Albert’s
classification of medicine for medieval classifications of the sciences in general.
Author: Richard Kremer
Title: The Fifteenth-Century Astrologers’ Codex as Toolbox: Exploring the Social Worlds of BL
Add Ms 34603
Session: The Materiality of Early Science (Friday, November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Binding books was expensive in medieval Europe, and copies of many shorter texts circulated widely as
unbound, folded quires, perhaps wrapped in a parchment sheet. When an owner decided to assemble and bind a
particular set of such texts, the resulting codex created a new physical object that can reveal much about that user’s
social and conceptual worlds. English bibliographers call these codices ‘miscellanies’, Germans call them
‘Sammelbände’. Much of the European astronomical and astrological material, produced up through the first century
of printing, survives in such codices; literally hundreds of astronomical/astrological Sammelbände fill European
libraries. To explore the significance and use of these Sammelbände for their early users, I will examine a particular
exemplar written, assembled and bound around 1500 by a German medical astrologer, Marcus Schinnagel.
Schinnagel’s book, I shall argue, served as a toolbox as he plied his several professions. Clues to the toolbox’s use
emerge from looking closely at its materiality, i.e., its binding, paper, quire structure, scribal hands, textual content,
rubrication, annotations, signs of wear, and layout of the textual and visual components.
Author: B. Harun Küçük
Title: Istanbul, an Epistemic Clearinghouse
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Our vocabulary of speaking about the motion of knowledge is infused with terms we borrow from
economics: circulation and exchange are obvious qualities. One may also read the transition from the vocabulary of
scientific universalism to globality as a further rapprochement between political economy and the history of science.
In this talk, I will be pushing the boundaries of this vocabulary in relation to Istanbul in the early eighteenth century:
I will be speaking about books and knowledge as goods, about immoral economies of science (plagiarism, false
testimony, ghost writing and the like), about bargaining, and about epistemic conflicts without closure. My talk will
be centered around the clearinghouse as a metaphor to explain how knowledge was exchanged, polished, sold and
bought in Istanbul.
Author: Joachim Kurtz
Title: The Uses and Limitations of Translation Studies for Histories of Knowledge in Motion
Session: Translation as Process: border-crossing knowledge, materialities, and concepts in the
history of science in Asia (and beyond) (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: It is often assumed that history "oozes from every pore” of influential translations, such as, say, the first
Chinese version of Euclid’s Elements, early Japanese adaptations of European anatomical treatises, or the initial
rendering of Darwin’s Origin of Species into Arabic. But just how much “history” can we indeed squeeze from such
works and what kinds of insights can we expect? What may we glean from analyses of the terms, styles, genres, and
media used in specific translations and, finally, how much attention do we need to pay to the immediate and more
distant contexts of departure and arrival when trying to track movements of knowledge in translation? I will discuss
these questions based on Chinese translations of “Western learning” from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries and a database I helped compile on “Modern Chinese Scientific Terminologies.”
Author: Molly Laas
Title: Condensed Meat and Bread for the “Best Fed Army in the World”: Eben Norton
Horsford's Marching Ration for the Union Army in the Civil War
Abstract: The Union Army may have been the “best fed army in the world,” as Surgeon General William
Hammond asserted, but Eben Norton Horsford saw room for improvement. Horsford, an entrepreneur and exchemistry professor who designed a condensed ration for the Union Army in 1864, convinced Hammond and other
war leaders that his plan would help them forge a more efficient Army by slimming its supply train. Horsford had
trained with the German chemist Justus von Liebig in the 1840s, and his ration – which consisted of roasted, dried
wheat and pucks of beef "varnished with gelatin" – used Liebig's chemical model of animal nutrition to create
lightweight, portable foodstuffs that equaled the nutritional value of bread and meat. My analysis of Horsford's
project will explore the rhetorical and political value of nutrition science during the American Civil War. Many
studies of science in wartime focus on the technologies of warfare; my study will analyze the chemistry of
alimentation and its potential to affect soldiers' health. As a plan for a nutritionally-complete diet comprised of
manufactured foodstuffs, Horsford's ration exemplified the sense of mastery over the body promised to governments
by Liebig's model of nutrition: once soldiers' food requirements were known, a chemist could design a perfect ration
to meet them. While the ultimate failure of Horsford's ration in the field demonstrated the practical limitations of
this approach, Horsford's project, and U.S. officials' enthusiasm for it, was a first instance of the science of nutrition
as a tool of the state.
Author: Kevin Lambert
Title: Towards a Cyborg History of Mathematics
Abstract: Over the last ten years or so, historians such as Andy Warwick and David Kaiser have begun to see
mathematical physics as a craft that has important symmetries with the skills needed to build and use scientific
instruments. Ursula Klein has talked about theoretical work in terms of a practice employing papers tools. Michael
Barany and Donald MacKenzie (among others) have explored the role played by theoretical technology such as
pens, paper, desks, chalk, blackboard, and even the computer in the practice of mathematics. One result of that work
has been the closing of the gap between cognitive and material practices, between brainwork and handwork. The
proposal here is to explore a way of closing that gap even further, by denying any substantive difference between
cognition inside and outside the head. Building on philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ extended mind
thesis, this paper will explore the proposition that thinking, just like digestion (cooking is, after all, a form of
digestion that occurs outside the body), routinely happens beyond the skin. My proposal is that Clark and Chalmers’
claim that cognition is a process involving interactions between brain, body and environment can provide the basis
for what Andy Pickering has called a cyborg history of mathematics in which theoretical work is explored as a
situated open-ended practice.
Author: Travis Landry
Title: Spanish Literature and the Conscience of Sexual Selection
November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: This presentation will explore the ambiguities surrounding Darwin's reflections on conscience in his
discussion of sexual selection from The Descent of Man (1871). The focus will be on female passive choice and
how the courtship dynamic in the realist novel might help us to better appreciate the moral dimension of Darwin's
thinking. In particular, it will be argued that the cultural praxis of this component of evolutionary theory at the end
of the nineteenth century appeared to determine that women should be domestic angels, slaves to their husbands and
political non-entities in the larger patriarchal structure. Yet the Darwinian 'conscience' behind the 'social instincts'
haunted the collective will with a different conception of identity founded on original principles of selfdetermination.
Author: Erika Langer
Title: “Distilled Development” in Yeast: Cellular Differentiation in Evolutionary Time
Abstract: The common baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae was developed in the 1970s and 1980s as an
experimental system for the study of cellular differentiation. Yeast was expected to unravel the genetic logic of
development in higher organisms such as humans to explain how a single cell (such as a fertilized egg) gave rise to
many different types of cells, including some that might proliferate as cancer. As a single-celled fungus, yeast
underwent a cycle of cellular division, by which it reproduced, and its generations could switch between two distinct
mating types believed to represent simple sexual differentiation. Regulatory control of these genetic processes was
thought to be generalizable to other organisms sharing a common evolutionary past with yeast, however distant in
time. American yeast geneticists of the early 1970s argued that yeast had a nucleus and was therefore more like
humans than the “lower” genetic organisms like bacteria and the phage. In seeking to emulate and build upon the
successes of earlier research communities who had worked with these “lower” organisms, yeast geneticists pursued
mechanistic and molecular proofs of their models of cellular differentiation as a means of confirming this
evolutionary hierarchy. In the early 1980s, the application of recombinant DNA procedures to yeast enabled controls
over cellular differentiation that were no longer just analogous to those of other organisms, but which now could
intervene in those organisms’ development. This reconfiguration of the evolutionary timescale collapsed the
“genetic distances” between yeast and other organisms to make the geneticists’ models into mechanisms.
Author: Tayra Lanuza-Navarro
Title: Removing Astrology from the University of Valencia: The Spanish Novatores and the
Decline of the Discipline in Spain at the End of the Seventeenth Century
3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: The University of Valencia was often seen in Spain as a reference academic centre for learning astrology
during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The teaching of astrology was part of the curriculum in Valencia, like
in all other universities of early modern Europe. The last professor of the chair of mathematics and astrology of the
seventeenth century, friar Leonardo Ferrer, was a prolific author of astrological prognostications, while his
successor, Juan Bautista Corachán, after a prognostication on the comet of 1682, never wrote an astrological work
again. The new plans of the early eighteenth century, in Corachán’s mind, still included natural astrology, however,
they were not applied in the way he initially planned. The group of Spanish scientists named novatores, of which he
made part, discussed the status of the discipline within natural philosophy and had probably a leading role in the
decline of astrology in Valencia and more widely, in Spain.
Author: Thomas Lassman
Title: Science, Technology, and the Reagan-Era Defense Buildup: The Management of Weapons
Acquisition in the Department of Defense, 1981-1989
Abstract: The United States embarked on the largest peacetime defense buildup during the 1980s. Much of the
scholarly literature on this subject has focused on the institutional inefficiencies that pervaded the acquisition of
major weapon systems, ranging from the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine to the B-1 strategic bomber. Written
primarily from a public policy perspective, this vast literature has used the history of cost overruns, schedule delays,
and technological failures in programs to recommend the targeted restructuring of key elements of the acquisition
process. Representative examples include, but are not limited to, greater congressional oversight of the military
departments and more regulation and competition in the defense industry. This paper deliberately substitutes
historical for prescriptive analysis. In 1981, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger reversed two decades of
centralized control of the weapons acquisition process in the Office of the Secretary of Defense; he devolved
programmatic control of major weapons systems to the military departments. Four years later, however, this
initiative had foundered on public outrage over the disclosure of the expenditure of exorbitant sums of taxpayer
money for basic commodities, such as toilet seats, coffee pots, and hammers. In response to public pressure,
Weinberger reversed course and centralized the management of weapons acquisition back in the Office of Secretary
of Defense. In this case too, similar results obtained. Examination of both of these management initiatives from a
historical perspective addresses a central weakness of the public policy literature—the tendency to conceptualize
acquisition reform as a goal unto itself.
Author: Matthew Laubacher
Title: Migrating from the Field
Abstract: The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago was the first major natural history museum to focus
heavily on with regard to both public outreach and biological research. This required a massive undertaking of
specimens for both research and display and the rapid hiring of naturalists that excelled in the field and the
laboratory. While the Field Museum was certainly successful with regard to the promotion of research and the
display of specimens, it was troubled with personality conflicts and poor leadership in its early history that annoyed
a number of the museum’s staff, leading to the exit of Franz Boas and tensions with William Henry Holmes. The
conflicts continued into the early twentieth century, and led to a small exodus of talented naturalists, including Harry
Swarth and Edmund Heller in the late aughts. Both Swarth and Heller documented their frustrations to their friend
and colleague Joseph Grinnell about the “depressing” situation, which Heller remarked that he was “ready to
migrate from.” Both would soon join Grinnell at his new Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Berkeley. Carl Akeley,
the renowned taxonomist, would flee the Field Museum a year later in order to go on Roosevelt’s Expedition to
Africa, where he would join Heller, who had taken leave from the MVZ. This paper uses the examples of Swarth
and Heller in order to examine how this seemingly toxic culture impacted the twin missions (collection and display)
of the museum in the first decade and a half of its existence (1893-1908).
Author: Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Title: Social Unrest and the Power of ‘Science’ in 1960s Mexico
Abstract: In the 1960s and 1970s a handful of physicians in Mexico used information such as infant and maternal
mortality among indigenous women to illustrate the growing disparity between rural and urban spaces. While the
information was neither new nor particularly shocking it was presented as such to question the racial overtones that
described indigenous women as unfit mothers. In recent years eugenic notions of ?fit bodies? and ?fit minds? have
resurfaced to justify instances of extreme abuse of indigenous, pregnant women in state-run clinics and hospitals.
My participation will examine how health data was transformed into a demand for social change and social justice
by medical anthropologists and social activists.
Author: Susan Lederer
Title: Medical Equipment as Child’s Play in the Mid-Twentieth Century
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In 1935, the first toy doctor and toy nurse kits were marketed to American parents and their children.
Over the next three decades the kits remained remarkably stable in their adaptation of the technologies of midtwentieth century primary care medical practice (thermometers, stethoscopes, eye charts, syringes, reflex hammers)
to small hands and curious minds. This paper examines the origins and implications of such kits for understanding
the translation of biomedicine to the child’s level. One unanticipated consequence of these kits, many of which
included pill bottles containing candy medications, was poisoning of children who sought to refill their bottles with
medications taken from their parent’s medical cabinets.
Author: Eunsoo Lee
Title: Euclid's Elements
Session: Roundtable: Diagrammatic notation systems (Friday, November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: My research centers on the diagrams in Euclid's Elements. Recognizing the agency of diagram makers
(scribes, translators, readers, and printing presses), I look at variants of diagrams in Greek, Arabic, and Latin
manuscripts to explore how mathematical diagrams were transmitted and transformed as they are copied from
antiquity to the modern period (from papyri to manuscript, manuscript to manuscript, and manuscript to print). My
preliminary observations on manuscript diagrams (9th c. - 15th c.) demonstrate how metrical inaccuracy changed
into accuracy in mathematical diagrams. Several questions will be raised: did Greek mathematicians ignore the
metrical accuracy in their diagrams? If so, why? How did later mathematicians recover the necessity of exact
measurement? Ancient Greeks constructed mathematical diagrams using only an unmarked ruler and compass – no
measurement there! By tracing changes in manuscript diagrams, I aim to show how the world came to be deemed
quantifiable.
Author: Eunsoo Lee
Title: Visual Scholia in the Margins
Abstract: In the margins of mathematical and scientific text, we have marginal texts and diagrams. Of which, the
visual scholia have less been studied than the textual scholia. What were the roles of visual scholia in the
development of mathematical and scientific ideas? To find an answer to this question, this paper starts with the
investigation of marginal diagrams in the manuscripts of Euclid’s Elements (9th -14th centuries). The functions of
visual scholia largely can be divided into two: 1) some marginal diagrams are drawn for the purpose of correcting
the main diagrams. This might be either because the main diagram had been wrongly drawn or it was different from
another shape of diagrams found in other sources; 2) other visual scholia presented diagrams representing unhandled
cases in the text. This happened especially when the proposition to which visual sholia belong can be divided into
multiple cases. Tracing the changes of both main diagrams and marginal diagrams tells us that the corrections and
the unhandled cases expressed in the margins were gradually absorbed into the main text of the later traditions.
Based on this inter-language of main diagrams and marginal diagrams, I will argue that the addition of diagrams in
the margin, through which an opportunity was given to express diagrams different from that which had been drawn,
nourished the mathematical ideas and sometimes showed what the text does not instruct. Thus, visual scholia,
though placed in the margin, were deeply involved in the knowledge-producing process.
Author: Victoria Lee
Title: Japanese Microbial Gardens and Ecologies of Production
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: My image is a product label for dried kōji (Aspergillus oryzae) spores by a Japanese mold starter
company (1920s). This company was one of a number of small-scale, high-tech companies that specialized in selling
kōji mold starter preparations to sake, soy sauce, and other brewing companies. The commercial product label is one
way of visualizing how microbial type culture collections, or what one scientist called “microbial gardens,” were
cultivated by scientists and technicians in anything from a small brewing shop to a national scientific facility for
microbes’ ability to manufacture a variety of food, pharmaceutical, and chemical goods in Japan in the twentieth
century. I will talk about microbial collections in order to raise questions on how considering the activities of
scientific and technical experts, which occupy a middle-level role between state planning and consumer activism, is
important in understanding how the texture of everyday life and material culture took shape as an aspect of political
economy; how a focus on the manipulation of productive microbes brings new narratives to light of how people in
the past conceptualized human intervention in broader ecologies; and how attention to science’s relationship with
political economy in a non-western context highlights the continuing significance of indigenous industry or craft in
modern and contemporary science.
Author: Don Leggett
Title: The British Association for the Advancement of Science at War: Remaking Science-State
Relations during the Great War
Abstract: The history of British science during the Great War has largely focused on the mobilization of scientific
disciplines and the structural transformations that the war had on the institution of science. This has resulted in a
narrative of war’s ratchetting effect on scientific research. A large number of scientists saw the war as an
opportunity to remake their relations with the state, capturing greater funding and extending their influence. Within
the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) there was enthusiasm to embrace these
opportunities, but at the same time members discussed the costs of a closer union with the state and the
militarisation of science. Providing an important contrast to the prevailing narrative of science in Great War Britain,
this paper examines the moral and national dilemmas that faced the leaders of British science during the early
twentieth century. Under the leadership of Arthur Schuster, a naturalised Briton of German birth, the BAAS
developed a strategy to reposition the society as a hub of co-ordination, control and advice between science and the
state. Keenly aware of ongoing debates in the BAAS about its role in politics – whether its members ought to use the
annual meeting to debate matters of national importance, be they economic, social or military – and a proponent of
scientific internationalism, Schuster sought to balance the investigation of immediate war problems with coordinating the peaceful work of post-war planning and reconstruction, including the preservation of scientific data
from former German colonies.
Author: Daryn Lehoux
Title: Generating Natures in Aristotle
Abstract: In Greek as in English, the word for nature, physis, offers a range of meanings that can be deployed in
different ways in different contexts. We can talk of the ‘nature’ of a plant, meaning its special properties or forms
(either internal constitutions or external qualities like size and colour). Alternately, when thinking about possible
explanations for difficult phenomena, we may appeal to the rules that ‘nature’ generally follows, and use this as a
guide to limit the range of potential causes. We can even talk about phenomena that, although they in fact happen,
are said to be ‘contrary to nature.’ In his work on animal generation and inheritance theory, Aristotle slips between
these and other uses of nature, producing a complicated theory that attempts on the one hand to explain how babies
come to be what they are, and on the other hand seeks to corral anomalous instances of generation by subsuming or
re-explaining the anomalies under the guise of acceptable theories. By teasing out where Aristotle finds problems,
and how and when he appeals to nature in his explanatory edifice, I will sketch out some of the ways in which
Aristotle conceives of the place of ‘natures’ in his explanation of nature writ large.
Author: Elaine Leong
Title: Paper Cures: Managing Knowledge and Health in the Early Modern Household
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In recent years, the household has emerged as a central place for knowledge codification practices in the
early modern period. Investigations into medical and health-related knowledge and practices have proved to be
particularly illuminating. Through analysis of personal letters, household account books, diaries and recipe books,
we have uncovered the myriad of ways in which householders sought to understand their own bodies and the natural
environment around them. Paper played a central role in a number of connected epistemic practices. Householders
utilised a range of paper technologies such as notebooks and paper slips to collate, categorize and manage the vast
volumes of medical knowledge they stored in anticipation of possible sickness and ill health. They also used similar
techniques to manage, account for and maintain their social, economical, familial and knowledge networks. Yet, this
was not the only medical function taken on by paper within early modern homes. Householders also used paper to
apply plasters and ointments to the body, to shape rolls of medicinal pills and tablets and to fashion containers in
which to mix ingredients. This talk investigates the multiple ways in which housewives and household managers
used paper ‘technologies’ both in performing quotidian tasks and in codifying practical knowledge. This focus on
the materiality of paper, I suggest, offers a new perspective to link the collection and management of knowledge and
hands-on practices on the ground. Situated within the home, these multifaceted practices are framed by complex sets
of continual gender negotiations.
Author: Julia Lewandoski
Title: Vernacular Land Surveying: Hybrid Cartography and Metrology in Quebec and Louisiana,
1760-1820
Abstract: Land surveying is often touted as the quintessential rationalization of space, replacing diverse localities
with abstract, commoditized tracts of land. But not all of North America was mapped and measured by rational
bureaucrats building a centralized state. Vast areas were surveyed during imperial transitions, in places where
sovereignty and jurisdiction was uncertain. Local surveyors with little formal training and loose affiliation to state
authorities improvised the creation of hybrid maps, often blending the units of measurement of several empires. By
examining the creation and usage of these complex sources, I complicate the histories of cartography and metrology
as modern, state-directed practices.
This project explores surveying practices in Quebec and Louisiana in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, during the series of transitions from French to British Quebec, and from French to Spanish to American
Louisiana. In British Quebec, Francophone surveyors laid out English-style townships adjacent to French seigneurial
estates. In Louisiana, irregular Spanish grants coexisted with French long-lots well into the United States territorial
period. In both places, Native Americans resisted, participated in, and in some cases requested surveys of their
territories. These cross-cultural cadastral patterns were expressed at the level of the measuring practices of
surveyors, and in the maps they created. I will display several intriguing examples of these hybrid documents. In
contrast to more well-known geo-political maps that reflect the aspirations of singular empires, I argue that these
property maps reflect the complexities and contingencies of the eras and localities they represent.
Author: Amanda Lewis
Title: In the Field: The Transformation of Biological Research in Post-Colonial Kenya
Abstract: Amboseli, the low salt plain at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Kenya, has been the subject of much
scientific research since the early 1960s. Its uniqueness is what attracted scientists as well as Kenya’s openness to
foreign researchers in the early days of independence. This freedom gave them access to a landscape that was unlike
any other, seemingly functioning without human interference. The local Maasai population was largely ignored and
they saw the scientists as strange outsiders doing nothing that made any difference to their pastoralist lifestyle. Over
the next four decades, local Maasai participation in scientific research increased. This paper explores the reasons for
this shift. I ask why local people became involved in biological research in Amboseli? How did local Maasai
participation change scientific inquiry? What place did Amboseli have in pushing scientific understanding of
evolution, animal behavior, and ecosystem dynamics. Based on oral histories with scientists and local Maasai, I
explore the history of science in the Amboseli ecosystem. The paper examines the convergence of Western
methodologies with local knowledge systems, which shaped the results and impact of research on savanna
ecosystems. The history of African scientists is an area that needs much more inquiry, and Amboseli provides a case
study for the inclusion of local people in science. Issues related to human-wildlife conflict, the changing
environment, and managing a landscape for both wildlife and livestock shaped research questions. Thus, science in
Amboseli has never been detached from the reality of local life.
Author: Clara Seligman Lewis
Title: The Promise of Racial Purity: The U.S. Eugenics Movement and the Positive Value
Attributed to Whiteness
Session: Roundtable: The Promises of Science: Historical Perspectives (Friday, November 20,
1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: This paper will detail how the most influential scholars of eugenics described the social benefits and
moral virtues of whiteness in their pre-WWII professional publications. Through a rhetorical analysis of the
meaning of “fitness” found in the most widely distributed and academically celebrated American eugenics texts, I
consider how utilizing the new historiographic lens of “promise” can trouble contemporary intellectual histories of
scientific racism. While the eugenics movement is well studied, scholars tend to overlook how eugenicists framed
the positive good of their science, which is arguably a significant factor in the movement’s extended popularity. A
focus on the promises eugenics made about the value of white racial purity can serve as a mechanism for suspending
modern-day value judgments of the movement’s practitioners. A suspension of this kind generates possibilities for
better understanding the movement in its own terms, which I argue is necessary to both avoid interpretive violence
and to fully comprehend the less obvious aspects of the movement’s legacy. Ultimately, this analysis seeks to
generate new theory on the history of intersectional privileges and the continued legacy of white racial pride,
loyalty, and love.
Author: Sarah Lewis-Descamps
Title: Dr. Louis Godeffroy’s Personal Encyclopedia: a 17th-Century French Doctor’s Attempt to
Organize Knowledge
Abstract: Dr. Louis Godeffroy, who practiced medicine in Orléans, France from 1657 until his death in 1686, left
six large bound volumes of manuscripts to what became the municipal library. Composed largely in the 1680s, they
sum up a lifetime of reading, study and fascination with everything medical and scientific. Godeffroy’s writings
offer us an unusual view of 17th-century science and medicine, through his efforts to bring order to the study of
nature. The largest is a 1100-page treatise on medicine, an encyclopedia of theory and practice, apparently intended
for publication with chapters, page numbers, illustrations and indexes. It offers a personal approach drawing on all
medical writers from ancient authors to contemporaries such as Thomas Willis, while incorporating new ideas and
treatments. Medicine was not Godeffroy’s only passion. He read everything: Greek and Latin authors; the latest
works on science and medicine; the first scientific journals; travelers’ accounts of distant continents, and everything
in between. Visits to Paris allowed him to observe dissections and meet colleagues, such as John Locke and Niels
Stensen. Inspired by his reading and contacts, Godeffroy poured his ideas into the other 5 volumes, covering
methodically subjects such as physics, astronomy, mineralogy, metals, zoology (one volume is entirely devoted to
animals,) and critiques of astrology and divination. This paper will examine currents of 17th-century medical
thinking and science as reflected in the work of this remarkable physician.
Author: Lan Li
Title: Tracing Interior Landscapes: Chinese Medical Epistemologies and Representations of
Jingluo (1948-1966)
Abstract: Historians of science have long appreciated the role of visualization and representation in shaping
knowledge regimes in biomedicine, yet little attention has been paid to visually articulating alternative materialities
of the body. This paper uncovers how mapping meridian tracts, known as jingluo in Chinese medicine, destabilized
efforts to standardize images of Chinese anatomy and physiology in the 20th century. While major reformers tried to
interpret Chinese medicine as science, the materiality of the Chinese body remained highly contentious. Circulatory
and nervous systems appeared evident in the biomedical body, but jingluo remained ambiguous. Though it was
represented as a series of lines and dots that guided acupuncture and moxibation practice, the exact nature of
meridian tracts both evident and undefined. What kinds of epistemologies were necessary for making sense of
physiological phenomenon invisible to mechanical and biological ways of seeing? Based on a close reading of
visual and discursive print media, this paper traces the ways in which different historical actors sought to answer this
question. In particular, it closely follows the attempt to completely eliminate jingluo in producing the first textbook
on acupuncture and moxibation in Communist China, New Acupuncture and Moxibation (1954). By examining how
lived experiences of the body conflicted and cohered with intellectual and political alliances, this paper brings
together concerns in visualizing and representing scientific knowledge in STS with current debates in the history of
medicine and Chinese studies.
Author: Monica Libell
Title: Linnaeus' Anthropomorpha
Abstract: To a modern audience, few pictures can offer such rich and provocative layers for interpretation as the
plates in the booklet Anthropomorpha (1760) by Carl Linnaeus. While often presented as an example of the overly
active imagination of the time or as a racialized narrative in the wake of European colonization and expansion, the
images effortlessly mesh a Christian narrative with the dynamic world of 18th century science.
As a comment to a taxonomy that lent Linnaeus the label ‘the second Adam,’ Anthropomorpha presented four manlike creatures: Troglodyte, Lucifer, Satyrus, Pygmaeus that in various ways all showcase how the boundaries of man
were shaped, represented, challenged, and recast in contemporary Enlightenment discourse; as cultural beings
(Satyrus originally holding a tea cup; canes and bench as evidence of Homo faber,) as part of the animal world,
often gendered (Troglodytes having a genital apron; breasts to suckle their young; “fur,”) as a dimension of the
racialized debate of colonization (Hottentot as the offspring of an African and a Troglodyte (hybridization); as
efforts to marginalize certain ethnicities as uncivilized.)
In a wider context, Linnaeus’ images can be seen as emphasizing a fluid model of relationships between nature and
culture, art and science, change and continuity. Climatological and humoralist theories would account for
differences in appearance and stature. A division of the genus Homo into several human species could be
accommodated within the Great Chain of Being. And Enlightenment philosophy conceived of humans as pliable sets
of potentialities rather than unchangeable beings.
Author: Erik Linstrum
Title: The Truth about Hearts and Minds: Psychology, Development, and Counterinsurgency in
the Postwar British Empire
Abstract: The promise of defeating anticolonial resistance through psychological knowledge captured imaginations
across the postwar British empire. In peacetime, development planners supplemented material improvements to
schools, clinics, and roads with attitude surveys, exercises in group dynamics, and programs of emotional training.
In counterinsurgency campaigns, military leaders put the science of mind to work in everything from propaganda
posters to interrogation techniques. In war and peace alike, the imperial state worked to thwart rebellion in part by
understanding motives, charting the unconscious origins of behavior, and ultimately changing minds. Is the use of
psychology in the postwar empire, then, just another episode in the militarization of the human sciences—a case of
experts taking their intellectual cues from the interests of the state? In some ways, British human scientists and
government officials did grow closer together in this period. But these shifts did not eliminate tensions from the
relationship between researchers and rulers. Confronted with the realities of coercion, many psychologists raised
ethical and practical objections to the instrumentalization of their expertise—even as administrators and soldiers
continued to draw on the theories, methods, and language of mind science to advance their own aims. The postwar
history of imperial psychology is less a morality play about the corruption of intellectuals than a cautionary tale
about the state’s selective use and creative reappropriation of science.
Author: Daniel Liu
Title: The Biology of the Spherical Horse and the Molecular Orientation of Life, 1917-1972
Abstract: One of the more iconic, yet mundane images of the biological microworld aside from the DNA doublehelix is the lipid bilayer membrane, a rolling landscape of spheres or circles with opposing pairs of wriggling tails,
and iceberg-like protein globs jutting through its surfaces. Although this theory of membrane structure is often
attributed to a 1935 paper by James Danielli and Hugh Davson, the lipid bilayer became known to biologists in
several other scientific contexts, and there are others who can be credited for a near-simultaneous discovery
of membrane structure. In this paper I will argue that the history of the modern biological membrane reveals a long
and convoluted border between biology and physics, and that ideas of membrane structure proliferated in an
increasingly fractured disciplinary landscape in the life sciences. More importantly, I will argue that the ball and
stick iconography of lipid structure allowed biologists to imagine molecules as having had specific orientation and
individuality, rather than being merely spheres or points in physical chemists’ mathematical equations. By
imagining and drawing this new biological microworld, biologists could explore the molecular structure of living
matter decades before electron microscopy was available for more direct visual observation.
Author: Valeria López Fadul
Title: Languages, Knowledge, and the History of a New World from Afar, 1492-1650
Abstract: In his Method for Writing History, the Spanish chronicler Juan Páez de Castro lectured his young king,
Philip II, on the merits of sponsoring a universal history encompassing all of Spain’s realms. Such a book, he
believed, would help answer the fundamental problem of empire: how to govern vast lands with radically different
climates, languages, political traditions, natures, and peoples. Páez de Castro urged his fellow scholars to pay close
attention to regional toponyms, indigenous languages, and the works of reliable historians as the best sources
through which to access the ancient knowledge that locals had acquired through centuries of experience with their
surroundings. He was particularly keen on what we would call oral history, exhorting his colleagues to collect the
testimonies of the most elderly and distinguished members of a community—particularly in the provinces of the
New World, where the lack of alphabetic writing made reliance on oral traditions all the more necessary. My talk
examines a set of projects initiated by Páez de Castro and furthered by his friends and heirs, including the
distribution of royal censuses, the writing of local and universal histories, the sponsorship of botanical expeditions,
and the collection of materials for a royal library. It argues that scholars in the king’s court, influenced by an influx
of information and objects from the New World, formulated early interpretations about the role that oral evidence
and glyphic writing played in the remembrance of history in the New World and in the Iberian’s Peninsula’s own
ancient past.
Author: Jemma Lorenat
Title: Jakob Steiner’s Virtual Geometry
Abstract: How does the geometric figure, which can be both representational and relational, correspond to other
scientific diagrams? From Joseph Louis Lagrange’s famous rejection of geometric reasoning in Mécanique
analytique in 1778 to the rise of axiomatic geometry in the foundations of mathematics, the long nineteenth century
often appears as a downward trajectory in the history of the geometrical figure. This transition away from figurebased reasoning is often framed in terms of intuition and rigor. However, the use of the figure could also be attacked
from the perspective of intuition itself, as shown in Jakob Steiner’s injunction that certain geometric considerations
could only be properly understood when viewed purely through the inner imagination, without any intermediary
sensual medium—such as a drawn representation or figure. Steiner reinforced his commitment to the inner
imagination by often teaching geometry with the lights out and the curtain drawn, so students would only be able to
see figures in their mind’s eye. Steiner's idiosyncratic approach to geometric visualization reveals several of the
possible roles a figure could play in geometry. In particular, forms of geometric figures during the early nineteenth
century both complement and complicate our understanding of diagrams in mathematics.
Author: Maren Lorenz
Title: For the Betterment of Mankind: Ideas about Selective Breeding in French and German
Enlightenment Thinking
Abstract: Unlike the common notion of eugenics as a phenomenon of the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
concepts of "human breeding" were developed in Western Europe since the middle of the 18th century. Based on
case studies and tracts dealing with "medical police" and "medical hygiene", scientific and economic experts
discussed problems such as the hereditary transmission of disabilities and diseases, and the origins of so-called
"degenerate" peoples publicly in a variety of enlightened journals. In the forefront of the French Revolution
especially French and German public servants developed concrete concepts for a strictly state controlled marriage
policy. "Female stud farms" in the manner of livestock breeders to enhance not only the "quantity" but also the
"quality" of their countries' population were part of such plans as well as selective breeding to produce pain resistant
soldiers or robust agricultural laborers. My focus will be upon the reception and transformation of such ideas
between French and German scholars of various professions, primarily surgeons, physicians, and the (new academic
field of) governance (“Cameralists”). In particular the talk will address their utilitaristic perspective and its
religious/ethic limitations on the range of legitimate means to promote the welfare of their respective states. By
examining scientific publications as well as literary contributions to non-scientific scholarly journals (“Gelehrte
Journale”) of the second half of the 18th century the paper explores the close entanglement of science, culture and
nation building.
Author: Kaat Louckx
Title: Statistics or State-istics? A History of Scientific Representations of the Nation-State
(Belgium, 1846-1947)
Abstract: Statistics are, as the etymology of the term suggests (state-istics), intimately connected with the
construction or administration of the nation-state. In this paper, I will focus on one of the main instruments that
states use to ‘embrace’ their populations, viz. population statistics. I will build upon the idea that censuses and
statistics do not only provide objective or scientific representations of the state. They also depict their object in
statistically relevant formats. Seen in this light, the history of statistics may shed light on the shifting interests and
concerns of the nation-state. More particularly, I will present a historical analysis of the conceptual representations
of modes of belonging to the nation-state as produced in the Belgian population censuses between the midnineteenth century (when Adolphe Quetelet was in charge of the Belgian censuses) until the mid-twentieth century
(when the welfare state took shape). My analysis of the statisticians’ interests, techniques and classification schemes
sheds light on the various ways in which inclusion in, or exclusion from, the Belgian nation-state have been
articulated in its population censuses. It helps us to elucidate the ways in which the modern nation-state has become,
to adopt Benedict Andersons’s felicitous phrase, an ‘imagined community.’ It shows how statistics and the census
not only generate facts about the population, but also create facts to act upon.
Author: Kira Lussier
Title: From Amateur Psychology to Corporate America: The Case of the Myers-Briggs Type
Indicator
Abstract: This paper takes up the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a personality measure that has become wildly
popular despite persistent criticisms of its scientific legitimacy. Although historians of psychology have highlighted
the centrality of mental testing in twentieth-century America, the MBTI has not been an object of historical inquiry.
And yet, I argue, the MBTI’s uneasy relationship with mainstream academic psychology is precisely what makes it
such a revealing case study for the history of science. The MBTI’s creator, Isabel Myers, was an amateur
psychologist: she read Jungian personality theory, taught herself statistics and used her family and friends to
standardize questions. Starting in 1956, Educational Testing Services agreed to distribute the test for research, but
the relationship was fraught from the start. ETS staff psychologists, trained in statistical-oriented psychometrics
were profoundly skeptical of Myers’ amateur status, the MBTI’s roots in Jungian theory, and its insistence on
typological, rather than trait-based, claims about the self. At stake in these debates were an interrelated set of
ontological questions about the nature of personality and methodological questions about the appropriate techniques
for studying the psyche. Contentious among psychologists, such debates were less important to the corporate clients
who enthusiastically adopted the MBTI in the 1970s as part of management practices. By examining the interplay
between psychologists’ criticisms of the MBTI and its popularity in corporate America, this paper helps reveals how
porous and unstable the boundaries of psychology have been in late twentieth-century America.
Author: William Macauley
Title: Evangelizing Science: Scientific Expertise and the Aesthetics of Wonder in Irwin Moon’s
Film Series Sermons from Science, 1945-1960
Abstract: Historical studies of the interplay between science and entertainment media rarely examine how
evangelical Christian organizations and religious practitioners have not only challenged but also produced and
disseminated notions of scientific expertise. In 1945, evangelical California pastor Irwin Moon formed a partnership
with the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago and established a film production company Moody Institute of Science
(MIS). Moon and his colleagues subsequently made 39 educational films in the Sermons from Science series for
mass audiences in the US and across the globe. The films depict spectacular scientific ‘experiments’ and detailed
observations that serve two primary purposes. Firstly, to promote a sense of wonder at the intricate beauty of the
natural world and, secondly, to render nature as cinematic spectacle that reveals the handiwork of divine
intelligence. I will show in this paper how the portrayal of scientists and scientific work in the Sermons from
Science films refashioned stereotypes from entertainment media of the 1940s and 1950s, notably film and television.
I discuss how Moon and his colleagues developed animation, cinematographic, and narrative techniques to simulate
scientific experiments and convey the belief that modern science offers unprecedented views of the natural world
that necessitate a religious explanation. Further, I will trace the close relationship between the visual aesthetics
produced at MIS and contemporaneous award-winning wildlife documentaries created at the Walt Disney Studios. I
will argue that filmmakers at the MIS deployed aesthetics of wonder and cinematic spectacle to equate empirical
scientific observations with evidence of a divine Creator.
Author: Paige Madison
Title: The Use of Images in Studying the First Fossil Hominins: the Neandertals
Abstract: In 1864, when geologist William King argued that a fossilized skull from the Neander valley should
constitute a new species separate from humans, he had never actually seen that skull in person. In fact, the majority
of nineteenth century naturalists who discussed the skull, which later became Homo neanderthalensis, never studied
the fossil directly. Naturalists such as King and Thomas H. Huxley instead relied on images and other
reconstructions of the bones to make measurements, compare with other primates, and ultimately make claims on
the fossil. These images and reconstructions included casts, photographs, and illustrations using the Camera Lucida
tracing tool. These secondhand images, a step removed from the scientific object itself, lay at the center of the
discussion and controversy that ensued over the first ever non-human hominin species. The images also raised
questions of access and talent. For example, which scientists received photographs and casts of the original fossil
from Germany, and why? And who was trusted with accurately tracing these casts for comparative studies? This
poster explores how Huxley, King, and others used images—and not original fossils—to make claims about the
human past. I argue that, in the nineteenth century, these images and reconstructions introduced a degree of
interpretation, which played a crucial role in naturalists’ disagreement about the place of the Neandertals in the
human story.
Author: Hannah Marcus
Title: Prohibited Science and Licensed Readers in Counter-Reformation Italy
November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: In 1559, the papacy issued a Roman Index of Prohibited Books which identified works that the Catholic
Church deemed religiously threatening and morally pernicious. However, while the Pope, the Master of the Sacred
Palace, the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and the Congregation of the Index all worked to detect and disrupt the
circulation of prohibited books, they also simultaneously issued licenses to approved readers permitting them to
“keep and read” books that were otherwise banned. The archives of the Inquisition and Index contain records of well
over 6,000 reading licenses from the period between the Pauline Index of 1559 and the Alexandrine Index of 1664.
This talk examines the readers of prohibited scientific texts and the subjects, titles, and authors that they were
licensed to read. Through licensed reading we can access a cross-section of scientific readership that has largely
been a subject of speculation. Who, in fact, read ‘the book nobody read’? And how does licensed reading revise our
understanding of the history of science in Italy in the aftermath of the Reformation?
Author: Joseph D. Martin
Title: The Simple and Courageous Course: Industrial Patronage of Basic Research at the
University of Chicago, 1945–1951
Abstract: When University of Chicago development officers Guy Martin and Arthur Feltes donned seersucker suits
for a meeting with the Cotton Council in 1948, they were pandering to a potential funder. They sought support for
three new research institutes—known as the Institutes for Basic Research (IBRs)—which were established to
cement the legacy of Chicago’s wartime research and which conducted an aggressive fundraising campaign between
1945 and 1951. Superficially, this story fits neatly into the standard understanding of Cold War academia-industry
relations. Studies focused on Stanford and MIT have argued that academic physical sciences research became newly
responsive to social, technological, and military needs as an intimate relationship between academia, government,
and industry developed. Stanford and MIT are more exceptional than exemplary, however, and Chicago made
notable departures from their example. IBR scientists and university administrators, although they dressed to
impress, also took great pains to impress upon their industry counterparts that their patronage would have no
influence over the direction or focus of IBR research. This strong stand on basic research was an uncommon point of
agreement between Chicago’s physical scientists, who valued freedom of inquiry, and its Chancellor Robert
Maynard Hutchins, who expected scientists to be easily corrupted by industrial interests. Like its coastal peers,
Chicago was more distinctive than representative. The funding model it pioneered based on its uncompromising
basic research ideology nonetheless raises questions about how complete our historical understanding is of the
relationship academia and industry negotiated in the early Cold War.
Author: Laura Martin
Title: G. Evelyn Hutchinson’s Geochronometric Laboratory and the Construction of Ecological
Time
Abstract: In the late 1940s, Willard Libby of the University of Chicago suggested that the decay of carbon-14 could
be used to date organic matter. G. Evelyn Hutchinson, a limnologist at Yale, was among the first to apply Libby’s
method of radiocarbon dating to biological specimens. At the time, students in the Hutchinson laboratory were
immersed in established methods of historical dating: analysis of pollen trapped in peat cores, examination of tree
rings, and fossil stratigraphy. Radiocarbon dating emboldened ecologists to make new claims about the conditions of
past climates and ecological communities. Historians of ecology have illuminated the ways in which atomic
fieldwork reorganized spatial understandings of the natural world – a reorganization that can be broadly
characterized as a shift from habitats to ecosystems. But atomic fieldwork also reorganized temporal understandings
of the natural world. Radioisotopic “chronometers” led to new constructions of ecological time, and with them, new
forms of environmental governance, such as the Nature Conservancy’s “living museums” and federal plans to
restore “degraded” wetlands. The importance of ecochronological research also inheres in the work of Aldo
Leopold, whose essays of the late 1940s repeatedly assert biologists’ abilities to read history through species,
describing the burr oak as a “historical library,” the hen plover as an “immemorial timepiece,” an Illinois corn field
as a “garden of forgotten blooms.” The work of G. Evelyn Hutchinson and other ecologists gradually became
manifest in American ideas wilderness, restoration, and ecological legacy.
Author: Janet Martin-Nielsen, Matthias Heymann
Title: Science and Danish Authority in Greenland over a Century of Change
Session: Science and Environmental Authority in the Arctic (Saturday, November 21, 3:45 –
5:45 PM)
Abstract: The twin concepts of intellectual (or epistemological) sovereignty and juridical sovereignty, as well as the
closely related concept of environmental authority, are currently attracting much scholarly attention. This paper aims
to examine these concepts as they relate to Greenland from the late 19th century through to the end of the Cold War.
Geographic, cartographic and other scientific knowledge were means of justifying authority over spaces in the
absence of more traditional symbols of sovereignty, and, later, of bolstering that authority in face of real and
perceived challenges. From the late 19th century, Denmark sponsored scientific expeditions to assert control over
eastern Greenland in the face of Norwegian queries over Denmark’s sovereignty – which proved decisive when the
International Court of Justice ruled in Denmark’s favor in 1933. When it became clear that the United States military
was in no hurry to leave Greenland after 1945, Denmark again turned to science as a means of exercising
sovereignty. The Danish government looked to meteorology, cartography and geology--all sciences with strong
connections to the performance of sovereignty--as tools to regain authority over territory that had been separated
from occupied metropolitan Denmark through the war. After tracing these episodes through newly-studied
documents from national, military and private archives in Denmark and the US, the paper concludes with reflections
on the importance of science as both source and manifestation of political power.
Author: Alberto Martinez
Title: The Heresies of Bruno and Galileo
Session: Religion and Science (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: For decades, historians and conscientious writers have plausibly argued that the Roman Inquisition's trial
of Giordano Bruno was not linked to its proceedings against Galileo. Surprisingly, my efforts to confirm this "myth"
have led to the contrary conclusion. On the basis of a systematic analysis of all extant primary sources on Bruno's
Venetian and Roman trials, plus hitherto unknown sources, I will show that Galileo's most prominent critics in 1616
and 1633 were very concerned about Bruno's condemned "Pythagorean" views. By studying treatises on heresies
and Catholic Canon Law, I found that Bruno's beliefs about the existence of many worlds and about the soul of the
universe had been officially categorized as heretical before he even voiced them. Previous accounts of Bruno's trials
had not taken into account these important facts. The Copernican theory was connected to the pagan belief that the
Earth is animated by a soul, a view that Cardinal Bellarmine rejected in his writings. Moreover, by 1616, nine
prominent individuals linked the plurality of worlds to Galileo's telescopic discoveries, and such concerns affected
the censorship of Copernicus's work in 1620. These considerations seemed entirely absent from Galileo's trial of
1633, yet I have found an extensive, previously unanalyzed and unpublished Latin manuscript by the Consultor for
the Inquisition who provided the most critical expert opinion against Galileo, Melchior Inchofer, that explicitly
reveals that Galileo's works were offensive, scandalous, and temerarious especially for defending the "Pythagorean"
heresies about the soul of the universe and of many inhabited worlds.
Author: Gisela Mateos, Edna Suárez-Diáz
Title: “Countries Worthy of Attention”: the IAEA´s Technical Assistance Programs in Latin
America (1955-1970).
Abstract: Commenting on the Non-Atomic Weapons Proliferation Treaty, known as the Treaty of Tlatelolco,
signed in Mexico City in 1967, Sigvard Eklund, director of the IAEA for most of the Cold War period (1961-1981),
noted: “In the ten years between 1958 and 1968, total expenditures on technical assistance in Latin America, for
experts, equipment and fellowships, was about $5 million, which was 21% of the total technical assistance provided
by the Agency. About 300 experts have been provided in fields ranging from general atomic energy development to
the application of radioisotopes. During the same period 440 fellowships have been awarded to Latin American
countries and 14 regional training courses have been held in seven different States”(“Treaty of Tlatelolco”, p. 35).
Indeed, as a result of the Atoms for Peace initiative and the creation of the IAEA, during this decade investment and
involvement of Third World countries in nuclear technologies was part and parcel of development programs.
Nuclear technical assistance provided by the IAEA was directed towards projects in agriculture, medicine and other
branches of nuclear sciences. Our aim in this talk, however, is to problematize the idea of technical regional
assistance, by stressing differences between Latin American countries and emphasizing the techno-political agency
of all the actors involved.
Author: Brendan Matz
Title: The Science of Selling: Animal Agriculture and Its Products in the United States
Session: Producing Knowledge, Promoting Products: Advertising, Commercial
Communication and the Practical Sciences in Comparative Global Perspective, 1750-1950
Abstract: As animal agriculture took on greater importance during the second half of the nineteenth century,
farmers in the United States increasingly drew from scientific knowledge resources in the production of livestock.
At the same time, entrepreneurs who serviced these farmers often made claims about their wares, which included
animal feeds and breeding animals, that appealed to the authority and power of science. Although many stressed in
their advertising the importance of objectivity and disinterestedness in the making of a superior product, it became
clear that mechanisms were often necessary to ensure that consumers were in fact getting what they paid for. These
protections included third-party tests and various forms of certification. In this paper I analyze the relationship
between farmers and agricultural entrepreneurs as it unfolds in the pages of the farming journals and state
agricultural reports of the day.
Author: Pablo Maurette
Title: The Children of Anaxagoras
AM)
Abstract: The notion that links the possession of hands with superior intelligence in human beings is as old as
philosophy itself. According to Aristotle, this opinion was first expressed by the Pre-Socratic philosopher
Anaxagoras of Clazomenes. Anaxagoras thought that human beings are the most intelligent creatures because they
have hands and they have learned how to use them to impose their power over nature. In Aristotle’s teleological
view it is the other way around: because we are the most advanced species, providence has endowed us with hands.
One of the most passionate defenders of this idea was Galen. It is mainly through him, as well as through Aristotle,
that the teleological position concerning human nature makes its way to the Renaissance. Anaxagoras’s position, on
the other hand, survives primarily in the works of atomistic philosophers, especially Lucretius, whose impact on
Renaissance thought was strong and transformative. In this paper, I look at this debate as it reappears in the sixteenth
century, a time of vibrant discussions concerning the relationship between theory and practice. I will focus mainly
on reformulations of both positions in the works of physicians and anatomists, like Andreas Vesalius and Giulio
Casserio. I show that although the Aristotelian-Galenic experiential approach to natural philosophy is at the basis of
the so-called scientific revolution, its theoretical framework becomes obsolete as a new conception of nature and
knowledge as a continuous process of trial and error becomes the dominant paradigm.
Author: Kathryn Maxson
Title: “They gave it away”: Building an International Policy for Data Sharing in the Human
Genome Project
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Scientists working for the Human Genome Project (HGP) gave their data away, online and for free,
within a day of generating it. How did this consortium of scientists and public sponsors, hailing from the U.S., U.K.,
Germany, France, Japan, and ultimately China, come to implement a policy so divergent from that which normally
predominates in the scientific community, where data is disclosed only at publication? From the 1970s through the
1990s, the community of C. elegans (nematode worm) researchers in the U.S. and Britain developed a norm of
immediate data sharing for DNA sequencing that, due to its demonstrated accomplishments and transplanted
leadership, became a model for the HGP. From 1996 through 1998, the consortium working on the human genome
converged on a data-sharing policy based on the norms of the C. elegans group, with three meetings in Bermuda
resulting in the “Bermuda Principles” mandating open online release of human sequencing data within twenty-four
hours. This talk focuses on the negotiation process by which the international HGP consortium adopted the
Principles, and particularly on how agreement was secured from French, German, and Japanese contributors to this
otherwise Anglo-American project. During negotiations, several models of how “public science” might create
“public good” vied for supremacy. Two ideas, I argue, won out, leading to the adoption of the Principles as
government policies: first, that the immediate availability of data to all scientists promoted scientific progress, and
second, that this was still compatible with the private commercialization of public science.
Author: Neasa McGarrigle
Title: Recreating the Land of Scholars: Erwin Schrödinger and the Dublin Institute for
Advanced Studies.
Abstract: This paper discusses new sources on Erwin Schrödinger and the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies
Act, passed in July 1940, and argues that the establishment of the institute integrated science into government policy
on Irish identity and neutrality. In July 1939 Ireland’s Prime Minister, Eamon de Valera, introduced the bill to
establish the state-funded Institute with two schools, the School of Theoretical Physics, and the School of Celtic
Studies. This paper argues that the School of Celtic Studies was appended to the institute because a scientific
institute would not appeal to the parliament. In the parliamentary debates the Irish government combined promises
of the benefits of science and nationalist rhetoric to reaffirm the historic romanticisation of Ireland as a land of
scholars and to support Ireland's neutral status during WWII. As a former mathematician, de Valera saw the
potential of the 20th century physics to bolster Irish national identity and create for the relatively new state an
international reputation for scientific and intellectual excellence. To this end physicist Erwin Schrödinger was
rescued from Nazi Austria and brought to Ireland to direct the institute. During the debates de Valera explained the
Irish were historically a race peculiarly suited for the more abstract speculations involved in mathematical physics.
The debates starkly contrasted the nobility of the pursuit of science against the war in Europe to support the State’s
policy to remain neutral, a policy pursued to distinguish Ireland’s borders from those of its former master Britain.
Author: Larry McGrath
Title: Psychology’s Lamentations: Theology, Pragmatism and the Human Sciences in the Fin de
Siècle
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: During the late nineteenth century, the modernist upheaval in the Catholic Church brought about a crisis
in belief, fracturing its theological commitments and psychological dimensions. I examine French Catholics who
culled action-oriented models of belief from the human sciences under the banner of le pragmatisme. The
movement’s wide appeal, I argue, demonstrates that experimental psychology served not to undermine the Church’s
authority, but to rejuvenate a pragmatist account of faith. By displacing America as the privileged origin of
pragmatism, my presentation also sheds light on the transnational and religious contexts in which pragmatism
emerged. I focus on the theologian, Maurice Blondel, and the philosopher of science Édouard Le Roy, thinkers who
challenged the boundaries between theology and the human sciences by re-imagining religious dogmas as beliefs
rooted in practices rather than propositions – a claim that precipitated the Vatican’s 1907 condemnation of
pragmatism in the syllabus Lamentabili Sane Exitu [With Truly Lamentable Results.] Using archival materials
gathered at the Université catholique de Louvain and the Institut Catholique de Paris, I explore le pragmatisme as a
project that conceptualized the Immaculate Conception and Jesus’s resurrection, e.g., as test cases to inject sensorymotor physiology into Church doctrine. This epistemological revolution revealed, as Le Roy held, that “Christianity
is not a system of speculative philosophy but a source and regimen of life.” By drawing attention to a heretoforeneglected French current of pragmatism, my presentation expands the cultural and conceptual valences of an
intellectual formation central to the history of the human sciences.
Author: Megan C. McNamee
Title: Christ^3 or the Geometry of Jesus in the Central Middle Ages
Abstract: Whoever seeks to understand the letters of true wisdom will rejoice to hold this square full of mathesis
These lines were incised in narrow copper-gilt bands set into the cover of the Pericope Book of Henry II (Munich,
Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm. 4452), dated to between 1007 and 1012. The anonymous author calls on viewers
to consider the splendid manuscript with its spectacular jeweled cover as a "full square" or cube. Such books
functioned as vessels of divine presence in liturgical and legal settings and were the focus of veneration, and, as the
above-quoted inscription attests, geometric practice. Geometry, for the makers and viewers of the Pericope Book,
was less a body of axioms and precepts to be demonstrated and memorized, more a tool that flexed and sharpened
the mind, thus heightening the ability to comprehend worldly and divine things. Mathematical argument illuminated
mysteries of the Christian religion. The apparent paradox of the dual nature of Christ—simultaneously human and
divine, incorporeal and corporeal—was best resolved through geometric demonstration. This paper will consider
how makers of manuscripts in the central middle ages (roughly the ninth through the eleventh centuries) drew
attention to the quadrate form of books containing the gospels, stories of the incarnate Christ. I suggest that the
intrinsic shape of these objects, so often overlooked in modern studies, was itself meaningful; and that a
"mathematical" mode of representation was preferred in a period generally treated as one that saw the eclipse of the
hard sciences in Latin-speaking Europe.
Author: Francesca Merlin
Title: Epigenetics and Inheritance: from Nanney’s Epigenetic Control Systems to Today
Session: Roundtable: Epigenetics: Its History and Current Issues (Saturday, November 21, 12:00
– 1:15 PM)
Abstract: In developmental biology, “epigenetics” is associated with the study of the developmental process: it
refers to Waddington’s idea of epigenetics as the study of the causal mechanisms bringing about a phenotype from a
genotype (Waddinton 1942). In molecular biology, “epigenetics” rather refers to “the study of mitotically and/or
meiotically heritable chances in gene functions that cannot be explained by changes in DNA sequence” (Russo et al
1996). This notion finds its origin in what Nanney (1958) called the “epigenetic control systems”, i.e., auxiliary
mechanisms determining the specific gene expression in each particular cell (see Haig 2004). In this presentation, I
will focus on this second meaning of “epigenetics”. Actually, since the late 1980s (in particular, see Holliday 1987),
it has a much more widespread use in biology than the first. In the first part, I will identify and analyze the reasons
of the shift, in the 1970s-80s, from a developmental conception of epigenetics to the contemporary way to conceive
it, which more focused on its impact on inheritance, and so on evolution. This will bring me to discuss, in the second
part, the main conceptual and epistemological implications of recent research in epigenetics on the notion of
extended inheritance and on the theory of evolution.
Author: Dmitry Mikhel
Title: The Vicissitudes of Soviet Primatology from the 1920s to the 1960s
Abstract: This paper will analyze the shifting institutional and conceptual framings that the study of primates
experienced in the Soviet Union, with particular focus on the Stalin era. In the early 1920s, Soviet research on
primates was an exotic endeavor, carried out by a few enthusiasts, using as their research bases their own homes or
city zoos. In 1927 a biological research station was built in Sukhumi, Abkhazia, transforming Soviet research on
monkeys and primates into a large-scale scientific enterprise. The Nobel laureate Ivan Pavlov entered the fray in the
early 1930s, introducing the study of primates to his laboratory in Koltushi, near Leningrad. At the turn of the
1920s-30s, primatology contributed primarily to Soviet eugenics, broadly conceived. However, when Soviet science
was radically restructured under Stalin in the 1930s, work at Sukhumi and Koltushi biological stations was
reorganized as part of experimental medicine. Attempts to give Soviet primatology a new direction can be glimpsed
in plans for a center that was expected to be built in Novosibirsk, but these ambitions were never realized. In the
1930s-40s, primate research that focused on forging a “materialist understanding of the origins of the human
intellect” was restricted to lab-based research by a few competing groups (of Pavlov and N.N. Ladygina-Kots). At
the turn of the 1940s-50s, this research was in jeopardy again thanks to the ratcheting up of ideological control over
genetics under T.D. Lysenko, although work was revived during the Thaw.
Author: Erika Milam
Title: The Ascent of Man and the Politics of Humanity’s Evolutionary Future
Session: Human Nature in the Public Eye (Friday, November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: What makes us human? This perennial question acquired particular potency after the Second World War
as American biologists and anthropologists struggled to make sense of the violence they had witnessed in the
previous decade and continued to see around them. Liberal academics invested themselves with the responsibility to
use their professional positions to correct ostensible popular misunderstandings about human nature, wrest the
legacy of evolution from any association with eugenics, and build a more equitable world for all. Establishing a
universal human nature that distinguished us from mere animals thus became an intellectual project underpinned
with political and moral valence. This paper examines the means by which scientists in the 1960s and ’70s—
including paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, biologist J.B.S. Haldane, and population geneticist Theodosius
Dobzhansky—sought to change the politics of human evolution by claiming that the principles governing the
physical past of humanity differed fundamentally from those that would matter in the coming decades, centuries, or
even millennia. They argued that when humans became human, a new form of evolutionary process came into
being. Our capacity for culture, humor, and language signaled a pronounced break with the past and necessitated a
new set of conceptual tools for thinking about humanity’s possible evolutionary futures. Whether they called it
cultural, creative, or social evolution, scientists endowed the “ascent of man” out of our physical past with hope and
self-determination.
Author: Mary Mitchell
Title: Whose Bodies Count?: Performing the Legality of Nuclear Testing at the Argonne
National Laboratory
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In 1957, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) transported seven Marshallese leaders to the
suburbs of Chicago, Illinois for whole body counting at the Argonne National Laboratory. Just three years prior, the
people of Rongelap and other northern atolls in the Marshall Islands had been showered with radioactive fallout
following the U.S.’s detonation of a massive nuclear device, codenamed Castle Bravo. Exposed to large doses of
radiation and evacuated from their homes, three years on, these islanders continued to suffer from health problems
they linked to radiation exposure. This paper explores the 1957 field trip to Argonne, tracing the ways in which
scientific practices entangled with legal justifications for nuclear testing. By the late 1950s, amidst rising discontent
in the Marshall Islands and growing concern among segments of the U.S. public, AEC administrators began to
worry about legal blowback from atmospheric nuclear testing. I argue that a central purpose of the trip to Argonne
was to perform the legality of nuclear testing by demonstrating that the island leaders’ body burdens of radiation
were within ranges deemed to be safe. Publicized through a carefully orchestrated media campaign designed to
smooth over the limitations of whole body counting, the field trip became a symbol of the safety and legality of
American nuclear testing. Before the issue of radiation exposure arrived in the courts, I argue, the AEC attempted to
settle it in the lab.
Author: Alexander Moffett
Title: George Murray Humphry and the Logic of Collective Investigation, 1880-1900
Abstract: In an Address delivered at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in 1880, George Murray
Humphry called for the members of the Association to gather together in the collective investigation of disease.
Collective investigation involved the production of cards formatted to document clinical encounters with specific
diseases, the circulation of these cards among the members of the Association, and the collation and codification of
the results. A Collective Investigation Committee, led by Humphry, was formed in 1881 and in the years that
followed it circulated tens of thousands of cards and collected thousands of clinical observations. Proponents of
collective investigation claimed that the philosophical foundations of the movement could be found in the work of
Francis Bacon. The machinery of collective investigation was intended to produce clinical knowledge by induction,
with the stacks of completed cards functioning in much the same way as the tables of instances described in the
Novum Organum. Critics of collective investigation questioned whether medical phenomena were uniform in the
manner needed to support such induction, whether clinicians should attempt to reason from particulars to universals
or should remain instead at the level of the particular. This paper argues that debates about the validity of collective
investigation were thus debates about the logic of clinical medicine, about whether clinical medicine possessed a
logic and about whether that logic could be captured by Baconian induction.
Author: Rebecca Moore
Title: A Science Policy by Accident? Historical Perspectives on Science and the Canadian State,
1968 – 1980
Abstract: On March 2nd, 1968, Canadian Liberal Senator and economist Maurice Lamontagne gave the keynote
address at the "Science Policy for Canada" conference. In front of a crowd of scientists, bureaucrats, and industry
representatives, he criticized the existing separation of government-funded science from government oversight and
declared that the nation’s limited funds must be spent in programmatic ways to harness the promise and power of
scientific research. In the absence of such direction Lamontagne feared Canada would continue to possess a ‘science
policy by accident.’ Lamontagne’s assertion marked the beginning of a shift in the Canadian model of science
patronage. The Government of Canada had acted as a patron of industrial science since World War I; however,
beginning in the 1960s, individuals like Lamontagne argued that government needed to act as both patron and
director of federally funded science. Undergirding this move toward directorship was the belief that government
bureaucrats could identify scientific research most likely to lead to ‘innovations’ that would best serve national
interests. In effect, Lamontagne argued for a central government machinery that could invest in innovative winners
while avoiding costly losers. In this paper I profile the shifting norms in Canadian science policy from the late 1960s
to the early 1980s and discuss the conceptual changes that influenced these shifts. I argue that the commitment to
directed government research was rooted in changing theories about the nature and origin of ‘innovation’ and an
emerging emphasis on scientific innovation as a national economic driver.
Author: Bruce Moran
Title: The Subtleties of Enterprise: Curiosities, Preparations, and Performances in the Printed
Luxuries of Leonhard Thurneysser
Abstract: The intersection of alchemy and medicine not only equipped the early modern era with new products and
new debates, but also played a role in fashioning its perceptions, desires, and experiences. Among the cross-currents
of social and intellectual life, wonder, utility, and, in certain instances, playfulness combined as powerful elements
of curiosity. This paper focuses upon the print productions of one of the most skilled in bringing playfulness and
performance to bear upon alchemy and medicine in the early modern era, the self-trained Paracelsian physician,
mining expert, and alchemical adept, Leonhard Thurneisser (1531-1596). In particular, this paper focuses upon texts
that refer to Thurneisser’s abiding interest in extracting medicinal virtues (subtleties) from plants and other objects
of nature by means of alchemical techniques, and his use of recipes as saleable curiosities and luxuries. Extending
observations made earlier by Lorraine Daston, the paper focuses upon the role of recipes in provoking curiosity and
in responding to the demands of a luxury market. Recipes played a major part in Thurneisser’s medical and
alchemical performances, and included diverse formulas and procedures related to plague remedies, sexual aids,
cosmetic preparations, glass making, and pharmaceutical mixtures aimed at preventing future diseases in individuals
whose susceptibility to them had been identified by means of urine analysis. I will argue that recipes linked medical
and commercial practices. Recipes established credibility for novelties and, at the same time, functioned as
performances to create value and to promote desire for luxury objects.
Author: Dmitry Mordvinov
Title: The Imperial Roots of Early Soviet Ethnography: From Siberian Local Knowledge to
Soviet Ethnographic Science
Abstract: The paper traces the development of Soviet studies of peoples, nations, and ethnicities to the local
experiences of scientists on the Russian imperial periphery. The paper centres on two principal figures of early
Soviet ethnography, Lev Sternberg and Vladimir Bogoraz, during their formative Siberian experiences in the late
Russian Empire. The paper pays special attention to the curious phenomenon of the “ethnography of the banished,”
to which both belonged: the often well-educated political exiles who either took up or continued scientific careers,
often in the fields of geography and ethnography, in the regions to which they had been banished, an activity silently
condoned by the authorities. In this respect, particular attention will be paid to the so-called Sibiryakov expedition to
Yakutia (1894-1896), which comprised many other exiles, such as Vladimir Jochelson and Dmitry Klements. The
paper will argue that their shared destiny as banished ethnographers who studied particular peoples in Russian
Siberia, Far East and Far North proved crucial to forming their conceptions of ethnography in general. After the
revolution, the exiled became the architects of the new Soviet ethnography, desperately needed by the state which
inherited imperial ethnic diversities and needed to urgently address them. The paper argues that their ideas about
nations and ethnicities, and conceptions about the ways in which to study them, especially “small” ones, formed in
contact with Siberian inhabitants. Their formative experience in Eastern Siberia and the Russian North guided earlySoviet vostokovedenie, which in turn was crucial for the governmental policies of indigenization.
Author: Noah Moxham
Title: Knowledge Bound and Unbound: Circulating the Scientific Periodical in the 18th Century
Abstract: The 18th century is commonly understood as a period of steady and, in its final decades, of rapid
expansion in the number of scientific periodicals in print. Relatively little work, however, has been done to
investigate how these publications circulated and how efficient they were as methods of knowledge communication.
This paper endeavours to answer this question by reconstructing the circuits of distribution of the Philosophical
Transactions during the 18th century, before and after the Royal Society of London assumed official responsibility
for its publication. It will also argue that, far from straightforwardly embodying a revolution in efficient science
communication, the journal itself was, for many 18th-century audiences, the least likely means of encountering its
contents, and that the circulation of knowledge from the pages of scientific journals depended instead on a host of
other printed forms. Despite extremely slow commercial sales of its actual periodical issues, Philosophical
Transactions indirectly supported, in whole or in part, a miniature industry of scientific book (as opposed to
periodical) production. Translations and abridgements of the journal were much more widespread and some were
considerable financial successes; at the same time more and more papers from the Transactions circulated in offprint
or were reprinted in other periodicals, in Britain and overseas. In effect, I trace the development of the institutional
scientific periodical from a method of simplifying and multiplying scientific correspondence in the 17th century, to
the copy of record at the heart of a web of dependent forms in the 18th.
Author: Wangui Muigai
Title: Scaffolding the Data
Abstract: On one level, national morbidity and mortality statistics are at the heart of public health work. They are
critical for identifying large-scale health patterns and designing public health interventions. At the same time, such
simplified and aggregated data can obscure as much as it illuminates about individual and local experiences. Behind
vital statistic reports is a network of individuals, public and private institutions, and locations that have shaped and
been shaped by interest in specific groups and the health of the nation more broadly. For my presentation I plan to
draw on early twentieth century infant mortality data (most likely from a database I’m currently building on
Washington D.C. infant and child deaths 1892-1914) to explore the very local geographies of births and deaths, the
building blocks of vital statistics. Based on research on the D.C. Board of Children’s Guardians, infant deaths tended
to occur in common places – not just hospitals or infant asylums, but particular districts, blocks, and addresses were
the location of multiple health events, mortality “hot spots” so to speak. By focusing on these tightly defined areas
(and noting who paid attention to what happened within them) I aim to highlight the ways public health data can
help historians understand the social impact of health experiences.
Author: Teasel Muir-Harmony
Title: Projecting the Best of American Science Abroad during the “Crisis of Confidence”: US
Science-themed Propaganda Films in the 1970s
November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Although scientific internationalism has a long history, the postwar era saw a drastic rise in the U.S.
government’s incorporation of science, and scientists, in foreign affairs. This effort included an elaborate array of
science themed propaganda aimed at audiences in strategically significant countries around the world. From the
Voice of America’s “New Horizons in Science” radio broadcast to the U.S. Information Agency’s fortnightly 15minute television news review “Science Report,” public diplomats utilized science as a vital form of soft power.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s U.S. public diplomats, drawing on the rhetoric of modernization theorists,
presented American science as a key contributor to global progress. But by the 1970s the emancipatory promise of
scientific progress that American policy makers confidently championed in the immediate postwar period came into
question. With inflation on the rise, the meltdown of nuclear reactors, the country under the strain of an energy
crisis, and the Cuyahoga River aflame, U.S. government could no longer convincingly sell America as a modern
scientific utopia on the international stage. This paper explores this critical period when public diplomats, seeking to
support the country’s foreign relations objectives, attempted to refashion America’s scientific image through their
propaganda programming. As this paper will examine, U.S. science-themed propaganda films produced in the 1970s
projected an picture of nation in search of a new approach to scientific progress and power, where topics such as
agricultural and sustainability replaced earlier themes about the miracles of atomic energy and the massive thrust of
rockets.
Author: Projit Mukharji
Title: Braided Science: Thermometers, Modern Ayurveda and the Electromagnetism of Bile, c.
1870-1920
Abstract: Thermometers most likely arrived in Bengal as purely meteorological instruments. By the 1870s
however, they were gradually being incorporated into traditional Ayurvedic medicine as it was itself in the process
of modernizing. While the integration of the thermometer produced new data about the body, precisely what such
data meant was not clear. Over the next half a century, modern Ayurvedists creatively braided elements of European
electromagnetic theories, new images of neural anatomy and available Ayurvedic ideas about pathogenesis to create
a novel framework predicated upon the electromagnetic properties of the bile. Thus even as modern Ayurveda
sought to cultivate an ‘authentically indigenous’ identity, its appetite for small technologies, made it ever more
transnational. Using a host of 19th century Ayurvedic textbooks and journals, I will interrogate how small medical
technologies, like the thermometer, were integrated into non-western scientific traditions? What does it tell us about
how instruments travel in particular, and how science travels more generally? What kind of new practices
crystallized around this newly integrated instrument? Finally, does Ayurvedic thermometry offer us a glimpse into
an alternative globality? A globality that despite being self-consciously modern and universal, is defiantly nonwestern.
Author: Projit Bihari Mukharji
Title: Vernacularizing Translation: Power, Affect and the Aesthetics of Sound
Abstract: What is ‘translation’? What does the word mean in the realm of science? Who decides these questions
and as historians whose definitions of the word ‘translation’ should we adopt? While recent interest in ‘translation’
within histories of science has come as a welcome move towards writing more inclusive histories of science, there
has been remarkably little interest in non-Western attempts to theorize scientific ‘translation’. This is especially
unfortunate given that Gyan Prakash back in 1999 had already pointed out that there was indeed a serious attempt to
reflexively theorize scientific translation in places such as British India. In my contribution I want to revive that
tradition of ‘vernacularizing translation’. I want to ask once again, as Prakash did, how did historical actors in
colonial India theorize the process of scientific translation? Moving beyond Prakash however, I will suggest that
there was no single coherent postcolonial theory of scientific translation. Likewise, I will also show that the
epistemic investment in the visual that Prakash has noted, was just one amongst several other political
epistemologies. Drawing upon the work of Ramendrasundar Tribedi—a scientist, philosopher and essayist—and his
theory of scientific translation grounded in an aesthetics of sound, I will argue that theorizing scientific translation
was itself a heterogeneous, dynamic and deeply political project.
Author: Annette Mülberger
Title: Promises of Positivist Psychology (1855-1945)
1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Psychology, as any other kind of knowledge, uses and used a rhetoric of promise in its attempt to achieve
scientific, social, and philosophical legitimacy. In my paper I will take a look at some of the most emblematic
promises in the field of psychology. The psychologists who wanted to convert their discipline in a distinct and
scientific enterprise, similar to other sciences such as physics, chemistry, and biology, had to overcome fundamental
critiques manifested first by I. Kant and, afterwards, by A. Comte. They are well known and refer to methodological
problems in the exploration of the human mind. Therefore, while adopting Comte’s positivistic stance, J. S. Mill and
T. Ribot had to argue against the limitations imposed by Comte. Thus, the tradition of positivist promises in
psychology stems from the belief in human progress and a view of science as useful enterprise. In my paper I will
use texts of influential psychologists and philosophers, to highlight the promises launched in the 19th and the first
half of the 20th century. Thereby, I will show that there exists a tradition of positivist promises in psychology which
gained adepts towards the end of the 19th century through the influence of Comte, H. Spencer, Mill, and Ribot.
Afterwards, in the 20th century, this tradition led to Watson’s behaviorist promise and, finally to Skinner’s utopia.
Through my analysis I will reflect on the specific features the scientific promises in psychology show and which
distinguish them from the ones made in other fields.
Author: Thomas S. Mullaney
Title: On Machine Translation and Translating Machines: A Cold War History of Chinese
Computing
Abstract: Had everything gone to plan, President Dwight D. Eisenhower would have unveiled the “Ideographic
Composing Machine” to the world in Summer 1959, revealing the first Chinese computer in history, and scoring a
technological and cultural victory for the U.S. Cold War camp. Not only could such technology be presented as a
“gift” from Capitalism to the Chinese people, but so too did it offer up the possibility of a powerful new
infrastructure for the global dissemination and translation of Chinese-language material. Whoever possessed such a
device could flood the world with Chinese texts at a rate never before witnessed in human history. The machine did
not prove ready, however, and Eisenhower made no such announcement. The technological system at the heart of
this optimistic plan nevertheless remains one of the most significant yet least understood in the history of computing
and machine translation. Originating in the 1940s in the linguistic and mechanical work of author and cultural critic
Lin Yutang, the Ideographic Composing Machine – alternately known as the Sinotype – carved a circuitous pathway
between China, Taiwan, and the United States, becoming an enduring Cold War enterprise for a network of
American academic and military outfits that included MIT, the CIA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, the
Pentagon, the RAND Corporation, and the Graphics Arts Research Foundation; and finally a burgeoning network of
Chinese computer scientists in post-Mao China. This paper charts the biography of this device, and its place within
the broader history of computing.
Author: Staffan Müller-Wille
Title: On the Role of Vanity and Death in Darwinian Evolution
November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Staffan will discuss how Darwin’s belief in animal intelligence and agency undermined the narrative
linearity of Darwinian evolution, rendering development unpredictable and open-ended. This theme will be pursued
through an examination of Darwin’s last, best-selling book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action
of Worms (1881). The presentation will focus on the alleged ability of Darwin’s worms to explore options and make
choices via extravagant tastes and proclivities in their diet, amusements and dwellings.
Author: Carla Nappi
Title: Translation Imagined as Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent Flow
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: We often understand translation as a metamorphosis of one set of elements into another: Chinese word A
is translated into English as word B, idea Y from Dutch is transformed into idea Z in Japanese. The history of
translation thus becomes a kind of comparative history. My contribution will suggest an alternative that may elevate
our understanding of the broader importance and nature of early modern scientific and medical translation. Focusing
on 18th century Manchu-language efforts to translate bodily architecture and experience, I’ll suggest that we instead
understand translation in terms of fluid dynamics and turbulent flow, treating translated terms, objects, and ideas as
always and explicitly in motion and already in the process of transformation, rather than considering them as static,
individual entities.
Author: Jaume Navarro
Title: The Many Faces of the Ether in Early Twentieth-Century Physics
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: The battleground for the ether in the early twentieth century was wider than the limited scope of early
relativity. The development of quantum theory was also a field for debates on the ether. At a cultural level, the ether
was largely present in the public sphere through the raise of wireless communications and radio broadcasting, the
popularity of spiritualism, the surge of new philosophical arguments, or the new literary and artistic forms of
modernism. Indeed, the mysterious, largely undefined ether became a trope in the new pictorial, literary and cultural
experiments of the early twentieth century. In this paper I want to explore and discuss the historiography of the
demise of the ether. A full and comprehensive history of the fate of the ether in the early twentieth century has never
been written, which means that we only have a patchy sketch of the presence and disappearance of the ether in the
first half of the twentieth century. This may well be due to the excessively theory-centeredness of the historiography
of physics, with a disproportionate emphasis on relativity and the quantum theory. But there is also a problem with
any history of the ether: the need to define, in actors’ categories, what the ether actually was. From this point of
view, historians find themselves with the problem of chasing a polysemic term with multiple uses that need to be
clarified before a comprehensive history of the decline of the ether may be written.
Author: Nicole Nelson
Title: Mice
Abstract: Mice are strictly controlled laboratory instruments and unruly vermin, valuable commodities and costly
problems. Mice scurry back and forth between the boundaries of the scientific and the public, the objective and the
subjective, inanimate and the animate. The critters that are now one of the most widely used organisms in
biomedical research are the descendants of what once were hobbyists’ pets; and even within the confines of a single
contemporary laboratory mice might variously treated as research subjects, invaders, and food for other animals.
Following the mouse reveals the interdependences between scientific work and other domains, but I argue that it
also demonstrates that erasing these very connections is a mechanism by which scientific authority is generated.
Using the example of animal research on human psychiatric diseases, I will explore how the natural history of and
cultural familiarity with the mouse are key to making credible arguments that mice can act as models for humans. At
the same time, researchers rhetorically separate out a “non-anthropomorphic” way of viewing the mouse from the
interpretations offered by the lay public as a way of retaining control over the interpretation of their findings. Taking
an object oriented approach to studying animal modeling, therefore, provides a different perspective than that which
would be gleaned from staying within the confines of the scientific community, where the dependence of the
scientific mouse on other kinds of mice is routinely made invisible.
Author: Reviel Netz
Title: Greek Mathematical Form: Beginnings
Abstract: Greek mathematics is written in a precisely regimented form, based on the combination of the lettered
diagram with formulaic language. That a scientific genre should have its own distinct genre is for us almost a given;
for the Greeks, it had to be a new invention. How did the Greek mathematical genre emerge in its attested form?
Why does it have the form it has? Why is it so homogeneous? Such questions are necessary to raise and yet very
difficult to answer, as the evidence belongs to the early, and so mediated and fragmentary stage of our evidence. In
this talk I will briefly present the evidence we have, such as it is, and offer some possible explanations for the
emergence of the Greek mathematical form. Little is clear, but that much should be emphasized: the rise of the first
scientific genre must have been associated with a moment of radical departure, of a text insisting on its pure, nonperformative textuality.
Author: Antonine Nicoglou
Title: Epigenetics and Development
– 1:15 PM)
Abstract: “Epigenetics” is differently conceived and defined depending on the scientific context the notion is used.
In developmental biology, “epigenetics” is associated with the study of the developmental process: it refers to
Waddington’s idea of epigenetics as the study of the causal mechanisms bringing about a phenotype from a
genotype (Waddinton 1942). Since the late 1980s (Holliday 1987) the relationship between inheritance and
evolution has received a much more widespread interest in epigenetics studies than Waddington’s original’s idea
concerning the notion. However, I will show that the field of developmental biology has been highly influenced by
the original meaning of “epigenetics”. In the presentation, I will first show how the old opposition between
epigenesis and preformation still appeared in epigenetics of the 1970s-1980s (Lovetrup 1974, Hamburger 1980,
Gilbert 1988). This will bring me to discuss, in the second part of the presentation, the role of epigenetics in recent
research in developmental biology to point out what new approaches in evolutionary biology might be.
Author: Agustí Nieto-Galan
Title: Popular Astronomy and the Promise of “Social Peace” around 1900: the Case of Camille
Flammarion
1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: The paper describes how, around 1900, the “popular” astronomy designed by the French science writer
Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), became a powerful tool to promise peace and stability in industrial societies.
Flammarion’s followers and their European network of amateur societies used popular astronomy to extrapolate
natural harmony to social harmony. As a result, astronomy, in its popular version, became an excellent hygiene for
the calmness of spirit it provided. The nature of the subject - the universe, the planets, the stars, and the deep
emotions associated to the wonders of the heavens- entertained, and diverted urban audiences from more political
issues. Popular astronomy also acted as an effective balm for soothing contemporary science and religion tensions.
Flammarion, in particular, developed a "religion by science", a positive philosophy that included aspects of natural
theology, and rejected materialism and atheism, as well as religious fanaticism. Flammarion justified the genre as an
efficient means of diffusing the wonders of nature in society, as a rational, empirical approach to the act of divine
creation. The paper attempts to analyze in more detail how, beyond general trends of scientific professionalization,
amateur astronomers and their particular way of developing a “popular” astronomy acted as a social balm. The
article also discusses how, aiming to gain public recognition, these amateurs promised to palliate the high social
tensions of the century, and even to blur national borders for the sake of a truly cosmopolitan brotherhood.
Author: Ricardo Noguera-Solano
Title: Life and Philosophy Branching: Lamarck's Evolutionary Legacy
Abstract: In his work Philosophie Zoologique (1809), Jean Baptiste Lamarck presented a graphical representation
of the transformation of species in the form of what can be seen as a tree diagram, identified as Tableau Servant à
montrer l'origine des différence animaux (p. 463). In this scheme is possible to identify the fundamental concepts of
Lamarck's evolutionary philosophy, which emphasized the natural causality of the origin of the first organisms, as
much their transformational processes. Our aim is to illustrate Lamarck's philosophy of life summarized in the
following ideas presented on this diagram: 1) species as an arbitrary concept, 2) the ancestor-descendant
relationship, 3) the organic diversification resulting from branching, 4) gradual change, and 5) natural causality.
These general principles are all related to philosophical topics, such as nominalism, realism, causality, materialism
and morality, which enabled him to construct an argument in favor of the natural origin and gradual transformation
of species, from a materialist stance. An important part of his discussion also included the common origins of both
physical characteristics and morality in human beings, always considering a common origin and successive
transformation from organisms such as orangutans.
Based on a novel interpretation of Lamarck's evolutionary philosophy through this image, we want to present his
philosophical legacy to evolutionary thinking, from an alternative point of view, in which Lamarck's place in the
history of biology must be reconsidered.
Author: Lynn K. Nyhart
Title: Reproducing Science: William B. Carpenter and the British Reception of German
Ideas on Generation, 1839-1854
Abstract: Between 1839 and 1854, the British physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter published four editions of
his Principles of General and Comparative Physiology. This book was unusual—Carpenter claimed unique--in
extending anatomical and physiological comparisons beyond the animal kingdom to plants as well. Carpenter strove
to keep it up to date, incorporating the latest developments into his successive editions of 1841, 1851, and 1854. The
greatest changes over each edition occurred in how he represented the processes of reproduction and their
comparison across animals and plants—changes initiated by new microscopical observations and the rapid
development of cell theory. However, since most of that important work was published originally in German, and
Carpenter did not read the language, tracing the changes in these editions offers an ideal opportunity to consider the
paths by which knowledge of sex and cells traveled from Germany to Britain, and the changes that knowledge
underwent as it was subjected to a very British approach to generalization through induction
Author: Michael Nylan
Title: Translating Chinese Concepts into European Models
Abstract: Michael Nylan proposes to assess the unfortunate history, from the eighteenth century onwards, of
adapting European terms to Chinese usages in the sciences. Two in particular interest her: talk of "correlative
thinking" and the discourse of the Five Elements. The former, used to categorize a host of supposedly more
"primitive" ways of conceiving the world, in China and beyond, occludes one of the most distinctive approaches of
Chinese scientific thinking: resonance theories relating to qi. The latter does great damage to the phase energetics
that is fundamental to longstanding traditions of astronomy, medicine, and cultivation of the body and psyche in premodern China. Moreover, comparing Chinese traditions with EuroAmerican writings shows us a different (and in
some ways more thrilling) mode of reasoning.
Author: Jason Oakes
Title: "Freedom is the Recognition of Necessity": Garrett Hardin’s Approach to Popular Science
and Political Advocacy
Abstract: Garrett Hardin (1915-2003) was a professor of human ecology, an author of popular textbooks for
undergraduates, and a public intellectual who argued forcefully for population control. He declared “The population
problem has no technical solution; it requires a fundamental extension of morals.” There was no technical solution
because human nature drove people towards individual optimization. It required an extension of morality in the
rapidly changing organizational and institutional context of the 1960s in education, warfare, racial segregation,
youth culture, sexuality, and environmental consciousness. Hardin experienced this "revolution" firsthand and his
engagement with public science and advocacy should be considered with that in mind. My paper characterizes these
institutional shifts, illustrating how Hardin struggled to fit his message into them as they happened. The model in his
essay The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) was deterministic: individual preferences for well-being led to a ratchetlike degradation of collective resources. The only way out of the trap was to force American society to recognize
humanity's irrational rationality, and take appropriate preventative action. His conclusion was to educate the public
regarding the perils of population growth, and to advocate for liberalizing abortion laws, legalizing birth control,
ending immigration, and limiting US involvement in foreign affairs. While his awareness of contemporary social
change helped him deliver his message at an effective register, he restricted himself to elite audiences (college
students, policy makers) and maintained a restricted sense of who constituted a competent public.
Author: Ingrid Ockert
Title: Television Magic: The Early Wizards of Science Educational Broadcasting
Abstract: Most historians rely upon the written record to learn about the past. But, in recent years, images of
science have caught our eye. Scholars like Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have suggested that we consider the
importance of scientific images; that we should cultivate both an appreciation for the representations themselves and
an awareness of their reception. Conversations about pictures of science are generally confined to static images,
such as photographs, paintings, and drawings. I contend that historians should also examine moving images of
science that are found in films and television programs.
As a dynamic platform, television allows scientists and media creators to construct images of scientists and to shape
the reception of scientific ideas. My poster investigates the images of scientists that were offered by the first popular
science education series, The Johns Hopkins Science Review and Watch Mr. Wizard. Emerging in the early 1950s,
these two series presented separate portraits of postwar scientists. How were scientists introduced onto American
television? Who was the ‘ideal’ science communicator? How did the tools of television, (i.e., visual pictures,
musical soundtrack) support this characterization? A comparison of these two programs will uncover how the
creators of these programs experimented with scientific imagery.
Along with visual stills, I will show clips from each program on my tablet computer, allowing the conference
participants to watch the visualization of science, in action.
Author: Kathryn Olesko
Title: Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel and the Geopolitics of Biography
Abstract: Biographers have treated Friedrich (“Fritz”) Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846) as an astronomer,
mathematician, educator and family man. Yet when considered from the perspective of geopolitics—including the
Polish Partitions (1773, 1792, 1795), which enlarged Prussia considerably, and Prussia’s relationship with Russia
and Eastern Europe—Bessel’s biography reveals the strategic political goals that the Prussian government had in
mind when appointing him to the University of Königsberg at Prussia’s eastern frontier. That Königsberg rather than
Berlin was chosen as the site for a new observatory during a period of financial duress was a clear indication that the
Prussian government intended it as an anchor for several different kinds of measuring operations in the east. His
triangulations of the region legitimated and made visible Prussia’s claim to these provinces just as astronomers
across the border were doing in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Bessel’s subsequent revision of
Prussia’s weights and measures unified at least on paper the cacophony of systems Prussia had inherited from
Poland. Finally his more precise determination of the oblateness of the Earth depended upon geodetic measurements
taken in the course of triangulating the east. These three measuring operations accentuated the strategic role that the
eastern provinces—a largely unmeasured space governed by local metrologies—ironically played not only in the
rationalization and standardization of Prussia’s metrological regimes, but also in bolstering Prussia’s position vis-àvis Eastern Europe, the Russian Empire, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Author: Lisa Onaga
Title: Making Silk into Sense and Cents: Japanese Silk and the Search for Standards in the
United States
Session: Producing Knowledge, Promoting Products: Advertising, Commercial Communication
and the Practical Sciences in Comparative Global Perspective, 1750-1950 (Sunday, November
22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: Salesmanship has long characterized the work of silkworm egg production and the work of selling silk
fibers and textiles. In the early 20th century, the overwhelming majority of raw silk was exported to the United
States. Just how Japan managed to sell raw silk depended on the establishment of direct trade relationships between
Japanese and American businessmen, and most of all, trust. This paper discusses the ways by which trust in a
technological and scientific product was constantly negotiated among American and Japanese counterparts.
Examination of the distinction between trustworthiness and desire in the crafting of silk allows for a line of sight
into the different motivations behind two advertisement cultures and the sciences connected to those respective
worlds. Within the context of Japanese sericulture, robust advertising by silkworm seed/egg producers targeted
growers and reeling and filature companies by describing the cocoons of the hatched silkworm larvae. Americans,
however, experienced a disjuncture in the raw silk advertised to them, which rendered information about the
organism irrelevant. Instead, silk reelers in the United States desired an intelligible way to understand raw silk
grades arriving from Japan in order to process the raw silk for subsequent use. What began as business disputes
about the “advertised” and the “actual” transformed into a joint US-Japan endeavor to establish a system of technical
standards for raw silk production.
Author: Erica O’Neil
Title: Regulating Alcohol at the End of the 20th Century: From Treating the Alcoholic to
Protecting the Victims of the Alcoholic’s Behavior
Abstract: The historical dichotomy of alcohol as a benign agent versus a social harm has slowly been subsumed by
a growing focus on atypical drinking like alcoholism as the source of social problems, particularly as it relates to the
pregnant woman consuming alcohol. The rhetoric of alcoholism following the repeal of Prohibition brought into
focus the alcoholic as a rights-holding individual with a disease that needed to be treated instead of vilified. The
medicalization of alcoholism led to the creation of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism in 1970,
a move that reintroduced federal alcohol regulation under the aegis of public health. However, the last quarter of the
20th century ushered in discussions of the government’s role in not only treating alcoholism, but in protecting the
victims of alcohol abuse, brought about as the result of fetal alcohol syndrome’s emergence as a diagnosis in 1973.
This paper will examine how the federal focus of alcohol-related policy shifted from concern for the alcoholic and
his or her sobriety, to the victims of an alcoholic’s behavior. Within three years of fetal alcohol syndrome’s
emergence in 1976, government agencies began discussing the prospects of requiring a warning label to highlight
the risk of drinking during pregnancy. Soon after, concern over youth drinking and driving under the influence also
emerged in legislative discussions. This paper examines the moral shift surrounding alcohol policy in the 1970s and
1980s, and the specific role that fetal alcohol syndrome played in that driving that narrative.
Author: Donald Opitz
Title: Lily
Abstract: For this roundtable, I will suggest how folio-sized art books devoted to monstrous, botanical objects of
colonial discovery helped to transform them into domesticated objects of Victorian science. My focus will be on the
case of the Victoria regia, a species of water lily, indigenous to the Amazon region, noted for its gigantic size. In my
consideration of its bookish, artistic transformation from the monstrous to the domestic, I will ask how the lily -- as
both object of nature, object of art -- itself possessed historical agency and thereby offers much potential for objectoriented historiography. So, too, I will address the pitfalls we may encounter in extending that historiography into
the realm of popular history, again with a focus on the lily and its recent aggrandizement as "the flower of empire."
When does (big) object-orientation cause one's narrative to become too big for one's breeches?
Author: Jessica Otis
Title: The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon
Abstract: Jessica Marie Otis will describe reconstructing scholarly/social networks through statistical analysis of
the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for the Six Degrees of Francis Bacon.
Author: Deryc Painter
Title: Computational Approaches in Understanding Evolutionary Medicine
Abstract: Agent-based models offer a unique opportunity to study complex systems by creating simple behavioral
rules that lead to emergent properties. As an historian of science, I am particularly interested in trans-disciplinary
collaborations and the commonalities that arise when different disciplines cooperate. I create and analyze social
cooperation networks of scientists using co-authorship. I created an agent-based model for scientific collaboration
where the agents choose to collaborate based on overlapping interests, social standing, and social exposure. These
three variables produce distinct social network structures. When these model networks are compared to observed,
historical social networks, it is possible to dissect the various influences of actual scientists through text-based
models of their previous publications, computational analysis of their journal publication history, and the scientists’
h-factor.
Author: Philip Palmer
Title: Reconstructing a Network of Scholarly References
Abstract: Philip S. Palmer will discuss reconstructing a network of scholarly references from an annotated book, as
well as the challenges of digitizing and encoding complex marginalia.
Author: Buhm Soon Park
Title: Spectroscopy on Trial: Chili Powder, Country of Origin, and the Boundaries of Regulatory
Science
3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In January 2007, a Korean wholesale dealer, who faced a prison sentence of one and a half years for
mixing Chinese chili powder into Korean one and selling it as a domestic product, was pronounced not guilty in the
district court. The judge did not accept the prosecutor’s claim that the analytical method based on near-infrared
spectroscopy (NIRS) could scientifically verify the origin of chili powder—the method that had been developed and
practiced since the 1994 implementation of the Origin of Country Labelling (COOL) system. The validity of
spectroscopic evidence was once again contested and denied in another court case that took place later. This paper
examines the rise and fall of NIRS analysis as a chief method to discern foreign agricultural products from domestic
ones in the context of neo-liberal economic policy. Korean agricultural administrators desperately needed a
“scientific weapon” to protect the domestic market against the influx of imported products whose quality and safety
were often in doubt. Under this circumstance, near-infrared spectroscopy, which had been used to analyze the
characteristics of agricultural products, such as color, sweetness and spiciness, was adapted to produce a set of data
to be used statistically for identifying the origins of agricultural products. Despite the fact that Korean and Chinese
chili powder do not much differ in their biological components, this paper shows, the identity of “domestic chili
powder” was invented in the social, political, and cultural space that esteemed something uniquely Korean.
Author: Hyung Wook Park
Title: Mortal Cells for Sale: Lifespan, Contamination, and Business of Leonard Hayflick's Cells
Abstract: I illustrate the trajectory of the American scientist Leonard Hayflick's successful tissue culture experiment
and his temporarily failed career. I argue that his refutation of Alexis Carrel's claim ultimately resulted in his
longstanding litigation against NIH from 1976 to 1982, during which he lost his job and lab. As Hannah Landecker
has shown, Hayflick in 1961 discredited Carrel's theory of immortality, which stated that vertebrate somatic cells
would never die in a carefully controlled culture. This work was motivated by what Adele Clarke called
"biomedicalization," which involved the routinization of lab procedures with semi-skilled workers, human body
parts shuffled between labs and clinics, and massive capital infused for cancer and virus research through NIH and
private patrons. I analyze how Hayflick transformed his demonstration of somatic cells' limited lifespan into a
promotion of his "clean" human cell strains as a commercial item for biomedical laboratories using graduate
students' and technicians' work. His non-immortal cells, free from tumors and microbes, would enable these semiskilled workers to manage their routine tasks effectively. But Hayflick's lucrative cell business led to his temporary
failure when NIH claimed that his cells, created with NIH funding, were the federal government's property rather
than merchandise. The cleanliness of his cells was also questioned when NIH found that some of them were
contaminated. I analyze this issue through pictures and graphs in his publications, using literature on contamination
by Michael Lynch, Cyrus Mody, and Barbara Rawlings, alongside the historiography of biomedicine by Clarke,
Peter Keating, and Alberto Cambrosio.
Author: Shobita Parthasarathy
Title: The Missed Opportunities of Asilomar and the Implications for Regulating Controversial
Technologies
PM)
Abstract: The Asilomar Conference is largely seen, by scientists and policymakers alike, as a major success in the
regulating controversial new technologies. And yet, its narrow focus on acute health and environmental risks
associated with recombinant DNA research has had long-lasting negative effects on both public discourse and
policy-making related to biotechnology. In my remarks, I will focus on how the narrow framing of biotechnology's
implications at Asilomar led US policymakers to miss an opportunity to develop policy-making strategies to deal
with ethically and socially controversial technologies, which has had long term impacts from CRISPR to
geoengineering regulation.
Author: Diane Paul
Title: “On the Other Hand ...”, Darwin's Vacillations on Human Selection
November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: Diane will draw on her research in the history of eugenics to examine the ambivalent language and
unresolved tensions in Darwin’s engagements with possibilities of human selection. The presentation will explore
the links and disjunctions between Darwin’s original arguments and those of Social Darwinism and eugenics. Diane
will suggest Darwin’s irresolution about the dynamics of human selection (and whether it should be consciously
controlled) was reflected and consolidated by the structure of his rhetoric in texts such as The Descent of Man
(1871). Through frequent parallelism and syntactic opposition, Darwin destabilized his own implied arguments.
Author: Erick Peirson
Title: Vogon Web: creating contextualized relationships online
Abstract: Erick Peirson and Julia Damerow will jointly present on their development of a software system that
provides tools for creating for creating networks of contextualized relationships from texts. They will show
examples of how that system can be used to bridge the gap between close reading and big-data analysis in HPS.
Author: Neil Pemberton
Title: Reading the Blood: Paul Kirk and the Performance of Blood Spatter Analysis in Modern
American Forensic Cultures
Abstract: This paper examines the status and epistemology of blood spatter analysis – that is, the interpretation of
bloodstains at a crime scene in order to create the actions that caused the bloodshed. Focusing on the Berkeley-based
forensic scientist Paul Kirk, singularly identified as the founding father of modern bloodstain pattern analysis, this
paper will analyse the knowledge-making practices that transforms drops of blood into identifiable, predictable and
readable patterns. This practice combined labour intensive crime scene practice with an equally labour intensive
laboratory-based practice that focused on the reconstruction and performance of the blood event in order to identify
the nature of the convergence. The paper focuses on Kirk’s blood work in one of the controversial enduring murder
cases in post-war America – the trial and retrials of Sam Sheppard for the murder of his wife. Following the
conviction of Dr. Sheppard in 1954, Kirk examined the crime scene in January 1955, and through a spectacular
demonstration of the reconstructive powers of blood spatter analysis, showed that the previously ignored crime
scene blood revealed a different story, one that suggested Sheppard's innocence. Kirk’s blood reading powers,
however, failed to persuade the Ohio judicial authorities to re-open the case. By examining these judicial reactions
and the later retrials of Sheppard in 1964 and in 2000, I will examine how Kirk’s blood work was comprehended,
contested and re-evaluated by lawyers, journalists, members of the public, and even by other forensic regimes, most
notably by the retrospective and reconfiguring powers of DNA-forensics.
Author: Erik Peterson
Title: Mapping the History of Epigenetics
– 1:15 PM)
Abstract: Several different versions of ‘epigenetics’ have existed simultaneously throughout the latter half of the
twentieth century. By applying new digital techniques to dozens of articles from the 1950s onward, I map what
appear to be the outlines of various speciation events in the history of epigenetics. The hope is to uncover both the
explicit choices made by scientists and the implicit contours of scientific epistemology at the birth of a new, now
quite popular, subfield.
Author: Helen Pfeifer
Title: Do Try This at Home: Astronomy in the Ottoman Salon
Session: Sociability and Intellectual Exchange in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Sunday,
November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: The 1580 destruction of Istanbul’s ambitious astronomical observatory – some say it surpassed that of
Tyco Brahe in sophistication and size – has served as a potent and tangible sign of the decline of Ottoman scientific
resolve. Dramatic as the demolition must have been for contemporaries, its symbolic weight today rests in large part
on the assumption that science is best cultivated under the auspices of a powerful, centralized state. Surely
technology-heavy endeavors like astronomy flourish in the context of concerted, well-funded efforts. And yet, there
is evidence that even as the royal observatory was still in operation, its employees relied on the observations of
scholars across the Ottoman Empire, many of whom worked from their homes. This paper examines domestically
held Ottoman salons as spaces of astronomical study. Throughout the sixteenth century, from Istanbul to Salonica to
Damascus and Cairo, scholars drafted astronomical tables and observed eclipses from the comfort of their own roofs
and gardens. Yet these were not dilettante astronomers working in isolation or for leisure; rather, a pan-Ottoman
salon culture allowed men to exchange ideas and diffuse writings quickly and in safety. As this paper shows, the
domestic setting likely offered Ottoman astronomers more independence and less scrutiny of the kind that ruined the
observatory of Istanbul.
Author: Scott Phelps
Title: Undertaking the Neuro: Brain Banks and the Postmortem Production of Mental Illness
Abstract: The practice of collecting and dissecting postmortem human brain tissue, though more than 300 years old,
reemerged in the 1970s in a relatively new form known as the "brain bank." Brain banks have steadily multiplied
throughout Europe and North America, abetted in part by new techniques of tissue preservation as well as an
increasing awareness of the limitations of brain imaging technologies. I propose to examine this recent history of
brain banking procedures, paying special attention to the renewed importance of material techniques to the mind
sciences, including the shipping and handling, cutting and cataloguing, freezing and fixing, and finally,
reconstituting of stray bits of brain matter involved in the day-to-day life of a tissue "bank." Building on recent
scholarship by Lederer, Swanson, and Gere, I would like to offer a bridge of sorts between their historical work and
that of the anthropologists, Dumit, Joyce, and Beaulieu, on brain imaging practices. To do so, I will argue that brain
banks have been one of the pervasive if less conspicuous ways in which we have institutionalized and memorialized,
in the name of science, a deeply cultural conviction that who we are, or who we were, is all in our heads.
Author: Christopher Phillips
Title: Maynard Amerine, Sensory Judgments, and the Statistical Measure of Expertise
Abstract: The evaluation of wine quality presents a conundrum for researchers who seek objective and replicable
results. How might a deeply--indeed paradigmatically--subjective judgment be made “scientific”? This was
precisely the problem a number of mid-century oenologists tried to solve through the institution of elaborate
technical apparatuses and statistical procedures. They sought, in short, to know taste objectively. This paper focuses
on the work of Maynard Amerine and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and in particular their
innovative use of sequential analysis within laboratory taste testing. Sequential analysis, developed as a statistical
procedure for economic decision-making during the Second World War, provided a method for making the results
of taste testing reliable and standard. Amerine’s trials created a laboratory setting in which judgment and sensory
experience were made objective. The statistical apparatus enabled researchers to claim that statistically significant
findings would reveal “real” differences in quality and sensory experience—as well as reveal which judges were
most capable of the task at hand. Statistical analysis enabled an objective measure of taste differences and quality
rankings. Amerine’s work suggested ways of understanding, and managing, the “problem” of subjectivity more
generally.
Author: Denise Phillips
Title: Advertising and Enlightenment: Commercial Communication and the Practical Sciences in
Eighteenth-Century and Early Nineteenth-Century Germany
Session: Producing Knowledge, Promoting Products: Advertising, Commercial Communication
and the Practical Sciences in Comparative Global Perspective, 1750-1950 (Sunday, November
22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: The Enlightenment was famously enamored with useful knowledge. Much previous scholarship,
however, has questioned whether the eighteenth-century practical sciences actually had much meaningful impact on
economic life. According to one line of thought, enlightened efforts to create useful knowledge were merely elites’
well-intentioned but ineffectual attempts to meddle in matters they only poorly understood; in another view, the
enlightened practical sciences were a cynical attempt to discipline the lower orders or to attract patronage for learned
elites. My paper examines enlightened journals and economic societies in German-speaking Europe between 1760
and 1830, and it argues that past scholars have missed an important link that bound these forums to practical
economic life. The history of enlightened networks of communication can also be usefully understood as part of the
history of modern advertising. Among their other functions, enlightened journals provided a venue for the statusappropriate promotion of products for sale. In this context, a reputation as a trustworthy purveyor of goods and a
reputation as an enlightened expert were often coproduced. My paper explores this aspect of eighteenth-century
enlightened publishing, and then ends with an examination of the early nineteenth-century career of Albrecht Thaer,
an academic expert on sheep breeding who was also, in the moniker assigned him by his contemporaries, the “King
of the Wool Market.”
Author: Danielle Picard
Title: Selling (Out?) Science with H. G. Wells’ Things to Come
Abstract: In his 1936 film Things to Come, H. G. Wells depicted the rise of a technocratic socialist society that
overcame war and pestilence by devoting resources to science and “progress.” Wells wanted his first foray into film
to build upon the legacy he created with his prophetic scientific romances. His specific blend of politics, science,
and socialism permeates the film with its rejection of nationalism, capitalism, and petty competition. This poster
presentation considers the advertising directed at theater managers to promote their showings of Things to Come. It
will use images from two of the film’s advertising guides to examine how the film studio suggested using scientific
instruments and appeals to science to lure film-going audiences. Specifically, I examine the suggested theater
decorations, “street stunts,” and shop window tie-ups to answer questions concerning the role of advertisements in
the construction of scientific knowledge. Given Wells’ role as a science educator, writer, and public scientist who
made regular radio broadcasts on the BBC, I argue that the advertising that accompanied Things to Come should be
examined as an extension of the film’s didactic message about science in world politics. Further, I argue that the use
of science in film advertising shapes non-specialists’ understanding and imagination of science and its role in world
politics.
Author: Jim Porter
Title: The American High School Today: James Bryant Conant and the Marshalling of Talent
Abstract: This paper has grown from documents in the James Bryant Conant collection which suggest the need to
reevaluate his 1959 study, The American High School Today. Here, Conant constructed an actionable vision of an
American high school more rationally ordered around presumed individual differences in intelligence. Internal
documents related to the production of this study reveal that “intelligence” (or “aptitude,” “I.Q.”) served various
functions. It worked as a scientific measure of worth structuring the study’s proposals, and as a political trope to
assuage fears—generated by the National Defense Education Act--about federal involvement in local school
systems. With “intelligence,” Conant fashioned a tool that bridged divides between ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative,’ and
‘federal/national’ and ‘local/provincial.’ Though Conant scarcely mentioned “race,” I argue his proposal to more
rigorously order schools around presumed individual differences in “intelligence” was also a tacit attempt to ease
fears among whites about school desegregation in the years after Brown v. Board. Further I hold this report should
be viewed less as a “personal study” by Conant (as many have assumed), and more as an inter-institutional
collaboration between Carnegie, the Educational Testing Service and the National Education Association, with
Conant serving as the project’s highly visible executor. This paper is a part of larger project tracing how
“intelligence” as an idea was constructed and redefined from 1945-1975. My analysis presumes “intelligence” is not
an ahistorical or organically determined given, but rather a nexus of assumptions, practices and performances that
shape-shift over time in response to cultural exigencies.
Author: Theodore Porter
Title: "In Opposition to All My Prepossessions": Data, Ratios, and the Evidence of Medical
Mendelism
Abstract: So much has been written about the battles of biometricians and Mendelians that historians have failed to
notice their fundamental similarity. In the years from 1900 to 1915, and even for decades more, the crucial evidence
of a Mendelian trait was nothing other than the appearance of an appropriate ratio between presence and absence of
a Mendelian trait, most famously the All-Holy Three to One. Especially in the Davenport circle, it was common to
claim astonishment and to speak of a reluctant capitulation to conclusions "suggested by the data themselves."
(Goddard) We see then that Mendelism was biometry with other ends, and to a degree with different techniques. In
Britain and Germany as well as the US, particularly in relation to human heredity, the parties fought mainly about
numbers. When was it appropriate to combine data, and how close a match could you legitimately expect between
prediction and results? How close did you have to be to a correct classification for the numbers to be meaningful at
all, and what should you do when the data did not cleanly segregate? As Spencer and Paul have shown, many of
what now appear as the most absurd claims for one-factor traits were accepted by first-rank biologists and even
statisticians (Fisher) on no more evidence than a ratio arising from numbers that had been bitterly controverted.
Author: John Powers
Title: The Usefulness of Thermometers: Instruments and the Chemical Arts in EighteenthCentury Britain
Abstract: By the middle of the eighteenth century, many philosophically-minded chemists, such as Peter Shaw,
George Martine, Cromwell Mortimer, and others had proposed the incorporation of thermometers and pyrometers
into the chemical arts. Practical arts, such as metallurgy, distilling, brewing, and pharmacy, they argued, would be
vastly improved by the precise measurement and control of heat in the processes used in these arts. By making this
claim, the chemists implied or, in some cases, explicitly stated that the use of thermometers was superior to
traditional artisanal practices, in which the artisan used his trained senses to read and interpret empirical signs
produced by matter during his processes. In effect, these programs advocated for the importation of the values and
methods of experimental philosophy into the arts, notably in their call to use experiments to determine the optimum
degree of heat to be used in various processes and then to rely on the instruments used to determine that optimum to
control the process itself. In this paper, I will focus on two cases – Michael Combrune’s publications on brewing and
Josiah Wedgwood’s work on pyrometers for pottery-making, and will discuss both the propositions and claims made
by each as well as the ways in which both programs challenged traditional artisanal practices.
Author: Janina Priebe
Title: Studying Fish while Naturalizing Markets? Debates over Far North Atlantic Fisheries
Development in the Early Twentieth Century
5:45 PM)
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to illuminate how scientific knowledge about the marine environment was used
to mount arguments for economic deregulation within a Nordic colonial context. The analysis begins with the
comprehensive plan that a private consortium submitted to the Danish Home Office in October 1905, one of several
private initiatives that demanded the end of the Danish state’s strict monopoly on resource use and trade in
Greenland on the basis of mismanagement by the colonial administration. Christian Fredrik Drechsel (1854-1927),
the Danish government’s consultant on fisheries and representative at the International Council for the Exploration
of the Sea (ICES), contributed a report on Arctic char in Greenland’s coastal waters. Drechsel stated that knowledge
about the fish and its commercial potential was still fragmentary, but that the industrial expansion of fisheries was
nonetheless inevitable. The absence of firm knowledge could fuel visions of prosperity that derived legitimacy from
the assumption that science would enhance development. The incomplete state of fisheries science only affirmed the
scope for economic growth, which was posited as an inevitable and natural outcome of such research, while also
serving as an indictment of the shortcomings of Danish state’s administration. The paper concludes with reflections
on the political role played by science in legitimizing or contesting the authority of state authority over colonial
spaces – and the growing recognition that rational administration of natural resources was a hallmark of legitimate
rule.
Author: Greg Priest
Title: Darwin’s Tree of Life
Abstract: In 1837, Charles Darwin opened a notebook in which he proposed to explore the “Transmutation of
Species.” He suggested that “organized beings represent a tree, irregularly branched” and sketched a simple drawing
of a tree to illustrate the idea. From this seed was to grow the only illustration included in editions of On the Origin
of Species published during Darwin’s lifetime—his “tree of life” diagram. Scholars have explored how Darwin used
the tree of life metaphor and its associated diagram to explain and persuade. Darwin, however, used his diagram not
only as a rhetorical tool, but as a way to think his way into how evolutionary processes operate. By tracing the
changes in Darwin’s tree diagram from his first tentative sketches to its final, published form, we can gain insight
not only into Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, but also into his fundamental metaphysical commitments. Finally,
exploring how the tree diagram related to specific questions such as the role of contingency in evolution and the
level(s) at which selection operates, we can better understand how Darwin addressed these questions. Darwin's tree
of life thus serves as a window into his thought, and as a case study in the role of metaphor and visual representation
in science.
Author: Greg Priest
Title: Envisioning Nature: Four Competing 19th-Century Diagrams of the Living World
Abstract: In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin included a single visual image, his “tree of life” diagram of
the operation of evolution by natural selection. Although Darwin’s diagram is today the most recognized visual
representation of the living world of its period, the first half of the 19th century witnessed the creation of a number of
alternative graphical representations of animate nature that were, at the time, equally well-known and equally
influential. I examine Darwin’s diagram in the context of three competing visuals: Macleay’s quinarian diagrams,
Strickland’s maps of the affinities of birds and Lamarck’s diagrams of transmutation of species. All four authors
had a heuristic and rhetorical intent in publishing their diagrams; each used their visuals to explain their theories and
to persuade their readers to accept them. My interest, however, is in the basic ontological and epistemological
commitments that serve as the foundations for the diagrams. Each of the diagrams embodies an implicit theory of
both the nature of the fundamental entities that constitute the living world and of what kind of knowledge a
diagrammatic representation of that world can and should attempt to convey. By attending to the ontological and
epistemological understructure of these visuals, we can better understand the alternative ways of envisioning nature
that existed during the period, and develop a clearer picture of exactly how Darwin differed from earlier naturalists
and where his thought was more continuous with that of his predecessors.
Author: Valentina Pugliano
Title: Cure, Talk, Eat, Listen: The Life of Diplomatic Physicians in the Venetian Fondaci in the
Ottoman Empire
November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: In 1547, the physician Cornelio Bianchi returned to Venice after spending four years between
Damascus and Tripoli of Syria in the service of the Venetian consuls. Along with gifts for his extended family,
Bianchi brought back two journals filled with accounts and observations, one of which has survived. Far from being
an occasional traveller to the Ottoman Empire, Bianchi was part of a little-known network of medical provision set
up by the Venetian Republic across the eastern Mediterranean and wider Levant. Enlisting Christian and Jewish
practitioners, this network became a major circuit for mobilizing antiquarian, natural historical and Islamic medical
knowledge and practices between Europe and the Near East in the medieval and early modern periods. Drawing on
Bianchi’s notes, this talk examines one of the spaces at the heart of this exchange, the fondaco (fundūq/han), where
the Venetian consulates were based. Modelled after the caravanserais dotting the Eurasian trade routes, this was a
place of trade, diplomacy and litigation, but also one of conviviality and sociability that afforded the transplanted
Europeans and their doctors access to the Empire’s intellectual world. In this it was complemented by the doctors’
medical practice and the encounters it fostered with the local communities of Muslims, Jews and Christians. I will
argue that the fondaco’s aural environment, often mediated by translators, not only derived part of its etiquette from
established modes of social and intellectual gathering across Islamic lands (from majalis to coffeehouses), but also
affected the nature and format of the knowledge transmitted.
Author: Valerie Racine
Title: Micro-RNA Research: A Case for Reductionism in Post-Genomic Molecular Genetics
Abstract: In this paper, I describe the history of micro-RNA discovery, bringing attention to the important
contributions made by Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun in their research on C. elegans. Micro-RNAs are small noncoding RNA molecules involved in transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. I focus on
the different methods that biologists have used to identify micro-RNAs and their targets, and to infer their biological
functions. The case study of micro-RNA research demonstrates several characteristics common to the epistemic
practices in gene expression research, some of which have continued from the research tradition in bacterial genetics
that led to early models of gene regulation in the 1960s, as well as others that have broken with that tradition. Many
have described this new era of research in post-genomic molecular genetics as holistic or anti-reductionist, to
contrast it with earlier research in molecular genetics. I argue that research on micro-RNA depicts as much of a
reductionist strategy as earlier work in molecular genetics. Historians and philosophers have confounded emergence
with anti-reductionism, and keeping these categories distinct has important consequences for how we understand
and evaluate the development of research in molecular genetics.
Author: Joanna Radin
Title: History, Science and the Politics of Return
Abstract: What does it mean to relinquish one’s research materials? Beginning in the 1950s, geneticists and
physical anthropologists began to collect blood from communities they understood to be endangered. Around the
turn of the century, members of certain indigenous communities who had not, in fact, disappeared, demanded that
their blood be destroyed or returned. More recently, the Peruvian government sued Yale University, whose Peabody
Museum for Natural History maintained a huge range of materials from Machu Picchu. These items included both
human and non-human remains, including several type specimens In researching the history of both of these kinds
of contestations over the appropriate use and disposition of biological materials, I have become interested in the
unique role historians of science have to play in documenting the history of what anthropologist Jim Clifford has
called, “returns.” In my contribution to the roundtable, I offer some reflections on the justice issues involved with
returns and how historians of science might approach episodes that involve the dissolution, rather than the creation,
of collections.
Author: Dhruv Raina
Title: Civilizations and Diversity: Explorations in the Historiography of Sanskrit Mathematical
Tradition (1900-1950)
9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: The historiographies of mathematics for long was preoccupied with the question of origins. The diversity
of mathematical traditions was subsequently understood in terms of the dichotomies of the algorithmic and
geometric. The early histories of Indian mathematics produced in Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth century
were farmed often enough by this dichotomy, and historians of mathematics subsequently were constantly
attempting to redress or balance assertions and claims about the deficit on one side of the register or the over
development on the other side. A second set of concerns had to with the characterization of the tradition as either
marked by the presence of “proof.” In this paper I shall attempt to examine the historiography of Indian mathematics
as evident in the work of Indian scholars writing in the first half of the twentieth century as they produced began
producing histories of mathematics. I shall try to argue that within the narrative of a singular origin of mathematics,
wherever that origin might be, the diversity of mathematical practices was comprehended in terms of these
dichotomies. The deeper question, deriving from the contemporaneous concerns of historian skeptical of the concept
of civilization, is of course that conceptual categories inherited by historians of mathematics, such as “civilizations”
and “civilizational” styles tended to limit or overdetermine the internal diversity of mathematical traditions. This
paper is part of a larger concern with travelling ideas and concepts.
Author: Ramya M. Rajagopalan
Title: Variations on a Chip: Polymorphisms, Microarrays and Genomic Studies of Health and
Disease
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In the past decade, human genetic variation has become an intense site of inquiry for biomedical studies
of disease susceptibility. Its roots lie in early genomics work of the 1990s, when researchers began to interpret the
meanings and implications of different regions of the genome for human health and disease. Although the consensus
emerging from the Human Genome Project was that humans were largely similar in their genetic makeup,
researchers identified several types of genetic variation, among which the single nucleotide polymorphism, or SNP,
has become most prominent. In this paper, we trace the technological, methodological and conceptual developments
in the 1990s that established SNPs as key focal points in the genome for complex disease studies. We do this by
examining the development of the “SNP chip,” a high-throughput technology for assessing genetic differences
among people. This technology was built through a collaborative effort involving academic labs, governmental
research institutes, biotech and pharmaceutical partners in the USA, who mobilized public catalogs of SNP variation
contained in dbSNP and The SNP Consortium as well as the International Haplotype Map. We trace how the idea of
population differences, encoded on SNP chips, encountered hurdles in the delineation of human groups, and in
unraveling the complexities of disease biology within the limits of reductionist genetic views of disease etiology. A
careful examination of the genesis of the SNP chip illuminates the historical roots of the hurdles that continue to
constrain contemporary genomic medicine.
Author: Peter Ramberg
Title: The Education and Exile of the Chemist Johannes Wislicenus (1835-1902)
Abstract: By the middle of the nineteenth century, the career paths of aspiring academics in the German States had
settled into a fairly rigid passage through the academic hierarchy, beginning with the passage of the Abitur at a
Gymnasium, and proceeding from university student to Ordinary Professor. A notable exception to this path was the
academic chemist Johannes Wislicenus (1835-1902), whose early career was unusual among German chemists
specifically and perhaps among German academics generally. Although he achieved a great deal of success,
attaining the rank of ordinary professor of chemistry at the universities of Zürich (1866), Würzburg (1872) and
Leipzig (1885), his early life is unusual in many respects. Wislicenus did not go to Gymnasium or obtain an Abitur,
and, as the eldest son of an infamous radical theologian, spent three years in exile in the United States. He completed
work for his dissertation and Habilitation at the rather undistinguished University of Halle in 1859, and climbed the
academic hierarchy in a single place (Zürich). This paper will argue that many aspects of Wislicenus’ life, including
his interest in chemistry as a Wissenschaft, his future relationships with students and colleagues, and his German
nationalism, can be explained by the unique circumstances of his early life as the son of an infamous pastor,
attendance at a Realschule, and his exile in the United States and Switzerland. Wislicenus’ early life, furthermore,
shows that routes into the German academic world at mid-century were perhaps not as rigid as commonly assumed.
Author: Alisha Rankin
Title: Poison Antidotes, Panaceas, and Proof in Sixteenth-Century Europe
Abstract: This paper examines attempts to establish the efficacy of poison antidotes and panaceas in the sixteenth
century. Two overlapping trends led to a greater focus on antidotes. First, broad healing properties began to be
attributed to many antidotes, a characteristic that previously had been limited to the ubiquitous theriac and to cures
for plague. Treatises on bezoar stone, unicorn horn, and terra sigillata, all originally used primarily for poison, began
to emphasize their expansive potency. Second, a host of new antidotes hit the market, leading to a greater number of
available possibilities for curing poison and disease. Some, like Caravita’s oil, were tied to a specific person; others,
like Peruvian bezoar or Silesian terra sigillata, were new iterations of familiar antidotes. All claimed to work.
Increasingly, physicians and other healers engaged in attempts to “prove” the efficacy of these antidotes by testing
them on living subjects in contrived trials. If an animal or human survived the attempted poisoning, it was seen as
strong evidence that the antidote was efficacious, and not merely for poison. Eyewitness accounts of such trials
circulated in manuscripts and were included in highly regarded medical works such as Matthioli’s herbal.
Concurrently, alchemists began to create medicines that they claimed were cure-alls. They, too, attempted to
“prove” the efficacy of their medicines, through eyewitness and experiential accounts. Traditional Galenic
physicians, however, rejected their claims, even as they promoted eyewitness accounts of antidote trials. These
debates also attempted to establish epistemological differences between antidote cure-alls and alchemical panaceas.
Author: William Rankin
Title: Spatial History and Geographic Knowledge
Abstract: For most historians, doing spatial history means investigating spatial practice. It means asking how space
– whether at the scale of a room or the scale of a continent – was reconfigured by historical actors and how the
physical environment channeled action down some paths and not others. But there is another version of spatial
history as well, which is more focused on the history of spatial knowledge, especially in fields like geography,
cartography, and certain kinds of statistics. Usually these two ways of historicizing space have minimal overlap:
historians of the laboratory and historians of cartography are, for the most part, two different sorts of people. In my
comments, however, I want to challenge this distinction and argue that all spatial history needs to grapple with both
spatialities at once – both space as a field of action, but also space as a form of knowledge. This has been important
in my own work (which includes both laboratories and mapping), but it can apply to a wide range of other topics as
well. Crucially, I will argue that spatial knowledge is often implicit; it comes in many forms and is installed in a
variety of everyday objects and techniques. Seeing space itself as an epistemological problem allows the history of
science to approach well-known spatial topics in new ways – everywhere from environmental or urban history to the
history of technology, capitalism, or the body.
Author: Lisa Raphals
Title: Comparative Views of Human Taxonomies
Abstract: Human taxonomies of the “temperaments” or “characters” of Western and Asian peoples informed a
broad range of thinking from the 18th through 20th centuries, including medicine and the young disciplines of
psychology and sociology. This paper examines comparative views of human taxonomies in ancient medical texts,
texts on the selection of individual talent, and 18th through 20th century accounts. Part 1 briefly frames the pre-19th
century background in the taxonomies of Francois Bernier (1625–1688), Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) and the
discussions of China by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and 19th century discussion by Georg W F Hegel (1770-1831)
and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). Part 2 contrasts these accounts with human taxonomies in ancient Chinese and
Greek sources, with particular attention to accounts of European and Asian peoples, flora and fauna in the
Hippocratic text “Airs Waters and Places,” accounts of “barbarians” by Herodotus and Aristotle, accounts of human
difference in the Chinese medical Classic Huangdi neijing, and the rhetoric of human taxonomies in such texts as
Liu Shao's 劉卲 (+3rd century) Ren wu zhi 人物志 (Treatise on Human Abilities) and the evidence of excavated
texts. Juxtaposing the modern and ancient evidence helps us ask how comparisons were carried out, by whom and
for what intellectual and social purposes. These taxonomies are important because, in both ancient societies and in
the modern world, they inform a wide variety of practical assessments of human nature(s) and human abilities.
Author: Nicolas Rasmussen
Title: Intellectual Property, Litigation, and Regulation in Early Biotech
Abstract: Far more than merely a claim of ownership to an independently defined invention or discovery, patents
and the patent law are an arena in which scientists (together with commercial and other actors) define what is
discovered, what credit is deserved for which discovery, and what the state's interest in a research field should be.
Thus when scientists take part as active players, IP law becomes a way that they can strive to enlist other social
institutions in regulating their own research community as well as the commercial fields connected to it. These
issues are illustrated by discussing some of the speaker's research and his recent book, Gene Jockeys, on the early
era of genetic engineering.
Author: Jessica Ratcliff
Title: The East India Company, the Company’s Museum, and the Political Economy of Natural
History in the Early Nineteenth Century
Session: Science and Empire: New Agents, Spaces, and Connections (Friday, November 20,
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: At the turn of the nineteenth century, at its headquarters in the City of London, the East India Company
established a new museum and library. By mid-century, the museum had grown to contain one of Europe’s most
extensive collections of the natural history, arts and sciences of Asia. This paper uses the early history of the
Company’s Museum, focusing in particular on its natural history collections, to explore the material relationship
between scientific practice and the imperial political economy. Much of the collections were gathered in the wake of
military campaigns, trade missions or administrative surveys. In this talk I will focus on the military context, first
describing some of the ways in which the early decades of the Company’s collections were shaped by military
engagement during the Napoleonic Wars. Brief case studies will be drawn from the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War
(1799) and the British invasion of Dutch Java (1811). I will then use these examples of wartime acquisitions in
natural history to raise some questions about how contemporaries may have then understood and engaged in
collecting as both a philosophical and a political economic activity.
Author: Jessica Ratcliff
Title: The Great Data Divergence
Abstract: Bringing the history of data a bit further back in time to the early nineteenth century, and applying the
terms “data” or “information” in a way appropriate to the pre-digital era, I would like to consider whether the history
of data might be historiographically situated within studies of the material culture of science, and how doing so
might shift disciplinary boundaries in an interesting way. In thinking about these questions, I will draw on my
research into collecting by imperial institutions in nineteenth-century Britain.
Author: Fernanda Rebelo-Pinto
Title: Bacteriology and Immigrants’ Selection Between Europe and Brazil in the Late 19th and
Early 20th Centuries
Abstract: Araguaya steam docked in the port of Rio de Janeiro in 1910. Araguaya was a luxurious ship in which
there were not only distinguished passengers travelling in first class, but also 1028 immigrants in the basement of
the third. It used to make the route between America and Europe. A cholera epidemic had spread during this
crossing. Although everyone was travelling together, the bacteriological diagnosis indicated the presence of vibrio
cholerae only among passengers of the third class. The others received the diagnosis of cholerina, a kind of mild
cholera, benign, mild diarrhea (Chernoviz, 1904). They had the same symptoms, vomiting and diarrhea, for different
diseases: for the first class, cholerina, for the third class, cholera. The bacteriological diagnosis brought a greater
taxonomic organization (Rosenberg, 1977). It allowed the immigrants’ selection to be more precise and rational.
Even though all passengers presented the same clinical frame, the presence of the vibrio inside the organism
characterized the cholera sickness. According to the former screening model, the Medical Service could only
identify the disease through body observation. If the immigrants presented apparent symptoms or visible lesions, the
medical inspection line could exclude them. However, the emergence of the bacteriological diagnosis created a new
situation: there would be exclusions if they would be carrying the germ, albeit not presenting any visible symptoms.
This talk will discuss the problem of the disease`s classification and people`s categorization by biomedicine in the
specific case of the immigration process and the institutionalization of bacteriology in Brazil.
Author: Katherine Reinhart
Title: ‘By Their Own Hands’: The Drawings of the Early Académie Royale des Sciences
Abstract: Communicating knowledge both verbally and visually was integral to the earliest processes of knowledge
production in the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences, founded in 1666. The archives of the Académie preserve
hundreds of manuscript drawings, sketches, and diagrams created by the natural philosophers in the process of their
work. Often these drawings depict first impressions or the working out of concepts or physical principals. The
images provide a visual record of how members of the Académie perceived the subject matter and technical
parameters of natural philosophy in this period, and how they engaged and grappled with their individual and
collective pursuits. This collection of drawings, therefore, provides invaluable access to more ephemeral and
intimate moments that are integral to the processes of scientific conduct and knowledge production in seventeenthcentury Europe. I argue these drawings were not a mere by-product of the Académie’s pursuits but a constitutive
part of their technical practice and the foundation of their knowledge claims. The numerous drawings in the archive
of the Académie des Sciences not only represent a scientific subject, they reflect the process of intellectual
interrogation itself. This talk will use a variety of case studies to show how image-making played a central role in
the collaborative experimental culture of the early Académie des Sciences.
Author: Maria Rentetzi
Title: Getting the Radiation Dose Correct: The Politics of Radiation Dosimetry and the Role of
the IAEA
Abstract: Getting the radiation dose correct is of strategic importance for a number of interrelated actors: the
manufacturers of radiation equipment and of the specialized computer software that these machines require; the
physicists, radiobiologists, specialists in nuclear medicine and experts in dosimetry in the laboratory; the medical
physicists, dosimetrists, radiation oncologists, technicians, and health care workers in the medical clinic; and of
course, the cancer patients themselves. What is at stake after all is human health. This paper focuses on a major
actor, the Dosimetry Laboratory of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which since the late 1950s has
been one of the most influential players in implementing dosimetric methods worldwide and in establishing
dosimetric protocols or codes of practice in radiotherapy. The Dosimetry laboratory exists from the Agency’s very
beginning. Operating in the shadow of a highly political organization for half a century, the Dosimetry Lab deserves
to be acknowledged for its present services to the world but ought to be mentioned for its important history as well.
The idea of adding a research laboratory to a diplomatic agency did not develop as smoothly as one might expect.
During the IAEA’s Preparatory Commission in 1957 it had already become a controversial issue. Tracing this
interesting hisotry, this paper argues that although science has been perceived as mostly “above” politics, in the case
of the IAEA’s Dosimetry Laboratory science and international politics have mutually and constructively influenced
each other.
Author: Linda Marie Richards
Title: Exposing Human Rights
Abstract: Nuclear history is often represented by historians as a successive series of internal nation state
controversies over fallout, nuclear power plants, and uranium mining, or an assessment of risks in micromicrocuries
of strontium 90. However, nuclear history, especially radiation health safety science, exposes the US Atomic Energy
Commission’s (AEC) domination of the definition and development of human rights that promotes contamination
worldwide.
Radiation safety science is inextricably bound with human rights. US scientists like Willard Libby of the AEC
compared artificial man made radiation to naturally occurring background radiation to create what became an
enduring global imposed paradigm of safety reassurance. This was despite the lack of scientific consensus or
democratic consent. Primary sources show how the US AEC with UN agencies deployed their AEC interpretation of
radiological contamination. This was done as a project to provide “human rights to education, medicine and
development.” Guidelines for acceptable exposure were instituted as fact via UN agency technical experts who
crafted national legislation in developing countries. With the international relationships and access provided by
UNESCO, WHO and the IAEA, nuclear modernity was heralded for its promise to fulfill human rights utopian
dreams. This subsumed the dystopian reality of irreversible radiological contamination as an intergenerational
irrevocable taint which silently violated human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
Author: Sarah Richardson
Title: Intergenerationality: Conceptions of Time in Non-Genetic Theories of Intergenerational
Inheritance
Abstract: Biologists have long been intrigued by the notion that parents might pass traits to offspring that can
persist for several generations but are not encoded in DNA. Most recently taken up within the science of epigenetics,
non-genetic theories of intergenerational inheritance posit that phenotypic features of parents and aspects of their
social and physical environment can be transmitted from generation to generation, with consequences for our
understanding of heredity, development, and health. Such theories operate on a timescale of generations. The
concept of a “generation,” as it is used in non-genetic theories of intergenerational inheritance, is a historically
locatable construct with origins in the mid-twentieth-century social sciences. This paper theorizes the concept of
“intergenerationality” as representing a particular conception of temporality that implicitly sources historically
specific ideas of control, agency, and responsibility.
Author: Marsha Richmond
Title: Epigenetics: The Cases of T. H. Huxley and Richard Goldschmidt
– 1:15 PM)
Abstract: In his 1853 criticism of German cell theory, Thomas Henry Huxley laid out a clear epigenetic conception
of cell structure and functioning. Richard Goldschmidt, in challenging Thomas Hunt Morgan’s Mendelian
chromosome theory of genetics after 1915, put forward an epigenetic conception of the chromosome organization
and action that accounted for development as well as heredity. What commonalities can we identify in Huxley’s and
Goldschmidt’s rejection of preformationist views of life?
Author: Adam Richter
Title: Biblical History in the Natural Philosophy of John Wallis (1616-1703)
Abstract: For John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Mathematics at Oxford and Presbyterian minister, the Bible was a
valuable source of knowledge that complemented empirical and experimental evidence. This paper considers two
cases that demonstrate the interaction between biblical and natural evidence in Wallis’s thought. The first is his
critique of Robert Hooke’s theory of fossils, which depended on dramatic changes in ocean levels throughout the
history of the Earth. In addition to raising physical and astronomical objections, Wallis finds biblical evidence
indicating that the geography of the Earth has not changed since the time of Noah’s flood. In the second case, Wallis
discusses whether humans are naturally herbivorous or carnivorous with the anatomist Edward Tyson. Here Wallis
considers both the anatomy of the human digestive system and biblical passages that suggest humans have always
eaten animals. These cases will inform a twofold argument. Firstly, I argue that, while Wallis has mainly attracted
the attention of historians of mathematics, he has an important place in the history of science and religion. Secondly,
the particular insight emerging from these two case studies is that, for Wallis, historical evidence from the Bible
contributes to the development of novel ideas in natural philosophy. This is especially clear when Wallis addresses
the natural human diet and, considering evidence from both Scripture and Nature, devises a solution that redefines
what it means to be an herbivore or a carnivore.
Author: Marlise Rijks
Title: The Epistemology of Collecting: Artists’ and Artisans’ Collections in Early Seventeenth
Century Antwerp
Abstract: This paper considers the epistemology of collecting. The central claim is that users of early modern
collections were invited to observe, investigate, depict, converse about, and question individual objects and their
interrelationships, and as such, collections became catalysts of knowledge. The case studies are the collections of
artists and artisans in early seventeenth-century Antwerp. Systematic archival investigations of the probate
inventories of four groups (goldsmiths, apothecaries, engravers, and painters), yields a rich image of Antwerp’s
culture of collecting. Of particular interest are the processes through which collected objects became sources of
artisanal, artistic, or scientific knowledge and innovation.
Often avid collectors (but largely ignored in the research on collecting), artists and artisans played a vital role in
early modern knowledge economies characterized by an increasing market for material objects that were considered
to be transmitters of knowledge. Individual objects (naturalia, instruments, drawings, paintings, jewels) as such
could raise all kinds of questions, but as objects became part of a collection, the number of questions multiplied
exponentially: the potentially endless interrelationships between objects were catalysts in the dissemination of
knowledge. The fact that we cannot, and are not supposed to, establish one definitive interpretation about these
collections, should not prevent us from understanding the context in which collections were amassed. In Antwerp,
that context was the Counter Reformation, an intellectual climate that underpinned the possibility of sacred material
and miraculous nature, the physicality of devotion, and the vital role of imagery as a way to gain knowledge of
God’s Creation.
Author: Lissa Roberts
Title: Situating Chemistry, 1760-1840
Session: Chemistry in (Practical) Context: Connecting Eighteenth-Century Chemistry to its Uses
Abstract: This presentation will highlight the outcomes of a three-year collaborative research project among
historians from eight countries, directed toward examining chemistry as a contextually situated, hybrid field of
material and knowledge production. (For details, visit our website.) The presentation will have two parts. The first
will sketch the new understanding of chemistry that has grown out of this project. In brief, it offers a challenging
alternative to the growing literature on the 'industrial enlightenment', the narrative of which privileges mechanically
based, innovation-driven industrialization, seen as most successful in laissez faire contexts. Key terms to be
discussed are productivity, sustainability, materiality and governance. The second part entails the presentation of the
project's database, which allows researchers to track the location of and relations between sites of chemistry around
the world, along with the people, objects, materials and activities that were situated in and moved between them.
Following a demonstration of the database's capabilities, a general invitation will be issued for others to participate
in its continued growth and use.
Author: Meghan Roberts
Title: Spontaneous Human Combustion, Criminal Trials, and Medical Expertise in
Enlightenment France
Abstract: In 1726, Jean Millet discovered what remained of the charred corpse of his wife. The local criminal court
ordered Millet subject to “the question,” a euphemism for torture. The verdict was, per routine, appealed to a higher
court, which imprisoned Millet for six months and then ordered him free, but under perpetual investigation. Despite
the unusual corpse, this was a standard trajectory for an eighteenth-century murder trial. Less standard, however,
was the interest expressed by physicians. Nicolas LeCat, a onetime guest of the Millet inn and a well-known
physician, published a much-sensationalized version of the case in a treatise on spontaneous human combustion. In
LeCat’s telling, Millet – an upstanding citizen – had had nothing to do with his wife’s death. Rather, it was her own
fondness for drink that had made her body susceptible to spontaneous combustion. LeCat claimed that Millet had
been sentenced to death by the lower court until an “enlightened” upper court paid heed to the testimony of medical
experts and realized the true nature of what had happened. In subsequent retellings, LeCat featured as the star
witness, heroically using his medical knowledge to save an innocent man. Historians have relied on these published
accounts as evidence of the growing importance of medical expertise. This paper, by contrast, will explore the
discrepancies between the historical case and subsequent retellings by physicians. While medical experts were
important to criminal trials, savants depicted themselves as more central to the legal process than they actually
were.
Author: Peder Roberts
Title: Science and Environmental Authority on Interwar Svalbard
5:45 PM)
Abstract: This paper explores how the production of knowledge concerning the geology, topography, and zoology
of Svalbard facilitated Norwegian political authority during the interwar years. Located between the northern coast
of Norway and the North Pole, the archipelago was long considered a “no man’s land.” Sovereignty was awarded to
Norway in the peace conferences that followed the First World War, albeit under an international treaty that granted
equal economic rights to other states. The argument has two strands. First, as in so many other parts of the world,
surveys produced artifacts of political authority such as maps. In the case of Svalbard, concerns for the maintenance
of Norwegian sovereignty led to the regulation of non-Norwegian scientists – ostensibly for reasons of safety and
efficiency. Second, specific research conclusions could provide a foundation for “rational” administration, as in the
case of studies of reindeer populations. The moratorium on reindeer hunting that followed this study could provide
evidence of superior administrative capacity based on superior knowledge of the archipelago’s environment – and in
turn reinforcing the need for the Norwegian state to wield regulatory power to ensure enforcement. A virtuous circle
resulted in which Norwegians controlled the production of knowledge concerning Svalbard and its environment,
which in turn legitimized Norway’s authority over the archipelago (and the people and animals that resided upon
it).
Author: Samuel Robinson
Title: De-mobbing British Oceanography: the Politics and Networks behind the Founding of the
National Institute of Oceanography
Abstract: This paper will chart the establishment of the National Institute of Oceanography between 1944 and 1951.
Split into three distinct ‘rounds’ or periods, an analogy used by Whitehall Civil Servants during the period, the
conversion of oceanographic research activity from military frameworks to civilian frameworks is explored and
analyzed using extensive archival investigation. That war time work would continue was by no means inevitable in
1946 when the financial cost of the war and the governments preoccupation with establishing a welfare state, whilst
maintaining a global empire, left little space for the development of non-nuclear government science policy. The
eventual institute gained Royal Navy funding, but not without a fierce debate which almost led to the scheme being
scraped entirely. That the institute would combine the oceanographic interests of the Royal Navy Hydrography
office, Oceanography Research group and the Discovery Committee, was never foreseen in the original proposal,
made in 1944. Nor did the original proposal outline exactly how the institute would fit in existing frameworks. All
of these debates are brought to light in this paper highlighting the breath of concern and interest in oceanography in
Britain in the immediate post-war. Using ministerial notes and associated marginalia this paper provides a window
on the original austerity Whitehall, illuminating the internal politics and competition amongst departments. This
paper will challenge the historiographical trend to simplify notions of ‘government’ and the ‘civil service’, arguing
that the civil service cannot be taken as one entity but several competing branches.
Author: Francesca Rochberg
Title: The Representation of Phenomena in Babylonian Astronomical Models
Abstract: Models, whether mechanical, kinematic, evolutionary, computational, heuristic, analogue, or other kinds,
have long prevailed as a tool of science. Babylonian astronomical models provide one major source of evidence for
model-making and for thinking about the world with models. If we ask, however, in what way Babylonian
astronomical models represent, we must realize that a relation to the idea of nature is not a part of the answer.
Babylonian models can nonetheless be shown to have an anchor in the world, although that world was not construed
as a cosmological whole in the same way we regard “nature,” nor did these models purport to describe the physical
nature of celestial motion in any literal sense. They were not aimed at explaining nature, but belong to a different
landscape of knowledge that connected the prediction and explanation of phenomena in a different way. This paper
will explore the various ways that Babylonian astronomical models represent, and how this representation is
altogether independent of the idea of nature.
Author: Kristin Roebuck
Title: Davenport in Japan: (Broken) Circuits in Transnational Genetics and Eugenics after World
War II
Abstract: It is often said that eugenics vanished as a global force after World War II, even as the notion of distinct
human “races,” let alone a hierarchy of races, was swiftly losing scientific credibility. Yet in Japan, conditions of
defeat and occupation heightened the relevance of “race hygiene” as a key to national survival and strength. Bereft
of a strong state to pin their hopes to, many scientists and laymen devoted themselves instead to a supposedly “pure”
Japanese “race.” Postwar geneticists, medical researchers, physical anthropologists, and others studied “mixedblood” children born to Japanese mothers of Western fathers (often members of the Allied armies) in order to prove
the essential otherness of these children and their inferiority to “pure-blood” Japanese. Comparison of the Japanese
and Western cases casts doubt not only on the notion that race-based eugenics fell out of the scientific mainstream
after World War II, but on the explanations usually given for what de-legitimization did occur. Most often, the
allegedly universal decline of scientific racism and eugenics is credited to outrage against Nazi atrocities or a
teleology of scientific progress. In fact, the crucial variables determining the fate of race science and eugenics are
the identities of scientific practitioners and their political commitments. In both Japan and the West, the identities,
politics, and racial attitudes of scientific practitioners depend upon local contingencies rather than universal trends.
Author: Sophia Roosth
Title: “Taken with a Grain of NaCl: Molecular Gastronomy and the Biochemistry of Cuisine”
Abstract: In this talk, I describe the French branch of a food movement called “molecular gastronomy.” Its
practitioners include physical chemists and biochemists who study food and chefs who apply their results. They
define molecular gastronomy as the application of the experimental sciences and laboratory tools to furthering the
culinary arts. In particular, I pay close attention to the relation of taste to science and to culinary heritage. What
happens to taste when scientists seek to formalize and universalize it? When they wrest taste away from its typical
domain in histories of foodways, heritage, and culture? And what becomes of French culinary connoisseurships,
cultural criteria already authorized as “natural,” when they may be simulated by the chemical legerdemain of
biochemistry? I explore what happens when chemicals are no longer simply components of flavor but are also used
as explanatory grounds for articulating the rich and evanescent experience of taste. Molecular gastronomy offers a
compelling example of how scientific practices and rationales sometimes percolate outside of professional scientific
fields, where they can become aestheticized and fetishized, commodified and consumed. Molecular gastronomers, I
conclude, codify the experience of taste by articulating it using a chemical vocabulary. They seek to identify a
rational and universal cooking schema that can systematize and explain taste using the rules of chemistry. Taste, for
them, is no longer the culmination of densely imbricated relations between foodways, local know-how, regional
ecologies, individual biography, and learned discernment. Instead, they imagine taste to be a mere side effect of
chemistry.
Author: Ricardo Roque
Title: Luso-colonial Race Science and the ‘Timor Anthropological Mission’, 1953-1974
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Between the mid-1930s and 1974 the Portuguese Overseas Scientific Board sponsored a set of
anthropological expeditions to the then Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia. The prefix “anthropological” could
stand for an eclectic and multi-disciplinary definition encompassing archaeology, linguistics, ethnography,
anthropometry, and so on. Yet here anthropology’s core meaning was dominantly physical and biological. The field
“Missions” were racialist in character. Using anthropometry, blood sampling and other bio-anthropological methods,
the expeditions were designed as surveys of the different racial types of indigenous populations under Portuguese
rule. This racialist focus persisted after World War II even when the Portuguese regime adopted a softer, so-called
“luso-tropical” or “Latin”, version of racial ideology that celebrated miscegenation and multiracialism as a sign of
benign colonization. However, in contrast to this benign “luso-tropical” vision, the Missions’ science conveyed
distinct bio-typologies with a strong colonial and nationalist imprint, rather than plastic visions of white/non-white
mixed-races. In this paper, I focus specifically on the case of the Timor Anthropological Mission developed between
1953 and 1974. I intend to discuss how a type of luso-colonial racial science could exist alongside “luso-tropicalist”
ideologies and how biological difference could continue to be articulated within a self-styled Portuguese theory of
affective colonial and racial communion.
Author: Thomas Rossetter
Title: John Keill (1671-1721) vs. the World-Makers: Physical Evidence for Special Providence
Abstract: The Oxford Natural Philosopher John Keill is best known for his role in the calculus priority dispute. He
was also involved in another prominent controversy, however: that surrounding clergyman Thomas Burnet’s Sacred
Theory of the Earth (1681). Burnet purported to trace the earth’s history by appeal to biblical events like the
Creation and the Flood for which he offered naturalistic explanations drawn from Cartesian philosophy. Dozens of
books and pamphlets emerged either attacking or praising Burnet or proposing alternative hypotheses. Keill’s first
two books (1698 and 1699) presented refutations of Burnet’s theory and of an alternative proposed by Cambridge
mathematician William Whiston. He averred that the Creation and Deluge did not result from natural processes but
required direct intervention from God. Literature on the “Burnet Controversy” tends to emphasize Keill’s adherence
to a literal interpretation of Scripture and his defense of miracles in opposition to Burnet’s and Whiston’s allegorical
reading of Scripture and positing of natural rather than divine causes. What the literature does not sufficiently
underscore, however, is the important role played by physical evidence in Keill’s position. I argue that his adherence
to the letter of Scripture and insistence on miracles were built upon a secure foundation of natural knowledge. Keill
adduced a wealth of evidence from mechanics, hydrostatics, chemistry and meteorology to show that the foregoing
biblical events could not have resulted from natural processes. By ruling out natural causes in this way he showed
that miracles were the explanation best supported by both Scripture and nature.
Author: Kirill Rossiianov
Title: Configuring the Animal-Human Boundary in Soviet Psychology: Nadezhda LadyginaKohts and Her Studies on Primate Cognition, 1923-1963
Abstract: Nadezhda Nikolaevna Ladygina-Kohts (1889-1963) is mainly remembered for her 1935 book Infant
Chimpanzee and Human Child – a comparative study between the behavior of an infant chimpanzee, named Joni,
and her own son Roody. Working with Joni, as well as with the adult anthropoid apes, Ladygina-Kohts also
developed the so-called “sample-to-match” technique that is widely used by modern researchers of animal behaviour
but has been originally designed by Kohts in order to answer the question about whether or not the anthropoid apes
can operate with elementary abstract concepts. Assuming that primates do experience emotions and can form
elementary concepts set Kohts on a collision course with the behaviorists, and made her research vulnerable to
critical attacks, especially in the post-WWII years when Ivan Pavlov’s “physiology of higher nervous activity” came
to dominate Soviet psychology. At the same time, Ladygina-Kohts disagreed with the prominent primate
researchers, such as Wolfgang Koehler and Robert Yerkes, who emphasized the similarities, rather than differences,
between the behavior of anthropoid apes and humans. Referring to the title of Robert Yerkes’ book Almost Human
(1924) that analyzed the behavior of chimpanzees, Ladygina-Kohts claimed in her book that chimpanzees are “by no
means human.” Examining this disagreement demonstrates how profoundly the perception of differences between
people and divisions in human society can influence the scientific, “objective” judgement about the degree of
similarity (or difference) between man and other species.
Author: Jason Rozumalski
Title: Mathematical Qualities of Boundary and the Changing Content and Practice of English
Land Law, 1520-1620
Abstract: This paper investigates why and how mathematical thought influenced the practice and epistemology of
English land law roughly within the century from 1520 to 1620. During this time, representations of space changed
in a process characterized by a shift from oral-vernacular traditions to visual-Euclidian systematization. Using
archival material collected from twenty-eight national and regional archives around England, Scotland, Ireland, and
Wales, this paper, firstly, recounts how real property was spatially defined in early modern leases and how those
descriptions changed in relation to the introduction of scaled cartography and the popularization and
professionalization of surveying. Then, the paper considers how the changing definitional qualities of the object
(land) influenced the conceptions of legal rights to it. Did mathematical abstraction of measurement create an
increasingly abstract concept of real property? Did increasingly mathematical representations of boundary influence
changing legal qualities of bounds or the movement of people through space? Did the use of Euclidean geometry to
demarcate spatial bounds influence the axiomatic structure of common law’s “artificial reason” (particularly as it
was defined by Sir Edward Coke in 1616) in relation to real property litigation? Rather than emphasizing the
intellectual history of common law, this paper uses economic and social methods in order to relate demographic and
market pressures on land use to changing definitions of space itself in order to connect histories of the rule of law
and mathematical thought through commonalities in rationalization, quantification, and universalization by way of
history from below.
Author: Michael Ruse
Title: Debunking the Myth of the “Non-Darwinian Revolution”
Session: The Darwinian Revolution in Victorian Literature (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30
PM)
Abstract: Building on earlier work by others Peter Bowler has argued that there was so little taking up of Darwin’s
ideas after the Origin, it is truly appropriate to speak of what happened in the world of evolution in the nineteenth
century as a “non-Darwinian” revolution. While agreeing that many of the professional scientists were less than
enthused by the opportunities opened up by natural selection, although if one looks at the example of Thomas Henry
Huxley one needs to be nuanced about this for Huxley was very enthusiastic about selection in the human realm
even as he ignored it in his professional science, I want by looking through the lens of poetry and fiction strongly to
oppose the Bowler thesis. There was a revolution, it was hugely significant, and it was absolutely, utterly and totally
Darwinian. It is entirely appropriate to speak of Darwinism as a new religion opposing and in major respects
conquering the existing religion of Christianity. I shall show this by considering the fiction and poetry of Thomas
Hardy, the poetry of Emily Dickenson, and the fiction of George Gissing and Edith Wharton.
Author: Doina-Cristina Rusu
Title: Atoms and Spirits: Bacon’s Experimental View on the Minina
Abstract: Notoriously, Bacon started as a promotor of the atomist theory in his early writings. Scholars argue that
there is a change in the later ones, where natural and artificial phenomena are explained as being the result of the
activity of pneumatic matter. In this paper I argue that Bacon did not completely changed his perspectives. I claim
that Bacon never ceased to consider atoms the very last particles of matter. However, he considered that phenomena
can be both explained and manipulated by introducing the idea of the minute parts of natural bodies – the pneumatic
matter enclosed in the tangible, which though are very small, they are not the very last ones. Compared to a classical
atomist view, Bacon’s spiritual matter, strongly influenced by alchemical theories, offers several advantages for his
experimental practice: spirits have a big array of qualities which in turn define the qualities of bodies, they move and
their motions create the visible processes, their appetites can be manipulated with the aim of changing nature and,
moreover, pneumatic matter can transform into tangible and vice-versa. It will be argued that it is Bacon’s
experimental view what made him stop at a more ‘superficial’ level. The first part of the paper will show that
because they represent the material substatratum, atoms cannot be discovered through experimental techniques and
thus they do not represent an interest for natural philosophy. The second part will provide a description of Bacon’s
pneumatic theory as resulting from his natural and experimental histories.
Author: Nicolas Sanchez-Guerrero
Title: "The Humanism Inherent to Us." Reforming Science Education in Colombian schools,
1975-1985
Abstract: In 1981 the Colombian Ministry of Education released science curricula for school grades 1 through 9
that reflected the input of scholars who instilled a change in the ministry's understanding of the country’s
educational needs. During the test phase that followed, an oppositional coalition of Colombian physicists,
mathematicians, and philosophers emerged who questioned the Ministry’s administrative and pedagogic
assumptions behind the new curricula and who would become largely responsible for the eventual demise of the
curricular reform. My paper explores notions about the societal role of science education as championed by
supporters and critics of the reformed curricula. The paper shows how the former promoted understandings of what
it means to teach science right, that to these scholars science education should give children the ability to grasp the
increasing complexity of knowledge, and how the latter saw this curricular reform as the ministry's attempt to
increase control in the classroom amid misconceptions about quality in education. Drawing on governmental
documents, on the memoirs of a First colloquium of science education that followed the publication of the reformed
curricula, and on later works from promoters and critics, I will argue that efforts to introduce science to a large
population through teaching and to moderate science's societal role, stemmed not from social and political
consensus, but from the agency of small groups of academics who represented well-structured views of science and
education concerning the relevance of science in Colombia.
Author: Matthew Sargent
Title: Chemistry and Commerce in the Dutch East India Company: German Experts in Southeast
Asian Gold Mines
Abstract: In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith argued that alchemy offered opportunities for commercial
advancement to the landlocked German states that were unable to take advantage of the seaborne commerce that
were the primary engines of wealth creation during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This paper extends her
thesis by exploring the ways in which alchemy/chymistry was used as a commercial resource by the most advanced
trading economy of the seventeenth century - Dutch East India Company. One of the primary business problems
facing the Dutch East India Company was that there were few trade goods that could be exported from Europe to
trade for the spices and luxuries of Asia. Virtually all transactions had to be paid for with silver of gold. To address
this balance of payments problem, the Dutch began to operate a gold mine in Sumatra, which they hoped would
provide a local supply of precious metals to pay for their operations in Asia. Lacking the expertise to operate and
improve these mines themselves, the Dutch hired German chymists to ply their trade in Asia. Using printed memoirs
and Company archival materials, I reconstruct the ways in which these chemists were hired and how they practiced
their trade in Asia. Rather than viewing alchemy as the last resort of impoverished princes willing to look anywhere
for economic salvation, this paper positions chymistry as a promising science that could be applied throughout the
world.
Author: Anja Sattelmacher
Title: Animated Mathematics: Ludwig Muench’s Experimental Cartoons
Abstract: In the early years of the twentieth century, Ludwig Muench, a German math teacher, began to create
animated cartoons of mathematical topics, such as the Pythagorean Theorem, conic sections, and the tracing of a
rolling cycloid. Muench made over 200,000 drawings that he then photographed with a special trick-film camera
and projected at a speed of sixteen frames per second. Muench envisioned showing his films during math lessons in
order to develop his students' mathematical intuition ("Anschaulichkeit"). Although few mathematicians
experimented with film around 1900-1930, "visual instruction" was a highly discussed topic among pedagogical
theorists, teachers and scientists of various disciplines. This paper recounts the history of Muench's films by
investigating the rich archival material from the Film Institute in Frankfurt/Main (Germany) and examining
Meunch's pioneering practices in film-making within pedagogical and scientific institutions. In examining the wider
context of the history of educational films (both cartoons and non-animated), this paper not only addresses historians
of mathematics and mathematical pedagogy, but also scholars interested in the connections between the aesthetic,
political and scientific dimensions in the use of moving images in the history of knowledge.
Author: Tilman Sauer
Title: Historical Remarks on the (Non-)Discovery of Gravitational Lensing and the Cosmic
Microwave Background Radiation in the Early Sixties
Abstract: The paper explores historical aspects of two related astrophysical phenomena as of the early sixties,
gravitational lensing and the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The idea of (strong) gravitational
lensing was formulated already in 1912---even before the final formulation of general relativity---and then
reappeared again and again in the literature, separated by long periods of dormancy. The phenomenon was finally
observed in 1979. A number of papers discussing the idea were published in the late fifties and early sixties. The
reappearance of the lensing idea in the literature at that time will be contextualized with the observation of strong
radio sources, later dubbed quasars, which culminated in the first identification of one such source with an optical
counterpart in 1963. Around the same time, developments of radio astronomy also led to the identification of
unexplained background noise in observations of the microwave sky, which in 1965 was quickly identified as relic
radiation postulated in a cosmological hot big bang scenario. While the identification of the cosmic microwave
background radiation constituted a discovery of momentous importance, the speculations of explaining quasars as
lensed astrophysical objects proved unsuccessful and, in a certain sense, constitute a non-discovery. The
investigation of historical details of the discovery of the CMB radiation and the non-discovery of gravitational
lensing in the sixties illuminates the role of astrophysical observation in the renaissance of GR and also provides an
interesting historical example for reflections on the concept of discovery as a complex historiographical category.
Author: Patience Schell
Title: James Trail: The Amazon’s Forgotten Naturalist
Abstract: While the names Spruce, Agassiz, Wallace and Bates all bring to mind Amazonian exploration, James
Trail has been largely forgotten as one of their number. Yet Trail (1851-1919), a Scottish medical doctor, spent
about eighteen month surveying the region, in the mid-1870s, as part of the first foreign and commercial expedition
given permission to explore the Amazon. This paper will, first of all, situate Trail’s naturalising, collecting and
observations in the context of nineteenth-century Amazonian exploration, which functions both as a necessary
addition to our understandings of Amazonian exploration but also analyses Trail’s work through a framework he
himself used. Trail frequently met local people who had known these earlier explorers and the publications from
earlier expeditions helped him orient his own work. Secondly, using Trail’s unpublished Amazonian journals, as
well as other archival material, this paper will examine his surveying, botanising and collecting, while based on two
different steamboats, contributing to our understandings of the practice of field science, in relation to informal
empire and commercial science. Lastly, the paper will seek to understand why Trail was not able to use his personal
collection, writings and experiences to forge a place amongst Amazonian naturalists. Instead, his life lived out in the
remote Scottish city of Aberdeen suggests that there were significant barriers facing provincial naturalists who
sought to participate in the global circulation of scientific knowledge.
Author: Arne Schirrmacher
Title: Objects in Transit: On the Mobility of Interactives between Science Museums and Science
Centers in Europe and Northern America
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: It appears that a line can be drawn from the experimenting halls of the Berlin Urania founded in 1888,
which leads to the Deutsches Museum in Munich and the Science Museum in London as well as to a number of
American museums of science and industry opened since the 1920s; a line, which not only carries the idea of
interactivity, but which actually is one of 'objects in transit'. By following push-button experiments, hands-on
demonstrations, working models and the like from one place to another, a transatlantic discourse on interactivity
may become apparent. While the Exploratorium has absorbed much form East Coast museums and European
institutions at the end of the 1960s, the first European science centers imported – or re-imported? – many
interactives from there some twenty years later. While I try to deconstruct the singularity of the Exploratorium and
its concept to some extent by putting it into a wider setting, at the same time, I would like to exhibit the 'political
machines' (A. Barry) that were pushing the interactive turn replacing artefacts of curiosity and narratives of
progress, which can be scrutinized, by rather context-free presentations of entertaining phenomena, which rather
cannot.
Author: Martina Schlünder
Title: Improving by Translating? The Multilingual and Multiple Afterlives of Ludwik Fleck’s
“Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact”
Session: Translation as Process: Border-Crossing Knowledge, Materialities, and Concepts in the
History of Science in Asia (and Beyond) (Saturday, November 21, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: In 1935, the unknown Polish doctor and microbiologist Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961) published in German
a witty polemic against logical positivism and its emphasis on a universal logic engraved in all scientific knowledge.
According to Fleck thinking and knowing is practiced in specific “thought styles”, as a collective phenomenon and
as the result of an intensive training and socialization. The specific style becomes invisible to the members of a
collective. Thus, knowledge is not only situated but also trapped in the style and blind to its own texture and
infrastructure. The English translation of Fleck’s book provides a telling example that not only (scientific)
knowledge production but also translations are done (and trapped) in specific thought styles. Fleck’s book did not
receive a thorough reception until about two decades after Fleck’s death, when in 1979 the University of Chicago
Press published an English version. It had taken more than five years of cumbersome work to tackle – as a draft
preface phrases it – Fleck’s “idiosyncratic” and “extraordinary difficult” German and translate it into an English text
that “improves upon Fleck so far as style, accuracy, and readability are concerned”. I will present this translation as
an example of a transformation or – using Fleck’s concepts – an appropriation by a different thought collective and
thought style, by which Fleck’s book is catapulted from the margins of “old Europe” to the heart of Anglo-American
academic elite institutions and into a classical canonical text of the History of Science and Science Studies.
Author: Pete Schmidt
Title: Testing Out Tesla; The Role of Myth and Media in Challenging Technological Systems
Abstract: In 1972, the Minnesota United Power Association (UPA) teamed up with the Minnesota Cooperative
Power Association (CPA) to initiate an electrification project designed to bring power from North Dakota to the
Twin Cities area. The power lines were slated to cross hundreds of miles of farmland, and significant backlash and
protest began once farmers across the state became aware of the plan and the potential impending land seizure. In
the midst of these actions lays a fascinating and unexamined reaction to these developments, in which one group of
farmers initiated a grassroots scientific movement. Their form of protest was to create an alternative to the power
line transmission system by designing a system of wireless energy transmission based on the plans of Nikola Tesla.
This self-funded conglomeration of farmers and amateur researchers formed the People’s Power Project and set
about building Tesla’s system for the wireless transmission of energy. Using archival documents, including
newspaper accounts, press releases, and oral histories, this presentation will recount and examine this overlooked
episode. It will engage areas relevant to research in the history of science and technology including: the role of the
non-professional in the advancement of science and technology; how communities reject or accept large
technological systems; the role of the media in communicating scientific knowledge; and the role of popular media
in developing and promoting the legacy of the myths and legends surrounding prominent figures from the history of
science like Nikola Tesla.
Author: Martina Schneider
Title: Dealing with Cultural Diversity in the History of Mathematics: the Case of Moritz Cantor
9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: During the 19th century history of mathematics was taken up by scholars from diverse fields.
Philologists, philosophers, teachers, and mathematicians turned to mathematical sources, and engaged in
transcribing, transliterating, translating, editing or interpreting them. Among the sources were rather recently
discovered sources from ancient China, Mesopotamia and India - areas that had hardly been present in histories of
mathematics before. How did the scholars deal with this new diversity of source material? In what way did it
influence their writing of the history of mathematics? Moritz Cantor (1829-1920), trained as a mathematician,
became one of the first full-time historians of mathematics in 19th century Germany. He played a key role in the
process towards the professionalization of the history of science and mathematics. Very early on, at a time when
Germany was struggling to become a nation state, Cantor embraced the concept of a “cultural history of
mathematics" (Kulturgeschichte der Mathematik). In my talk I will explore what Cantor meant by this and how he
implemented it in his writings.
Author: Robert Schraff
Title: Making and Unmaking Madness with LSD: From Psychotomimetic to Psychedelic and
Back Again
Abstract: Much of the history of LSD is focused on Timothy Leary, his close group of acolytes, and the flowering
of the counterculture in San Francisco and Berkeley. Yet, some of the earliest research on LSD took place in Los
Angeles, where in the late 1950s it was widely promoted as a possible treatment for alcoholism and adjunct to
psychotherapy. LSD was, however also defined as a psychotomimetic in academic articles and by early advocates
including Humphry Osmond. LSD was also used productively to create dependence and dread, or a psychotic
experience, by the CIA.
The definition of psychotomimetic also shifts at just this time. Psychotomimetic is first, early in the 20th century,
something like a common-sense description, covering a wide range of agents, symptoms and behaviors. It comes to
mean production of the psychotic effects of schizophrenia with LSD through a mechanism provided by the new
neuroscience of receptor theory. Animal models are also engineered through genetic modification to produce a
physical symptom of schizophrenia, pre-pulse inhibition, a symptom which is aggravated by LSD. LSD becomes a
model for schizophrenic symptoms, and LSD agonists such as Risperidone are currently purported as effective
treatments.
This work explores the dual nature of LSD as both cure and cause of madness perhaps most succinctly expressed by
Humphry Osmond, who coined the term psychedelic in correspondence with Aldous Huxley, himself a central
figure in the history of LSD in LA, “ To fathom hell, or soar angelic, take a pinch of psychedelic.”
Author: Kristen Schranz
Title: The Fashioning of a Philosophical Chemist: The Philosophical Transactions papers of
James Keir (1776, 1787 and 1790)
Abstract: Late-eighteenth-century British chemistry traditionally has been viewed as more practical than the
theoretical and philosophical French chemistry at that time. More recent historical scholarship, however, argues for
a closer relationship between pure and applied chemical knowledge in the British ‘Industrial Enlightenment’. Indeed
there increasingly appears to be a greater interdependence of philosophical and industrial pursuits in the
development of early modern European chemistry. This paper argues that British industrialist and Lunar Society
member, James Keir, forged a pivotal intellectual and industrial link with his 1771 English translation of Pierre
Macquer’s Dictionnaire de chimie. Although Keir’s translation did not necessarily produce ‘new’ chemical
knowledge, his inclusion of apparatus plates, Geoffroy’s affinity table and additional articles on practical chemical
operations resulted in a text that testifies to the prevalent intersection of knowledge and know-how in provincial
England as well as to the region-dependent nature of chemical knowledge. Keir prepared himself for glassmaking
and industrial alkali production by studying and translating Macquer’s text. This conscious decision appears to
support the argument for the unidirectional flow of knowledge from the theoretical to the practical in early chemical
industry. Keir later published several Royal Society articles, however, that sought to produce chemical knowledge
originating in industrial practices. His translation of and original contribution to chemical literature, therefore,
illustrates an interconnected and bidirectional relationship between philosophical and practical chemistry in lateeighteenth-century Britain.
Author: Amanda Sciampacone
Title: Atmospherics of Illness: Cholera, Weather, and the Scientific Image
Abstract: With the emergence and repeated epidemics of cholera in Britain between 1831 and 1866, and the elusive
nature of its epidemiology, British medics were compelled to investigate the cause of the disease. Various theories
were posited to explain cholera, with the miasma theory dominating much of the medical discourse. Since the theory
provided only partial answers, however, medics searched for other factors that may have propagated the illness.
Increasingly, the climate of India, where cholera originated, as well as unusual meteorological phenomena in
England, were identified in government and medical reports as the cause of cholera’s morbidity and spread. India’s
tropical heat and jungle miasmas were blamed for first producing a deadly form of cholera, while odd weather was
noted for spreading the malady in England. Although much of this discourse was textual, images were used to
visualize and support the arguments made about cholera and the conditions in which it propagated. In these visual
representations, medics mapped the disease to a certain type of “cholera weather,” giving the invisible illness
substance and material presence. As my paper will demonstrate, the conflation of cholera with the Indian climate,
strange weather, and a heavy atmosphere powerfully evoked visual tropes of cholera as a mysterious and malignant
disease that tainted the very atmosphere of the British nation.
Author: Sarah Scripps
Title: Interactivity and Science Fairs in Contemporary America
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: This paper discusses the role of interactivity in science fairs in the United States during the years leading
to Sputnik. Over the course of the twentieth century, generations of American children conducted their first
experiments by crafting science fair projects. As a primary vehicle for training America’s adolescents in careers in
science and technology, science fairs raise important philosophical questions regarding the epistemology of
children's experimentation. From vibrant three-dimensional dioramas of the Progressive era to postwar argumentdriven text panels, science fair displays reveal students' changing beliefs about what counted as faithful scientific
evidence. In particular, the interactivity of these displays changed alongside the shifting ideological goals of the
competitions. The primacy of objects and dioramic exhibits in earlier science fairs of the 1920s and 30s were
supplanted in postwar competitions by text panels that emphasized ingenuity over narrative. After World War II,
science fairs served as a vehicle for exporting American conceptions of extracurricular science abroad. In this
regard, the element of interactivity found in science fairs spread from beyond American borders to engage
adolescents across the world in a particular vision of science as an analytically-driven enterprise that suited the aims
of the emerging military-industrial complex.
Author: Rob Semper
Title: The Origins of the Exploratorium and the Development of its Interactive Exhibits
Paradigm
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: The Exploratorium was founding in San Francisco in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer as a museum where
the public was encouraged to explore the phenomena of nature through their own interaction. Based in part on
exhibit techniques from European science museums and in part from educational activities taken from the science
curriculum reform efforts of the early 60’s in the US and elsewhere, the museum developed its own unique
interactive exhibit philosophy. Early development of exhibits on physics (light, color and sound) and perception
(vision, hearing and touch) by scientists and artists lead to a founding notion of an interactive exhibit curriculum that
the Exploratorium has carried through its history. These ideas were disseminated throughout the developing science
center movement through publications and media. This presentation will discuss the origins of the Exploratorium in
the context of early science center movement in North America and the development of its particular exhibit
pedagogy.
Author: Joydeep Sen
Title: Geomythology and Indian Nationalism
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: For scholars who contend that ancient civilisations found ways of encoding advanced knowledge of
fossils and other geological processes, ‘geomythology’ has, since the 1960s, emerged as a key concept. In the
context of India, some writers following its broad logic have in recent times made especially bold claims, suggesting
that the great epics embed geological truths belatedly uncovered by modern science. However, attempts by Indians
to show ancient antecedents of modern geological thought can in fact be discerned from the late nineteenth century,
considerably predating the formal conceptualisation of geomythology in the West. In some cases, such interventions
were indeed associable with a nascent (Hindu) cultural nationalism. In tracing this historical continuum associable
with geomythology, this paper seeks to critically reflect on its claims. It suggests that while the more nationalist
articulation of its tenets might well be challenged on the basis of its ideological character, there are more
fundamental and understated problems with the epistemic assumptions central to geomythology more generally.
Author: David Sepkoski
Title: What Difference Did Computers Make to the History of Data?
Abstract: In a 2006 paper, Jon Agar provocatively asked “What Difference Did Computers Make to Science?” I
will apply this question specifically to the history of “data-driven” science, asking whether the advent of digital
computers played a truly transformative role in collection, storage, analysis, and visualization of data in the natural
sciences. Using the example of analytic paleontology, I will suggest some ways that computers did—and did not—
decisively alter scientists’ approach to data.
Author: Nir Shafir
Title: Hummus on Hot Iron: The Space and Place of Manuscript Pamphlets in the Medico-Legal
Debates of the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire
November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: In the late seventeenth century, a controversial medical procedure began to appear among the urban
populace of the Ottoman Empire. A patient, suffering from severe pain, would have a doctor cauterize the area in
question and then smear the wound with a poultice of ground chickpeas. The patient would keep the wound tightly
bound for weeks at a time, never washing it, until it festered. The controversy revolved around whether the patient
could perform the ablutions necessary for prayer without cleaning the pus-filled wound. What was novel about this
medico-legal debate was not only the procedure itself—other forms of cauterization had been practiced for
centuries—but that it occurred in a newly formed intellectual space that had emerged from quickly circulating
manuscript pamphlets. "Hummus cauterization" was the most popular pamphlet topic of its time, with authors from
Damascus, Cairo, and Istanbul penning missives until even the imperial palace entered the fray. Its popularity partly
stemmed from the fraught state of medical knowledge at the time; patients feared the myriad novel materia medica
and procedures and the European physicians who practiced them. Through the case of "hummus cauterization," a
procedure that came to be associated with European physicians, this paper examines how the new pamphlet-based
intellectual space contributed to the construction of medical knowledge. I suggest that these pamphlets, while
creating empire-wide intellectual debates, also unraveled and transformed earlier spaces of sociability (e.g. salons,
courts), where knowledge production relied on close social bonds among practitioners.
Author: Steven Shapin
Title: “Chemistry and Connoisseurship in the 20th-Century Wine-World”
Abstract: Present-day ways of describing the sensory characteristics of wine center on the components of odor:
wines are said to smell of green peppers, petrol, raspberry, leather, and so on. Many people take such talk as
mystifying nonsense– wholly subjective and probably arbitrary. Yet the roots of such descriptions are in the
scientific laboratory, and especially in enological work done at the University of California, Davis from the Second
World War by Maynard Amerine (1911-1998) and his colleagues. Amerine pursued a research agenda devoted to
what he called the “sensory evaluation” of wine; he aimed to sort out objective from merely subjective ways of
talking about wine characteristics; and he sought a vocabulary in which the order of descriptive words matched the
order of odoriferous substances actually present in wine. To what needs did such a program respond? How were
objectivity and subjectivity identified, bounded, and practically managed? What was the role of chemistry, and
especially of new chemical technique, in the reform of descriptive language? And what were some of the persisting
influences of this scientific and linguistic reform?
Author: Myrna Perez Sheldon
Title: The Epistemic Character and Political Use of Science in the United States
Abstract: Scholars of American political thought have long been interested in the use of the natural, human and
social sciences as instruments of management, state organization and political rhetoric in the United States.
Similarly, historians of American science have traced the relationship between state structures and the cultural
authority of science. However, the connection between these histories is often confused by the changing boundaries
and epistemological goals of the very category of science itself. In this roundtable, I suggest that it is possible to
trace a history of arguments for the role of science in American public life from the turn of the twentieth century to
the present, even as the epistemic qualities of science are understood differently through this same period. If, for
instance, science was understood to be primarily about the proper application of method in the early twentieth
century, but was then understood to be verified by community consensus and peer review in the last quarter of the
same century, I reflect on how this difference in epistemic character figured in political debates about the proper role
of science in relationship to politics. Further, history provides a uniquely powerful perspective on contemporary
debates over the appropriate relationship between scientific knowledge and the political process. Because it is only
through this kind of historical investigation that we are able to interrogate contemporary intuitions for the definitions
and boundaries of “science” and “the political” that implicitly govern present-day debates on topics as wide-ranging
as environmental protection, bioethics and human sexuality.
Author: Myrna Perez Sheldon
Title: The Year that Criticizing Science Moved from Left to Right in the United States
Abstract: The years around 1980 were a watershed moment in the relationship between American politics and
public scientific authority. In the preceding decades, most criticism of science came from the left—specifically the
New Left. Leftist activists feared the power of science and its ability to exploit the oppressed, fashion hierarchies
and harm the natural world. However, when creation-science burst onto the national scene in the early 1980s, public
criticisms of science moved from the left to the right of the political spectrum. Creationists did not focus on the
overreaches of science, but instead criticized the fundamentals of its epistemological authority. Tied to the power of
the Christian Right, creationism dramatically recast the terms for scientific expertise in national debates through to
the present day. This talk uses the public career of Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould to argue for and illustrate
this transitional moment. Focusing on Gould’s criticisms of “adaptationism,” I argue that his 1981 book The
Mismeasure of Man attempted to model a New Left critique of E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology research program.
However, Gould’s contentions with “adaptationism” were severely complicated when other evolutionists held up
adaptation as the primary rhetorical weapon against creationists during the 1980s and 1990s. His claims to an
evolutionary account of human nature, that nevertheless supported a progressive politics, had to be reframed in order
to contend with a new epistemic and political foe.
Author: Megan Shields Formato
Title: The Physicist at Work: Iconography and Practice
Session: Scientific Workspaces: Reconstruction and Representation (Saturday, November 21,
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: From the photographs of Albert Einstein standing in front of a chalkboard filled with equations to images
of Niels Bohr seated, seemingly alone, at an empty desk in his office in Copenhagen, the history of early 20th
century theoretical physics is rich with images of physicists at work. This paper takes up the iconography and
grammar of such images: What do these images suggest about how, where, and with whom these physicists did their
work? What role do these kinds of images play in defining what it meant to be a theoretical physicist in the first half
of the 20th century? Working with the specific case of Niels Bohr, this paper will reach beyond the borders of these
iconic photographs to compare these visual renderings of work practices and spaces with the practices and spaces
that can be reconstructed from archival sources. The pages of Niels Bohr’s drafts suggest a much messier desk than
the one depicted in photographs and an office that was far from empty, peopled instead with amanuenses,
secretaries, colleagues, and children engaging in administrative and writing labor. This paper argues that by
reanimating Bohr’s workspaces with the people and practices visible in his drafts, we shift our understanding of
what it meant to do theoretical physics in the first half of the 20th century and of the people and spaces integral this
work.
Author: Matthew Shindell
Title: A Man of Peace in Times of War: Harold C. Urey, Pacifism and National Service in the
Two World Wars
Abstract: Despite his peace church upbringing and his life-long commitment to pacifism, Harold C. Urey
participated as a scientist in both world wars. He spent WWI, with only a BS in chemistry, as a low-level chemist
preparing explosives at the Barrett Chemical Company – an activity through which he defined himself as a patriotic
American chemist with a duty to his country. This new self-definition – important to a man self-conscious about his
ethnic German heritage and his “peculiar” religious upbringing – carried forward into Urey’s WWII experience. He
was now a famous scientist – a Nobel Prize-winning quantum chemist who specialized in the study of isotopes and
methods of separation. When asked to head up uranium separation efforts for the Manhattan Project at the Substitute
Alloy Metals (SAM) Lab, Urey did not hesitate to say yes. Urey never publicly expressed feelings of regret or guilt
over having participated in the development of atomic weapons; he did not question his obligation to help. But the
work was difficult and stressful, and it led him to a nervous breakdown even before the demoralizing use of the
bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The emotional trauma of WWII shaped Urey’s postwar research program and
public speeches. In this talk I address the factors that motivated Urey’s participation in war work, and how he
negotiated his own peace position with weapons work. I also address the professional pressures and channels that
led Urey to war work, and how Urey’s career benefited from his wartime work.
Author: Allen Shotwell
Title: Teaching, Learning, Feeling: Touch and the Public Anatomy lesson
AM)
Abstract: “And afterwards I took the lung in my hands, and it was like a very light sponge, and there was a very
large quantity of blood in it.” In his notes about the public dissection performed by Andreas Vesalius in 1540,
Baldasar Heseler often described touching the parts of the dissected body with his own hands, sometimes by battling
with an unruly crowd of students equally eager to touch the corpse and its parts. Heseler’s interest in touch
contrasted with Vesalius’s own fairly limited and controlled references to touch in the demonstration. We have other
examples of touch playing a role in mid sixteenth-century medical education where the students were interested in
touching patient bodies, but historians have seldom recognized touch as integral to medical theory or practice. Using
Heseler’s account of his experience at Bologna, my talk explores the idea that touch is something easier to see in
student accounts than in formal texts. This difference in the way touch is treated in sources leads to broad questions
concerning the role of touch in anatomical study and medical practice as well as issues concerning the place we
should assign to teaching and learning in our historical understandings of science and medicine. Ultimately, I
suggest that while touch played an important role for teacher and student, it was difficult to incorporate into the
theoretical apparatus of medicine.
Author: Thomas Simpson
Title: Moving Mountains: Maps, Ethnography, and the Making of Colonial North-East India and
Upper Burma
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Colonial intrusion into the upland regions at the fringes of Assam, eastern Bengal, and northern Burma in
the late nineteenth century was a contradictory affair, marked by extreme violence but also multi-faceted
dependence on hill inhabitants. Knowledge of terrain and populations was understood to be an integral part of
colonial dominion, and surveyors and administrator-ethnographers were often at the vanguard of British expansion.
However, these projects were as likely to destabilise colonial rule as to provide firm foundations. Riven with
difficulties at every stage – data collection, transmission, and interpretation – these knowledge projects were prime
examples of the fallibility of colonial power even during an era of supercharged European expansion. This paper
sets these ways of understanding space and people in global context, arguing that they were manifestations of a
wider shift towards a form of colonialism fixated on continental interiors rather than maritime zones. They were also
projects in which some of the most remote and inaccessible locales and communities were brought within the pale of
imperial knowledge structures. This moment of apparent geographical 'triumph' was simultaneously productive of
anxieties about the future of exploration and the flattening effects of the spread of 'civilisation' under the auspices of
empire. While colonial sciences were sufficiently powerful to 'move mountains' through subsuming regions and
communities into global schema, the impact of these undertakings was deeply contested and uncertain.
Author: Kavita Sivaramakrishnan
Title: Voices of Expertise: Age, Aging and the Lifecourse in ‘Developing’ and ‘Developed’
Societies in Late Colonial Asia and Africa
Abstract: This paper explores the unstable and competing notions of the meanings of age and aging that were being
contested and shaped by experts in South Asia and Africa in the late colonial decades. It argues that demographers,
anthropologists and missionaries were attempting to situate aging beyond chronological age, in terms of
dependency, social status and cultural beliefs; and it was anxieties about youth and unchecked social change that led
to a greater interest in old age. It also created the conditions for a reinterpretation of the lifecourse and of aging in
primitive and agrarian societies by experts that were viewed as being different from and a distortion of the lifestages
and role of the aged in the West. How were binaries about age and aging in industrialized and agrarian societies
created? How was expert knowledge about non-western societies shaped by the anxieties about aging and society in
the West? These are some of the questions that will be examined in this paper, and it will draw from a diverse
archive of colonial demographic surveys, anthropological writings about social change in the central Africa and in
India; and finally, a transnational archive in North and Central Africa of missionary ethnographic surveys conducted
in the 1950s.
Author: Sujit Sivasundaram
Title: From the Winds of the Bay of Bengal: Science, Empire and Self
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: The East India Company’s Straits Settlements – Singapore, Malacca and Penang – expanded as strategic
bases of trade on the sea route between India and China. This paper charts the consolidation of the Straits
Settlements until c.1850 at the interface of nature and science. It argues that there was a symmetry and entanglement
between ‘Malay’ and ‘British’ understandings of being, the seas and the uses of knowledge in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries. The material context of the Bay of Bengal – including the monsoon system, and its
patterns of trade and migration – set the terms for Britain’s so-called imperial meridian. Yet the arrival of new
machines and regimes of free trade governance – steam-ships, surveying instruments and the mobilisation of labour
– reforged the relation between the body, knowledge and terrain, allowing the British to rule supreme,
instrumentalising humans and nature. While charting this story of convolutions and interconnections in time and
space, and placing people and nature together in complexes of agency, the paper integrates some revealing Malay
sources alongside British ones, showing how historians of science and empire may in turn diversify their vantage
points in all of these ways.
Author: Amy E. Slaton
Title: Selves, Measured, Measuring Nature
Abstract: This is a story of three little Atomic Force Microscopes. The first, a student-grade instrument, carries a
list price of $26,000. The second AFM is a “mock-up” assembled from paper probe, wood scraps and hardwarestore laser pointer; total price: $25. The third, consisting of a shoebox with holes punched in the top, through which
calibrated kabob skewers can be thrust onto the banana concealed within, costs no more than $3. The most costly is
found in American university classrooms, the next in community colleges, and the last in elementary schools. All
three inculcate in students the essence of remote materials sensing, systematic and revelatory in the way of all
legitimate science. But we are wrong to treat encounters with the high-end AFM as naturally following upon student
mastery of the $25 mock-up, or to see the shoebox as preparation for either of the more expensive instruments. Each
AFM projects the existence not just of significant material characteristics but also of instrument-users who may or
may not have the innate capacity to reach a more expert status. Many students will in fact be deemed unworthy of
the educational resources needed to move up the AFM ladder. Like those famous porcine houses of brick, wood and
straw, it is the distinction to be made among the three apparatuses that produces a single moral lesson for attentive
audiences: all should strive and not all can succeed. This paper deploys ontological understandings of scientific
instruments to map this production of differentiated human capacities.
Author: Ivahn Smadja
Title: History of Mathematics, the Crisis of the European Sciences and The Humboldtian
Tradition
Abstract: This paper explores how different responses to the crisis of the humanistic sciences in the 1930s hinged
upon different conceptions of history of mathematics. Distinctive positions in the German intellectual field at the
time will be shown to reflect alternative ways to deal with tensions previously generated by the attempt to meet the
challenges posed by comparisons between cultures in mathematics.
On the one hand, the editors of the pioneering series Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte der Mathematik (19291936), the mathematicians Otto Neugebauer and Otto Toeplitz, and the classical philologist and philosopher, Julius
Stenzel, envisaged history of mathematics as a way to « bridge the gap between the so-called humanistic sciences
and the apparently so unhistorical ‘exact sciences’ ». On the other hand, Edmund Husserl concurrently dismissed
what he termed « romantic » factual history, presumably fascinated with extra-European mathematics, in favor of
some kind of « inner history », opposing the Greek breakthrough to universal validity to the so-called self-enclosed
cultural particularity of all other historical peoples.
Both stances will be contrasted by tracing out how they connected – whether faithfully or not – with the
Humboldtian brand of nineteenth-century comparative historiography of mathematics, practised by Hermann Hankel
in the early 1870s. Confronted with newly available Eastern sources and ethnographic data of mathematical
relevancy, history of mathematics then emerged as a professionalized subfield within German academia, while
prompting thorough reflection on the nature of history writing in a context of structuring polarities (history vs.
geography (ethnography), philology vs. mathematics).
Author: Jonathan Smith
Title: Darwin and the Sensation Novelists
AM)
Abstract: Literary scholars have long explored the impact of Darwin’s writings on Victorian fiction. Since the work
of Gillian Beer and George Levine, much of that exploration has taken up the connections between Victorian
realism as practiced by figures like George Eliot and Darwin’s portrait in the Origin of Species of an interconnected,
dynamic natural world. Attention has also been paid to degeneration and dystopian narratives like Erewhon, The
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the scientific romances of H.G. Wells that were shaped by darker
readings of Darwin. Yet virtually nothing has been written about the potential cross-fertilization that occurred
between the popular genre of sensation fiction and Darwin’s writings on plants in the 1860s and 70s. A closer look
suggests that not only was Darwin reading sensation fiction in these decades, but that the world of Darwin’s plants
shared much in the way of content, form, and readerly affect with the worlds of sensation novels. Darwin’s botanical
writings, like the best sensation fiction, gave readers the chills. The murders and illicit sexuality of sensation fiction
found their analogue in Darwin’s insectivorous plants and flowers of multiple sexual forms. And as sensation fiction
was a hybrid genre, combining domestic realism with gothic romance, so did Darwin’s botany labor to break down
the distinctions between plants and animals. These connections, moreover, were visible to contemporaries, who
commented on them, variously embracing or made nervous by the possible lessons to be drawn for the human realm
from Darwin’s plants.
Author: Sverker Sörlin
Title: French Geography and a Humanist Articulation of Environment until Braudel's La
Méditerranée
Abstract: During the period 1912 to 1922 Lucien Febvre wrote what turned out to be a major work not only of
human geography but also environmental history, La Terre et l'évolution humaine. It drew on regionalist French
geography and inspired Fernand Braudel. The book was also a sweeping and hard critique of German and AngloAmerican determinist strands of environmental interpretations in geography and climate science of the time. Febvre
did not actively use the concept of 'environment', still his thinking carved out a distinctly humanist understanding of
the human-environment relationship that proved to be important as the environment was conceptually articulated in
a range of scientific fields towards its modern understanding after WWII. In this paper I will locate the Febvre
tradition in this context of a wider history of conceptualization of the environment in the period between ca 1920
and the 1950s.
Author: Aaron Spink
Title: The Mechanical Resilience of Astrology
3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: When Descartes made his scientific work public he ushered in a worldview based almost entirely on
mechanical motion, which brought along a complete rejection of occult forces. Thus, the foundation of astrology
was equally rejected. As an explanation of the marginalization of astrology, the adoption of a mechanical worldview
seems to work rather well. However, we find Descartes’ system being adopted to many subjects, astrology included.
Here, I will take a look at the curious case of Claude Gadroys, whose primary work, Discours sur les influences des
astres (1671), defends a mechanical account of astrology that accords with Descartes’ principles. Gadroys’ Discours
employs a sophisticated strategy to rehabilitate astrology of the 17th century against Pico della Mirandola, among
other critics. Gadroys’ theory even incorporates Descartes’ discovery, contra the scholastics, that the sublunary and
celestial spheres do not differ in kind. Surprisingly, Gadroys uses Descartes’ discovery to substantiate the stars
influencing the Earth, whereas earlier astrologers required such a distinction. Gadroys’ adoption of Cartesian
philosophy highlights two major theses. First, the advent of mechanical philosophy in no way necessitated the
downfall of astrology; instead, it merely changed the direction of astrological explanation for those that followed
current science. Second, it shows that Descartes’ rejection of astrology is not as principled as one might imagine.
Author: Alistair Sponsel
Title: Visualizing Time, Travel, and Publication in the History of Expeditionary Research,
1830–1930
Abstract: My comments will ask how voyaging natural history changed over a century, from the era when wooden
sailing vessels carried men of science on several-year surveying expeditions to the time when academic scientists
used steamships in order to travel around the world to carry out a season of field research during the summer
vacation. My topics are the cognitive and social consequences of changes in traveling duration and the temporality
and geography of theorizing and publishing. Charles Darwin and James Dana spent their scientific youths circling
the world on five-year voyages in the 1830s. Each developed grand, globally applicable geological theories, and
upon returning from their respective expeditions they published them in long books and defended the ideas therein
throughout their lives. Their counterparts a century later, such as A. G. Mayer and Wayland Vaughan, traveled to
remote field sites almost every summer. They drafted journal articles en route home from locales such as the Great
Barrier Reef, Samoa, and the Torres Straits, and got them published before the next summer’s trip. Faced with the
perennial opportunity to return to the field, they never published grand, decisive claims in book form, but they
seized the new opportunity to pursue research based on comparative and longitudinal studies. I will display maps
illustrating the duration and sequence of long voyages (Darwin) and the frequency of travel and publication
(Mayer/Vaughan), and discuss the narrative challenges historians face in writing about frequent short trips and
iterative thinking versus grand voyages and big theories.
Author: Richard Staley
Title: Mach’s Ether, Einstein’s Ether, and the Debate between Relativists and their Critics
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Although well known for insisting that the “luminiferous ether” would be found superfluous when
proposing his special theory of relativity in 1905, on several occasions after developing his general theory of
relativity, Albert Einstein admitted that the new theory allowed a concept of the ether. In 1918, for example, he
offered a brief sketch of the “fluctuating fate” of what he called “the sick man of theoretical physics,” and refused to
pronounce it dead. In an address on the topic delivered in Leiden in 1920, Einstein said that in general relativity
space without ether was unthinkable, linking this new form of ether to Ernst Mach and noting that it deprived the
luminiferous ether invoked in H.A. Lorentz’s electrodynamics of the last mechanical characteristic it had possessed
(immobility). Examining the contexts for Einstein’s changing views and in particular his dialogue with both Lorentz
(a supporter) and opponents like Ernst Gehrcke will show that remarkably, Mach’s 1883 critique of Newton’s views
in The Science of Mechanics forms a common source, firstly for conceptual elements central to special and general
relativity, secondly for Einstein’s later perspective on the ether, and thirdly for some of the attacks he received from
anti-relativists between 1911 and 1920.
Author: Kathryn Steen
Title: U.S. Chemical Warfare in World War I: The Gas Networks
Abstract: As other scholars have noted, American chemists and chemical engineers saw opportunities in World
War I to raise their profession's prestige, given chemistry's high profile in the war. Although chemical warfare had a
negative reputation by the time the United States joined the war, American chemists and chemical engineers joined
the national effort to mobilize on all fronts, including the production of war gases. Mobilizing for war gas
production posed a challenge for Americans, however, not least because gases were products Americans never made
or sold to the Europeans prior to April 1917. This paper will consider the kinds of organizations and networks
Americans built to research and produce war gases. Knowledge of war gases was scarce in the United States,
including inside the military, within firms, and among chemists. Not surprisingly, Americans learned from the
Europeans, particularly the British, through sharing research results and establishing regular channels of
communication. Inside the United States, several networks emerged and evolved that linked academic and industrial
chemists to one another. The scarcity of knowledge and the toxicity of the gases shaped gas mobilization in patterns
that diverged from mobilizing other war matériel. When the war ended, most American chemists remained strong
proponents of the military's capacity to make gases and became opponents to the 1925 ban on chemical weapons.
Many of the bonds among chemists forged in war remained, facilitating professional organization and
communication, formally and informally.
Author: Katharina Steiner
Title: Why did Ernst Haeckel Copy Wilhelm Giesbrecht’s Copepod Drawings?
Abstract: The famous drawings of the zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) have been criticized for misinterpreting
the appearance of organic forms to suit Haeckel's aesthetic conception of evolution. I will argue, that his plate on
copepods in his Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904) appropriated figures from zoologist Wilhelm Giesbrecht's
Systematik und Faunistik der pelagischen Coepoden (1892), only reorganizing the arrangement and changing their
formal-aesthetic presentation to a minimal degree. This is particularly of interest because we have here practically
identical images used by researchers from different schools, distributed in two different contexts, with two different
scientific aims. Giesbrecht (Karl A. Möbius student) wrote his study for a scientifically trained audience—
methodologically it is aligned with an expedition to examine plankton carried out by Victor Hensen in 1889; it
remains a key piece of basic research comprising both a systematic morphological biological description of species
and a quantitative data set treating their geography and behavior. By contrast, Haeckel’s Kunstformen was aimed at
a lay audience. At the same time he tied his collection of plates directly to his theoretical texts Generelle
Morphologie (1866) and Schöpfungsgeschichte (1868). In my paper, using the drawings of Giesbrecht and Haeckel I
inquire into the function of scientific images within zoological research. Haeckel's appropriation of Giesbrecht's
images shows how an epistemic object can transition from an 'objective', quantitative context to a 'subjective',
qualitative context. Giesbrecht’s drawings of copepods were open to interpretation. Their use as an epistemic object
by Haeckel was not contingent upon Giesbrecht’s particular aims and tradition.
Author: Beatrice Steinert
Title: Drawing Embryos Together: Images and Observation in Late Nineteenth Century Cell
Lineage Studies
Abstract: In developmental biology, formerly embryology, the primary focus on understanding how organic form
changes through time and space in increasingly complex ways has necessitated the use of visual thinking and
mediums. Hence the field has long relied on image-making and visualization technologies. This was especially true
for late 19th century cell lineage studies of early stage embryos, which required extremely close observation of both
the form and movement of individual cells. For the American cell lineagists E.B. Wilson and E.G. Conklin, images
were not only the most effective way to communicate their work, but the process of producing drawings and
sketches played a central role in observation and the production of knowledge about the embryo. For each study,
hundreds of initial camera lucida sketches were compiled into approximately ninety final drawings, which were then
copied onto lithography plates and put through several rounds of revisions and proofing. This poster will include
examples of the different kinds of images produced in Wilson and Conklin’s studies and will guide the viewer
through their visual process of studying cell lineage. It will highlight how their studies were inextricably wrapped up
in the production of images and how the technologies at their disposal influenced how they saw, and thus knew, the
embryos they studied.
Author: Alma Steingart
Title: Formalizing Abstractions in Cold War Mathematics
Abstract: At the turn of the twentieth century, the ontological status of mathematical objects changed dramatically.
Gone was the abstractionist philosophy by which mathematicians held that mathematical concepts were derived
from physical objects by ignoring their sensible qualities. In its place, mathematicians embraced a formalized
axiomatic approach to defining the various entities populating the mathematical landscape. In so doing mathematical
formalization superseded mathematical form. Nowhere was such a transformation more evident than amongst the
growing cadre of topologists who turned from studying geometrical forms to examining the geometrical properties
of objects that remained constant under continuous deformation. Movement replaced shape, and qualitative
configurations displaced quantitative measurements. The field that coalesced into an independent research branch in
the 1920s and 1930s would exemplify twentieth century American mathematicians’ fascination with abstract and
generalized studies. As mathematician Raymond Wilder noted in the late 1930s, “considered as a most specialized
and abstract subject in the early 1920s, [topology] is today an indispensable equipment for investigators in modern
mathematical theories.” By anchoring my analysis in the qualitative and ontological status of form and formalism in
mid-century topology, I demonstrate how abstraction came to denote not only a mathematical epistemology, but an
ideology as well, one that had far reaching effects on the constitution of theoretical knowledge more broadly.
Author: Clara Steinhagen
Title: Smallpox, Female Sensitivity, and Inoculation Rhetoric in Early Modern England
Abstract: This paper examines the physical and social implications of smallpox in early modern England when
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu first introduced inoculation to the Western world. Many studies have addressed the
impact of smallpox epidemics in Europe and the process by which inoculation became an acceptable medical
practice. I will bring a new dimension to this discussion by applying the history and philosophy of the body,
specifically the gendered cultural significance of the skin and face. Inoculation was an unfamiliar procedure from a
foreign culture that ran contrary to longstanding Christian injunctions against medical interference with divine will.
It also carried a real risk of death for patients too weak to fight the infection. However, inoculation also offered the
promise of future immunity from smallpox and a face free of the permanently disfiguring scars that could ruin a
woman’s social standing and marriage prospects. Medical treatises and popular literature indicate that for many
women the chance of literal death was worth the avoidance of an emotional, social demise followed by self-imposed
isolation from the world. Although the primary goal of inoculation was always to prevent smallpox fatalities, the
arguments for performing the procedure on women suggest that facial disfigurement was thought to traumatize the
fragile feminine spirit, and it was better to risk physical death than face emotional ruin. In this way it is possible to
better understand motivations for the adoption of smallpox inoculation and the reasons for its eventual normalization
among all classes in eighteenth-century England.
Author: Alexandra Stern
Title: The Racialized Genealogy of the 'Gay Gene'
Abstract: This talk explores one phase of the circuitous emergence of the ‘gay gene’ as a scientific and popular
concept. Recent history traces its appearance to the early 1990s, when LeVay and Hamer announced their findings
based on studies of same-sex attraction in gay brothers. Since that time, studies demonstrating a genetic basis for
homosexuality alternately have been pursued, embraced, disparaged, and dismissed by overlapping groups of
scientists, LGBTQ advocates, conservatives, and liberals. Yet lost in debates over biology versus choice is a longer
history of hereditarian theories about non-normative sexuality and sexual identities. In the first half of the twentieth
century, these theories tended to mimic but be overshadowed by racial typologies. In the second half of the twentieth
century, as “race” transmogrified into “population,” biological understandings of sexuality and sexual identities
increasingly became more fixed, on one hand, fueling persecution, and on the other, providing seeds for liberatory
identity politics. This talk delves into the period from the 1940s to the 1960s when new attempts to classify
populations shifted to gene frequencies on the macro level and to biotypology and anthropometrics on the micro or
individual scale. This shift reshuffled the relationship between race and sexuality, and tended to enforce hard-wired
understandings of sexual and object desire. This in turn provided the scientific substrate for the articulation of
findings about a ‘gay gene’ during the early years of the Human Genome Project.
Author: Hallam Stevens
Title: Data Fantasies
Abstract: Data is rarely presented to us directly. Rather, we see carefully constructed traces of the data – data
designed to be beautiful and revealing and legible. Our relationship to data is constructed through images – pictures
show us what data is and what it means. The aesthetics of data generate "fantasies" about what data is and what it
can do for us. This presentation will consider how charismatic data visualizations--in both the sciences and in
marketing and social media--reveal the fantasies we have about data.
Author: Hallam Stevens
Title: Globalizing Genomics: The Emergence of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database
Collaboration
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: The Human Genome Project has been lauded as an example of international scientific cooperation. The
Human Genome Organization (HUGO) coordinated efforts of laboratories in the United States, the United
Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, and China. Although the HGP has been extensively studied by historians and
sociologists of science and medicine, relatively little attention has been devoted to understanding the "transnational"
aspects of the project, and in particular the origins of the project's international dimensions. This paper uses archival
sources from the National Institute of Human Genome Research and the European Bioinformatics Institute to
examine the history of the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC). The first efforts to
establish systematic international exchange of sequence data began in 1980. These ultimately resulted in the
reciprocal exchange of DNA and RNA sequence information between GenBank (USA), EMBL-Bank (Europe) and
the DNA Databank of Japan (DDBJ). During the 1980s and early 1990s, worldwide exchanges of quantities of
biological data presented significant technical and social challenges. I argue that the establishment and maintenance
of the INSDC laid important groundwork (both technical and social) for the kinds of international collaboration that
later came to characterize the HGP. Examining the history of these nascent forms of genomic collaboration will
allow us to build a more detailed understanding of the significance and the limitations of international relationships
in the biosciences.
Author: John Stewart
Title: Chemical Physiology in the Scottish Enlightenment: Affinities of Fevers, Asthma, and
Bile
Abstract: The secondary literature has tended to use modern scientific categories to parse out and compartmentalize
the physiological, mineralogical, agricultural, and chemical works of eighteenth century natural philosophers like
William Cullen. I argue that Cullen and his students used chemical affinity theory to create a chemical
understanding of physiological processes, unique to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Cullen
considered this chemical physiology complementary to his better-known, vitalistic work on the nervous system.
John Haygarth’s use of elective attraction in describing the affinities of smallpox and fevers has not received any
attention, though it informed his well-known work in developing protocols for preventing contagion in fever
hospitals. While respiration as an affinity based chemical process has been studied, in part because of Lavoisier’s
contributions to the subject, Robert Bree’s conceptualization of asthma as a breakdown in this chemical process has
gone unnoticed. Likewise Helenus Scott’s promotion of nitric acid in the treatment of liver obstructions and syphilis
has been mentioned, but Scott’s initial research into the affinities of bile and his larger theory about oxygen delivery
using weakly attracted oxygen compounds are only noticed when we foreground the use of chemical affinity in
physiology. In exploring the interrelations of affinity doctrine and physiology, I argue that Cullen and his students
did not encapsulate their theories along disciplinary boundaries, but rather that chemistry informed their
physiological works and vice versa.
Author: Daniel Stolzenberg
Title: A Book Nobody Read? Cellarius’s Copernican Atlas in Seventeenth-Century Rome
November 22, 9:00 – 11:00 AM)
Abstract: Andreas Cellarius’s Harmonia Macrocosmica was published in Amsterdam in 1660 as the final volume of
Johannes Janssonius’s epic Atlas Novus. Despite its wide dissemination and great fame—due above all to its
extraordinary and frequently reproduced astronomical diagrams—the text has received little scholarly attention. This
paper will examine the atlas’s peculiar fortune in Rome, where Janssonius secretly solicited the Holy Office for prepublication approval of its diagrams, and where the book subsequently circulated without controversy despite its
blatant endorsement of Copernican cosmology.
Author: Edna Suárez-Díaz
Title: The Molecular Basis of Evolution: From Excitement and Promises, to Confrontation
November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: In the late 1950s, a combination of new experimental techniques (zone electrophoresis, protein
fingerprinting), public health-related studies on enzymes anomalies, and research on the role of nucleic acids in
protein synthesis, combined to produce the first attempts to understand the Molecular Basis of Evolution, as claimed
by the title of Christian Anfinsen´s book (1959). As he described it, the writing of his book had been “stimulated by
the excitement and promise of contemporary protein chemistry and genetics and by the possibilities of integration of
these fields toward a greater understanding of the fundamental forces underlying the evolutionary process” (Preface,
vii).
As a biochemist who had devoted his research to the relation between protein function and structure (his work on
ribonuclease folding gained him the Nobel Prize in 1972), Anfinsen was convinced that biochemistry and the new
molecular genetics would be an exciting complement to the work of evolutionary biologists, by understanding the
principles of protein variation and the effect of such variations in species characteristics.
Anfinsen´s project was taken up by other protein biochemists in the 1960s (including Emilé Zuckerkandl and Linus
Pauling, Thomas H. Jukes, and Emmanuel Margoliash among others), population geneticists (Jack L. King, Motoo
Kimura) and computer-science inclined biologists (Walter Fitch), in what would become a field full of promises of
what a single gene sequence could achieve (Zuckerkandl and Pauling 1965). Nevertheless, Anfinsen´s idea quickly
led to claims about the superiority of the molecular approach over the traditional organismic, and to conflicting
views on the nature of evolutionary mechanisms.
In this short talk, I will focus on three themes barely discussed when talking about the context of the origins of
molecular evolution: the importance of proteins and protein research as subjects of public health and biomedicine,
the role played by new technologies (including computers in the biological sciences), and how an initially
“complementary” approach challenged the evolutionary synthesis between the 1960s and 1980s.
Author: Woodruff T. Sullivan, III
Title: William Herschel’s Mapping of the Cosmos
Session: Roundtable: Diagrammatic notation systems (Friday, November 20, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: The late eighteenth-century astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822) counted stars in over a thousand
sample directions on the sky using his 20-ft telescope. He then, making several key assumptions, turned these star
counts into wholly novel diagrammatic representations of the shape and size of our stellar Universe (the Milky
Way). These diagrams changed over the 1780-1810 period as he modified his approaches to manipulating the star
counts. Herschel was the first astronomer to take the two-dimensional celestial sphere and turn it into a diagram of
three-dimensional space or, as he called it, the "Interior Construction of the Heavens." Mapping the cosmos in such
a manner was a radically new approach to astronomy. Herschel’s work on the structure of the cosmos, and the
diagrams he produced along the way, worked convincingly in tandem to produce a new view of the cosmos.
Author: Kara Swanson
Title: The Possibilities and Responsibilities of Historians of IP
Abstract: In the legal academy, intellectual property (IP) scholarship is booming. What was a sleepy backwater in
the 20th century, largely ignored by practitioners and law schools alike, has become a growth industry. Congress
and the courts are also paying increasing attention to the topic, with the Supreme Court issuing frequent opinions on
the subject. The America Invents Act, the biggest revision to patent law since 1952 was enacted in 2011, and there is
constant discussion of further revisions to copyright and patent laws. Both policymakers and legal scholars are
hungry for empirical evidence, but they have been overlooking history as a source of data. This ferment provides
possibilities and responsibilities to those who think about science and technology in historical context. My
contribution to the roundtable will explore those possibilities from the perspective of a historian who teaches in a
law school. I will also consider the responsibilities and ability of historical scholarship to speak to contemporary
policy debates. We are trained as historians to avoid presentism, yet that training can limit the dissemination of our
work. I will consider historical IP scholarship as a case study in the role of history of science and technology in
public discourse.
Author: Kara Swanson
Title: Knowing the Body in Law and Science
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In 21st century United States law, patents mark the boundary of the human body, legally distinguishing
the technological from the natural. For the last century, “products of nature” have been foundational elements of the
public domain against which intellectual property is defined. In the context of living organisms, and technologies
sourced from the human body, however, the courts have found this category difficult to adjudicate. The recent
Supreme Court decision involving BRCA human gene patents, Association of Molecular Pathology v. Myriad
Genetics (2013), highlights the continuing difficulty with patents as boundary markers. Long before body products
were potentially patentable inventions, scientists and doctors sought to separate these new medical technologies
from the originating natural bodies. This paper recounts the development of two early body products, human milk
and blood, in the first half of the twentieth century, based on primary source research. In the absence of intellectual
property, scientists and doctors who created and used such body products also attempted to maintain a boundary
between natural and artificial in order to moderate persistent tension about body products as medical technologies. I
argue that in these decades, Americans learned to tolerate body products as technologies by considering them as
personal gifts. In focusing on the distinction between gifts and commodities, they avoided the problematic
distinction between technologies and persons. This history reveals how this way of knowing was incommensurate
with legal categories, giving rise to the current controversies within patent law.
Author: Wei Yu Wayne Tan
Title: Rediscovering the Earth and the Universe: Tenkei Wakumon and Astronomy in Early
Modern Japan
Abstract: Tenkei wakumon was one of the most influential treatises on astronomy in Japan from the late
seventeenth century. It was written by the astronomer You Ziliu in China and imported into Japan, where it gained
much attention. Current scholarship, however, has not addressed the significance of this work. In this paper, I focus
on an eighteenth-century reproduction of the manuscript. I begin by exploring the political contexts of scientific
knowledge in Japan and trace the circulation of the manuscript in scholarly circles based on a survey of different
published editions. I argue that Tenkei wakumon is an important source because it offers a rare look at the practice
of translating ideas and concepts in European astronomy, which many Japanese scholars at that time knew little
about because of the prohibition of Christianity and the strict censorship of foreign sources. In particular, I discuss
how the geocentric theory was interpreted through the traditional framework of Neo-Confucian thought. I suggest
new ways of reading the diagrams, charts, and translation notes in the manuscript, and illustrate how these material
aids—textual and visual—facilitated the study of phenomena like solar and lunar eclipses. I further argue that this
revised understanding of the movements of the sun, the earth, the moon, and the stars relative to one another had
implications for calendrical reforms and, more broadly, the development of early modern Japanese astronomy.
Author: David Theodore
Title: Biomedicine, Hospital Life, and the Invention of ARPANET
Abstract: This paper traces the influence of biomedicine on the development of computer communication networks
in the United States. I argue that the attempt to create a national hospital network was a crucial but overlooked
project that led to important concepts implemented in early digital networks. The story follows the joint efforts of
Cambridge-based research consultants Bolt Beranek Newman, the National Institutes of Health, and the American
Hospital Association, to set up a working, time-shared computer network for the Massachusetts General Hospital
between 1961 and 1966. Scholars have noted that BBN’s work on the project gave them both reputation and
technical skills that supported their well-known work on ARPANET. Yet the research team failed to produce a
working prototype. I use published and archival reports, including the extensive grey literature compiled by BBN, in
order to argue that it was a productive failure. The difficulties associated with setting up a reliable network between
BBN’s headquarters in Cambridge and the hospital, which was seven miles away in Boston, led BBN to
conceptualize network connections as immaterial nodes rather than physical locations. Moreover, the hospital staff
resisted BBN’s attempt to computerize hospital routines. More broadly, therefore, the paper contributes to the
ongoing re-assessment of Cold War computing, in which the computer is no longer studied as a tool that was applied
to existing epistemic formations, but rather as a constraint that actively transformed complex sociotechnical
configurations so that they could be addressed with computer technology.
Author: Tzuchien Tho
Title: The Continuous, the Infinitesimal and Elasticity: Leibniz's "Kinematics" of Collision
Abstract: Leibniz's doctrine of the principle of continuity accounts for the structure of the physical world and the
aptness of the infinitesimal calculus for its description. However, Leibniz also holds to the imaginary status of
continuous extension, stating that only the discrete can be actual. With this, he affirms the indefinite (interminable)
Zenoic division of the continuum as only approximate to the discrete and actual infinite nature of reality. As such
the mereological stucture of Leibnizian bodies is indefinite; there is no final division for any Zenonic subdivision,
and there is no final indivisible element from which bodies are composed. This synthesis of the continious and
discrete comes together through the metaphysical model of the monadic universe: simple discrete substances that
constitute the relations (among them continuity of space) responsible for generating a coherent cosmos of physical
phenomena. Leibniz however also applies the synthesis to a more difficult physical problem: the necessity of elastic
collisions. Here Leibniz requires both the continuity of corporeal motion and the discreteness of metaphysical reality
to explain the gap between the dynamics and kinematics of collision, a solution that appeals to the infra-phenomenal
dimension of the "very small" without requiring atoms of indivisibles. I provide a new interpretation for Leibniz's
theory of elastic collision starting from the centrality of the mathematical synthesis of the continuous and the
discrete set forth in the infinitesimal calculus. I also clarify the fluid-dynamical conception that Leibniz developed in
order to resolve this contentious point of debate in the late seventeenth-century.
Author: Marion Thomas
Title: Visions of Cells and Sexual Differences in the Works of Claude Bernard and Charles
Robin in Republican France
Abstract: In a recent work, Florence Vienne challenges F. Jacob’s 1966 argument that the cell theory “profoundly
transformed” the study of reproduction in the mid-nineteenth century. Vienne argues that a new vision of the role of
the male in reproduction made possible the envisioning of the spermatozoon as cell. In line with her work, I compare
the views of the Parisian physiologists Charles Robin and Claude Bernard on germ cells. I examine how far the
Schleiden-Schwann cell theory impacted on their understanding of reproduction, and if their visions of the egg and
the sperm as germ cells arose out of a single, undisputed way of thinking. Also, I analyze to what extent they
envisioned reproduction as a specific process or as part of a universal biological law articulating the cell concept.
One related question will to examine the language these scientists used: did they borrow the German cell theory
terminology, such as Mutterzelle and Tochterzelle, or dismiss it, and did they forward nationalistic rationales?
Finally, I examine to what extent these scientists developed a model of reproduction in which both sexes played
equal parts. Indeed, this paper aims at highlighting their views on female education and female role in society in the
years preceding and following the inauguration of the Third Republic, as well as seeking to establish the extent to
which these views were reflected in their work on reproduction.
Author: Samantha Thompson
Title: Early Television as an Aid to Astronomy
Abstract: Astronomy is inherently an observational science, but how astronomers record those observations has
changed greatly over time. Early astronomers sketched what they saw, drawing only what their eye could detect. In
the late nineteenth-century, readily available dry, gelatin-based photographic emulsions completely revolutionized
astronomy. Photography not only provided a permanent record, but also allowed for integration over extended
exposures. In 1910, photoelectric principles were exploited to measure stellar brightness. The accuracy of this
method far exceeded that of photographic methods. The disadvantage of the photoelectric technique is that only one
measurement could be made at a time, whereas a single photograph can record several stellar magnitudes
simultaneously.
To overcome this disadvantage and take advantage of the benefits of the photoelectric principle, experiments began,
in 1934, into the electronic detection of astronomical images. While some astronomers experimented with electronic
image devices built specifically for astronomy, others tested established tubes, those already successfully employed
in television cameras. My poster will examine these early television tube tests, explain through the comparison of
photographic and television images of astronomical objects the improvements this method provided, and explain
how these results encouraged astronomers developing more specialized tubes to continue testing and developing this
technology. By focusing on scientific images produced with television tubes, through this poster I hope to trace how
television developed from being considered generally in terms of mass entertainment to a useful tool in astronomical
imaging.
Author: Jenna Tonn
Title: Engineering Systems of Order in E.L. Mark’s Zoological Laboratory
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Historians of science have long pointed to the laboratory as a crucial site for disciplining the production
of knowledge in the modern biosciences. Assemblages of instruments, reagents, benches, libraries, practitioners, and
invisible technicians, converge to generate the social and material infrastructure of the laboratory. This paper
reconstructs Edward Laurens Mark’s Zoological Laboratory at Harvard University between 1890 and 1910. Mark’s
relentless interest in visualizing zoological phenomena with great precision and accuracy manifested itself in the
physical and material arrangement of his laboratory. Mark engineered indexed systems of order for the instruments,
experimental organisms, reference materials, reagents, pedagogical demonstrations, preparatory techniques and
undergraduate and graduate students circulating through the Zoological Laboratory. Beyond reconstructing Mark’s
laboratory, this paper uses memoirs, fragmentary time capsule diaries, and personal correspondence to capture both
the representation of a zoologist intent on constructing a wholly comprehensive, ordered scientific culture and the
subjective experience of moving through that culture as a student. More broadly, Mark’s system of order raises
crucial questions about the laboratory as a physical place, administrative site, and discursive ideal that mediated
zoological teaching and research in higher education at the turn of the century.
Author: Harshad Topiwala, Anna Greenwood
Title: Practising Medicine in a Segregated World
Abstract: Indian doctors working in Kenya under British rule have been almost entirely written out of the history
books. This research gap has remained largely unacknowledged by historians of the region, who have focused
instead on the Colonial Medical Service, missionary doctors, or tensions between white and black communities. We
will demonstrate that the omission has distorted our understanding of the medical history of colonial East Africa,
leaving significant racial and political complexity unaddressed. Our paper shines a light on the true diversity of
Kenyan colonial society, a society that relied pivotally on Indian immigrants, and imported ideas and medicines as
well as personnel from the subcontinent. It will also, crucially, reveal how colonial power was exercised through the
creation of a medical hierarchy with Indians in the middle, and that Indians’ position as ‘middle men’ made them
valuable intermediaries, but also potentially untrustworthy collaborators for the British elite who saw themselves as
inherently superior. We will discuss the individual experiences of these doctors, exploring how colonial politics of
race continually touched the remit of their professional and private lives. Moreover, we will show that this is broadly
an immigrant success story—that despite challenging circumstances, these doctors made a major contribution to the
medical developments and clinical care of the period. This research not only advances a more nuanced
understanding of the British Empire as a linked, multi-centered global phenomenon, it also provides a case study
that enriches our understanding of the practice of medicine in a racially segregated society.
Author: Erica Torrens
Title: The Teaching of Biological Evolution in Mexico
Abstract: There is no theory more central to modern biology than evolution. One of the most interesting aspects of
the current studies on the history of evolution is the growing attention in exploring its role and scope in non-
scientific fields, for example, in education. Some scholars have explored how the theory of evolution was introduced
to the classroom and when the efforts to include the topic in textbooks began. There are only a few studies focused
in the Mexican scene. Our study is focused on an analysis of the content of evolution, from a HPS perspective, in
Mexican basic education since Darwinism found its way into textbooks. It also explores the social and political
tensions behind it. Interestingly enough, in Mexico since 1954 textbooks for basic education are free and universal.
This means that every Mexican child from 6 to 15 years old receive the same educational material (2.7 million
copies of every subject are published every year), making textbooks a truly influential element in Mexican
education. Given the importance of evolution to biology, and the influence of textbooks in shaping the perception of
students, both of themselves and the world around them, the authors consider this to be an important approach to
understand the dominant values and ideology of the era in which each different textbooks were written and how
certain social, political and scientific dynamics occurring in the Mexican scene from late Eighteenth century have
had a direct impact in basic school biology education.
Author: Henry Trim
Title: Green Numbers: From Limits to Growth to Sustainability
Abstract: Environmentalists have often had to overcome the abstract environmental consequence of human action.
To address this problem both scientists and environmentalists have turned to quantification using models and
simulations to analyze and describe the environment. These technologies have indelibly shaped understandings of
the environment. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, the feedback systems pioneered by computer scientists’
transformed ecology and contributed enormously to the enormously popular Gaia Hypothesis. Perhaps more
importantly, the embrace of quantification highlights role of citizen scientists who repurposed techniques and
technologies designed to manage the economy and fight the Cold War to question the very foundations of American
progress.
My poster explores the mobilization of numbers and their accompanying technologies of analysis from the arresting
graphs of the Limits to Growth Model to contemporary measurements of environmental impact. It show that by
embracing data and mathematical analysis a small groups environmentalists gained a voice in Canadian and
American debates over energy and resource scarcity and they outline and championed the first green development
projects. This network of data focused environmentalists also fundamentally changed what it means to take
environmental action. Most notably, by using consumption data to show that the gray urban spaces a generation of
environmentalists had abandoned for the country side were actually the greenest place on earth. Today cities like
Vancouver and San Francisco proclaim their “greenness” using a variety of data while eschewing moral arguments.
The rhetorical power of quantified data and forecast models has come to dominate environmental politics.
Author: Elly Truitt
Title: Enyclopedic Clockwork: Technologies of Time
Abstract: In the first centuries of the Common Era, Christianity and the codex developed in tandem. The Christian
bible offered a continuous narrative of humanity from the creation of the world to the promised return of Jesus.
Similarly, Christian writers began to write a new kind of historiography to record what they saw as the entirety of
human history—both pagan and Christian. The universal history proliferated in Latin and the vernacular in western
Euraisa, and the number of highly decorated, illuminated universal histories in medieval manuscripts attests to their
importance and desirability. By the turn of the fourteenth century, a new technology for presenting past, present, and
future into one master narrative emerged: the mechanical clock. Monumental clocks used mechanical technology to
convey the present time in all its complexity, as well as things to come, such as eclipses. Religious-themed automata
depicted the events of the past, as well as the promised future of Jesus’ eventual return. This paper traces the
interdependence of technology and historiography from late antiquity through the fourteenth century, and suggests
that the explosion of monumental astronomical clocks throughout northern Europe in the fourteenth and early
fifteenth century is indicative of the prevailing interest in temporal narrative. Furthermore, by examining the
possibilities that mechanical technology offered to fuse past, present, and future into a conceptually and visually
seamless master narrative, this paper argues that the history of technology is critical to understanding the technology
of history.
Author: Arleen Tuchman
Title: The Racialized Genealogy of the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis
Abstract: This paper explores how an evolutionary hypothesis meant to explain diabetes’ widespread distribution
among human populations became a scientific theory about “indigenous genetics.” In 1962, when geneticist James
Neel published "Diabetes mellitus: A 'thrifty' gene rendered detrimental by 'progress'?," he was trying to explain
how diabetes could have established itself in “our species.” Why hadn’t natural selection reduced its presence in the
human gene pool? Neel ended up speculating that a "'thrifty' genotype" might have conferred a selective advantage
to early humans by increasing the efficiency with which they stored fat during cycles of feast and famine. When
food became plentiful, this advantage would have become a liability. Neel’s initial focus was on the universality of
diabetes. And his explanation, which was modeled on recent studies of sickle-cell anemia, elaborated on a new
understanding of race, proposed by popular geneticists and anthropologists in the postwar period, as the product of
mutation, selection, and reproductive isolation. Gone was the idea of fixed racial types. In its place was an
understanding of race as “relative differences in the frequency distribution of traits or genes.” This was not,
however, how his hypothesis was understood. By the late 1960s, medical researchers were employing the thrifty
gene hypothesis almost exclusively to explain the high rate of diabetes among American Indians and to mark them
as different than whites and blacks. This paper analyzes the shift from universal explanation to “indigenous
genetics,” highlighting in particular moments of tension between old and new definitions of race.
Author: Anna Tunlid
Title: Science Policy on Medical Genetics: Knowledge and Values of Human Heredity in the
Swedish Welfare State
Abstract: Interest in human heredity has a long history in Sweden. In the 1920s the Parliament decided on a State
institute for race biology and in the 1930s a sterilization legislation that put eugenics into practice was enacted.
During the postwar decades both research and the political-medical practices were successively transformed:
medical genetics became established and proclaimed as a new research field, and genetic counseling emerged with
an increased emphasis on individual autonomy. The aim of this paper is to explore this development with a focus on
the continuing interest in human heredity by the state after World War two. Two interlinked processes are followed:
funding of research in medical genetics and the institutionalization of clinical genetics as a new medical specialism
within the health care system. State funding of research in human genetics rapidly expanded in the 1960s with the
development of new laboratory techniques and methods and medical genetics developed to an important
specialization within biomedicine. From a science policy perspective funding was legitimatized as support of both
basic science and applications that could contribute to the development of the welfare state. The increased
knowledge of human genetics and the laboratory methods to diagnose genetic diseases formed the basis for clinical
genetics that was established in the 1970s. The paper discusses the norms and values concerning health,
reproductive choices and quality of life that were intimately linked to this development.
Author: Adam Turner
Title: The Question of Prevention: Genetics, Disability, and Abortion 1960-1980
Abstract: Amidst news about less invasive prenatal testing and continued debate about the ethics of abortion, the
relationship between abortion and disability, though present in current debates thanks to decades of activism,
remains historically underexamined. Scholars like Leslie Reagan have shown how parents' concern about disability
played an important role in the legalization of abortion, but they have not adequately analyzed the understandings of
disability and prevention that undergird these concerns.
My paper examines the centrality of disability in the abortion debates of the 1960s and 1970s, with special attention
to the role of genetic counselors and alongside growing disability advocacy around deinstitutionalization. Focusing
on genetic counselors' professional publications, letters to elected officials, and other efforts in support of abortion
reform, I trace how their rationale for supporting abortion rights grew out of understandings of disability as rooted in
individual impairment that could be predicted, diagnosed, and prevented. I argue that early genetic counselors spoke
out in favor of decriminalizing abortion in the years leading up to *Roe v. Wade* based on their expectation that
genetics could help prevent the birth of babies with disabilities, and that some early advocacy groups, like the
National Association for Retarded Children, shared this belief, seeing no paradox in supporting scientific research
into prevention at the same time they advocated for greater inclusion.
This project, by examining the historical connections between abortion reform and disability, sheds light on current
debates about the ethics of selective abortion and the tensions between reproductive freedom and disability rights
Author: Krista Turner
Title: Insidious Identities, Or When Poisons Became English
November 20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In the preface to Iberian physician Nicolás Monardes’ "Ioyfvll Newes out of the Newfound World,"
English translator John Frampton sought to inspire his fellow countrymen by proclaiming that the Spanish had
discovered “wond’rous” “Hearbes, Trees, Oyles” and “poysons” in America which served as “cures for sundry great
diseases.” Fifty years later, New World exotica like tobacco enjoyed a lively presence in London apothecary shops.
This paper investigates the impact of New World medicaments on early modern English conceptions of health,
agency, and national identity. By drawing on the writings of doctors, explorers, herbalists, and playwrights from the
late 1590s to the early 1630s, such as Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, Thomas Harriot, and Walter Ralegh, I
trace the increasing presence of medically significant exotica, particularly poisons, in English expansionist texts. I
further argue that poisons--as both metaphors and materials--correlated the health of the individual to the health of
the political body. At the same time that Iberian tobacco enjoyed broad popularity, for instance, colonial proponents
such as Ralegh contended that English control over drugs--growth, usages, and classifications--were vital to the
emergent imperial agenda. Yet as I demonstrate, underneath this telos of health resided deep ambivalences about
New World ventures. Indeed, for these writers, sovereignty in the Americas ultimately came down to a battle over
substances, substances that, as Robert Boyle put it, operated through “subtle,” “invisible,” and “insidious” means,
poisons that could endanger not just English bodies, but also the expanding English nation.
Author: Brian Tyrrell
Title: The Horse's Mouth: Citizen Science in American Sporting Weeklies
Abstract: Sporting weeklies emerged early in United States history. During the colonial period, many elites sent
their sons to Cambridge for school, and these young men returned to North America having been bitten by the
horseracing bug. Magazines like the American Turf Register, the Spirit of the Times, the American Farmer, and the
Thoroughbred Record popped up to keep observers abreast of sporting news. They covered topics important to
horseracing aficionados: breeding and training information, turf management issues, and racing results.
Additionally, scientific treatises—on the natural history of horses or native flora—proved to be among the most
popular features in these magazines. While these magazines employed editorial staffs, they relied on subscribers to
submit content. The resulting scientific content represents a blend of tacit knowledge, formal scientific
communication, and myth. Editors at the sporting magazines implored readers to submit content to their magazines.
They encouraged subscribers by telling them that they each possessed knowledge that would be useful and
interesting to other readers. Such inclusiveness reflects a paradox in knowledge production. The very existence of a
dedicated sporting press suggests a burgeoning professionalization of knowledge; however, much of the content was
generated by readers. The suggestions, observations, and advice that appeared within the pages of the sporting press
guided the breeding and farm management of legions of owners. The scientific writing in the sporting press allows
consideration of how early examples of citizen science became formalized against a rapidly professionalizing
knowledge regime.
Author: David Unger
Title: Where We Worked: Understanding Place in Historic Industrial Preservation
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: The preservation, reconstruction, and re-enactment of workspaces has been an important aspect of
industrial history and industrial heritage since the mid-20th century. Across the world, industrial buildings have been
preserved as historic districts, damaged and destroyed spaces have been rebuilt, and work environments have been
recreated, complete with moving machinery and working people. These projects have developed at a unique
intersection between academic history, urban economic development, tourism, and museum practices, and have
developed a unique set of techniques for understanding and presenting spaces that can inform the study of other
kinds of workspaces. This paper focuses on the reconstruction of historic workplaces in Lowell, MA. Lowell was
once a center of the textile industry. It was one of the first examples of large-scale industry in the United States and
was also one of the first cities to face the problems of de-industrialization. Beginning in the late 1960s an unlikely
coalition formed between labor historians, public education activists, architects, and city officials. The result was a
broad-based and wide-ranging effort to save, restore, and interpret the city's industrial legacy. Lowell became a
model for industrial preservation around the world. This paper looks at the kinds of knowledge produced in this
process, how that knowledge has been presented, and how it is embedded in the social, cultural, and economic
context of industrial preservation. By better understanding preservation as a set of knowledge-generating techniques,
it is possible to suggest ways that these techniques can be applied in other areas.
Author: Rienk Vermij
Title: The Role of Astrological Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic
3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: Whereas it is often assumed that belief in astrology was closely connected to the Aristotelian world view,
the example of the Dutch Republic shows that matters could be more complicated. As prediction-making, astrology
was largely abandoned in the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Dutch Astronomers and physicians largely
ignored the topic. Among natural philosophers, however, the demise of Aristotelianism seems to have raised interest
in the question of celestial influences rather than diminishing it. Whereas traditional Aristotelian philosophers never
paid much attention to the issue, philosophical modernizers often actively tried to incorporate the various
astrological theories into their philosophies. To them, the function of astrology, it would seem, was mainly to offer
an integrated view of the universe. In the end, the rise of mechanical philosophy offered a new alternative that made
this function superfluous.
Author: Ruben Verwaal
Title: Lifeblood: Chemistry of Blood in Eighteenth-Century Medicine
Abstract: Was early eighteenth-century chemistry merely a handmaid to medicine? This paper aims to reassess
assumptions about the relation between chemistry and medicine in the early modern period arguing that chemistry
played a central role in medicine. The fluid and flow of blood can serve as a starting point to trace developments of
academic chemistry at medical faculties. Dutch physicians and university professors such as Herman Boerhaave and
Jerome Gaub analyzed blood in retorts and flasks. Additionally, chemical examinations of blood ignited new ideas
and theories about physiology and pathology. The unique properties of blood in the body, such as coagulation, were
believed to be only understood by chemistry. To understand blood’s constituent parts and properties were believed
to be of great advantages to understand the signs of health and disease. Thus, the focus on the chemistry of blood
can provide a new perspective on eighteenth-century perceptions of the living body and the academic transformation
of chemistry.
Author: Florence Vienne
Title: ‘Give Me a Cell and I will Disclose all Forms of the Organized World for You’: Raspail’s
and Schwann’s Search for a Common Origin of Organic Life
Abstract: The Frenchman François-Vincent Raspail and the German Theodor Schwann probably never met. This is
surprising, first, because both scholars lived in Belgium in the 1850s. Raspail stayed in this country from1853 to
1862 as a political refugee, as a consequence of his commitment to republicanism. In the case of Schwann, religious
motives had influenced his decision to leave protestant Prussia and to accept a position at the Catholic University of
Louvain in 1839. Secondly, both scholars were among the first to have proposed – Raspail in 1827, Schwann in
1838 – that plants and animals originated from ‘cells’. In this talk I will compare their respective research of the
1820s and 1830s in the fields of botany, physiology, embryology that led them to this groundbreaking assumption. I
will also discuss if, and to what extent, Raspail’s political and Schwann’s religious convictions had influenced their
search for a universal basic unit of life. The overall aim of this case study is to highlight differences between the
cultural contexts of early nineteenth century French and German cell research. These differences may explain why
Schwann and Raspail never met.
Author: Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi
Title: Experiments in the Silence Room: Phyllis M.T. Kerridge's Experiments on Hearing Loss
Abstract: Dr. Phyllis M.T. Kerridge (1902-1940) was a physiologist whose experiments on hearing loss
significantly contributed to modern hearing tests and prescriptions of hearing aids. This paper examines Kerridge’s
experiments for measuring the hearing capacity of deaf persons at the “Silence Room,” a clinic established in the
basement of the Royal Ear Hospital in London. Although the clinic was initially set up as a six-month research trial
in 1937, Kerridge’s work in quantifying hearing loss for more accurate prescriptions of hearing aids was so
encouraging that the hospital’s Governing Committee decided to extend her research contract. Her research revealed
the difficulties of accurately conducting tonal hearing tests to assess the ability of deaf persons to hear spoken
words; variables such as the intensity of the speaker’s voice or background noises, frequently caused errors in
audiometric readings. To solve this problem, Kerridge devised phonetic frequency tests that relied on the utterance
of words from a list of monosyllabic nouns and short commonplace sentences. The former was used to test people
with hearing sufficient to hear isolated, but common words, whereas the latter was for people who required context
for comprehension. These tests were significant for incorporating a new and broader standard for hearing tests, one
which merged not just tonal and phonetic sounds, but lip-reading, individual comprehension, and guessing.
Author: Christine von Oertzen
Title: Gendered Data: Paper Technologies and Labor Division in Nineteenth-Century Census
Compilation
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: The presentation focuses on the paper technologies, the labor, and the practices involved in producing
printed results of census taking before the arrival of punch cards and Hollerith machines in 1889. My particular
focus is Prussia, the biggest and most powerful among the German states, which developed a unique system of
manual abstraction of census records, intimately intertwined with core social values and political rationales.
Gendered Data explores how mid-nineteenth century paper technologies used in population statistics triggered a
dramatic change in the practices of manual census compilation, trespassing established boundaries of class and
gender. Instead of following its mandate to provide additional income to retired servicemen, the Prussian census
bureau came to rely heavily on the skills of middle-class wives, widows, and unmarried female staff working from
home, creating virulent tensions among its clientele of veterans. The paper shows how notions of gender, skill, and
class were weighed against entitlement through military service, providing evidence of how paper-based practices in
data processing became defined as a female domain – long before punch cards and computers arrived on the scene.
Author: Adelheid Voskuhl
Title: Engineering Knowledge, Engineering Practice, and German Idealism in the Industrial Age
Session: Cultures and Communities (Thursday, November 19, 1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: The internal and external conflicts that engineers were facing as they were constituting themselves around
1900 as a new academic discipline and social elite have been studied from a number of perspectives by historians
such as Edward Layton, Jeffrey Herf, Kees Gispen, and Ron Kline. Engineers negotiated disagreements among each
other about education, accreditation, and institutionalization, and they found themselves in fierce social competition
with traditional academic elites whose roots went far back to pre-industrial eras. I focus in my paper on how and
why, early in the twentieth century, engineers also became interested in philosophy. I look specifically at
philosophical writings by engineers in Germany in the 1920s that were written, edited, selected, and printed in
periodicals of elite academic engineering institutions. Like other discussions in the public sphere of the Weimar
Republic, such philosophies by engineers relied on, explained, and aimed to extend epistemologies and political
theories that had been developed in the tradition of German Idealism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
by Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. I trace those parts of Idealism that engineers were particularly attracted to, and I uncover
moments in which philosophical claims they made (with the help of Idealist philosophy) about engineering
knowledge coincided with social claims they made for engineers’ status as a new cultural elite. The ambitious ideas
as well as the intellectual cachet of German Idealism helped them formulate strategies about how to integrate
engineers and engineering into the complex social and intellectual orders of interwar Germany.
Author: Emily Wakild
Title: From Notional Parks to National Places: Field Science and Nature Protection in Patagonia
Abstract: This paper examines two interrelated but separate processes: the emergence of natural field science as a
way of knowing landscapes in southern South America and the design and creation of national parks in the same
places. Scientists advocated and designed parks based on their own explorations and investigations of Patagonian
lands. But scientists alone could not make parks. By the 1930s, parks became items of discussion and transitioned
from notions to institutionally managed entities. This occurred comparatively early for global conservation and the
parks have been stable and generative. That is, the parks have expanded over time and associated reserves have also
been created. One explanation for this is their association with active scientists including naturalists, geographers,
and biologists. Field science that took place in South America, most famously with Darwin, was at first removed
from the sites of encounter. By contrast, creating parks involved fixing the elements to be studied in the places they
occurred. Policymakers often made scenic or recreational arguments for creating national parks, but they frequently
credited scientists for bringing the notion of a park forward. Nationalizing these places enveloped the idea of nature
study inside a broader public park. By examining these processes through the lens of specific parks (such as Torres
del Paine, Los Glaciares, and Nahuel Huapi National Park) this paper contributes a fresh look at field science.
Author: Sarah Walsh
Title: Religion of Life: Latin Eugenics as Laboratory (Testing Ground?)
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: In a 2011 article, Alexandra Minna Stern credited Nancy Leys Stepan with “Latinizing” eugenics by
demonstrating that North Atlantic notions of eugenic fitness and legislation were unpopular in Latin America and
were replaced with local versions that were better suited to national projects of modernization there. The defining
characteristics of Latin American eugenics, according to Stepan, was their interest in environment over heredity and
their rejection of sterilization. Marius Turda and Aaron Gillette have, as recently as 2014, used these same neoLamarckian parameters to define Latin eugenics as a specific intellectual development during the first half of the
twentieth century not only in Latin America but also in the so-called Latin European countries such as Italy, France,
and Spain. This paper builds upon this historiographical framework to examine an often neglected site of Latin
eugenic knowledge production: Chile. By focusing on Chilean eugenicists’ understandings of environment and
sterilization, this paper reflects upon what role, if any, Catholicism played in the formulation of Chilean eugenic
science. It will also discuss how eugenics in Chile was deployed to racially distinguish Chileans from other Latin
Americans and thereby create a whitened history of race mixing. Finally, the paper posits that Latin eugenic
principles focusing on education, reform, and the plasticity of human beings was the foundation upon which later,
anti-racist scientists built their claims. As such, Latin eugenics (and Latin America) served as a laboratory for testing
future racial and anti-racist ideologies.
Author: Scott Walter
Title: Poincaré on Clocks and Radio Waves in the Ether
November 21, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: For most of the twentieth century, historians of physics situated the discovery of the theory of relativity at
the cutting edge of contemporary experimental and theoretical physics: ether-drag experiments, electron theory, and
the electrodynamics of moving bodies. Following the practical turn in HST, Peter Galison suggested that to better
understand the relativity revolution we should review its embedding in turn-of-the-century material cultures of clock
coordination and telegraph networks. The co-founders of relativity, Henri Poincaré and Albert Einstein were both
engaged with these iconically-modern technologies, at the Paris Bureau of Longitudes, and the Bern Patent Office,
respectively. Galison's technology-driven account of the theory of relativity can be extended by taking into
consideration Poincaré's contributions to wireless telegraphy, including his studies of the diffraction of wireless
waves (1903-1912), and a 1908 lecture series on the stability of current oscillations in the singing-arc radio
transmitter. Just a few months after the latter lecture series in Paris, Poincaré delivered another series in Göttingen,
financed by the Wolfskehl Foundation. During his talk on the new mechanics issuing from the Lorentz group,
Poincaré proposed a thought experiment that corrected his earlier, physically-untenable interpretation of the Lorentz
group, ostensibly to accommodate observers in inertial motion with respect to the ether, whom he equipped with
timekeepers and radio transmitter-receivers. Poincaré's new radio-based understanding of the physical significance
of the Lorentz transformations was closer to the relativity theories of Einstein and Minkowski, while it retained a
traditional role for the ether as the seat of radio wave propagation.
Author: Iain Watts
Title: The Periodical Commons and the Tyranny of Distance in Science, 1790-1820
November 20, 9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: Around 1800, the idea that published work immediately became available to the whole scientific
community was a fiction. Because of the disruptions of the two-decade-long Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars,
and the general difficulty of communication before the railway era, delays of several months were common between
a scientific discovery or claim being announced and its being known across Europe. One key tool for mitigating the
tyranny of distance was periodical print: both the new journals that emerged around 1800, like the Philosophical
Magazine or the Annales de Chimie, and general-readership media like newspapers. A fundamental feature of these
publications was that they constantly reprinted and translated from one another. This was not understood as piracy
or copyright violation; the system spread information precisely because it allowed texts to become part of a
periodical commons. But the norms governing this early knowledge commons were still unclear, so that science
finding its way into periodicals often exposed tensions with coexisting methods of communication involving
manuscripts, public lectures, and the "reading" of papers at societies. I discuss this using examples drawn from the
history of electricity. The announcement of Alessandro Volta's battery, for example, initially made in a letter to
Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, controversially was first printed and spread (unauthorized) by a
London newspaper. Another episode, on the supposed electrical production of acids from pure water in 1805, also
highlights tensions over how claims from distant and perhaps little-known researchers arriving in periodicals could
be assessed and trusted.
Author: Debbie Weinstein
Title: "Bonobos Do Have More Style": Frans de Waal and Late 20th c. Explanations for War
and Peace
Abstract: In 1931, Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud under the auspices of the League of Nations, in order to
ask a question of grave public concern: why do people fight wars? This was not a question about the proximate
causes of specific conflicts but a query about the nature of human nature. This paper considers the late-twentiethcentury reframing of Einstein and Freud’s dialogue on “why war?”. By the 1970s and 1980s, ethology and
primatology had supplanted psychoanalysis as preferred sites of knowledge for explaining human aggression and
conflict. Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression (1963) and the increasingly violent behavior observed by primatologists
among chimpanzees during the 1970s, coupled with the ascendance of sociobiological explanations of human
behavior, contributed to increasingly dark views of the innate inevitability of human conflict at the individual and
societal levels. One counterpoint to such views came from primatologist Frans de Waal. De Waal’s popular books
(including Peacemaking Among Primates, 1989), celebrated the capacity of bonobo apes for reconciliation as an
indicator that “for humans, making peace is as natural as making war” (Peacemaking, 7). His message for the
general public thereby concurred with the presumption that one could learn about human nature by studying other
primates but argued that other scientists had ignored apes’ behaviors for resolving conflicts, not just fighting them.
His efforts to herald the peaceful, sex-loving bonobos as humans’ evolutionary next-of-kin drew on his own
scientific persona as well as the charisma of the bonobos themselves.
Author: Margaret A. Weitekamp
Title: Space Stations on a Changing Frontier: Race, Gender, and Space Science Fiction
November 21, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In the 1990s, space stations took center stage in both fiction and reality. Rooted in ideas as old as Edward
Everett Hale’s “The Brick Moon” (1869) and based on the precedents set by the United States and the Soviet Union
in the 1970s and 1980s, the International Space Station (ISS) resulted from an agreement in 1998 between those two
space-faring nations to cooperate in building a joint space station. Even as nine Shuttle-Mir missions flown between
1994 and 1998 established the basis for future international cooperation regarding the ISS, American audiences
could already see depictions of complex space stations every week on television. Beginning in 1993, viewers could
tune into Babylon 5 from 1993-1998, or from 1993-1999, the newest iteration of the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine. The multicultural meeting places depicted in these science fiction series became a backdrop for
plotlines that debated the meaning of the past, an echo both of new scholarly interpretations of the frontier and the
contemporary culture wars raging over the meaning of the lived past. Using a close reading of various episodes, this
paper examines how depictions of race and gender reflected and reacted against their broader social and cultural
contexts. As a part of a broader consideration of how various images of space exploration interact with larger
political, social and cultural trends, this paper will explore why the narrative potential of space stations resonated in
the 1990s.
Author: Simon Werrett
Title: “Enlightened Icons: Lomonosov’s Mosaics Factory and the Uses of Chemistry”
Abstract: From 1755 the Russian chemist and professor of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences Mikhail
Vasil’evich Lomonosov oversaw the production of coloured glass mosaics in his chemical laboratory at the
Academy and at a factory near Moscow named Uts-Ruditsky. Lomonosov’s mosaics have usually been discussed as
import substitutes, since they were meant to replace expensive Italian mosaics imported into Russia as luxuries by
the aristocracy. But this paper will situate Lomonosov’s mosaic work within competitions at the Imperial Academy
of Sciences to manage spectacle for the Russian court and attempts by Lomonosov to garner the patronage of a new
regime at court under the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. To gain power over the Academy, Lomonosov presented
mosaics as a material manifestation of the value of chemistry for Elizabeth’s regime. Mosaics, made artificially with
coloured glass instead of naturally-occurring precious stones, showed that enlightened chemistry was a means to
enhance Russian profits and patriotism, Orthodox piety, and absolutist power. The paper thus considers UtsRuditsky as a “production utopia” of the kind more commonly identified in French and British contexts in the
second half of the eighteenth century, as a location where manufactures and enlightened science were mixed
together to provide a model of social order for the future Russian empire.
Author: Benjamin Wilson
Title: Macroeconomics Goes Nuclear: Thomas Schelling and the Rational Mechanics of Nuclear
War
Abstract: Economic theories and techniques loomed large in the development of nuclear strategy. We often think of
game theory, decision theory, or cost-benefit analysis as species of “economic rationality” that were applied with
enthusiasm to the grim subject of thermonuclear war. Several important nuclear thinkers of the 1950s and 1960s
were trained professionally in economics, and were employed (as staff or consultants) in the economics division of
the iconic RAND Corporation—an epicenter of what foundation officer Warren Weaver once referred to as “the
rational life.” But there is another connection between economics and strategy in the nuclear age, unrecognized by
historians. It owes more to the midcentury study of macroeconomics than to the rational-choice models of
microeconomics; is indebted more to Keynes than to von Neumann and Morgenstern; has more to do with the
behavior of complex interactive systems than with individual decision. And it is central to one of the most important
developments in the history of nuclear strategy: the idea of stable deterrence, articulated at the end of the 1950s by
Thomas Schelling and Albert Wohlstetter. Long before either had encountered game theory, Schelling and
Wohlstetter were trained in branches of macroeconomics, including the theory of national income and the study of
business cycles. This paper shows how these thinkers carried specific tools from the study of macroeconomic
systems and adapted them to the construction, and critique, of nuclear strategy.
Author: Rebecca Woods
Title: Imperial Environments: Between Physical and Figurative
Abstract: The notion of “environment” carried signification in the context of British agricultural thought in the
nineteenth century. Though rarely articulated in such terms, ideas about landscape and terrain, and the beings that
inhabited them, domesticated or not, were polyvalent and served multiple ends. Such notions were often used to
invoke a concrete thing—a particular place, or a particular component of what we would today recognize as an
ecological community (a type of plant or animal, for example)—but also, critically, they were employed in such a
way as to confer valuation on precisely those categories (type and place). My comments will explore the dynamics
between the physical and the figurative—the concrete and the evaluative—within the context of the British Empire,
using their application to types of domesticated animals as an example.
Author: Alexander Wragge-Morley
Title: The Utility of the Spleen: The Body, Medicine and Aesthetic Judgment in EighteenthCentury London
Abstract: This paper reconsiders the role of discourses about the body in two disciplines strongly associated with
the early British Enlightenment – aesthetics and the empirical science of medicine. Scholars of literature, art history
and philosophy have, in recent years, begun to identify a key role for medical discourses in the emergence of visual
and literary aesthetics in the early 18th century. At the same time, historians of science have focused on the interplay
between the early modern arts and sciences, showing that medics and natural philosophers both appropriated, and
shaped, the visual practices of the pictorial arts. However, there has been little discussion of the role of medics and
medical discourses in framing the fundamental problem shared by aesthetics and empirical sciences: the unavoidable
role of the body’s animal functions in sensory perception. In the arts and sciences alike, practitioners wanted to
make the body a better instrument for the perception of beauty and the production of knowledge by disciplining its
sensory responses and appetites. I will bring medicine back to the fore by focusing on an 18th-century debate about
the role of the spleen in the animal economy - a debate that attracted the attention of leading medics including
William Cheselden, William Stukeley and Richard Blackmore. Focusing in particular on Stukeley, I will argue that
medics played a crucial role in describing – and even pathologizing – the forms of embodiment associated with
artistic production and consumption. Thus medicine played a key role in the emergence of aesthetics.
Author: Aaron Wright
Title: Principles of Correspondence: What PAM Dirac's Correspondence Says about Scientific
Communication
Abstract: Correspondence has been a central site of inquiry across the history of science, and this centrality is being
further institutionalized. The importance of correspondence to historians' work has led to a developing interest in the
study of correspondence itself. Like all historical sources, correspondence reveals and conceals. Like all media,
correspondence communicates and conditions. Correspondence instantiates relations between persons, but it also
stands in relation to other forms of scientific media: notebooks, published papers, presentations, monographs, etc.
This paper uses the example of the interwar correspondence of physicist Paul Dirac to elucidate the function of
correspondence in science. It argues that Dirac's correspondence network created a private space for elite European
physicists to explore the metaphysical consequences of Dirac's developing theory of the electron. Based on material
from Dirac's archive, this paper explores the rhythm of letters, preprints, visits, and publications to explore the
relationships between the various ways scientists communicate. The material practices of knowledge matter, even
beyond the laboratory or chalkboard. Polanyi argued that there was a form of knowledge associated with people, a
form of knowledge that must be spread by circulating people: tacit knowledge. What is the form of knowledge
associated with correspondence? This paper argues that in the case of Dirac's circle a personal, freer, more
metaphysical exchange was possible in letters than in published materials. As historians of science seek congruence
between the diverse regions, periods, and scientific activities we study, correspondence offers itself as a unificatory
frame within which to enrich our discipline.
Author: Jessica Wright
Title: Politics, the Brain, and Public Health: The Deployment of Medical Knowledge in Late
Antique Sermons
Abstract: "Just as when, if a hand is torn from the body, the spirit—proceeding from the brain and seeking the part
but not finding it—does not leap out from the body and fly to the hand; rather, not finding the part in place, the spirit
does not touch it." (John Chrysostom, Commentary on Ephesians 11)
The Greco-Syrian preacher John Chrysostom (c. 349–407 CE) had a remarkable knowledge of the brain and nervous
system, as understood by contemporaneous medical practitioners. This was not unusual among early Christian
writers, many of whom had, like Chrysostom, initially trained in rhetoric and philosophy. Unlike many of his peers,
however, Chrysostom did not turn his medical knowledge to explication of the human body and its wonders but
toward management of the political body in his care: the church and, increasingly, the city as a whole.
Whilst fashioning himself—in line with philosophical and Christian tradition—as a “physician of souls,”
Chrysostom practiced through his sermons a therapeutics of the city, deploying the naturalising logic of the body
and its diseases to situate himself as an authority in how members of the body should be treated and, in some cases,
amputated. This paper argues that focusing on Chrysostom’s use of medical knowledge, in particular about the
nervous system, opens up his texts to a study of his political interventions, and, more generally, to the role that
medical knowledge about the body played in late antique political and ecclesial debate.
Author: Susan Wright
Title: The Political Design and Legacy of the 1975 Asilomar Conference
PM)
Abstract: A discussion of the politics of the Asilomar conference and its twin legacies: self-governance with respect
to NIH-sponsored research and non-interference for military establishments and agri-chemical industries.
Author: Shellen Wu
Title: Dixue and the Making of a Chinese Geology
20, 3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In his magisterial two-volume work on the history of geology, Martin Rudwick focused on the growing
linkage between conceptions of time and history and views of the earth, tracing to the first half of the nineteenth
century the diffusion of ideas on historical change and revolutions to the history of the earth. The puzzle for China
specialists is why the issues central to Rudwick’s argument—a historical understanding of the earth, the issue of
time, and the expansion of geological time—only appear tangentially in China, mentioned if at all, as an
afterthought. Both in China and in the West, the study of geography long predated the rise of geology. Yet following
the collapse of the Qing in 1911, it was geology and not geography that became the leading science of the Republic.
From the mid-nineteenth century a new category of Dixue, studies of the earth, incorporated both geology and
geography, but ultimately the development of the former dominated the latter, older and formerly more prestigious
area of studies. This paper attempts to answer the question of why geology came to dictate the disciplinary
boundaries of Dixue by examining pre-modern Chinese epistemological organization of the kind of knowledge that
subsequently became classified under Dixue, as well as, the production of both geological and geographical works
in the late Qing into the early Republican period. I argue that the unique historical context of late nineteenth century
China helped to shape the development of modern geology in the country.
Author: Elizabeth Yale
Title: “The Highlands of this Kingdom”: Antiquities, Fossils, and the Representation (and
Reconstruction) of the Field in Eighteenth-Century Britain
9:00 – 11:45 AM)
Abstract: This paper explores “the field” as a site of natural history and antiquarian research, exploring its
representation and reconstruction using a set of illustrated letters written by the naturalist Edward Lhwyd (16601709) during his travels through Celtic Britain. Over five years, Lhwyd collected materials towards comprehensive
studies of the languages, natural history, and antiquities of the mountains, coal mines, and sea coasts of Ireland,
Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall—from the perspective of London, Britain’s marginal, under-inhabited places.
Though Lhwyd intended these as semi-private letters, not wishing them to circulate beyond a narrow band of
correspondents, they were edited by Royal Society secretary Hans Sloane and published in The Philosophical
Transactions shortly after Lhwyd’s death. The differences between written letters and printed papers—including
shifts in the appearance and placement of illustrations—highlight certain tensions in conceptions of the field as a
source of scientific knowledge. For Lhwyd, his travels through Britain’s high and lonely places produced new
theoretical knowledge, particularly regarding the origins of fossils; yet when his travels were represented in print in
The Philosophical Transactions, those theoretical possibilities were largely edited out. Additionally, for Lhwyd,
developing knowledge about fossils and antiquities, both of which were found in the ground, required understanding
and representing to one’s readership the natural and cultural spaces in which they were first discovered.
Reconstructing—and representing—these spaces was central to naturalists’ arguments for the identification and
classification of objects they found in it.
Author: Chen-Pang Yeang
Title: Replicating Heinrich Hertz’s Electromagnetic Wave Experiment in 1887
Abstract: In 1887, a German physicist Heinrich Hertz in Karlsruhe used an electric spark generator to induce an arc
at several meters away. After further tests, Hertz claimed that this novel effect marked the first production of manmade electromagnetic waves. According to today’s general belief, Hertz’s results confirmed the dominant theory of
electricity and magnetism developed by the British scientist James Clerk Maxwell in the 1870s. Hertz’s “discovery”
of electromagnetic waves has been portrayed as one of the most important experiments in the history of physics.
Contrary to the common view, however, his laboratory work did not conclude but rather opened a new page of
research on electromagnetism. From the late 1880s to the early 1900s, European physicists endeavored to reproduce,
challenge, scrutinize, and utilize Hertz’s 1887 experiment. A way to understand the nature of this post-Hertz
research program is to learn from the experience of replicating Hertz’s trial. In this paper, we will present our
attempt to replicate Hertz’s electromagnetic wave experiment in 1887. We will demonstrate the process we have
gone through, show the results we have obtained, discuss the implications of this experience to pose research
questions about the history of the post-Hertz program, and reflect on how our project engages the historiographical
significances of replicating historical experiments in general.
Author: Doogab Yi
Title: Representing Korean Smokers before the Court: Science and the Mobilization of
American Tobacco Litigation in Korea
3:45 – 5:45 PM)
Abstract: In 1999, Gum-Ja Bae, a Harvard-trained lawyer, filed a civil lawsuit against the KT&G (Korea Ginseng
& Tobacco Company). Inspired by a successful wave of American tobacco litigations in the 1990s, Bae wrote her
thesis on the applicability of American tobacco litigation theories in Korea at Harvard. This paper analyzes the fate
of the Korea tobacco litigation by looking at the trans-Pacific circulation of scientific knowledge and legal practices.
We will first examine how both the plaintiffs and the defendant in the Korea tobacco litigation mobilized scientific
knowledge generated and used in American courtrooms. In an attempt to hold the tobacco industry accountable for
Korean smoker’s sufferings, epidemiological studies of smoking, neurological and psychological studies of
nicotine’s addictiveness, and additives in cigarettes emerged some of the key scientific issues that were hotly
contested in Korean courts. The Korean court, much to the disappointment of the plaintiff, denied the legitimacy of
the plaintiff’s allegations against the KT&G. This outcome, as this paper shows, was a result of the trans-Pacific
circulation of knowledge generated by transnational tobacco companies regarding such issues like cancer causation
and addictiveness. The manufacturing of scientific uncertainty across the Pacific Rim indeed led to the coproduction of a scientific and legal order in Korea that did not recognize its smokers as a legal victim of the tobacco
industry. This paper will conclude with a discussion on the role of science in recognizing legally and compensating
justly those who suffered and in an increasingly globalized toxic world.
Author: Doogab Yi
Title: Asilomar for Genome Editing? Regulation in the Age of Global Science
PM)
Abstract: This contribution will examine the history of two Asilomar Conferences on recombinant DNA
technology, which were held in 1973 (Asilomar I) and 1975 (Asilomar II) respectively, within the context of the
early network of recombinant DNA research formed around the laboratories of Stanford University. I will show how
competition among early recombinant DNA researchers, along with their safety concerns, figured prominently
among participants in the Asilomar conferences. By comparing the local nature of the Asilomar I and the national
nature of the Asilomar II, this talk will illustrate broader shifts in the relationship between biology and capitalism in
American society.
Author: Waqar Zaidi
Title: The Promise of Atomic Energy and the Contested Emergence of Atomic Expertise, 19451946
1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: The revelation of the atomic bomb to the American public in August 1945 opened up a new public space,
a new opportunity, driven by public and media demand, for publicly identifiable expertise on this new technoscientific marvel. Into this breach stepped the (so-called) atomic scientists, who quickly came to be accepted as
public experts on this new artefact, and on its beneficial and detrimental effects. In this paper I problematize
scientists’ claims to this expertise and point out, first, the surprisingly wide-ranging nature of their claims: not only
did they claim to know the science underlying atomic weapons, but also to speak to other applications of atomic
energy and their positive and negative social, economic and political effects. They connected these together into one
large heterogeneous epistemological unit through the rubric of “atomic energy” which they claimed to know and to
be uniquely placed to understand. I argue that scientists’ claims to be the gate-keepers of this new science and
technology was not uncontested: other individuals offered themselves as experts too. Amongst them was Carnegie
internationalist James T. Shotwell, who presented himself as an alternate source of expertise on the impact of atomic
energy on society and politics. A study of these early atomic era discourses allows us unveil legitimizing process
and claims: I show, in particular, how claims for the promise of atomic energy need to be considered as part of wider
disciplinary and epistemological boundary-work.
Author: Anya Zilberstein
Title: Cheap Promises: Prescription Diets for People and other Animals
1:30 – 3:30 PM)
Abstract: As part of a larger project that seeks to understand when, why, and how food security first became an
object of government planning and a domain of scientific expertise in the British empire, this paper will examine
nutritional experiments and policy proposals for developing easy to grow (or labor-free), low-cost alternative
subsistence crops that could be sown on marginal lands with limited agricultural potential. Perhaps most strikingly,
these schemes treated food for working people as more or less equivalent to fodder for livestock. Naturalists and
reformers like Count Rumford, Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Banks, John Sinclair, Arthur Young, among many others
looked for ways to cheaply nourish the urban poor, laborers, and slaves in military or naval service, workhouses,
orphanages, soup kitchens, prisons, and colonial plantations or frontiers, developing methods that might feed
dependent populations much as farmers provided fodder for livestock. These food scientists believed that animal
physiology, the physics of heat and cold, and agricultural improvement could be applied to solving the growing
problem of food provisioning for the lower orders at home and abroad, part of a broader strategy to gain control of
Britain’s domestic and colonial food supply. They promised to efficiently feed large groups of people or other
animals while addressing the pragmatic, paternalistic, and theoretical concerns of physicians, plantation masters,
merchants, and government officials, presaging several crucial aspects of twentieth-century dietary and agricultural
science and policy.

Paper and Poster Abstracts for 2015 History of Science Society

Transcription

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