Abstracts of Papers Presented
at
The History of Science Society
2003 Annual Meeting
Tara Abraham, Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science (abraham@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm President's
Ballroom A
By
the end of the 1940s, a picture of the nervous system emerged that
characterized the neuron as a digital entity. This view was largely the result
of theories presented by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943, 1947, 1948)
that described hypothetical arrangements of neurons whose function was
expressed in terms of mathematics and logic. Their fundamental presupposition in these theories was taken
from neurophysiology itself: the all-or-none law. Expressed in 1914 by E.D.
Adrian, the all-or-none law held that the relation between a neural stimulus
and the activity it produces is all or nothing. Any neuron has a finite
threshold which the intensity of the impulse must exceed for production of
excitation, and the response is independent of the intensity of the stimulus.
McCulloch and Pitts translated this principle into the supposition that just as
propositions in logic can be true or false, neurons can be on or
off—they either fire or they do not. This assumption enabled them to discuss neuron function in
logical terms. However, by the mid
1930s, from the point of view of neurophysiologists, the all-or-none principle
could still be seen as an accurate description of the relation between stimulus
and response, but the underlying mechanism could empirically be shown to be
more continuous (or analog) than discrete. Although the McCulloch-Pitts neuron was a key element of the
cybernetic vision, and allowed cyberneticians to conceputalize the brain as a
digital computer, neurophysiologists were critical of their idealizations that
ignored details of neural activity such as chemical concentrations and
continuous electric fields. My paper will explore the debates that ensued among
neurophysiologists and cyberneticians during the 1940s and 1950s on the nature
of neural activity, focusing on the relationship between these two conceptions
of the neuron—digital and analog—in neurophysiology and
cybernetics. It will be shown that
the emphasis placed on the digital and analog aspects of the neuron was related
to the extent to which theoretical possibilities were valued over experimental
realities.
Annmarie Adams and Thomas
Schlich, McGill
University (annmarie.adams@mcgill.ca)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
Symbolizing Scientific Surgery: The Modern Hospital
and the Modern Surgeon
How did the
structure, planning and image of spaces for surgery symbolize the scientific
aspirations of the emerging team-oriented surgical practices so key to the
development of the 20th-century academic hospital? The central argument of our
paper is that the design of environments for surgery became increasingly
isolated from other units in the modern hospital and the institutions urban
context. This reflects surgerys character as a "technology of
control," after the model of experimental science. Surgery needs special spaces in order
to exert control in the same way that experimental science needs laboratories.
An innovative use of architectural and visual sources is the primary evidence
for this argument through a case study of one of the worlds foremost teaching
hospitals in the early 20th century, the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal. A
theme of this paper is thus to test how visual evidence adds to or even
contradicts a history of medicine predicated on textual sources. Plans and photographs show how the
isolated early 20th-century surgical theatre, illuminated by daylight and
surrounded by fresh air, became in the postwar period a myriad of smaller rooms
at the core of the institution.
Surgical suites in the 1950s, for example, were typically surrounded by
corridors and patient rooms, and ventilated and illuminated wholly by
artificial means. This multi-disciplinary paper explores the relationship of modern
architecture and surgery in the 20th century.
Sam Alberti, University of Manchester
(sam.alberti@man.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes B
Collecting the Dead: Anatomy Museums in
Nineteenth-century Britain
St Bartholomew's
Hospital museum was a "Valhalla of spoils snatched from the dead, the
dying, the living, and those who have never been born". To illuminate the form and
function of such a collection, this paper presents a study of museological
practice, following the life - or death - of a museum specimen through the
'cadaver circuit', from acquisition through display. Acquisition routes leading to the hospital will set the
collections firmly in their medical and cultural context: twinned to the path
of the specimen to the museum was the process of legitimation, as curators
sought to remove their collections from the unsavoury cultural environs of the
freak show and circus. Enormous
energies were thus expended in acquiring choice specimens, and yet it was once
they arrived at the museum that the real labour began. Touching on preparation, preservation
and articulation methods, I examine the cataloguing and arranging of these vast
and eclectic collections - especially how they impacted upon the disciplinary
formation of pathology - before turning to their audiences and use. The paper explores the working
practices not only of curators, such as Thomas Hodgkin of Guy's hospital, but
other less prominent personnel - artists, modellers, keepers: the invisible
technicians of the museum.
Although the focus is on hospital museums, connections and comparisons
are explored with a range of other sites, from commercial freak shows such as
Kahn's Anatomical Museum to 'respectable' collections such as those of the
Royal Colleges of Surgeons in London and Edinburgh.
Katharine Anderson, York University
(kateya@yorku.ca)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Tom
Paine A
Weather Writ Large: The Imperial Scale of British
Meteorology
In the 1870s, as
international coordination in meteorological study was developing, researches
on cyclical patterns of rainfall entered into heated debates about the
management of the British Empire - which, just like meteorology, involved a
conception of governance on
"the largest possible scale." Focussing on rainfall, sunspots
and famine prediction, British meteorologists turned their attention to India's
intense but regulated tropical climates. The promising prospects of Indian
meteorology defused the theoretical and administrative uncertainty that surrounded
the science at home. The Indian experience also suggested how science and the
state became mutually reinforcing models of rational order.
Nancy Anderson, Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science (anderson@mpiwg-berlin-mpg.de)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
Transitive Light and Digital Pictures: Fluorophores
and Electronic Imaging in Cell Biology During the 1980s
In a 1978 article for
the journal Cell,
two molecular biologists highlighted the current and potential uses of video
for visualizing fluorescence probes in living cells. In particular, video cameras could detect extremely low
levels of illumination so photobleaching was markedly reduced as was
photodamage to the cellular organelles.
Throughout the following decade experimental systems developed that
coupled fluorophore and electronic imaging technologies. CCD cameras (along with accompanying
computer hardware and software) appeared in the microscopists laboratory in
the mid-1980s and opened up greater opportunities for quantitative analysis,
image manipulation and enhancement, and 3D optical microscopy. Today, fluorophores and CCD cameras are
familiar tools in molecular biology and proteomics, but twenty-five years ago
researchers were just beginning to grasp the advantages of highly
light-sensitive video cameras over conventional photography. This paper will
discuss the development of fluorophores and electronic imaging in the 1980s,
emphasizing how the visualization of subcellular entities and activities in
living cells has become a matter of transforming molecular light into
electronic pixel.
Jimena Canales and Andrew
Herscher,
Harvard University (jcanales@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
Ornament and Crime: Modern Architecture, Criminal
Anthropology, and Evolutionary Theory
Adolf Looss essay,
"Ornament and Crime," decisively linked unornamented architecture and
the culture of modernity and, in so doing, became one of the key formulations
of modern architecture. To a great extent, the essay's force comes from
arguments drawn from nineteenth-century criminal anthropology and evolutionary
theory. In this paper, we focus on Looss extension of criminal anthropology's
evolutionary gaze from the human body to architecture and to the body's
material prostheses, the Gebrauchsgegenstande, or objects of everyday use. We
thus position Looss essay as connecting scientific uses of ornament as a
divider between the normal and the pathological or objects of everyday use. We
thus position Looss essay as connecting scientific uses of ornament as a
divider between the normal and the pathological to the aesthetic use of
ornament as a divider between the functional and the free in art and
architecture.
Peder Anker, University of Oslo
(peder.anker@sum.uio.no)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
The Bauhaus of Nature
This paper examines
the history of architecture based upon ecological principles. The point of
departure is visionary ecological design in the film Things to Come (1936)
written by H. G. Wells and produced by Alexander Korda. Inspired by the Bauhaus
style of architecture and city planning they worked with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,
among others, to design an environmentally friendly ecotopia based on the science
of human ecology and biotechnology. Architects of the avant-garde and scholars
shared a social concern for the wellbeing of humans living in the dark homes
and polluted environments of London. For some this was a matter of evolutionary
survival of the human species, and they saw the solution to such problems in
the new architecture of fresh air, sunlight and efficient use of energy. The
geometric order of Bauhaus architecture in the designed, for example, by
Berthold Lubetkin for the London Zoo also reflected the promising mathematical
turn in biological research models. The new modernist households mirrored this
new order of the household of nature. It was a science driven architecture
based on the understanding of humans as animals struggling for evolutionary
continuation and territorial expansion.
Rima D. Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(rdapple@consci.wisc.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
Service and research: The Medical Career of Dr.
Dorothy Reed Mendenhall
The
career of Dr. Dorothy Reed Mendenhall exemplifies the evolution of a health
reformer whose experiences as a woman, a wife, a mother, and a doctor led her
to a life of service. Most
significantly, her efforts enabled the philanthropic and service impulses of
others to be realized. Early in
the 20th century, Mendenhall's medical credentials attracted the attention of
educators, such as Caroline Hunt, the first director of the University of
Wisconsin's Department of Home Economics, and of the eager young women of
Madison, Wisconsin's who had already founded Attic Angels, a philanthropic
society. Hunt asked Mendenhall to
speak to Wisconsin farm women about infant care during the popular
Housekeeper's Conferences held by the University in the first decade of the
century, thus cementing a life-long commitment to maternal education. This commitment found additional
expression when in response to efforts of the Attic Angels, she established the
first well baby clinic in Wisconsin and later the Madison Visiting Nurse
Association, which she chaired until 1936. When her husband travelled to Washington, D.C. for war duty,
Mendenhall followed and joined the U.S. Children's Bureau as a medical officer
in 1917. She also continued
her position at the University of Wisconsin where, with the encouragement of
Marlatt, she lectured to students and women around the state on issues of child
health, maternal health, and sex hygiene.
Drawing on sources located in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin,
the Archives of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Mendenhall's
UW-Extension and U.S. Children's Bureau pamphlets, as well as her unpublished
autobiography located in the Sophia Smith Archives, this analysis of
Mendenhall's career illuminates important social, cultural, and gendered
factors that attracted scientifically minded women to a life of service and
reform in the early 20th century United States.
Noga Arikha, Bard College (narikha@aol.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Haym
Saloman
Humours and Passions in Early Modern Europe
Concentrating on the
early modern era in Europe, I examine the survival of the theory of humours for
psychological explanation and the treatment of mental illness, beyond the
demise of Renaissance scholasticism and beyond the advent of Cartesian dualism.
The growing interest in scientific studies of emotions (by Joseph LeDoux or
Antonio Damasio, for example) is accompanying a redefinition of the compass of
the cognitive sciences and enabling us to understand the interconnection of emotion
and reason. However, the history of the ways in which emotions have been
conceived does not inform this new work, partly because of the 17th-century
separation of psychology from epistemology. Humoural theories of mind and
emotion survived this separation; the animal spirits which, since Hippocrates
in the 5th century BC, were deemed to circulate within humours, were taken over
by the 18th-century natural philosophers who studied the nervous system. The
humoural model offered an explanatory structure for a confluence between mind
and body which post-Cartesian metaphysics had problematized, confirming a view
of emotions as separated, and in conflict with, reason. I shall recount the
genealogy of this explanatory structure and show how it informs the ways in
which we understand the scientific data about emotions.
Eric Ash, Wayne State Univeristy
(ao0103@wayne.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Serving the 'Prince of Purpoole': Francis Bacon and
the Expertise of Natural Philosophy
Francis Bacon's
agenda to reform the pursuit of natural philosophy placed great emphasis on the
inclusion of practical knowledge, including even the trade skills of humble
artisans. This emphasis may be seen not only in his more famous philosophical treatises,
but also in his earliest attempts to obtain patronage from the Elizabethan
court. The precise role the artisans themselves were to play in Bacon's natural
philosophical program, however, was actually very limited-the vast majority
would be assigned to simple data collection, while the more rigorous task of
generating theorems from the data they supplied would be reserved for Bacon
alone. I will argue that, in effect, Bacon intended to "black box"
the pursuit of natural philosophy, allowing practitioners to deal only with the
"input" of data and the "output" of theorems, while
remaining utterly ignorant of what happened to their knowledge in between.
Soren Bak-Jensen, University of Copenhagen
(sbj@mhm.ku.dk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
The Patient as Scientist: Chiropractors and the
Production of Medical Knowledge in Interwar Denmark
Promoting claims to
therapeutic innovation involves presentations of the kind of knowledge that
will support such claims. But what constitutes such legitimizing knowledge?
Several studies have pointed to how groups of health care practitioners tend to
use either rationalist or empiricist arguments in order to support or refute
healing methods. And much research has gone into demonstrating how different
groups may try to raise and consolidate their professional status through the
suggestion of specific criteria for what should count as scientific knowledge.
In this paper, I will use the attempts by Danish chiropractors to prove the
value of their healing method as an opportunity to discuss how a health care
profession may identify relevant knowledge concerning such a question.
Chiropractic moved from America to Europe following the First World War, and
Denmark attracted a relatively large number of chiropractors. In the mid-1920
these united in an attempt to gain state authorisation for their profession,
campaigning under the central claim that this should be granted because
chiropractic worked and provided cures where all other therapies had failed.
Yet when looked at in detail, it is clear that rather than being committed to
justifying chiropractic through practical results, it was the way in which
specific knowledge-claims were produced that determined whether chiropractors
thought them useful for their purposes. The criteria by which they identified
legitimate arguments point towards the employment of an epistemology fit to
include not just chiropractors or formally trained doctors, but also the
subjective experience of patients in the production of scientific knowledge.
Daniela Barberis, University of Chicago/ Franke
Institute (d-barberis@uchicago.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Crispus
Attucks
A novel object for science: 'society' as defined by
the organic metaphor
Between the 1870s and
the early 1900s numerous attempts were made to lay the foundations of a science
of society in France: science du social, science sociale, or sociologie.
Programmatic books were published, journals created, societies founded, and
attempts to create chairs in academic institutions were made. Different groups formed, with
conflicting views of what such a science of society should be; various
standards were proposed and developed for such a science. The very existence of
the object of this new science, society, was contested, and its contours only
slowly came to be defined through many debates and exchanges among
authors. It is important to keep
in mind the diversity and dispersion of the science of society in the beginning
of the 1880s in order to appreciate the structure that it gained in the
following decades. This paper focuses on one of the models proposed for
sociology in this period, that of organicism, also known as biological
sociology. I examine the way it defined sociology's object and the approach it
took in treating this object. I
argue that, despite its relatively quick demise as a sociological trend,
organicist literature contributed to the acceptance of certain fundamental
traits of the new object proposed by the emergent science of society, traits
that remained constitutive of this object after the organicist analogy that had
grounded them was rejected.
Nicole B. Barenbaum, University of the South
(nbarenba@sewanee.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine A
An Identity of Difference: A. A. Robacks Jewish
Hereditarianism
This paper examines
the hereditarian thought of A. A. Roback (1890-1965), who earned a doctorate in
psychology from Harvard in 1917 and became an author of scholarly and popular
works on psychology and on Jewish culture. It draws upon published and archival
sources, including a collection of Robacks papers that has been overlooked for
nearly 40 years as a result of an error in cataloguing. In his popular writing,
Roback addressed themes of race, heredity, irrationalism, and evil –
themes that characterized the work of many Jews in popular psychology between
1890 and 1940, as Andrew Heinze (2001) has shown. However, unlike the Jewish
psychologists Heinze examines, Roback maintained early hereditarian views of
Jewish characteristics and rejected the environmentalist conclusions of
anthropologists Maurice Fishberg and Franz Boas, who argued that Jews did not
constitute a separate race. Roback extended his hereditarian view to a
constitutional theory of individual character, and he opposed environmentalist
perspectives throughout his career. These theoretical preferences reflected the
Yiddishist cultural nationalism he had developed as an Eastern European
immigrant living in Montreal in the 1890s and early 1900s. Robacks work
suggests that Jewish psychologists views of heredity, like those of the Jewish
racial scientists examined by Mitchell Hart (1999), varied with their
engagement in the complex debate between assimilationists and nationalists regarding
the place of Jews in modern society. Although Roback did not address this
debate directly in his psychological writings, his cultural nationalism appears
to have conflicted with his career aspirations. Robacks distinctive Jewish
voice suggests the importance of interlocking historical, cultural, and social
contexts – cohort, national origin, social class, political and religious
affiliations, and professional training, to name a few – in which Jewish
psychologists theoretical views and career patterns were embedded in early
twentieth-century America.
Peter Barker, University of Oklahoma
(barkerp@ou.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A
Astronomy, Providence and the Lutheran Contribution to
Science
Recent work by S.
Kusukawa and C. Methuen attributes slightly different religious significance to the Wittenberg program
in natural philosophy, and especially astronomy. Methuen believes that
Wittenberg students were expected to draw moral lessons from their study of the
heavens. Kusukawa, on the other hand, connects Wittenberg scientific activity
generally to Phillip Melanchthons vision of a causally ordered providence. I
will suggest that, for Melanchthons followers, moral knowledge and knowledge
in the mathematically based exact sciences shared a single divine origin, and
was accessible through a single mental faculty: the natural light of human
reason. Thus it was not necessary to derive moral truths from astronomical knowledge, although the
study of astronomy showed the existence of a providential, causal order that
was divine in origin, a theme that recurs in the work of Erasmus Reinhold,
Caspar Peucer and their successors. Kepler believed he had definitively
uncovered this providential order
in his 1596 Mysterium Cosmographicum, and established its causal structure in the 1609 Astronomia
nova.
Antonio Barrera, Colgate University
(abarrera@colgate.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom A
Knowledge and Nature in the Spanish Atlantic World
My paper presents an
overview of the empirical activities pursued by Spaniards in the Atlantic World
during the sixteenth century. I argue that the commercial and imperial
expansion of Spain in the Atlantic fostered the development of empirical practices
for the study of nature. This expansion facilitated relations and negotiations
between diverse groups (scholars, artisans, merchants, royal officials, and
Native Americans) and their respective epistemological practices. From these
negotiations emerged a tendency towards empiricism and the institutionalization
of these practices, which characterized sixteenth- and seventeenth -century
production of natural knowledge in Europe and America. This paper discusses the
significant role played by the Atlantic and those engaged in the American
enterprise in the development of empirical practices.
Naomi Beck, Universit de Paris I and
University of Chicago (nbeck@uchicago.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Crispus
Attucks
The Appeal of the Organic Metaphor in Spencerism
The first step in the
way of a politicised interpretation of Spencers evolutionism was laid down by
one of his theorys principal elements: the organic analogy. Indeed, Spencers
ultimate goal was to provide laissez-faire liberalism with a scientific
legitimacy through positing a bio-sociological continuity, of which the organic
analogy was both cause and illustration. Some political thinkers in Italy and
France were inspired by Spencers portrayal of social reality as an organic object,
which obeyed the laws of nature just like any other living being. However, they
differed considerably in the political meaning they invested in this notion,
notably through its integration in socialist doctrines. In my paper, I examine
the particularities of Spencers organicism and investigate into the reasons
for its appeal to contemporary thinkers in both Italy and France of the later
nineteenth century, insisting on the importance of the socio-political context
in the process of appropriation of ideas.
Susan D. Bernstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(Department of English) (sdbernst@wisc.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Haym
Saloman
'The Mystery of Their Alteration in Form': Lydia
Becker's Letters to Darwin
In May of 1863 Lydia
Becker initiated a correspondence with Charles Darwin by enclosing a packet of
hermaphroditic flowers, unusual specimens she had collected near her Lancashire
home and thought might be a variety of interest to this celebrated naturalist. During five decades Darwin corresponded
with more than 120 different women of whom over half were related in some
fashion to friends, colleagues, or to himself. Of the select number of correspondents on scientific topics
with women he did not know, Beckers letters rival in number those of Lady
Dorothy Frances Nevill on orchids and Mary Treat on insects. In over a dozen letters during the
1860s Becker exchanged observations, specimens, and hypotheses with Darwin
about these heterogeneous and altering forms in nature, as she repeatedly
expressed the pleasures of botanical investigations. This private
correspondence served many purposes for Beckers emergence in the public sphere
of science debates: a material and textual field of botanical observation and
theory-testing, an impetus for starting a philosophical society in which
Manchester women discussed scientific topics of the day, a medium for sounding
out her own ideas on heterogeneity in nature which she then presented at the
BAAS and published in the Journal of Botany. My paper explores this correspondence as a kind of
heterotopia, Foucaults term for transitional spaces such as museums or
libraries, in-between spaces that in this case bridge the private and public,
the amateur and the professional, the everyday and the celebrated, in the field
of science research. In 1863 when
Becker first wrote to Darwin her resources for collaboration and exchange on
scientific questions were limited both by her gender and class, but by 1869 she
had established herself several times on the podium and in print. These letters also provide a border
space in which Beckers broader commitments to science co-education for women
and men together take shape.
Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Indiana University
(dbmeli@indiana.edu)
Thursday,
November 22nd: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Crispus
Attucks
Experiments in Newton's Principia: The First Edition
Traditionally
Newton's Principia
has been read following its division in three books on motion in non-resisting
media, motion in resisting media, and the system of the world. This paper
approaches the text from a different perspective, namely Newton's usage of
experiments. I identify common themes, concerns and experimental apparatus
used, and draw some general conclusions on the functions of experiments in the
first edition of Newton's work.
Richard H. Beyler, Portland State University
(beylerr@pdx.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A
'Free' Science and Purged Scientists: The Kaiser
Wilhelm/Max Planck Society 1933
and 1945
This paper examines
the institutional response of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft to Nazi dismissal
policies – chiefly the "Civil Service Law" of April 1933
– in comparison to the response of the erstwhile KWG and its successor
organization, the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, to Allied-mandated
"denazification" policies following 1945. In both contexts, KWG leadership ostensibly sought to
maintain, as much as possible, the "autonomy" or "freedom"
of science as a social institution.
But it is necessary to "operationalize" this concept: what constituted the
"autonomy" or "freedom" of science in these periods of
politically mandated purges? In
1933 the KWG adopted a policy of general cooperation and selective
non-cooperation with the dismissal policies which aimed at maintaining
traditional patterns of authority in the community of science, while
renegotiating but not fundamentally challenging the pact between scientific
knowledge and state power. After
the war, though for quite different reasons than in the Nazi era, once again
the concept of the integrity of "science" comes to the fore. The putative defense of the scientific
discipline often proved successful in overcoming or diminishing the problem of
denazification for specific individuals.
Siam Bhayro, Yale University (siam.bhayro@yale.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine B
Syriac Botanical Terminology: The Work of Sergius of
Ra's al-'Ayn
In this paper, I will
discuss the attempts of the sixth-century monk Sergius to transmit the
medicinal/botanical work of Galen into a completely new linguistic and cultural
setting. Examples will be
analyzed, taken from British Library ms BL Add 14,661 which contains three
complete books of Galen–his sixth, seventh and eighth treatises on simple
medicines - De Simplicium Medicamentorum Temperamentis et Facultatibus. This work describes many plants and
their therapeutic uses. In
addition to translating Galen's work, Sergius provided introductions to each
book and transliterations into Syriac of the Greek botanical terminology. He also attempted to identify the
proper Syriac term for many of these plants.
Daniela Bleichmar, Princeton University
(dbleichm@princeton.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
Viewing as Possessing: The Visual Culture of Natural
History and the Locality of
Colonial Science, 1750-1800
This paper argues
that image production was the central practice of colonial natural history in
the eighteenth century, and that images were the most important production
through which Europeans identified, translated, transported, and appropriated
foreign natures during the period. The paper engages with the literature on
exploration, science, and visual culture and expands this discussion by
focusing on the eighteenth-century Spanish scientific expeditions to Latin
America, which remain largely unexplored by Anglophone historiography,
particularly in comparison to the vast literature on Cook, Bougainville, La
Prouse, Humboldt, &c. Between 1735 and 1800, Spain sponsored over twenty-five
scientific expeditions to its colonies; eight of them focused specifically on
natural history, employed over fifty artists, and produced a pictorial corpus
numbering approximately 7,500 images. Examining the scientific practices and
visual production of the Spanish natural history expeditions complicates the
way in which much of the literature on the English and French expeditions has
described scientific travel and illustration, since the situation between Spain
and its American colonies was quite different -not first-contact experiences as
in new colonies in the South Pacific but a Creole colonial society going back
over two centuries with strong local identities and interests, and the end
rather than the beginning of an empire. Similarly, the Spanish Americas help us
rethink and refine many of the important arguments that post-colonial and
subaltern studies have made about science and the visual. A first section of
the paper presents an overview of the visual culture of natural history in
18th-century Europe, describing the importance of images in printed books on
distant natures, their role in scientific training and research, and the ways
in which academic art training, natural history training, and published
guidelines for collectors of natural specimens ('professional' and amateur)
served to construct expert eyes and hands that produced a specific type of
representations and displays that were used to claim authority and ownership
over nature. Much of the writing on scientific images has focused on the
transformation of science through the incorporation of visual technologies such
as the microscope, the telescope, and mapping practices. While the role of
technology is undoubtedly important, such emphasis on instruments would suggest
that optics and mathematics were the exclusive technologies through which
vision was mediated. Instead, I argue, natural history and artistic practices
and traditions constituted a different kind of visual technologies that also
shaped the way in which nature was apprehended and understood. A second section
of the paper discusses and contrasts natural history images from the Spanish
expeditions, produced by European and non-European artists, with images of
foreign natures produced by other Europeans in other regions, in this way
exploring the generalities and local specificities of image-making and
scientific production.
Francesca Bordogna, Northwestern University
(f-bordogna@northwestern.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
Disciplinarity and its Values: William Jamess 1906
Address on 'The Energies of Men'
In 1906 William James
(1842-1910) delivered his presidential address before the American
Philosophical Association. The address, entitled The Energies of Men, invited
a philosophical audience to take up the task of formulating a psychological
science of bodily and mental energy. By choosing to lecture on such a topic,
James deliberately challenged American philosophers efforts to exclude
incursions into the newly professionalized association from outsiders,
something they did by building rigid disciplinary boundaries. This paper
discusses the reasons why on that occasion, as well as on many others, James
chose to transgress disciplinary and other types of divides. The paper examines the social and
political dimension of Jamess resistance to specialization and to the modern
disciplinary mode of knowledge production. I argue that James feared the
socially conservative implications of disciplinary training, and I suggest
that, at a deeper level, his resistance to the disciplinary fragmentation of
knowledge (especially, to the fragmentation of the studies of the human
subject) paralleled his worries about the fragmentation of the modern self. I
interpret Jamess APA address as an attempt to constitute a cross-disciplinary
and holistic discourse of the human subject. Thus, his call for the creation of
a science of energy in his APA address was a strategy that James mobilized in
order to reconfigure philosophy as an open and free social space, where not
only professional philosophers, but also scientists, practically oriented
professional groups, and amateurs could fruitfully and cooperatively converse
beyond all disciplinary confines. The paper concludes by arguing that in the
era of disciplinary specialization James strove to make philosophy expressive
of a social unity of the sciences.
Alan C. Bowen, IRCPS (bowen@ircps.org)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
The Assimilation of Babylonian Celestial Science in
Greco-Latin Astronomy of the First Century BC
During the first
century BC many writers in the Greco-Latin world addressed an increasing
interest in horoscopic astrology, which was itself a very recent and on-going
adaptation of a Babylonian celestial science that included its own horoscopy.
Some were highly critical of this innovation, but others were considerably more
tolerant. Indeed, this new interest inspired in some quarters a substantial
change in the very idea of astronomy, that is, in the range of what were thought
to be the subjects and techniques proper to astronomy. In this paper, I will
examine how a particular writer, Geminus, adapts to the emergent horoscopic
astrology in his Introduction to Astronomy, and I will locate his efforts in a process of
assimilating Babylonian celestial science that was not completed until Ptolemy.
Emily Brock, Princeton University
(ebrock@princeton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes B
Industry, Government, and Academia in the Formation of
American Professional Forestry
In its early years at
the turn of the twentieth century, the science of forestry in the United States
was fundamentally shaped by the ideas and ideals of European academic
forestry. Within the next
several decades, however, the appeal of European forestry faded. The ecology of the American forest was
proving to be quite different than that of the European forest, especially that
of the Germanic lands. The
economic status of the forest and the structure of the timber industry were
also fundamentally different from Europe.
Because of these differences, the continuing reliance on European
frameworks of knowledge, especially those pioneered in the German-speaking
schools, came into question.
American professional forestry occupied a space in which individuals
could be employed by industry, government or academia, and in which movement
between these three institutions was common. Because of the diverse employment of its members, and
because of the diverse ownership of forest lands, professional American
foresters were very cognizant of national political changes. Disputes in the profession during the
1920s and 1930s concerned not only formulating a clear distinction of American
forestry from its European roots, but also concerned the political content of
the professional discourse. This
period saw the rise of the conservation movement, and with it a new public and
political perception of the nations forests. The relative participation of individuals in different
employ was contested as much for its political ramifications as for its impact
on professionalization. The
conservation movement split professional foresters and deeply politicized the
policy and scientific recommendations they produced.
Thomas Broman, University of Wisconsin -
Madison (thbroman@wisc.edu)
Sunday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A and B
All the nouvelles that is fit to print: Pierre
Bayle and the retailing of scholarly news in the late 17th century.
It has become a
commonplace among historians of science and of print that Henry Oldenburgs Philosophical
Transactions was
launched in 1665 at least in part as a reflection of his role as a nodal point
in the correspondence network of the Republic of Letters. Other journals, such as the Acta
Eruditorum, have
similarly been cast as printed reflections of this community. Yet these publications were
supplemented by another group of journals that aimed not only to facilitate
communication between scholars, but also to publicize the world of scholarship
to an audience of non-scholars.
Led by Pierre Bayles Nouvelles de la Rpublique des Lettres, which was inaugurated in 1684,
such journals traded in news from the world of letters. In this talk I will explore how the Nouvelles and contemporary publications
such as the Journal des Savans defined what was newsworthy from the world of letters
and how they attempted to identify as broad an audience as possible for this
news. By doing so, I hope to expand our current appreciation of natural
philosophys popular appeal in the early 18th century.
Eve E. Buckley, University of Pennsylvania
(ebuckley@sas.upenn.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30pm Thomas
Paine A
Development Discourse on a Post-colonial
Periphery: Engineering in
Northeast Brazil's Drought Zone, 1909-1930.
My paper examines competing
development strategies proposed for Northeast Brazils semi-arid interior
following the establishment of a technical planning agency for the
drought-plagued region. Politicians, physicians and engineers debated which
aspects of the areas economic backwardness were the result of natural,
climatic factors and which were attributable to social structure, in particular
the colonial legacy of concentrated landholding on agricultural and ranching
estates. Engineers dominated the National Department for Works Against the
Drought and modeled their development plans on the U.S. Bureau of Reclamations
recent projects in Western states. The dam and road construction that ensued
was based on scant analysis of the interior Northeasts natural endowments or
political landscape. I focus on the misuse in this development discourse of
analogies from foreign regions with different hydrologic and sociologic
features. Ranchers and other elites were well served by their pronounced resistance
to considering the multiple origins of drought crisis in the interior
Northeast, winning infrastructural investments on or near their properties. But
this strategy did little to reduce the human misery that cyclic droughts
produced. Regional boosters hailed the scientific and technological
achievements of other lands as symbols of democracy and widespread economic
improvement, while ignoring that the effects of such development programs
depended on the social context in which they were executed. In examining the
drought agencys policies, I contrast the professional culture and practice of
Brazilian engineers with that of the development agendas most vocal critics in
this period, doctors launching a rural sanitation program. Sanitarians
consistently emphasized the political imbalances that left the rural poor
vulnerable to disease and drought. They thus recommended land redistribution to
smallholders, agricultural extension efforts, and public health campaigns as
essential components of the drought relief program.
Juliet Burba, University of Minnesota--Twin Cities (burb0006@umn.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Reconstructing the 'Actual History of Mankind': Franz
Boas and Native American Origins Research
By the late-19th
century, the origins of American Indians and their cultures had become a
perennial topic among U.S. anthropologists. The anthropologist Franz Boas chose
to tackle this issue, advertising it as the central question of a six-year
program of intensive field research undertaken during his tenure at the
American Museum of Natural History. Boas, however, had an uneasy relationship
with this research question. As he embarked on this program, Boas had been
engaged in debates about the aims and methods of anthropology. He championed an
approach that has been called inductive, particularistic, and historical.
Success in finally answering long-standing questions about Native American
origins would demonstrate the superiority of his methods for addressing
prominent questions within anthropology. Boas, however, resisted the
generalizing necessary to develop a broad narrative of New World prehistory.
This paper explores the promise and limitations of Boass historical
methodology as he and his field crew employed it to address the relationship of
American Indians and their cultures to those of the Old World. It argues that
concerns over field methodology were at the core of debates about the shape of
anthropology during this formative period for the discipline.
David Cahan, University of Nebraska
(dcahan@unlnotes.unl.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
Science above Politics?: Helmholtz on the French and
the French on Helmholtz
This paper treats the
issue of the relations of science and politics by measuring Hermann von
Helmholtz's public pronouncements on the universality of science against his
private attitudes and behavior toward French science and France in general. It
relates how Helmholtz confronted a number of incidents in his life and career
that brought him into a variety of academic and political conflicts with French
science and France in general. It discusses how his attitudes towards France
were first shaped by his familial background and his home in Potsdam, where he
received a strong sense of Prussian/German patriotism; and how the hostile
reaction by Parisian scientists to some of his early work in electrophysiology
first revealed his own hidden and hostile behavior toward French science and
France. Furthermore, the paper reveals Helmholtz's attitude towards and
activities against France during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Finally, it
argues that during the last decades of his life, thanks in part to the guidance
of his second wife, Anna von Helmholtz, a Francophile, and thanks in part to
his own growing international reputation as a polymath and his responsibilities
as an international savant, Helmholtz's attitudes towards the French softened.
As Helmholtz increasingly confronted the modern world as a public figure, he
moved beyond his earlier prejudices and hostilities towards French science and
France. Finally, and more generally, the paper treats the development of
Helmholtz's public persona and the implications of his attitudes and behavior
for the relations of science and politics on both sides of the Rhine.
Luis Campos, Harvard University
(lcampos@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Molly
Pitcher
The Right Element for the Organism: Radium,
'Radiobes,' and the Origin of Life
Decades before J. B.
S. Haldane's 'hot dilute soup' theory of the origin of life, the Cambridge
physicist John Butler Burke claimed to have produced what he called
'radiobes'--putatively life-like entities--after having immersed radium in
sterilized bouillon. Burke's experiments, performed at the Cavendish Laboratory
in 1904, presented a contested path of attack into the origin of life, an
otherwise seemingly intractable problem at the turn of the century. In this
paper, I reconstruct the untold story of Burke's radiobes and analyze some
inherent instabilities in his claims to have produced life-like but not living
organisms. I also describe the widespread attention, praise, and condemnation
his results drew, and suggest that the immediate and far-reaching
popularization of Burke's work both represented and helped to inaugurate--along
with the work of Jacques Loeb, T. H. Morgan and others--a new realm of
biological possibility for radium. In more ways than one, radium became the
'right element for the organism."
Jane Louise Carey, University of Melbourne
(jcarey@unimelb.edu.au)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
Sex, Race and Kindergartens: Australian Women in the
Pursuit of Scientific Social Reform, 1900–1940
This paper traces
middle-class Australian womens involvement in scientific social reform
movements from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s-—a period in
which effective social reform was increasingly seen as a scientific project,
rather than simply a Christian philanthropic endeavour. It will explore some of
the implications of this scientific turn in the traditional womans sphere
of social reform. Just as the reinsertion of western womens engagement with
popular, amateur scientific pursuits in the nineteenth century has enhanced our
understanding of the extent of womens scientific endeavours, so, I suggest,
would the inclusion of scientific social reform within the rubric of feminist
science studies. While historians of the womens movement in America and the
British Empire have noted its extensive engagement with science in this period,
these histories have yet to be firmly situated within the history of women and
science. Examining elite womens participation in arenas such as the eugenic,
kindergarten and sex education movements allows the recovery of elite womens
engagement with the broader culture of science in this era. The rise of
modernity—based as it was in an increasing cultural commitment to
science, rationality and progress—has frequently been presented as an exclusively
masculine project. Focussing on womens strong involvement in scientific social
reform complicates this broad framework, and provides a new lens through which
to explore the gendered boundaries of the modern and the scientific. This
evidence suggests that, rather than being alienated from the increasingly
scientific modern world, elite women embraced and promoted it.
Michael C. Carhart, University of Nevada
(carhart@unr.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Crispus
Attucks
Culture and the Rejection of the Organic Metaphor in
the 1780s
As the human sciences
emerged in the 1770s and 1780s the term "culture" came into
circulation as a way of explaining the development of nations. When speaking of totalities like
society, i.e. the human mind and everything it created (the arts, sciences,
crafts, religious and ethical systems, societies with constitutions,
governments, manners, and so forth), it was useful to reduce the topic of
discussion to a metaphor. Society-as-organism was such a metaphor, and in the
eighteenth century it had the philosophical distinction of being associated
with Leibniz's idea of the autonomous monad. Herder, for example, relied heavily on Leibniz for his
understanding of human society, and he sequestered different nations away from
each other as different monads that developed according to their own internal
logic. But the metaphor of
society-as-organism had a distasteful implication: organisms die. This was clear enough in the histories
of ancient Greece and Rome which experienced periods of rise-and-progress followed by decline-and-fall,
and recent evidence from Easter Island suggested a similar pattern there. But when one turned from anthropologist
to sociologist, the organic metaphor implied the same fate for Europe. As revolts, revolutions, and
constitutional crises swept the continent in the 1770s and 1780s, one wondered
whether the end was nigh. Was
decline and fall inevitable? Scientists
of humanity in the 1770s and 1780s hoped not. If the human sciences taught one thing, it was that there
were no inevitabilities.
Theoretically - and if there was such a thing as the "Enlightenment
project" then this was its goal - a nation could make infinite progress
toward perfection or completion.
The destination was vague, certainly, but it was preferable to certain
death or destruction. Culture, therefore, came into circulation specifically as
an alternative to the organic life-cycle metaphor. Culture too was a dynamic concept implying change, either
progress or regress, but it lacked the eschatological implications of the
organic metaphor. Drawing on
anthropology and travel literature, on encyclopedism and linguistics, on famous
authors like Condorcet and Herder, and on obscure ones like Goguet and Meiners,
this paper will offer a transnational look at the ways the human sciences were
practiced in the 1770s and 1780s as scientists sought to understand Europe's
own place in global human history and tried to divine what might lie in the
darkness ahead.
Angelo Cattaneo, European University Institute
(cattaneo@iue.it)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
Johannes Regiomontanus, Nicolaus Germanus, and
Albrecht Drer as Readers of Ptolemy's Geography: Towards an Analysis of the
Links between Map Projections and Perspective in the Renaissance
This paper defines
the relationships between the theory of perspective in Alberti's De pictura and
fifteenth-century reception of Ptolemaic map projections, placing the
historical and theoretical links between the two in Regiomontanus' Annotationes
Joannis De Regio Monte, in errores commissos a Jacobo Angelo in traslatione sua
('Notes on
Jacopo Angeli's translation of the Geography'), in the Dedication of Donnus Nicolaus Germanus to
the Duke Borso d'Este, and, finally, in three early sixteenth century
representations (one by Albrecht Drer) of the third Ptolemaic projection. It
is important to underline that the paper will not deal with the investigation
of the theoretical and conceptual links and similarities between map projections
and perspective. It will instead concentrate on the way in which Ptolemaic map
projections were incorporated into humanistic knowledge. In other words, it
investigates what kind of mental - and linguistic - frameworks were used to
understand and concretely use Ptolemaic map projections in the Renaissance. The
analysis of the way in which Regiomontanus, Donnus Nicolaus Germanus and Drer
understood Ptolemaic grids and projections has made it possible to argue that,
in the early Renaissance phase of reception of Ptolemy's Geography, the Ptolemaic issue of
"depicting the image of the oecumene in an armillary sphere" (Geography, VII, 6) was understood and used
not only within the mental framework of geometrical perspective, but as a geometric
perspective projection in itself. Ptolemy paid great attention on the issue of
visualisation. Ptolemy introduced the second and third map projections for the
specific purpose of increasing the resemblance of maps depicted on flat
surfaces to the "visual perception of a globe" (Geography, I.22; VII, 6.). His approach
did not go unnoticed by fifteenth and sixteenth-century readers of the Geography. Johannes Regiomontanus used a
pictorial exemplification and Alberti's perspective concepts of radius
centricus and of
pyramidis radiosae in order to explain and define the position of the spectator
in the third Ptolemaic projection (Regiomontanus, Annotationes, c.Q Vr, 1474). Donnus Nicolaus
Germanus, in the drawing of the planisphere in the Dedication to Borso d'Este that opened his
manuscripts codes of the Geography, explained that he had chosen Ptolemy's second map
projection for "artistic reasons" (Dedication to Duke Borso d'Este: Illustrissimo
principi ac domino Borsio, duci Mutine ac regii, Marchioni Estensi Rodigque
comiti Donnus Nicholaus Germanus, ca. 1460). The 1525 Strasbourg edition of the Geography with Drer's woodcut provides a
most interesting case of reception of Ptolemy's theory of projections: the
image of the cartographic grid inside the ringed globe, with its Western and
Eastern borders shrinking to the edges in perfect accord with the rules of
perspective, is the clearest example of an interpretation of the third
Ptolemaic map projection in harmony with the theory of perspective. Therefore,
S. Edgerton was probably misguided in his claim that Brunelleschi's great
achievement in architecture and Alberti's in the theory of painting were that
they [...] could apply [Ptolemy's] grid metaphorically and aesthetically in
their art." From reading Regiomontanus's Annotationes and Niccolaus Germanus' Dedication, and gazing at Drer's woodcut it
is possible to argue the opposite: that during the Renaissance Ptolemaic
projections (especially the third) could be mainly understood through the
symbolic form of perspective.
Elizabeth Mary Cavicchi, Dibner Institute
(elizabeth_cavicchi@post.harvard.edu)
Saturday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Cambridge
Finding the Body in the Circuit: Historical and
Reconstructive Experiments with a Spiraled Conductor
Human bodies are
always part of the experiments done in science, although the body's inclusion -
and its risk -- may not be explicitly apparent to the experimenter, or others
who may be affected. Standard lab
practice today includes safety precautions -- which sometimes fail. It was different in the nineteenth
century; an experimenter's body could be both detector, and subject, in
research. For Harvard medical
student Charles Grafton Page in 1836, the shocks he took from one hand, through
his body to the other, were a way of sensing the high tension electricity that
arose in his homemade spiraled conductor. He felt shocked only when battery current stopped
flowing in the spiral. Page's
experimenting went further: he put
the battery's connectors and his body across different spans of the spiral,
independent of each other. This
showed something startling: the
shock's sudden electricity extended into parts of spiral that were beyond where
the battery's direct current went.
The spiral filled with an electricity that could feel painful; Page
viewed this as a prospective medical treatment. Reproducing his novel historical effect takes a different
form under today's lab practices.
The oscilloscope substitutes for the body as a detector; flashlight
batteries replace the acid cells.
Even so, high voltages arise within the winds of my hand-wound spiral -
and are recorded by the oscilloscope.
However I did not observe some voltage increases that Page
described. This raised the
question about whether the body might be operative in affecting the
circuit. To check this out, I
added an electrical analogue to the human body, into the circuit. It changed the shape of the voltage
signals. The body's interactive
role in experiment, inferred here, portends something further: new evidence about past practices may
emerge when the methods used in replicating historical experiments differ from
those employed in the original case.
Kevin Chang, Academia Sinica (kchang@sinica.edu.tw)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
Legitimacy and Social Order: Johann Franz Buddeus'
Dissertation on Toleration and Alchemy
Should alchemy be
tolerated by the republic? That was the title and the central question of a
dissertation (1702) supervised by the Pietist philosopher and theologian Johann
Franz Buddeus (1667-1729). The author of the dissertation approached his
question by reconstructing a history of alchemy, offering an epistemological
investigation on the truth of metallic transmutation, and making a political
argument on how alchemical imposters should be punished with a view to
maintaining social order. Though deeming the art of gold-making potentially
dangerous and its practitioners often deceptive, the author nevertheless
accommodated a space for good alchemy. This paper will contextualize Buddeus'
dissertation and examine its historical, epistemological and social analysis of
the legitimacy of alchemical practice.
Alex Checkovich, University of Pennsylvania
(acheckov@hotmail.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Mapping as a Land Use: Geographical Knowledge and the
Development of the United States, 1900-1933
The nineteenth
century with its heroic explorers is often regarded as the golden age of
American cartography. Yet after
people like Fremont and Powell had sketched the nation's basic physical and
topographic characteristics, those contours still had to be filled in. There were some 3,000,000 square miles
of country in the United States, but at the turn of the century their specific
forest, soil, and geographic contents were very nearly blank. This paper explains how a related
family of applied field scientists advanced their own disciplines and careers
by filling in those gaps. It does
so by adopting a broadly geographical perspective. The family emerged just as Turner's frontier of western
settlement dissolved. Now the
order of the day became intensive settlement, a form of land use that required
equally intensive knowledge of the land.
Field scientists who worked in new bureaus (the Forest Service and the
Soil Survey) and in new academic departments (geography and land economics)
provided that knowledge by mapping the land with unprecedented precision and
detail. In the first three decades
of the twentieth century they pioneered a host of special-purpose maps, many of
which remain familiar: forest and soil type maps, land valuation and recreation
site maps, land-use maps and regional classifications. The geographical knowledge embodied in
their maps facilitated the on-going settlement and exploitation - the
development - of American lands.
Intensive mapping itself thus emerged as a land-use strategy for applied
field scientists, one they found particularly appropriate for the historical
geographical conditions of a developing, post-frontier nation.
Tobias Cheung, REHSEIS, Universit Paris VII
(tobias@paris7.jussieu.fr)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
The 'Mechanisator' and its Environment: Functional
Order in Jakob von Uexkll's Protoplasmic Theory
Jakob von Uexklls Theoretical
Biology (1909), as well as Hans Drieschs Philosophy of the Organic (1908),
belongs to the so called neo-vitalism in the first half of the 20th century.
Recently, Uexklls experimental settings to prove organismic subjectivity have
been discussed in biosemiotics (Kulevi 1998) and as an example for holistic
biological theories that foreshadow the Nazi period (Harrington 1996). However,
much less has been said about Uexklls protoplasmic theory and its relation to
the functional order of organisms. Uexklls concept of functional order covers
all levels of the living world: from the cell activity to the activity of the
organism as a whole, and from the individual world (or the Umwelt) of a
single organism to the interorganismic world of many. The functional orders of
each level result basically from the relation between impulse series and a
vital factor in the protoplasm. The vital factor is a property of the
nucleus. It is responsible for the edification (Erbauung), the management
(Betriebsleitung) and the re-establishment (Wiederherstellung) of the cell.
Uexkll calls this factor Mechanisator. From cells to their environments,
Uexkll tries to demonstrate how the operational mode of the Mechanisator is
initiated through specific impulse series that result from the dynamic
interaction between receptors and effectors. Uexklls Umwelten are thus
inside and outside of the organism. They depend on the physiological
differentiation of functional circles. Beginning with the protoplasm, I will
reconstruct the different levels of this differentiation.
Stephen Clucas, Birkbeck College, University of
London (s.clucas@english.bbk.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom B
'Full Satisfaction for your Ease': Natural Philosophy,
Patronage and the Service Ethos in the Northumberland Circle
In this paper I
examine the patronage structures of late sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century natural philosophy through a single test case - the
intellectual circle surrounding Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland
(1564-1631), which included the mathematicians and natural philosophers Thomas
Hariot, Walter Warner, Nathaniel Torporley and Robert Hues. Through an examination of a series of
'patronage events' between 1600 and 1619 (involving the presentations of
manuscipt work on atomism, mechanics and hydrostatics) I suggest that the
natural philosophers in Percy's circle present their work in ways which closely
relate to the service ethos of patronage and household employment, with a
particular emphasis on face-to-face interactions and the conveying of
information 'viva voce'. Although the traditional historiography of the period
has tended to overlook these more informal interactions - looking instead for
evidence of 'proto-institutions' or 'formal circles' - I argue that the idea of
a client's 'satisfaction' of his patron's needs is extremely important to an
undersanding of 'scientific' communication in early modern England. Although intellectual historians such
as John Shirley and Ian Prins have tended to make distinctions between what
they see as the servitorial or household functions of the ninth Earl's clients
and their scientific work, I will suggest that these roles are not as distinct
and clearcut as one might first assume.
Deborah R. Coen, Harvard University
(coen@fas.harvard.edu)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Tom
Paine A
Scaling Down: Mapping the 'Austrian' Climate Between
Empire and Republic
My theme is the
ambiguous status of political borders in early twentieth-century meteorology.
Borders drawn by war and diplomacy awkwardly overlaid the putatively global
framework of synoptic methods. Nowhere was this tension so evident as in
Central Europe in the wake of World War One. After the signing of the Versailles
treaty and the break-up of the Habsburg lands, the old Austrian network of
observing stations was riddled with holes, creating insurmountable problems for
synoptic mapping and forecasting. The director of Austria's national institute
for meteorology, Felix Exner, attempted to rescue Vienna's contacts with
observatories in the old crown lands and to reinvigorate the new republic's
standing in the international meteorological community. At the same time, using
his institutional position to a very different end, he worked to make Austria's
natural resources marketable. His research divided similarly into global and
local projects. In one vein, he mustered vast statistical data to compare
anomalous weather across the globe using the new methods of correlation. In the
second, he constructed scale models of the landscape within Austria's new
borders in an effort to determine the forces that had carved the peculiar
features of the 'eastern Alps.' My analysis will press the question of whether
Exner's maximally global and maximally local perspectives were compatible,
politically and theoretically.
Benjamin R. Cohen, Virginia Tech (bcohen@vt.edu)
Thursday,
November 21st: 4:00 - 6:00 pm President's
Ballroom B
Books and Farms, So Happy Together (Or, Practicing Chemistry
in the Fields of the Early American Republic)
References to book
farming in early nineteenth century America came about mostly in disparaging
tones. This practice of codifying
and prescribing scientific solutions, though, provides a great example of the
contested use and promotion of formalized science for the improvement of
agricultural lands. Book farming
stands as an interesting example of the philosophical contrast between action
and contemplation (actual practicing farmers who know the land by labor versus
wealthy landowners who invoke principles of improvement from sheltered windows,
to exaggerate slightly for effect).
It also serves as an interesting reference to informal chemical practices
by local practitioners, like Virginias John Taylor, for one, who espoused
early concepts of chemical examination through the publication of a rural
press and by advocating agricultural surveys. In both venues, it was the chemical action of soils
and fertilizers that undergirded the move to advance beyond the unenthusiastic
reception of book farming. In this
paper, I will discuss the treatment of generalized agricultural treatises for
the cause of specific local farming practices. I will focus on what the traffic between learned,
pseudo-academic prescriptions and hands-on, field-based practices can tell us
about the place of agricultural science in the young American nation.
Nathaniel Comfort, George Washington University
(comfort@gwu.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes A
Barbara McClintock's Evolutionary Developmental
Genetics
One of the roots of
the current synthesis of evolutionary developmental biology lies in 1920s and
1930s Germany, with Alfred Khn, Richard Goldschmidt, and others who sought to
understand the action of genes through developmental and evolutionary time. In
1933-34, Barbara McClintock, an American cytogeneticist, spent six months in
Berlin as a Guggenheim fellow. There, from discussions with Goldschmidt and
others, she cultivated a lifelong interest in gene action. Scholarly and
scientific emphasis on her Nobel-winning discovery of genetic transposition has
obscured her overarching interest and, arguably, her most important scientific
contribution. She discovered transposition in 1948, while studying genetic
elements that she believed controlled the developmental program. Her famous
1951 presentation at Cold Spring Harbor was really a duet with Goldschmidt,
with each singing the other's praises and criticizing the prevailing view of
genes as autonomous determiners of traits. She framed much of her research for
the next twenty-five years in terms of developmental genetics. Another
long-term project focused on the genetics of evolution. In the 1960s and 1970s,
McClintock united genetics, development, and evolution into a sweeping vision
of organic change. Biological differences, she said, were the result of
differences in gene regulation, not different genes. She asked questions about
the timing, localization and evolution of gene action that are fashionable in
today's evo-devo research. McClintock refused to acquire the molecular
techniques that might have allowed her to approach more satisfactory answers.
But her career should be recognized as a fifty-year effort to import into the
mainstream American cytogenetic tradition the German research agenda now
understood as one of the roots of evo-devo.
Allison Coudert, Arizona State University
(Allison.Coudert@asu.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
Religion, Magic, and Science on the Eve of the
Enlightenment
Boyle and many of his
colleagues in England's Royal Society were deeply concerned by what they saw as
the growth of skepticism and atheism and the role that science may have
inadvertently played in promoting both. The debate about witchcraft was a case
in point. During the 17th century a growing number of naturalistic and medical
explanations had been given for the supposed actions of witches and spirits,
and these were taken by many as a direct assault on Christianity. Hobbes, Descartes,
and Spinoza were singled out as especially pernicious in this regard, for by
denying the existence of spirits, they were accused of undermining the belief
in God. Joseph Glanvill, a vociferous advocate of the Royal Society, considered
a disbelief in spirits the first step in the inevitable march to atheism. This
paper will discuss the evolving attitudes towards magic and the demonic in the
late 17th century and the effect these attitudes had in determining boundaries
between the natural and the supernatural. Underlying the interest in magic and
the supernatural were the same issues that surfaced in the debate over
witchcraft about the authority and credibility of the Christian revelation, the
role of God and spirits in the physical universe, and the epistemological
problem of what constitutes sound scientific knowledge. The investigation of
phenomena such as witchcraft was therefore not an anomalous aspect of the
period of the scientific revolution but an integral part of it. To arrive at
the modern definition of a scientific "fact" or "theory"
required new concepts of what constituted valid scientific evidence and
convincing scientific explanations.
Arthur Daemmrich, Chemical Heritage Foundation
(arthurd@chemheritage.org)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
Cross-Cultural Technology Transfer: From the
Laboratory to Mass Production in the early Antibiotic Era
This paper explores
technology transfers that take place as a drug is developed along a path from
research laboratory to testing, and regulatory review to mass production. A
fertile cooperation among academic researchers, the U.S. government, and drug
manufacturers marked penicillins development during World War II. Within a
short time, however, firms competed to market antibiotics invented and
developed through in-house research and the assistance of academic scientists
and practicing physicians. In contrast to an expectation for knowledge and
materials to transfer solely from academia to industry or from research to production,
Pfizers development of the antibiotic Terramycin during the late 1940s and
early 1950s offers a case study of multi-directional flows of knowledge,
skills, and materials. I argue that Pfizers experiences with the scale-up to
mass production for Terramycin ultimately fed back into the firms laboratory
culture and shaped its broader corporate identity in significant ways.
Likewise, relationships with academic consultants like R.B. Woodward involved
more than an exchange of money for knowledge of the molecular structure; they
brought new scientific methods to the fore and changed the firms core identity
to a synthetic pharmaceutical manufacturer.
Anne Davenport, Boston College
(adavenport@cfa.harvard.edu)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Thomas
Paine B
From 'cogito' to 'excogito' in Meditation V
While Meditation II
focuses on "cogito" as a means to establish the existence of the
thinking self, Meditation V focuses on "excogito" as a deployment of
the "vis cognoscendi" towards its objects. The point of the fifth day
is not to grasp the ego as an existing "res cogitans" but to deploy
the intentional power that exposes the ego to alterity as such, regardless of
existence claims. Appealing on the one hand to Bertrand Russell's distinction
between the reality of things and the truth of facts, and on the other to
Jean--Luc Marion's analysis of "saturated phenomena," I will argue
that the philosophy of mathematics presented in Meditation V aims primarily at
curing the meditator of pride.
Soraya de Chadarevian, University of Cambridge, UK
(SD10016@hermes.cam.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A
How the Double Helix Became the Most Important
Discovery of the Twentieth Century
The paper will
reflect on the many events, from the celebratory to the critical, set in place
to mark the 50th anniversary of the double helix and how these may have changed
the image of the double helix. It will examine how, after a much quieter
beginning in the 1950s, the double helix has come play the central role it does
today. Finally it will compare the 50-years history of the double helix story
with the construction and representation of other discovery stories in the
twentieth century to tease out the similarities and differences.
Mioara Deac, University of Notre Dame
(mdeac@nd.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
Looking into the Darkened Window: The 'Alchemical Eye'
and Psychological Theories of English Christian Spiritualists
Jonathan Crary, in
his Techniques of the Observer, has argued that during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries the 'camera obscura' (the natural magic of della Porta) was the most
widely used model for explaining human vision. After 1830, the Lockean-Cartesian-Newtonian model of vision
was substituted by the image of an observer posited as the active, autonomous
producer of his visual experience.
By contrast, I shall argue that during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries, there had always been around a different model of vision
and imagination, one that sprang from alchemical and mystical sources, and
reflected a monistic and animistic worldview. In England, from the Glorious Revolution throughout
Boyd Hilton's Age of Atonement, various groups of religious dissenters or
Romantic voices were espousing Boehme's alchemical and mystical models of
vision, having their sources in Paracelsian imagery and themes. I shall also show the way in which the
concept of an autonomous visual perception was selectively used by different
nineteenth-century thinkers who pondered the nature of mind and human
representations in order to support their worldview, theological affinities, or
social interests. (Imagination
came to be regarded by the scientific world of psychology as a constant
addition to sensorial stimuli, supplementing them in every act of
perception. However, this
assumption was selectively correlated, either with positivism and subjectivism,
or with realism and Platonism).
Crary's identity between 'modernist psychologists' and Romantic and
mystical thinkers proves inadequate.
I shall also analyze the doctrines used by the 'mystical psychologists'
in England – by which I mean a well-defined category of English spiritualists
(such as William and Mary Howitt, Sophia de Morgan, Camilla Newton-Crosland)
who used the scientific resources offered by contemporary physiological
psychology in order to offer credibility to age-old mystical and alchemical
tenets regarding the nature of vision and imagination.
Peter Dear, Cornell University
(prd3@cornell.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Haym
Saloman
Vortex and Visual 'Evidence': Huygens and the Natural
Philosophy of Authoritative Demonstration
Christiaan Huygens's
well-known theory of gravity in 1669 involved an "experimental"
demonstration to the Academy of Sciences of its central idea, that vortical
motion of a fluid could produce motion of solid bodies within it that directed
them towards the vortex's center. That demonstration functioned as the
equivalent of a fundamental premise upon the plausibility of which the formal
structure of the theory relied. The role of this kind of dramatic visual
"demonstration" in Huygens's work characterizes the ways in which
experiential premises could be developed as surrogates for essential
definitions in the emerging physico-mathematical form of natural philosophy.
This paper will explore such elements in later seventeenth-century mathematical
natural philosophy and consider their relations to the models of authoritative
plausibility embedded in the contemporary organizational structures of bodies
such as the Academy of Sciences.
James Delbourgo, McGill University
(james.delbourgo@mcgill.ca)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom A
Creole and Colonial Knowledges in the British Atlantic
World
Scholars have long
taken an interest in early modern discourses of hemispheric difference between
Europe and the Americas ("the dispute of the new world") generated by
the natural sciences. Natural history, in particular, it has been argued,
helped to foster a creole identity in the Americas and subvert Atlantic
hierarchies by privileging colonial observers over metropolitan savants.
Natural philosophers, however, did not emphasize observation of local diversity
but the verification of universal physical effects. Where local geography
defined the contours of natural history, it was implicitly irrelevant to
natural philosophy. Philosophy, therefore, proved more amenable to discourses
of cultural continuity than of creolization and difference. This paper uses the
case of experiments with electricity performed in colonial British America
during the eighteenth century to explore this contrast, distinguishing between
Atlantic natural history as a form of localized creole knowledge and Atlantic
natural philosophy as a form of universalizing colonial knowledge. In so
doing, the aim is to raise the larger question of how specific modes of natural
inquiry generated different perceptions of the relationship between colony and
metropolis in the production of natural knowledge, within a single cultural
geography: the British Atlantic
world.
Dennis Des Chene, Emory and Washington University
(ddesche@emory.edu)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Thomas
Paine B
How the world became mathematical
Physics in the
seventeenth century became mathematical. Newton's Principia provided the model. Since then,
"mathematization" has tended to mean doing things Newton's way. But
in the early part of the century, philosophers, though they shared the aim of
introducing mathematical demonstration into physics, had no single notion of
how that was to be done. Cartesian physics offered an a
"mathematical" ontology of the natural world but did not, in
practice, produce a mathematical physics in the manner of Newton. I will
examine first the ideal of "physico-mathematics" in Descartes
(contrasting his ideal with Beeckman's), and then the elaboration of that ideal
in Pierre Sylvain Rgis's Systme and the belated attempt by Bernard Bovier de Fontenelle
to replicate in a Cartesian setting the derivation of Kepler's laws by Newton.
By the time those works were written, conceptions of the role of mathematical
demonstration in physics had changed; Rgis and Fontenelle attempt to
accommodate the change while maintaining Descartes' ontological mathematization
and the epistemological advantages thought to accrue to it. Only gradually did
mathematization cease to have obvious metaphysical implications.
Nick Dew, Cambridge University
(nd230@cam.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom A
The Geography of Precision in the French Atlantic
World
In the last decades
of the seventeenth century, the French Acadmie des Sciences organized a series
of expeditions to locations around the Atlantic basin. These locations ranged from the
colonies in Canada to the recently-acquired trading posts of the French
monopoly companies in Senegal, Guyana, and the West Indies. The possibilities for natural
philosophy that the Atlantic triangular trade provided were realised by
Gian-Domenico Cassini, Louis XIV's star astronomer. From the Paris Observatoire, Cassini was able to coordinate
the missions, the data from which were to prove essential to the "perfection
of astronomy and geography".
Cassini's project required experimental techniques (involving special
instruments and skills) to travel reliably around the Atlantic space. This proved far from easy. This paper explores the problems
entailed by the establishment of this French Atlantic network – from
delicate negotiations with ships' captains to the thorny question of how the
numbers sent back by the envoys should be managed – and highlights the
complex interaction of different parties which allowed the network to function.
Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, University of Twente
(f.j.dijksterhuis@utwente.nl)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
Golden Sections: Cultures of Mathematics in the Dutch
Republic in the Middle of the 17th Century
Around 1650, several
sons of Dutch patricians took mathematics lessons with with Frans van Schooten
jr., professor at the Leiden school of engineering. Among them were Johan de
Wit and Johannes Hudde, important future administrators in the Republic, and
the renowned Dutch scholar Christiaan Huygens. This state of affairs could be
taken as a matter of fact, if not for some seemingly paradoxical circumstances.
At that time, Dutch patricians were in the middle of a process of
aristocratization, as some historians characterize it. To have their sons take
lessons with an instructor of surveyors and navigators hardly seems consistent
with such a trend. Van Schooten was appointed to teach 'Duytsche Mathematique',
the program of mathematics in the Dutch vernacular drawn up in 1600 by Simon
Stevin. However, in his own mathematical activities, Van Schooten had
increasingly moved away from this practitioners context, culminating in the
two editions of his influential Latin translation of Descartes' Gomtrie.
Against this background, Van Schootens lessons can be seen as a crowning
achievement in his efforts to secure a place within the highly complex
patronage relationships surrounding the Dutch court and parliament. On the
other hand, it shows how members of the Dutch elite chose mathematics to
fashion themselves culturally. In doing so, this paper will place this episode
in Holland's 'Golden Age in the context of a cultural history of mathematics.
John P. DiMoia, Princeton University
(jdimoia@princeton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine B
'In Due Course': The Mobilization of 'Science' and
'Democracy' under the United States Army Military Government in Korea
(1945-1948)
While the ties
between the United States and South Korea (or R.O.K.) have often been close,
they have also been subject to enormous strain, particularly during the
immediate aftermath of World War II, when the U.S. established a military
government south of the 38th Parallel, occupying the region for a period of
roughly three years (September 1945-August 1948). The tentative basis for the post-1953 relationship (e.g.,
following the Korean War), characterized by generous amounts of U.S. aid, along
with the alleged gift of "science," was first established during this
earlier period, when the United States radically transformed the structure and
organization of Korean education, introducing numerous changes as a remedy for
the perceived effects of Japanese colonialism. In their effort to promote greater access to education,
American planners focused initially on the logistics of opening schools and
meeting immediate material needs (e.g., classroom, textbooks). The contested category of
"science" then appeared when U.S. authorities reallocated the
resources of a number of technical institutes (or senmon gakko in Japanese,
chunmun hakkyo in Korean)) in the process of forming a single national
university, Seoul National University.
Whether characterized in terms of its initial formulation of a
"democratic" impulse, or through its subsequent mobilization of a
particular version of "science" (especially after 1953), the American
education mission would continue to be based on the perception of lack,
providing the rationale for an ongoing intervention in Korea. Contemporary Korean historians of
science have begun to critique the US occupation for its science policy, and
this is what I plan to explore, using the reconfigured national university as
my point of entry in this debate.
Rick Dingus, Texas Tech University
(rick.dingus@TTU.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Cambridge
The Problematic View: Reconsidering Nineteenth Century
Photographs as Evidence
In this presentation,
I explore the complex and sometimes problematic nature of the interpretation of
photographs, focusing on the history of geology in the nineteenth century. As a member of the Rephotographic
Survey Project in the 1980s, I made careful repeat photographs duplicating as
closely as possible the exact vantage points and framings of photographs
originally made for early topographic surveys of the American West. My repeat photographs indicated that,
far from the primitive and straightforward "records" of landscape I'd
been taught to expect, nineteenth century photographers, including Timothy
O'Sullivan, sometimes utilized devices that subtly altered the appearance of
the landscape. Tilted framings, masked backgrounds, unusual vantage points, and
a variety of interpretations for each scene raised a number of questions about
the relationship between each photograph and its subject, as well as the
constant impact (intentional or not) that photographers have on what their
cameras record. This serves as a springboard for considering a wider range of
issues that include the changing contexts in which photographs are made and
seen, the assumptions and projections that viewers bring to looking at
photographs, and our understanding of nineteenth century geologic practice.
Mary Domski, California State University,
Fresno (mdomski@csufresno.edu)
Thursday,
November 22nd: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Crispus
Attucks
The Cataract and the Fudge Factor: Newtons Strategies
for Fitting Theory to Experiment
In this paper I will
focus on two cases included in Book II of the Principia: the demonstration of the law of efflux and the calculation
for the speed of sound. In both
instances, Newton attempts to correlate theoretical predictions with
experimental results, and in both instances, the fit between theory and
experiment is, to say the least, a tenuous one. Newton proposes a thought experiment involving a cataract of
ice as he modifies his first edition results for the law of efflux, and when
dealing with the speed of sound, he appears to fudge his numerical data to make
prediction match observation. As
suggested by the negative commentary spurned by these cases, the strategies
Newton adopts in the course of his revisions do not themselves fit into the
framework of a genuine Newtonian method (cf. Truesdell 1970 and Westfall
1973, 1980). As a result, we are
led to a somewhat strange conclusion that when the fit between theory and
experiment is tenuous, Newton is simply not Newtonian enough! I want to suggest that we should
embrace these strategies as part and parcel of Newtons experimental method
rather than diversions from it. By
doing so, we are brought to a much richer picture of Newtons innovative style
in experimental settings that, I believe, can deepen our appreciation for the
genuine complexity of the Newtonian experimental method.
Jennifer Downes, University of Cambridge
(jdd26@cam.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
Cosmography and Chorography: The Geographical
Tradition and the Telescope
The assertion that
the use of the telescope for astronomy brought about a 'new visual language' in
astronomy ignores the flourishing sixteenth-century genre of star mapping,
which fitted into the enterprise of descriptive cosmography: 'the description
of the whole world, that is to say, of heaven and earth, and all that is
contained therein'. How did the new opportunities for visual depiction arising
from the telescope fit into existing genres? Depictions of the 'new worlds' of
the moon and other planets observed through the telescope were ambiguously
placed between two different genres in the cosmographical tradition: global
mapping, involving the mathematical determination of position (geography), and
depictions of individual features (chorography). Hence the first years of
telescopic observation saw disputes about how images of heavenly bodies were to
be read and used: for example Galileo's lunar images were criticised by
Hevelius as inaccurate because, unlike a world map, they did not record the
exact positions of the features of the moon. This paper will discuss these
tensions in the genre of telescopic observations in the period between Galileo
and Hevelius, and how Hevelius's moon images, published in Selenographia (1647) attempted to combine
geography and chorography.
Dennis Doyle, SUNY-Stony Brook
(DaDoyle@ic.sunysb.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom B
The Universal Mind Assumption: The Development of a
New Racial Formation in Psychiatry, 1946-1958
In this paper, I will
explore the development of a new theory and practice of how race fit into the
work of select postwar New York City psychiatrists who treated black Harlemites
with psychotherapy. This new racial formation in psychiatry was undergirded by
a new guiding assumption which I refer to as the "universal mind." By
universal mind I refer to the largely unacknowledged postwar assumption that
all human beings--black or white--were born equipped with the same emotional
machinery necessary for forming the basic human personality. By examining the
psychiatric case records of two New York City psychiatrists--Viola W. Bernard
and Frederic Wertham--who had worked with Harlem patients, I will explore the
process by which this universal mind assumption found shape within the clinical
setting. I will compare how each clinician dealt with one fundamental conflict
that both encountered in their attempts to create a more racially tolerant postwar
psychiatry:how should the white clinician balance color-blindness with a
concern for the emotional impact of racism on their black patients' lives?
Otniel E. Dror, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem (otniel@md.huji.ac.il)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Cambridge
'Voodoo Death': Fantasy, Excitement, and the Untenable
Boundaries of Science
In 1942 Walter B.
Cannon, head of the Department of Physiology at the Harvard Medical School,
published his now-famous essay on "'Voodoo' Death." In this study,
Cannon elucidated the mechanisms responsible for the detrimental physiological
effects of "magic" spells or "voodoo" rituals in
"primitive" societies. Cannon's essay, which appeared in American
Anthropologist, soon became a staple of anthropological studies on
magic-induced death. Claude
Levi-Strauss, for example, had expressed a common view in 1958, when he argued
that Cannon's 1942 "'Voodoo' Death" essay had provided the
physiological rationale for "the efficacy of certain magical
practices" to cause death in normal and healthy individuals. The subject
of 'Voodoo Death' engaged and negotiated several important late nineteenth and
early twentieth century concerns that lay at the boundaries between mainstream
and fringe, alternative and orthodox, and subversive and normative. Questions
relating to the relationships between science and the occult, knowledge and
emotions, colonial and indigenous people, and--particularly in the United
States--black and white Americans, as well as between women and men were all
implicated in Cannon's "'Voodoo' Death" study. In my presentation I
will situate Cannon's "'Voodoo Death" essay within these different
contexts. I begin with an examination of the voodoo contexts of Cannon's work
and the problems and negotiations that Cannon and his correspondents faced in
attempting to transform voodoo death into a legitimate object of knowledge.
Then, I study the mechanism for
subjugating voodoo death: emotional '"excitement," and the new and
fascinating laboratory model that Cannon proposed in explaining voodoo death.
On a broader front, I also wish to contribute to the literature on the
political dimensions of modern knowledge, by presenting a model in which
biomedicine fails in its endeavors to completely subjugate alien forms of
knowledge, yet unwittingly legitimates those untamed disorders. Voodoo ritual signified a presence of
the 'primitive' and disruptive in the midst of modern Western society, and
excited the popular, literary, ethnographic, and medical imagination. Despite
the fact that Cannon was only partly successful in his attempts to incorporate
voodoo into modern biomedicine, post-war biomedicine 'discovered' that
voodoo-like phenomena were ubiquitous in modern Western experience. The radical
shift from earlier attempts to distance and distinguish between Western and
'primitive,' to the post World War Two 'discovery' that the primitive is
ubiquitous in Western societies, signifies and reflects the broader
transmutations that Western knowledge underwent during the cultural and
political upheavals of the post World War Two period.
Darrin Durant, University of Toronto
(ddurant@chass.utoronto.ca)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine B
Big Science and Public Participation: A Basic Tension?
In between Derek de
Solla Price's Little Science, Big Science (1963) and Steve Fuller's critique of big science
in The Governance of Science (2000), big science has become synonymous with modern
science. Yet even as we describe big science as capital intensive, collaborative,
and dominated by specialists, many worry that it represents a threat to
democracy. Whether one thinks of direct participation or the pluralistic
interplay of interest groups, the concern is that big science excludes all but
the experts from political issues involving technical decision-making. A remedy
commonly proposed for this illness of political exclusion involves increasing
both information and participation. However, drawing on a case study of the
Canadian controversy over deep geological disposal of nuclear waste, it is
suggested that increasing information and participation only attenuates a basic
tension between big science and public participation in the democratic
management of big science. In short, big science depends upon trust between unrelated
specialists, who are typically brought together to solve a problem external to,
because of complexity and scale, any one narrow field, as we see in
Environmental Impact Statements. For the public, the result is often
information overload, with one way of coming to grips with the information
being to draw upon the public's own social relations of trust, in this case the
social relation between public and expert-as-member-of-an-organization. The
great potential for mis-match between different relations of trust feeds into
an ambiguous role for participation in technical decision-making: the public
participates, yet can often interpret sheer information as a means to co-opt
their participation as by-proxy support for a pre-established technical agenda.
I will conclude by considering the apparently fanciful speculation that big
science may, by the weight of its own success, lose political power and merge
into new social institutions for the governance of social life.
Ellen Dwyer, Indiana University (dwyer@indiana.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pmf President's
Ballroom B
Race, Neuropsychiatry, and World War II
With the exception of
the large literature on the eugenics movement, historians of twentieth-century
medicine have paid relatively little attention to how issues of race have
shaped psychiatry and neurology (two disciplines with complex and often
contested ties to one another) In large part, this reflects (and perhaps is the
result of) the formal medical literatures relative silence on the topic of the
psychiatric and neurological problems of African-American before 1940. The few exceptions used race to analyze
aggregate institutional data; no clinical case histories involving
African-Americans appeared in major neuropsychiatric journals. This situation
began to change during World War II, in large part as a result of the work of
military doctors with African-American troops. In attempting to explain the
higher rates of psychoneuroses and psychoses among African-American enlisted
men, these neuropsychiatrists located racial differences simultaneously within
and without the troubled minds of their patients. Several also wrote frankly about the difficulties they
encountered in their therapeutic relationships with African-American patients. Thus, war-time neuropsychiatrists,
while holding on to vestiges of racial stereotypes dating back to the
nineteenth century, began to rethink (and to write about) the impact of race on
neuropsychiatric thinking and practice in innovative ways. Although other
issues took center stage during the 1950s, the conversation prompted by the
socio-medical contingencies of World War II would become lively again, in an
altered but still recognizable form, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Catherine Eagleton, University of Cambridge
(cte20@cam.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes A
'Chaucer's Own Astrolabe' and the Relationship Between
Text, Image and Object
A group of surviving
medieval astrolabes bear a striking resemblance to the illustrations in copies
of Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe; obviously, not all of them can have been
"Chaucer's own astrolabe." In most copies of the treatise that
contain diagrams, the same distinctive design of astrolabe is shown, and I will
argue that this design links to a wide variety of intellectual traditions
including meteorology and numerology, in which there is evidence that Chaucer
had an interest. I will then examine the copying of text and diagrams in
manuscripts of the Astrolabe, and the links between the text and images, showing that
they are the product of a set of sometimes complex relationships between the
scribe and the rubricator, the original and the copy, the actual and the ideal
version of a text. Bringing this study of text and image together with
consideration of surviving instruments I will consider Chaucer's
fifteenth-century reputation and readership and the links between the
instruments and the manuscript images and text of the Treatise on the
Astrolabe. I
will suggest that study of the three types of evidence can tell us more in
conjunction than any one can on its own, and within this context re-examine
some of the assumptions made about "Chaucer's own astrolabe" and the
links between books and instruments in late medieval England.
Michael Egan and Maril Hazlett, Washington State University, University of
Kansas (michaele@wsu.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A
Technological and Ecological Turns: Science and
American Environmentalism
After the Second World
War, American environmentalism experienced a sort of revolution as new
technologies constituted a series of new environmental hazards that required
attention. Leading both the
political and intellectual branches of the movement were scientists who were
able to articulate the significance of these new hazards. This paper is a joint effort to examine
Rachel Carsons and Barry Commoners influences of and contributions to
American environmentalism. Michael
Egan will examine Commoners attempts to come to terms with the
"technological turn" after World War II, while Maril Hazlett will
consider the "ecological turn" and the significance of Rachel
Carsons Silent Spring. Both
investigations are central to our contemporary understanding of
environmentalism, and critical to the relationship between science and
environmental ethics.
Greg Eghigian, Penn State University
(gae2@psu.edu)
Sunday,
November 23rd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A and B
Socialism and the Sciences of the Deviant Self: The
East German Psyche Observed
In the years immediately
following World War II, Allied occupation forces believed not only that the
social and economic infrastructure of Germany required rebuilding, but that
Germans themselves were in need of reconstruction. This project of fashioning
historically different Germans was quickly professionalized and politicized
within both East and West Germany. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR),
this enterprise was taken up by the state, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), and
scholars in the human sciences of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, psychology,
psychiatry, pedagogy, sociology, and criminology and focused on the problem of
deviance. In the regimes first decade of existence, public pronouncements and
discussions about the individual were inflected by a highly utopian and
moralizing Marxist-Leninist rhetoric that stressed collective identities and
militant anti-fascism and treated forms of deviance as cases of
counter-revolutionary decadence. Soon, however, state and party officials
became acutely aware that this message did not resonate with large segments of
the population, particularly young people. Over the course of the 1960s and
early-1970s, the communist party and the state asked physicians, social
scientists, and social service experts to identify those reasons why socialist
norms were not being effectively internalized. The result was a renaissance in
the study of the self in East Germany: criminologists sought the sources of
delinquency and recidivism; psychologists and psychiatrists reconsidered the
causes and treatment of mental illness; and pedagogues sought ways of
instilling socialist virtues in the youth. The work of making sense of deviant
East German subjectivities did not stop, however, with the end of the communist
regime in 1989. Instead, psychotherapists, psychologists, ethnographers, oral
historians, and pollsters all carried on this legacy as part of spirited public
debates over the legacy of authoritarianism in the former-GDR and the question
of how well Easterners were adapting to their new liberal, capitalist society.
This paper, based on both archival and published sources, argues that the
history of how the human sciences have been employed to make sense of East
German subjectivities reveals a peculiarly postwar preoccupation with "the
psychological" in liberal and socialist societies, one shaped by the
confluence of international, institutional, social, and ideological factors.
Lynne Osman Elkin, California State University at
Hayward (lelkin@csuhayward.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A
Rosalind Franklin and the Double Helix at 50: A Daring
Proposal Since Little Has Changed
Most 50th anniversary
celebrations of the Double Helix inadequately explain Franklin's essential
role, only showing her portrait
and photograph #51. After conducting extensive original interviews and archival
searches, I can show that without
her data Watson and Crick could not have proposed a structure before Franklin
published her March 17th draft paper proposing a double helix. Also, their
views are often quoted as historical fact, even when misleading or incorrect.
Watson's conversation in Scientific Amrican.com (3/11) ignores it was
Franklin's precise A form MRC report data that enabled them to solve the
structure, not Wilkins' initial picture. The NY Times 2/13 subheading erroneously proclaims "Another DNA Mystery: How crucial
was Franklin's work?" and "at last (they) realized the bases might
be on the inside of the spiral" without clarifying the idea and evidence
was Franklin's. She was de facto a collaborator in
abstentia, which is why I proposed the name "Watson, Crick and Franklin
structure."
Paul A. Elliott, Nottingham University
(paul.elliott@nottingham.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes B
Public Arboreta: the 'Living Museums' of Victorian
Britain
Arboreta are gardens
that display trees and shrubs for pleasure and instruction. They became popular
from the early nineteenth century, championed by influential British landscape
gardeners such as Joseph Paxton and John Claudius Loudon. They were one of the
most important models for the gardens of learned societies, the private
suburban garden and for the first public parks in Britain and further afield,
including the USA. Remarkably however, despite the amount of material that has
now been published on gardening and botanical history, and the importance of
trees in myth, art and culture, there has never been any general study of
British arboreta as a genre. Employing case studies of nineenth-century public
arboreta, the paper considers their relationship to other, perhaps more
familiar, aspects of Victorian culture such as art galleries, museums and
mechanics institutes. It focuses on the attempt to combine scientific
instructon inspired by the rhetoric of rational recreation, with aesthetic and
social considerations, and examines the planning, layout and organisation of
arboreta, their schemes of admittance, and their cultural and spatial
relationship to the urban community. Arboreta were laid out to represent global
fora with carefully delineated specimens placed according to climatic zones
producing variety but not violent contrast, as US landscape gardener Charles
Mason Hovey said of the Loudon's Derby Arboretum, it was 'the very treasury and
epitome of the wide world's natural wealth.' Some were instigated by wealthy
individuals and scientific activists, others by local government, whilst others
were promoted and marketed by private companies, and the paper explores the
reasons for these different forms of organisation and how these influenced the
design. Finally it offers some suggestions as to why British public arboreta
tended to decline and considers why the form was so much more successful
elsewhere, notably in the USA, where more arboreta were created from the late
nineteenth century than anywhere else in the world.
James Evans, University of Puget Sound
(jcevans@ups.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
Astrology as Temple Practice
Recently, a detailed
picture has emerged of the material circumstances of astrological consultations
in the Greek and Roman worlds. The convergence of textual and archaeological
evidence also now permits us to say a good deal about the astrological practitioners
and the cultural locus of astrology in the first through third centuries CE. In
L'Egypte des astrologues Franz Cumont gave an argument for situating astrology in the temples
of Greek Egypt. While Cumont based
his argument almost exclusively on texts, newly developed archaeological
evidence lends a good deal of weight to his thesis. I will review the evidence for locating astrology in the
temples, not only in Greek Egypt, but in other parts of the Roman world, such
as Gaul. While other cults were
undoubtedly receptive to astrology, the strongest case can be made for
astrological practice in the cult of Sarapis. I will offer a detailed account of how astrology entered
into and functioned in the temples of Sarapis.
Claire Fanger, Independent Scholar
(cfanger@bmts.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
Like a Virgin: the Body and the Cosmos in Late
Medieval Theurgic and Catoptromantic Texts
In the later middle
ages, practices designed to induce visions of intermediary beings for
divinatory purposes were numerous and widespread. Medieval natural philosophy
tried to account for and explain the mechanisms of these practices and their
effects on the operators, generally dismissing the actual information elicited
from these forms of divination as likely to be false and/or demonically
inspired, but often in complex and qualified ways that rested on then current
notions in cosmology and physiology.
For example the commonplace requirement that catoptromantic mediums
should be virgin boys may be seen from a religious perspective as a reflection
of the requirement for ritual purity in the operator; but from the perspective
of natural philosophy, both William of Auvergne and Nicole Oresme discuss this
requirement for virginity in ways that make it an efficient cause of the
effects of catoptromancy on the medium (their explanations resting on both the
platonic cosmological idea of macrocosm being reflected in microcosm, and
physiological accounts of the impressionable psychology of young boys).
However, the flow of ideas is not all one way, for the ritual texts themselves
rest on a cosmological underpinning not greatly different from that of natural
philosophy and susceptible to influence from it. This paper will examine
several fourteenth and fifteenth century ritual texts concerned with inducing
visions of intermediary beings, focussing on the ways the prayers and ritual
actions link physiology and cosmology, and examing the ways information is
expected to be delivered in visions whose visual and auditory components are
often tightly scripted. Texts
examined will include John of Morigny's Liber Visionum, the extended
crystallomancy in the prayer book of Wladislas of Varna, and a series of experiments
for inducing visions of angels or demons in reflective surfaces in the
necromantic manual edited by Richard Kieckhefer.
Vittoria Feola, Cambridge University
(vf205@cam.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine B
'New' Plants for Fame, 'Old' Plants for Religious
Controversy: the Exceptional case of Elias Ashmole's Uses of Botany
My paper will focus
on the uses and means of transmission of botanical knowledge of the English
collector Elias Ashmole (1617-92). He has remained famous for founding the
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His uses of botanical knowledge, however, have been
overlooked. While he used the press to publish a plant catalogue in order to
gain fame, he only used manuscripts to discuss theological issues by references
to particular plants. In the catalogue Ashmole considered previously unknown
plants in Europe (the 'new'), as well as already familiar ones (the 'old'). In
letters to his friends about the possibility of miracles and the ungrounded
doctrine of Socinianism, he only referred to 'old' ones. My paper will shed new
light onto a totally unknown aspect of Ashmole's botanical expertise, by
considering him from the point of view of
a plant connoisseur who was able to use 'old' and 'new' plants for two
radically different goals: fame and religious controversy. The areas to which
my paper will contribute are the history of botanical knowledge, the
transmission of culture in seventeenth-century England, the history of the
book, as well as that of early museums. His role within the Socinian
controversy relates instead to seventeenth-century English theological debates.
Barbara Finan, University of New Hampshire
(bfinanp@aol.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
A Case Study in Nineteenth-Century Statistics: The
Lowell Mill Girls in 1845
This paper concerns
the first use of European statistical methods to describe social issues in
America. In the city of Lowell,
Massachusetts, the first planned industrial city in the United States, the work
force consisted of women who were recruited from rural areas and were protected
from urban influences by the paternity of the corporations. To answer public
concern about the suspected moral decline of these women, a survey was
conducted by a Lowell Unitarian minister in 1845 with the intention of proving that
the health and welfare of the working women remained intact after their
temporary working careers in the mills. The survey methodology was published in
complete detail, including the wording of the questions, to whom the questions
were addressed, by whom the answers were given, and the resulting data. An argument is presented that the
ministers connections to Adolphe Quetelet and to P.A.C. Louis influenced the
design of this survey.
Maurice A. Finocchiaro, University of Nevada-Las Vegas
(mauricef@unlv.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm President's
Ballroom B
Retrying Galileo, 1633-1992: Science vs. Religion, or
Cultural Myth vs. Historical Fact?
In 1633 the
Inquisition condemned Galileo for holding that the Earth moves and Scripture is
not a scientific authority. This
ended the original Galileo affair that had started in 1613, involving issues of
both physical fact and methodological principle; but a new controversy began,
continuing to our own day. The
subsequent controversy is about the facts, causes, issues, and implications of
the original episode, and so partly reflects the original issues: whether and
how the earth's motion can be proved; whether the earth's motion contradicts
Scripture; and how Scripture should be interpreted. But the subsequent affair has also acquired a life of its
own, with debates on the compatibility of science and religion, of individual
freedom and institutional authority, and of cultural myths and documented
facts. Besides such controversial
issues, the subsequent affair has two other strands. The historical aftermath of the original episode consists of
events stemming from it and involving actions mostly by the Catholic Church, up
through the rehabilitation of Galileo by pope John Paul II (in 1979-1992). The reflective commentary consists of
countless interpretations and evaluations of the original episode advanced in
the past four centuries by astronomers, physicists, theologians, churchmen,
historians, philosophers, cultural critics, playwrights, novelists, and
journalists. Although the literature on the affair is enormous, the full story
of the aftermath has never been told; the reflective commentary has never been
systematically examined; and the controversial issues have never been
contextualized in the story or anchored in the textual sources. I am in the processing of completing a
book aiming to do these things and providing an introduction to, and survey of,
the textual sources, the chronological facts, and the controversial issues of
the subsequent affair. This paper
aims to present a brief description of such sources, facts, and issues. Thus while the paper will have as its
underlying basis a key event of the 17th century, it will also have a general
thematic component, stressing the implications for the question of the
interaction between science and religion in modern western culture; and it will
have a historiographical or meta-historical component, involving the
identification of the sources and the analysis of the reflective commentary.
James R. Fleming, Colby College
(jrflemin@colby.edu)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Tom
Paine A
Localism Meets Globalism: Reductionist and Determinist
Themes in the History of Global Climate Studies
How do scientists
gain awareness and understanding of climate phenomena that extend far beyond
their local horizon and that are constantly changing on time scales ranging
from geological eras and centuries to decades, years, and seasons? That is, how
do individuals immersed in and surrounded by the phenomena they study construct
privileged positions? In the quest for generalizable answers, this paper
examines several case studies of climate theories drawn from local sources,
practices, and research schools. These approaches involve appeals to authority,
first principles, favored mechanisms, microphysical entities, data collections,
and models. The paper looks at the historical interrelationships of these
positions and their shortcomings. In the quest for a general theory of climate
change, do the interplay of localisms and globalisms generate certifiable
knowledge or threaten to devolve into reductionism and determinism?
Ab Flipse, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
(flipse@nat.vu.nl)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm William
Dawes A
The Founding of a Science Department at a Calvinistic
University in the Netherlands (1930)
In 1880 a Calvinistic
University (the Vrije Universiteit (abbr. VU)) was founded in Amsterdam by
the leader of the Calvinistic part of the nation Abraham Kuyper to install an
orthodox Christian science, based on Reformed principles. For the three
departments of which the VU consisted until 1930 (Theology, Law and Letters) it
was relatively easy to work out these ideas. The first professors at the
Science department, however, would have the less obvious task of developing a
Christian Physics and Mathematics. In this paper, first the considerations that
precede the founding of the new department are discussed. It proved very
difficult to find capable scientists who were willing to accept a Chair in the
new department. The physics Chair was finally accepted by G.J. Sizoo, a
talented young man, who had studied in Leiden under Kamerling Onnes and
Ehrenfest. Secondly I will address the question as to what extent Sizoo and his
successors were able to cultivate physics in agreement with the ideas of
Abraham Kuyper. To this end I will focus on the numerous papers by Sizoo on the
relationship between science and religion. This paper, then, examines the ways
in which physics research and teaching at the VU was influenced by the
Christian character of the VU and to what extent the conflict between (natural)
science and religion (as experienced by the orthodox Christians) could be
solved by the ideas about Christian science advanced by the Calvinistic
theologians and philosophers.
Kevin Francis, Mt. Angel Seminary
(kfrancis@mtangel.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Haym
Saloman
Rethinking the Radiocarbon Revolution
Historians of
archaeology have described the invention and application of radiocarbon dating
techniques in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the radiocarbon revolution.
Their accounts emphasize the importance of radiocarbon dating for establishing
an absolute chronology of calendar dates that allowed archaeologists to test theories
about rates of cultural diffusion and evolution. Historians have devoted less
attention to the impact of radiocarbon dating on other disciplines, such as
geology and paleontology, or on the relation between the various disciplines
concerned with the late Quaternary Period. This paper examines the impact of
radiocarbon dating on scientific efforts to date the extinction of some thirty
genera of North American mammals, including the mammoth, mastodon, and giant
bison. In this case, the radiocarbon revolution was a gradual process
spanning several decades, since the new method required extensive calibration
with traditional methods like tree-ring analysis. The most immediate and
important consequence of radiocarbon dating was that it produced, not an absolute
chronology, but a shared relative chronology. By allowing evidence from
different disciplines, geographical locations, and prehistoric periods to be
arranged within a shared timeframe, radiocarbon dating provided a common
language for the Quaternary sciences and sparked a new period of collaboration
and synthesis.
Aileen Fyfe, National University of Ireland,
Galway (aileen.fyfe@nuigalway.ie)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine A
Media Technology: Steam-printing and Popular Publishing
in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
The British book
trade was transformed by the development and gradual acceptance of new
technologies in the first half of the nineteenth century. In particular, the steam-printing
machine made it possible to print large numbers of periodicals, and then books,
rapidly, and at a lower unit cost. The possibility of purchasing books for a
shilling, and periodicals for a penny, meant that information could be far more
widely accessible than ever before.
New genres – including that called "popular science"
– emerged as publishers began to recognize the benefits. This paper
examines the representations of steam-printing in the media created by it.
Particularly in the early days, many of the penny periodicals were quite
self-conscious about their own steam-printed identity and were keen to explain
the technology to their readers. By the 1850s, the technologies were usually
taken for granted, but there was increasing debate about the way they were
being used by publishers.
Margaret D. Garber, California State University,
Fullerton (mgarber@fullerton.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
Experimental truths and social consequences in late
seventeenth-century alchemy
During the academic
infancy of alchemy, teachers of alchemical arts had to defend and justify the
legitimacy of their discipline. Georg Wolfgang Wedel (1645-1721), a prolific
author of alchemical and pharmaceutical treatises at the University of Jena,
attempted to redress criticisms with his Introduction to Alchemy, – a kind of alchemy 101.
Wedel lent historical legitimacy to alchemy by tracing laudable claims from
recent and ancient authors, and by clarifying the chymical symbolism, terms,
and procedures in order to display its simplicity and veracity to a broad
audience. In a quite separate response to skeptics of alchemy, the court
alchemist Johann Kunckel (1630-1703), inveighed against those whose own
philosophy did not engage the alchemical arts and against alchemists who had
knowledge of corrosives and coals but were ignorant of philosophical causes.
Kunckels own pretenses to confirming chymical philosophy by means of
experiment often depended on the serendipitous discoveries of charlatans. After
having exposed the fraudulence of their findings, he often appropriated them as
his own discoveries by recasting them as experimental byproducts of his
investigations. While both authors firmly bound alchemys social place within
the confines of university-trained, and Latin-speaking practitioners of alchemical
arts, their approach to what constituted proof, and adequate experimental
practice led to very different portraits of alchemical truth.
Antonio Garca Belmar and
Jos-Ramn Bertomeu-Snchez, University of Alicante (belmar@ua.es)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
Scientific and Technological Textbooks in the European
Periphery
The paper will offer
a general picture of a STEP research project focussed on scientific and
technological textbooks in the European periphery. The project began in a STEP
meeting in Aegina (Greece) during June 2002, in which several participants
analysed topics such as textbook and translations, textbooks and political
ideologies, textbooks and scientific revolutions, textbooks and national
contexts, textbooks and technology, etc. The meeting provided a large number
of case-studies in which textbooks and their makers and readers were analysed
in their local contexts. Participants paid attention not only to the textbook
writers and their different backgrounds and goals but also to the printers (and
their technological tools and methods) and the publishers and booksellers, who
sold and distributed textbooks in specific commercial contexts. Moreover,
textbooks are generally constrained by special rules of book control
(Inquisition, governmental or academic censorship) and they are read and used
by a great variety of audiences with different reading practices and aims.
Thus, textbooks are shaped by - and consequently, they provide historical clues
about - the different audiences of science, the institutions (or sometimes
informal meetings) in which science is learnt and the practices of teaching and
learning which are associated with these contexts. The purpose of the STEP
research project is to analyse these historical issues from a comparative point
of view.
Jean Francois Gauvin, Harvard University
(gauvin@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Volontaires and Artisans in Descartes's Early Natural
Philosophy
In this paper I will
contrast the relationship between Descartes and the artisan Jean Ferrier on the
one hand with the relationship between Descartes and Mydorge on the other.
Descartes considered Mydorge as a "volontaire," a social equal whose
help he elicited without paying for it; by contrast he paid for the help of
artisans like Jean Ferrier and claims_a preference for the latter kind of
interaction in the Discours de la Methode. I will also examine the role of the artisan
metaphor in Descartes's writing about intuition and knowledge making--I will
highlight the heuristic role of the artisan in Descartes' writing to 1640
(mainly in the Regulae and the Discours de la Methode).
Michael D. Gordin, Princeton University
(mgordin@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes B
Running in Circles: Towards a Cultural History of the
Professionalization of Russian Chemistry.
This paper argues
that as historians we need to expand our concepts of what it takes to build a
professionalized group of scientists beyond the rather dry categories of
publication patterns and traning standards to include the contextual local
cultural models of sociability that made organized interchange thinkable.
Taking the specific case of the gradual professionalization of Russian chemists
in the decade before the establishment of the Russian Chemical Society in 1868,
this paper argues for the importance of the Russian cultural formation of the kruzhok (circle) in providing a cultural
model of sociability and intellectual exchange that underwrote the coherence
and success of the long-lived Society. In 1858, two Petersburg chemists
attempted to organize a journal and private laboratory in order to establish a
professional base of chemists in the Russian capital. Despite the large
population of domestic chemists, this effort collapsed. Ten years later, the
Russian Chemical Society was formed. I argue that in the interim, a core of
Russian postdoctoral students abroad in Heidelberg began to organize social
evenings around the literary and social circles known in Russian as kruzhki, and that the implicit
sociability of this institution – which had flowered under the repressive
climate of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) – gave them a model for how to
organize when they returned to Petersburg in the early 1860s and found no
adequate professional structures. Their path to professionalization was thus
borrowed from their time in Germany, but not from the German experience of
professionalization. Rather, it took the exporting and then reimporting of a
local Russian model to underwrite the complicated cultural interactions that
were necessary to stabilize a venture as complicated as professionalization in
the absence of a functioning civil society. Despite surface similarities to
chemical professionalization in Western Europe, therefore, the Russian
experience is historically incomprehensible without a proper appreciation of
these prior intellectual models.
Gennady Gorelik, Center for Philosophy and
History of Science, Boston University (gorelik@bu.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine B
The Best Defense, or the Worst one? Physics and politics in the history of
Russian ABM program
Antiballistic missile
defense was a major battlefield of the Cold War. The USSR initiated the race in
ABM and gained an apparent lead in the early 1960s. However, by the late 1960s
the very concept of strategic ABM defense was drastically reevaluated. Major
figures in this reevaluation were scientists the top experts in strategic
weaponry. While there were prominent public discussions of the issue in the
USA, the Soviet government kept it secret. Two outstanding Soviet scientists
were engaged in the issue with dramatic consequences. For Andrei Sakharov,
"the father of Soviet H-bomb", his involvement triggered his 1968
transformation into a public figure and human rights advocate. Aleksandr Mints,
the top expert in radio engineering, had to resign from his directorship of
major Radiotechnical Institute. I am going to consider the role of scientists
on the Soviet side of the antiballistic problem on the eve of negotiations that
led to 1972 ABM treaty. The issue involves the question of professional and
social responsibility of scientists that will never fade in our hi-tech
civilization.
Robert David Goulding, University of Notre Dame
(goulding@princeton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
Astrology and Magic in the Philosophy of Everard Digby
Everard Digby's Theoria
analytica (1580) was the first substantial
philosophical treatise to be written in England after the Reformation. Digby constructed a theory of knowledge
based on a broadly Aristotelian framework. He was no orthodox Peripatetic,
however; for Digby, Aristotle's logic was merely a cover text for mystical and
occult truths. A large section of the book was also devoted explicitly to the
promotion of astrology, alchemy and the other later works, such as De arte
natandi (1587)
and Dissuasive
(1590) return to some of the same themes, where the interest in magic and astrology
is brought to bear upon theological issues dividing the academy and English
society in general. In my paper I explore Digby's uses of astrology and magic,
and compare him with Oxford and Cambridge contemporaries who were also
interested in the magical arts.
Elizabeth Green Musselman, Southwestern University
(greenmue@southwestern.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
Worlds Away: European and African Ideas about
Celestial Objects in the Cape Colony
This paper centers on
the argument that for various constituencies in the Cape Colony in the first
half of the nineteenth century, the moon and other celestial objects served as
uncanny projections of the turbulent life of the colony. The paper adopts an
unconventional approach to the history of science by considering various kinds
of natural knowledge about celestial objects at the Cape (European and African,
educated and uneducated). The paper will consider some of the historiographic
implications of this approach.
Jeremy A. Greene, Harvard University
(greene@fas.harvard.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
Behind the Miracle Drugs: Marketing and the Postwar Pharmaceutical
As the postwar drug
explosion of the American pharmaceutical industry produced a glut of novel
therapeutic products, manufacturers increasingly saw the need for active
marketing and branding practices to convince prescribing physicians of the
significance of their new innovations. In the '40s and '50s, as pharmaceutical
marketing began to develop its own journal literature, novel techniques of
market research – including the prescription audit, surveys of
therapeutic practice, and the applied sociology of the medical innovator
– became an essential aspect of pharmaceutical research. And yet, as pharmaceutical marketers
jostled with researchers for a place at the table in product development, they
retained an uneasy sensibility that their influence not disrupt the delicate
relationship between science and commerce upon which the success and legitimacy
of the pharmaceutical industry rested.
This paper uses corporate archives, sources in the pharmaceutical trade
literature, and memoirs of salesmen, researchers, and marketing executives to
trace out the delicate moral economy of pharmaceutical promotion taking shape
at mid-century. My narrative seeks
to demonstrate how, by the onset of the Kefauver hearings in 1958, practices of
pharmaceutical marketing had developed a broad foundation in the heart of
clinical research and clinical practice.
Peter Bacon Hales, University of Illinois at
Chicago (pbhales@uic.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Cambridge
Reconsidering the Evidentiary in Photographs: Lessons
from Three Historical Moments in the History of Science
Scientific photography
is traditionally seen as a repository of evidence, contemporary and historical,
within circumscribed boundaries.
It is a tool to be used in ways not dissimilar to the applications
derived from other technologies designed to gather experimental data. But photography carries with it a habit
of realism. Even skeptical
scientific experimenters have a different relationship to a crime-scene
photograph than a pathology report; a representation of a poverty-stricken
woman in a photograph strikes emotional cords that are not so easily aroused in
the reading of a welfare-law analysis and not so easily dismissed or curtailed
even when acknowledged. This
conundrum lies at one side of the history of the evidentiary. At the other lies the question of unique
properties that photographs investigate, archive, and communicate: properties
that are better relegated to the photographic than to, say, measuring tools or
literary texts. A Harold Edgerton image tells us almost nothing of temporal
relativity, bullets or apples, but a great deal about surprise and surreality.
Similarly, Jacob Riis's reform photographs don't provide much to the student of
ethnography (he was notoriously inadequate in his ethnic characterizations of
his subjects) but a great deal about middle-class ethnic stereotypes and fears
– his, and his audiences'. Within the history of science and social
science, a third element obtrudes: the fascinating question of belief at the
time; that is to say, the opportunity, when examining a photograph, the context
of its making, and the progress of its reception, to unearth approximations of
the ways photographer, audience and culture understood scientific truth,
evidence, and the question of the Real.
In this paper, I will show three test cases for such analysis: the
photography of geology and geography made under the supervision of 19th century
American scientific surveyors; the bizarre case of Eadweard Muybridge's motion
photographs, and the antic celebrations of Harold Edgerton.
Nancy S. Hall, University of Delaware
(nhall@wam.umd.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
R. A. Fisher and Randomized Experimental Design
Today randomization
is used routinely in many experimental situations; the randomized trial has
become the gold standard in many disciplines. But until the 1920's the
preferred method was one of systematic design: the researcher arranged the
experimental treatments in a way that in her judgment would give the most
reliable results. Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890-1962) changed the methods of
experimentation and statistics and his principles of experimental design are
now considered basic to much of
scientific experiment. While randomization occurred in experimental work prior
to Fisher's, most notably in psychology of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Fisher was responsible for a major change in the way
randomization was, and is, used. He advocated that randomization was necessary
even in experiments that could be done otherwise; he argued against using a
non-random plan chosen by the experimenter. Fisher's reasons were that
randomization would eliminate bias in the experiment and would also enable a
valid test of significance. I argue that what led Fisher to the requirement of
randomization in experimentation was his several years of working on the
statistics of small samples and a realization of the role there that randomness
plays. This interest in small samples is apparent in the Fisher -
"Student" (William Sealy Gosset) correspondence, more than 200
letters. Fisher extended the randomness that is inherent in sampling and made
randomization a necessary part of experimentation. He developed randomized
experimental design at Rothamsted Agricultural Station in Harpenden, England,
between 1919 and 1933. Fisher was responsible for the wide acceptance of this
new usage of randomization, a methodological revolution, through his
publication of many journal articles, several books, and his work with
statisticians of many nationalities.
Paul Halpern, University of the Sciences in
Philadelphia (p.halper@usip.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm William
Dawes B
Nordstrom in Ehrenfest's Garden: The Hidden Prequel to Kaluza-Klein
Theory
In Summer 1916,
Finnish physicist Gunnar Nordstrom arrived in Leiden for a research stay with
Paul Ehrenfest, the respected head of the University's physics department. Nordstrom had recently published the
first five-dimensional unified model of the universe, a theory that went
virtually unnoticed by the physics community. As documented in Ehrenfest's
personal journals, Nordstrom's visit coincided with a flowering of Ehrenfest's
own interest in dimensionality.
Ehrenfest's explorations at the time resulted in a now well-regarded
paper, "In what way does it become manifest in the fundamental laws of
physics that space has three dimensions." Like Nordstrom's paper, however,
Ehrenfest's contribution received little notice by his contemporaries. However, in the following decade
influential work by Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein appeared that concerned
itself with similar issues. This
talk will examine the collaboration between Nordstrom and Ehrenfest, explore
some of the reasons their respective papers in dimensionality received little
attention at the time, and address how each of their ideas indirectly shaped
the Kaluza-Klein model of five-dimensional unification.
Deborah Harkness, University of California Davis
(debharkness@ucdavis.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Interview with an Alchemist: Hugh Plat's Pursuit of Natural Knowledge in Early Modern
London
This paper will
examine the working notebooks of Sir Hugh Plat, an early modern Londoner with a
deep curiosity about the workings of the natural world. Over the course of his life he conducted
drug trials, wrote books of secrets for publication, and even entertained
invitations to relocate to the court of the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel. His notebooks provide us with an
unusually large body of evidence about HOW he pusued natural knowledge: by interviewing expert practitioners,
recording their experimental procedures and conclusions, and then testing those
experiments. Ranging from medical
cures to compost recipes, and including such luminaries as Joachim Ganz and
John Dee as well as the man who sold his family melons, Plat's notebooks give
us new insights into the social and intellectual foundations of the new science
of the 17th century.
Peter Harrison, Bond University
(pharriso@staff.bond.edu.au)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Cambridge
Laws of Nature, Miracles, and Early Modern Religion
The early modern
period witnessed fundamental changes in how miracles were defined, and in their
religious function. Miracles
increasingly came to be understood as events that contravened a law of nature,
as opposed to events that transcended the natural powers of the objects or
agents involved. As to their function, miracles came to play a central role in
inter-religious disputation – genuine miracles being thought to validate
the truth of a particular religious tradition, while false miracles (or no
miracles) were the mark of false religion. This adjudicatory function contrasted with the previous
place of miracles in popular piety and as relatively informal criteria for
canonisation. Natural philosophy
had a central place in each of these developments. New natural philosophies
frequently relied on a voluntarist conception of laws of nature, which in turn
had led to the redefinition of "miracle." Equally importantly, natural philosophers, with their
knowledge of laws of nature, claimed to be able to discern what was genuinely
miraculous, and thus to make a contribution to the distinguishing of true
religions from false. Such claims, partly aimed at establishing the religious
legitimacy of natural philosophy, reinforced a particular conception of
"religion" as having to do with assenting to propositions on the
basis of evidence.
Helen Hattab, Wabash College
(hattabh@wabash.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Haym
Saloman
Slings, Pebbles and Eddies: The 'Humble' Origins of
Descartes Celestial Mechanics
At the end of the Principia Philosophiae Ren Descartes compares the
universe to a machine, and claims that explaining natural phenomena requires
transposing our knowledge of what constitutes and drives visible machines to
the impenetrable realm of natures ultimate constituents. This kind of explanation, which later
came to be known as mechanistic explanation, differs starkly from the forms of
explanation stemming from Aristotles common-sense, organic conception of the
natural world and his accompanying teleological physics. And yet Descartes boldly
proclaims: in having tried here
thus to explain the universal nature of material things, I have certainly not
used any principle for this which was not admitted by Aristotle and all the
other philosophers of all ages. (Principia Pt.IV, a.200, AT VIII,
p.323) As it turns out, there is
an Aristotelian precedent for the forms of explanation Descartes employs in his
physics, but one must look to the tradition in mechanics, the ancient art of
machines, not to physics. We know
from Descartes letters that he was familiar with the subject matter of the
pseudo-Aristotelian Quaestiones Mechanicae – a work that was recovered and heavily
commented on in the Renaissance.
In this paper I will explore two ways in which Descartes employs the
forms of explanation found in Aristotelian mechanics in his natural
philosophy. First he relies on the
analogy to motion in a sling, a simple mechanical device discussed in the Quaestiones
Mechanicae, in
order to develop and justify his second law of motion. Second, in his explanations of the
motions of bodies in celestial vortices he adopts some answers given by
commentators in response to the only two questions regarding natural phenomena
addressed in the Quaestiones Mechanicae (i.e., the question regarding how pebbles come to
be round, and the question regarding what causes objects thrown into the eddy
of a river to always end up in the center of the vortex). In conclusion, while the exact
relationship between the two remains to be spelled out, the mechanics of
Descartes celestial vortices and the mechanics of Aristotelian artificial
and natural devices appear to be more than mere homonyms.
Elizabeth Hayes, University of Notre Dame
(ehayes@nd.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine A
Science, Politics, and Satire: Reconsidering the
American Philosophical Society in its Political Contexts, 1775 – 1800.
This paper will
explore contemporary perspectives on the American Philosophical Society during
the years 1775 – 1800, originating from both within and from outside the
institution. I look at such genres
as satire, anniversary orations, transactions of the society, and political
writings, written by a diverse assortment of people--society President Thomas
Jefferson; Astronomer, politician and society member David Rittenhouse;
Federalist polemicist and inventor Thomas Greene Fessenden; and satirist and
politician Henry Hugh Brackenridge.
In doing so I begin to situate the APS within a context of budding
nationalistic American politics, by highlighting assumptions and webs of
meanings that different people held about APS-style research and about the APS
itself and by tracing the way those meanings changed as the American political
system evolved through the 1790s.
Darin Hayton, University of Notre Dame
(Hayton.1@nd.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Haym
Saloman
Astrolabes and Power in Renaissance Germany: Andreas Stiborius's 'Clipeus Austrie'
Emperor Maximilian I
(1493-1519) was an avid supporter and keen student of the astronomical and
astrological sciences. He employed
numerous astrologers and astronomers at his court and, perhaps more importantly,
at his university, the University of Vienna. One of his favorite clients was Andreas Stiborius (though
Stiborius has received little attention in the secondary literature). At Maximilian's request, Stiborius came
to the Vienna to take a position in the Ducale College, where he lectured on
various instruments and carried out extensive observational work. Stiborius was also expected to provide
service directly to the Emperor.
In this paper I begin to recover this interesting and little-studied
figure by looking closely at a manuscript in which he describes the
"Clipeus Austrie". This
was an astrolabe that he dedicated to Emperor Maximilian I, arguing that this
instrument would bestow worldly power on Maximilian. Moreover, Stiborius claimed that the famous emperors of the
past had all had similar instruments.
In this way, Stiborius' "Clipeus Austrie" played an important
role in Maximilian's political projects, in particular, in his attempts to link
the House of Habsburg up with a mythical genealogy of all the great
emperors. But Stiborius'
"Clipeus" also points to Maximilian's efforts to acquire the skill
necessary to use such instruments.
I use this manuscript to illuminate both Stiborius activities vis-a-vis
the imperial court and Maximilian's real interests in astronomy and astrology,
interests that extended beyond simply patronage.
Peter Heering, Institute of Physics,
Carl-von-Ossietzky Universitt Oldenburg (peter.heering@uni-oldenburg.de)
Saturday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Cambridge
Regular twists: Redoing Coulomb's Experiments on the
Torsion of Metal Wires
In my paper I am
going to discuss a case study based on the replication method as it is used in
the Oldenburg group. The subject of this example are the experiments on the
torsion of metal wires the French military engineer Charles Augustin Coulomb
published in 1784. Some of the findings of this case study are very much alike
those from others using the replication method, i.e. that it is more difficult
to build the set-up or to perform the experiment in accordance to Coulomb's
description than one would expect from reading his memoir. However one
particular aspect of this case study turned out to be that in one of the
experiments Coulomb's description seemed to be misleading: If the experiment
was carried out in the way it was described in the memoir the results were
irregular, although Coulomb's findings are in agreement with our modern theory.
Moreover, if the experiment was carried out in a different way it was possible
to produce data according to Coulomb's publication. From this problem it became
possible to develop a new notion of Coulomb's research strategy in which theory
and experiment are connected in a manner different to what has been supposed up
to now.
Susanne Heim, Max Planck Gesellschaft
(SHeim@ushmm.org, heim@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A
Ostforschung (Eastern' Research)
The paper will deal
with the agrarian research at several Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institutes and the role
these institutes played in the context of German expansion policy to the East.
Plant and animal breeding research was conducted in the
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institutes in order to gain self sufficiency in food supply and
for an improved exploitation of the natural resources of the occupied
territories in the East. By offering their expertise scientists contributed to
the concept of a German ruled Greater Europe. The occupation of large parts
of Eastern Europe entailed a shift in scientific aims, questions and methods.
The institutes have not just been used of misused for the purposes of the
Nazi Regime, but scientists were eager to collect data and research material in
the occupied territories which then became part of the common knowledge of the
discipline. Of particular interest for German plant breeders was the taking
over of institutes in the Soviet Union, at that time one of the worlds leading
nations in plant breeding research. War played an important role in the
coalition of interests between the political leadership and the scientific
community. Political control of research was unnecessary – indeed
counterproductive – as long as scientists were offered good research and
career opportunities: professional advancement through new positions in the
occupied areas, and the opportunity to exploit the scientific results of their
colleagues in the occupied countries.
Pamela M. Henson and Ronald E.
Doel,
Smithsonian Institution, Oregon State University (hensonp@osia.si.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Cambridge
(Re)viewing Recent Science: Using Photographs as
Visual Evidence in History of Science Research
Until recently, the
history of science has been dominated by text-based interpretation, using the
wealth of published and archival text documentation that scientists have
left. Contemporary interpretations
of science place it within a larger context of institutional settings, research
practice, personalities and interpersonal relationships, and world events. Historians of science are, therefore,
turning to supplementary forms of information, such as participant/observer
studies and oral histories. This
paper examines one supplementary form of evidence – the photographic
image – and explores the concepts and methods of analysis needed to
effectively use these materials.
We argue that photographs should be an integral part of research, a
source of visual information, and focus on the analytical skills necessary to
effectively use images as well as the methodological challenges posed by such
investigations. Millions of images
of the scientific enterprise from the 1860s forward document research in
settings from field tents to high-tech laboratories, from small college
classrooms to elite university labs.
They reveal the kinds of tacit knowledge required to make measurements,
provide new insights into the practices of field scientists, and remind us of
the extensive scientific research accomplished by less glamorous fields such as
agriculture. We explore the range
of evidence available, identify repositories that are rich in visual documentation,
and discuss how the analysis of photographic images should be integrated with traditional research
methodologies in history of science.
Georgina Mary Hoptroff, University of Minnesota
(georginahoptroff@hotmail.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Place, Practice, and Primatology: Clarence Ray
Carpenter's Early Field Studies, 1931-1950
Early twentieth
century American biology is generally identified as having been dominated by
the laboratory until after World War II when field science began to emerge as
reputable and field sites as significant places for the practice of biology.
Clarence Ray Carpenter conducted field studies of primate behavior in the
relatively barren soils of the 1930s, and survived to see field studies grow in
the 1950s and 60s. In the histories of field primatology written by the
investigators themselves, Carpenter is commonly referred to as the
"pioneer" whose 1931-1933 field studies proved that detailed and
systematic field studies of primate behavior were in fact possible.
Publications dating from the 1950s, ranging from primatology textbooks, to the
journal Science, to popular science books helped to engrain this narrative
within the fledgling discipline. Despite Carpenters reputation within his scientific
community, his contribution to the development of field sites and methodology
has avoided historical examination. In this talk, I argue that Carpenters
views about the value and limitation of field studies, which evolved through
his experiences in the field, spurred him to establish innovative practices and
places with which to conduct science in the field.
Keith Hutchison and Neil
Thomason,
University of Melbourne (k.hutchison@unimelb.edu.au)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm President's
Ballroom B
Did Tycho Brahe suffer from a cognitive illusion?
It is widely believed
that announcement of the Tychonic model of the solar system was delayed until
after the comet of 1577 had demonstrated to Brahe that planetary spheres did
not exist – for other wise the sphere of Mars would seem to 'clash' with
that of the sun. More significantly, it has also been suggested that Copernicus
himself toyed with this theory, but rejected it – in favour of a more
radical heliocentrism – for exactly this reason. In recent reviews of
this question, Margolis has insisted that Tycho (and perhaps Copernicus, and
certainly all historians who accept this story as plausible) are victims of a
cognitive illusion. The alleged clash (he says) does not occur. It only appears
to occur because of our tendency to use static diagrams to represent kinematic
actions. If we use a moving diagram to represent the Tychonic hypothesis, then
it is patent (he continues) that there is no incompatibility between the two
spheres. We however dispute this claim – and defend the traditional view
that the Tychonic hypothesis did have to confront a genuine obstacle. For
Margolis eliminates the clash between by adopting a very odd interpretation of
the celestial spheres. We show firstly that it is very implausible to attribute
this interpretation to astronomers of Tycho's era, or to later historians. We
observe secondly, that Margolis' remedy does not in fact work. For though it
does eliminate the clash between the spheres of Mars and the Sun, it creates
other clashes, equally problematic.
Sarah E. Igo, University of Pennsylvania
(sarahigo@sas.upenn.edu)
Sunday,
November 23rd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A and B
Statistics, Selves, and Other Subjects: Kinsey-Era
Americans
Over the course of
the twentieth century, serving as a research subject, whether in a
man-in-the-street interview, a psychological experiment, or a consumer
survey, was becoming increasingly commonplace for ordinary Americans. For those unfamiliar with the position
of a subject—that is, most individuals in the early twentieth
century—being studied could seem very intrusive. It could also be thrilling. The turn from studying the other to
studying ourselves that occurred in this eras social scientific practice
carried with it both a confessional mode and a voyeuristic attitude toward
knowledge about others. This paper
traces the publicity around and reactions to the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey Reports
(Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female) in order to explore the
resources social scientific data and discourses—newly accessible through
media outlets—provided for self-creation. As it turned out, actually serving as one of the Sexual
Behavior
interviewees was not necessary for individuals to imagine themselves as
Kinseys subjects. Thousands of
individuals volunteered for interviews with Alfred Kinsey, and countless others
sent in unsolicited data about their sexual habits to the scientist. But others, never in contact with
Kinsey, were able to find themselves in his statistics—and even to frame
their self-understandings with the aid of social scientific concepts and
vocabularies he and others popularized.
Subjects—actual or vicarious—of the Sexual Behavior research seized upon Kinseys statistics
and averages, reading him as establishing new gauges by which they could
measure themselves. Ultimately,
this paper hopes to highlight the ubiquity of a process little noticed by
historians of the modern United States: the wide-ranging transformation of
ordinary Americans into social scientific subjects.
Juan Ilerbaig, Independent Scholar
(jilerbaig@hotmail.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
A Time for Place, a Place for Time: Continuity and
Change in American Field Zoology c. 1900.
Between the mid-1890s
and the 1910s, American field zoologists tried to improve on the practices of
earlier generations of naturalists by introducing new methods and establishing
new sorts of institutions. It has
been recently argued that the changes in field biology during this period were
the result of importing laboratory standards and means of operation into the
field. In contrast to this view,
this paper addresses how some of these institutional and methodological
proposals drew heavily from earlier experiences of field zoologists. Specifically, I examine two examples,
the establishment of inland biological stations in the 1890s and the work of
Joseph Grinnell in the early decades of the twentieth century. More than a mere copy of marine
biology models, the flagship stations established at the universities of
Indiana and Illinois were an extension of previous exploration work conducted
in the West, but with a geographical twist. Grinnell's research grew also out of the exploration work of
a previous generation of naturalists, but his concern for the effect of
historical geography on evolution led him to develop field methods that
superseded those of his mentors.
In these and other cases, the field zoologists' concern for history and
geography led them to advance their natural history tradition in new directions
at the onset of the new century.
Gabriela Ilnitchi, Eastman School of Music /
University of Rochester (gilnitchi@esm.rochester.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
Rational irrationality: Nicole Oresmes Mathematics
of Planetary Motion and Celestial Harmony
Despite Aristotles
authoritative rejection of celestial sound in his De caelo, scholastic thinkers of the late
middle ages remained deeply invested in the Neoplatonic notion of cosmic
harmony, and often found innovative ways to negotiate between these two
seemingly contradictory views and find acceptable compromises. More often than
not, their conceptual reworkings of the cosmic music became manifold and
dynamic syntheses between sets of upstart cosmological and scientific doctrines
and the established Neoplatonic philosophical core. Particularly noteworthy in this respect are Nicole Oresmes
interpretations of the celestial harmony as developed in his Tractatus de
commensurabilitate
and Le Livre du ciel et du monde. Contingent
on his own kinematics of circular motion and rigorous mathematical derivations,
Oresme envisages a cosmic harmony regulated not by the standard Neoplatonic
harmonic ratios, but by continuously variable irrational ratios of mutually
incommensurable quantities. The incommensurability of celestial motions, which
Oresme seems to favor, leads therefore to an infinity of planetary conjunctions
corresponding, on the one hand, to a dynamic though not precisely codified
cosmic polyphony, and on the other, to the extension of the
Neoplatonic/Pythagorean ratios into the newly opened realm of irrational
numbers. Oresmes cosmological, mathematical, and aesthetic premises –
fundamentally different from those of the Neoplatonists – ultimately
engender a sounding universe that he regards as infinitely more beautiful
because it is infinitely more varied.
Jeremiah James, Harvard University
(jjames@fas.harvard.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm William
Dawes B
Theories of X-ray Crystallography
Familiar tales like
the discovery of the DNA double helix present images of x-ray crystallography
as a powerful experimental technique in the decades following the Second World
War. But with neither high-speed
computers nor advanced Fourier analysis techniques at their disposal
crystallographers before the war were unable to generate the kinds of precise
data that would maintain the close ties between their post-war successors and
researchers in fields like molecular biology and solid state physics. Thus pre-war x-ray crystallography was
a discipline markedly different from its better-known, post-war descendant. In particular, crystallographers before
the war were more directly concerned with theoretical innovation, both as part
of the development of crystallographic techniques and as part of their
relationship with researchers in closely allied fields like x-ray physics,
atomic physics, and structural chemistry.
The contrasts this presents between pre- and post-war x-ray
crystallography provide interesting insights into the limits and conditions of
the divisions between experiment and theory in the twentieth-century physical
sciences.
Sarah Jansen, Harvard University
(jansen@fas.harvard.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine B
'Optimum Sustainable Yield: Concept and Practices of
Productivity in German Forestry Science during the late 18th Century
During the eighteenth
century, German forests underwent a dramatic transition. Until then, forests
had been sites of multiple uses such as those of a social space for nearby
villagers, a place to gather firewood, to drive in pigs to feed on acorns and
grubs, to harvest trees as building materials, and to burn charcoal. This began
to change in the late eighteenth century, when the new field of forestry
science developed material and conceptual techniques to turn the forest into a
space devoted primarily to the rational production of wood. In rationally
used forests, foresters planted trees in a geometrically ordered topography,
the most efficient floor plan for the growth of trees and for the labor of
foresters. Trees were regularly measured and their growth was assessed to
determine the optimal time of their harvest and the optimal sustainable yield
of the whole forest, both new notions developed at this time. Thus individual
trees, the whole forest, and the forest workers, were reconfigured. In this
talk I will examine the concept and practices of productivity in rational forestry,
and situate these in contemporary discourses on accounting, on agriculture, on
the regulation of populations, and on manufacturing goods.
Bernardo Jefferson Oliveira, Universidade Federal de Minas
Gerais, Brazil (be@fae.ufmg.br)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm President's
Ballroom A
Nineteenth-Century Utopias and the Social Imagery of
Science
This paper focuses on
scientific utopias as an important vehicle to the understanding of the
formation of social imagery of science.
Utopias are evaluated as a special kind of mental experiment in which a
large part of the population foresees designs of the possible uses of science.
The distinctiveness of this kind of mental experiment, we argue, comes chiefly
from the way one get emotionally affected by it. Here we present a synthesis of a comparative analysis of six
important and influential utopias of the nineteen century: Owen's A New View of Society (1813); Saint-Simon and Comte's
Le Cathcisme des Industriels (1825); Fourier's Le Nouveau monde industriel et
socitaire (1829), Cabet's Voyage en Icarie (1842); Verne's Les cinq
millions de la Bgum
(1879); Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and Harris' Brotherhood of the New Life (1891). The main points analyzed
are the characteristics of science, the scientists, and the role the scientific
endeavor plays on the societies described on these narratives. These elements
are discussed as important pieces for the historical process of science
authority diffusion and the impression that scientific knowledge was steadily
progressing toward a brave new world.
Kristin Renee Johnson, Oregon State University
(johnskri@onid.orst.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
Karl Jordan: Systematics and the History of Science
The entomologist Karl
Jordan has been one of the central figures important to the "fierce
campaign" biologist Ernst Mayr has carried out to raise the status of
systematic biology, particularly due to his clear statement of the biological
species concept. Mayr held Jordan up as exemplar of what the systematist should
be due to his interest in determining the causes of geographic speciation
rather than simply compiling descriptions of geographical variation. But due
partly to the motivations behind Mayrs narratives – a defense of systematics
in a post-Synthesis world, when the biological species concept was itself being
criticized – the original reasons Jordan did the work subsequently
considered so important is lost in synthesis-stories. Leaving post-Synthesis
narratives aside, my paper will examine Jordan, not in view of his
contributions to the evolutionary synthesis, but in terms of his own context
and the meaning and point of systematics in a pre-Synthesis world. Looking at
systematics in this way brings to the fore the methods, priorities,
institutions and communities that produced systematics, and how these changed
during Jordans life in a way that made his work explainable in a different
context than that in which it was undertaken. Jordan, although often cited as
important in the synthesis, is more accurately viewed as a man working on the
problems of an earlier period. The theoretical writings Jordan produced were
written in direct response to the work of his contemporary zoologists,
including George Romanes, Wilhelm Petersen, and Theodor Eimer. They often had
as much to do with enforcing accurate and careful systematics as they did
theoretical musings, an aspect lost in lists of Jordans contributions focused
on how he led up to the synthesis.
Matthew L. Jones, Columbia University
(mj340@columbia.edu)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Thomas
Paine B
Mathematical Formalism, Simplicity and Peace of Mind
in Descartes and Leibniz
Descartes and Leibniz both
worried about the deleterious effects of overly autonomous formal reasoning;
these worries shaped their accounts of legitimate mathematical objects and
mathematical practice. This paper examines how Leibniz appreciated,
reconstructed and reworked Descartes considerations of the epistemic,
practical and emotional effects of formal reasoning. Descartes held algebra to
be an essential art for gaining simultaneous intuitions of complex mathematical
situations. Drawing heavily on Descartes and his own mathematical innovations,
Leibniz defended mathematical formalism by stressing its power to provide an
ersatz form of simultaneous intuition, one proper to postlapsarian embodied
humanity, one essential for moral reform and mathematical discovery.
Edward Jone-Imhotep, University of Guelph
(imhotep@uoguelph.ca)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Tom
Paine A
Global Metrology/Local Meteorology: Reading the
'Arctic' Ionogram
This paper explores
the tension between global networks and local identity in meteorological
investigations of the upper atmosphere. Following World War II, ionospheric
researchers sought ways to standardize the cherished visual records of their
discipline – the graphic inscriptions known as ionograms – and the
interpretive practices associated with them. Their aim was global: to tie
together observations stretching across six continents into a synoptic study of
upper atmospheric phenomena spanning the globe. One class of ionograms
stubbornly resisted this regime. Complex and turbulent 'arctic' ionograms,
produced at isolated field stations in high northern latitudes, represented
anomalies under the dominant interpretive schemes of British and American
meteorologists. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a group of Canadian
researchers attempted to make readable this class of previously unreadable
records. This paper investigates how it became possible to read 'arctic'
ionograms convincingly and what that reading signified in post-war Canada. It
argues that the unconventional practices developed for reading these peculiar
records in Canada emerged as a way of carving out Canadian particularity during
the early Cold War. Within an increasingly global network, the ability to
authoritatively read these graphs underwrote claims to a distinctive Canadian
natural order, steeped in auroral displays, magnetic disturbances and
ionospheric storms. For Canadian researchers, making things the same –
standardizing machines, practices and people – threatened to erase
difference even while it promised to legitimate distinction. By investigating
just what standardization meant in post-war ionospheric research, how it still
allowed for meaningful difference, this paper hopes to show how and why local
identities could be carved out of the interstices of global metrologies.
Gwen Kay, SUNY Oswego (kay@oswego.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
Cleaning House: Sacrificing Science for Service in
Home Economics
For many women
seeking a career in science in the late 19th century, the new discipline of
home economics provided a haven.
As conceived by its founders – educators, scientists, Progressive
reformers – home economics would offer scientific training as it revolved
around and pertained to the smooth running of the home. In the art of domesticity, only a woman
armed with a proper understanding of chemistry and biology could understand new
discoveries in nutrition, and translate science from the laboratory into a
healthier meal for her family. The
1862 Morrill Act, which created land grant universities, embraced home
economics as a way to provide an education for the female citizens of the
state. The Progressive emphasis on
science and efficiency also served the new discipline well, providing another
rationale for college-educated women. And yet, a course of study that required
two years each of chemistry and biology, a year of mathematics and physics
became, by the end of the Progressive era, less scientific in its drive to
become more service-oriented. I
will argue that the Smith-Lever Act (1914) and the Smith-Hughes Act (1917)
leached out the science, in favor of more vocational training, and in this
shift, "scientific" and "motherhood" became irreparably
divorced.
Vera Keller, Princeton (vak26@cam.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
Emblematic Knowledge and the Celestial Sphere
Francis Line's much
discussed glass globe of the world or "magnetic clock" made its debut
onto the printed page and into the republic of letters through Sylvestro
Pietrasancta's emblem book, De Symbolis Heroicis (1634). Why did such machines
lend themselves to emblematic depictions? This paper will discuss the symbolism
of celestial machinery in the context of an iconographic tradition that
contrasted knowledge of the world through faith with observation. In
particular, natural light of the planets seen through the glass of the
telescope is contrasted with divine light transmitted through the crystalline
spheres. Within this framework of two contending routes to knowledge, artifical
models fall in the camp of privileged knowledge opposed to observation through
the telescope. The "clockwork world" analogy uncovered in emblem books, title pages, and
allegories from Coornhert and Drebbel to Pietrasancta and Vermeer will help to
recuperate the contemporary divinely endowed symbolism of the machine.
Elizabeth Kessler, University of Chicago
(eakessle@uchicago.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
Resolving Nebulae: The Aesthetics of Representing Deep
Space
With the development
of large telescopes in the eighteenth century, the realm of the nebula became
visible. For the following two centuries, astronomers debated as to whether
these cloudy, indistinct, and glowing forms were gaseous phenomena or stellar
systems, galaxies like our own Milky Way. Only in the twentieth century was it concluded
that both existed. Now the Hubble Space Telescope offers incredibly detailed
views of these formerly mysterious regions, and these images have reformed both
scientific and popular understandings of the universe. Yet, these digital
images are highly mediated; an untouched image more closely resembles a drawing
by William Herschel than the spectacular scenes that have become the HSTs
trademark. Digital technology plays an essential role in creating these images,
allowing astronomers to enhance the representation. My paper will examine the
aesthetics of images of nebula, from the first depictions by Messier, Herschel,
and Rosse to the photographs that resolved the debate in the twentieth century.
Finally, I will turn to the HST images and suggest that while the goal of
incredible detail is clearly met, through their appearance they continue to
propose a universe that is mysterious and unknown.
Dong-Won Kim, Korea Advanced Institute of
Science and Technology (dwkim3@yahoo.com)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine B
How did a wrong ideology destroy a healthy physics
community?: Physics in North Korea between 1953 and 1980
After the Korean War
ended in 1953, physics grew rapidly in North Korea during the late 1950s and
1960s. Many North Korean physicists carried out research on quantum and nuclear
physics, and the papers on these basic subjects were superior to those on the
applied subjects. The situation, however, dramatically changed at the beginning
of the 1970s when the North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung, imposed his ideology of
Self-Sufficiency upon science and technology. The Self-Sufficiency ideology
emphasized the applied sciences that could directly benefit North Korean
industry and military. It also demanded the scientists to pay more attention to
particular aspects of nature in North Korea, to become independent from any
foreign influences, and to develop a Korean science. The result of this
policy was especially catastrophic for physics, a discipline that aspires to
develop general laws of nature, not regional ones. By analyzing physics papers
from 1953 to 1980, Ill argue that the Self-Sufficiency ideology eventually
led the Self-Destruction of physics in North Korea.
Mi Gyung Kim, North Carolina State University
(kim@social.chass.ncsu.edu)
Sunday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A and B
News in the Air: Balloons in the Public Sphere
The News of the
balloon ascension in 1783 spread quickly, opening a new phase of 'public'
science. Often funded through
public subscription, they were witnessed and celebrated by the entire
population of the region.
Returning aeronauts were given a hero's welcome, greeted by the local
dignitaries and paraded through the town accompanied by grand military
music. Laborers forsake a day's
wage to witness the event, women wore ballon hats, children ate 'drages au
balloon,' and poets produced countless odes. The balloon flights reflect an important shift in the
constitution of the European public.
They became a public craze not simply through the circulation of words,
but through the multiplication of flights throughout Europe. While literacy, personal contact, and
rules of conduct had policed the boundary of the Republic of Letters, the
balloon flights obliterated it by allowing the participation of all people and
through their immediate, universal capacity to inspire wonder among them. They helped constitute the bourgeois
public sphere by mobilizing local resources while commanding universal
authority as a 'news in the air.'
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, University of Minnesota
(sgk@umn.edu)
Saturday,
November 22th: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Molly
Pitcher
Nature by Design: Masculinity on Display in
Nineteenth-Century Natural History Museums
Using visual
representations as well as archival records, this paper explores the
intersecting ways that museum proprietors and taxidermists presented themselves
as well as zoological specimens nineteenth-century museums. Technical expertise, scientific ideas
about living forms, and indeed public presentations of science shaped these
displays and other illustrations of natural history, and so did ideas of
maleness. This gendered emphasis
was evident already in Charles Willson Peale's museum and became more dramatically
evident in the increasingly sophisticated habitat groups created by curators at
the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the pioneering work of William
Hornaday.
Eric D. Kupferberg, MIT and Harvard University
(edkupfer@mit.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine A
Alice C. Evans and the Link Between Contagious
Abortion and Undulent Fever: An
Inversion of Bacteriological Discovery
Traditionally Alice
C. Evans (1881-1975) is portrayed as a tragic figure in the history of 20th
century medicine. In 1917, Evans described
an organism in market milk closely resembling the microbe responsible for both
contagious abortion in cattle and undulant fever in humans. As a result, she argued that milk
produced from infected cows posed a significant threat to public health. Evans claims found little support and
even greater ridicule. Historians
and biographers have attributed this rejection to her status as a female
scientist in a male-dominated profession.
This paper argues that gender played a more subtle and complex role in
debates over the relationship between contagious abortion and undulant fever. I
argue that Evans was marginalized on several accounts. Initially, she was a dairy
bacteriologist and a federal employee who ventured into a domain dominated by
medically trained university scientists.
Moreover, her findings arose from a taxonomic study of fecal-colon forms
in cows milk, a specialty largely removed from the field of pathology. Lastly, and most importantly, Evans proposed an etiological
agent in search of an unrecognized diseased population. As many contemporary bacteriologists
noted, if most market milk contained germs capable of causing undulant fever,
then the disease should be widely evident. Evans' claims were vindicated in the late 1920's, only after
diagnostic techniques could distinguish undulant fever from several similar
febrile conditions.
Peter Kuznick, American University
(Pkuznick@aol.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A
Nuclear Threat, Scientific Ethics, and the Roots of
Scientists' Anti-Vietnam War Activism
This paper will
explore why, among professional groups in the United States, scientists,
individually and collectively, were in the forefront of efforts to stop the
U.S. invasion of Vietnam. It will
argue that scientists' activism was propelled not only by humanistic opposition
to war, but by concerns about heightening the risk of nuclear conflict and by
scientists' awareness of responsibility for having made modern warfare
incalculably more lethal. It will look specifically at the role of scientists
like Barry Commoner, whose longstanding efforts to curb the nuclear arms race
laid the groundwork for their leadership in the scientists' anti-Vietnam War
movment.
W. R. Laird, Carleton University
(wrlaird@ccs.carleton.ca)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Haym
Saloman
Francesco Maurolico's Problemata Mechanica and Renaissance Mechanics
The
pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems was a principal source of and inspiration for a
renaissance of mechanics in the sixteenth century. From it – together with the medieval tradition of the
science of weights, Pappus, Hero, and of course Archimedes – there
emerged a new mathematical and fully demonstrative science of mechanics to take
its place alongside astronomy, optics, and harmonics. Francesco Maurolico (1494-1575) contributed to this
tradition in his Problemata mechanica, a brief reworking, with some 40 added questions, of the
Mechanical Problems. But unlike other
commentators, Maurolico impatiently dismissed the principle of circular motion,
putting in its place the principles of equal moments and centres of
gravity. In this paper, I shall
look in detail at Maurolico's mechanical premises and how he tried to adapt the
Archimedean statical principle of equal moments and apply it to various
problems involving movement. I
shall also examine the mechanical quantities that he distinguished –
volume, weight, moment, and vis or impetus – and show that, despite his analysis of the
relation between volume, weight, and moment, he relied on a rather vague and
intuitive sense of power, force, or impetus (vis or impetus). Had he extended this analysis to vis and impetus by taking account of speed, he
could perhaps have been led to an Archimedean dynamics similar to what Galileo
would later develop. Finally, I
shall compare Maurolico's approach to that of Guidobaldo del Monte and Giuseppe Moletti, in order to
suggest his place in the renaissance of mechanics of the sixteenth century.
Cornelia Campbell Lambert, University of South Carolina --
Aiken (envirohist@yahoo.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine A
Bee is for Benevolence: Natural Theology in Nineteenth
Century British Insect Science Texts for Children
Natural theology
played a diminished role in nineteenth century apologetics but remained a
mainstay of children's books through the mid-1800s. The purpose of this paper is to present uses of the basic
tenets of natural theology, as defined by Brooke and Cantor (1998), as surveyed
in British entomology texts written for children from the 1830s through the
1850s. To the authors of texts on
insects and their homes, natural theology served as the epistemological
foundation of science education, regardless of the social, religious, or
political aims of publication.
Examples of the hive/hill as governments, sites-of-production, and
families are explored in order to illustrate the ways in which insect science
provided authors with justifications for a universe created by a benevolent God
– one of a white, British persuasion.
Cindy Lammens, Ghent University
(Cindy.Lammens@rug.ac.be)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm President's
Ballroom B
Gemma Frisius' critical reading of Copernicus' De
revolutionibus:
argumentation and truth enhanced by observations and demonstrations.
Research on
Renaissance astronomy often highlights the so-called Copernican revolution
which, in fact, only occurred in the 17th century. Questions concerning the
early reception of Copernicus' De revolutionibus (1543) have only partially been
dealt with, in particular as concerns Germany and Italy. It is generally
accepted that the early reception theory focuses on the mathematical utility
rather than the cosmological truth, such as the so-called 'Wittenberg
Interpretation'. A further articulation of the Copernican planetary models and
cosmological claims was generally delayed until the 1570s. Up until now, the
significance of the Low Countries as concerns the early reception of the
heliocentric theory, is seldom recognized. Nevertheless, the work of Copernicus
had been awaited with great interest and aroused enthusiastic reactions of
competent readers immediately after its publication. One of them was Gemma
Frisius (1508-1555), the Louvain cosmographer and astronomer. He elaborately annotated
his Copernicus copy ('the most extensive such reading/study notes found in any
copy of De revolutionibus' according to Owen Gingerich's Annotated Census) without interruption between
1543 until his death in 1555. In this paper I will argue that Gemma's reception
of the new theory departed significantly from the Wittenberg Interpretation.
His annotations reveal that he was interested in the mathematical as well as in
the cosmological part. In fact, he accepted the new hypotheses as being 'true'
and as offering a reliable explanation of the observed phenomena, and he
emphasized the newly established 'symmetry'. Furthermore, although matters
concerning the status of mathematical demonstrations and the basis of certainty
in mathematics were especially discussed in Italy in the second half of the
16th century by Christopher Clavius, Giuseppe Biancani, Jacopo Mazzoni, a.o, we
already find the first traces of attempts towards emphasizing the crucial role
of mathematics in the field of natural philosophy, present in Gemma's notes and
writings. Attempts towards underlining the importance of combining precise
observations with accurate demonstrations in order to establish the truth, have
been neglected so far, especially for the period immediately preceding and following
the publication of the De revolutionibus. I will argue that Gemma's method essentially
consists of combining practical observations with mathematical demonstration
and of confronting them with authority. Special attention is also given to the
often-introduced comments on types of argumentation and on truth-value. Thus,
an analysis of Gemma's notes reveals his critical appraisal of the new theory
with respect to mathematics, cosmology and the demonstrational and
argumentative means and methods used to find 'the truth'.
Susan Lanzoni, Boston University
(slanzoni@bu.edu)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm President's
Ballroom A
The Prominence of Subjective Experience in
Phenomenological Psychiatry, 1912-1922
In the early years of
the twentieth century in Central Europe, Karl Jaspers, Ludwig Binswanger and
Eugne Minkowski were among a number of psychiatrists working in clinics and
asylums who turned to forms of phenomenology to explore psychopathological
experience. These psychiatrists
were concerned that the experiences of patients were increasingly removed from
the purview of psychology and that persons were converted into bundles of
associations rather than being understood as active, thinking, experiencing
beings. The turn towards phenomenology was therefore an attempt to retain the
experiencing subject as a vital element of psychiatric analysis. One of first publications in this vein
was the journal Pathopsychologie, founded in 1912, by the Munich psychiatrist Wilhelm
Specht, with an editorial staff that included the life-philosopher Henri
Bergson, and the psychologists Pierre Janet, Oswald Klpe, and Hugo
Mnsterberg. This journal sought
to revitalize psychiatry by searching for an alternative to the brain-based
psychopathology of Wernicke on the one hand and the main psychological
alternative, psychoanalysis, on the other. In addition to this publication, Karl Jasperss 1913 General
Psychopathology
also brought phenomenological ideas within the purview of the discipline of
psychiatry. Jaspers distinguished
what he called a subjective psychology, which he allied with phenomenology,
from an objective, or performance-oriented psychology
(Leistungspsychologie). My paper
explores the ways these psychiatrists, with collaboration and insight from
psychologists and philosophers, formed a common venture that sought to give
ample due to this subjective approach by bringing patient experience into the
center of psychiatric theorizing.
Mark Largent, University of Puget Sound
(mlargent@ups.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom A
The Fix: Sterilization as the Solution for Oregons
Woes
While historians have
recognized eugenic improvement as the primary motivation for the popularity of
involuntary sterilization in the United States, the punishment of sexual
offenders played a major role in the American sterilization movement. Newly discovered documents on the
history of sterilization in Oregon demonstrate that punitive and eugenic
rationales intertwined to bring about the forced sterilization of approximately
3,000 Oregonians between 1917 and 1983.
For several decades, Oregons governmental officials and medical
professionals advocated coerced sterilization as an economical solution to the
states problems with rapists, child molesters and especially homosexuals. In addition to the diversity of
motivations for sterilization, Oregon also had a variety of methods and was
perhaps the only state that used castration to solve some of its most vexing
social problems.
Manfred Dietrich Laubichler, Arizona State University
(manfred.laubichler@asu.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes A
The Machinery of the Genes: Alfred Khn's
Physiological Genetics
In the eyes of his
peers Alfred Khn was one of the most comprehensive zoologists of the 20th
century. His many contributions ranged from comparative morphology and the
study of animal behavior all the way to research in genetics and development.
He is best known for his work on Ephestia and his famous race with Beadle and
Tatum to isolate the first causal chain from gene to gene product to genetic
effect (which he actually won.) Yet he also made important empirical as well as
theoretical contributions to developmental biology and genetics that are
nowadays almost unknown. However, Khns work represents an important bridge
between earlier work in theoretical biology and developmental physiology and
the later emergence of a European tradition of developmental genetics that
nurtured, among others, Walter Gering and Christiane Nsslein-Volhart. Since
the latters work is now considered the basis for much of the emerging
synthesis of evolutionary developmental biology the question of the continuity
of research agendas off the beaten path is an interesting one. This paper
will argue that indeed, just below the surface of the sanitized history of the
Modern Synthesis and of the rise of Molecular Biology, lies a continuous
current of extremely interesting work in developmental physiology that
represents an important link to earlier attempts to integrate development and
evolution. The history of these ideas is thus much more reticulate than
previously thought.
Paula Lee, University of South Florida
(plee3@luna.cas.usf.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
The Social Architect and the Myopic Mason: The
Zoological Politics of the Musum dHistoire Naturelle in 19th-Century Paris
In the first three
decades of the 19th century, the Musum dHistoire Naturelle in Paris was the
undisputed leader of the natural sciences and full-time residence to its staff
and professors. Two of these residential professors were zoologists Georges
Cuvier and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, bitter rivals whose radically
divergent views of animal anatomy culminated in the famous Cuvier-Geoffroy
debate of 1830. Outside observers noted the imperative need to reconcile these
opposing schools, whose doctrinal conflicts seemingly threatened to tear apart
the edifice of knowledge along with the very foundations of modern civilization.
Even when standing directly in front of the temple of science, scoffed one
journalist, Cuvier did not understand all the splendor of the edifice. He saw
only lines to reproduce, capitals to sketch, an architectural arrangement to
describe, without seeing from all of it that there was a general idea to
deduce. What modern society required instead was a man capable of working as
an architect and not as a sculptor. For the social reformers of the period,
that gifted architect was Geoffroy. Though anatomical imagery had saturated
architectural theory since the Renaissance, these nineteenth-century debates
marked the first time that architectural metaphors consistently informed
popular discourse regarding zoological thought. This phenomenon represented a direct
vulgarization of Geoffroys and Cuviers use of architectural analogies to
explain difficult anatomical concepts. Yet it is also evident that the general
public transformed the architectural metaphor, using it as an external bridge
that linked the specialized interests of the natural sciences to broad,
socio-political concerns that were preoccupied with the problematics of social
classification. As a result of these overlays and exchanges, the built form of
the Musum itself became the surprising target of social reformers, who
specifically criticized the Gallery of Comparative Anatomy as the architectural
expression of wrong-headed scientific ideas that were corrupting the social
body; by correcting the building, they argued, one could ameliorate science and
improve society at the same time. This paper explores this formative dialogue
at the Museum dHistoire Naturelle, the enduring influence of which can be
directly seen in the theories of Le Corbusier and other functionalist
architects of the 20th century.
Wolfgang Lefvre, Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science, Berlin (wlef@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Crispus
Attucks
Pictures and Plans: Cognitive Functions of Pictorial
Representations in Practical Mechanics - 1400 to 1600
The talk will address
the question of whether technical images of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries can tell us something about the thinking of the mechanicians. On the
basis of a defined distinction between pictures and plans, I will analyze which
role pictures and plans played as means of designing, communicating, or
reflecting. I will show that, until the end of the sixteenth century, only
architects and shipbuilders were familiar with the use of plans for designing
and manufacturing intricate technical devices but not mechanicians when
inventing and manufacturing machines. Consequently, the bulk of pictorial
representations drawn by mechanicians consisted almost exclusively of pictures
which were used either for recording and communicating ideas or for reflection.
However, being pictures, these representations were only of limited use even
for these purposes.
Theresa Levitt, University of Mississippi
(tlevitt@olemiss.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Molly
Pitcher
Polarization and the Mystery of Life
Jean-Baptiste Biot
spent decades meticulously establishing that organized bodies (matter that had
once been alive) rotated the plane of polarization of polarized light while
unorganized bodies (even if chemically equivalent) did not. But what did this interaction of life
and light mean? This paper
presents his work as balancing between the efforts to, on the one hand confirm
a domain of life irreducible to chemical description, and on the other hand
incorporate life into the range of physical forces. I trace how his work was then used both by Pasteur in his
campaign against spontaneous generation, and in attempts to explain the origins
of life by the action of polarized light.
Alan Love, Indiana University and
University of Pittsburgh (aclove@indiana.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes A
N. J. Berrill and the Evolutionary Developmental
Biology of Ascidians
In the present paper
I investigate the work of Norman John (Jack) Berrill as part of an untold history
of Evo-Devo, primarily focusing on his studies of the evolution and development
of ascidians from the 1930s.
Berrill's descriptive embryological work and goal of elucidating
phylogenetic relationships appears strikingly different from the developmental
genetic focus of contemporary Evo-Devo.
But this focused research on one particular group lead him to a
reconsideration of evolutionary mechanisms involved in the origin of
vertebrates, a perennial research problem juxtaposing evolution and development. Berrill serves as an interesting
'transition' figure because he survives into period of reinvigorated interest
in rejoining evolution and development from the 1970s/80s and has contact with
relevant individuals (e.g. Brian Goodwin and Scott Gilbert). Although it would be wrong to label
Berrill as an Evo-Devo 'precursor', it is interesting to understand why his
work has not received more attention, especially given its intellectual lineage
(Alexander Kowalevsky's evolutionary embryology of ascidians) and recognition
by his peers (e.g. a prominent citation in de Beer's classic discussion of
heterochrony, Embryos and Ancestors). I explore
two potential sources for this lack of attention: (1) his pedagogical
commitments, evident in a number of different textbooks and popular science
writings; and, (2) his articulation of a brand of holism and interest in
aspects of morphogenesis at higher levels of organization (e.g. morphogenetic
fields). Considering Berrill as
part of the history of Evo-Devo sheds light on current perspectives held by
scientists within Evo-Devo. For
example, Berrill's knowledge of larval adaptation and marine ecology put him in
a privileged position to evaluate different theories of vertebrate origins, a
knowledge lacking in many current studies of development aimed at understanding
evolutionary processes.
Paul Lucier, Independent Scholar
(plucier@alumni.princeton.edu)
Thursday,
November 21st: 4:00 - 6:00 pm President's
Ballroom B
The Science of Coal and the Character of American Geology
Coal has a rich
scientific history, one that can reveal a great deal about the development of
the earth sciences and of American geology in particular. But until now, coal has not figured
largely in the histories of science or American geology. One reason, to be explored in this
paper, is coals close association with industry. Coal mining has never been regarded as a
scientifically-based industry, but this does not mean that scientists were not
intimately involved in coal. As
the industrial mineral of the nineteenth century, American geologists were
keenly aware of the cultural importance, as well as the economic and scientific
contributions, of their coal investigations. Common wisdom held that coal was the measure of national
character and the index of civilization.
According to James Dwight Dana, coal was also the best illustration of
the American character of geology.
The following paper discusses how the search for coal motivated and
molded the practice and theory of American geology and the identity of the
geologists themselves.
Elizabeth Lunbeck, Princeton University
(lunbeck@princeton.edu)
Sunday,
November 23rd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A and B
Paradoxes of Plenty: The American as Exemplary
Narcissist
In popular commentary
since the 1970s, narcissism has been cast as a largely American phenomenon, the
narcissist seen as a peculiarly modern exemplar of a well-established American
character type-greedy, self-interested, vacuous, empty, grandiose. Cultural critics from David Riesman to
Christopher Lasch, among others, have located the narcissist's origins in a
post-World War II culture of abundance, in the demise of a disciplined,
patriarchal Victorianism that produced autonomous, inner-directed individuals
and in the rise of a modernity that promised to remove all constraints and
satisfy all desires. Yet
narcissism first took shape clinically not in me-decade 1970s America but in
the straitened circumstances of London and Vienna following World War I, in
clinical work, published papers, and private correspondence that issued from
the fraught analytic triangle of Freud, Ernest Jones, and Joan Riviere. The concept found further elaboration
in the work and practices of mid-century British object-relations theorists,
most important among them D.W. Winnicott, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and Harry
Guntrip-work of which the American analytic community was largely unaware. In this paper I address the question of
how narcissism, rooted at the start in a cultural context of privation and,
clinically, referring not to a plentitude of satisfactions but to a carefully
maintained refusal of basic sociability, came to occupy so central a position
in popular indictments of the modal American personality. I examine the revisions to which the
concept was subjected at the hands of sociologists and popularizing
psychoanalysts who deployed it as grounds from which to enter a national
conversation about the excesses of individualism and the deficiencies of the
modern self. And, I argue that
this conversation-peculiar to America, notably absent from Britain until quite
recently-provided the conceptual space within which what remained narrowly
clinical concerns in British psychoanalysis found resonance in the United
States in a range of popular venues, with the result that the condition came to
be seen, even by clinicians, as echt American.
Abigail Lustig, Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science (ajlustig@mit.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Cambridge
Why Be Nice?
Focussing on the work
of W.D. Hamilton and E.O. Wilson, I discuss how and why explanations of
"altruism" were created in the mid-1960s as a central focus of
evolutionary biology and were subsequently read backwards into the
historiography of evolution. These new theories of altruism, phrased in the
economic language of cost-benefit analysis and rational choice theory and
depending on a definition of altruism that was no altruism at all, but only a
form of disguised selfishness, laid the groundwork of sociobiology,
evolutionary psychology, and debates about the biological basis of human nature
that continue to trouble us today.
Pamela E. Mack, Clemson University
(pammack@clemson.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
Progressive Reform and Women Engineers
Some of the work done
by the few women engineers before World War II has been dismissed as women's
work. The work these women did, however, often represented their interests not
only in what we think of as the stereotyped concerns of women but also in reform.
Scientific management expert (and later professor of engineering) Lillian
Gilbreth did some time-and-motion studies of housekeeping, particularly during
the period after her husband's death when her industrial consulting business
was slow. But even before that she brought a greater concern for the worker
into scientific management and she did pioneering work developing adaptations
so that disabled veterans could hold factory jobs (she later transferred those
ideas into adaptations for disabled housewives). Gilbreth and some other women
engineers (and other women with technological expertise) had careers
significantly shaped by a female-associated commitment to service. Their
creativity as engineers came at least in part from the different ideas they
brought from the women's reform movement.
They represent a road not taken at a time when engineering was trying
increasingly to take a politically neutral stance.
Anna Maerker, Cornell University
(akm23@cornell.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Molly
Pitcher
Visible Technicians, Embodied Scientists: Artisanal
Practice, Administrative Control, and the Production of Anatomical Models for
the Tuscan state
In the late
eighteenth century, the Tuscan sovereign founded a public science museum that
contained a workshop for the production of anatomical wax models. In a
microhistorical reading of the museum's archival sources, I investigate the
collaboration between artisans and scientists at the workshop to analyse how
actors' cognitive authority, and the status of the artificial anatomies as
valid representations of nature, were established in the interplay between
artisanal practice and administrative control. I argue that the assumed
impossibility fully to articulate workshop practices and to control the artisans
indispensable to model production, together with the new institutional context
of a state institution, brought about fundamental changes in the ways in which
cognitive authority was ascribed: Unlike the early modern gentleman's
laboratory, the state-administered model workshop brought about "visible
technicians", and "embodied scientists", and dispensed with the
assumption of autonomy as a functional element in the production of knowledge.
Michael S. Mahoney, Princeton University
(mike@princeton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Crispus
Attucks
Drawing Mechanics: Christiaan Huygens and His Clocks
Christiaan Huygens
thought with his hands as well as his head. A skilled craftsman, he filled his
notebooks with drawings and sketches of mathematical configurations and
mechanical devices. The talk will look at some of these drawings to see the
role they played in his analysis of the dynamics of the pendulum and other
oscillators and in his design of mechanisms to translate his theoretical insights
into practical time-keepers.
Helmut Maier, Max Planck Gesellschaft
(maier@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A
Armaments Research
The mainstream
historiography argues that the mobilization of the sciences for the war effort
by Germany under National Socialism failed. Neither science in the military,
academia, and industry, nor the admittedly high military potential of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society contributed
significantly to the war effort. After the war, however, when allied
intelligence teams investigated the sciences, their institutions and their war
related innovations, they recognized extremely effective nerve gas,
trans-Atlantic ballistic missiles, high-speed jet air planes, proximity fuses,
remote controlled flying bombs, and high speed long distance submarines. Apart
from this often futuristic weaponry, they saw that German science had been able
to replace scarce raw materials such as metals, leather, rubber, mineral oil,
fertilizer, and explosives with synthetic products. Despite a stagnating
production of coal, aluminum, and steel, Germany had managed to triple her
armament production from 1942 to 1944. Consequently, the Allies hired several
thousand German experts for their own R & D institutions. As this talk will
illustrate, obviously the National Socialist state was able to mobilize
science, or the scientists were able to mobilize themselves.
Christine Manganaro, University of Minnesota
(mang0084@tc.umn.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom A
Eugenicist as Patient Advocate: Therapeutic
Sterilization in Washington State
In recent years,
several governors have publicly apologized for their states histories of
involuntary sterilization.
Generally, publicity surrounding the apologies emphasizes the American
eugenics movement as the context and motivation for the sterilization of
thousands of Americans. While
historians of science have generally considered state-sponsored sterilization
programs the hallmark of the eugenics movement, several states sterilized
mental patients for therapeutic as well as eugenic reasons. Recently recovered records from Western
State Hospital in Washington, including patient files and the personal papers of
the hospital superintendent, demonstrate that in 1921 Washington state
authorities expanded the rationale for coerced sterilization to include
therapeutic rationales. Rather
than demonizing the perpetrators of involuntary sterilization, this paper will
examine therapeutic motivations for sterilization and demonstrate authorities
notions of the relationship between patient care and social welfare
Alexander Marr, New College, University of
Oxford (alexander.marr@new.oxford.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom B
Learned Benefaction: Scientific Patronage of the
Bodleian Library
The Bodleian Library
Benefactors' Register for the period 1600-1620 records donations that reflect a
dramatically burgeoning interest in, and awareness of, advanced mathematical,
natural historical and natural philosophical ideas in England. This document, accompanied by Bodley's
letters to his first librarian, reveals a complex culture of intellectual
gift-giving perpetrated by the nobility, merchants and scholars, in which the
new library acted as a highly public vehicle for status enhancement. The Register provides evidence of the
specific interests of particular donors, which this paper further reconstructs
by identifying texts currently in the Bodleian from named donations. The process reveals a large number of
annotated editions which can now confidently be traced to specific owners. Furthrmore, the Register shows the
Bodleian was not only a repository for books, but also for mathematical instruments
and other objects, thus forming a pedagogic environment facilitating the
interaction of text with object.
The patronage dynamics of this scenario suggests a greatly increased
engagement by early English elites with education in the sciences.
Craig Martin, University of Oklahoma
(craigmartin@ou.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
Alchemy and the Legitimazation of Aristotelian Science
in Early Modern Italy
The status of alchemy
changed dramatically among Italian commentators on Aristotle during the early
modern period. Those who worked in
a relatively secular university tradition generally rejected the possibility
of transmutation of species of
metals despite typically being proponents of the concept of occult powers.
Jesuits and Thomistic commentators, however, were more open to the possibility
of transmutation as well as the application of alchemy to more traditional
modes of inquiry into nature. The
Jesuit scholar Niccol Cabeo (ca. 1644) argued that the practice of alchemy
could be used to interpret Aristotle's text because its experimental methods
corrected the overly metaphysical tendencies of his contemporary
Aristotelians. While his
predecessors attacked alchemy as an illegitimate field of inquiry, Cabeo attempted to reaffirm the
legitimacy of Aristotelian natural philosophy with experiments based on
alchemical laboratory practice.
Ruben Martinez, University of Texas, Austin
(rubenm@mail.utexas.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Haym
Saloman
Plum Pudding and the Folklore of Physics
Physicists are all
familiar with J. J. Thomsons plum pudding model of the atom, but this model
appears to have been falsely associated with Thomson in order to frame him as a
foil for Rutherford. The story of
how the label became synonymous with Thomsons work reveals much about the
nature of physics research, teaching, and mythmaking. The first published account of plum pudding came
nearly forty years later in a textbook that helped mark a shift in physics
teaching. After World War II,
physicists as a group became much more self-aware in a trend visible in physics
textbooks. Historical anecdotes
and disciplinary folklore appeared in physics textbooks, and their imagery
switched from depicting experiments to depicting nature. Out of this shift came the myth of plum
pudding, a misleading legend that has been canonized through dozens of
re-tellings. This paper hopes to
explore physics education and community by following the development of this
myth.
Karin E. Matchett, Yale University
(karin.matchett@yale.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30pm Thomas
Paine A
Scientific Agriculture, Well-fed Citizens, or National
Pride: The Competing Environmental and Political Imperatives of Corn
Improvement in Mexico
In 20th century
Mexico, the corn plant has been subjected to intense attention and conflicting
visions about how its modification might best serve the modern agricultural
ideal. Corn was still grown
primarily as a subsistence crop in Mexico, as compared with its highly
industrialized cultivation in the United States. In this paper, I examine two distinct strategies that
agricultural scientists working in Mexico pursued in the 1950s. During this period, most Mexican government
officials and many Mexican and U.S. agricultural researchers asserted or
assumed that agricultural science was key for both the Mexicos modernization
as well as for individual farmers well-being, and they applied these
assumptions to corn. I demonstrate
how the practical impact of this local scientific research was reduced almost
to nothing by another institution firmly devoted, ironically, to modern
scientific agriculture— the government-sponsored seed distribution
agency, the Corn Commission. In
both of the research programs, the scientists attempted simultaneously to
address the biological requirements of the corn plant, farmers needs and
preferences, the government agency charged with distributing seed, and the
lofty visions of government officials themselves. While government officials seated at desks in Mexico City
had few constraints on their visions for modern Mexican agriculture,
agricultural scientists could not escape the difficult contradictions between
high-yielding, industrialized corn cultivation, such as that offered by the
U.S. hybrid corn model, and subsistence agriculture practiced on dry, poor soil
by farmers with little cash and unable to purchase inputs or seed. Scientists in the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Mexican national programs pioneered innovative corn breeding
programs that departed significantly from the U.S. hybrid corn model. But despite their innovations, the Corn
Commission was an institutional barrier planted firmly between the breeders
best efforts and the corn growers.
The Corn Commission strongly favored conventional, U.S.-type hybrids and
thus was the clearest transplantation of a foreign model of corn improvement to
Mexico. I demonstrate how the
clash between the breeders scientific efforts and the Corn Commissions
unwavering focus on the ideal of modern, hybrid corn in this period led to
precious little benefit for either farmers or the nation; the ideal of science
prevented scientists research from impacting either farmers or the nation.
Robert Mathiesen, Brown University
(robert_mathiesen@brown.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
Through a Glass, Darkly: A Medieval Model of the
Cosmos as Reflected in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scrying Devices and
Practices
The term scrying
refers to a method of divination that uses a reflective surface to produce apparent
visions. Objects commonly used in
scrying include mirrors, crystal spheres or shew-stones, basins of water and
pools of ink. From late Medieval
and early Modern descriptions we know how many such objects were mounted or
positioned for scrying, and a very few of the objects themselves have been
preserved in museum collections (e.g. the shew-stones that once belonged to Dr.
John Dee). These objects were
often mounted or positioned in ways that derive from a Medieval model of the
cosmos as a circle or disk. This
model is otherwise well known from many texts and drawings, including some of
great complexity (e.g. Byrthferth's diagram, the Hereford Cathedral mappa
mundi and the
mappa mundi
formerly at Ebstorf). In scrying,
either the object in which one scries is positioned or mounted at the center of
this model, or the scrier himself stands at its center. By occupying the center of the model,
the object or the scrier symbolically stands at the center of the cosmos. For Medieval and Early Modern scriers,
this practice may sometimes have been more than just symbolic. The unknown Medieval author of the
Hermetic text, Liber XXIV philosophorum, claims that the circumference of the
cosmos is infinite, and that in consequence the center of the cosmos, mathematically
defined as a point equidistant from every point of the circumference, is
everywhere within that circumference.
His argument was accepted by several important Medieval philosophers
(e.g. Bonaventure). By this
argument any scrier could consider the center of his model (wherever he might
happen to place it while scrying) to be the center of the cosmos not just
symbolically, but in actual fact.
This paper will look at some Medieval and Early Modern descriptions of
scrying objects and scrying practices, show how their specific details reflect
the above-mentioned Medieval model of the cosmos, and draw out the cosmological
assumptions that are implicit in these objects and practices.
Andreas Mayer, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (mayer@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine B
'Rational Shoes': The Study of Human Locomotion in the
Laboratory, the Clinic, and the Military
"Isn't it really
quite extraordinary to see that, since man has begun walking, no one has raised
the question as to why he walks, how he walks, if he walks, if he could walk
better, what he does while he walks, if there were not means to impose, to
change, to analyze his gait: questions that are related to all the
philosophical, psychological and political systems that have occupied the
world?" When Balzac raised this provocative question during the 1830s, a
new science of "walking" was already in the making. Physiologists,
anatomists, pathologists, and military scientists in the Western world were
searching for the laws underlying the mechanics of the "human walking
apparatus". In this paper, I explore how the experiments of locomotion
science affected walking techniques in French and German clinical and military
settings during the 19th Century. This process cannot be exclusively understood
as a disciplining of human bodies. The transformation of the "techniques
of the body", discussed by Marcel Mauss a hundred years after Balzac, was
intimately connected with changing material arrangements and, most important of
all, with the development of new enhanced walking equipments (e.g. the
"rational shoes").
Craig Sean McConnell, California State University,
Fullerton (cmcconnell@fullerton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine A
Mother Earth and Daughter Moon: George Darwins Lunar
Genesis Theory and the Dynamics of Popularization
In the late 1870s,
the physicist George Howard Darwin published a series of heavily mathematical
papers on tidal dynamics and planetary motion. One of Darwins most significant findings was his claim that
the earth was much older than previous calculations implied, a result that
tempered the long-standing debate between his father, Charles Darwin, and his
mentor, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), regarding the possibility of biological
evolution. By far the most
provocative outcome of his work, however, was the hypothesis that the moon had
once been a part of the earth.
Darwin discovered that the friction produced on the earth by the tides
was slowly draining energy out of the moons orbit, allowing it to slowly drift
away from the earth. Projecting
backward in time, Darwin suggested that many millions of years ago, when the
earth was in a molten state, the moon pinched off and started drifting away. In a remarkably short period of time,
this esoteric result of Darwins mathematical work was popularized by
astronomers, geologists, and physicists, who enticed the readers of periodicals
and pamphlets with a romantic vision of the earth giving birth to the moon,
perhaps creating ocean basins and continents in the process. These geological claims were not at all
supported by Darwins work; to his chagrin, he found himself cited as the
father of a theory that he considered wildly speculative. In this paper, I will explore the life
of Darwins lunar genesis theory as it emerged in technical venues, moved to
popular venues, and subsequently evolved over time.
Stuart McCook, University of Guelph
(sgmccook@yahoo.com)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30pm Thomas
Paine A
The Search For a Usable Science: Harvard's Atkins
Garden and Botanical Research in Cuba, 1900-1960
The Atkins Botanical
Garden was founded at the turn of the twentieth century in Cienfuegos,
Cuba. It was located on the
grounds of a sugar mill owned by Edwin F. Atkins, who set it up in consultation
with several plant scientists from Harvard University. It began as a small experimental garden
for the sugar mill, with only loose ties to the university. Over the years, it emerged as one of
the leading centers for tropical botanical research in the Americas, with close
ties to Harvard University. To a
certain extent, it functioned as a scientific enclave, more connected to
Cambridge than to Cuba. In this
paper, I examine how the scientists at the garden nonetheless sought to make
the garden's research useful to the surrounding communities and to Cuba at
large. The search for a useful
science – one that both Americans and Cubans perceived to be useful
– was to be a perennial challenge for the garden's entire history. Over the years, reflecting some of the
major changes in Cuba's economy over the twentieth century, the garden
initiated research projects on sugar cane, forests, and corn. I focus on how none of these projects
ever produced significant changes in Cuban agriculture, nor were Harvard's
administrators ever satisfied with the research the Garden produced. Cubans also imagined a variety of
scientific roles that the Garden could fulfill, but their visions of the
garden's role in the Cuban economy differed sharply from those of the American
scientists. Ironically, the
promise of agricultural research projects that would firmly connect with
agriculture on the island emerged only shortly before the Garden ceased to
exist. The Americans and Cubans
initiated significant cooperative research projects in the first two years of
the Cuban Revolution, just before relations between Cuba and the United States
broke down entirely and Harvard withdrew from the operation of the station in
1961.
Victor K. McElheny, Massachusetts Institute oif
Technology (mcelheny@mit.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A
James Watson at Cold Spring Harbor, 1968-93
The iconic quality of
the double helix discovery of 1953, which profoundly changed the conversation
in biology away from description and toward a molecular basis for living
processes, as well as its depiction by James Watson in The Double Helix (1968)
have obscured Watsons several decades as an instigator (Sydney Brenners term)
of modern biology. By the age of
30, Watson had largely laid aside personal experimentation to take up the role
of pushing biology through the work of others. He did this most notably through the assembling of a
laboratory at Harvard in the late 1950s and 1960s, writing the seminal textbook
in molecular biology (first edition 1965), rescuing and building up Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory near New York (beginning in 1968 with an intense focus on
viruses and cancer), participating in the controversy over genetic engineering
in the 1970s, and serving as the first director of the Human Genome Project in
the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The paper will focus on Watsons work at Cold Spring Harbor as an
example of his multi-faceted influence on modern biology. Although abrasive and unpredictable,
Watson was widely respected, even feared, for his talent in sensing the next
direction biology must take; and in locating the talented, willful, and
determined young researchers to work on the important new things, pushing them
through incessant questioning and involving them a Cold Spring Harbor blizzard
of meetings and courses and books.
His behavior was not that of a pater familias, or an emperor surrounded
by acolytes. He goaded people in
his labs during the few years they spent there and then kept goading them in
occasional conversations. To a
great extent, Watson shaped the frenzied conversation of biology over several
decades, in a sense teaching several generations of biologists how to think.
David McGee, Burndy Library, Dibner
Institute for the History of Science and Technology (mcgee@MIT.EDU)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Crispus
Attucks
Drawing and Doing: Konrad Kyeser, Mariano Taccola, and
the Beginnings of Early Modern Machine Design
There are only a
handful of manuscript that can tell us about the transformation in machine
drawing that took place in the early renaissance, making it essential that we
derive all the information we can from the scanty evidence available. This
paper argues that the best way to do this is to stop thinking about thinking,
and to start thinking about drawing in terms of doing. The paper applies this
approach to the early 15th century manuscripts of Konrad Kyeser and Mariano
Taccola, analysing sequences of drawings from each author to demonstrate
fundamental features of Renaissance machine design that were firmly established
before the introduction of linear perspective, and which would remain constant
in design and depiction of machines for the next 400 years.
Herbert Mehrtens, Technische Universitaet
Braunschweig (h.mehrtens@tu-bs.de)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine B
Engineering Efficiency
Central to the
American Efficiency Movement of the early 20th century was the Taylor System,
soon christened Scientific Management, with F.W. Taylor as the main
protagonist. It was foremost a movement of engineers, who used the means of
engineering to achieve their aim, efficiency of human labor in industry.
Accordingly, the task became constructing a controllable and reliable system of
shop floor labor from the given elements and additional materials: it resulted
in a technologically functioning system made up of humans, physical things and
communications. The paper will analyze the work of the American engineeers
Taylor and Frank B. Gilbreth, and of their German contemporary Georg
Schlesinger. Of special interest will be the details of the multliple and
mutual adaption of humans, things, and communication techniques necessary to
form a technological system. The final conceptual question will be: What is
technological (and what not) and what is scientific (and what not) about
this construction? The answer will not be completely unambivalent. The
construction is in its aims, means, and materials (including humans) thoroughly
technological and the attitude indeed scientific, while the missionary zeal of
the movement is neither. I will argue that this type of belief in betterment
is essential to the technological impetus.
Gregg A. Mitman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
(gmitman@med.wisc.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
Natural History and the Clinic: The Regional Ecology
of Allergy in America
This paper challenges
the presumed triumph of laboratory life in the history of twentieth-century
biomedical research through an exploration of the relationships between
laboratory, clinic, and field in the regional understanding and treatment of
allergy in America. In the early establishment of allergy clinics, many physicians
opted to work closely with botanists knowledgeable about the local flora in the
region to develop pollen extracts in desensitization treatments, rather than
rely upon pharmaceutical companies that had adopted a principle of standardized
vaccines beholden to bacteriology that gave no thought to the particularities
of place where their products were to be sold. Natural historical sciences like plant ecology and
systematics furnished important knowledge, resources, and practices in
establishing a medical marketplace for allergy in America. And botanists similarly profited from
biomedicine and allergic bodies in extending their network of knowledge about
the plant world.
Daniela Monaldi, University of Toronto
(daniela.monaldi@utoronto.ca)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm William
Dawes B
The Fate of the Mesotron
Cosmic ray studies
during the period 1938-1946 focused on the decay of a particle then called the
mesotron. For the first time, an
elementary particle was observed to be unstable. This transformed the concept
of an elementary or fundamental particle. Mesotron decay investigations
combined cosmic-ray research, nuclear physics, quantum field theory, and the
creation and stabilization of new apparatus and techniques. Throughout the difficult years of World
War II, a team of young Italian physicists pursued the direct observation of
mesotron decays by innovations in instrumentation and in the experimental
methods of the Italian cosmic ray tradition. The outcome of their experiment was unexpected and had
far-reaching consequences.
Gregory J. Morgan, Johns Hopkins University
(morgan@jhu.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Cambridge
How to Build a Virus: The Beginnings of Structural
Virology
In this paper I trace
the beginnings of structural virology from the work of Francis Crick, James
Watson, and Rosalind Franklin in the mid 1950s to the work of Donald Caspar and
Aaron Klug in the early 1960s. In
these early years of structural virology, advances in the x-ray crystallography
and electron microscopy of viruses fostered theoretical speculation and a
search for the general construction principles of macromolecular assemblies
such as viruses. I explore the
roots of the analogy between spherical viruses and Buckminster Fuller's
geodesic domes and the role of the proto-pop artist John McHale who arranged a
meeting between the architect Fuller and the virologist Klug. The history of early structural
virology illustrates a fruitful interaction between science and art.
Iwan Rhys Morus, Queen's University Belfast
(i.morus@qub.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Molly
Pitcher
And Galvanism has Set Some Corpses Grinning
Byrons throwaway line in Don
Juan takes a sideways swipe at early nineteenth-century efforts to resurrect
the dead by means of electricity. It is likely that Byron was at least familar
with Giovanni Aldinis experiments in London on the corpse of an executed
murder in 1803. Throughout the nineteenth century, electricity proved to be a
valuable resource in negotiating the boundaries between the animate and the
inanimate. As a science that potentially breached conventional understandings
of the distinctions between the living and the dead, electricity was frequently
the focus of particular scrutiny. This paper looks at some examples of
nineteenth-century debates concerning electricity, death and life, focussing in
particular on the material culture that sustained such arguments: the material
artefacts and practices involved in the application of electricity to the body.
Using these examples the paper will show how material culture mattered for
Victorian metaphysics and how matters of life and death could be subjects for
the experimental technology of display.
Adam Mosley, University of Cambridge
(ajm1006@cus.cam.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes A
Object-Lessons: Instrument-Books and their Uses in the
Sixteenth Century
Instrument-books,
texts which purported to describe the construction and/or use of mathematical
instruments, were produced in very large numbers during the early-modern
period. Their authorship is often associated with the catch-all category of the
"mathematical practitioner"; yet just as this category covers
individuals of very different social status, the genre of the instrument-book
encompasses a wide range of objects and applications. In many cases, the
utility of these works is in doubt: for every text describing a
long-established instrument such as the astrolabe or horary quadrant, there is
one which treats an elaborate and novel artefact of dubious practical value;
and even when the described instrument is useful and desirable, the text and
its illustrations are not always able to convey information sufficient to
construct or operate it, as at least some authors admitted themselves.
Consequently, the question of what uses were served by the early-modern
instrument-books - why were they written, why were they printed, and why were
they read? - is one that needs to be addressed. Drawing together evidence from
a variety of sources - including the texts themselves, and annotations to
copies of them, instruments in museum collections, library catalogues, and
correspondence - I will sketch the range of answers that might emerge from a
thorough consideration of this question, and consider the effect that those
answers might have on our understanding of the representativeness of the body
of extant instruments. My examples will be drawn from the sixteenth century,
and will range from Peter Apian's Quadrans Astronomicus (1532) to Tycho Brahe's Astronomiae
instauratae mechanica
(1598).
David P.D. Munns, Drexel University
(dpm33@drexel.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
An International, Cooperative Vision for Cold War
science: The Formation and Character of the Radio Astronomy Community.
My paper will argue
that only though understanding the contours of the radio astronomical community
can we understand the fields instrument choice and research emphasis. The
radio astronomical community emerged during the 1950s as practitioners from
astronomy and radio physics agreed to include the techniques of radio as valid
instruments investigating astronomical research questions. Each of these
disciplines traded expertise in the form of communication, and exchanges of data
and instrument design. My paper will encompass the British cases of Jodrell
Bank and Cambridge, the Australian case of the Radiophysics Laboratory, and the
United States cases of the Harvard Observatory and the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech). In Britain and Australia radio physicists largely became
radio astronomers, whilst in the United States established sites of optical
astronomy and astronomers nurtured the field, establishing radio astronomy
within astronomical journals, forums, and pedagogy. Ideals of community for the
new radio astronomers seemingly clashed with the Cold War rigidity of
discipline-oriented science. Perhaps part of a wider movement reacting to the
ascendancy of nuclear physics - certainly Mt. Palomar Director Ira Bowen fits
this model – diverse practitioners from several nations collectively
guided the research agenda of radio astronomy. In contrast to a discipline
based approach, the large centerpiece instruments of radio astronomy work as
nodes in the network of an international community. Open cooperative
communication tied those nodes together, especially frequent personal and
student exchange between nodes. Finally, astronomys graduate programs became a
staging ground for the production of the new scientific community.
Jane H. Murphy, Princeton University
(jmurphy@princeton.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
'Despite the All Too Real Disasters': The Practice of
Science in French-occupied Egypt, 1798-1801
The enthusiastic
rhetoric of the extravagant military and scientific campaign – rhetoric
which survived French eviction from Egypt to be codified in the Description
de lEgypte
– is at odds with both the difficulties of establishing Egypt as a French
colony and the personal frustrations of many of the savants. I question the
role that failure and unmet expectations should play in our characterizations
of colonial science and the diffusion of European practices.
Simon Keith Naylor, University of Bristol
(simon.naylor@bristol.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes B
Regional Science: Nineteenth Century Cornwall as
Natural Museum
The rapid and
widespread expansion of interest in natural history in Britain during the
nineteenth century encouraged the proliferation of a range of institutional
spaces of science. Whilst some recent work has been done to open out these
sites to examination, less attention has been paid to the invention of other,
apparently 'natural' spaces, such as the vice-county, the region, or the nation.
This paper focusses on the production of the region as a natural space of
nature. Taking the example of Cornwall, the western-most county of England, it
is suggested that the region was constructed as a natural repository, or
'natural museum', for nature's productions. Whilst it is suggested that similar
processes were ongoing elsewhere in Britain, Cornwall's exceedingly mild
climate and topographic peculiarities made it a particularly good place for the
staging of a natural museum. The boundaries of this alive and in situ
repository were scripted through a range of both scholarly and popular flora
and fauna - the naturalists who collected them the field-equivalent to the
museologist. Displays of indigenous species in the county's formal museums were
also important, forming an artifactual version of the natural museum beyond
their walls. Lastly, tourist and botanical guide books and excursion-schedules
also scripted the contents and boundaries of this museum through the use of
itineraries, travel plans and maps, guiding the curious around the displays on
offer. The paper concludes with a consideration of the nature of place in the
history of science.
Julie R. Newell, Southern Polytechnic State
University (jnewell@spsu.edu)
Thursday,
November 21st: 4:00 - 6:00 pm President's
Ballroom B
Cabinet, Lab, and Field: Where is 'Real' Geology to be
Done in Antebellum America?
At the beginning of
the nineteenth century, geology was emerging as an important but none too
clearly defined science in the United States. Over the first half of the
century, the study of the nature, composition, and arrangement of the materials
forming the accessible portion of the earth's crust would come to include
activities variously described as geology, mineralogy, paleontology, chemistry,
and natural history. What kind of study could produce true understanding and
where such study could, or even must, be conducted, were questions that
generated much and often heated discussion in the American scientific
community. In the end, where the study was conducted became as integral to
disciplinary differentiation as what was being studied.
Ian Nicholson, St. Thomas University
(nicholson@stu.ca)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine A
A Characterological War: Abraham Maslow,
Self-Actualization & Anti-Semitism
Abraham Maslow was
one of American psychologys most influential figures, and for much of his
youth and early education, one of its most tormented. Although he suffered from
all the usual adolescent concerns, as a young Jew in the 1920s and 30s Maslow
was also obliged to contend with anti-Semitic stereotypes involving Jewish
character. This paper examines
Maslows experience as a Jew within the anti-Semitic world of mid-20th century
American psychology. As Winston (1996) has noted, anti-Semitic stereotypes
served to impede the career of a number of Jewish psychologists and Maslow was
no exception. Despite his blue
chip education he spent much of his early career at Brooklyn College – a
teaching intensive institution with a predominantly working class Jewish
student body. Although the anti-Semitic concept of Jewish character was a
professional liability, it
provided the underlying rationale for much his subsequent psychological
theorizing. Maslow rejected the negative stereotype of the Jew, and much of the hereditarian thinking
that accompanied it. Championing a language of transcendence, individual
agency, and self-actualization, he became famous as a founder of humanistic
psychology. However, in his private journals he embraced a positive model of essential Jewishness while
simultaneously indulging in a brand of crude ethnic stereotyping (Maslow,
1979). Viewing the American experience in characterological terms, he
envisioned a kind of psychological war between a quintessentially Jewish
sensibility and a repressed, pinched WASP mentality (Maslow, 1979). For Maslow, psychology was an ideal
vehicle for waging this war and he shared the faith of an earlier generation
of Jewish psychologists in the power of the discipline to provide what Heinze
(2001) has described as a moral prescriptionthat was good for the Jews but
also propitious for other outsiders seeking integration into American society
(p.2). However, Maslows career also speaks to psychologys potential to
accommodate a more ambitious ethnic/religious outsider agenda. Using the
ethnically neutral discourse of psychology, Maslow hoped not just to foster a
cultural context that would be more welcoming for the Jewish self; he wanted to
transform the psychological profile of Christian America into something more
open, more fun-living, more peace-loving and in his view, more Jewish. Maslows
experience highlights both the pervasiveness of essentialised conceptions of
Jewish character within psychology and the role of the field in what Hollinger
(1996) has described as the de-Christianization of American public culture
(p.17).
Catherine Nisbett, Princeton University
(cnisbett@princeton.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine A
Thanks for the Check: Women, Money and Labor at the
Harvard College Observatory
After the death of
Henry Draper, his widow, Anna Draper, intended to remain involved in astronomy.
She had been his able assistant, and her plans included founding an observatory
under her own administration. Instead, she found herself cut off when she was
convinced to export some of the work to Harvard College Observatory in the name
of the Henry Draper Memorial. But as Anna Draper was losing her direct
involvement in astronomy, she facilitated the participation of over twenty
other women computers at Harvard. This paper argues for taking a labor view of
the HCO. Women could occupy two places in Edward Pickering-era astrophysics:
that of donors and that of laborers. Edward Pickering, directory of the HCO,
was, rather than a brilliant astrophysicist, a brilliant middle-man and
manager, legitimizing and holding together a precarious female scientific labor
system.
Richard Noakes, Department of History and
Philosophy of Science, Cambridge (rn236@hermes.cam.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm President's
Ballroom A
Measuring Mediums: Instruments, Delicacy, and Control
in Victorian Physical and Psychical Sciences
This paper examines
the relationship between the physical sciences, instruments of precision, and
spiritualistic investigations in late-Victorian Britain. Historians have long been preoccupied
with the interests of nineteenth-century scientific practitioners (especially
those in the physical sciences) in spiritualistic and psychical phenomena. Most accounts of the relationship
between 'physics and psychics' have been told from the perspective of history
of ideas: making spiritualism and psychical research a branch of physics was
one of the ways in which conservative physicists tried to dissociate their
enterprises from charges of gross materialism and atheism. This paper does not challenge the
plausibility of this argument, but demonstrates the insights we can gain from
examining the material cultures of 'scientific' sances and the laboratory
protocols and instruments mastered by physicist-psychical researchers.
Concentrating on the physical and psychical experimental investigations of the
chemist William Crookes, the meteorologist Balfour Stewart, the photographer
and science journalist William Harrison, the physicist Oliver Lodge, and
others, this paper shows how Victorian scientific practitioners treated
'occult' phenomena much as they tackled capricious physical phenomena in the
laboratory and field. These practitioners recognised the metaphysical goals
that could be served by the transcendental realms suggested by psychical
research, but to produce evidence for such worlds they drew on their skills in
detection, filtration, measurement, and control of 'residual' phenomena, their
mastery of accurate instruments for displaying subtle forces, and their ability
to deal with delicate experimental conditions. In conclusion, this paper considers the development of these
physical-psychical research enterprises in the early twentieth century.
Joe November, Princeton University
(november@princeton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
Impossible to Accomplish Otherwise: Early Advocacy
for the Use of Computers in Biology
Digital electronic
computers have become a sine qua non of most research in modern biology and
medicine; but for all of the practical and conceptual changes associated with
computers in late twentieth-century research, professional historians have only
begun to study the impact of computer technology on the life sciences. One
promising starting point for an investigation of how computers transformed
biology is provided by Robert S. Ledley and Lee B. Lusted – both of the
National Academy of Sciences National Research Council on Electronic Computers
in Biology and Medicine (NASNRC-ECBM) – who led an impassioned effort
during the late 1950s and early 1960s to encourage American biologists to
harness the power of computers.
Not only does Ledley and Lusteds attempt to introduce computer
technology to biology elucidate how biologists—and biomedical
workers—needed to transform their research agendas to accommodate
computers, but it also demonstrates how the introduction of such technology to
the laboratory would recast the relationships between researchers,
instrument-makers, and the federal government. Consequently, the early push to computerize biology presents
an opportunity to explore how computers altered the conventions of the
historical interaction between scientific practice, institution, and
instrument.
Ian Nyberg, University of Texas at Austin
(inyberg@mail.utexas.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Cambridge
The History of Xenopus laevis as a Model Organism:
Pragmatics vs.
Representation
Animals have been
used in research as models for human medicine and biology since at least as far
back as the second century physician and philosopher Galen. It is still true nineteen centuries
later that the accuracy and reliability of the knowledge gained from using a
model organism is only as accurate as the understanding of how the model in
question is representative of the system being studied. Despite the enormous diversity and
complexity of biota, only six species have come to dominate experimental work
in developmental biology. The vast
majority of experiments are carried out on the fruit fly Drosophila
melanogaster, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, the house mouse, Mus
musculus, the frog Xenopus laevis, the zebrafish, Brachydanio rerio, and the
small, weedy, flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana. These six species are used as model organisms for
development. However, certain
philosophical assumptions are made by biologists when they use model organisms
as representative systems for studying developmental biology. These include assumptions about the
representativeness of development of these organisms, the impact of the
laboratory environment, and the reasons for the adoption of each species as a
model system. These species may
have been chosen largely because they are good laboratory organisms. Although, pragmatic considerations are
a fundamental part of empirical investigation, choosing species solely based on
convenience causes a problem if it greatly decreases the degree to which the
model organisms are representative of their respective taxa. The history of X. laevis shows that the
driving force behind entrenchment of the model organisms was not always
conscious choice about accuracy or representation as much as historical
contingency and pragmatic concerns.
This carnivorous, purely aquatic, year-round breeding frog is anything
but typical. Amphibians typically
do not breed year-round; but, because X. laevis does, it was deemed a good
laboratory animal. X. laevis
became ubiquitous in European and North American laboratories because its
unusual breeding characteristic was exploited for pregnancy testing. By the time using animals in pregnancy
testing became obsolete X. laevis had already become so common in laboratories
that it was very convenient to adopt it as the primary amphibian research
system. In one case, X. laevis
became popular as a direct result of the German occupation of Holland during
World War II having interrupted the laboratory supply deliveries. This further increased the importance
of being able to continually breed X. laevis. Some of its unusual properties make it an interesting
species to study as well as an ideal lab organism. However, the traits that initially led to its becoming a
model organism may be the traits that make it less than an ideal exemplar.
Michael A. Osborne, University of California, Santa
Barbara (osborne@history.ucsb.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
Medicine and the Places of Natural History in an Age
of Empire: The Paris Faculty of Medicine and the Chair of Medical Natural
History
Holders of the Chair
of Medical Natural History at the Paris Faculty of Medicine played important
roles in collecting and disseminating information on colonial floras and
faunas. The history of the Chair itself
is revealing of dynamic and evolving relationships between natural history and
medicine, and newer ideas of governmentality and medicalization as regards the
colonies. Henri Ernest Baillon (incumbent from 1863-1895), and his collaborator
and student, Jean Louis de Lanessan, authored numerous text books on medical
natural history. Their publications reveal much about the status of what we
might term local knowledge. They also display de Lanessans enthusiasm for
the study of colonial floras and colonized peoples, activities enriched by his
service as Secretary of the Navy and Governor of Viet-Nam. The next incumbent of the Chair,
Raphal Blanchard, began his functions at a time when the French Navy was losing
control over colonial medicine. As sectors of French colonial medicine became
civilianized, the oportunistic Blanchard promoted parasitology as the essence
of medical natural history and created an Institute of Colonial Medicine at
Paris in 1902. His reforms
marginalized botany and natural history and reduced their role in medical
pedagogy. Blanchard's agenda, though driven in part by an imagined experimental
prowess of the laboratory, was also the result of changes in colonial
governance, the cultivation of patronage, and the institutional and
disciplinary politics of Parisian medicine.
Margaret J. Osler, University of Calgary
(mjosler@ucalgary.ca)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A
When Did Gassendi Become A Libertine?
Pierre Gassendis
reputation for skepticism and for the recovery of the materialistic and
hedonistic philosophy of Epicurus has led to the attribution of heterodoxy to
an early modern thinker who appears prima facie to have been perfectly orthodox
in his beliefs and conservative in his behavior. I examine the accounts of previous historians to determine
when he was labeled a libertine.
This paper is part of a more general argument that questions the claim
that the period of the Scientific Revolution witnessed the separation of
science and religion, a claim that has more to do with the concerns of
twentieth-century historians than the historical figure himself.
Abena Osseo-Asare, Harvard University
(osseo@fas.harvard.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
'No Time to Dance': Herbal Research in Post-colonial
Ghana
This paper charts
trends in plant medicine research and herbal drug development in the Ghanaian
scientific community from 1960-2000.
Taking as its focal point Ghana's national Centre for Scientific
Research into Plant Medicine (CSRPM), the paper traces shifting relationships
between key scientists hoping to refashion indigenous therapies in the interest
of an African nation.
Beginning with the idealism of early scientists like Oku Ampofo and
Albert Tackie during the independence era, I consider the development of plant
medicine research at CSRPM and affiliated departments in the University of
Ghana system. Specifically, I
highlight strategies Ghanaian scientists have used to wrest information from
local herbalists, translating local knowledge into an elite scientific genre
out of the grasp of the majority of the population. I argue that in a context of political and economic crisis,
Ghanaian researchers have had to make critical and scientific compromises to
salvage their careers, oftentimes at the expense of the herbalist
community. While
biological-prospecting is usually associated with pharmaceutical companies
based in wealthier countries, the Ghanaian case-study outlines the critical
role played by African scientists in phyto-medical research and the various
alliances they have had to make with international researchers, drug firms, and
local healers so as to sustain their research.
Larry Owens, University of Massachusetts
(lowens@history.umass.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Haym
Saloman
Silo Memories
In 1986, a small band
of military rocketeers managed to save the last Titan II missile site from
demolition. The story of the improbable, last minute rescue of the Copper Penny
complex in Green Valley, Arizona hinged on transforming the deadliest of
nuclear deterrents into a public museum. Its success illustrates the diverse
and surprising convergence of forces that help shape the landscape of Cold War
memory.
David Alexander Pantalony, Dartmouth College/Dibner
Institute after Sept. 1, '03 (david.a.pantalony@dartmouth.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Cambridge
By the end of the
nineteenth century, the tuning fork had become a standard instrument in physics
and psychology laboratories. But only a few years earlier, it had been the
subject of a fundamental disagreement on the nature of sound. Following a
series of well-publicized experiments in 1875, the instrument maker, Rudolph
Koenig (1831-1901), challenged some of the core findings of the renowned German
scientist, Hermann von Helmholtz. He contested Helmholtzs studies on
combination tones, an acoustical phenomenon central to his new theory of sound
and music. In this paper I look at the origins of this controversy and how it
came to revolve around the integrity of the tuning fork, and attempts by
scientists, especially Koenig, to make pure and precise forks beyond criticism.
I argue that much of this story is about Koenigs workshop and the world behind
the instruments. His reputation as a master craftsman and skilled experimenter
loomed large over the dispute, perpetuating it and sowing doubts within the
scientific community about Helmholtzs theory. Part of my research has entailed
studying the many forks that survive in museum collections. Through
examinations of their materials, designs, construction and use, the objects
themselves provide a window into Koenigs vibrant workshop and the important
role it played in shaping the material and social dynamics of this controversy.
This is part of a broader study looking at instrument workshops in
nineteenth-century scientific culture._
Katharine Park, Harvard University
(park28@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Cambridge
Anatomizing Sanctity: Miraculous Autopsies in
Renaissance Italy
This paper will look
at three cases of holy women whose bodies were opened after their deaths in a
search for corporeal signs of sanctity: Margaret of Citt di Castello (d.
1320), Colomba of Rieti (d. 1501), and Elena Duglioli Dall'Olio (d. 1520).
Although the author of Colomba's Vita invokes the precedent of Margaret's "autopsy,"
the discipline of anatomy and the practices of dissection had in fact changed
dramatically over the intervening two centuries. I will use the
"autopsies" of Margarita, on the one hand, and Colomba and Elena, on
the other, to illustrate these changes and their implications for contemporary
understandings of both anatomy and sanctity.
Manolis Patiniotis, University of Athens
(mpatin@phs.uoa.gr)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
From Physis to Cosmos: A Step Towards the Geography of
Nature
The subject of this
paper is the introduction and the elaboration of the idea of Nature in the
Greek intellectual life of the eighteenth century. The current notion of Nature
is the outcome of a variety of intellectual, theological and philosophical
considerations, which took place in Western Europe during the early modern period.
At the same time, this notion of Nature comprised the necessary condition for
the development and the establishment of modern science. However, the validity
of this historically tinged notion of Nature was not deemed self-evident in the
context of all cultural formations, especially those bearing different
religious beliefs and philosophical commitments from the ones that gave birth
to modern science. The present inquiry aims to instantiate this differentiation
by examining the ways Greek-speaking scholars of the eighteenth century tackled
the idea of Nature. The emerging Greek society of the time was part of the
Ottoman Empire and its intellectual representatives wavered between various
intellectual traditions, ideological affiliations and political expectations.
As a result, the elaboration of the idea of Nature and of the subsequent
possibility of science reflects the tensions among all these factors and
depicts the character of the specific intellectual constraints provided by the
local context.
Christine M. Petto, Southern Connecticut State
University (pettoc1@southernct.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
Selling Science: The Promotion and Patronage of
Geographical Works in Early Modern Europe
In early modern
Europe, English and French mapmakers and map sellers promoted geographic
commerce both on and off the map.
Advertisements in journals and newspapers informed not only an elite
intellectual and government class, but also a growing middle and bureaucratic
class of the usefulness and status of map ownership. Much of the rhetoric on or in these geographical works
championed scientific authority and invited its reader or consumer into a
select cultured group. Advanced
subscriptions and large project proposals ideally assured the industry of
operating funds and financial solvency, while rhetorical texts on or
accompanying the map boasted of not only such critical authority, but powerful
patronage within this select group.
Geographical productions in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England
and France reflect differences in both the structures of social power and the
commercial attitudes of consumption in these nations. An investigation of maps, atlases, and other geographical works
of the period draws attention to the differences (and similarities) in the
pursuit of patronage, the use of scientific authority in promotion, and the
technological challenges of bringing these works to light. Despite the differences in the English
and French governments, social structure, and mapmaking 'industry' that worked
either to open opportunities in the field--not necessarily guarantees for
success – or to constrain producers and thus commerce in a staid
conservative atmosphere, the efforts to sell science remained the same.
Hans Pols, University of Sydney
(hpols@science.usyd.edu.au)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
Normal Minds in the Colonies: Psychiatrists as
Cultural Commentators in the Former Dutch East Indies
In this paper, I
analyze a significant part of the history of colonial psychiatry in the former
Dutch East Indies: the social function of psychiatric discourse in the Dutch
colonial context. Apart from discharging their day-to-day responsibilities in
the care and treatment of mentally ill individuals in their charge,
psychiatrists working in mental asylums in the Dutch East Indies also actively
participated in public debates on the nature of colonial administration.
Applying their expertise on the specific nature of mental disturbances in the
native population, they provided analyses of the nature of the normal native
mind, and concluded that limited self-government and eventual independence were
highly idealistic but unpractical propositions. By making these statements,
psychiatrists reacted against the progressive forces of proponents of the Dutch
ethical policy, which envisaged independence for Indonesia, albeit in a distant
future. A small group of Indonesian intellectuals and physicians took exception
to the conservative views expressed by psychiatrists. As early as the 1920s,
they argued that the disorders observed among the native population could
easily be explained as the result of oppression. In these ways, Indonesians
physicians refused to accept the descriptions given of them by psychiatrists
and developed alternatives using the same discourse of medical and psychiatric
cultural critique.
Theodore M. Porter, UCLA (tporter@history.ucla.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
Karl Pearson Defends Individuality in Science
One of Karl Pearsons teachers at
Kings College, Oscar Browning, joked that he would hang this slogan outside
the young mans door: Der Teufel ist ein Egoist. Pearson was deeply troubled
by the preoccupation with self that he found in himself, as well as by
shortcomings of a capitalistic society founded on individualism, and one theme
running through his entire career is the effort to confine this egoism. His
appreciation for medieval folk culture and for Catholicism, his advocacy of
socialism, his involvement in the womens movement, and his eugenics all
reflected this concern. So also did his advocacy of scientific method as the
form of thought that raises the individual above personal interest and
prejudice. Statistics itself was in more than one sense an expression of
anti-individualism. Yet Pearson did not seek to attain greater selflessness by
imposing scientific method as an external constraint on personal freedom.
Rather, he looked to science and statistics as a path to a higher morality—as
ways to elevate and strengthen the self, not to chain it down or to impose
artificial uniformity on it. On a personal level, too, he was very much
concerned to preserve and even enhance his own individuality. So perhaps it is
not, after all, so startling that this pioneering statistician and socialist
should have found so many ways in later life to assert the possibility and
necessity of individuality in science. He came to see individuality everywhere,
even in atoms, and he insisted, to take an extreme example, that numerical
tables reflect the personality of the men (and women?) who calculated them. He
became, in short, increasingly disenchanted with the impersonal world he had
helped to make, a world in which science seemed to have fallen into the hands
of careerists and specialists. His was a quite different vision, of scientists
who, through their command of method, would develop the skill and wisdom to
form a genuine elite.
Courtenay Jane Raia, UCLA (plscortena@aol.com)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm President's
Ballroom A
Ether Theories and Ether Theology: Oliver Lodge and
the Physics of Immortality
My paper explores
some of the synergies between psychical research (what we call today the
paranormal) and the scientific thought and practices of physicist Sir Oliver
Lodge. Lodge took the study
of paranormal phenomena as central to his investigation of electromagnetism and
radiation, speculating that electrical and psychical manifestations were contingent
force phenomena, rooted in the deepest structures of the universe, and perhaps
clues to a "physical theology". The paper will examine Lodge in the
laboratory, correlating his work both as an experimental physicist and
experimental investigator of such
phenomena as telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, and "ectoplasm"
etc. Ultimately the paper aims to understand the deeper philosophical concerns
underlying and unifying Lodges investigations, arguing that his psychical and physical research combined
to serve as the basis of an
empirically founded inquiry into the physical nature of the divine. It was thus that Oliver Lodge
constituted his "scientific philosophy" of God and became a leading
figure in the late Victorian rapprochement between science and religion, giving
an Hegelian twist to two old epistemes.
Kirby Randolph, IHHCPAR, Rutgers University
(kirby.randolph@verizon.net)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pmf President's
Ballroom B
Racism: Mental Illness?
This paper is an
analysis of arguments made for and against classifying racism as a mental
illness. In 1969, group of African-American psychiatrists, and, in 1999,
psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint, argued that racism be considered a mental
disorder. The American Psychiatric Association, in 1969, and the anti
psychiatry group, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, in 1999, rejected
these suggestions. The paper analyzes how the arguments for and against
including racism in the DSM changed over time.
Nicolas Rasmussen, University of New South Wales
(N.Rasmussen@stanfordalumni.org)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
The Moral Economy of the Commercial Drug Trial in
Interwar America
The scientific
testing of drugs by trained researchers was one of the major changes brought by
early 20th-century medical reform movements. In this paper I characterise several common types of
relationships that developed between ethical drug firms and clinical scientists
in the 1920s and 1930s around such testing. I explore the impact of these new commercial connections by
analyzing the expectations (both contractual and implicit) of obligation,
status, and reward that accompanied each type of collaborative
relationship. I suggest that
although the 'scientific medicine' reform movement had roughly the intended
effect on pharmaceutical development and marketing in the United States, there
were unanticipated effects of academic medicine's accomodation with industry
which worked in the opposite direction, and which set in motion changes that
still attract widespread concern about the drug industry's undue influence.
Jessica R. Ratcliff, University of Oxford
(jessica.ratcliff@mhs.ox.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Cambridge
'A Sham Transit of Venus': Observation and
experimentation at Greenwich circa 1874
During the nineteenth-century,
British astronomy became recognizably modern. This transformation has most
often been described in terms of industrialization and an increased division of
labour. Historians have placed George Airy and the Royal Greenwich Observatory
at the root of this development, and Airy's long 'regime' as Astronomer Royal
has provided much of the material with which our picture of industrializing
astronomy has been drawn. The 1874
Transit of Venus was the occasion of a vast international operation that, in
the amount of administration and hierarchical management involved, could be a
flagship for what has come to be seen as Victorian industrial astronomy. Airy
was the head of the British effort to determine the solar parallax from
observations of the Transit, and had it been a success, the enterprise would
likely have gone down as the final, crowning achievement of his administrative
career. As it stands, the Transit and its inconclusive results have been
quietly left in the shadow of history. In this paper I will present the Transit
program as a case study of Greenwich working life against which some historical
perceptions of the modernization of the Observatory are to be tested. One aspect of the British program
in particular will be considered: the use of artificial models of the transit
during preparation. The use of these instruments reflects two key aspects of
modernization at Victorian Greenwich: the status of observation and the use of
experimentation.
Fernando Reis, New University of Lisbon
(freis@netcabo.pt)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
The Popularisation of Science in
Periodicals of Portuguese Liberal Emigrs, 1808-1822
In the first twenty
years of the 19th century many Portuguese emigrated to other European countries,
mostly to escape political persecutions, and some to foster their scientific
education. In these countries they were confronted with different stages of
scientific development and technological innovation in different economic and
political contexts. Reacting to this confrontation, some Portuguese tried to
disseminate the information and know-how acquired, in the process making the
necessary adjustments to push forward their effective application to the
Portuguese economic context. One such strategy was the publication of different
periodicals in London and Paris, which were sent to or sold in Portugal and in
its colonies, especially in Brazil. In this talk, I will concentrate on the
activities of Portuguese migrs in Paris, and especially in the activities of
Francisco Solano Constncio, who was the editor of many periodicals of
scientific popularization such as the O Observador Lusitano em Paris (The
Lusitanian Observer in Paris) (1815) and the Annaes de Sciencias, Artes e
Letras (Annals of Sciences, Arts and Letters (1818-1822). I will analyze their
aims and contents, and I will finally assess their success in fostering
communication between Portugal and the rest of Europe.
Maria Rentetzi and Jody
Roberts, Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science/Virginia Tech (jody@vt.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine A
Selling Science, Constructing Gender: The Role of
Chemical Instrument Advertisements in the Construction of Gender in the
Laboratory
In the wake of WWII,
the chemical laboratory was transforming—physically and
conceptually. This process of
transformation included new instruments, new settings, new buildings, new
funds, and new personnel. Instrument makers, too, were adapting their products
based upon the changing needs of those in the laboratory. The standardized production of cheaper,
but less powerful instrumentation allowed laboratories to invest in an
instrument that effectively black-boxed much of the technology responsible
for the creation of laboratory phenomena.
These new instruments—smaller and less complicated—could be
operated by trained technicians without requiring a full comprehension of the
details of how the instrument, itself, operated. The advertisements created by the companies in these years
reflect this shift in production. Moreover, as we argue, advertisements of
scientific instruments in the 1950s and 1960s created and maintained specific
gender discourse through the ways they portrayed men and especially women in
relation to the advertised products. Along with the information about the
instrument and its seller, advertisements also reflect constructed stereotypes
of the roles of men and women in the laboratory and their participation in
science, more generally. In our
paper, we explore the role advertisements played in recognizing and reifying
gender within the cultures of experimentation and instrument making.
Specifically, we examine the advertisements of two prominent chemistry
journals—the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and the Journal of Chemical
Physics.
Andrew Stuart Reynolds, University College of Cape
Breton (Andrew_Reynolds@uccb.ca)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Cambridge
The Metaphor of the Cell State in Late Nineteenth and
Early Twentieth Century British Biology
Rudolf Virchow first
introduced the metaphor of the cell state (Zellenstaat) in the late 1850s to
press the analogy between multicellular organisms and a modern human political
state. It has been well noted that in making the analogy Virchow preferred metaphorical
language which promoted his political cause for democratic reforms in a
repressive Prussian state. Ernst Haeckel, a contemporary of Virchow, also used
widely the metaphor of the cell state, but with less emphasis on a "free
republic" of cells. For Haeckel higher animals (metazoa) were "cell
monarchies" because of the greater degree of centralization of control in
the central nervous system. Paul Weindling Health, race and German politics between national
unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge
1989) has noted that while the metaphor of the cell state was also taken up by
some British biologists, the political situation there was quite different from
the newly unified and increasingly centralized Germany of Virchow and Haeckel.
This paper looks closely at the language of the British biologists who used the
metaphor to see whether the different political context led them to make
different choices in the particular type of political organization they
ascribed to organic cell states.
Robert J. Richards, University of Chicago
(r-richards@uchicago.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
The Battle over Evolution in Germany: Ernst Haeckel's Struggles with the
Religious Right and the Political Left
Ernst Haeckel was
among the first to introduce Darwinian Theory into Germany. As a result of personal tragedy, he
came to regard evolutionary theory as a substitute for religion and a guide for
political orientation. His
anti-religious polemics stimulated response from conservative
scientists--especially members of the Thomasbund and the Keplerbund. Though his family was politically
liberal, after German unification Haeckel himself became more politically
conservative, especially in opposition to the efforts of Rudolf Virchow to
restrict the teaching of evolution in the German lower schools. The symbollic climax of his political
endeavors came when he arranged for Bismark to receive an honorary degree from
Jena as Doctor of Phylogeny. I
will attempt to show how Haeckel's religious and political attitudes were both
grounded in his science and came to affect that science in specific ways.
Peder Roberts, University of New South Wales
(peder@student.unsw.edu.au)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
'Proving Our Worth to the Empire': The 1911
Australasian Antarctic Expedition and the Australasian Scientific Community
The Australasian
Antarctic Expedition of 1911-1914 was billed as a predominantly scientific
venture, with detailed studies planned in meteorology, terrestrial magnetism,
geology and biology. Much scientific data was gathered and analysed, though the
Expedition is nowadays more remembered for the solo survival trek of its
leader, Dr (later Sir) Douglas Mawson. This paper will closely examine the
activities of John Hunter and Charles Laseron, respectively Chief Biologist and
Biological Collector with the main party. I show that the biological program
was more sophisticated in both aims and techniques than any Antarctic
expedition to date. I agree that this reflects Mawsons intellectual investment
in the Expedition, through which he hoped to advance his own academic career,
and the importance of the Expedition to the infant Australasian scientific
community. The Expedition represented a major opportunity to show the rest of
the world, especially Britain, that Australasians were capable of contributing
to science, and by extension to the British Empire.
David K. Robinson, Truman State University
(drobinso@truman.edu)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm President's
Ballroom A
Vladimir Bekhterev and the Psychiatric Subject: Early
Work in Hypnosis
V. M. Bekhterev (1857-1927), a
neurologist and psychiatrist by training and profession, is also considered to
be the founder of the Petersburg School of psychology, one of two or three
important directions of early Russian psychology. He eventually defined a vast
research program, especially once he established his own institute in St.
Petersburg in 1908, and laid claims in almost every conceivable area of
neurology, psychiatry, and psychology. Bekhterev became best known for his
programmatic work in associative reflexology (and thus competed with Pavlov's
work with conditioned reflexes). Long a liberal leftist and a supporter of
"objectivism" in science, Bekhterev embraced the Bolshevik Revolution
and even published a book called Collective Reflexology in 1921 to support a socialist
viewpoint. This paper looks at Bekhterevs work during his early career, soon
after he returned from his study trip to France, Austria, and Germany, 1883-85,
where he worked with Charcot, Bernheim, Flechsig, and Wundt, among others.
Although he published standard studies on neurology, neuropathology, and mental
disease, Bekhterev also published some lengthy cases describing treatment by
hypnosis. Some of the hypnotic studies took the form of experiments to discover
how hypnotic suggestion worked, in particular the relationship between
perceptive processes and the controlling ego of the patient. Far from arguing
for objectivity, these early studies show Bekhterevs great interest in the
subjective experiences of his hypnotized patients. At this point in his career,
hypnosis provided him with the main method for understanding subjective
experience.
Francesca Rochberg, University of California,
Riverside (rochberg@citrus.ucr.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
The Roots of Western Astrology: Ancient Mesopotamian
Celestial Omina and Horoscopes
A number of
well-known European traditions, from natural philosophy to astronomy and
astrology testify to a continuation of ancient assumptions concerning the
heavens capacity to influence or indicate mundane phenomena. Specifically
traceable to ancient Mesopotamia are the notions of divine communication
through heavenly phenomena and the belief that the heavens as a whole are
significant even for the life of an individual. The cuneiform traditions
forming the ultimate sources for European belief and practice of horoscopic
astrology are themselves diverse and reflect a course of development over many
centuries. This paper discusses the relationship between the two principal
parts of Babylonian astrology, i.e., celestial omina and horoscopes, not only
in terms of their respective contents and aims, but also as a function of the
apparent use of these traditions within a social context. It is further hoped
that fruitful investigation of the relations between ancient and later Western
astrology may be made on this basis.
Naomi Rogers, Yale University
(naomi.rogers@yale.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pmf President's
Ballroom B
Science, Medicine and the Ghetto: Anti-Colonialism and
American Health Activism in the 1960s
The American health
care system of the 1960s was in turmoil.
Not only did federal officials seek to ensure improved access and the
"maximum participation feasible" but miltant local communities,
spurred by black separatism, were threatening to burn down hospitals if they
did stop treating their potential patients as teaching material rather than as
dignified clients. Into this
atmosphere came young health activists, many in medical school, inspired by New
Left revolutionary thinking, and sought to apply the work of such
anti-colonialists as pyschiatrist Franz Fanon to what they identified as the
American health empire. This paper
will examine this neglected topic in the history of health care, and ask how
were the concepts of "colonizers' Western science" to be applied in
the American ghetto?
Anne Christina Rose, Johns Hopkins University (arosejhu@hotmail.com)
Thursday,
November 20th: 4:00 - 6:00 pm President's
Ballroom A
'Moral Orthopedics' and the Debate over Suggestibility
in Fin-de-Siecle Psychiatry
Throughout the
nineteenth century, educational psychologists argued across national and
linguistic borders for and against the cultivation of juvenile subjectivity,
introspection, and self-consciousness.
The ethical contours of this discourse were defined by questions of
social responsibility regarding moral treatments for precocity and infantile
neuroses. Several neurologists in Britain were consumed with identifying
characteristics of psychological imbalance that mitigated "mental
hygiene" in childhood. Thomas
Clouston and William Bevan Lewis, for instance, argued that introspective and subjective
states of consciousness threatened the natural processing of external
impressions by derailing attention toward deranged internal sensations. Once mental attention attention became
obsessed with a morbid train of thought, they taught, the will was rendered
helpless to prevent adolescent psychosis.
Clouston and Lewis were representative of a psychological community that
viewed introspection as tantamount to mental masturbation because it perverted
natural development and thus jeopardized the "mental evolution" of
the human race as a whole. In
contrast, several French experimenters, A.A. Liebeault and Edgar Berillon in
particular, developed therapeutic approaches to childhood disorders that optimized
infantile suggestibility. Thus the
insight that suggestibility could be productive of selfhood involved a turn
away from certain sociological formulations of immaturity that devalued
attention to the subjective self as interfering with, hence compromising to,
early consciousness formation. The
French proponents of suggestion therapy questioned the social evolutionists'
link between self-consciousness and moral degeneration and, therapeutically
speaking, they resisted prescribing treatments that inhibited subjectivity. In doing so, they produced a reservoir
of case studies that define what Berillon called "moral
orthopedics." My paper
examines cases from the 1880s which demonstrate how juvenile psychological
agency was achieved through mental suggestibility. I conclude by explaining how the increasingly positive view
of childhood suggestibility contributed to a new understanding of developmental
selfhood for French psychiatry.
Lisa T. Sarasohn, Oregon State University
(LSarasohn@orst.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom B
The Newcastle Circle and the Rejection of the
Experimental Program of the Royal Society
Thomas Hobbes's
condemnation of the experimental program of the Royal Society is well known,
but he was joined in his antipathy to its program by Margaret Cavendish, the
first woman to publish on scientific subjects in English, and by the playwright
Thomas Shadwell. These three
writers had something else in common.
Hobbes and Shadwell were the clients of William Cavendish, the Duke of
Newcastle, and Margaret Cavendish was his wife. Newcastle had long been an
advocate and supporter of the new science, but he was not asked to join the
Royal Society. My paper will
address the subject of how far the repudiation of experimental philosophy in
the works of Hobbes, Cavendish, and Shadwell was the result of a commitment to
a traditional form of the organization of intellectual activity, where status
and reputation were determined by external patronage rather than the consensus
of the scientific community.
Moreover, the members of the Newcastle Circle believed that an
experimental investigation of nature inhibited the development of true and
useful scientific knowledge. To
some extent, the members of this circle composed an anti-experimental cabal in
the 1660s and 1670s, which sought to undermine the Royal Society's attempt to
dominate scientific activity.
Jutta Schickore, University of Cambridge
(js427@cam.ac.uk)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Cambridge
'Some half-taught booby bragging of the goodness of a
microscope': The introduction of test objects into microscopy, 1820-1835
In the late
eighteenth century, microscopes came to be introduced into astronomy and
surveying. They played a crucial role in the operation of measuring instruments
as devices for reading the divisions of minute scales. In the 1820s, however,
the situation had reversed. Now fine lines and delicate gratings served to test
the quality of the microscope's image. This paper traces the transition of the
microscope from a device for controlling the division of scales to a device in
need of testing and considers the implications of this development. Focusing on
the works of the physician and microscope enthusiast Charles R. Goring and the
instrument maker and naturalist Andrew Pritchard, I show that in the course of
this transition, the conception of the instrument fundamentally changed from a
magnifier and reading aid to a complex device, whose effectiveness depended on
several different factors. I argue that this transition had profound
methodological implications: Rather than aiming for perfecting the instrumental
means of microscopy, microscopists were now concerned with determining the
instrument's limits and with eliminating disturbances. Moreover, the practice
of assessing microscopes through test objects set up boundaries between
different groups of users: the practitioners, who relied on test objects to
assess the quality of their instrument; the scientists, who sought to establish
the physical causes of those imperfections that the test objects revealed, and
the 'half-taught booby' (Goring), who knew nothing of their importance.
James A. Secord, University of Cambridge
(jas1010@hermes.cam.ac.uk)
Sunday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A and B
Scientific Discovery as Illustrated News, 1840-1870
In Genesis and
Development of a Scientific Fact, Ludwik Fleck suggested that important aspects of
specialist "esoteric" science depend upon popular
"exoteric" science. This
paper, building on recent work in this area, argues that this relationship has
a history. Changes in the
reporting of science in the mid-nineteenth century, and especially the rise of
the mass circulation illustrated newspaper, began to transform what it meant to
make a discovery. The notion that science depended on sudden insights and
unexpected breakthroughs developed in conjunction with a culture of journalism
that depended upon the reporting of dramatic events and vivid spectacles. The pictorial papers (from the
foundation of the Illustrated London News in 1842) depended on a diet of
scientific and technological innovation; in their turn, scientists gained new
public audiences and heroic celebrity.
The relationship shaped not only general concepts of discovery; it also
began to change the ways in which practitioners conducted their research and
reported their results, as I will suggest in a brief examination of the
resolution of the Orion nebula by Lord Rosse's reflecting telescope in 1846.
Steven Selden, University of Maryland
(ss22@umail.umd.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm President's
Ballroom A
Popularizing Eugenical Sterilization Through Texts and
Contests in the 1920s: Albert Edward Wiggam and the New Decalogue of Science
This paper will analyze the roles
of individuals and organization in the popularization of biological determinist
ideas by the American eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. The
first section of the paper will present a detailed analysis of the work and
policy recommendations of one the most prolific popularizers of American
mainline eugenics, Albert Wiggam (1871-1957). The papers second section will
focus is the major initiative of the American Eugenics Societys Committee on
Popular Education, that of contests for "Fitter Families .0for Future
Firesides" (1920-1929). Wiggam would serve on that committee. The papers
third section will outline the impact of both the movement and of Wiggam on the
school curriculum of the period. The paper argues that despite the various
disciplinary alternatives practiced by contemporary biologists, todays popular
media continue to present the public with rather determinist interpretations of
advances in modern biology. It concludes that this narrow interpretation, in
the 1920s and today, provides the public with unnecessarily constrained insights
for resolving increasingly complex challenges in social policy.
David Sepkoski, Oberlin College
(david.sepkoski@oberlin.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A
Walter Charleton, physico-theology, and 17th century English
natural philosophy
The career of the
17th century English physician Walter Charleton has proved something of an
enigma to historians of science.
He has been associated, variously, with the Helmontian
medical-alchemical tradition, the mechanical and atomistic philosophy of Pierre
Gassendi, the anatomical tradition of Harvey, and the naturalistic program of
Linnaeus. Despite the genuine
diversity of Charleton's interests over his lifetime, however, I argue he did
self-consciously follow a consistent program of inquiry--but also that such a
characterization requires we examine the entire scope of his career. Charleton's work exemplifies the
developing tradition of English 'physico-theology' (a term he seems to have
coined), which can be characterized by a few basic principles: an interest in
reconciling mechanical ontology with revealed theology, agnosticism about grand
explanatory hypotheses, and a commitment to the concomitance of divine and
natural laws. After presenting my
reinterpretation of Charleton as 'physico-theologist,' I will propose
connections between Charleton and contemporary practitioners in the physical
and natural sciences, including Boyle and John Ray. Finally, I will suggest that the term physico-theology
provides a more nuanced and contextually sensitive definition for a particular
kind of English natural philosophy that was an important link between early
modern theology, physics, and natural science.
Suman Seth, Princeton University
(sseth@princeton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
Instituting an Empire of Theory: Max Planck and the
Theoretical Physics Community in Germany
On July 2nd, 1914,
only four days after the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand by the
student and Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, the Prussian minister of
finance received a letter from his counterpart in charge of culture and
education. National (and nationalist) tensions were running high as Germany
geared up for war. Richly chauvinist, the letter drew attention to another,
perhaps less obvious area in which German supremacy was being challenged by its
international competitors: theoretical physics. "It has already caused
unhappiness in the German scholarly circles involved, that important parts of
the area have, in the last years, found stronger and more successful
cultivation in England and France than with us. It is all the more essential to
emphatically support this scientific development, which is a result of German
research work, and to preserve for Germany the rich share of the inheritance in
international standing in the area of research into exact scientific principles
which has passed down to German science through the efforts of Helmholtz." Yet the Kultusminister had
a solution to this attack on Germany's intellectual honour. Following a
suggestion made to him by five of Berlin's most famous physical scientists (Max
Planck, Walther Nernst, Emil Warburg, Fritz Haber, and Heinrich Rubens) he
proposed that the empire help fund the construction of a Kaiser Wilhelm-Institute
for theoretical physics in Dahlem, a small village just outside of Berlin. This
paper describes the first (unsuccessful) attempts to establish such an
institute. Its aim is to use these attempts as a particularly useful window
onto the vision(s) for the structure and place of theoretical physics in
Germany of two principal signatories to the document arguing for the
institute-Max Planck and Walther Nernst.. For the image built up in the
document is of a theoretical physics that is not a small sub-discipline, nor
even a substantive part or section of physics. Instead it is posed as the
centre, the heart and brain of all physics research, providing solutions to
problems as they are received and, crucially, deciding the direction of new
investigation. The select few who were to occupy the key positions in the
institute would become the leaders, not only of theoretical physics, but of
physics, and even (by some of the rhetoric) science as a whole. The elaboration
of this image also stands as part of a study into the role of Max Planck in the
creation of a theoretical physics community in Germany. Much has been made of
the importance and pervasiveness of ideas of "unity" in Planck's
thought. Yet insufficient emphasis has been placed on the multiple and
different ways in which this unity was conceived. In particular, the
institutionalisation of unity has been almost entirely ignored. This paper
attempts to rectify this situation, for the story of the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for Theoretical Physics provides a rare and deep insight, into
Planck's view of the ideal local structure of a field in which, by 1914, he had
become a leader. It bears strong parallels to the image of theoretical physics
that Planck discursively constructed in a series of public lectures between
1908 and the beginning of World War I. Planck, I suggest, sought to create an
"empire of theory," one in which an imperial institute and a
"physics of principles" would provide in turn an institutional and
intellectual cohesion for a community of "modern" physicists.
Theoretical physics, in this vision, would lie at the central-point of an
interconnected intellectual landscape, providing a unified knowledge for a
recently unified nation.
William R. Shea, University of Padua
(william.shea@ihs-ulp.u-strasbg.fr)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm President's
Ballroom B
Galileo's Roman Agenda
Between 1587 and
1633, Galileo made six long visits to Rome where he spent altogether over five
hundred days, meeting the Pope, high-ranking members of the Church and the
nobility, as well as leading figures of the scientific and literary
establishment. His career can be seen in a novel and fascinating way when
studied from the vantage point of the city where he was most anxious to be
known and approved. This approach also casts light on the Galileo Affair and
enables us to offer a fuller interpretation of the new document related to the
trial that was discovered in the Vatican Archives in 1999.
Hanna Rose Shell, Harvard University
(shell@fas.harvard.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Haym
Saloman
Casting Life: Bernard Palissy's Renaissance Occupation
between Maker and Nature
Bernard Palissy
(1510-1590) was a polymath potter, storyteller and geological theorizer. But above all, Palissy was a
craftsman. In this paper, I
will analyze Bernard Palissy's 'rustic-style' ceramic vessels - plates fused
with multi-colored glazed statuary cast from shells, plants and live amphibian
and marine specimens - in light of both their production and of Palissy's 1580
treatise on agriculture and geology, entitled Admirable Discourses. I read the visual and material contours of his ceramic
plates - sculpted stagnant ponds encrusted with animals and gilded by glazes -
as expressions of his theories of terrestrial petrifaction and
fossilization. In addition, I
excavate from the Palissy pottery collection a nascent (pre-Baconian)
empiricist philosophy of scientific knowledge production. In the historiography of Palissy, the
intellectual and the material have been severed; scholars have considered his
textual and ceramic oeuvres separately.
Whereas geological historians have looked almost exclusively at
Palissy's writings, art historians have focused on his 'art.' Neither group of scholars have fully
contextualized either the text in the art, or the art in the text. In my paper, I will strive for exactly
this kind of integration. I
analyze Palissy's rustic pond-ware as an articulate - and highly innovative -
expression of astute 'practical' philosophies of terrestrial and organic
nature. Palissy's theories of
fossil formation, petrifaction and putrefaction find their most apt
articulation (expression) in his plate-ware produced in the years around
Admirable Discourses' publication.
For Palissy, I will show, the proof is in the pottery.
Brian C. Shipley, Dalhousie University
(bshipley@dal.ca)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine B
From Field to Fact: Surveyors' Experience, Geological
Mapping, and the Production of Environmental Knowledge in the Victorian British
Empire
One of the most
important outcomes of state-sponsored geological surveys in the nineteenth
century was the production of large-scale geological maps. These maps linked scientific knowledge
of strata, topographical data about the land, and political information such as
boundaries and population centers.
Examining the development of the geological map of Canada (British North
America), 1842-1869, this paper traces the sequence of processes that turned
raw field experience into sophisticated environmental knowledge. Field geology in the Canadian
wilderness was a deeply personal activity, with geologists making frequent
references to their physical involvement in their work, and using their own
bodies as quantitative instruments. Intermediate-stage maps reflected the contingent conditions
under which geological knowledge was produced, but in their final published
form the large-scale color maps represented an unambiguous authority that
promised their users predictive power about the economic potential of specific
territorial units. Although such
maps, heralded by distinguished European commentators as well as by domestic
audiences, contained within them no visible trace of their origins, they
circulated accompanied by popular stories of the physical challenges that
surveyors faced, thus turning messy field experience from a limitation on the
reliability of environmental knowledge to a legitimation of it.
Ann B. Shteir, York University
(rshteir@yorku.ca)
Saturday,
November 22th: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Molly
Pitcher
Iconographies of Flora: The Goddess of Flowers in the
Cultural History of Botany
The frontispiece to
Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden (1791) shows Flora, the goddess of flowers, gazing into
a mirror in the presence of ethereal beings that adorn her with flowers. A
gendered symbol of both renewal and sexuality, Flora belongs to an iconographic
tradition that traces back to Roman culture and across Renaissance painting
into early modern horticultural and botanical books. She gestures toward the
history of science writing and toward visual traditions within early modern
science that routinely incorporated personifications, emblems, and poetic
ornaments as part of book design.
By the 18th century, however, a visual tradition of Flora began to fade
in scientific books, and the term "flora" came to designate a type of
botany book in an inventory tradition. This paper will read the gendered
representation of the goddess of flowers in Darwin's late 18th-century
scientific poem against this broad iconographic backdrop. It will argue that the complex figure
of Flora can take students of gender and science into rich cultural and
historical terrain, helping us examine relations between aesthetic and
technical aspects of sciences, as well as between visual and verbal languages
of nature.
Christian Sichau, Deutsches Museum Munich
(c.sichau@deutsches-museum.de)
Saturday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Cambridge
Storming a Citadel: The Mathematics of Measurement and
its Reconstruction
When we think of a
precise measurement of a physical quantity, instruments and experimental skills
usually come first to our mind; only seldom do we consider the mathematics
involved in making such a measurement.
However, when James Clerk Maxwell and his German rival Oskar Emil Meyer
wanted to measure the viscosity of gases with oscillating discs in the 1860s,
the mathematics needed to calculate a numerical value for the viscosity from
the observational data turned out to be a major difficulty. For Maxwell, it was a citadel which
needed to be stormed. As in many
other cases, the solution could not be derived deductively from the
fundamental physical theory. The two
protagonists chose different paths, constructed different solutions for the
problem and obtained different values for the viscosity of air. The discrepancy in viscosity values led
to a controversy at the time. This
paper discusses my (re-)construction of Maxwells and Meyers mathematical
theories of the experiment. This
(re-)construction process bears many similarities to the (re-)construction of a
material apparatus or an experiment.
It enabled me to infer that the mathematical theories of the measurement
depended on tools that were only locally available and on judgments,
attitudes, and lines of argumentation that were specific within the
different scientific communities within which each scientist worked. This paper argues for the necessity of
paying more attention to this important aspect of experimenting which not only
plays a minimal role in the publications of the scientists, but has also been
so far neglected by most historians.
It discusses the possibilities and limits of reconstructing the
construction of the mathematical description of an instrument as an extension
to the historiographic method of replicating the actual apparatus and redoing
experiments with it.
Ana Simes, Maria Paula Diogo
and Ana Carneiro,
University of Lisbon (asimoes@fc.ul.pt)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine B
Scientific Travels: A Step towards a Geography of
Science in Europe
In the disciplines of
the history of science and technology, scientific and technological travelling
has often been analyzed in the context of colonialism and imperialism, but
seldom in the context of the European peripheries, the new perspective taken in
this paper in which we report on one of the on-going projects of the STEP
group. In order to escape the narrow limits of geographical-intellectual
boundaries, scientific and technological travelling has been used as a
conceptual tool to clarify the detailed mechanisms of assimilation of diverse
scientific experiences in different cultural contexts. Through the mediation of
scientific and technological travelling, a network of practitioners is built up.
The notion of network appears as another conceptual and practical tool, which
offers new possibilities of historical analysis. By developing models of
networks and studying their dynamics the historian of the European peripheries
can unveil the relations between scientists in different local contexts, assess
how scientific and technological practices are adopted through the consensus of
their practitioners, and how localities become increasingly homogeneous,
especially when they overcome the tensions between local discourses and the
progressive internationalisation of science and technology. We will illustrate
these views by taking examples from 18th century natural sciences in Portugal,
especially in the realm of the geological sciences, and their institutionalization
throughout the 19th century in the context of the Geological Survey.
Dana Simmons, University of Chicago
(dj-simmons@uchicago.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Cambridge
Excrement and consumption in the 19th-century
chemistry labs of Dumas and Boussingault
The paper examines
the physiological experiments carried out in the 1840s by J.B. Dumas and J.B.
Boussingault on animal digestion and respiration. Boussingault's agricultural
experiments attempted to measure carbon and nitrogen consumption through an
analysis of animal excrement. Dumas held what Klosterman has called a
"steady state" vision of organic matter as a zero-sum balance of
production and consumption. Students who passed through his laboratory included
Adophe Wurtz, Jean Stas and Louis Pasteur. Among its many lines of research,
Dumas' group attempted to measure atmospheric composition; this involved a
massive effort of air collection from sites worldwide. As part of that project
Leblanc and Peclet attempted to determine minimum air volumes necessary for
comfort and survival: they enclosed a human subject and a pot of excrement in a
prison cell with varying air circulation. Both Dumas and Boussingault sought to
measure the minimum level of food and air that a living being could consume
without altering its body weight or the composition of its excrement. I argue
that these experiments reflect a model of human and animal life in terms of
consumption and waste or expenditure.
Amy Slaton, Drexel University
(slatonae@drexel.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
Race, Geography, and the Definition of Engineering
Communities: The University of Maryland 1940-1960
Following the end of
World War II, the University of Maryland crafted an ambitious plan to expand
engineering research programs tentatively begun during the war, capitalizing on
the growing need of regional industries and the nearby federal government for
research and trained personnel..
The school's leaders and
supportive legislators depicted the University as a major source of economic
uplift and industrial modernization for the entire state. However, decisions about how this
modernization would take place reveal profound commitments to segregation in
this "Border State," and purposeful delineations of technical
communities along lines of race and purported economic importance. UMD's
leaders delegated engineering resources to the main, and entirely white,
College Park Campus, while designating the all-black Eastern Shore campus as a
site in which agricultural work would remain central, with a minimal investment
in industrial and mechanical programs.
George E. Smith, Dibner Institute
(gesmith@mit.edu)
Thursday,
November 22nd: 4:00 - 6:00 pm Crispus
Attucks
Newton's Misleading Initial Pendulum Experiment
As is well known,
Newton performed a preliminary pendulum-decay experiment in his effort to
measure forces of resistance while writing the Principia. Although he summarized it as if for publication, he elected
not to include it in Book 2 of the Principia; the manuscript in question was
transcribed and published in the 1970s.
Even then, however, a transcription error has heretofore masked the
importance of this experiment in the development of Book 2. The data from this experiment, once the
transcription error is corrected, turn out to be in direct conflict with the
pendulum-decay data published in Book 2: the velocity-squared contribution to
resistance totally dominates any other contributions in the experiments
reported in the Principia, while it is of the same general magnitude as the
velocity-to-the-first-power contribution in this preliminary experiment. In other words, the results from the
preliminary experiment were misleadingly bad data. These data help to explain why Newton expected so much from
the pendulum-decay experiments in the first edition, and they may even explain
why he decided to abandon his original plan of locating the material on
resistance in Book 1, instead to form a separate Book 2 for it.
Sarah Anne Smith, Indiana University -
Bloomington (sarahs@indiana.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
Mirrors on the World, Mirrors of the Mind: Nicole
Oresme's Doctrine of Configuration and Theories on Catoptromancy in De
configurationibus.
In Nicole Oresme's
discussion of the geometry of qualities and motions in the Tractatus de
Configurationibus qualitatum et motuum, the figuration of qualities and their actions are
viewed as formative characteristics which endow naturally occurring phenomena
and objects with their particular natures, and in some cases, powers. The
configuration doctrine is advanced as an explanatory scheme for naturalizing
operations more typically viewed as supernatural (i.e., the magical or curative
powers of precious stones, divinatory and prophetic practices, and certain
magical operations) in the sense that a general explanation can be sourced in a
specific and determinate cause derived from occult figurations of qualities.
The first part of this paper will introduce the tenets of the geometry of the
figuration doctrine and its application in the determination of internal and
external configurations of qualities. The second part of the paper will focus
on Oresme's application of his doctrine of configuration to the physical and
psychological phenomena parceled under the divinatory practice of catoptrics
and catoptromancy, with particular attention to Oresme's discussion of the
interrelation between a received medieval theory of vision and the
configuration of intellective power.
Laura Ackerman Smoller, University of Arkansas at
Little Rock (lasmoller@ualr.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes A
Astrology and the End of the World: The Bleeding Edge
of Late Medieval Prognostication
Beginning in the
twelfth century, medieval European thinkers took an eager interest in natural
philosophy, seeking to delineate carefully natural from supernatural causality
and to explain more and more phenomena by natural causes and not by resort to
the supernatural. At the bleeding edge of this trend to desacralize nature
was the attempt to naturalize the apocalypse, leading to astrologically-based
prognostications about the time of the arrival of Antichrist. If scholastic
theologians fairly easily dealt with the major Christian objections to
astrology (that giving power to the stars interferes with human free will and
Gods omnipotence) by insisting that the stars incline but do not compel,
astrological calculations of the apocalypse proved a harder pill to swallow. By
the early fifteenth century, however, Pierre dAilly would use the stars to
proclaim his stunning conclusion that Antichrist would not arrive until 1789.
This paper will treat the debate about the naturalization and astrological
calculation of the apocalypse in the thirteenth through the mid-fifteenth
century, with particular reference to the contexts in which such
prognostications became acceptable and eventually routine.
Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Michigan State University
(gsotolav@hotmail.com)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
The 'Politics' of Healing: Local Beliefs and State
Agendas in Mexico's Failed Domestic Pharmaceutical Project (1976-1984)
In the 1940s the
global quest for a cheaper steroid hormone precursor led American and European
chemists to the tropical humid areas of southeastern Mexico in search of wild
yams. The contact established between Western laboratory researchers and rural
Mexican peasants ultimately transformed the meaning of laboratory science.
Indeed, the Mexican state refashioned and re-interpreted what it meant to do
science in a Mexican context by interspersing and adding local ethnobotanical
knowledge to patent medicine production. This paper analyzes the contradictions
and unexpected consequences of creating a "domestic pharmaceutical"
industry based in rural Mexican belief systems. In addition, it questions the
meanings of scientific knowledge in post-colonial societies.
David I. Spanagel, Harvard University
(dspanagel@townisp.com)
Thursday,
November 21st: 4:00 - 6:00 pm President's
Ballroom B
Mapping, Scientific Knowledge, and Borderline Politics
The activities of
surveying, exploring, and conducting geological, agricultural and ethnological
research in North America were all bound up together in the service of the
governments of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain during the first
half of the 19th century. In this
paper, I will pursue my investigation of how the earth sciences were used to
locate and identify important landmarks and to inscribe boundaries. From Thomas Jeffersons geometrical
abstractions of the 1780s to pragmatic compromises in the face of international
tensions in the 1840s, the authority of science was mobilized in various ways
in order to divide territories into political units, to determine legal (if not
always rightful) ownership, and even to shape political debates about the
natural state of a given territory and its potential land uses. Patriotic impulses might collide with the
disinterested pursuit of truth at the borders. Were these expeditions seen by practitioners of science as
welcome opportunities to ply their skills, or fearful traps that might
embarrass either the facts of physical geography or the scientists themselves?
Andrew W. Sparling, Duke University (aws2@duke.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Haym
Saloman
Putrefaction in the Laboratory: How an
Eighteenth-Century Experimentalist Refashioned Herself as an Homme des Lettres
While recent
scholarship on the Republic of Letters in eighteenth-century France has rightly
celebrated the importance of the salons, the example of Marie-Genevieve Thiroux
d'Arconville, a woman of letters, Jansenist, and wife to a president of the
Parlement de Paris, shows that it was also possible, in the 1750s and 1760s,
for a woman to participate in intellectual life while repudiating salon
culture. The salon was a feminine-gendered form of sociability, but Thiroux
d'Arconville espoused a masculine-gendered Republic of Letters. In her
published writings, such as her Essai pour servir a une histoire de la
putrefaction
(1766), she adopted a masculine persona; going further, she used Stoic moral
philosophy, Jansenist devotion, and her own laboratory regimen to reshape
herself, physically as well as morally, in conformity with an antifeminine,
masculinized ideal. Thiroux d'Arconville's methodical observations, over a span
of years, of pieces of decaying meat exposed her to horrific stinks, which she
dutifully recorded. Such stinks, according to contemporary medical belief, posed
an imminent threat to her health, a threat to which the feminine constitution,
which was more sensitive than the male, was supposed to be particularly
vulnerable. Sniffing rotting specimens in the lab functioned as a daily
scourge, disciplining her passions physically as well as morally, reshaping her
as less of a woman thereby (by her lights) improving her. While Thiroux
d'Arconville's strategy could never afford her equal status in a male
intellectual world nor serve the long-term interests of women, it did grant her
a precarious freedom, for a few prerevolutionary years, to pursue her interests
as she pleased. Soon, beliefs that the differences between the sexes were less
malleable would render gender-bending strategies like Thiroux d'Arconville's obsolete.
Emma Spary, Independent Scholar
(e.c.spary@ntlworld.com)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine B
Coffee Grounds: Plant Identification and French
Colonial Botany before 1740
"Big
picture" histories of botany tell triumphalist accounts of the victorious
seizure of commerce in plant products by European states in the post-Columbian
period, an appropriation enabled by the establishment of colonies in which
useful plant species could be naturalized and multiplied. Local histories, however,
tell a different story. For example, it might be supposed that Europeans would
have been familiar with coffee by the early eighteenth century. As a drink,
drug and commercial good, it had been widespread in Europe since the 1660s.
Nevertheless, achieving agreement among merchants, consumers, colonists,
ministers and botanists about what exactly the coffee plant was proved far from
easy, as the first French colonial cultivation experiments during the 1710s
proved. Challenges to naturalization projects of this sort forced substantial
redefinitions of the parameters of plant classification and of the content of a
plant's botanical identity.
Alistair Sponsel, Princeton University
(asponsel@princeton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Crispus
Attucks
School of Empire: The Voyaging Naturalists of Joseph
Banks' Network
Joseph Banks home at Soho Square
has been portrayed as the Center of Calculation of a vast network of voyaging
naturalists. In his roles as an administrator of resources, advisor and provider
of credibility to junior collaborators, and leader of a program of knowledge
acquisition, Banks possessed many of the characteristics of a research school
director as described by Morrell, Geison, and others in their seminal
contributions to research school historiography. It is interesting to consider
the implications of this comparison, such as the reverse proposition that the
archetypal nineteenth century lab-based research school director should be
viewed as the Center of Calculation of an extremely localized network of
knowledge accumulation. Ultimately, though, this simile poses a crisis: how is
it that an eighteenth-century project of field-based accumulation of
knowledge fits so well into a model that was supposed to be the product of newly
institutionalized nineteenth-century methods of laboratory based production
of knowledge? I contend that traditional research school historiography
privileges the director in such a way that Banks fits the model, even though it
might be argued that he neither did research nor had a school. I argue that in
order to understand both types of community in question we must examine them
from the bottom, up. We can learn a good deal more about field-based and
laboratory-based projects, about cataloguing and experimentation, if we turn
our attention away from the leaders and their similar goals of knowledge
consolidation. We ought to focus instead on the training and practices that
allow individuals to collaborate in a socialized venture of knowledge acquisition,
and I begin by taking just such a look at the naturalists of the Banksian
network.
Kent W. Staley, Saint Louis University
(staleykw@slu.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Haym
Saloman
The Pursuit of Experiment by Other Means: The
Evolution of an Experimental Research Report in High Energy Physics
The purpose of this
paper is to explore the role of the research report in collaborative
experimental physics, bringing to light its important methodological functions.
The subject of my study will be the first published paper claiming to present
evidence for the existence of the top quark, which was made public by the
Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration in 1994. My analysis of that
episode is based on interviews with collaboration members, internal
collaboration documents, and the final published report. In writing this
research paper, the CDF collaboration underwent a process, not merely of
finding a way to communicate perspicuously an empirical claim, but of
determining the content of the claim that they intended to make, and
scrutinizing the argument for that claim for possible errors. Through this
process, the result to be presented, the confidence collaboration members had
in that result, and their understanding of potential errors in their argument
all evolved in response to one another. Furthermore, certain features of the
process altered individual collaboration members evaluations of the result.
Especially susceptible to influence by features of the process were
individuals judgments as to whether particular problems required explicit
discussion and resolution. I conclude that published papers are important not
merely, perhaps not even primarily, as a means of communicating a result to
other scientists. Much of the value of research reports attaches to the process
of producing them. Because it encourages the continued probing of the analysis
and argument for potential errors, that process can be thought of as the
pursuit of experiment by other means.
Ida H. Stamhuis, Free University Amsterdam
(stamhuis@nat.vu.nl)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
The Fruitfulness of a National Study of Development of
Knowledge and the Stubbornness of Various Ways of Statistics
In my paper I will
argue that a study of the development of knowledge in one country does not only
learn us about the specific characteristics connected with that country but
also on the characteristics of the kinds of knowledge concerned. In 2002 the
volume The Statistical Mind in a Pre-Statistical Era: The Netherlands
1750-1850, of
which I am one of the editors, was published. The striking conclusion was that
the various ways that statistics was pursued remained quite isolated from each
other. A major segmentation in statistical 'spheres' was to be found between
the secret statistical practice of the public administration and the
intellectuals working on statistical theory. Commercial actuarial theory
remained outside the academic system. Segmentation was also found between the
various theoretical approaches of Staatenkunde and Political Arithmetic. This
can only partially be explained by the specific Dutch political en economical
situation of that time. This will be illustrated by the unsuccessful contacts
between people of Staatenkunde and of Political Arithmetic. This study leaded
to the conjecture that the differences between the various ways statistics was
practised and the different worlds in which the people were operating were
apparently of a very stubborn nature. It can therefore be expected that in that
time in other countries integration will also not easily have taken place.
Thomas Stapleford, University of Notre Dame
(tstaplef@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes B
Last of the Practical Statisticians: Professionalizing
the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics during the New Deal
Current histories of
twentieth-century, U.S. government statistics, written primarily by
participants, identify the New Deal as a turning point, a time of staff
transition from clerks and clerical supervisors to academically trained
statisticians. By incorporating advanced statistical techniques, so the story
goes, these new recruits facilitated a revolution in government statistics,
producing more extensive, more reliable quantified information. Instead, I
argue that at least in the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the data
improvements during the 1930s derived from factors unrelated to the graduate
education of the new staff, mainly greater funding and tighter methods of
bureaucratic control. Although graduate training would become increasingly
important during the 1940s and 1950s, as federal statisticians made greater use
of probability sampling techniques, developments during the 1930s largely
followed existing patterns. The sense of a revolution resulted primarily from
a clash of professional cultures that occured as academics colonized federal
institutions. Prior to the New Deal, government statistical agencies were
staffed almost exclusively by self-proclaimed practical statisticians, who
received their training on the job and perceived their task as gathering
quantitative facts for public consumption. Wanting their methods and results to
be comprehensible by the general public, they saw no need for extensive
academic training in complex mathematics and statistical theory. By contrast,
the New Deal staff members believed data analysis to be a key part of
statistical work. Trained largely in economics, they carried their interest in
political economy into their new posts and took responsibility for both
compiling data and interpreting its significance, creating new roles for
federal statisticians as economic policy advisors.
Darwin H. Stapleton and Donna
Stapleton,
Rockefeller Archive Center and City Schools of
New Rochelle (stapled@mail.rockefeller.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm William
Dawes A
Little Science? The Paradoxes of Research and
Education in the Sciences at Swarthmore College, 1935-1965
Virtually all
attention to American science and education in the middle years of the 20th
century has gone to the major universities and institutions. We will examine
science at Swarthmore, a small liberal arts college, focusing on the presidency
of Courtney C. Smith (1953-69). We will utilize research that will not be
published in our forthcoming biography of Smith (Delaware, 2003), and
additional material from the Rockefeller Foundation Archives. Concentrating on
the college's biology department, but refering substantially to the astronomy,
chemistry, physics and psychology departments, we will argue that research
competitive with much larger institutions was carried out at Swarthmore.
Drawing on Zuckerman's observations in Scientific Elite, we will suggest that the
intense, mentored education at the college is why it produced three Nobel prize
winners, the creator of hypertext, and the president of the Carnegie
Institution of Washington (among others) as scientific leaders during this era.
President Smith often claimed that the college had high-quality science despite
not having a cyclotron. While in general we will support his claim, we will
consider both the limits and virtues of the pursuit of science at Swarthmore
and will suggest the degree to which similar institutions provided a similar
experience.
Joan Steigerwald, York University
(steiger@yorku.ca)
Saturday,
November 22th: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Molly
Pitcher
Figuring Nature, Figuring the (fe)Male: The
Frontispiece to Humboldt's Ideas Towards a Geography of Plants
The frontispiece to
Alexander von Humboldts 1807 German edition of his Ideas to a Geography of
Plants depicts
Apollo, god of art and reason, unveiling a statue of Diana of Ephesus, the
multi-breasted goddess of nature. This paper exams the significance of this
mythic imagery fronting a work of science, and drawing a study of plant
geography out into a context of a fascination with antique cosmotheism. Deists,
pantheists, masons and atheist, opposed to official Christianity often found in
philosophies of nature alternative sources of meaning and authority. In
Humboldts frontispiece, the figure of Apollo suggests that nature is best
revealed through both the cultivation of reason and aesthetic sensibility, the
veil raises the question as to whether or not the truth of nature might be
fully revealed, and the hieroglyphic inscriptions draws attention to the visual
and verbal figures produced in the reading of natures script. Humboldt, after
Goethe, tried to develop a visual language, which, if not able to penetrate to
the essence of nature, nevertheless could represent its empirical laws in a
definite and normative form, and offered a means of visual reasoning, of
figuring out the form of such laws. His maps and diagrams were introduced as
such a figurative vocabulary, a product of both instrumental reasoning and
aesthetic appraisal. As Egyptian hieroglyphs were studied as part of the
natural development of language and the human mind, so Humboldts figures could
be regarded as contributions to the natural development of scientific language
and scientific reasoning. The question of unveiling nature was also central to
questions of figuring of the self and concepts of male and female nature at the
turn of the nineteenth century. The notion that there is a definitive or
normative gender or sexual identity was challenged in a variety of ways during
the early German Romantic period, defying any simple reading of the image of
the male or female presented in Humboldts frontispiece. Indeed, artistic play
with sexual ambiguity suggests a performativity to figuring of the self.
Goethes and Humboldts experimentation with figurative languages in their
exploration of the nature of the self was productive of creative readings and
writings of sexual figures. Such issues remain unstated in and hence exterior
to Humboldts text, and yet, through the mythic imagery of its frontispiece,
press upon it and frame it.
Rebecca Stott, Anglia Polytechnic University
(pas6@hermes.cam.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Haym
Saloman
The Speculative Poetics of Evolution
The poet Lord
Tennyson is famed for coining the phrase "Nature Red in Tooth and
Claw," which is often cited as expressing the new understanding of nature
brought about by the assimilarion of Darwin's evolutionary ideas in Origin of
Species (1859). But the lines were published in 1850 and written a good number
of years earlier. They were not provoded by Darwin's Origin but rather by other
evolutionary ideas being published, translated, reviewed, promoted and
contested in the 1830s and 40s, including Robert Chambers' best-selling
Vestiges (1844). In this paper, I will examine some of the ways in which
pre-Darwinian evolutionary ideas entered into British culture in the 1830s and
40s and were assimilated through the exchanges of letters, reviews and
conversations. The 1830s and 40s were speculative decades – in natural
philosophy, in politics and in finance. Furthermore, a number of experimental
narrative poems were written or published in the late 40s and 50s share a
dialogic conversational form and a speculative vision about both the origin and
future of the human race: Tennyson's The Princess, Clough's Amours de Voyage
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh. Their experimental
newly-conversational form owes much, I propose, to the way in which these
dazzling new ideas were discussed at dinner tables and through the exchange of
letters in earlier decades. Speculative ideas demanded a newly-flexible form.
James E. Strick, Franklin and Marshall College
(jamesstrick@earthlink.net)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Molly
Pitcher
'Life Is Too Complex to Be Captured in a Concise
Formula': F.J. Allen and Changing Views of the Living in 1898
In a highly
influential 1898 paper, F.J. Allen attempted to review current discussions on
"What Is Life?" and to synthesize new energetic and biochemical ideas
with older traditions. The
complexity of biochemical metabolism rendered it unlikely, he argued, that any
simple, concise formulation such as those of Herbert Spencer and others, could
fully "define" life. He argued that Pflueger's cyanogen theory had
more of an up to date grasp of energetics. Yet Allen then went on to lapse into his own pet theory,
which, while sounding decidedly modern, still sought a "life formula." Thus a close look at Allen's argument
reveals a time of transition, from the still tenacious "life
particle" and "specific life energy" ideas of 1850-1918, into
the new era of mechanistic biochemistry and bioenergetics.
William C. Summers, Yale University
(william.summers@yale.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A
Physics, Phage and DNA
The investigation of
bacteriophage as a model genetic system was one of the crucial pathways of
research that led up to the elaboration of the macromolecular structure of DNA
in 1952. A major paradigm for phage research was based on radiobiological
target theories derived from well-established work in atomic physics dating
back to Einstein, Thompson and Rutherford. Key members of the loosely organized American Phage Group
were educated as physicists and adopted these approaches to study of the
physical nature of the gene just as earlier scientists had approached the
physical nature of the atom. Max
Delbrck, Salvador Luria and Lurias student, James Watson, based much of their
research on this paradigm, and the identification of DNA as the critical
radiosensitive target was a central issue in some of this research aimed at
understanding the steps in phage reproduction. The collective and individual memories of the key
participants, however, have emphasized the goals of this research program more
in terms of later successes rather that in terms of these contemporary research
aims. Recent study of archival sources, however, reveal complex and varied
research goals, methods, and results.
This paper will examine the tension between the canonical account and
the archival record to provide a detailed and nuanced picture of the American
Phage Group during the period leading up to the proposed double helical model
for DNA structure.
Abha Sur, MIT (asur@mit.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
Ever Since Orientalism: Implications of Graded
Hierarchies of Race for Postcolonial Histories of Science
In The Mismeasure
of Man, Stephen
J. Gould reveals inherent prejudices in the collection as well as the treatment
of data on cranial capacities published in the 19th century by George Samuel
Morton, Americas distinguished scientist and physician who was also a leading
proponent of polygeny. Morton not
surprisingly, established a perfect correlation between social hierarchy and
racial ranking of mental capacities.
Not only did Caucasians rise to the top of the charts, but also within
this category Teutons and Anglo-Saxons were endowed with the highest capacity
and the Hindus the lowest. While
their inclusion in the category of
Caucasians distinguished the Hindus
from other races, Morton
also posited that the Hindus were bringing down the averages for the
Caucasian race and therefore he excluded from his calculations all but three
Hindu skulls. The circumstance of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of the
people from India in theories of racial ranking is often overlooked in
postcolonial studies, which tend to bifurcate the world into colonizers and
colonized. In this paper I will
argue that the graded racial rankings played an important role not only in the
establishment of racialized hierarchies in colonial India, but that these
categories have influenced
profoundly the production
of scientific and social knowledge.
Michele Thompson, Southern Connecticut State
University (thompsonC2@southernct.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
Jean Marie Despiau: French Physician in the Royal
Medical Service of the Nguyen Dynasty
Jean Marie Despiau, originally
from the town of Brazas in Gironde (France), first arrived in Vietnam in
1795. He became a member of the
medical service for the military forces of Nguyen Anh, later Emperor Gia Long. At that time Nguyen Anh was involved in
a brutal civil war which resulted, after his victory, in the establishment of
the Nguyen Dynasty in 1802. After
the founding of the dynasty Jean Marie Despiau became a member of the Nguyen
Dynasty Palace Medical Service and he served under emperors Gia Long and Minh
Mang from 1802 until his death in 1824.
Emperor Minh Mang expelled all other Frenchmen from his court yet Dr. Depiau remained in his position
with the friendship and affection of members of the royal family. No other European held a permanent
position in the court of the Nguyen Dynasty between Dr. Despiau's death and the
forcible colonization of Vietnam ending in 1883. The story of J.M. Despiau's career in Vietnam offers
insights into the Vietnamese Royal Medical Service and the tensions between the
Nguyen Dynasty and expanding European colonial powers. This paper will examine Despiau's
involvement in the Royal Medical Service and his relationship with members of
the royal family.
Helen Tilley, Princeton University
(htilley@princeton.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom B
Tropical Africa and Environments of Disease: Imperial and International Research
Priorities, 1880-1940
In the decade
following the "Scramble for Africa" scientists in Britain actively
debated the possibility of intensive European settlement in the territories
between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. Opinions were decidedly mixed with some like the advocate of
tropical medicine, Patrick Manson, declaring settlement feasible and others
like the Surgeon-General William Moore arguing that no European
"race" could ever flourish in tropical zones. The central reason advanced by those
who opposed settlement was the unhealthiness of equatorial Africa. As the authors of an 1890 book on The
Development of Africa
declared, "to turn up the virgin soil is to release the messengers of
death . . . Few escape fever."
Not only were diseases like malaria, plague, and dysentery singled out
as the primary culprits in this period, but these were linked to nascent fears
about the possible barrenness and sterility of the land itself. By the end of the First World War,
these debates had shifted from concern for the future of European
"races" in Africa to panic over whether Africans were themselves
dying out. The diseases held responsible
in this period were sleeping sickness and tuberculosis. The problems seemed so acute that the
League of Nations was asked to intervene, its Health Committee recording for
the year 1924 that "it is a humanitarian duty incumbent on all civilised nations
to give their attention [to this health crisis], for there can be no doubt that
it is contact with the white races which has caused the spread of tuberculosis
and that sleeping-sickness has been transmitted outside its original
frontiers." This paper
explores not only how this dramatic shift took place -- a product both of the
germ theory of disease and of active field research relating to climates,
soils, forests, flora and fauna -- but it also examines the empirical content
of international and inter-imperial research on Africa's disease environments
in the inter-war period, paying particuarly close attention to the
interventions of the League of Nations and the British government.
Sarah Whitney Tracy, University of Oklahoma
(swtracy@ou.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Molly
Pitcher
Days of Recurring Desires: Inebriety and Alcoholism in
Patient Narratives, 1890-1920
The founding of the
American Association for the Cure of Inebriates in 1870 launched the first
organized attempt to medicalize habitual drunkenness in the United States. This
Gilded- Age and Progressive-Era medico-moral reform movement met with mixed
success, its efforts coming to a close with the arrival of national prohibition
in 1920. My paper examines one dimension of this episode in the history of
alcoholism: how patients being treated for their drinking problems in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America made sense of their illness and
negotiated its medical and social meanings with their physicians, families,
friends, and interested others. Employing patient records and family
correspondence from inebriate hospitals; recovery narratives published in
popular periodicals; and professional medical and social reform literature, I
argue that patients and other non-medical parties exerted a tremendous
influence on the definition of inebriety as a disease, on the treatment
policies adopted by various private and public institutions, and ultimately on
the relative success of the movement to medicalize habitual drunkenness. This
work is part of a larger monograph I am writing, From Vice to Disease:
Alcoholism in America, 1870-1920.
Katherine Tredwell, University of Oklahoma
(ktredwell@ou.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Haym
Saloman
Astronomy Translations in Tudor England
Translations of
Continental works are an underutilized source of information on astronomy in
early modern England. Translations
helped English readers keep abreast of developments elsewhere, but they did not
simply transmit pristine knowledge from one language to another. Wittingly or unwittingly, translators
also transformed the works of others by their choice of what to translate and
by adding their own commentary. By
translating a portion of Copernicus De revolutionibus, Thomas Digges brought a novel
cosmological system to an audience its originator never intended. Thomas Blundevilles translation of
Michael Maestlin made a textbook by a major astronomer available to English
readers, but altered it by omitting portions and combining it with other
texts. These case studies raise
the question of how Tudor translators may have contributed to forming a
distinctly English approach to astronomy in the early modern period.
John Tresch, Northwestern University
(j-tresch@northwestern.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
The Place of the Daguerreotype in the Moral Economy of
Instruments: Francois Arago at the Observatoire de Paris.
Francois Arago,
Director of the Observatory of Paris and Perpetual Secretary of the French
Academy of Sciences in the 1830s and 1840s, placed a heavy emphasis in his
public role as representative of the sciences on the part played by skill,
labor, and new instruments in the production of knowledge. He was closely
involved in designing, making, testing, and promoting a wide range of new
devices in optics, magnetism, geophysics, and industrial mechanics. The
importance he placed on instruments was part of a specific epistemology, one he
shared with his friend Alexander von Humboldt. In this new image of
objectivity, instruments were seen as the external and socially stabilized
correlates of Kants categories of the understanding. At the same time, these
instruments and the distributed communities of practice associated with them
were given a significant moral weight. A conception of freedom through
interdependence with roots in enlightenment and romantic political thought
accompanied this regime of instrumentation. It is against this background of
epistemological and moral reflection that Arago introduced the Daguerreotype in
1839. This paper will compare and contrast Aragos views on the possibilities
of photography with his experiences with the other instruments with which he
developed his form of astronomy— a Humboldtian science of the skies. In
addition, it will touch upon Aragos flirtation with illuminist and occult
themes in his public discourses on science, placing early photography within a
cultural milieu in which positive science was forging significant links with
radical political, literary, and cultural movements. This paper addresses an
important moment in the history of visual representations in astronomy. It will
shed new light on the romantic and even mystical aspects of a technique that
has been seen as exemplary of mechanical objectivity.
Jennifer Tucker, Wesleyan University
(jtucker@wesleyan.edu)
Saturday,
November 22th: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Molly
Pitcher
Gender and Genre in Scientific Photography, 1850-1900
The role of labor in
the production of nineteenth-century photographs is often obscured because
scientific photography made its claims to objectivity by denying that human
agency is part of the process.
Many Victorian scientists themselves promoted the view that photographs
were, as one said, free from the "vitiating element" of human agency.
Closer examination of nineteenth-century discourses and material exchanges of
photographs of scientific phenomena, however, exposes prevalent concerns with
gendered human agency in photographic practice. This paper demonstrates some historical factors that led to
the masculinization of the norms and practices of "scientific"
photography from 1850 to 1900, and gives an account of how ideologies of gender
and class operated in the creation of the "genre" of scientific
photography. It also explores how
gendered patterns of authority in scientific photography as a field of study
affected women's participation in photography as image makers and consumers. Paying attention to often overlooked
genres such as spirit photography can show us much about the presence of women
photographers and about the history of science more generally.
William Joseph Turkel, MIT (wjt@mit.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine B
A Property Rights Approach to the Practice of
Geological Surveying in British Columbia
Earth scientists
employ a remarkable variety of techniques and instruments to reconstruct past
events from material traces. In so
doing, they are able to tell stories about the very long-term pasts of particular
places. In this paper, I use the
framework of new institutional economics to provide a novel perspective on the
practices of geologists engaged in mineral exploration in British
Columbia. In the model used here,
property rights can never be fully delineated because many of the attributes of
a particular commodity (such as an ore) cannot be measured accurately or
cost-effectively. These attributes
fall into the public domain. There
is always some potential for wealth to be captured by those willing to expend
resources to do so. By analyzing
the costs associated with the allocation of property rights amongst
stakeholders, I am able to make some interesting predictions about the
direction of earth science research.
What might initially seem to be an unlikely way to think about the
historical development of geological practice turns out to nicely complement
existing work on the social and cultural contexts of earth science.
Ryan D. Tweney, Bowling Green State University
(tweney@bgnet.bgsu.edu)
Saturday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Cambridge
Reconstructing Research Programs: Faraday and the
Colors of Gold
This paper describes
our research on a year-long program of research carried out in 1856 by Michael
Faraday. He was attempting to
determine why thin transparent gold leaf was typically green by transmitted
light, but the familiar gold color by reflected light. The question remained unanswered by his
research, but during the work, he did discover the nature of metallic colloids
and the optical effect known as the "Faraday Tyndall Effect," in
which submicroscopic particles scatter light. Recently, I discovered the
nearly-complete set of over 600 specimens used by Faraday (mostly thin deposits
of gold and other metals on ordinary microscope slides). The specimens are
individually numbered and can be matched to his characteristically rich diary
records, giving an amazingly complete record of his work. In addition to
studying these specimens, we have reconstructed some of Faradays chemical and physical procedures used in
the gold leaf experiments. The investigation sheds much light on the way in
which Faradays early vague conceptions of the underlying processes were
altered by his research and developed into a final set of conclusions about the
phenomena under study. The complete record, now consisting of Diary + Specimens
+ Reconstructions, permits us to understand how Faradays attempt to explore
the colors of gold was actually an extension of his earlier success (in
discovering the magnetoelectric rotation of plane polarized light) in linking
the nature of light and of matter. Apparently, he hoped to use the gold
research to establish the difference between continuous matter and discrete
particulate matter, perhaps confirming a (non-Daltonian) force-centered material
substrate. Instead, he found evidence only for particulate matter, although he
showed also that arrays of particles appeared to have "field-like"
effects on light.
Petra van der Heijden, Leiden Observatory
(heijden@strw.leidenuniv.nl)
Friday,
November 21st: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine A
Educating the General Public: Frederik Kaiser
(1808-1872) and the Popularization of Astronomy and the Natural Sciences in the
Netherlands
Frederik Kaiser
(1808-1872) was the Netherlands' foremost 19th-century astronomer, and director
of Leiden Observatory throughout his life. He is known for his revival of Dutch
astronomy, which comprised the foundation of a new observatory building, the
introduction of new styles of education and research, and a successful effort
in bringing the science of astronomy to the public. Kaiser had some very
specific ideas about the popularization of the natural sciences in general, and
astronomy in particular. He wrote them down in a treatise which is probably
unique in Dutch 19th-century science. In this paper I will use Kaiser's ideas
to explore these various ways and forms of bringing science to the public, and
discuss the broad spectrum of (explicit and implicit) reasons Kaiser and his
contemporaries may have had for educating the general public. I will then try
to answer the question whether a Dutch style of popularization can be
distinguished, and what may have been specific for the popularization of
astronomy.
Frans van Lunteren, Utrecht University and Vrije
Universiteit Amsterdam (f.h.vanlunteren@phys.uu.nl)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm William
Dawes A
Dutch Physicists and Causality Before, During, and
After World War I
The interwar period
saw an unusual concern among Dutch physicists with the philosophical
foundations and implications of physical doctrines. In a way reminiscent of
Paul Formans Weimar Physics, some
repudiated conventional views on causality and even adapted the content
of their theories to cherished cultural values. Unlike their German colleagues,
however, they did not connect their revaluations to problems within atomic
physics, but rather to Einsteins theory of relativity. Moreover, their attitude
cannot simply be explained as a postwar reaction to a hostile intellectual
environment, as Forman suggested in the German case. For misgivings with regard
to causality among Dutch physicists can also be found before and during the
war. It seems more fruitful to regard these philosophical concerns as genuine
expressions of the cultural mood of the early twentieth-century-Netherlands.
Elisabeth van Meer, University of Minnesota
(vanm0020@tc.umn.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm William
Dawes A
From Individualism to Socialism via Technocracy: The
Americanization Debate in Czechoslovakia (1918-1948)
The influence of
American technology and culture on national identity was much debated in
inter-war Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia was hardly the only European
nation-state to be engaged in an Americanization debate at that time. However,
the Czechoslovak case had some unique features that would influence the
political development of the nation. The debate can be divided up into three
phases. During the 1920s, there was basically a 'clash of two cultures.' At the
heart of the controversy stood the relationship between American technology and
individualism. Engineers promoted American methods of production arguing that
these would facilitate individual development. By contrast, many members of the
liberal arts, internationally acclaimed playwright Karel Capek first among
them, warned against an embrace of what he saw as "machine
civilization." In the 1930s, the debate centered around the American
technocracy movement and its calls for engineers to take control of politics.
As the country was struck by mass-unemployment, professionals from both sides
joined together for the first time to promote economic planning. The experience
of WWII, set the tone for a final debate on American methods. Members of both
professions tried to combine Americanization with socialism, before
Soviet-style socialism forced the debate to go underground in 1948.
A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Southern Polytechnic State
University (abvr@mindspring.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine B
The Last Catastrophist: Joseph Prestwich and the
Submergence of Western Europe, 1890-1895
Joseph Prestwich, a
respected British geologist at the end of a long and distinguished career,
proposed in the early 1890s that large portions of coastal Western Europe had
been submerged within the geologically recent past. He argued that Stone Age humans had witnessed, and been
affected by, this submergence, and speculated explicitly on its relationship to
the story of Noah. Prestwich's
three papers on the submergence were not the work of a "scriptural
geologist" shouting in the professional wilderness. Published in leading journals, they
were his final attempt to come to grips with two critical, unresolved issues
that had dogged the geological community throughout his career. The first issue was methodological: How
to estimate the absolute ages of geological deposits. The second, intimately related to it, was conceptual: How to
come to grips with the evident antiquity of the human race.
Koen Vermeir, Leuven University
(koen.vermeir@hiw.kuleuven.ac.be)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes A
'Magical Instruments' for Visualizing the Invisible:
Instruments/Illustrations/Texts
Usually, scientific
instruments are considered to be a means to discover new facts or, as in the
demonstration lectures of Rohault and sGravesande, to demonstrate known
scientific theories. In this paper, I will show that instruments were used for
other means as well, and that relations between texts, figures and instruments
are often very complex, and depend on the specific context and aim of the
author. Taking Kirchers Ars Magna as a case-study, I will argue that this work is not just
an encyclopedia or a list of instruments. In the Ars Magna texts and instruments are
intrinsically connected; the metaphysical preface and epilogue are crucial for
the interpretation of the pictures and descriptions of the instruments in the
rest of the book. The instruments, on the other hand, are the necessary test,
concretization, and visualization of Kirchers metaphysical principles. Texts
and instruments are mutually indispensable for his work, which aimed at a
visualization of the invisible. I will argue that Kircher used a special kind
of demonstration, which I will call analogical demonstration, to realize this
visualization and to persuade his intended public. The book and the described
instruments (often also exhibited in the Collegio Romano) must be seen in the
context of a new Jesuit rhetoric of which Kircher was an important exponent. On
the one hand, the instruments must be read as a rhetorical text, and they
embody contemporary rhetorical figures such as the inventio, illusio and allusio. On the other hand, while the
instruments were shown in the Collegio Romano, the text, the Ars Magna itself, must be seen as a
performance as well, and its structure and function can be compared with a
performance in Kirchers museum or with the famous Jesuit theatres.
Experimental, metaphysical and theatrical demonstrations cannot be clearly
separated. This makes clear that seventeenth century texts, instruments and
figures had a complex and intimate relationship. Finally I will generalize some
of my conclusions and place them in the broader contemporary framework.
Janet Vertesi, Cornell University
(janet@vertesi.com)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am William
Dawes B
Picturing the Moon: Hevelius' and Riccioli's Visual
Debate
This paper will focus
on the selenographic images produced in the mid-seventeenth century by Jesuit
Giambattista Riccioli and Johannes Hevelius, two lunar cartographers whose
mapping projects competed for widespread acceptance. Although Hevelius' Selenographia (1647) was applauded for its
many detailed, self-engraved pictures of the moon, his cartography and proposed
nomenclature were supplanted by Riccioli's as offered in Almagestum Novum (1651), in spite of the latter's
simplistic pictures and heavy-handed Earth-centred cosmology. Exploring this paradox through
pictorial analysis, this paper will compare three types of images common to
both Selenographia
and Almagestum Novum using an analytical tool developed by Svetlana Alpers in The Art
of Describing
(1983). A focus on this visual debate exposes the tensions evoked by new
technologies of vision, competing cultures of perception and changing ideas of
experience in seventeenth century astronomy; as both selenographers grappled
with questions about the role of representation and what kinds of knowledge
could be generated visually, the successes and failures of their competing
mapping projects ultimately shaped the early course of the visual culture of
astronomical imaging.
Marga Vicedo-Castello, Harvard University
(vicedo@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Cambridge
Primate Love: Mothers, Machines, and Morals
Love is a wondrous state, deep, tender and rewarding, but an
improper topic for experimental research. With these words, Harry F. Harlow
started his 1958 Presidential Address to the American Psychological
Association. His talk The Nature of Love would change the status of love
within the walls of the laboratory and beyond. His experiments raising rhesus
monkeys with surrogate cloth mothers have become legendary in the social
sciences and popular culture. According to this legend, Harlow showed that
maternal care in infancy was essential for adult sexual adjustment and mental
health and, thus, corroborated in non-human primates the theories of
mother-infant attachment developed by John Bowlby and other psychoanalysts.
According to Harlows detractors, he was simply a mouth-piece for the cultural
assumptions of his time regarding womens roles as mothers. In this paper, I
analyze Harlows views on maternal instincts and love in the context of
psychoanalystss and ethologistss ideas about instinctual behavior. I examine
the development of Harlows experimental program and the debate about the
implications of his results. I argue that Harlow did not support
psychoanalystss views about the determinant role of experiences in infancy and
the essential role of the mother in infant development. More generally, I show
how scientistss ideas about human behavior were framed between the allure and
the fear of the beast and the machine. In constructing a chain among instincts,
behavior, and emotions, scientists placed maternal love precariously between
the natural, the mechanical, and the moral. In turning mother love into an
instinctual mandate, scientists constructed a virtue beyond reason and beyond
praise. Such are the paradoxes of science and love.
Fernando Vidal, Max Planck Institute for the
History of Science (vidal@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Cambridge
Imagination and Canonization: Prospero Lambertini's
Discussion of Miracle Cures
The Catholic Church
does not beatify or canonize individuals on the sole basis of miracles
attributed to them, but it requires miracles (which it considers as God-sent
signs of holiness), as well as evidence for them. Cures make up most of such
miracles; and since at least the 13th century, the Church has called upon medical
judgment to examine them. While, as noted by David Gentilcore, scepticism about
miracles would be too much to ask of a procedure designed to celebrate them,
physicians have long played a crucial role in beatification and canonization,
and the entire procedure depends largely on the rigor with which miracles are
verified. In 1734-38, Prospero Lambertini, archbishop of Bologna and future
pope Benedict XIV, systematized it in De Servorum Dei Beatificatione et
Beatorum Canonizatione, which (in spite of the later simplification of the process) is
still the authoritative "manual" in the matter. A substantial part of
the work is devoted to miracles, with emphasis on looking for natural causes
before concluding that a cure (or stigmata, or tears of blood, or the
incorruptibility or resurrection of a corpse) constitute a miracle. Particulary
important is Lambertini's account of the imagination as a pathogenic and
healing agent, capable, in addition, of producing the belief that an event is
supernatural. This paper will examine Lambertini's account in its
epistemological, theological, and psycho-medical context.
Adelheid Voskuhl, Cornell University
(acv3@cornell.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm William
Dawes A
'Bodily Motions Betraying Emotional Involvement':
Technical and Textual Production of Music-making Automata in late 18th Century
Germany and Switzerland
My presentation will
be concerned with the technical and textual production of mechanical humans -
'automata' - in late 18th century Germany and Switzerland. This period is often
considered to be unusually productive both in the construction of artefacts and
in literary and philosophical elaboration on the theme of machine-men. One of
the problems coming with the investigation of a setting so suffused with
meaning and connotation, however, is to understand precisely the nature of the
interplay between artisan and literary cultures. My main examples will be a set
of three spectacular automata - a writer, a draughtsman, and a woman piano player
- built in the late 1770s by the Swiss clockmakers Pierre and Henri-Louis
Jaquet-Droz and a set of two satirical sketches by the German writer Jean Paul
written in the early 1780. I will look at the circumstances of the automata's
production in a Swiss clockmaking workshop and then follow a 'chain of texts'
that leads from newspaper articles reporting on the Jaquet-Droz automatas
regular public performances via more general reports and descriptions on them
in almanacs, calendars, and political or literary magazines in the years
following their construction up to their mention in two satirical sketches by
the young Jean Paul in the early and mid-1780s (Jean Paul most likely never had
the chance to see the automata himself). Jean Pauls texts are a remarkable
microcosm of contemporary concerns over the relationship between mechanical
motion and artistic expression. The analysis of the production of texts
between reports on the automatas initial public performance and their
mention in specific literary elaboration a few years later will help explain
and interpret the artefacts and texts with respect to each other. I will
finally spend some time on a close reading of one of Jean Paul's short
satirical texts to mark the various exegetical techniques they require and
demonstrate their relevance in the readings of late 18th century machine-men.
Steven Walton, Penn State University
(saw23@psu.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Haym
Saloman
Daniel Santbechs Aristotelian Ballistics, or, What
was he thinking?!?
Daniel Santbechs
commentary, Problematum astronomicorum et geometricorum (1561), offered the reader a
complete grasp of cannon balls flight (complectens absolutum artificium
eiaculandi sphaeras tormentarias) just as the fusion of practice and theory in the
Scientific Revolution got under way.
Modern commentators have rejoiced in reproducing his woodcuts, showing
how foolish and moribund an Aristotelian conception of violent and natural
motion was, and how out of touch with the new mechanics these commentators
really were, for Santbechs triangular trajectories show cannon balls ejected
straight out of the cannons mouth to an apogee, where they apparently stop
dead and fall straight down to the ground. Rarely, however, have modern commentators tried to
understand this admittedly curious trajectory in the context of the entire
book. The Problematum is Santbechs only work (and in
fact the only evidence we have of him at all). An Aristotelian commentary published in conjunction with his
new edition of Regiomontanus, the book sought to derive a practical mechanics
of topics as diverse as the construction of sundials, aqueducts, and
cartography, even though at first glance it is a theoretical work with initial
sections on phenomena and prime movers (observationibus tn phainomenn) and canonibus primi motus). As such, Santbechs methods, while unorthodox, were an
initial salvo for the mixt mathematicals and are an interesting commentary on
the sort of argument Osiander used to try to protect Copernicus less than two
decades before: it is the job of the [scientist] to think up or construct
whatever causes or hypotheses he pleases such that, by the assumption of these
causes, those same movements can be calculated from the principles of geometry. Here I want to explore what Santbech
was doing with ballistics in 1561 as well as the rhetorical space in which he
tried to situate the work after Tartaglia yet before Galileo. Ultimately his contribution to
ballistics is minimal, although his methodological approach was well ahead of
its time.
Jessica Wang, UCLA (jwang@ssc.ucla.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A
The Science of Law in New Deal America: Legal Realism
and the Administrative State in the 1930s
Historians of
American science have paid considerable attention to scientists as political
activists, but they understand far less well the role of science itself as a
basis for political action. How
does science uphold conceptions of law and political authority? From the mid-nineteenth century until
the middle of the twentieth century, the idea of law as a form of scientific
inquiry heavily influenced American jurisprudence. The meaning of this notion varied dramatically from
Christopher Langdells case method of the 1870s and 1880s to Roscoe Pounds
sociological jurisprudence in the 1910s, to the legal realism of Herman
Oliphant and Hessel Yntema in the late 1920s, but in an age of modernity, legal
theorists remained confident about the scientific character of their
calling. Both the natural sciences
and the law shared a common epistemological mission as means of determining
truth; consequently, legal scholars consistently sought to place law on firmer
ground by modeling it on scientific methods. This paper focuses on the early
history of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) under the New Deal and
examines the ways in which scientific conceptions of law shaped public policy
in the 1930s. Three of the early chairmen
of the SEC–James M. Landis, William O. Douglas, and Jerome N.
Frank–were deeply influenced by the legal realist movement and
pragmatisms reconceptualization of science as an arena of uncertainty,
contingent truth, and experimentation.
All three defended the rise of the administrative state by appealing to
the scientific and technical basis of modern society and the need for expertise
in government. In particular,
Frank derived his defense of the New Deals expansion of administrative power
explicitly from a philosophy of science that challenged positivist concepts of
law and replaced beliefs about judicial certainty with a call for policy
experimentation. By understanding
the place of science in New Deal legal and political culture, historians can
comprehend more fully the ways in which science, as a means of thought and
action, has played a profound role in shaping political and social experience
in the era of high modernity.
Nadine M. Weidman, Harvard University
(weidman@fas.harvard.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Cambridge
The Aggression Instinct: Masculinity and Pop Ethology
in 1960s America
In 1966, two works of
popular ethology appeared that profoundly reshaped American conceptions of
human nature. On Aggression, by the ethologist Konrad Lorenz, and The Territorial
Imperative, by
the American playwright Robert Ardrey, naturalized aggression by arguing that
humans had a basic biological tendency toward violence against members of their
own species. The most outspoken critic of the doctrine of innate aggression was
the American anthropologist M.F. Ashley Montagu. This paper will examine the
link that these writers forged between aggression and masculinity. They contended that it was specifically
the males of all species, including human males, who possessed the killer
instinct, and that that instinct could be traced, in human evolutionary
ancestry, to a violent, armed, proto-man.
How did the concept of the aggressive male function in the writings of
Lorenz and Ardrey, as well as in those of their followers, the ethologist Desmond
Morris and the psychiatrist Anthony Storr? I will compare Lorenzs forging of the link in both his
scientific and popular writings, and explore the extent to which Montagu
opposed it. I will show that the
masculinized aggression instinct helped put ethology on the map in the
mid-twentieth century, giving it a popular standing that earlier
social-psychological studies of aggression could not match, and that, as a
result, ethologys scientific status and popular appeal developed
simultaneously. I will argue that
the concept of the aggressive male also functioned across scientific
disciplines. Not only did it
consolidate ethology, but it helped establish a new paradigm for physical
anthropology in which gender, rather than race, became the organizing concept;
and it made appearances in the neurosciences and in the burgeoning study of
hormone biology as well. Finally,
I will examine the political uses of the masculinized aggression instinct by
the Lorenzians and their opponents as they participated in public debates about
violence—from urban race riots to the threat of nuclear war—in
1960s America.
Charles Weiner, MIT (cweiner@mit.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A
Social Responsibility in Science From the Bomb to
Cloning
A major legacy of the
atomic bomb was its effects on the consciousness of scientists in all fields.
Although many continued to work on weapons after the war and many sought or
accepted military funding for their research at universities, others assessed their
individual and collective social responsibility and debated and acted on the
ethical, social and political issues raised by their research and its
applications. These concerned scientists tried to prevent possible military use
of their work. They also felt the need to anticipate negative consequences of
beneficially intended research and applications. Some felt a responsibility to speak out to provide early
warning to the larger society, or to call attention to harm already done. They also organized for political
action on controversies including nuclear arms control, chemical and biological
warfare, toxic materials in the environment, nuclear reactor safety, the
effects of radiation upon human health, the safety of recombinant DNA research
and the ethical limits of genetic engineering. The paper focuses on scientists
who became involved in these issues at the local, national and international
levels, and outlines the patterns of their responses, the conflicts and
difficulties they faced, the options, constraints and incentives influencing
their behavior, and their successes and failures. Drawing on archival documents
and oral history interviews, I explore how the personal politics of these scientists and the larger
political context relate to professional contexts including scientific
institutions, nurturing laboratories, role models, and the availability and
awareness of alternative roles.
Sheila Weiss, Clarkson University
(sheilafw@clarkson.edu)
Friday,
November 21st: 9:00 - 11:45 am Thomas
Paine A
Bio-Medical Research
The proposed paper
will examine one of Germanys premier research institutions for biomedical
research, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut fr Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre
und Eugenik (KWIA), as a test case for the way in which politics and
science--in this case, human heredity--served as resources for each during the
Third Reich. Directed during its eighteen year existence (1927-1945) by the
Freiburg anthropologist Eugen Fischer (1874-1967) and later, beginning in 1942,
by Fischers student and confidant, the medical geneticist Otmar Freiherr von
Verschuer (1896-1969), the KWIA was an institute dedicated to research on human
heredity (broadly defined to include genetically-based anthropology, medical
genetics, and the applied science of eugenics). It was also the institute that
bore (and continues to bear) the historical burden of the notorious Josef
Mengele-Auschwitz connection—for many, the very symbol of research devoid
of moral boundaries in the twentieth century. An institutional analysis of the
KWIA reveals the power of human genetics, not only as a political resource in
the carefully negotiated Faustian bargain between Fischer and officials of
the Nazi state, but as the KWIA researchers primary tool in their own
professional self-fashioning under the changing political conditions in which
they and the Institute operated. It also demonstrates that the international
context of human heredity may have been just as important as its intellectual
content in its function as a resource for KWIA researchers and National
Socialist State and Party officials. And finally, a study of the KWIA suggests
that when National Socialist politics became a resource for the science of
human heredity itself, far more was changed than research budgets. The very
nature of scientific practice in the field of human genetics was
altered—a change revealed in the wholly unethical research practices of
at least some of Germanys most renowned biomedical practitioners at the KWIA.
Paul White, University of Cambridge
(psw24@cam.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Haym
Saloman
Letters and the Scientific Life in the Age of
Professionalization
As a medium of
scientific communication, correspondence was substantially transformed over the
course of the 19th century. Various developments, all closely linked to
professionalization, such as the expansion of printed materials, the increasing
prevalence of non-verbal technologies for observing and recording, and the
concentration of research in institutional centers, tended to displace
correspondence from its former prominence as a vehicle of exchange. At the same
time, letter writing became the most authentic expression of private life, of
inner feelings, and of domestic and friendly bonds. Codes of plain speaking, of
unaffected manner, and of 'photographic' inscription, codes which bore equally
on scientific writing of the period, underpinned the authority of letters as
genuine testimony of individual character, and as such, secured their
transference into print, as the dramatic centre of Victorian biography. Crucial
both for the maintenance of professional identity, and for communication by
those, especially women, with little or no access to other places of scientific
exchange, correspondence is thus an important site for exploring how the
possibilities of scientific participation were reshaped, through the
articulation of highly gendered spaces of 'public' and 'private', new
categories of scientific work, such as popular and professional, and new forms
of authorship and authenticity.
Jeffrey R. Wigelsworth, University of Saskatchewan
(jeffwigelsworth@hotmail.com)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A
English Deists as Heretical Newtonians
Due chiefly to the
efforts of M. C. Jacob, we know that the deist John Toland cited Newton's Principia in his arguments for a
materialistic universe. Jacob deals almost exclusively with Toland and suggests
that what was true of Toland was true of other deists. Scholars have accepted this conclusion
and subsequent studies of deists and natural philosophy focus on Toland. However, other deists engaged with
Newton's works (physics, optics, and chronology) and those of his closest
circle (Samuel Clarke and William Whiston). I demonstrate that several deists
such as Anthony Collins, Matthew Tindal, Thomas Chubb, Thomas Morgan, and, of
course, Toland all employed aspects of Newtonian philosophy, in a variety of
ways, to advance their goal of rational religion and freedom from authority and
superstition. Deists held Newton's work in high esteem and their
interpretations changed to reflect contemporary views. I suggest that we use
the label of 'Heretical Newtonians' to describe the deists who used Newton to
describe a non-Newtonian universe. By examining these writings, it becomes
apparent that deists' use of Newtonian philosophy cannot be described with
facile categories or subsumed into the person of Toland; moreover, this study
will contribute to our understanding of deism and the dissemination of Newtonian
philosophy in the eighteenth century.
Andrew S. Winston, University of Guelph
(awinston@uoguelph.ca)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 3:30 - 5:30 pm Thomas
Paine A
Good Jews, Bad Jews, Dangerous Jews: Anti-Semitism and
the Hiring of Psychologists, 1925 - 1955
In this paper, I
discuss how Jewish identity and character were conceptualized in letters of
recommendation for psychologists from 1925 to 1955. These letters, primarily from the R. S. Woodworth papers at
Columbia University and the E. G. Boring papers at Harvard, implicitly or
explicitly contrasted bad Jews possessing objectionable traits with Good Jews who were free from the
defects that Jews were thought to have. A standard formulation was used, consisting
of the statement that he is a Jew,
but.... followed by an assertion that this candidate had none of the expected
defects. The uniformity of this
disclaimer in history (Novick, 1988), philosophy (Kuklick, 1977), and other
academic disciplines suggests that
these issues were not specific to psychologists but reflect a fundamental set of social processes. I
will argue that the discursive practices regarding Jewish job candidates should
be viewed in the context of shifting conceptions of collegiality in the
academy, and perceived threats to the harmony of relatively small scholarly
groups. However, these
constructions of Jewish character were sufficiently flexible to accommodate a
shift from racial to cultural conceptions of Jewish identity and could be
deployed as a means of denying rather than expressing prejudice while
preserving exclusion. I will
propose that the formulation of Jewish character and fears of a Jewish
incursion in academia lie on a continuum with more virulent ideas of a Jewish
conspiracy to control the social sciences. These notions of dangerous Jews, drawing on a number of
traditional antisemitic themes, centered around Franz Boas and the Boasians,
and served a variety of functions for segregationist and politically extreme
groups from the 1940s to the present.
Alison Winter, University of Chicago
(awinter@uchicago.edu)
Sunday,
November 23rd: 9:00 - 11:45 am President's
Ballroom A and B
Chemistry of truth and sciences of identity on film
1930-1950
Chemicals that could
be used scientifically to force an individual to tell the truth -chemicals
dubbed "truth sera" - were first described in 1922. Ever since, the
notion of a "truth serum" and "truth drugs" has remained
tenaciously within popular culture. One of the most important reasons for the
development and survival of the notion of a pharmaceutical technology of
authenticity was the role of truth drugs in psychiatric research and treatment
during the 1930s through the 1950s. This paper will trace that history, giving
special emphasis to one feature of it, namely the role of motion pictures. Threaded through this story will be
another one, about the way in which researchers used the new medium of film to
convey aspects of their experimental and clinical phenomena. I'll make the case
that in different and conflicting ways what researchers were after was a
technology of authenticity (rather than of truth per se), and I will examine
how they sought to use motion pictures to help them develop and disseminate
this technology.
Charles Withers, University of Edinburgh (cwjw@geo.ed.ac.uk)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Thomas
Paine B
Mapping the Niger, 1798-1832: Travel, Trust and
Testimony in Late Enlightenment Geographical Enquiry
The paper will
examine the means employed to solve, between 1798 and 1832, the 2,000-year old
'Niger problem'. Attention will be paid to the work of the two men who, in
1802-3 and 1821 respectively, correctly identified the end point of the river
but who never travelled to see it for themselves, and to the expeditions which
solved the problem through fieldwork. The paper raises questions about the
place of trust and testimony in the making of maps and the different practices
which underlay what was held to be authoritative geographical enquiry.
Gabriel K. Wolfenstein, UCLA (gkw@ucla.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm Crispus
Attucks
Statistics of Empire, Empire of Statistics: The
British Imperial Census, 1881-1901
In the second half of
the Nineteenth century, statistics had become firmly ensconced as a method of
apprehending the world, in terms of understanding and control. From local surveys to the largest
undertakings, statistics were everywhere.
They reflected existing conditions, provided materials for governance,
and created identities. It should,
therefore, come as no surprise that there were statistical inquiries into so
intricate, vast, and contradictory an entity as the British Empire. Indeed, of the many numerical surveys,
the most complex, and perhaps the most illustrative of these complexities, were
the attempts to take an Imperial Census in the last decades of the
century. After 1871, as the census
had become an increasingly routine and accepted way for the nation to know
itself, there grew within both the official bureaucracies and the statistical
societies a desire for an Imperial Census. This Census would provide information on the whole Empire at
a specific moment in time. Looking
in particular at the bureaucratic discussions, materials from the India Office,
and the vast periodical and pamphlet literature, this paper will explore
difficulties in taking this census (finally successful - at least in part - in
1901), and suggest that such an enquiry served to simultaneously affirm and
reinforce its existence - and (perhaps inadvertently) to highlight the fractured
nature of that Empire.
Chen-Pang Yeang, MIT (cpyeang@mit.edu)
Saturday,
November 22nd: 1:30 - 3:10 pm William
Dawes B
A Natural Phenomenon or an Instrumental Artifact? The
Case of Quasi-Elastic Force
This paper discusses
how radio scientists in the 1920s and 30s conceived the ontological attribute
of a controversial concept – quasi-elastic force. The British physicist
William Henry Eccles suggested in 1912 that refraction by the ionized
atmosphere bended the paths of radio waves along the earth's curvature. The
core of the theory was that the dielectric constant of an ionic medium
decreased with ion density. Owing to the discovery of the ionosphere, Eccles's
theory was widely accepted. Thus radio scientists studied wave propagation in
man-made ionic media in order to shed light on the behaviors of waves in
nature. In 1913, Balthasar van der Pol, Edwin Barton, and Walter Kilby at the
Cavendish Laboratory found from tabletop experiments that, contrary to Eccles's
prediction, the dielectric constant of an ionic gas increased with the degree
of ionization as the latter became high. This odd behavior was devoid of
explanation until 1927, when Henri Gutton and Jean Clment at the University of
Nancy proposed a hypothesis: Every ion experienced an elastic-like force due to
the collective action of other ions. This 'quasi-elastic force' had the effect
of increasing the dielectric constant, but the effect was salient only when the
ion density was large. Gutton and Clment's hypothesis incurred both positive and
negative responses. P. O. Pedersen and Joergen Rybner in Denmark argued that
the odd phenomenon was caused by the extra capacitance of the gas tubes used in
the experiments instead of an inter-ion force, whereas Camille Gutton in France
confirmed the phenomenon with another experiment in which the effect mentioned
by Pedersen and Joergen was minimum. In 1930, Edward Appleton and E. C. Child
at the University of London, following an inquiry by the General Electric
researcher Irvin Lagmuir, contended that the odd variation of the dielectric
constant was caused by sheaths of charges formed on the metal plates in
laboratory setup that bounded the ionic gas. Therefore, the phenomenon was an
artifact produced by apparatus. In the real, unbounded ionosphere, it did not
occur. The brief history of the quasi-elastic force reflected a difficulty
scientists in the early 20th century encountered when they tried to study the
planetary nature with laboratory methods. In this period, the inventions of
'mimic' devices such as cloud chamber raised the hope of understanding
meteorological or geological processes with tabletop models [Peter Galison:Image and Logic, Gregory Good (ed.), The Earth, the Heavens, and the CarnegieInstitution of Washington]. But models had limitations. When radio scientists
replaced the ionosphere with apparatus-generated ionic gases, they faced the
question whether an observed extraordinary phenomenon was a hidden natural fact
or an instrument-induced artifact. Quasi-elastic force was not only a failed
theory; it was a symptom of an epistemic problem concerning the applicability
of models.