HSS Awards for 2005
For Outstanding Service to the History of Science
Frederick Henry Burkhardt
From time to time the History of Science Society honors a member of the Society for outstanding service to the discipline in domains not covered by the regularly established awards, prizes, and medals. This year the Society is extremely pleased to award a special citation to Frederick Henry Burkhardt in recognition of his extraordinary contributions to advancing scholarship in the history of science through publishing the correspondence of Charles Darwin.
For over thirty years Fred Burkhardt has been devoted to a single cause--publishing the complete correspondence (around 14,500 letters) of Charles Darwin. How he came to this project provides an interesting lesson in academic drive, creativity, connection, and persistence. Indeed, to understand fully Fred's accomplishments, it is helpful to review some of the milestones of his long and distinguished academic career.
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Fred received both his A.B. and Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia. In 1937, he joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Wisconsin, first as a lecturer and then as assistant professor. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Fred was called away from his service in the Navy to join the Office of Strategic Services, which put his fluency in German to good use. After the war, he returned to Wisconsin but was there for only a year before becoming President of Bennington College, Vermont. Ten years later, in 1957, Fred was appointed President of the American Council of Learned Societies, serving in this high profile position until his retirement in 1974.
Long accustomed to an active life in academic service, Fred began looking around for a project that could engage his Olympian interests and expertise. He was already involved in The Correspondence of William James Project, and from 1975 to 1988 served as a General Editor of the ACLS-supported edition of The Works of William James . Then, in a fateful turn of events, Fred was asked to participate in the conference on the Comparative Reception of Darwinism held in April 1972 in Austin, Texas. While investigating Darwin's reception by the learned societies of England and Scotland, Fred was astounded to learn that no one had yet published Darwin's complete correspondence, and so in 1974 Fred turned his considerable talent and energies to championing the cause of Mr. Darwin.
Fred soon established a working partnership with the redoubtable Sydney Smith, Cambridge embryologist and long-time Darwin scholar. Sydney was the intellectual gatekeeper to the unrivalled Darwin Archive in the Cambridge University Library. He had diligently acquired an incomparable knowledge of surviving Darwin manuscripts and a keen insight into Darwin's working practices. While Fred and Sydney were matched in their enthusiasm to present the real Darwin to the world, Sydney's failing health meant that Fred became the powerhouse behind the project they initiated to locate and catalogue the entirety of the surviving correspondence, a project that soon grew to encompass a definitive edition of all letters to and from Darwin.
Fred's hands-on approach led in organizing, seeking the necessary funding, collecting correspondence from libraries, archives, and individuals the world over, and developing editorial policies that would best preserve Darwin's original intent and yet conform to the needs of publishing standards. Decades later the Darwin Correspondence Project reaps the benefit of these early, critical decisions. The small research team he put together in the U.S. and Cambridge first paid dividends in 1985 with the publication of both the Calendar and the first volume of the Correspondence. In the intervening twenty years, through the efforts of rotating teams of historians of science, volunteer proofreaders headed by his wife Dr. Anne Schlabach Burkhardt (herself now a Darwin expert), and, since 1991, senior editor and now Project Director Duncan M. Porter--all of whom mirror Fred's passion for Darwin--fourteen volumes have appeared (with the fifteenth soon to be published), in an edition that will eventually run to thirty volumes and see completion around 2020. Scholars the world over benefit not just from the printed version but also the Project's online database, which will eventually include all the published letters in a searchable format.
Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize
In her Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II, Kathleen Broome Williams highlights a little studied chapter in the history of women in science: women's contributions to war. Skillfully weaving individual biographies into broad cultural and political contexts, Williams focuses on the achievements of four exceptional womenMary Sears, in charge of oceanographic intelligence; Florence van Straten, meteorologist who analyzed the use of weather in combat; Grace Murray Hopper, computer scientist who developed the first universal computer language COBOL; and Mina Spiegel Reese, the only woman on the Applied Mathematics Panel. Carefully researched and compelling, Williams' Improbable Warriors adds significantly to our understanding of gender-and specifically the role marital status can play-in the professional and scientific workplace. Much of what we read here resonates with issues surrounding women's standing in military science today: As a North Carolina newspaper commented in 1944 with reference to the Navy's attempt to recruit women, "Men Still Direct the Show."
Londa Schiebinger, Chair, Elizabeth Lunbeck, Fernando Vidal
Derek Price/Rod Webster Award
The Price/Webster Award Committee unanimously and enthusiastically awards
the 2005 prize to Marc J. Ratcliff for his article "Abraham Trembley's
Strategy of Generosity and the Scope of Celebrity in the Mid-Eighteenth
Century" (Isis, December 2004, Volume 95, pages 555-575).
Using a wealth of published and unpublished sources, Marc Ratcliff explores Abraham Trembley's strategy of scientific generosity. By freely sharing his curious polyps and techniques for growing them, Trembley permitted other naturalists to confirm his ingenious experiments on regeneration -- and established the biological laboratory, filled with jars of experimental specimens, as a distinctive scientific site, with its own disciplines, career paths,and opportunities for fame. Moreover, by refusing to speculate on the souls of polyps, Trembley and his colleagues reinforced the cultural boundaries between science and metaphysics. Ratcliff's elegant,insightful narrative enriches our conceptions of Enlightenment science.
Judith Grabiner, Chair, Diane Paul, Karen Reeds
Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize
The Hazen Prize Committee of the History of Science Society is proud to award the prize to Professor Pamela E. Mack, Clemson University.
In his letter in support of Professor Mack's nomination, the Chair of her department, Thomas Kuehn, calls her "an innovative, even adventuresome teacher, " who is so committed to shaping and reshaping "scientific and technological subjects for undergrads and grad students" that she appears never to teach the same course twice. In addition to her regular courses in the history of American science and technology, she has developed courses in The Forest in America, The Space Age, and Mill Towns North and South. Her home institution honored her teaching by awarding her the D.W Bradley award for outstanding contributions to the Honors Program in 2001.
But the Hazen Prize was designed to honor more than teaching excellence, important as that is: the Committee feels it has the additional task of recognizing those who directed an important share of their professional efforts toward expanding the pedagogical frontier of the history of science. Professor Mack has certainly fulfilled this criterion through the diversity of settings in which she has introduced issues in science, technology, and society. These include not only her department and the Honors College, but also General Education, through which she coordinated a series of STS workshops to develop multidisciplinary course proposals among faculty from the sciences, engineering, and the humanities.
Pamela Mack is the outstanding candidate for the 2005 Hazen Prize. The Committee is proud to honor her contributions to the History of Science and Technology, and feels that it is particularly appropriate that she receive the award in a year in which HSS and SHOT meet together.
Lisa Rosner, Chair, Barbara Becker, Mott Greene
Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize
The Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize is awarded each year by the History of Science Society “to the author of a book useful in undergraduate teaching or which promotes public understanding of the history of science.” This year's committee – consisting of Nathan Brooks, Richard Olson, and Charlotte M. Porter – is honored to announce the award of the 2005 Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Award to Alan Kraut for Goldberger's War: The Life and Works of a Public Health Crusader , published in 2003 by Hill and Wang. This story of Dr. Joseph Goldberger focuses on his research to establish that pellagra, a debilitating and sometimes fatal disease that afflicted many southern poor, was caused by a dietary deficiency and his crusades both to convince physicians that it was not caused by a germ and to get poor southerners to change their dietary patterns. It fascinated us because it works on so many levels and raises so many important issues. On one level it is an openly and unashamedly old fashioned tale of heroism, written so compellingly and evocatively that one of the committee could not put the book down until it was finished, and another reported being emotionally drained at the end of the chapter on Goldberger's funeral. But Alan Kraut's story is informed by an interest in and awareness of recent trends in the social studies of science and cultural studies. It is a story of the interaction of economics, politics, culture, and disease. It is a story of the mobilization of many resources from a wide variety of personal, professional, and political connections to promote an unpopular view. It is a story of the maturation of the Public Health Service into a major center of epidemiological research. It is a story of how a poor immigrant Jewish physician was able to navigate in a southern cultural context rife with antisemitism. And it is a story that raises important bioethical issues about the use of one's self and family, of orphans, of mental patients, and of prisoner “volunteers” in medical experiments. Moreover it does not hide Goldberger's moral ambivalence about some of his own actions or the stresses that his career placed on his marriage. We congratulate Alan Kraut for producing a work that is equally moving and enlightening and which deserves a wide public readership.
Nathan Brooks, Chair, Richard Olson, Charlotte Porter
Pfizer Prize
The Pfizer Prize for 2005 is awarded to Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chemistry , written by William Newman and Lawrence Principe, and published by the University of Chicago Press in 2002. To unlock the secrets of the history of alchemy, Newman and Principe refine the surviving laboratory notebooks of the seventeenth-century American George Starkey, transmuting the dross of conventional wisdom into unadulterated historiographical gold. In their hands, this hitherto minor character is elevated to the central figure in the early modern science they call chymistry. Starkey becomes a crucial transition between his own hero, a splendidly revitalized J. B. Van Helmont, and a Robert Boyle whose contributions to chymistry turn out to be much less original than we all had thought. Boyle, we learn, deliberately and systematically concealed his substantial chymical debts to Starkey, his first tutor and guide in this field; these debts were even greater than Boyle knew, for he also learned much from the chrysopoetic writings of Eirenaeus Philalethes, without ever realizing that Philalethes was Starkey's pseudonym. Newman's and Principe's innovative focus on the actual content and practice of laboratory chymistry reveals that the work of Starkey and his predecessors possessed features that until recently were associated only with the period of Lavoisier—open-minded empiricism, close interplay between theory and experiment, and quantitative application of the principle of mass balance to infer the course of chemical reactions. Their reading of chymistry ca. 1550-1700 thus utterly transforms our understanding of the formative stages of what would become modern chemistry. But the significance of this work does not end there. The book is a model for the further extension of laboratory studies in history of science, and at the same time sets an example of how much we still can learn about science from close study of intellectual-historical sources. Based on extraordinary research in difficult primary sources, brilliantly analyzed and gracefully written, Alchemy Tried in the Fire is a landmark of contemporary scholarship in the history of science.
Sarton Medal
Professor A. I. Sabra
The Sarton Medal is the most prestigious honor the History of Science Society confers upon scholars in the discipline. It recognizes a lifetime of scholarly achievement and is awarded annually to a historian of science selected from a distinguished field nominated by members of the Committee on Honors and Prizes, the wider Society administration, and ultimately any member of the Society. It is my honor to introduce this year's recipient of the Sarton Medal, A. I. Sabra, Professor Emeritus in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.
Professor Sabra's scholarly career spans now fully fifty years in teaching and scholarship in the history of Islamic science, and especially the exact sciences in Islam and the West. Following his undergraduate work at the University of Alexandria, Professor Sabra pursued postgraduate work in the philosophy of science under Karl Popper at the University of London, receiving his PhD 1955. The remainder of the ‘50s was spent in Alexandria, where he held positions as Lecturer and then Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy. In the 1960s, he returned to London, where he was a Senior Research Fellow, then Special Lecturer, and finally Reader in the History of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute. In 1972, he moved to Harvard University, where he remained until his retirement in 1996.
Beginning with a note on Newton's corpuscular theory of light published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 1954, the history of optics has been a central focus of his more than fifty articles and thirteen books, edited volumes and translations. Most of us are thoroughly familiar with Theories of light; from Descartes to Newton (1967), now one of the great classics of postwar history of science.
Somewhat less widely read, but I think no less significant, is Professor Sabra's The Optics of Ibn Al-Haytham : Kit?b al-Man?zir. Books I-II-III (On direct vision), the Arabic text of which appeared in 1983, followed by the English translation in 1989, both of which contain introductions to and commentaries on the text, Arabic-Latin glossaries and correspondence tables, and other scholarly apparatus.
Professor Sabra's generation emphasized textual editing and translation because it saw itself as starting with few resources for scholarship, and when it looked to predecessors it could see the results that casual selection had produced: studies that were defective because of the unlucky choice of an aberrant exemplar and therefore had to be done again. If one truly believes that one's discipline is to flourish for generations, it is extraordinarily unselfish to provide one's successors with these tools.
Without editions of ancient and medieval texts, the historian must locate a suitable (and I place special emphasis on this, because without the preliminary work that goes into establishing a text, one is as likely to choose a defective copy as a superior one) exemplar, then wade through the seemingly impossible hand of the scribe, then search for sources on which the author of the text relied, and only then attempt to make some sense of the author's ideas. While it is true that classic historical interpretations can continue to serve scholars in succeeding generations, it is far more likely that a good (and again, I place emphasis here, because a poor edition serves no one) edition will continue to be a resource for generations of historians in the field. Seen from this perspective, Sabra's work in editing texts – and they are genuinely fine editions – can stand as the foundation for generations of scholars to come after him.
Faced with the overwhelming number of texts needing editions, it might have been tempting to concentrate on texts rather than interpretation. Sabra himself recognized this dilemma, for in his 1995 Distinguished Lecture to the Society, he noted that while some in his field were beginning to ask and answer larger questions about science within the larger Islamic culture, others were concerned that doing so diverted attention from the vast number of texts waiting for editions and analysis. His response?
The skeptics have a point, and I share their concern. But this is not an either/or matter. As for the argument that ‘we do not yet know enough to ask the big questions,' my answer is this: it is only by attempting to formulate appropriate questions that can be fruitfully examined in light of what we now know that we make it possible for others to come up with deeper and more probing questions in the future.
Retreats to the text invoked a day of omniscience that would never come, and in the meantime it “tempt<ed> others to fill the vacuum with easy and useless essentialist generalizations.”
Following his own advice, Sabra possessed a strong and insightful interpretive role for his discipline. In his “Science and philosophy in medieval Islamic theology: the evidence of the fourteenth century” (1994), he forcefully argued against those who would see kal?m merely as apologetics dressed up in the language of Greek philosophy. His “Situating Arabic science: Locality versus essence” (1996) and especially his “The appropriation and subsequent naturalization of Greek science in medieval Islam: A preliminary statement” (1987) emphasize still more broadly the cultural dimensions of Islamic science. Because of his interests in the exact sciences, it would have been easy for him to have fallen under the spell of emphasizing the technical over the cultural, but this has not been the case, and it is Sabra who has helped steer his discipline away from a certain narrowness. And while Bashi was among the first in line to reject facile comparisons of Islamic and Western medieval science, let me also say that his analysis of science in Islamic culture has deepened my own appreciation for the place of science in western medieval Europe, not because the answers he has suggested can be transplanted in new soil, but because his questions have challenged my assumptions about fundamental issues of transmission and assimilation of science.
It is, I think, customary in these citations for the speaker to say a few words about the recipient's teaching and direct mentorship of students. Sadly, I have no direct experience, for like the apostle on the road to Damascus – you'll have to forgive a European medievalist for invoking a biblical reference, although I suspect Bashi is reluctant to identify with his half of the image, and I'm certainly uncomfortable about Paul – I am only a recent disciple. Yet it would be hard to go very far in the discipline without finding younger (and not so young!) scholars whose careers have been enriched by personal contacts, sometimes in the classroom, but very often through the exuberant and warm generosity of his advice and assistance. First in Egypt, later in the United Kingdom, and finally in the United States, A. I. Sabra has upheld the highest standards of historical work and richly merits recognition as a Sarton Medalist.
Citation by Steven Livesey .
A. I. Sabra, “Situating Arabic Science: Locality versus Essence,” Isis 87(1996) 654-670 at 664.