2011 Prize Winners
Sarton Medal: Robert Richards
A full citation for Robert J. Richards, which places his work in context, will appear in Isis. The following précis describes aspects of his academic life.
Professor Richards holds three higher degrees: an M.A. in biological psychology (University of Nebraska), a Ph.D. in philosophy (St. Louis University) and a Ph.D. in the history of science (University of Chicago). He has served as the director of the Fishbein Center for the History of Science at the University of Chicago since 1992 and was appointed the Morris Fishbein Professor of the History of Science in 2004. He holds appointments in the Department of History, in the Department of Philosophy, in the Department of Psychology, and in Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science.
The University of Chicago has bestowed on Professor Richards numerous awards for teaching at the graduate and undergraduate level. The University appointed him Distinguished Service Professor in 2011, and Ryerson Memorial Lecturer in 2005. The University also granted him the Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Teaching in 1995, and The Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1982.
Professor Richards received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and was made a corresponding member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen in 2010.
Professor Richard’s publications are too numerous to list in this space but among his major books are The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008; Paperback, 2009), winner of the University of Chicago Press Laing Prize in 2011; The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), winner of the University of Chicago Press Laing Prize in 2004; The Meaning of Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987; paperback, 1989), winner of the 1988 Pfizer Prize awarded by the History of Science Society for the best book in history of science, and the prize of the Biophilosophy Form in 1989; Darwinian Heretics, edited with Abigail Lustig and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and the Cambridge Companion to Darwin’s Origin of Species, edited with Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Pfizer Prize: Eleanor Robson
All who teach the history of science face the question of ‘where to begin.’ Many of us start with the cuneiform tablets of the ‘land between the rivers.’ An older generation’s scholarship, best represented by Otto Neugebauer’s Exact Sciences in Antiquity, has long informed non-specialists about the subject, even as a new generation has revised and historicized that work. The 2011 Pfizer Prize recipient at once summarizes this effort, contextualizes it, and advances the project. That awardee is Dr. Eleanor Robson’s Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History, published in 2008 by Princeton University Press.
Covering over three millennia of cuneiform texts, some of which have become available through Dr. Robson’s own efforts, Mathematics in Ancient Iraq displays a mastery of difficult technical arts, including the interpretation of archeological and artifactual evidence, the decipherment of often fragmentary texts, and the analysis of scribal mathematical procedures. Dr. Robson’s skillful use and limpid explanations of these esoteric crafts undergird the larger goal of situating the writers of these texts in their societies. Here she succeeds brilliantly. Her book informs us about how scribes learned their numbers, about the skills that mattered to the bureaucrats, traders, and rulers of ancient Iraq, and even about the family networks in which those skills were maintained, sometimes over centuries. Throughout Dr. Robson balances the synoptic and particular with impeccable taste. She joins the fray on such vexed questions as the relation between the mathematical traditions of Mesopotamia and Greece, but she also drills deeply into the history of particular problems, techniques, and ideas—keeping constantly before the reader a sense of the integrity of cuneiform mathematics and its roots in practical problems, especially of mensuration. Not least remarkable, Dr. Robson succeeds in bringing readers of many levels into her enterprise, often by using photographs, sketches, maps, diagrams, and tables in ways that both exhibit and elicit historical imagination.
Mathematics in Ancient Iraq, in short, is one of those uncommon gems that advance and enliven a specialty while providing outsiders clear understanding of its contours and importance.
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John Servos, Chair
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Karen Reeds
- Katharine Park
Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize: Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway
Merchants of Doubt provides a penetrating analysis of important aspects of science and society in late twentieth century America, centering on the use of seemingly scientific methods to undermine scientific authority in popular culture and the halls of Congress. Through their powerfully argued and deftly structured study of the public debates engulfing five of the leading environmental and public-health questions of the past half-century – DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, the ozone hole, and global warming – Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway reveal a historical pattern in which a small group of science advisors undermine scientific findings and raise doubt about the work of scientific experts. Relying on the nature of science to test hypotheses in the pursuit of knowledge, the funding of those who would be harmed by health and environmental regulations, and the desire of media to present both sides on every issue, this small group of doubters have managed to hamstring ,and in some cases to kidnap, national science policy. Merchants of Doubt underlines that the history of science, as a discipline of rigorous scholarship, can offer critical insights and wise counsel to citizens and policymakers on crucial contemporary issues. By doing so, it exemplifies how historical research can illumine public policy. Oreskes and Conway write in a clear, engaging style that makes their book accessible for a wide readership. For the quality of its research, analysis, and writing, we recognize Merchants of Doubt for the History of Science Society’s leading award for books in the history of science that can reach a popular or student audience, the 2011 Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize.
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Edward J. Larson, Chair
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Maria M. Portuondo
- Robert Smith
Derek Price/Rod Webster Prize: Nuria Valverde
Nuria Valverde, "Small Parts: Crisóstomo Martínez (1638-1694), Bone Histology, and the Visual Making of Body Wholeness," Isis, Vol. 100, No. 3, (September 2009), 505-536.
In her essay, Nuria Valverde deftly explores Baroque notions of unity and community through the lens of the human skeleton, linking anatomical visual culture to broader cultural and epistemic values in a creative and illuminating fashion. In this ambitious article she draws on the historical studies of anatomy and the technology and rhetoric of visual representation to provide a powerful analysis of visualization practices and the relationship between early modern art and science in seventeenth-century Spain. In careful detail, Valverde gives us a tour of the unpublished anatomical atlas of Crisóstomo Martínez, linking his work to broader concerns of human destiny and political unity and disunity—especially in relationship to his community of engravers and anatomists.
The Committee was especially impressed with Valverde’s careful and painstaking analysis of his anatomical imagery. Exploring the significance attached to different perspectives of observing natural objects, Valverde offers a grander view of the knowledge production in the early modern world. For her, the textual practices represented in Martínez’s anatomical atlas reflect his efforts to grapple with the uncertainties of knowledge, audiences and of the integrity of the human body. Rather than focusing only on an object’s structure, his illustrations self-consciously addressed the fragmentary nature of both the body and human knowledge. These representations, thus, become explorations of the relationships of parts (organs and individuals) and wholes (bodies and communities), and the permanence and ephemerality of matter. Combining careful historical and archival research with detailed visual reading and creative analysis, Valverde brilliantly interprets the deliberate juxtapositions inherent in Martínez’s style of representation. She shows how it functioned, moreover, within its intellectual and religious context, as an understanding of human nature and knowledge production in an increasingly unsettled and expanding world.
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Lloyd Ackert, Chair
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Sharrona Pearl
- Katharine Anderson
Nathan Reingold Prize: James Bergman
The Reingold Prize Committee unanimously selected “Fighting Chance: The Science of Probability and the Forecast Controversy Between the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory and the U.S. Signal Service, 1884–1890” as the winner of the 2011 Prize. Engagingly written and finely textured, James Bergman’s essay details the history of the struggle between the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory and the U.S. Signal Service in the late 1880s. Favorably placed on the highest land in Western Massachusetts, the Blue Hill Observatory under chief meteorologist Henry Helm Clayton had an unobstructed view of the horizon within a twenty-five-miles radius and effectively relied on local weather patterns. “Fighting Chance” offers a detailed narrative relying both on published and unpublished sources, displaying a firm command of the current secondary literature and historiographic issues; the result is a work that successfully addresses different audiences: including historians of late 19th-century science, of weather forecasting, and of probability, as well as the broader community of historians of science interested in amateur science and the role of maps, tables, and images. Unlike earlier “controversy studies” that identify winners and losers and in which a resolution occurs, readers of “Fighting Chance” learn about struggles to define what counted as a successful weather prediction. The issue was not simply to provide more and more detailed and accurate solutions to partial differential equations, but to navigate the complex interplay between the visual and the numerical, the theoretical and the practical, the local and the global.
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Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Chair
- Richard Kremer
- Georgina Montgomery
Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize: Pamela Henson
Pamela Henson, this year’s winner of the Joseph H. Hazen Education Prize, is Director of the Institutional History Division, at the Smithsonian Institution Archives where she directs the institutional history program documenting the history of the Smithsonian and American science. She is also Adjunct Professor in the Museum Studies Program at George Washington University.
Pamela Henson offers a highly diversified teaching portfolio of educational activities. She has produced plentiful and clearly outstanding work as an educator, reaching varied audiences and employing imaginative educational strategies. These strategies include exhibitions, on a wide range of topics, and use many different types of historical sources. As the Director of the Institutional History Division of the Smithsonian Institution, it is not at all obvious that she would be expected or able to accomplish so much, so directly, as an educator. We are really impressed by what she has done, over a long period of time. Clearly, she has been an excellent and much-appreciated advisor, to a large number of researchers, on a broad range of topics.
Pam has worked with great energy and creativity to nurture K-12 educators to use primary sources in their classrooms. She has offered training courses on oral history and those who have come under her care praise her work as transforming their teaching. It is a pleasure to recognize someone who clearly manifests the joy that one can find in historical discovery while probing the national archives, creating lessons for K-12 classes, conducting oral history interviews, or educating through museum exhibitions.
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Muriel Blaisdell, Chair
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Mark Borello
- Sara Schechner
Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize: Yi-Li Wu
Yi-Li Wu’s Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China is a learned, original study of fuke or "female medicine." Wu argues that, beginning in the Song dynasty, the notion that pregnancy, parturition, and the post-partum period were inherently dangerous and polluting was challenged by the idea that they were ordinary manifestations of cosmic cycles. Promoted by Neo-Confucian scholar-physicians, the new view never entirely displaced the old, which was sustained by custom, midwives, and philanthropic publications, and Wu follows this dialectic into the late nineteenth century. She argues that the benign view of women's bodies minimized difference without denying it; that it portrayed interventions by midwives as useless or dangerous; and that it thus implied that learned male physicians, with their mastery of the universal body and its cosmological framework, had authority over female medicine.
Productively controversial, Reproducing Women earns the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize both for its rigorous examination of a specific historical phenomenon, and for its ability to enrich the field as a whole. Based on an array of sources, including a few by women, Reproducing Women places fuke writings in a shifting political, religious, and cultural landscape, including periods of stress for scholarly elites. At the same time, in her conclusion that sameness and difference were not mutually exclusive within a system of thought comprehending multiplicity within unity, Wu provides insight for all scholars struggling to comprehend remote conceptions of the gendered body without imposing contemporary categories.
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Joan Cadden, Chair
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Elizabeth Williams
- Marilyn Ogilvie