Abstracts Archive

Victorian-era Geological Society of London members incorporated Charles Darwin’s illustrated geological coral growth argument in field guides used by Geological Survey students and naturalists’ clubs. This talk traces the evolution of Darwin’s images, first viewed in 1837 during his research p...

Midwifery provides a critical lens into the influence of women serving in medical capacities in early modern Europe, but this unique position has not been sufficiently explored with regard to Jewish communities. This paper examines the Yiddish translation of a Dutch treatise on reproduction and chil...

From 1440 to 1870, the Transatlantic Slave Trade (TAST) produced the largest forced migration in history; more than 11 million enslaved Africans were transported from Africa to the Americas. Throughout its more than 400-year span, economic, political, agricultural, and natural forces modulated the T...

For several hundred years, the traditional Korean society was governed by a group of upper-class scholars, called “Seon-bi.” Most of them were confucian philosophers (i.e. humanists), who read and interpreted Chinese confucian classics. These humanist scholars developed unique confucian virtues:...

With the “spatial turn” (Livingstone/Withers), scholars are examining local contexts and the networks linking scientists’ communities. We study the circulation of texts, scientists, scientific knowledge, and specimens or the raw materials used to produce (for example) drugs or armaments. We kn...

Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, was formally recognized in 1947 by German neurologist, Joachim Bodamer, though reports of the condition date to the nineteenth century.  More recently however, neurologists have begun to view the condition as a spectrum, arguing that if those with total face bl...

In the winter of 1938, a group of Jewish doctors and therapists fled Vienna, reassembled in northern Scotland, and founded an intentional community for the care of children with disabilities called Camphill Special School. In an era when shame, blame, and institutionalization were the response to di...

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Ecology is in principle tied to evolution, since communities and ecosystems result from evolution, while ecological conditions in turn determine fitness values, hence evolution. Yet, as disciplines, evolution and ecology were not unified along the 20th century. The Modern Synthesis intended to inves...

  While Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese Medicine represent two very distinct practices of medicine, thousands of years of cultural and economic exchange have led to numerous exchanges and overlap of theory, treatment modalities, and use of pharmacological substances.  By looking closely ...

This paper looks at records of baby height and weight in baby books in the US between 1872 and 1940. Baby books, books in which parents record information about their child, are still a familiar object in households with young children. These books, this paper shows, are a unique source in whic...

Human factors engineering professionalized in the early years of the Cold War due to the development of safety-critical systems—those in which failures would be catastrophic. Often used interchangeably with ‘ergonomics,’ human factors engineering (HFE) not only considers physical comfort in th...

Humanistic thinking played a significant role in the thought of one of modern physics’ greatest figures, Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, whose work extended far beyond his contributions to quantum mechanics. Nonconformist that he was, Schrödinger was also a prolific cultural writer, whose ...

In this paper I use specific examples drawn from microbiology to illustrate ways in which scientists have used the genre of fantasy--in its broadest possible sense--as speculative, explanatory and heuristic devices in their work. "A Christmas fairy story for oncologists,” was a short story by the ...

The case of the twentieth-century perfume industry illustrates the varieties of knowledge developed in the production of materials requiring a high level of both technical and aesthetic expertise. Previous studies, such as those of Geoffrey Jones and Eugenie Briot, have shown the significance of syn...

The first time that cytogenetic techniques were applied to athletes was in the 1966 European Championship in Budapest, and for the first time to Olympic athletes in the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. For this purpose, in 1966 the Genetics and Human Biology Program was createdin close collab...

Increasingly, historians of biology are paying attention to the various ‘personal syntheses’ achieved in the early to mid-twentieth century. This period, which has traditionally been viewed as one of synthesis, is becoming one of many syntheses, as we ask how individual evolutionists brought to...

Abstract: Addressing the perennial question “under what conditions can real objects, attributes or relations be represented by numbers?” Hermann von Helmholtz gave an answer in his 1887 lecture “Zählen und Messen” which diverged from the predominant Kantian understanding of quantity and...

In 1967, Clara Claiborne Park published The Siege: The First Eight Years of an Autistic Child, her memoir tracing the experiences of symptoms, diagnosis, treatments, uncertainty, and advocacy that became the dominant narrative of parenting a child with autism. The Siege initiated the genre of parent...

A “silver curtain” of secrecy separated Eastman Kodak’s photographic emulsion researchers from their co-workers and professional colleagues in the Cold War United States. As the popularity of this metaphor among Kodak’s laboratory workers suggests, the firm’s concern about divulging insigh...

This presentation seeks to show how naturalistic attitudes and interests that developed in the sixteenth century were a part of Boyle’s intellectual milieu. Their influence is seen in the evolution of his reflections on natural philosophy. From early in his natural philosophical career, Boyle rout...

The paper discusses the survival of racialist ideas in theories about dog breeding in post-World War Two United States. Its main focus is the notion that dogs of the same breed share similar mental traits and that these traits are hereditary. This notion had its roots in the 19th century, when dog b...

By the 1970s, the world’s deepest mines were operating two miles below the surface. In South Africa, prospective miners were required to undergo an extensive acclimatization process in order to cope with the intense heat builds up in the ultra deep gold mines. To streamline and increase the ef...

  A history of science focusing on how different media are deployed to construct and communicate expert knowledge would need to concede that no single medium—writing, imaging, or other types of notation or recording—dominates this process. But neither can we expect all media to function si...

  The narrative that the “four great inventions” of ancient China – paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass – changed the world, has been one of the most recognized tropes about China since the 16th century. Originating in Renaissance Europe, it was taken up by Francis Bacon and his...

By the twentieth century, the Royal Society was an experienced publisher of scientific journals: the Philosophical Transactions had been founded in 1665, while the Proceedings was created in 1831. But the Society’s traditionally generous and gentlemanly approach to publishing had already become di...

This paper analyzes one of the most distinctive developments in science and engineering from 1965 to the present, the emergence of high-visibility campaigns to improve scientific and technical education for a broader range of young people. It details how, when, and why diversity grew into ...

By the 1920s, comparative psychology would have hardly been recognizable to the naturalists who had filled its ranks a generation prior. In fewer than thirty years, it had transitioned from an area dominated by field observations, case studies, and at-home experiments to one consisting of lab wo...

The nineteenth-century communications revolution witnessed Islamic rulers eagerly adopt new technologies en masse. A curious outlier to this was the Afghan ruler Amir Sher Ali (r. 1863-78). Rather than adopt the communications revolution in toto, he adopted the postal system, printing press, and pho...

William Stanley Jevons (1835 – 1882) is no stranger to historians of 19th-century economics. Jevons's contributions to economics have been widely discussed including, but not limited to, a systematic overview of his economic writings (Peart, 1996), his use of mathematics (Schabas, 1990), to what e...