Abstracts Archive

Darwin’s idea of an evolutionary tree of life sprouted from this and other tree-sketches of his early notebooks (Notebook B, 1837), illustrating the way in which all species are connected by common descent. In On the Origin of the Species (1859), there is one “indispensable [illustration] to sho...

Herbaria, collections of preserved plant specimens, were first created in the early modern period in the 1530s. They were indicative of a greater interest in careful observation and correct identification of plants beyond written descriptions usually based on ancient writings, particularly on the fi...

This paper examines the relatively unexplored role of entomologists in the history of Philippine agriculture. Looking particularly at the life story of Leopoldo Uichanco, revered as the “father of Philippine entomology,” it interrogates twentieth-century state-making in rural agricultural commun...

Throughout the Cold War, colonies became preferred sites of nuclear weapons experimentation. The United States initiated this trend when it began testing weapons offshore in the Marshall Islands where, between 1946 and 1958, it detonated 67 of its largest nuclear bombs. As historians of science and ...

Since at least the 1930s, ferrets have been recognized as extremely well-suited models for studying the pathogenicity and transmissibility of both human and avian influenza viruses. Ferrets are attractive mammalian models due to their relatively small size and other physiological features including ...

For a quarter century the “Innocence Project” has garnered public attention for using DNA evidence toward the exoneration of persons wrongly convicted of crimes, often by means of forensic techniques that, in light of DNA no longer seem authoritative.  And yet DNA collection/interpretation ...

For a premodern scientist, matter is what made an apple this apple and also distinguished that apple from the mental idea. Matter was the carrier of three-dimensional extension and the bearer of forms, which in turn articulated the patterns of definition, shape, and intrinsic nature of this or any a...

This paper will present an attempt to visualize the itineraries of objects and knowledge in the hinterlands of Portuguese America at the end of the eighteenth century. One source is a handwritten document that outlines the travels of José Joaquim Roiz, an expert in the hinterlands of Pernambuco. Th...

The last two centuries have seen an unprecedented growth of international collaborative enterprises in science and those scholars who have looked at these historical developments have emphasized their merits, especially in terms of connecting local centres of knowledge production and propelling grea...

Twenty-five years ago, Lisa Bloom’s "Gender on Ice" (1993) drew historians’ attention to the ideologies of masculinism and nationalism operating in historical discourses of polar exploration and science. Key to Bloom’s intervention was an analysis of the white, masculine heroism performed and ...

Abstract: My method of drawing tangents, René Descartes told Marin Mersenne, “is the most noble way of demonstrating that can be, namely, that called a priori.” Descartes turned to scholastic terminology to describe his new mathematics; yet its practice involved compound compasses and scratched...

This paper explores the entanglement of scholarship, commerce, and leisure that accompanied the spread of scientific literature throughout the seventeenth century in France by focusing on the popular treatise of drugs printed in 1694 by a Parisian grocer-druggist.  By uncovering the epistemolog...

The concept of hormone-dependent cancers, or cancers that are sustained by particular hormones, developed slowly during the period from about 1940–1990. I chart how the development of the notion of hormone-dependent cancers initially relied upon assumptions that cast androgens and estrogens, prost...

Infant mortality was a prominent object of global intervention in the second half of the twentieth century. Envisioned by liberal health experts at mid-century as a blueprint for a comprehensive and cooperative approach to social health, by the late decades of the twentieth century the problem had b...

At Johnson Controls, Inc., a car battery manufacturer, the assembly process entailed exposure to high levels of lead. After discovering that six of its female employees became pregnant while maintaining blood lead levels more than those thought safe by the Occupational Safety and Health Administrati...

It was no coincidence that the new field of neuroscience began to take shape in the early 1960s at MIT where cybernetics received much attention. This paper examines how the brain-computer metaphor was shared among mathematicians, computer scientists, and electrical engineers in the 1950s, and how i...

In the 1780s and 1790s, the East India Company surgeon Helenus Scott sent specimens of Indian alkali from Bombay to England. He had observed the local population procuring the substance from brown earth and making it into soap. Recognizing Britain’s need for alkali in the arts, Scott petitioned th...

Portugal’s Atlantic empire had a way of ignoring Brazilian nature and of making some bodies more evidentiary than others. In an age in which the South American landscape was said to brim with all manner of mirabilia and in which many metropolitan naturalists eagerly sought novelties from abroad, n...

In a version of history told by Hans Bethe, scientists in the nuclear age had a dual obligation to serve the state and to inform the public about government policy, especially when policy had become unwise or dangerous. Bethe himself seemed to model these principles. A leader on the Manhattan Projec...

In the 1980s, three neurologists from Boston and Glasgow proposed that brain laterality and numerous human ‘abnormalities’ might have a shared hormonal cause. Norman Geschwind (1926–1984) and colleagues suggested that fetal testosterone regulates brain asymmetry and impacts other characteristi...

In 1908 a huge blast occurred over the Siberian taiga in a land inhabited primarily by indigenous Evenki. When Soviet scientists first investigated the event two decades later, they assumed it had been caused by a meteorite. Yet traces were never found. This inconclusiveness eventually led to wide-r...

Histories of science in late nineteenth-century China often examine the circulation of scientific knowledge from Europe and the United States in China and the institutions and people which facilitated such circulation. This paper seeks to move beyond this dominant geographical paradigm by exploring ...

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of a critical turning point in history with long-lasting impacts on the cultural, social and political spheres of human life. Amidst the social and political unrest across the globe, on September 26th sixty-two physicists gathered at CERN to found the Europea...

‘The soil is the laboratory in which the food [of the plants] is prepared.’ (Humphry Davy, 1813) In the mid-eighteenth century, chemists started to explore and describe agricultural processes in terms of chemical methods and principles. The utilitarianism of Enlightenment thought in Europe and N...

This paper examines gender in the interplay of practice, knowledge production and device in medicine in Sweden between approximately 1870 and 1914 by looking at medical trade catalogues and trade journals. Studying this relationship aims to locate where women are through the examination of technolog...

When the Bose-Einstein and the Fermi-Dirac statistics were first formulated and explored, their conceptual foundations raised more questions than the formal apparatus of the theories could answer. The interpretive flexibility of the theories, however, did not deter physicists from probing their appl...

The scientific exploration of the sea in the early modern period was closely tied to military concerns as nations jostled to gain and maintain maritime hegemony and as captains armed their ships against pirates on the high seas. During this time, most of what was known about the sea had to do with n...

An outbreak of encephalitis in 1938 Massachusetts sent health officials scrambling to find a way to explain the epidemic. Upon the deaths of eight children, brain matter from an infected child was used to inoculate horses, resulting in the confirmation of a distinct disease that could infect both hu...

In the spring of 1941, the United States Army Corps of Engineers authorized an ambitious geological investigation of the alluvial valley of lower Mississippi. This project would occupy the Mississippi River Commission for the next three and a half years, and its final report would showcase the remar...

In the United States during the early twentieth century, liberal Protestant scientists and theologians were heavily influenced by Andrew Dickson White’s conflict thesis.  Owing to White’s famous two-volume book, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), they d...