Abstracts Archive

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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 ...

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 session focuses on the development of a science-based conservation practice and the emergence of art history as a ‘science of art’ (or Kunstwissenschaft) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With which scientific methods was technique in the arts studied, and how did they relate to lar...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

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During the 1950s, a surge of new research describing the electrophysiology of neural communication, behavior, and higher-order mental processes emerged alongside the first electronic, stored-program computers. Growing public consciousness of the affinities between information technologies and minds ...

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...

Expeditions play a formative role in natural science research. Data – in the guise of key specimens or crucial experiments – are collected on expeditions. Expeditionary science has long served to bolster the collections of natural history museums. The specimens collected, as well as the publicat...

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...

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 ...

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...

The contemporary concept of “transgender” is based on the nuanced theoretical differences between biological sex and socialized performative gender roles; attempting to apply this contemporary distinction to historical actors has the potential to limit the depth and breadth of source material. A...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In recent decades, scholars have shed light on the coalescence and professionalization of the human sciences in a variety of national and transnational contexts, raising intriguing questions about power and resistance. Historians of social science in Latin America have exposed, for example, how the ...

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 ...

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:...

‘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...

  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...