Abstracts Archive

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...

In this talk, I will discuss the research that I've conducted as a 2018 NASA/HSS History Fellow on postwar visions of spaceflight on television. My study considers ways to rethink science fictional series (like NBC's Star Trek) as serious science educational ventures. Understanding the partnerships ...

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...

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 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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

Historians of science are notoriously critical of their subjects. We despise hagiography and critique commemoration. We rightly have exposed and condemned those who have used the power of science to oppress other people. But history of science, as a discipline, is also notorious for its whiteness, b...

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 ...

  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...

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 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...

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...

Research on glandular secretions and their metabolic impact transfigured the medico-scientific understanding of the body in the late 19th century. In 1905, British physiologist Ernest H. Starling (1866–1927) coined the word “hormone,” an umbrella term for secretions from various parts of the b...

Following Nancy Stepan’s path-breaking study of Latin American eugenics (1992), two generations of historians have continued to investigate the history of biomedicine, psychology, anthropology and other social sciences in the region. And yet many topics remain unexamined. The purpose of this round...

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...

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...

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...

Over the last decade, historians, sociologists, and biologists have identified new strains of eugenic thought and practice. In 2014, Amrita Pande depicted the global surrogacy market using the bodies of Indian women as a form of “neo-eugenics.” More recently, Robert Pollack warned Science reader...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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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 ...