Abstracts Archive

The proposed panel seeks to bring together recent trends in the history of animals, science, and the environment to expose how animals and their bodies participate in the knowledge production of human science. Our papers demonstrate that the knowability of nature around the world is directly relate...

The question of the periodization of early science is connoted with political concerns: whether Pierre Duhem's "discovery" of Medieval Science in the context of radical Catholicism in early twentieth century France; Herbert Butterfield’s cold war notion of the scientific Revolution as surpassing a...

Over the course of the twentieth century, the concept of life has been loosened from its moorings to nature. Launched in 1958, the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provided the institutional and political context to stage the ‘liveliness’ of mac...

Historians of mathematics have increasingly appreciated the role of written practice and bodily perception in producing mathematical research. In treating the relationship between thought and symbolic formalisms, for instance, they now avoid reproducing notions of universal and disembodied cognition...

In 1955, the climatologist C. Warren Thornthwaite presented a paper to the conference on Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth in which he proposed a way to improve the “water economy” of drought-prone regions. The language he used was one of “balance,” and the hope that he had was ...

In June 1966 Hungarian-French architect Yona Friedman traveled to Folkestone,UK to join the International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture (IDEA)— a large two-day symposium on radical experiments with architecture and urbanism. A leading figure of “prospective” international groups of arc...

In 1843 a phrenologist examined the skull of Benjamin Franklin Perry. He presented his subject with a chart rating the strengths and weaknesses of his mental developments: Amativeness large, Combativeness large, Acquisitiveness full. “He gave my character entirely and perfectly,” Perry marveled....

Ever since the late 19th century, professionals from different disciplines have measured deaf people. Teachers and psychologists ascertained their intellectual achievements and psyche; eugenicists, anthropologists or physicians charted their family and medical history. The way this data was used rev...

The end of the First World War also marked the end of the German overseas empire. And while it was ultimately a rather quiet and subdued end, colonialism did not vanish without a trace. During the thirty years of German colonial presence in Africa, China, and the Pacific islands, geographers and cli...

William Gilbert (1544-1603), a founder of early modern science in Britain, was the author of De magnete (On the Magnet, 1600), esteemed by many later natural philosophers for its rejection of scholasticism and extensive use of experiment. Since the 19th century, Gilbert has been routin...

The importance and profile of transmutational alchemy in royal and princely courts of the early modern period, particularly in German lands, has been a valuable area of research for some time. Hopeful transmuters, or those with other valuable chymical knowledge, frequently offered themselves and fou...

In the study of the conflict thesis of science and religion, two central questions persist: Why does belief in inevitable historical conflict between science and religion remain current, in spite of over a half century of historians' best efforts to refute it. Why did this belief and its central nar...

When France opened the world’s first veterinary schools in the 1760s the Crown changed its relationship to non-human animals and reconfigured a new set of social and scientific categories for livestock. The principle innovation of veterinary medicine was not the act of healing animals – a projec...

In Morocco during the seventeenth century a significant minority of Muslim scholars studied and wrote works on the natural sciences. How do we go about telling their stories? This paper lays out the historiographical challenges of narrating the history of the natural sciences in the Muslim world dur...

Despite numerous failures, economic forecasting has maintained its interest and importance. But both the forecasting instruments and the understandings of time that inform them have changed fundamentally. The paper examines three forecasting tools, developed by American and European economists and b...

Matter and body are conceptually distinct ways of addressing the same physical reality, i.e. that which is fundamental in physical reality. Hence, material causes and bodily causes are on the same explanatory level, or so it seems to us. Yet medieval explanations of physical causation took a differe...

In 1943, the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Ophthalmology and Otolaryngology formed a joint “Committee on the Conservation of Hearing” composed of some of the top otolaryngologists and acoustic physicists in the country. Working in conjunction with the American Federati...

This paper considers a group of early modern scholars who combined philological and experimental practices in their investigation of ancient systems of measurement units. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Guillaume Budé ("De asse," 1514), several humanists in the tradition of the treatises “...

Astrobiology, the scientific field investigating potential extraterrestrial life, is often understood as a post-Sputnik development initiated by academic molecular biologists anxious to distance themselves from NASA’s quasi-military human spaceflight program. This paper complicates this origin sto...

With the commercial and colonial expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the early modern world, European missionaries played an important role in the interactions with indigenous peoples around the globe. In the course of the interactions, European missionaries intentionally (and uninten...

In 1952, the People's Republic of China (PRC) initiated a propaganda campaign against the U.S. army's use of germ warfare during the Korean War. In what followed as "proof race" between the two divisive Cold War powers, the socialist regime produced a massive report out of scientists' on-site fieldw...

In the early 20th century, Germany's first garden city Hellerau rose to fame as a prime example for an efficient and modern, yet worker-friendly life environment. Thanks to its school for somatic education and performances at the Festspielhaus, Hellerau became a center of the European avant-garde. A...

Over 90% of children on the autism spectrum have sensory challenges.  But sensory difficulty is not recognized as one of criteria for an autism diagnosis until DSM V released in 2013.  This late recognition of sensory processing raises several critical questions: What symptoms are required...

As has been frequently remarked, Charles Darwin often used narratives to explain evolutionary change, as when he traced how the eye might have evolved from a patch of light-sensitive skin into a complex optical instrument. But narrative played a more fundamental role for Darwin, and one far less wel...

In Republican China, controversies over antiquities and fossils management during Western expeditions in China prompted new laws and policy regulating foreign biological expeditions in China’s interiors. Luo Guihuan has examined the restrictions introduced by Academia Sinica to limit Wes...

This session investigates how early modern European courts influenced, and were influenced by, controversies over natural knowledge, taking alchemy as its exemplar. Alchemy was always a politically-inflected science, whose practitioners promised to both preserve and enrich the person of the prince b...

Objectivity has often been used to refer to an ideal of scientific representation, facilitated by precise measurements and standardized instrumentation. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, clinical and research programs attempted to measure difference in human bodies and minds. Quantitati...

As no other country in the Western Hemisphere, homeopathy consolidated as a medical science during the first two decades of the 20th century in Mexico. But what type of science homeopathy was? Three schools emerged as the providers of medical training in the city after the revolution (1910-1917), th...

In 1885, the eminent neurologist Jean Martin Charcot convened the experimental Société de Psychologie Physiologique to keep the circle of hypnotic research expanding around his clinic at Salpêtrière. Early papers showcased edgy-enough experiments involving hallucina...

Telling scientific stories is a multispecies affair. Non-human animals have been instrumental to studies of the world’s natural order, as model organisms for the human body, as experimental objects, as livestock to be cared for, and as theoretical proxies for human social organizations. Furthermor...