Abstracts Archive

This session explores the intersection of geology and ecology in the 19th and 20th centuries. The questions we pursue are: How did scientists use information from one time-period or region to infer features of another, distant, time period or region? How did they determine which questions were worth...

   Sally Shuttleworth, in The Mind of the Child, marks the publication of Darwin’s Origins of Species in 1859 as a point in which the view of children as those “on par with the animal kingdom” informs the psychological treatment and literary depictions of children.[1]  A sh...

According to Physicist Leon Lederman, scientific myth-histories are not intended to be historically accurate. Instead, they serve as pedagogical devices that filter out unwanted historical details and noise. By filtering out this noise, myth-historians hope to perpetuate an essentialist idealization...

The subject of Isaac Newton’s alchemy has raised varying degrees of controversy since the 1936 Sotheby’s auction that made it widely known to the public.  Thanks to the sudden availability of about a million words on alchemy written by the famous physicist over a period of some thirty years, th...

This paper explores the founding and early development of the department of physics at Christian Yenching University in Peking (Beijing).  It shows how this small physics department evolved into a major cradle of physics researchers in China over the period of the 1920s and 1930s.  It will demonst...

This presentation examines the effects of the contraceptive technology known as the Ogino-Knaus or rhythm method on the debate about contraceptives and law in early twentieth-century America. In 1924, the Japanese gynecologist Kyusaku Ogino presented his theory on the timing of ovulation. This was i...

The standard Peripatetic view considers the primary qualities as constitutive, with the matter, of the substance of the body. Accordingly the only qualities responsible for any change are the four primary ones: hot, cold, moist and dry. However, properties of bodies like magnetic attraction are non-...

This paper looks at famed chemist (or chymist) Robert Boyle’s Origin of Forms and Qualities and considers an un-named target of Boyle: William Harvey. Boyle published Origin of Forms and Qualities in 1666 as an attempt to eliminate reliance on Aristotelian forms, promoting instead his own corpuscu...

Few topics in history of science have attracted as much scholarship as the birth of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. Yet despite the near-obsession with all things quantum, one of the major architects of this famous theory is largely forgotten: the brilliant German mathematical physicist Pascual Jord...

Perry H. Charley’s life illustrates translation as an act of healing. He is entwined with the American quest for nuclear supremacy through uranium. Like many other Native Americans, Charley was sent to boarding school as part of the U.S. government and Bureau of Indian Affairs efforts to assimilat...

Since the second half of the 20th century, the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) has sponsored international initiatives to investigate the Earth as a physical, chemical and biological system put in danger by human activities. In this context, a prominent collaboration emerged in the...

Our modern ideas of biological mutation date back to 1901, with the creation of a "mutation theory" that held that new species could arise from parent species in the space of one generation, in a sudden evolutionary jump. The first organism thought to provide evidence for this view, an evening primr...

This paper examines the historical relationship between theodicy and science, with particular attention to Unitarianism in the United States. It focuses on how scientists and theologians appealed to a particular version of theodicy (natural law theodicy, an explanation of evil that appeals to the go...

Paleoecology, which studies environmental change through geologic time, often made predictions about ecological change by comparing the changes experienced by vegetation communities in the past with similar changes facing modern communities. The modern analog method, which relied on these comparison...

This paper explores the relationship between Goethe's theater praxis and his early experiments on light and color throughout the 1790s. The paper first describes the inception of each endeavor: (1) Goethe's debut as stage director of Weimar's court theater on May 7, 1791-  a role that would las...

Translation was an important practice to the Old Babylonian scribe. It allowed a scribe to move between mathematical cultures, and it allowed the scribe to cross between systems of expression in a single culture. The word “translate” is used in this context to denote a change in numerical expres...

As well-documented in the history of biology, organisms have been used as experimental systems or even models to study a range of phenomena. This session goes beyond existing accounts to explore how various practices, data, and standards associated with use of many organisms have been articulated, n...

This talk focuses on the emergence of the term microbiome in the early 21st century, a rhetorical phenomenon that helped to legitimize the nascent field of human-microbial genomics as scientists advocated for the development of the multi-year, multi-site, $115 million Human Microbiome Project. The t...

Concern with the body, both human and animal, animated natural inquiry across the medieval and early modern periods. This panel brings together historians of premodern science and medicine in order to explore the ways in which definitions of the ideal body were socially constructed, received, enforc...

This paper examines a 1998 patent for a “Positive fertility testing and reproductive health system,” which consists of what is essentially a handheld microscope for women and men to examine small samples of their bodily fluids to determine fertility. This patent describes a reproductive technolo...

In vitro systems are commonly used within the fields of molecular biology and biochemistry. However, despite the prevalent use of these systems, discussions regarding the nature of in vitro modeling have thus far been limited, and do not capture the diversity of in vitro modeling techniques employed...

In the early 1970s, the young MD-PhD student Edward H. Shortliffe started work on his dissertation within Stanford University's Department of Computer Science. His PhD thesis, completed in 1975, involved the development of a computer program called MYCIN, an early expert system that aimed to furnish...

In 1967, Enzo Faletto and Fernando Henrique Cardoso published their classic work Dependency and Development in Latin America.  "Western" investment, far from placing Latin American nations on a path to progress, had created dependent nations struggling to chart their own path, stunting attempts...

In the early 1940s, a New York City organization known as the Dance Notation Bureau (DNB) began a decades-long effort to promote a system known as “Labanotation.” Using a combination of shapes, shading, dots, and lines on a eleven-column vertical score, Labanotation was designed to capture the e...

Buy the flashier car or save more for retirement? One marshmallow now or two in fifteen minutes? In the 1960s, the question of how people make decisions across time became a guiding research problem in the social sciences, following two notable trajectories. Economists like Tjalling Koopmans sought ...

For mid nineteenth century scientists of language, orthography was important. Spelling was a conduit of fact. The ability to render spoken sounds into written symbols was essential to understanding what was roundly understood as the “evolution” of language — the supposedly law-like progression...

As well-documented in the history of biology, organisms have been used as experimental systems or even models to study a range of phenomena. This session goes beyond existing accounts to explore how various practices, data, and standards associated with use of many organisms have been articulated, n...

“Owning the Evidence: The Lasting Controversies of Early Primatology Filmmaking” traces the unusual history of intellectual ownership over a groundbreaking collection of early comparative psychology films. From 1913-1917, the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler shot 6 reels of film depicting his exper...

21st-century wildlife films promote authenticity through the extensive use of making-of-documentaries (MODs), showcasing filmmaker trustworthiness and innovations in filmmaking practices and equipment. MODs have a long and understudied history, evolving in parallel with feature films. Enjoying recen...

This paper reconstructs the historical practice of naming scientific instruments through the composition of Greek and Latin roots so that the name of an instrument could serve a self-definition and description of its role and function. Following the use and translations of “pantographe” and “m...