Abstracts Archive

By 1900, a wide range of schemes for mapping climate had emerged in Europe. What most of them had in common was the absence of weather. They represented climate as a static variable, a long-term average, in which phenomena on the time scale of weather—clouds, storms, and gales—were invisible. Ho...

In the aftermath of the New Culture Movement (1915–1919), Western-trained biologists in China helped establish a popular understanding of sex dimorphism that construed bodily morphology and function of the two sexes as opposite, complementary, and fundamentally different. Starting in the mid-1920s...

Economists developed the concept of ‘marginal utility’ in the late-nineteenth century within several different ‘schools’ of economics.  Their ideas have been seen as sufficiently similar that historians of economics have sometimes taken this to be a case of simultaneous discovery - by f...

Charles Darwin famously puzzled over how to explain altruistic behaviors in animals and humans: Entire castes of social insects dedicate themselves to the good of the colony but are themselves sterile, while humans who save the lives of others might not live to pass on to their children such noble i...

During the Japanese colonial era (1910-45), biology was the scientific field in which the largest number of Korean researchers was active. Korean biologists trod diverse paths of academic growth, encompassing both those who had majored in the discipline at universities and those who had developed as...

The idea of “object stories” has gained prominence in the museum world. It is thus important not only to explore its potential and applicability to HSTM museums, but also to discuss its relevance to curators, archivists, and historians of science working in other collections-based settings. Whil...

This paper is a history of how “language” became a model for thought from the 1950s through the 1980s and specifically how cybernetic ideas of communication and stress pushed for the possibility of an internal language of thought. The paper begins with an introduction of psychological and cybern...

This paper centres on the oeuvre of Marcus Élieser Bloch (1723–1799), a Jewish physician living in Berlin. Bloch authored the Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische, a natural historical series on fishes consisting of twelve volumes published between 1782 and 1794. These books are lavishly illustr...

Can flavor be measured? This roundtable will trace the quantification, creation, and destruction of flavor by technoscientific institutions like the US military, the flavor industry, and by neuroscientists fixated on understanding how humans taste. Following Steven Shapin’s call for increased atte...

The first two decades of the twentieth century were not a golden age for the reception of Darwinism. Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975) and Peter Bowler (1944-) developed the descriptor, “the eclipse of Darwinism,” to explain the state of affairs prior to the “modern evolutionary synthesis” of ge...

In his pathbreaking 1996 article, Michael Bravo called for greater attention to non-Western knowledge systems and how Western actors have tried to render these systems commensurate with Western science. This paper heeds Bravo’s call by examining this process of creating commensurability in the car...

  Naomi Mitchison co-authored her first, and only, scientific paper in 1915 with her brother JBS Haldane. In her memoirs, Mitchison describes feeling pushed out of science because she was more interested in the behavior and personality of her subjects than their genes. She went on to pursue a l...

In 1584, a short and remarkable book appeared in print: Letters on Natural Philosophy, written by a Paduan apothecary named Camilla Erculiani. Recently-rediscovered after centuries of obscurity, this book is the only work of natural philosophy published by a woman in sixteenth- century Italy that we...

After the “rediscovery” of the Roman catacombs in 1578, the Catholic Church began exporting the relics of early Christian martyrs across Europe and beyond.  Between 1578 and 1803, the duchy of Bavaria received almost 400 of these “catacomb saints,” whose sparkling bodies still rest on altar...

This talk considers the contrasting forensic regimes involved in the celebrated 1955 trial and 1965 re-trial of Dr Sam Sheppard for the murder of his wife Marilyn. The first regime cohered around the Cleveland Coroner Sam Gerber, who took charge of the scene investigation, conducted a highly-publici...

The idea of “object stories” has gained prominence in the museum world. It is thus important not only to explore its potential and applicability to HSTM museums, but also to discuss its relevance to curators, archivists, and historians of science working in other collections-based settings. Whi...

Johann Beckmann (1739-1811), Professor of Oekonomie at the University of Göttingen, is often hailed as the founder of modern technology studies. But what can be said about Beckmann as an antiquarian? In this paper, I will discuss Beckmann’s longstanding interest in precious metals and his efforts...

Archaeological research in Puerto Rico has sought to understand the Taíno Amerindians and their predecessors. The Spanish Empire of the 16th century essentially wiped out these indigenous peoples, but by the 19th century aboriginal archaeological artifacts were being catalogued in Puerto Rico. The ...

During the past two years, the internet seems to have taken a turn toward the occult (a term which, in its original incarnation, simply referred to concealed knowledge). The darkly conspiratorial mindset of contemporary digital culture is not entirely new, however. In this paper, I explore a set of ...

This paper focuses on a specific aspect of the efforts of Durkheim and his colleagues to institutionalize sociology as a scientific research discipline in France in the late nineteenth century: the graduate training of the emerging sociologists. This training posed several challenges at its inceptio...

The fourteenth century constituted a significant moment in the history of Asia. The Mongol empire, which had earlier brought large parts of Asia under one roof and facilitated cross-regional movements of texts and artifacts, degenerated. In an attempt to re-unite China under uniform rule and re-esta...

In recent years, computer simulations have become ubiquitous in science. They work with huge sets of data, are technologies to study processes, events or behaviour and introduce ways of doing science other than through observation, experiment or theory.  In my paper, I will study the use of comput...

China has often been treated as a peripheral or isolated case in the history of science. This panel challenges such narratives of separateness and instead explores the ways in which science in China has been linked and integrated into wider international currents and transnational networks. It does ...

In this paper, I discuss the case study of the concept ‘synapse’, focusing on a debate that took place during the mid- to late- 20th century. The ‘war of the soups and sparks’, in which scientists attempted to determine whether synaptic transmission is electrical or chemical, had just ended....

In the contemporary world, regulating drugs, food products, consumer goods, and occupational hazards requires evidence. The basis on which such evidence should be considered reliable and valid gets to the heart of authoritative knowledge production. In mixed settings of regulatory bodies—a conflue...

In 1875 Balfour Stewart and Peter Guthrie Tait published The Unseen Universe, an odd book that attempted to combat materialism by using the newly formulated law of the conservation of energy to rationally explain supernatural ideas like miraculous happenings, the immortality of the soul, Christ’s ...

     In the late sixteenth century, a number of university-educated surgeons in Spain began producing vernacular surgical manuals designed to provide the most recent knowledge in surgical treatments to practicing surgeons who could not read Latin. These texts are notable in their...

The figure of Tsar Peter I of Russia (1672–1725), a reputed reformer of the early Russian state, has many times become such a plastic signifier as to convey different kinds of symbolism for different political purposes. However, many authors agree that the formidable pace of Petrine reforms caused...

Martin Wagner (1885-1957) was a leading city planner of the Weimar Republic, chief planner for Greater Berlin (1926 to 1933), planning theorist, and mastermind of social housing ventures. Relocating in 1938 to the United States, where he taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Wa...

Cobb Seamount, first discovered in 1950 off the coast of Washington, was the focus of a multi-year scientific research program named “Project Sea Use” from 1968 until 1975. This collaborative effort, involving private industry, state government, and the U.S. military, aimed to install a...