Abstracts Archive

How was knowledge about exotic drugs presented, consumed and contested in early modern print? Groves of large sassafras trees grew naturally in abundance in the English North American colonies, and the roots, leaves and bark were harvested for their medicinal virtues in treating the Pox, scurvy and ...

The indirect amalgamation technology, developed by Ignaz von Born following older methods from the Spanish colonies, was intended to be nothing less than a revolutionary method of extraction of precious metals using mercury. Between 1784 and 1786, the Austrian mineralogist and mining expert Born dev...

In the period following WWII, ideology critique was often characterized as a science. The French philosopher Louis Althusser epitomized this stance, updating Marx's theories to analyze the growing tertiary economy in Europe. In social theory, literary criticism, and philosophy, "historical materiali...

Science is regarded by many as unique among human endeavors in its inherent ability to correct its own errors. Many cases, such as those involving N-rays or cold fusion, are offered to exemplify the process. These episodes are uncontroversial and make attractive illustrations, but there are less wel...

Physicists often praise quantum electrodynamics (QED) as “the most precise scientific theory ever constructed”. Its calculations depend on a technique called renormalization, which was developed circa 1947 by Hans Bethe, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman. That technique m...

In 1714, the Irish physician and respected member of the Dublin Philosophical Society, Thomas Molyneux published an intriguing account of fossil teeth found in Ireland in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It argued that these specimens were the remains of prehistoric elephants and...

In a 1922 discussion of appropriate femininity, the author noted that “perspiration... steals away that natural freshness and fragrance” and “robs a young woman or girl of charm and daintiness.” Women navigated a complex system of etiquette in the early twentieth century in order to not only...

My paper will focus on the career of the Hindi Scientific Glossary (1906), an artefact of nationalist knowledge making and the global circulation of western science from early-twentieth century South Asia. A bilingual lexicon containing Hindi equivalents for English scientific terms, the Glossary wa...

Ethnoscientists play an invaluable role as exponents of biological and cultural diversity. This role has frequently been compromised, however, by the discipline’s close association with powerful imperial and colonial interests. This paper examines this tension in twentieth-century Philippines, wit...

The premature death of James Prinsep (1799-1840) was a massive loss to the British Orientalist community. In his twenty years in India his work was united by a common theme: coins. His role as Assay Master saw him perfect ways of measuring both high temperatures and precise weights, and his Indologi...

The nature and extent of Isaac Newton’s religiosity has become a dominant feature of Newtonian scholarship, ever since the opening of the Jerusalem archives. However, whereas Richard Westfall, for example, could acknowledge Newton’s piety, and recognize the earnestness with which he had pursued ...

This paper examines the shifting semantic cadences of the soybean as global economic conditions re-shaped Chinese scientific and medical enthusiasm for the soybean. Older associations as a famine crop, base for fertilizer, a source for cooking, lubrication, and lighting joined newer, techno-scientif...

This paper explores efforts to apply economic logic to human life. In U.S. federal regulatory agencies, government planners and policy makers have spent over a century trying to devise a scientifically sound way to measure the economic value of lives lost or saved by public programs. The methods the...

When collagen, abundantly available in all the connective tissues of animals, humans included, emerged as an important research problem right after the discovery of the double helix, G.N Ramchandran (GNR), a young Indian scientist at the University of  Madras, took up this topic as his main r...

English mathematician George Boole (1815–1864) is considered a principal inventor of mathematical logic and a major predecessor of computer science. Historians typically emphasize his recasting Aristotelian logic in algebraic notation and applying the computational techniques of mathematical...

When is the right time to know something? What difficulties arise if knowledge is created prematurely or tardily? How do fears about the punctuality of knowing shape the tools applied to knowledge problems? And how is the historian's understanding of the past configured by her concepts of time? ...

Over the past decades, our comprehension of the structures of 18th-and 19th-century natural history has exponentially grown. Several seminal studies have been published on the quantitative practices initiated in these centuries, thus completely redrawing our image of natural history as a descriptive...

In 1700 Johann Bernoulli (1667-1748) brought barometric light under control with his 'new phosphor'. It initiated a wave of inquiries that resulted, among other things, in the development of the first electrical engines. Bernoulli's apparatus was just one instance of phosphor at that time. Light-bea...

  Heart-lung machines are key components of cardiac surgery. Their main purpose is to replace cardiopulmonary functions during surgical interventions in the open heart. While today’s heart-lung machines are robust and reliable devices, their early versions were highly precarious assemblages. ...

 In place-based science, location is key to scientific inquiry.  Thus, place-based science expands the focus from the rituals of laboratory practices within a laboratory to the actual placement of research in a landscape, on parcels of land often controlled by governmental or corporate entities. �...

This paper explores the history of the “food-drug line” in U.S. product regulation: the classification boundary developed by public health regulators and medical professionals to demarcate medical products, with stricter safety standards, from food and dietary products normally governed by more ...

Project Sanguine was a controversial program to develop a network of power stations, amplifiers, and 6000-miles of antenna cable to serve as a communication transmitter capable of sending signals to submerged submarines around the globe. Publically proposed in 1968, northern Wisconsin was chosen as ...

In 1879, Samuel R. Elson, Marine Pilot on the Hooghly River, published a rhyming pamphlet entitled The Sailor’s East Indian Sky Interpreter and Weather Book. Contained in its clever couplets was the experienced navigator's expert advice for his "brother sailors" on how to detect and...

There is a "folk history" of quantum physics within the community of physicists, one that bears little resemblance to the history of the field. According to this folk history, there is a single orthodox "Copenhagen interpretation" which solves or dissolves all of the questions at the foundations of ...

European dried gardens from the 16th century have been traditionally associated with either the traditional genre of pharmacopeias or with the emergence of early modern botany.  This paper reviews a sample of the 37 known exemplars of these bound collections of books, and argues that the design...

Death Valley is the hottest, driest, lowest, place in North America.  It is also home to thousands of desert-dwelling plants, animals, and paleontological artifacts.  After the National Park Service took over management of the valley in 1933, park rangers struggled to develop a coh...

   Many traditional societies, often referred to as indigenous or tribal people, have accumulated a whole lot of empirical knowledge on the basis of their experience while dealing with Nature and natural resources. This traditional wisdom is based on the intrinsic realization that man and ...

For some years, the field of STS has focused on the need to write transnational connected narratives, based on a reciprocal treatment of global and local contexts that describe the dynamics of scientific practices to explain the role of transnational exchange networks and the circulation of scientif...

In 1972, Claude Teague, the Director of Corporate Research at R.J. Reynolds, argued that the tobacco industry should think of itself as being "a specialized, highly ritualized segment of the pharmaceutical industry." Reynolds, he claimed, was ultimately in the business of selling a drug: nicotine. W...

Before sexologists taxonomized human sexual differences, studies of non-human animals served as an important site for explorations of the meaning and manifestation of sex. But if scientists looked to the animal world for evidence that a clear distinction between male and female was the norm, they di...