Abstracts Archive

  Insights of book historians into the production and circulation of printed items have alerted historians of science to the scientific book as a material, commercial, and epistemic object. In recent years the scope of interest has broadened to include scientific paper technologies, scribal pra...

  Noise has been a common sonic experience since the beginning of history.  For a long time, noise was construed as sound of any form, aggregate of sounds, voice, cry, or roar that was voluminous, disturbing, composite, or extraordinary.  By the nineteenth century, however, two speci...

    Since the 1970’s epidemiological measures focusing on “health-related quality of life” have figured increasingly as endpoints in clinical trials. Before the 1970’s these measures were known, generically, as functional measures or health status measures. Relabeled as “quality ...

In this talk I assess how the availability of Newton's writings in a searchable, digital format has transformed our capacity to understand and explain his intellectual work. I examine the ways in which the existence of various datasets has allowed modern researchers both to examine Newton's work in ...

This essay examines the maternity ward records in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico in order to understand the hospital as a space where mothers, doctors, and midwives encountered one another and the State, and where they sought to legitimize and define the field of medicine at a time when childbirth ...

This panel explores intersections between human bodies and formal systems in the twentieth-century. The panel cuts across the history of forensics, mathematics, computing, and dance in order to demonstrate how different communities have worked to erase bodies, represent bodies, control bodies, ident...

Southern California is the land of sunshine, outdoor adventures, and opportunities. It is the place of movies, aerospace industry, and a bastion of scientific research activities. These images are the result of active promotion by the region’s boosters for the past 150 years, as Southern Californi...

The paper deals with the attitudes toward, the uses and the receptions of the science on the Italian Catholic press in the second half the 19th Century. In the course of the nineteenth century and particularly in the second half of the century, science started having a growing influence on...

August Boeckh (1785-1867) is still esteemed for a publication that appears to be a comprehensive handbook of all weights and measures of antiquity. In succinct numerical prose, he demonstrates the interrelatedness of all metrological systems of the Mediterranean world up to the sixth century. But th...

In an attempt to create a more coherent general picture of the history of science, historians have offered suggestions for categorizing the large-scale historical transformations in understanding nature, including "Ways of Knowing" (Pickstone) or "Styles of Knowing" (Kwa) and the use of mechanical m...

This paper examines human and animal bodies that were painstakingly assembled and programmed by clockmakers during the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries in the German-speaking world. Known today as automata, these self-propelled mechanical objects have long been seen by scholars as exemplary of th...

Situated at the intersection between the history of technology, economic history, and diplomatic history, this paper examines China’s three major waves of technology transfer during the Cold War period: from the Soviet in the 1950s, from Western European countries, the United States, and Japan in ...

Standard histories of psychiatry rely heavily on the distinction between psychogenic and biogenic approaches to mental illness. This distinction provides a framework for grouping actors into larger configurations, tracing the tensions between those configurations, and explaining psychiatry’s major...

 The concepts of biological specificity (of species, macromolecules, genes etc.) and genetic causality (in particular regarding heredity and development) played an important role in rendering biology a modern experimental science in the nineteenth century. Neglecting these concepts often led to sta...

Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-CN AR-SA Histories of science are traditionally plotted on chronologies that explain the rise of modern European science. These chronologies, even when globalized, have foregrounded the privileging of European history and provided justificatory narratives for colo...

This talk will explore the relation of the notion of body to the Aristotelian categorial scheme as expressed in the distinction between body as substance (corpus substantia) and quantified body (corpus quantum) employed by thirteenth and fourteenth-century thinkers. The focus will be on the early th...

In 1960, veterinarians discovered an unknown toxic substance in poultry feed to have caused the death of hundreds of thousands of British turkeys. Veterinarians collaborated with nutrition scientists, chemists, toxicologists, and mycologists to identify what became known as aflatoxin, a carcinogenic...

In the middle of the nineteenth century, lawyer and naturalist Peter A. Browne of Philadelphia obsessively collected, measured, and classified the hair of humans and animals. He built what he claimed to be the largest collection of hair specimens in the world. Browne had at least two major goals in ...

In the nineteenth century, European savants sought to reconstruct the history of the earth. The character of the evidence was routinely faunal, utilizing ossified organisms. Such methods built upon Georges Cuvier’s concept of a natural hierarchy of animal functions, which designated specific anato...

Despite having relative prominence in the early years of the emergence of professional history of science as a discipline, history of chemistry declined in prominence and has played only a small role in attempts to craft “grand narratives,” “big pictures,” or textbooks in history of modern s...

  I argue that William Bateson’s analogies between the units of genetics and chemical elements are best understood as analogies to theoretical entities in the history and practice of chemistry. Bateson did not intend that the units of heredity answer to material units that behave in ways anal...

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to train a strong military to ward off the Nationalists and Japanese in wartime Yanan, but faced tremendous challenges in protecting the health of its residents. Scholars have focused on the role of Norman Bethune in developing health care and scientific rese...

In 2016 Deborah Gordon proposed that the term ‘division of labor’ was misleading and ought to be abandoned. The problem with the term, as she saw it, was that it implied a division of labor among specialized castes of workers to explain colony behavior. In a series of experiments in the 1980s, G...

Historians of science have long been interested in the relationship between the making of scientific knowledge and emerging forms of nationalistic thinking. This panel gives a comparative examination of the intertwining of biology and nationalism in twentieth-century Korea and China. Consisting...

Contemporary geographies and their histories are connected to debates around immigration that are ingrained in the ethnonationalist views of racial difference and purity. From apartheid walls, isolated ghettos, enclosed reservations, to the sinking bodies of dead immigrants in the Mediterranean, the...

Over the last several years, scholars have increasingly attended to the role of craft knowledge and artisanal practices in early modern Europe. These studies have investigated the importance of hands-on experience for ways of knowing about the world and pointed to the significance of artisanal pract...

Logic became a mathematical science in the decades around 1900; that same period saw a wild proliferation of systems for representing the newly mathematical logic on paper. The fertile period for notational invention that began with English mathematician George Boole’s algebraic methods in the mid...

Scientists and fiction-writers face the common challenge of awakening their readers' senses. Especially when offering a new model or perspective, scientists share the creative writer's task of using language to activate the imagination, of getting readers to see what they mean. To feel real, languag...

The problem of integrating chemistry into “grand narratives” or macro-scale studies of the past applies not only to the history of science but also to history more generally. How has chemistry figured in the history of politics, industry, education, or the environment, in the longue durée? Chem...

In his First Part of a Dictionary of Chemistry (1789), the Scottish chemist James Keir claimed, ‘The progress of Chemistry within the last twenty years has been more rapid than…any science in an equal period.’ Around the mid-eighteenth century onwards, it is no surprise then to see the princ...