Abstracts Archive

During the nineteenth century, chemists were involved in conservation treatments of polychrome artworks. Appropriate methods for the cleaning of easel paintings, for instance, were sometimes done in consultation with chemists. In the field of archaeology, paint samples were extracted from historical...

In recent years, “diffusionism” has emerged as the most prominent bogeyman, if not straw man, for non-Eurocentric histories of science: witness proliferating critiques of Basalla, of Cold War development, of modernization theory. Such targets, however, should strike us as too easy. If we would n...

From the 1850s onwards, the Parisian Academy of Sciences awarded the Prix Bréant to incentivize all sorts of contributions in the fight against cholera. We use the Bréant archive in order to reappraise an old debate within the History of Spanish medicine regarding the merits of Jaume Ferrán’s a...

How did a supposedly blind man living on one island collect natural-historical knowledge about an archipelago of tens of thousands? This paper discusses the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius (1627-1702) who, living on the island of Ambon from the age of 25 until his death,...

0 0 1 191 1089 Buck Lodge Middle School 9 2 1278 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE ...

 On 20 January 2018 RocketLab, a space-tech start-up, launched the Humanity Star, a metre tall ‘disco ball’ intended to “blink brightly across the night sky to create a shared experience for everyone on the planet”.[1] The launch provoked a range of responses from the scientific community, ...

The United Fruit Company (UFCo) is notorious for its influence on Latin American political and economic life during the twentieth century. UFCo’s power was rooted in its control and transformation of land. By the 1930s, it controlled more than 3.5 million acres. While converting lowland Caribbean ...

The 1960s-1970s were marked by a profound interest in creative thinking among Soviet psychologists and educators. They connected creativity to the country’s economic success in the approaching era of computerization and defined creative thinking as the ability to solve problems, make discoveries, ...

This panel considers the proposition that economics “has always been a science of life.” I agree, and offer three instances of the transfer and exchange of models, tools, and matters of concern between economists and biologists modeling growth (population and economic) in the 20th century. I arg...

The paper is an interdisciplinary history of cybernetics in the People's Republic of China. Following the career of the founding cyberneticist and scientist Qian Xuesen (1911-2009), it presents a broad picture of the reception and legacy of cybernetics across social and human sciences in the second ...

Friedrich August Wolf famously criticized the work of Christian Gottlob Heyne. Many subsequent scholars have accepted Wolf’s criticisms noting, among other things, that Heyne was uninterested in the kinds of rigorous textual criticism that would come to define philology’s nineteenth-century stat...

The medical career of Mississippi native Andrew Bowles Holder (1860-1896) began inauspiciously. After receiving his medical degree, he obtained his first post thanks to his father’s letter to the Office of Indian Affairs, which resulted in Holder’s appointment as physician to the Crow Agency in ...

This session explores the history of attempts to visualize climate as a spatial phenomenon and the use of maps as historical records of climate change. The focus is on the early nineteenth to the mid twentieth century in central Europe, colonial Africa, and the United States, important contexts for ...

This panel brings together material, global and bibliographical approaches to natural history during the long eighteenth century (c. 1680–1820), seeking parallels between the processes involved in transferring three dimensional objects into a publication. Concentrating on a selection of different ...

When Giovanni Battista da Monte died in 1551, he had not put to paper a single line of his medical Consilia (advice given to patients during bedside consultations) that were praised so highly by his students. In contrast to common practice, da Monte’s Consilia comprised not only personal advice fo...

My paper, framed by the beginning of World War II and the end of the guest worker Bracero Program in 1964, examines the growth of binational transportation and hydraulic networks, industrial agriculture, and rural Mexican outmigration. This study of technocrats and campesinos, industrialized landsca...

In 1876, an unlikely candidate was considered for election to the Royal Society. Whilst his sunken eyes betrayed a lifetime spent in intellectual study, his body was crippled by years of working-class labour. The candidate was James Croll (1821-90). His qualifications for election were considerable:...

Can anecdotes be evidence? In general, “anecdotal evidence” is deemed potentially misleading (if not an oxymoron). But there are certain situations, and certain fields, in which anecdotes register phenomena that can be hard to capture, control, or quantify. Anecdotes are often the only way to re...

In the 2017 HSS Distinguished Lecture, Sverker Sörlin described the Northern Turn in the history of science; a wave of recent histories examining knowledge-making in the Arctic. Expanding this Northern Turn, the papers in this session explore ways of telling “other” histories of cold places. Cr...

Victorian-era Geological Society of London members incorporated Charles Darwin’s illustrated geological coral growth argument in field guides used by Geological Survey students and naturalists’ clubs. This talk traces the evolution of Darwin’s images, first viewed in 1837 during his research p...

In seventeenth-century Europe the practice of curating specific alchemical texts in order to create a comprehensive body of work increased rapidly owing to the technology of the printing press and the belief that these types of tract were most successful when used in tandem. Evidence of readership p...

Throughout much of the nineteenth-century in Ojibwe communities in the western Great Lakes of the United States, community members participated in a medically plural environment, seeking medical care from within their own communities as well as from French and Scots-Irish fur traders, New Englan...

In 1968, Taiwanese planners began to consider how to market their considerable expertise in agricultural science, accumulated after decades of success at increasing agricultural yields and raising daily caloric intake.  At the same time, the rise of the Green Revolution placed high-yield crop c...

Many of our best scientific theories exhibit the common feature that their wide acceptation or use, thus their stability, are paralleled by a persistent and sometimes growing dissatisfaction with their foundations. The most conspicuous case is the 90-years old controversy on the good foundations of ...

  By the 1950s it was well understood that concussions could result in brain changes and degenerative nervous diseases. Yet where many experts saw an immediate, widespread public health problem, their warnings exercised limited influence in American culture. Why? Such ignorance, historian Rober...

How does the process of medicalization take place when historians examine not reformers, but institutions and populations subject to medical reforms in a specific country? Traditional histories of medicine have focused on the steps “great medical men” took to adapt European medical sciences to t...

C​reationism goes global. Alt​hough there is no influential creationism in Mexico,​ like the one existing ​in the United States and other countries​, scientific creationism has been promoted in churches, schools and bible workshops in the last three decades. In this flash talk, I will make...

  In a 1977 Science article, psychiatrist George Engel critiqued the “biomedical model” approach to disease. Engel argued that this biomedical model, which accounted for disease based on somatic and molecular traits, lacked an examination of equally important psychological and social aspect...

To what extent can a criminal action be positively attributed to a particular psychological cause at a specific moment in time? By using a prominent case of matricide from 1870s Vienna to draw out just how urgent and messy this problem was, my paper explores how Viennese jurists used contemporary th...

Darwin’s idea of an evolutionary tree of life sprouted from this and other tree-sketches of his early notebooks (Notebook B, 1837), illustrating the way in which all species are connected by common descent. In On the Origin of the Species (1859), there is one “indispensable [illustration] to sho...