Abstracts
Qureshi, Sadiah
Living Curiosities: Human Ethnological Exhibition and
the Emergence of Ethnology, 1810-1854.
Shocking as it may be to contemporary sensibilities,
exhibitions of living foreign, often colonised, peoples were not only common
but highly profitable and conventional forms of public entertainment throughout
the nineteenth century. My paper examines these ethnological exhibitions in
early nineteenth century London. Ethnological shows have often been presented
as evidence of racism and agued to be of little scientific significance because
of their ephemeral nature and modern association with the spectacular. In
contrast to this view, my paper argues that ethnological exhibits were natural
historical specimens whose display was not just indicative of nineteenth
century racism but proved fundamental to emerging debates on race. I also argue
that the shows’ formative importance is contingent upon their ephemerality,
since it imbued them with direct contemporary political relevance. For example,
during this period many scientists were still debating whether racial groups
represented different species or variations of one lineage and thus which
racial groups deserved the status of human. In conjunction with these debates
many exhibited peoples were dissected, made casts of, shown in private viewings
arranged for the learned, described in scientific papers and appeared in the
standard texts of the period in attempts to define the physical development of
humanity and thus define the biological basis of what it meant to be human or a
distinct race. Furthermore, in his 1855 presidential address to the London
Ethnological Society (founded 1843) John Conolly lamented that, until recently,
“natives…. when brought to our country… have merely [been] regarded as objects
of curiosity or of unfruitful wonder.” Conolly called on his fellow men to
subject these displays to a more rational gaze. The paper explores this call
for rationalisation by tying the popularity of ethnological shows to the
institutionalisation of the emerging discipline of ethnology and this its
lasting importance for understanding scientific debates on race and the role
they played in British imperialism.
Raj, Kapil
Indian Detours of British Geography: Putting James
Rennell on the Map.
In the wake of its conquest of Bengal in 1757, the East
India Company perceived the need to make an inventory of their newly acquired
trade routes, navigable rivers as well as the revenue potential of the land.
James Rennell (1742-1830) who, as an ensign in the Royal Navy during the
7-years war had picked up the rudiments of coastal and harbour surveying, and
subsequently as an interloper in the South-east Asian country trade had gained
a deep knowledge of trade routes, got himself engaged for the task. This paper
presents the way Rennell, using his marine and commercial skills, translates
indigenous revenue statistics, route tables and accounts of military
displacements on the one hand, and the East India Company’s needs on the other,
into the “first” unified map of the Indian subcontinent, published in 1783. The
publicity given to this achievement was in large part responsible for the
co-emergence of the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain and of Rennell as the “father
of English Geography”. Through this presentation which is at complete odds with
the normal centre-periphery trajectory that underlies most stories of the
circulation of science, the paper also engages with current debates on the
nature of the encounter and interaction of British and indigenous “information
orders” and their contribution to the emergence of metropolitan and colonial
scientific institutions.
Ralley, Robert
Circulating manuscripts and the assembly of textual
authority in fifteenth century English medicine.
Medical knowledge in late medieval England was
predominantly non-literate, but oral forms were neither insulated nor even
entirely separate from written medicine. Studying the movement and reproduction
of medical texts in fifteenth-century England gives us a window onto cultures
within which medical knowledge was created, transferred and appropriated. Books
were circulated along clerical networks of communication by literate healers:
copies of older or more exotic texts could be bought, trade bridging temporal
and geographical gaps; scribes might be employed, or the reader could write out
his own. New works were compiled and created. Though they fell within existing
genres and corresponded to expected types, the precise nature of a given manuscript
depended on the interests of the people who produced it or for whom it was
made. Individuals put together tailored packages of textual authority and
reference. We can see the alterations copyists made to texts in the three
extant versions of a plague treatise by John Malverne, priest and physician to
Henry IV. One, entitled ‘On spiritual and corporeal remedies against the plague’,
contained a lengthy section on the importance of prayer and confession before
detailing the various material and medicinal remedies possible; a second, owned
by Henry VI’s physician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Somerset, focused
on the remedies and omitted almost entirely the ‘spiritual’ discussion; the
third version was the longest of all, including several receipts not in the
other two. In this paper I use the Malverne treatise and other examples to
explore medical cultures of late medieval England through their literary
manifestations. Texts had specific roles in medical practices, but their
circulation and concomitant alteration provide valuable evidence for the
cultures of knowing about healing.
Rauch, Alan
Manufacturing Knowledge: Private
Subscription Libraries and Public Erudition.
The purpose of the paper is threefold:
1.) to introduce and contextualize the phenomenon of the private subscription;
2.) to address the nature of collections and organization within the framework
of science and industry; and 3.) to suggest the significance of the libraries
in the organization and dissemination of knowledge in the early 19th century.
This rise of the mercantile
class in English industrial cities such as Manchester, Leeds, and Newcastle was
accompanied by the appearance (in each of these locations and elsewhere) of
private subscription libraries. The Portico library, on which this paper
will be focused, played a highly visible role in determining cultural values
and ideology in an era that saw an explosion of a new form of “knowledge
consumers.” These consumers, which included industrialists, inventors,
scientists, physicians, and clerics, were often self-made men who came from
modest means. Few of these individuals held degrees and fewer still had
access to any substantial collection of books or manuscripts.
To address this situation,
groups were formed to initiate private libraries which would not only become
repositories of knowledge, but would also serve as centers of commercial and
political discourse that were more genteel than the markets fairs, pubs, and
coffee houses of the streets. These libraries offered a place where interests
in science and technology, to say nothing of the need for readers to “keep up
with the times.”
The most significant implication
of the Private Library movement, for the present purpose, is the displacement
of knowledge from a public sphere to a private one. In other words, these
private libraries encapsulated knowledge in relatively controlled spaces for
consumption in private. The libraries thus functioned like the center of
Bentham’s panopticon. At the core is, of course, is the unobserved reader who
not only can scan the material around him anonymously, but can then bring that
knowledge to bear in more public spheres. This, in some sense, was the “power”
of the private library.
Rees, Amanda
A place that answers questions: primatological field
sites and the making of authentic observations.
This paper demonstrates the central importance of the
emergence of the field site space to the development of behavioural primatology
as a scientific discipline. Initial attempts to shift the study of free-living
primates out of the realm of anecdotal natural history and into the world of
standardised, quantitative reports of behaviour by importing to the field
methodologies and techniques originally developed for use in the laboratory
were hampered by the very different conditions that researchers experienced as
they themselves moved between the laboratory and the field. This paper analyses
the nature of the conflict between ‘field space’ and ‘lab space’ as it was
played out within field primatology in the 1950s & 1960s, and examines the
way in which the conflict had been resolved by the late 20thC through the
development of field methodologies and techniques that, while flavoured by
laboratory life, nevertheless are utterly dependent for their deployment on the
particular historical, ecological and social characteristics of the field site
itself - the place that can answer questions.
Reynolds, Andrew
Amoebae as exemplar cells: the protean nature of
elementary organisms.
Nineteenth century biology saw the intersection of
protozoology and early cell biology through the nexus of Darwin’s theory of
evolution. As single-celled organisms, Amoebae offered an attractive focus of
study for researchers seeking evolutionary relationships between the cells of
humans and other animals; their primitive appearance as “naked globs of
protoplasm” also made them a favoured model of the ancient ancestor of all
living things. Their similarity to the cells of humans and other metazoa made
them a popular object of study among morphologists, physiologists, and even
those investigating animal behaviour. It was due to their ambiguous nature, not
easily fitting into either plant or animal categories and yet resembling the
cells of higher animals, that they were able to serve as exemplary cells. The
amoeba became a convenient placeholder in biological equations, serving at once
as an “elementary organism” and as an analogue of the cellular units of the
complex human organism. A close look at the assumptions underlying their status
as exemplary cells reveals philosophical assumptions about primitiveness and an
evolutionary progress from chaos to order.
Richards, Graham
Spreading Psychological Knowledge: Top-down, Bottom-up,
and Simply Rotating.
The complex reflexive nature of the Psychology’s (the
discipline) relationship with its subject matter (psychology) creates a
situation in which the creation and dissemination of Psychological knowledge is
itself a peculiarly convoluted socio-psychological process. I will attempt to
disentangle this by examining the respective circumstances under which
Psychological knowledge is (a) disseminated in the ‘top-down’ fashion generally
taken (perhaps oversimplistically) to characterise the spread of orthodox
scientific knowledge, (b) a more sophisticated formulation and codification of
common psychological knowledge and (c) a constantly changing outcome of a
reciprocal relationship between psychologists-as-scientists and everybody else
(including themselves when out of professional role). It will also be
argued that in the last two cases notions of ‘popularisation’ become especially
problematical. The paper will use illustrative material from three main
areas: British Psychology 1918-1939 - with particular reference to
psychoanalysis and the Psychology-religion relationship, Psychology's
engagements with ‘race’ issues, and Psychology’s involvements with the military
- particularly during the Second World War and early Cold War.
Rider, Robin E.
End Runs and the Publishing of Science.
Over the years scientific authors have devised multiple
means to sidestep prerogatives of publishers, scientific institutions,
professional bodies, and/or regulatory authorities, in order to reach their
intended audience in timely and direct fashion. They have long sought
alternatives when the profit-making motives of publishers have proved too
constraining, or when normal avenues of scientific publication have slowed the
pace, compromised priority claims, or discouraged innovation. In particular,
both scientific authors with solid reputations as well as those on the margins
have tried self-publishing as an end run around the publishing establishment.
This paper uses examples of British and American authors between 1750 and 1850
to explore strategies of (and motives for) self-publishing.
Roberts, Lissa
Full steam ahead: failed inventors and entrepreneurial
networks in eighteenth-century Europe.
For every successful invention and inventor in
eighteenth-century Europe, countless died obscure deaths. By reconstructing
the networks within which two such failed inventors operated — both were
involved in the promotion of steam engines of their own design in the 1770s — I
want to add detail to the richly populated context out of which some of the
first ‘heroes’ of the modern industrial age arose.
Roos, Anna Marie
Salient Circulations of Chemical Knowledge and Natural
History: Martin Lister (c. 1638-1712), Volatile Salts and Fool’s Gold.
Seventeenth-century physician Martin Lister is best known
for his work in natural history and participation in the early Royal Society.
However, little attention has been focused upon Lister’s work in chemistry, the
most salient examples being his analysis of pyrites or “fools’ gold” near
mineral springs in the De Fontibus
medicatis Angliae Exercitatio (1684) [Exercises on the healing springs of
England], his contributions to the Philosophical
Transactions in the 1670s and 1680s, and his unpublished manuscript “A
Method for the History of Iron, Imperfect.” He defined pyrites more specifically
as “ironstone marcasites” which were “nothing else but a body of iron disguised
under a vitriolic varnish”; “vitriol” referred to Iron II sulfate which
occurred as a weathering product of pyrites. This paper demonstrates that
an understanding of Lister’s work on pyrites and vitriol is best attained by
placing him in the intellectual context of the seventeenth-century chemical
debate about minerallogenesis. Lister believed that the volatile exhalations of
pyrites and its vitriol in the air were important in the transformation of
matter, and he subscribed to the sixteenth and seventeenth-century theory of witterung [weathering] or ore
exhalations as an explanation for the formation of minerals. Despite his
allegiance to the theories of witterung,
we will illustrate that Lister made use of his interests in natural history to
go one step beyond them, postulating that the sulfurous exhalations from
pyrites were responsible for the heating of hot springs, as well as
meteorological and geological effects. Lister’s work will also influence
the work on lightening by Benjamin Franklin.
Roque, Ricardo
What’s in a head? Anthropology and the circulation of “stuffed
human heads”.
This paper attempts to explore the interplay between three
processes: the formation of anthropological knowledge, the economy of skull
circulation both among Europeans and non-Europeans, and Western colonial
expansion. It explores these links by discussing the discovery, circulation and
anthropological study of New Guinean “stuffed human heads”, between 1870s and
1930s. Eventually collected by explorers and colonial patrol officers, such
artefacts of Papuan headhunting soon became an object of desire and research
for anthropologists.
Rose, Anne Christina
Late Nineteenth-century French and Italian Psychiatric
Case Studies of Childhood Hysteria.
Historical investigations of hysteria have now reached that
celebrated mark where their production is labeled an industry unto
itself. Up to now, however, “the new hystericism” has not taken up the
question of why the symptomology diagnosed as hysteria was applied to children
at growing rates over the course of the nineteenth-century. This is
unfortunate since juvenile pathology was increasingly recognized as a
prosperous field for studying human development in the nineteenth century; thus
an historical focus upon hysteria in children can certainly illuminate the
development/pathology paradigm. In this paper, I show how the
discourse of juvenile hysteria needed to redefine its medical parameters to
encompass a variety of psychiatric practices including pedagogical
suggestion and hypnotherapy as well as assimilate studies of the pathological
dimensions of dreams. This expansion, and the therapeutic innovations it
encouraged, created a new identity for the hysterical child, associating it
with artistic creativity and psychological moral agency. I trace the
emergence of this new identity by analyzing French and Italian case narratives
that appeared in printed journals and newsletters. I show how these case
studies operated as a means of circulating psychological knowledge within the
medical community and I explain how the epistemic relation between
psychological theory and psychiatric treatment informed approaches to children’s
public health. The published cases I examine constitute an epistemography
that historians can exploit to understand not only how observation and
experiment were used to objectify children’s psyches, but also how these
objectified children experienced institutionalized medical treatment in situ and in relation to their
families, their teachers, their schoolmates, and their peers.
Rosenband, Leonard
Accounting for Productivity: Papermaking in
Western Europe and America, 1750-1850.
This essay examines the similarities in the account books
developed by master papermakers on both shores of the Atlantic.
Accordingly, it is a study in the nature, sources, and meaning of
precision. It is also an inquiry into power relations, since the
manufacturers intended to take the measure of the men and women who labored in
their mills. But this enterprise would prove difficult, for the workers
enjoyed elaborate customary control of their toil, a control embedded in their
skills. Moreover, paperworkers had labored aggressively to keep their
ranks thin, familial, and initiated. So the manufacturers’ use of account
books to mathematize production was one salvo in an enduring struggle. It
owed less to Foucauldian formulas concerning a newfound attention to the
measure and surveillance of abstract biopower, and more to the entrepreneurs’
desire to end an old pattern of long walkouts and short strolls by tramping
journeymen. By cobbling together fresh premiums and the “legitimate”
custom of the craft, the producers dreamed of keeping skilled hands in their
shops and thereby taking advantage of the rising demand for their reams.
The new designs for tracking output, then, amounted to a mixture of top-down
impositions and negotiated solutions across the Atlantic world. Since these
accounting procedures mirrored the transnational practices of management and
work in the trade, this paper challenges the assumption that the genesis of
modern labor management was uniquely British, or the vector of uniquely British
approaches to applied science.
Safier, Neil
Boundary Expeditions, Geographic Networks, and the
Circulation of Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia.
This paper will examine a series of maps produced by
members of the eighteenth-century Luso-Hispanic Boundary Expeditions (“expediciones
de límites”) alongside the instructions written to guide their activities and
the narrative accounts penned by the participants themselves. In
examining the texts written to accompany these maps, I will attempt to
reconstitute the social networks — including indigenous, African, Creole, and
European actors — as well as the cultural and scientific practices that allowed
for the production of these particular cartographic representations of South
America. Attention will be paid to how astronomical observations through
instrumental means constituted a particular kind of cartographic praxis that
effaced as well as foregrounded specific kinds of information. In
particular, I hope to probe the complex relationship between cartographic
representation and the emerging ethnographic sciences to better understand how
the graticule of longitude and latitude served as a kind of metaphorical fence
behind which ideas, information, and whole populations struggled — and
ultimately failed — to escape.
Sauter, Michael J.
Clock Watchers and Stargazers: Berlin’s Clocks between
Science, the State, and the Public Sphere at the Eighteenth Century’s End.
Using early-modern Berlin’s experience as a backdrop, this
paper will argue that time discipline was a product of the emerging
eighteenth-century public sphere. Over the course of the century, this
public sphere became increasingly interested in getting accurate time from its
public clocks, and complained routinely when Berlin’s turret clocks were
wrong. In 1787, responding partially to the increase in public interest,
the Berlin Academy of Sciences installed an extremely accurate clock over its
front door. The public reaction was immediate, as people on the street
abandoned their turret clocks and flocked to Berlin’s temple of science to get
the public time. The problem, however, was that scientists used a
different form of time reckoning than did the public. Scientific time was
“mean time,” whereas public time was “true time,” which was based on the
sun. Since the Academy clock ran on mean time, it could never be accurate
for a public expecting true time, and Berlin’s public now began to complain
about the inaccuracy of the Academy’s clock. During the 1790s, a battle
emerged between public and scientific definitions of time in Berlin. The
public demanded accurate time, but could never seem to find it at the Academy,
which meant that public complaints continually percolated upward through the
local regime. Eventually, a decision had to be reached in the name of
public order. In 1810, the battle was decided in favor of Berlin’s
scientists, as the government declared mean time to be Berlin’s time and
anointed the Academy clock Berlin’s master clock. This paper will show
how the public debate over time was a battle over knowledge’s
foundations. Science and the public provided mutually exclusive
definitions of time. When the local government chose one form of time
over the other, it decided, in effect, what knowledge was. Thus, two
factors combined to make modern time discipline possible. First, a
critical public sphere had put public time on the public agenda. Second,
the state government allied with science to determine what public time would
be.
Schaefer, Julia
Framing the colonial body - the German doctor as knowledge
producer.
My paper reflects upon German colonial discourse on
eugenics, including metaphors of the black body and intentions to measure and
use the black worker’s body for colonial enterprises (i.e. plantations,
railroads, fruit companies). I focus on the medical theories and practices of
colonial doctors which aimed to (re)structure and model a racially pure
population, providing a healthy ‘indigenous body’ for the settlers’
enterprises. I question the ‘empirical’ basis of that research as well as
looking critically at the authoritative language and actions of doctors
implementing hygienic discipline in housing and the working process. Quarantine
and fumigation of infected areas which are often identified with their
inhabitants indicate selective political practices which were medically and
scientifically legitimised. The battle against widespread epidemics such as
cholera, plague and yellow fever was staged on different levels: a) on a
practical, technically motivated level that was concerned with the defending
mechanism through special disinfectors and experiments on vaccination, b) on a
medical level that differentiated between endogenous inherited epidemics and
exogenous ‘imported’ illnesses and c) on a discursive level that mirrors the
concepts of framing a colonial body as a cultural-biological entity in contrast
to the white mentality in terms of capability and fitness for work. My sources
are based on material on Cameroon, Togo and German-Southwestafrica (official
medical reports: Medizinalberichte, files of the ‘Reichskolonialamt’, the
colonial office in Berlin, letters/memoires of the doctors, journals on Racial
Hygiene/Anthropology etc.). Finally I discuss the doctor’s scientific authority
concerning their effect on popular knowledge of the colonies and the
construction of the ‘other’ in the Wilhelminic Reich and in the aftermath, how
popular - racially biased - images were conveyed.
Schaffer, Simon
Instruments as cargo in the China trade.
The final years of the eighteenth century saw commercial
and political initiatives by British administrators and entrepreneurs to settle
trade networks in eastern Asia and the Pacific: these included the Macartney
Embassy to the Qing court, and the enterprises of Vancouver’s team in the north
Pacific. These enterprises often deployed precision astronomical hardware as
commodities of display and cultural authority. The paper tracks some of these
devices and the careers of their makers and users. In particular, the pathways
of those who moved across, as well as along, imperial routes of trade and
warfare help show how scientific hardware could embody a range of different,
often conflicting, senses in different cultural sites. These uses are not
exhausted by demands of position-finding, though they helped define the
positions of those involved in exchange and encounter.
Scheinfeldt, Tom
Scientific Servants in the Inter-war Museum.
During the inter-war period, academic historians of science
conceived of themselves first and foremost as scientists; nearly all were
trained as scientists, and humanists were scarcely to be found. For
instance, of the seven founding fathers of the Comité International d’Histoire des Sciences, all but one — Lynn
Thorndike — was trained as a scientist, mathematician or physician.
Museum practitioners, by contrast, were by and large products of civil or
military service. That is, while university-based historians of science
considered themselves as humanized scientists, science museum practitioners
proffered a model of practitioner identity that valued scientific achievement
and military or civil service in equal measures. The nascent American
science museum movement, for example, held civil engineer and Deutsches Museum
founder Oskar von Miller as its model for practitioner identity and scientific
service. Similar notions of scientific service were well-articulated in
the Science Museum, London, both in examples provided by senior staff and in
policy documents written for their juniors. By both example and decree, science
museum officers were intended to occupy a position of scientific service, just
as military officers occupied positions of military service. On the one hand,
this ideal of scientific service resounded with post-World War I rhetoric of
the science museum as a place of public betterment. On the other hand, science
museum practitioners’ identities were amplified and, in large part, defined by
the audiences they targeted. This paper will trace the origins, workings,
and effects of this notion of scientific service among the practitioners and
publics of inter-war science museums in both Britain and America.
Schimkat, Peter
The Astronomer-Accountant in the 16th Century: A Case
Study on Landgraf Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel (1532-1592).
Among historians of astronomy, the reputation of Wilhelm IV
rests primarily on his foundation of the Kassel Observatory and his
construction of a new star catalogue, which was undertaken with the help of
some of the finest instruments then in existence and which had an accuracy of
nearly 1 minute of an arc. But while these achievements of Wilhelm have been
compared and correlated with general developments in the history of astronomy
(most particularly the virtually contemporary work of Tycho Brahe), the
considerable non-astronomical context of Wilhelm’s stellar measurements has
hitherto seldom been discussed, in spite of some intriguing suggestions made by
Bruce Moran more than 20 years ago. Based on the work of Moran and other
authors which have focused on the wider activities at early modern European
courts, I aim to tie-in Wilhelm`s astronomical ambitions with his own primary
function as the reigning prince of Hesse-Kassel. More specifically, I
concentrate on the (by the yardsticks of late 16th century Germany) puzzlingly
in-depth and quantitative statistical survey of his political territory carried
out under Wilhelm’s supervision. I will discuss its local origin as well as
some of its unusual features and emphasize the similarities of this statistical
survey to the Kassel star catalogue, leading to overall conclusions about the
role of astronomy (and the specific conception about the nature of astronomical
knowledge) in the life of one of its foremost then practitioners.
Schlich, Thomas
What is Special about Surgical knowledge?
Knowledge in surgery has a specific character. Much of
surgical knowledge can be characterized as know-how and skill. It is thus a
highly personalized form of knowledge which needs direct personal experience to
be passed on. This fits in with the persistence and cultivation of
apprenticeship patterns in surgical training on all levels. It also accounts
for the specific difficulties encountered in standardizing surgical procedures
and objectifying the results of surgical treatments. The special character of
surgical knowledge can be examined in a number of interesting ways. Thus, one
strategy of making surgical knowledge more explicit and accessible is by
visualizing it. Therefore visualization plays an enormous role in surgical
training, diagnostics, procedural standardization and quality control. Being a
skill rather than “pure” knowledge, surgical competence can be conceptualized
as embodied knowledge. The way to pick it up is by experiencing it physically
rather than appropriating it mentally. Operative skill thus resides as much in
the body as in the mind. Since surgery is a tool-based activity, surgical
knowledge typically also gets reified into objects. Objects like surgical
instruments or implants can be understood as reified surgical knowledge.
Another dimension of the reification of surgical knowledge are spatial
structures, such as operating rooms, their equipment and their localization in
the larger context of hospitals or health centers. Even though the
configuration of various types of knowledge is typical of surgery, the
underlying issues are by no means specific to this field. Analyzing surgical
knowledge and its special features in the proposed way will therefore allow for
a more complete view of the circulation of knowledge in general.
Schneider, Daniel W.
Sewage, Science and Control: Science and Labor in the
Activated Sludge Process.
This paper examines the circulation of bacterial science
amongst scientists, engineers and sewage treatment plant operators. The
activated sludge process of sewage treatment, developed by chemists and
bacteriologists in 1915 was easily disrupted if operating conditions were not
ideal. Scientists soon focused on “process control,” understanding the
bacterial processes and seeking ways to maintain them at optimal rates.
Bacterial process control quickly became intimately connected to the labor
process. Activated sludge required greater skill and scientific knowledge on
the part of the plant operators, who were typically drawn from the plumbing and
affiliated trades. Scientists developed training programs to teach
principles of bacteriology to plant operators, and instituted requirements for
licensing of operators. Along with the professionalization of sewage
treatment workers came increased control of the labor process. As
operators gained experience with the plants, however, they developed their own
ways of seeing the bacterial processes that were informed by, yet separate from
the scientific and engineering modes.
Scholnick, Robert J.
Blasphemy, Subversion, and Transmutation: “The
Vestiges” (1844) Comes to America.
The appearance of the anonymous “Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation” in New York early in 1845 created a sensation. Written we
know by Robert Chambers, the volume had been published in London late in
1844--where, of course, it also became the subject of wide-ranging debate. In
America as in Britain the religious and clerical authorities united to attempt
to destroy a book which they saw as threatening their authority. This paper
examines successive American editions of the “Vestiges” as well as newspaper
and periodical reviews to consider the ways that a British book published in
America revealed fault-lines in American culture. From this perspective, the “Vestiges”
was perhaps the most important volume to appear in antebellum America until
Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in 1852. Chambers’ volume presents an excellent
opportunity to consider the conference theme of “circulating knowledge.” I will
argue that Chambers had in mind lessons from the American democratic experiment
in writing about transmutation from the bottom up, and so it is to be expected
that his accessible, widely popular book would challenge the
scientific-theological establishment in America. The paper will conclude with a
short discussion of the ways that the “Vestiges” came to inform such central
American texts as Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
Seth, Suman
‘Experimentalised Theory’: Arnold Sommerfeld and the
Old Quantum Theory, 1918-1925.
In 1922 the experimental physicist and Nobel laureate
Johannes Stark penned a tract entitled “The Present Day Crisis of German
Physics,” in which he attacked modern theory as dogmatic, excessively abstract
and insufficiently connected with reality. For all the theater and venom of his
attack Stark was undoubtedly responding to real tensions and trends within his
discipline. Over time the debate opened up questions concerning two purported
oppositions, German and Jewish physics, and experiment and theory, which still
configure our understanding of the period (if in very different ways). This
paper will take a new look at the nature of the community Stark fought over by
arguing for the existence of a viable alternative to the theoretical ‘physics
of principles’ espoused by researchers like Planck, Einstein and von Laue in
the early development of modern theoretical physics. In the work of Arnold
Sommerfeld and his Munich School one can see evidence for a ‘physics of
problems’, one where solutions were sought, not in terms of generalities, but
in terms of specific, often numerical, results and where the very questions
considered often had a practical, even industrial flavour. This paper will
pursue the relationship between the ‘physics of problems’ and experimental work
in the context of the ‘old’ (i.e. pre-1925) quantum physics. Close and
collaborative relationships with experimentalists like Paschen, Back and others
helped Sommerfeld produce an experimentalised theory, eschewing model-based
generalizations in favour of a series of selection rules gleaned from detailed
engagement with swathes of experimental data. Understanding his program offers
considerable insight into the practices of theory in the first decades of the
twentieth century and will help historians develop new approaches to the
discursive divide between experimentalists and theoreticians that looms so
large in our understanding of the period.
Shipley, Brian C.
Logan at Joggins: Fieldwork in the Carboniferous
between Britain and Canada.
Prior to beginning the Geological Survey of Canada in 1843,
William Logan undertook an extensive examination of the renowned 15,000-foot
Carboniferous outcrop at Joggins, Nova Scotia. This project had two
goals: first, to provide additional confirmation of his theory of the origin of
coal, originally developed in South Wales and verified in the coal fields of
Pennsylvania during his U.S. trip of 1840-41; and second, to establish a
starting point in British North America from which the Carboniferous formations
could be traced northwards through New Brunswick up to the Gaspé peninsula,
where the survey of Canada proper would begin. The first goal was central to
Logan’s reputation and authority as a geologist; the second was crucial to
answering the pressing question of whether coal could exist in Canada.
Logan’s work at Joggins marked the turning point between his British and
Canadian careers. It allowed him to make a personal transition in his
fieldwork, moving from familiar to unfamiliar territory, while his decision to
publish his results in Canada rather than in Britain indicated a pragmatic
reorientation towards new audiences. Nevertheless, although Logan did
become the leading Canadian geologist of his generation, it is important to
keep the imperial context in view as well, seeing his work as part of a larger
project to map the British world and its mineral resources. Nova Scotia,
though a small colony, played a significant role as a strategic outpost for
British naval and merchant shipping in the North Atlantic throughout the
nineteenth century. It was also known to be of unusual geological
interest, having already been visited by Charles Lyell on his American
voyages. As such, it was the ideal place for Logan to extend his British
knowledge of the Carboniferous, and begin his search for Canadian coal.
Silliman, Robert H.
Floods, Ice Floes, or Glaciers: Nova Scotia’s
Conflicting Testimony in 19th-Century Interpretations of the Diluvium-Drift.
It is a well known fact that in the historical development
of the science of geology exploration and travel have had a central role.
The empirical data on which geology rests has had to be gathered--if not in the
laboratory--in the field. This has often entailed a search for pertinent
rock outcrops located far from home, and, generally, exploration and travel have
been indispensable to the comparative assessment of geological structures and
processes on which sound theories have been built. Nineteenth-century
Nova Scotia presents the interesting case of a “destination” for a string of
geological explorers curious to find evidence bearing on one and the same
question: what accounts for the extensive surface deposits of unsorted
gravel and sand and the numerous traveled boulders found in the higher
latitudes of North America? As it turned out, the field evidence of Nova
Scotia supported different answers to the question, answers, not surprisingly, in
close conformity with the preconceptions the various travelers brought to the
peninsula. In this instance travel only confirmed prior beliefs.
This paper details and documents the episode, considering how in Nova Scotia
Alger and Jackson (1828) found in the diluvium-drift deposits evidence of the
Biblical Flood, Lyell (1842) obtained support for his iceberg theory of the
drift and Agassiz (1846) found indications of a universal icesheet.
Although by 1870 Agassiz’s glacial theory had generally triumphed, well beyond
that date Nova Scotia’s celebrated geologist J. W. Dawson was still loyally
affirming the iceberg theory of his friend Charles Lyell.
Simpson, Ruth
Substance & Vision: Theories of Epidemics as
Latent Social Theories.
The success of germ theory over miasmatic theory in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has frequently been framed
through a progress narrative that attributes the rise of germ theory to
advances in scientific practice. But numerous historians have observed
that the concepts and evidence necessary for a successful theory of germ-borne
disease were in place for at least one hundred years before the theory was
widely accepted, and here I propose one possible explanation for the apparent “delay”.
Abstracted from the biological context of disease, epidemics are fundamentally
social concepts—events of social transmission within and across groups.
Therefore, even the most medically technical theories about how disease spreads
through a community can also be read as latent social theories: cultural
artifacts that reflect our most basic ideas about what society is and how it
works. The Enlightenment, secularization, and industrialization
challenged longstanding assumptions about the individual, the group, and the
nature of the bond between them. As the individual and the group were
increasingly perceived to be in tension with one another, miasmatic theory
(with its emphasis on the inherently group-level threat of toxic air), and germ
theory (with its far more individualistic understanding of disease
transmission), were pulled to opposite poles. In short, miasmatic theory ceased
to be plausible because the social theory implicit in it required a conception
of society that was increasingly out of sync with the culture and social
structure of late nineteenth century industrialized societies.
Specifically, miasmatic theory implied (1) a conception of social space, (2) a
style of epistemological focusing, and (3) an understanding of social agency
that were fundamentally at odds with (and gradually, less compelling than)
those implicit in germ theory.
Singleton, Rivers, Jr.
Disciplinary Origins of Biochemistry, Two Case Studies.
In this paper I will address questions regarding the
disciplinary origins of biochemistry in the latter half of the 20th century. I
will use case studies that illustrate two divergent paths for the “discipline
building” of biochemistry in the United States. One path illustrates the
process described by Robert Kohler (From
Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline,)
who noted that “General biochemistry ... was a broadly biological program,
taking as its domain all forms of life,” and “was concerned ultimately with
fundamental processes.” This disciplinary vision needed a wider support base
than that provided by a physiological or medical service role. Furthermore,
Kohler notes that general biochemistry, as a research program, was restricted
to a few institutions prior to 1945. The biochemical disciplinary explosion, as
a “biomedical discipline” in the 20th century, resulted from a shift in
research focus away from topics of clinical interest (i.e. “medical chemists”)
to topics of more fundamental biological significance. A case study that supports Kohler’s view is based on an
analysis of the Western Reserve University Medical School (WRU) budget. WRU had
a Biochemistry Department, focused on research topics of clinical interest, for
many years. In 1944, Joseph Wearn, WRU Medical School Dean, created a budget
line for a new “Department of Clinical Biochemistry.” The following year he
transferred the salary lines for all of the members of the “Biochemistry
Department” into this new clinical department. Over the next couple of years
Wearn restaffed the “Biochemistry Department” with a new faculty of “modern,”
general biochemists, headed by Harland Goff Wood. Another case study seemingly contradicts Kohler’s view;
institutionalization of biochemistry at the University of Georgia followed a
very different path from that at WRU. The Biochemistry Department at Georgia
was created via more public political process. Individuals trained in
biochemistry began to join the Georgia Chemistry Department faculty in 1953,
and by the early 1960’s a number of individuals - both in Chemistry and
elsewhere in the University - disciplinarily identified themselves as “biochemists.”
This core of individuals began an institutional and legislative lobbying effort
to create a free standing Biochemistry Department at the University in order to
“modernize” the institution. A major rationale for state support of such a
department was the number of “Benefits to the State of Georgia” that would
result from an independent Biochemistry Department. These benefits included
training technically competent individuals, at both the undergraduate and
graduate levels, for employment in Georgia pharmaceutical and similar
industries. An important but “intangible” benefit was the “prestige” that would
be associated with an academic institution having a modern scientific program
like “biochemistry.”
Sivasundaram, Sujit
Competing Knowledges?: Indigenous Views of Geography,
British Engineering and the Conquest of the Kandyan Hills of Ceylon.
While the Kandyan mountains remained inaccessible to
British control in Ceylon they were cast as the home of impenetrable jungles.
Local peoples circulated tales of the geography of the interior in order to
resist European encroachment, and local knowledge about topography was also
vital in Kandyan warfare. Between 1800-1810, however, British officers were
able to secure local guides, and they appropriated indigenous knowledge pertaining
to the lay of the land. By 1815, the mountains had fallen to British control
and the Kandyans were paraded as barbarous; their knowledge was now said to
stand apart from the achievements of British surveyors and cartographers who
had been so crucial in securing the mountains. In the two decades that followed
what was said by one Governor to be the greatest testimony to British science
in Ceylon -a military road connecting the seaside capital of Colombo with the
seat of Kandyan power was built.
Surveyors were employed to trace the line of the road and local peoples were
forced to labour in making it.
By attending this closely to the circulation of
geographical information between Ceylonese and Britons it is possible to chart
the fall of Kandyan power and the consolidation of British control. The
possession of geographical knowledge was crucial therefore to imperialism; and
its application in works of engineering could result in the subjugation of the colonised.
This is therefore an attempt to elucidate the competitions and exchanges
between different genres of geographical knowledge that occurred in the process
of colonialism.
Smith, Robert
Robert Stawell Ball was one of the most prolific authors of
popular astronomy in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century.
After positions at the Royal College of Science in Dublin and the Dunsink
Observatory, Ball became Lowndean Professor of Astronomy and Geometry, as well
as Director of the University Observatory, at Cambridge in 1892. By this point
he had already published several books and more followed in a steady stream
until his death in 1913. During his career he also gave many hundreds of public
lectures. In this paper I will both examine and attempt to unpack the goals
behind Ball’s approaches to presenting astronomy for broad audiences,
particularly his use of history and the ways in which he avoided offering
dissenting opinions on various topics (even highly controversial ones such as
the canals of Mars). In so doing, I seek to draw contrasts between Ball and the
efforts of other populariziers of the period such as Agnes Clerke and T.W.
Webb.
Snobelen, Stephen
Isaac Newton, Pythagorean style and the
esoteric/exoteric divide.
It is well known that Newton deliberately wrote his Principia
in an obscure and difficult style. Recent comparisons of Newton’s public texts
with those that he confined to the private sphere help reveal that the writings
he intended for public consumption were composed in such a way that they
restrict access to their meaning, marginalising less competent and less
well-informed readers. This paper uses Newton’s more open private papers, along
with statements he made about his writing strategies, to demonstrate that
Newton was committed to an esoteric/exoteric intellectual divide and that his
chief goal was to reach the privileged cognoscenti not only through his carefully-crafted
publications, but also through private cabals, master-disciple relationships
and the controlled distribution of his scribal publications. Additionally, by
assessing Newton's discussions of ancient writing and communication styles,
including esoteric and encoding styles that he attributes to the ancient Hebrew
Prophets and the Pythagoreans, examples that Newton sees as prescriptive, this
paper emphasises the great distance between Newton’s natural philosophical
ethos and the sensibilities of modern science (which are so often attributed to
him). Finally, this paper shows that Newton’s commitment to the
esoteric/exoteric divide applies across the range of his intellectual
endeavour, including his mathematics, natural philosophy, alchemy, theology and
prophetic writings, thus providing another instance of the unity of Newton’s
thought.
Solan, Victoria
Model Skulls and Healthy Houses: Popular Science and
Domestic Architecture in Mid-Nineteenth Century America.
This paper examines the transmission of mid-nineteenth
century racial theory to American domestic architecture, using Orson Squire
Fowler’s pattern book for the octagonal Home
for All (1848) as a case study. Fowler, whose book spurred the
construction of nearly 1000 octagon houses across the United States, was
best-known as a promoter of popular phrenology. Fowler proposed that the
act of building single-family houses was an innate urge, pinpointing the
location of this trait within his model of the phrenological brain.
Fowler’s phrenology laid the groundwork for the popular acceptance of eugenic
theory in the United States. As a phrenologist, Fowler encouraged
Americans to rank and classify themselves according to their ethnicity and the
shape of their skulls. According to Fowler, the octagon house was the
architectural equivalent of the skull, and its endowments could be similarly
interpreted to reflect the value of its interior life. Fowler popularized
the belief that superior people built superior houses, drawing an indelible
connection between house, head and heritable traits. The spread of
octagon house across the North American landscape is evidence of the
pervasiveness of his theories in domestic architecture. Fowler’s
conception of the home as the embodiment of phrenological values demonstrates
the cross-fertilization of ideas between popular science and domestic
architecture.
Sommer, Marianne
A Lady Comes of Age: Do Modern Science Projects
Produce Definitive Reports?
The paper addresses epistemological questions in the
context of the recent re-excavation of Paviland Cave, South Wales, under the
archaeologist Stephen Aldhouse-Green of the University of Wales College. In
1823, the geologist William Buckland had discovered a partial human skeleton in
the cave, which acquired the name the Red Lady. Starting out as Ancient British
witch or prostitute, the Red Lady made it into the ranks of the male Cro-Magnon
warriors and into the most refined circles of prehistoric evidence. The
international and interdisciplinary project that began in 1995 culminated in
the monograph Paviland Cave and the ‘Red
Lady’: A Definitive Report (2000). Apart from contributions by experts from
various scientific (sub-)disciplines, it contains a historical overview of the
successive excavations and interpretations. This model scientific project
raises the following questions: what do we gain by approaching the mysteries of
our prehistory from the points of view of many disciplines, including the
humanities, and of scholars of various national and cultural backgrounds? And,
do such projects produce definitive reports? Apart from highlighting our desire
for completeness, the claim to have written the final chapter in the biography
of the Red Lady opens up further avenues for inquiry. For example, where does
narrative still fill evidential gaps? This question might best be approached
through the reconstructions of the Red Lady’s burial that were part of an
exhibit at the National Museum of Wales and the ensuing monograph, as spaces of
encounter between science and the public that encompass transformations of
abstract ideas into three-dimensional dioramas.
Spencer, Larry T.
J. Roger Bray and some historical aspects of Plant
Ecology in New Zealand.
Botanically, the first knowledge of the flora of New
Zealand was brought to light by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander
botanists/naturalists on board the Endeavour
when Capt. James Cook explored the Pacific Ocean in 1766-1771. About two
hundred years later (1963) J. Roger Bray arrived in New Zealand. Bray,
co-author with John Curtis of a classic paper on the use of ordination in
ecology, was philosophically opposed to the use of atomic energy in the United
States and had migrated to New Zealand because of that country’s policy towards
atomic energy. In this paper I will briefly discuss the state of plant ecology
in New Zealand at the time of his arrival and describe the contributions that
Bray has made both to the development of ecology in New Zealand and to the
development of ecological thought in general.
Staley, Richard
The Co-creation of Classical and Modern Physics.
Among the many tensions and oppositions that were in play
in the early twentieth century, one the divide between classical and modern
physics has retrospectively overshadowed our understandings of the period.
This paper offers an empirical and comparative study of when and why physicists
in different nations (Germany, France and Britain) first started using these
terms. Beginning with Boltzmann and ending with the 1911 Solvay Congress, on a
broad scale this story constitutes one of the most powerful instances of the
circulation of a rich cultural image. First developed in understandings of
literature, music, art and schooling, within the physics community the concept
of the classical came to be invested with a highly specific meaning of great
scope and this in turn formed the basis for the widespread popularization of
a new physical world view after World War I. But on a finer scale, charting the
means by which this particular understanding came to dominate discourse on the
period reveals significant tussles over the meaning of specific entities,
different intellectual tools, and disciplinary histories. As physicists like
Larmor, Poincaré, Lorentz, Planck and Einstein sought ways to cross the divide
between the macro-world and an emerging microphysics, the specific reach of
atoms and electrons, theory and experiment, the electromagnetic field, new physical
constants, and statistical mechanics were all at issue. Understanding the grasp
and limitations of such tools both involved physicists in a search for unity,
and created new fissures within their community.
Stam, Henderikus J., and René Van Hezewijk
Phenomenological Psychology in Europe and North
America: The case of Johannes Linschoten and the demise of the ‘Utrecht School.’
Prior to and immediately following WW II a loose movement
within Dutch psychology, led by Frederick Buytendijk, eventually solidified as
a nascent phenomenological psychology. Supported by German, Belgian and
French colleagues, Dutch phenomenological psychologists and criminologists
attempted to generate an understanding of psychology that was based on
interpretations of phenomenological philosophy, largely Husserlian in
inspiration. Although never widely accepted, this movement came to a
sudden halt in the 1960s even though it was exported to North America and
elsewhere as ‘Phenomenological Psychology.’ Frequently referred to as the
‘Utrecht School,’ most of the activity of the group was centered on Utrecht
University although it was less a school than a group of loosely affiliated
individuals. In this paper we examine the role played by Johannes
Linschoten in both aspects of the development of a phenomenological psychology:
its rise in North America and Europe, and its institutional demise.
Linschoten was Buytendijk’s most prominent student and succeeded to the latter’s
chair upon Buytendijk’s retirement in 1957. By the time of his early
death in 1964, Linschoten had cast considerable doubt on the possibilities of a
pure phenomenological psychology. Nonetheless, his empirical work can be seen
to be a form of empirical psychology that was inspired by phenomenology but
that clearly distanced itself from the more elitist and esoteric aspects of
Dutch phenomenological psychology.
Stanley, Matthew
Physics, Marxism, and Mysticism: Politics and Religion
in the Reception of Eddington’s Science Popularizations.
In the 1920s and 1930s A.S. Eddington was one of the best
known scientific figures in the English speaking world, largely due to his
extremely popular books, lectures, and radio addresses on the physical
sciences. In these popularizations Eddington made sophisticated arguments
about the positivist nature of modern physics and how that had important
implications for the domain of science. His discussions of mysticism,
free-will, and determinism caught the public’s attention, and his work was
quickly integrated into contemporary British debates regarding religion and
politics. This paper explores a print debate between Eddington and the
influential atheist and Marxist Chapman Cohen, which focused on Eddington’s
Gifford Lectures. Their exchanges help illustrate the way religion,
politics, and science were blended together in social debates in interwar
Britain, and specifically how determinism was a major and controversial point
of intersection for these three categories.
Steigerwald, Joan
The Insurrection of Nature: The Problem of Science in
German Idealism.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the term Wissenschaft was widely used in German
language publications to depict scientific or systematic knowledge, of which
natural science or natural philosophy was one part. German idealism is often
represented as aspiring to a scientific system of knowledge that resolves all
into reason. But Kant’s critical philosophy was concerned with the perspective
of finite human cognition. His ‘Copernican Revolution’ removed the human being
from its position of the sun or God, where it had rested in previous
metaphysical systems, and placed it in the position of the earth, attempting to
study the world from its limited perspective within the world. In particular,
human cognition was limited by sensory intuition and the problematic yet
necessary relation of reason to phenomena opposed to itself. The philosophic
systems of Fichte and Schelling continued to face the problem of reflexivity,
of trying to build scientific or systematic knowledge of the world by looking
at the world from within the world. As a result, one field of knowledge was
used to critically examine another; thus if philosophy provided a critical
examination of art, art in turn provided the means for a critique of
philosophy, and both provided a critical examination of natural science.
Natural phenomena also continued to have a significant but problematic place in
the system of knowledge, as necessary to cognition, indeed even self-cognition,
but opposed to reason and not resolvable into reason. Organic phenomena in
particular defied systematic placement in the science of knowledge. Organized
and self-organizing systems were phenomena for which no determinate concepts
were available and whose placement in relation to other natural sciences was
unclear and shifting at the time. It thus acted to destabilize the system of
knowledge. This paper will look at the problematic place of organic phenomena
in German Wissenschaft at the turn of
the nineteenth century.
Sterling, Keir
Mammal and Bird Collections made by Titian Peale
during the United States Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, and the Fate of his
Published Account.
Titian Peale (1799-1885) was the self-trained
artist-naturalist son of the Philadelphia artist and pioneering museum impresario
Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827). The younger Peale was one of a group of “scientifics”
who spent several years in the Pacific region as a member of the United States
Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842, otherwise known as the Wilkes Expedition
after its commander, Navy Captain Charles Wilkes (1798-1877). Peale’s
collection of wildlife from the Pacific, Antarctic and Southeast Asia were
among the many tons of unanticipated biological and anthropological materials
which this government-sponsored enterprise sent or brought back to Washington
prior to the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution in 1846. This paper
describes what became of Peale’s collections, Peale’s efforts to publish Mammalia and Ornithology, his book about
the mammals and birds he collected while with the expedition, the influential
scientists who opposed its publication, and the actions of Wilkes--acting for a
parsimonious U.S. Congress--which finally led to the suppression of Peale’s
book. This unfortunate outcome came about at a time when the era of the
old-fashioned artist-naturalist was giving way to the beginnings of modern
scientific zoology.
Stewart, Ian
Knowledge Circulation and William Gilbert’s A New Philosophy Concerning our Sublunary
World.
William Gilbert’s On
the magnet (London, 1600), now a canonical text in the history of science
as the beginning of ‘experimental philosophy’, represents an ambitious effort
to bring together in a new way various communities of readerships, practices
and communities of knowledge. It is, in that sense, relatively outward looking in terms both of
its application and its audience in the wider world. But his posthumously
published A new philosophy concerning our
sublunary world (Amsterdam, 1651)
represents, relatively speaking, much more the work of a private scholar, with
a large stack of books ready to hand, writing for those concerned with a
textual, scholarly refutation of Aristotelian orthodoxy. In this sense A new philosophy represents a different
and more established modality of knowledge circulation than On the magnet.
This mode is defined by the standards of scholarly exchange, standards
themselves undergoing gradual transformation in the face of new knowledge and
new contexts of knowledge exchange. It also was ‘experimental’ and ‘new’, but
in the sense of synthesising textual sources, concepts, arguments and
observations--natural historical, philosophical, astronomical and medical—from
both past and contemporary authors.
It is here that A new
philosophy was challenged by--and itself challenged--a different kind of
incoherence, as judged by a different modality of knowledge circulation than is
the case for the On the magnet. Here,
the reconciliation of different authorities and their claims to natural
knowledge, rather than the problem of single authorship is at stake. By comparing A new philosophy to On the magnet in this regard, my paper
will address the still-puzzling question of the emergence of the (then) rather
odd form of natural philosophical literature in the early-modern period:
experimental philosophy.
Stewart, Larry
Manufacturing Enlightenment : the factory and the
laboratory at the end of the eighteenth century.
This paper explores the nature of experimental practice and
the promotion of an industrial enlightenment at the end of the eighteenth
century. Numerous promoters of the public world of natural philosophy in
the eighteenth century, from Desaguliers to Nollet, expropriated
experimentalism in careers given over to philosophical and instrumental
demonstration. The purpose of such displays was, much like Diderot’s much
praised Encyclopedie, the wide expansion of philosophical as well as
technical and instrumental knowledge. The world of the public lecturer has been
the subject of some recent discussion, most notably the degree to which it
might have had some influence on the spread of natural and experimental
philosophy amongst a wide audience. This was especially important among
those who were mechanically inclined and especially adept at the promotion of industrial
enterprises in the last half of the century.
Theory and practice have often been regarded by historians
as existing on opposite sides of a divide which was, at least in the eighteenth
century, much lamented. With Nollet’s Lecons
de physque experimentale and L’art
des experiences, ou avis auz amateurs de la physique as the backdrop, this
paper will examine the world of experimental practice amongst industrialists in
Britain. Focussing on the laboratory experience of James Watt and Josiah
Wedgwood, the paper set out to explore the daily life of the laboratory,
the instrumental world of the experimentalist and the aims, utilitarian and
otherwise, which drove them. Particular focus will be on the wide range
of experiments, notably in chemistry and metallurgy, based on a highly
sophisticated knowledge of the chemical and theoretical debates which consumed
the late eighteenth century. Thus, in the daily life of the laboratory
were found the connections between theory and practice that have recently been
ignored.
Sturdy, Steve
From bedside to bench and back: cases, programmes, and
the cycle of scientific knowledge production in Edinburgh medicine, 1880-1920.
Post-Kuhnian historians of science have tended to regard
research programmes as the principle units of modern scientific knowledge
production, and have stressed in particular the role of disciplinary social
institutions -- notably research schools and scientific disciplines -- in
maintain the theory- and method- led character of such programmes. Recently,
however, historians of medical science and scientific medicine have begun to
recognise that knowledge was also produced in social and intellectual settings
that do not conform to this model of programmatic research. The present
paper examines such a case. During the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century, much scientific activity in the Edinburgh medical school
centred on the field of pathology. Socially, this activity was only
loosely disciplinary in character, involving shifting collaborations between
academic scientists and practising clinicians who drew on a broad range of
theoretical and methodological resources to further their investigations.
And intellectually, it was driven as much by problems arising in clinical
practice -- cases -- as by programmatic commitments to particular theories or
methods. The knowledge produced was also diverse: it included
contributions to general pathological theory; but these in turn were used to
elucidate the peculiarities of individual cases. This paper examines how
cases were conceptualised in this setting, emphasising the circulation of
knowledge from cases to theoretical generalisations and back. It
concludes that the work of scientific knowledge production in Edinburgh
represents a quite distinct “epistemic culture”, to borrow Karin Knorr-Cetina’s
terms, from the kind of research programmes that have hitherto preoccupied
historians of science.
Sumner, James
Dissemination and reception of scientific approaches
in the British brewing industry.
Natural-philosophical concepts and apparatus first
infiltrated the British brewery around the middle of the eighteenth century; by
the close of the nineteenth, chemical and microbiological training were
virtually prerequisites for entry to the brewing profession. In this
paper, I examine this development as a case of a traditional ‘craft,’ already
possessing some technological complexity, accommodating itself to the
unfamiliar tenets of speculative theory and experimentation. My study
proceeds largely from the manuals and treatises by which those brewers who
characterised themselves as ‘scientific’ disseminated their ideas: the
development of shared social spaces meant that brewers came increasingly into
contact with natural philosophers, and several early texts were written in
imitation of the model of the philosophical treatise, often introducing
speculations of their own. The ‘scientific’ brewers soon discovered,
however, that their ideas would proliferate only with the aid of careful
appeals to their more traditional fellows’ established norms; the brewery as a
whole did not straightforwardly accept as necessarily valid the discoveries and
underlying ideals of ‘science,’ but frequently adapted them to suit its own
technological and cultural imperatives, and were constantly mindful of the
option of ignoring them outright. The ultimate emergence of ‘brewing
science’ as a discipline embodying the shared values of the academic sciences,
I argue, cannot be explained purely in terms of the exhortations of the ‘scientific’
brewers, but has as much to do with the efforts of chemists, public analysts
and other outside groups, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to secure
this and other manufactures under their scrutiny and control.
Terrall, Mary
All in a Day’s Work: Réaumur and Natural History in
the Enlightenment.
The French naturalist René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur is
known today primarily for his hostility to Buffon’s version of natural history,
and perhaps for his obsession with insects. This paper uses Réaumur’s
extensive correspondence with a far-flung network of correspondents, readers,
and collaborators to draw a more nuanced picture of the practice of natural
history in the middle decades of the 18th century. This picture includes
experimentation with animal breeding (especially chickens) as well as
microscopy, dissection, collection, taxidermy, correspondence, drawing, and the
production of books. I look at method (and the contrast between Réaumur’s
methods and those of Buffon), but more especially the way that naturalists of
various stripes conceived of their work and talked about it with each
other. Ultimately, I address the question of the relationship of
experimentation to theories of generation.
Timmermann, Anke
A square circle: authors, writers and readers of late
medieval alchemical poetry.
‘Keepe this booke frome euil persones’ — written on the
flyleaf of an alchemical manuscript half a millennium ago, this warning
indicates a central issue in the history of alchemy: the discrepancy between an
alchemist writer’s anticipated or desired readership and the actual reception
of late medieval alchemica. The diversity of contexts for and readings of
alchemical documents in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries opens up
questions about the concepts of authenticity and authoritativeness. Any attempt
to give a coherent account of an alchemical text and its dissemination would
therefore, as I shall argue, be squaring the circle of its readers indeed. The
alchemical poem Verses upon the Elixir
will serve as an example of the role of written traditions in the history of
alchemy. Written in the late 1400s, the Verses
were copied, modified, re-worked and read in the following three centuries. All
relevant manuscripts show signs of scribal creativity, and some contain an
unusually wide range of early readers’ notes and comments. Furthermore their
places within manuscript collections indicate the copies’ position within the
corpus of alchemica at different times; for example, the texts appear several
times in the library of John Dee, the infamous sixteenth-century court
astrologer and magician. An analysis of these materials will show the
interactions between writing, the text’s history and also the historiography of
alchemy — some modern scholars, misreading or interpreting medieval texts, may
be considered the most recent addition to the group of ‘euil persones’ already
feared a few centuries ago.
Theerman, Paul
Profiles in Science: A Tool for
Educators in History of Science and Medicine.
With its combination of primary historical documents and
expert narratives, the National Library of Medicine’s Profiles in Science at www.profiles.nlm.nih.gov, presents
web sites on the life and work of prominent men and women in biomedical
research, public health, and health advocacy. The sites give access to digital
facsimiles of important print and manuscript materials. They set these
primary materials within an accompanying historical narrative. Together,
these features make the sites natural tools for educators in the history of
science and medicine. The sites include such figures as Nobel Prize
winners Joshua Lederberg, Marshall Nirenberg, and Linus Pauling, leaders of
women in science and medicine such as Barbara McClintock and Florence Sabin,
and international health workers such as Fred Soper. Profiles in Science also contains the Reports of the Surgeon
General of the U.S. from Smoking and
Health on, and an analysis of public health posters. This paper will
describe the Profiles in Science
project, focusing on the questions of deciding who is profiled, selecting
documents for each site, and making the sites usable by different audiences,
especially educators. The paper will then broaden its focus further, to
consider the role of digital collections in education, chiefly at the
university level, but also at the pre-collegiate level and with adult learners.
Valle, Ellen
The ‘colonial exchange’ in 18th century natural
history.
From the 17th century to 19th, an active correspondence in
natural history was carried on between various European ‘centers’, where
information was collected and knowledge generated, and the ‘periphery,’ which
by and large supplied the raw data for this creation of knowledge. This
periphery might be located in North, South or Central America, Australia and
the Pacific, India, or Africa; it might also be situated in less central parts
of Europe itself. The letters were often published either as such or after some
editing, especially the Philosophical Transactions. The writers might be colonists,
travelers or explorers. In the paper, I study a corpus of correspondence
between North America and Great Britain to illustrate the “colonial
exchange” in natural history. The colonies produce raw materials, which are
appropriated by the colonizing power; at the center these raw materials are
processed and converted into finished goods, which are re-exported at a
profit back to the colonies. What is being produced at the periphery in this
case is the raw material for the creation of scientific of knowledge:
specimens, descriptions and drawings, along with the vernacular names of
species. What is produced at the center is systematic knowledge: scientific
names, taxonomies and natural systems. These are then re-exported to the
colonies in the form of publications volumes of the Philosophical
Transactions and books on natural history. The colonial collectors can and do
use these books — above all by Linnæus, but also for instance by Philip Miller —
to attempt to classify and name their plants themselves: but the suggestion
always has to be submitted to someone in Europe for final approval, and is by
no means always accepted. This along with the construction of the sense of
community, and with genuine friendship and affection is what natural history
correspondence ultimately shows us.
Vermeir, Koen
Openness and secrecy in transmitting “magical
knowledge”.
In the current secondary literature on ‘openness and
secrecy’ in the transmittal of scientific and artisan knowledge, the discussion
of magic is often neglected or over-simplified. Magic, however, is crucial for
understanding the relation between science and the technical arts in the
Renaissance. We are confronted with the problem that traditional models for
understanding the circulation of scientific knowledge do not seem to capture
the specificity of ‘magical knowledge’, and both the classifications of magic
as open or secretive respectively fail when confronted with detailed
case-studies. The current historiography on the subject is unconvincing and
paradoxical.
In this paper, I will argue that it is possible to come to
a better understanding of magic by placing it in the context of rhetoric, shows
and illusionism. Recent research on itinerant showmen, demonstration lectures
and phantasmagoria has stressed the importance of such models for the
understanding of science as a whole, but the implications of this are not yet
fully conceptualised. Drawing on two case-studies (on alchemical furnaces and
magic lantern shows), I argue show that the dichotomy between openness and
secrecy is in itself flawed and I will show that both magic and science were
characterised by a specific dialectic of hiding and revealing. This is most
clear when magic or science are confronted with the public in demonstrations or
shows.
To conclude, I will suggest that a new (or rather, old)
concept of truth is needed, which cuts across the false dichotomy between truth
and illusion, to tackle the challenge magic poses to our understanding. Mapping
the evolution of different notions of ‘truth’ can furthermore help in our
conceptualisation of changes in ‘science’ and ‘magic’.
Vetter, Jeremy
Settler Science Goes Metropolitan? Studying Birds and
Mammals at the Colorado Museum of Natural History, 1901-1920.
In the early-twentieth-century U.S. Central West--still a
frontier zone for the global knowledge system if not for westward settlement
patterns--few regional institutions could lay claim to any recognition or
status in the scientific community. Other than some well-regarded research
related to mining and agriculture at the nascent state universities and
agricultural experiment stations, much of the science done in the region
(especially when it did not have direct practical application) was still
dominated by East Coast institutions. One emerging exception was the Colorado
Museum of Natural History in Denver, founded in 1901. By the 1910s, under a new
director, J. D. Figgins, the Colorado Museum embarked on an ambitious program
to expand its collections and research programs. This paper explores the
different ways that the Museum studied birds and mammals in the field,
emphasizing both how its leaders attempted to make its collecting practices
more systematic and rigorous, and how experiences in the field complicated
those efforts. By attempting to adhere to metropolitan standards of science,
despite many difficulties, Figgins and his allies worked to raise the status of
settler science in the burgeoning regional metropolis of Denver.
Wakefield, Andre
The German Sciences of State Promotion.
Looking out from landlocked central European
principalities, eighteenth-century officials coveted the wealth of their
European neighbors. They envied British markets, Dutch capital, and Spanish
colonies. Envy bred self-examination, a favorite German pastime;
self-examination, in turn, yielded a nagging sense of backwardness and
unrealized potential. But even as they envied the wealth of other nations,
German officials envisioned a prosperous future: they would extract new riches
from within their borders by fully exploiting human and natural resources. This
central European logic of development implied certain things about the
sciences. Above all it implied that state-funded knowledge, like the sovereign’s
mines and manufactories, had to turn a profit. By examining the fiscal
strategies of academic administration, my paper shows how German principalities
enlisted the sciences in their state building enterprises.
Wallace, Jeff
Literature, Science and Humanism.
Since its inception as a discipline, literary studies has
prospered on the back of the idea that it defends the ‘human’ against the ‘reductive’
and ‘mechanical’ tendencies of scientific materialism. The idea has taken
various forms, with differing degrees of subtlety, and in this paper I will
touch on various instances, from nineteenth-century humanism to
twentieth-century poststructuralism. Recurrently, the debate pivots on
contested models of what language is and does, and in recent interdisciplinary
work in the study of science and literature, the attribution to science of a
linguistic and therefore cultural identity can appear to restore ‘humanistic’
value to an otherwise barren domain. In part, I assent to this gesture,
arguing that certain caricatures of science might have seemed unsustainable if
literary critics had extended to science their much-vaunted methods of close
reading. But I also want to further unsettle the established terms of the
debate itself. What if scientific rationalism, rather than language, were
the shared medium of literature and science, implying that we gain from
recognising in literature a mode of scientific cognition? What if science
were the guardian of a rich and indeterminate sense of human value, and
literature the repository of reductive and essentialistic definitions?
What if materialism were the domain of creative imagination, and literature the
source of a mechanistic recitation of facts? Who might really lay claim
to the mantle of humanism?
Westman, Robert
Circulating Theoretical
Knowledge: Kepler and Galileo in the Years of Public Silence.
The earliest years of the 1600s witnessed a
convergence of new modes of natural philosophizing with theoretical astronomy
such as had failed to occur in the decades immediately following the
publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus. The later period is well
known, among other things, for the theoretical work of Galileo, Kepler and
Gilbert as well as Rome’s silencing of Bruno in 1600. Equally well known is the
infamous gap of thirteen years in the correspondence between Galileo and Kepler
after a promising initial contact in 1597. Yet, contrary to most current
historiography, Kepler and Galileo’s relationship, with its associated hopes
and disappointments, did not altogether vanish in the years before 1610.
In this paper, I will explore
residual, circumstantial clues that point to a continuing association. In
particular, I will look at a network of Italian and transalpine intellectual
friendships as well as the covert mediations through which Galileo and Kepler
continued to track one another’s theorizing. Such connections provide one axis
along which to read the circulation of theoretical knowledge in the period
immediately pre-dating the telescopic episode of 1609-1610.
Wittje, Roland
Launching from the physics department towards industry
building: The transition of practices between amateur radio, research and
commercial radio manufacturing in Norway during the interwar period.
Vebøjrn Tandberg was undisputedly the most legendary
personality in the history of the Norwegian radio industry. He repeatedly
stated that his radio factory had actually started in the basement of the
physics department of the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in Trondheim.
Tandberg was one of the first of a row of electrical engineers at Trondheim in
the 1930s to construct precision measurement instruments based on radio
technology. Like most of the other electrical engineers, Tandberg had been an
enthusiastic radio amateur and member of the Trondheim Academic Radio Club. After
graduating, these engineers spent between some months and some years as
assistants to Professor Johan Holtsmark before they left for appointments in
the industry. Consequently, according to Tandberg’s own understanding, his way
of manufacturing commercial radios was crucially shaped by his experiences at
the physics department and his acquisition of scientific work practices.
According to Holtsmark, it was necessary that young engineers had to learn to
think and work scientifically in order to suffice the requirements of modern
production life. More than the mere acquisition of a body of theoretical
knowledge, academic training of engineers for Holtsmark was the internalisation
of scientific practices. In my paper I will explore the transfer of practices between
amateur radio, scientific instrument making and research, and industrial
production. With examples from the physics department of the Norwegian
Institute of Technology at Trondheim I will show how practices and
practitioners crossed from one to another.
Worthen, Shana
Late Medieval Histories of Timekeeping Devices.
Historians of timekeeping have charted the history of
clocks, clepsydras, and things like sandglasses since before sandglasses were
invented in the mid-fourteenth century. In this paper, I will present the ways
in which timekeeping and its associated devices were chronicled by historians
of the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period, and briefly show how the
attitudes and understandings embedded in these texts reflect the larger histories
in which they have been written. In the process, I will shed new light on the
early history of timekeeping in general.
The fact of an object’s invention did not constitute
knowledge of its true historical origins. Many these written works speculate as
to those objects’ origins, based on etymological or deductive logic. Sometimes
the authors simply do not know when a device was invented, as is the case with
the sandglass.
Interest in the origins of
technologies flourished at the end of the Middle Ages. Several histories
devoted especially to the subject were printed by the end of the fifteenth
century, including those by Polydore Vergil and Marcantonio Sabbellico. I
will examine the works of these authors, as well as those by Alessandro Sardi,
Ramon Lull, and John Langley’s adaptation of Polydore Vergil’s work.