Abstracts Archive

How international scientific cooperation played out in Cold War politics and knowledge production has been a central concern for historians of science. The connection between U.S. or Soviet technical assistance and the rapid development of science in East Asia has been noted in this context. This pa...

This panel explores how dynamics of cross-cultural interactions changed from the early modern to the modern period and how such dynamics influenced the formation and interpretation of natural, medical, and cultural knowledge in different imperial contexts. Organized chronologically, from the sevente...

Although the importance of Descartes' work for the development of physical science in the pre-Newtonian period has been extensively explored in the literature, the impact of his work on the medical and biomedical sciences has not been examined in the same detail. This has been in spite of the explic...

Animal trade constitutes one of the key factors of animal mobility beyond their natural habitats. Exotic specimens found their way to menageries and zoos following the routes of colonial conquest and possession of land and natural resources. Whereas zoological gardens and animal collections in North...

Joseph Priestley had a particular story to tell about his own and others' scientific work, or rather a larger story, religious in nature, which historically placed and specified the fundamental meanings of historically recent and contemporary natural science. This paper will reconstruct these meanin...

This paper examines the importance of experiential knowledge in the work of thirteenth century natural philosopher, courtier, and Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (ca. 1214-1292), who saw experience as central to understanding natural knowledge, and to converting that knowledge into useful tools and pro...

We live in an age of innocence consciousness. Exemplified by the US-based Innocence Project (a non-profit legal network that leverages DNA evidence to overturn cases of wrongful conviction), and dramatized in popular docuseries largely devised and delivered on Netflix’s global platform, the pursui...

In this talk, I will explore some of the causal foundations for understanding and evaluating astrological practices in medieval and Renaissance Europe. I will do so in order to approach a topic that has been bothering me for a few years now, namely, whether or not we should call astrology and its va...

This paper opens by considering a peculiar phenomenon in scientific history – namely, the invention of the anatomical flap-book in the 16thcentury, in which a reader can lift a torso flap on a picture of a seated figure to reveal the organs beneath. Thus the reader replicates the experience of the...

In the mid-1970s, the Black Panther biochemist Curtis Powell pledged to publish his research only in African journals, in order to force western acknowledgment of African science. Five years before the publication of Bruno Latour’s Laboratory Life (1979), Powell was drawing on a precise underst...

This paper explores the planning, execution, and failure of the US-Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) newly initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar...

This paper looks at records of baby height and weight in baby books in the US between 1872 and 1940. Baby books, books in which parents record information about their child, are still a familiar object in households with young children. Baby books, this paper shows, are a unique source in which we c...

In 1625, the Protestant thinker Johann Heinrich Alsted defined medicina sacra as “the ability to heal well, deduced from sacred letters.” This definition points to the existence of a widespread early modern project between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries in which physicians and...

It is well known that scientific images have evoked emotional responses from (to name but a few) wonder to boredom, fear to possessiveness, and puzzlement to mastery. Yet outside certain specific contexts, notably Romanticism and the sublime, historians of science have paid more attention to the vis...

Since the first US case of post-conviction DNA exoneration in 1989, national advocacy organizations, spearheaded by the Innocence Project, have championed the cause of potentially innocent prisoners, raised public awareness, and promoted policy reform. These developments have been hailed as the dawn...

The story of statistics before 1900 is one of a logic common to every science that emerged from the interplay of two developments: the combination of observations and the use of probability mathematics. Both having separate beginnings, these two developments intersected in the first decades of the 1...

When stationed in Manila at the turn of the eighteenth century, the Jesuit pharmacist Georg Joseph Kamel found himself engaged in encounters between European and local traditions of knowledge. Based on his local experience, he produced extensive treatises of Philippine flora, which were later printe...

It used to be widely accepted that the eighteenth-century emergence of the 'aesthetic' as a category of experience and philosophical inquiry depended on an explicit denial of the pleasures, pains, and functions of the body. In recent years, however, scholars have become increasingly interested in ho...

"The Outline of History" (1920) by H. G. Wells is an ambitious title narrating the "whole story of man" from prehistory to the Great War. Wells adopted an unconventional approach comprising the natural world and human civilizations together. Before introducing the dawn of early civilizations, the bo...

This paper, which is also a contribution to the somewhat understudied area of the history of biography, discusses a couple of short accounts of the life of the English chemist Humphry Davy (1778-1829) and the three major biographies published in the years following his death. These latter were an �...

Pigs, chickens and cattle in factory farms need to eat. A lot. Millions of tons of feed are shipped across oceans to make industrial livestock production possible. This creates global problems, like deforestation in the global south, manure surpluses in the global north, and competition between anim...

Johannes Weigelt (1890-1948), a German paleontologist and geologist, was the first proponent of taphonomy—the study of the decay, burial, and fossilization of biological organisms. In the mid-1920s, while performing fieldwork in the U.S. Gulf Coast, he came across scores of dead cows, birds, fish,...

In recent years, scholars of early modern science have emphasized the visual aspects of natural knowledge during the period that was once called the scientific revolution. This panel examines how images and knowledge circulated between painters, draughtsmen, printmakers, naturalists and scientific p...

The scientific idea(l)s of racial anthropometry—as formulated by one of the most influential scientists of that field, Rudolf Martin, and taken over by his Dutch pupil Van der Sande—entailed a strict objectification of the study of anatomical difference in relation to geographical descent. It wa...

In early modern times, a considerable increase in the knowledge of the exotic medicinal plants enriched the European pharmacopoeia. The introduction and presence of new medicinal botanical species coming from the East and the Americas is testified by their inclusion in the various treatises of medic...

Illustrations and paper technologies contributed to and enhanced early modern science and especially the study of anatomy during the sixteenth century, not least by providing more accurate representations of the human body and allowing for the dissemination of consistent images. This paper documents...

This article takes up National Defense Education Act (NDEA) and NDEA-related calls in the late 1950s for the training of an emergent profession—the guidance counselor—which was to play an instrumental role in public schools in both the measuring and placement of students in schools by “intelli...

In this paper I will focus on the period c. 1530-c.1560 and on a cluster of Italian naturalists, their painters and patrons, in order to address the following two issues. The strong visual turn of natural history and the role of non-printed images in this period; the links in terms of methodology an...

This session will focus on the use of maps and the practices of scientific mapping by different social groups and cultures over different periods of time. Discussions of eighteenth-century planetary mapping, nineteenth-century terrestrial and botanical mapping, and early twentieth-century climatolog...