Abstracts Archive

It’s Paris, 18 April 1910. Eugène-Louis Doyen (1859-1916) takes the stage to deliver a lecture on topographical anatomy. Doyen intends to astonish the crowd with a carnivale moderne of medical science. There will be: lantern-slide projec­tions of color photographs of machine-sliced cross-section...

How does Locke contribute to the development of projects for a science of the mind, even though he seems to reject or at least bracket off such projects himself? A canonical empiricist, Locke nevertheless goes out of his way to state that his project to investigate and articulate the ‘logic of ide...

This paper examines the relationship between early modern accounts of longevity and the figuring of a new order of natural knowledge as a project of experience prodigiously extended, preserved and accumulated. Focusing on the English case, it examines the reinvention of longevity in the second half ...

Since Foucault’s History of Sexuality, sexology has been viewed by historians of science and medicine as a marker of sexual modernism, a category of biopower and an apparatus of discipline and social control. Postcolonial historians of medicine, including historians of the Middle East, have compli...

The early 20th-century American geographer Ellsworth Huntington is well-known for his work on climatic determinism, eugenics and in writing popular geographical textbooks (Fleming, 1998). Huntington’s work sought causal explanation for the patterns of civilization and mortality across the globe, i...

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...

What were the epistemic configurations of experience in the medieval sciences of soul and body? Simple sense perception, inspectio, anathomia, iudicatio by common sense, pre-universal experientia, and expertise all occupied distinctive, yet decidedly standardized spaces in the cognitive realm of the...

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...

One of the most pressing questions for the historically-minded nineteenth century was this: just how much could one trust Herodotus? Known since antiquity as ‚the father of history,’ Herodotus was also notorious for reporting improbable marvels (immense man-make lakes) and sensational tall tales...

In the 9th century, al-Farghānī composed a work on the elements of astronomy which remained well-known for centuries during the medieval period. Through thirty chapters, he presented Ptolemaic astronomy in a way whose “rearrangement” and “rewording” was praised by medieval readers. Not bea...

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...

To preserve the dead requires a well-timed pause—a cultural and technological application of energy or chemicals to create an indefinite ellipsis between a being’s biological expiration and the decay of their matter. In the eighteenth century, natural historians borrowed a word from the Old Worl...

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...

Following the Treaty of Madrid (1750) a bilateral Boundary Demarcation Commission was established to negotiate a permanent Luso-Hispanic Boundary in Ibero-America. The division between Spanish and Portuguese America remained imprecise, metaphorically drawn through a wild hinterland characterized by ...

The slow changing position of the fixed stars with respect to the vernal point, directly observable through the stars’ changing ortive amplitude, were accounted for by diverging models during the Middle Ages. Ptolemy assumed a linear increase of stellar longitude over time. A text on the movement ...

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...

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...

In the face of the current environmental crisis, i.e. climate change, the life and death of marine microbes has gained renewed scientific attention. Until recently unicellular marine microbes, such as phytoplankton, have been considered immortal unless eaten by predators. As marine ecologists recogn...

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...

Images of flayed human bodies, so-called écorché figures, occur with some frequency in artistic and anatomical handbooks from the sixteenth century onwards. Three-dimensional écorché models (‘anatomies’) sculpted in wood or wax are also occasionally listed in artist’s and collector’s inv...

This paper investigates different research traditions in early German-speaking theoretical biology. A century after the term ‘biology’ was coined, a number of scholars started to argue for the need to develop a ‘theoretical biology’. While through the works of, among others, Johannes Reinke ...

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke gives two explanations of intellectual habits and the association of ideas, one a psychophysiological account that has its origins in the Cartesian science of the brain, and the other a purely psychological account that seems to be original with...

The Lithophylacii Britannicii ichnographia [British figured stones] (1699) by Edward Lhwyd, the second keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, was the first illustrated field guide to English fossils. This paper analyses the book’s physical creation—the collection of specimens, fieldwork sketches and th...

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...

This paper proposes a comparative investigation of the use of emblems in two leading vitalist natural philosophies of the Renaissance, Giordano Bruno and Francis Bacon. Bruno and Bacon are rarely treated together. And yet, they share a lot: an“operative” vision of scientia, an appetitive matter-...

From 1851 onwards, coinciding with a period of relative political stability, Portugal achieved the necessary conditions for the development of its imperial plan. The Portuguese Government believed in the wealth of its African possessions, despite several public discussions about the future of the te...

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...

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the cranial or cephalic index was a widely used calculation for racial classification. This particular measurement, which could be applied both to skulls and to the heads of living people, allowed the comparison of members of ancient and biblical civi...

My paper intends to explore the impact of translation practices on the construction of female authority in one particular vernacular tradition. My approach traces how late medieval Catalan medicine articulated its own notion of female medical authority by acknowledging, adapting and erasing Latin id...

Boyle’s mechanistic interpretations of fire and the ‘spring of air’ are relatively well known. The elusive link between these two branches of his science—in particular his sustained and original work on the nature of fluidity—remains understudied, partly due to Newton’s long shadow in th...