Abstracts Archive

Alfonsine astronomy flourished in Latin Europe from the second half of the 13th to the middle of the 16th century. It is arguably among the first European scientific achievements and shaped a scene for well-known actors like Regiomontanus or Copernicus. There has been, however, little detailed analy...

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...

On April 27, 1790, the first natural history museum in New Spain—Spanish territory from California to Guatemala—opened its doors. Its founder, José Longinos Martínez, had arrived in the Americas in 1787 as the taxidermist for the Royal Botanical Expedition, one small part of an immense nationa...

Sébastien Le Clerc (1637-1714), one of the most successful engravers of Louis XIV’s France, was born to a family of goldsmiths in Lorraine, and received classical artisanal training. Yet over the course of a highly successful career as an engraver, he also became a widely published scientific aut...

The long eighteenth century saw changes in ideas of order not only in politics and society, but also in philosophy, the arts, and natural science. In the aftermath of the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution, the Aristotelian two-sphere cosmology, which for millennia divided a geocentric univer...

This paper explores the human-assisted transoceanic migration and resettlement of the African Palm Weevil in Malaysia and S.E. Asia, and the consequent environmental and social upheaval that emerged at the intersection of biological symbiosis, neocolonial labor policies, accelerating economic change...

In this paper, I will address three related topics: (1) I will discuss Descartes' medical sources and aims when he was writing the long eighteenth chapter of Le Monde (The World), devoted to the study of L'Homme (Man) in the early 1630s.
(2) I will demonstrate the significant novelty introduced in...

Around 1550 Antwerp was a vibrant port. Its many schools catered for the many companies, its Beurs was one of the first stock markets of the world, its printers published books on all subjects. Ships travelled to all parts of Europe, the Baltic, Italy, Scotland, the Azores with merchants dreaming of...

Using case studies of nineteenth-century anatomical model making and use, this paper seeks to challenge/interrogate current historiography concerning the role of anatomical representations for modernity. Following particular readings of Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge, historians’ interpre...

My paper engages with a rather specific and yet understudied case of natural irregularity: the phenomenon of monstrous births within the Medieval Jewish tradition. How did Premodern Jewish scientists and philosophers consider bodily defects that were evidently disagreeing with the regularity of Natu...

In this presentation, I will study the transformations of the concept of “race” in French sero-anthropology between the 1940s and 1970s, focusing in particular on the work of Jacques Ruffié and his collaborators, at the Centre d’hémotypologie of the French National Centre for Scientific Rese...

Quite unlike other European empires, Portugal’s was marked by the persistence of a manuscript culture well into the age of print, by the decentralization of its imperial investigative institutions, and by colonial medical challenges that gave metropolitan physicians particular influence over imper...

In 1828, the Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe (1788-1858) published his now famous work, The Constitution of Man. Over the course of the nineteenth century, this book sold more than 300,000 copies, and was translated into at least six different languages, including Bengali and Japanese. From Amer...

The sixteenth and seventeenth century have long been seen as fundamentally important to an understanding of the changing study of nature. The changes in this period have been variously categorized by historians as philosophical, methodological, or mathematical, among other explanations. A move to th...

In 1851, the botanist and cell-theorist Matthias Schleiden wrote a remarkable essay. In part a book review of Karl Vogt’s German translation of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, it ranged much further, to present an explanation of the contemporary vogue for popular science. Schleiden’...

The discovery of Burkitt’s lymphoma (BL), a childhood cancer that appeared to be limited to particular parts of Africa and caused by a virus, attracted a range of researchers with a stake in the field of cancer viruses to Uganda. Between 1962 and 1979, the East African Virus Research Institute (EA...

In the postwar era scientific conferences became ubiquitous and increasingly very large. As a reaction to this development, the Nobel Foundation in 1965 instituted the self-consciously elitist Nobel Symposia, still a going concern with around 160 meetings organized so far. The areas covered by the N...

In the historical memory of the twentieth century science the figure of the Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov looms large. Here, I tell a less familiar story, one that reveals how Vavilov’s genetic geography research has become entangled with the beginnings of the Annales school of historiography. ...

The public display of wax anatomical models in eighteenth-century Italy attracted Grand Tourists and was intended to contribute to the Enlightenment project of cultivating virtue and the public good. Not all anatomical models were destined for wide public consumption, however. This paper examines ob...

This paper investigates how the Chinese started to know about the agricultural value of guano and search for their own potential guano islands in late 19th and early 20th Century. Since the early nineteenth century, because of its nitrate-rich quality, guano has been recognized by chemists worldwide...

Today in China publicly minded social scientists are enthusiastically employing the methods of participatory action research, a form of engaged scholarship most famously associated with Brazilian philosopher of education Paolo Freire. Chinese social scientists typically treat participatory action re...

Despite extensive work on the history of medical instruments, the material turn has been slow to arrive in the history of medicine. Paradoxically, the materiality of medical objects and their practices is inseparable from their function. Designed to enact and control the violation of corporeal and p...

Materials research has contributed to pervasive, profound, yet largely invisible changes to both society in general and the sciences in particular. From computers to nuclear reactors, many high technologies – including the technologies of theory and experiment – require advanced materials. Yet w...

The paper explores the richness of scientific and philosophical approaches to matter in the thirteenth century. The twelfth-century Arabic- and Greek-into-Latin translation movements provided, in a relatively short time, Latinate audience with different accounts of matter as epistemic object proper ...

We live amidst a “biometric revolution,” a moment of accelerated development of technologies that identify individuals and secure societies by measuring and surveilling bodies. Those technologies centered on the head and the face are advancing especially quickly, exemplified by the growing use o...

This paper aims to discuss the medical practices in the cocoa plantations of São Tomé, a Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea. As in other contexts, São Tomé’s plantations were dependent on large contingents of displaced black laborers, framed by different institutions from slavery to inden...

The weather map has a crucial role in the history of meteorology. As Napier Shaw (1854-1945) noted in his History of Meteorology, the weather map had created a new generation of meteorologists after the first individual founders of the discipline in the early modern period. While historians have alr...

In 1794, several persecuted scientists, most notably the chemist Joseph Priestley, fled England for asylum in the United States. Americans celebrated Priestley’s arrival as a victory for science, human rights, and freedom, while their leaders hoped refugee scientists would enhance national science...

The Dutch anatomist Willem Vrolik collected several hundred abnormal human fetuses over the first half of the nineteenth century. Vrolik was one of the early teratologists, scientific men who sought to classify types of bodily abnormality and, through classification, discern what caused them. Vrolik...

In the 1840s, the French chemist Auguste Laurent turned to the study of the “active principles” of alkaloids, which ranged from the medicinal properties of quinine and cinchonine, to the deadly poison of strychnine, to the intoxicating effects of morphine and nicotine. Laurent had recently retur...