Abstracts Archive

A panel discussion with the audience.

While mindful of the broad range of climate science at work in the Soviet Union, this paper focuses primarily on the use of natural analogues for comprehending possible climate change and articulating climate futures. The paper is divided into three main sections. First, it reflects generally upon t...

This session brings together papers that show how interactions with Latin American environments shaped scientific practices over three centuries, spanning the colonial and independent period. They discuss how a variety of scientific practices intersected with understandings of landscapes and environ...

My paper is set in the Southern Pacific, or the part of the ocean that connected East Asia to Central and South America, from the late-sixteenth to the early-eighteenth century. With merchant vessels loaded with American silver, African slaves, and global luxury goods circulating throughout the regi...

For decades, it was widely assumed, even by some historians of science, that the notion of human races had lost any real scientific legitimacy sometime around the end of the Second World War, only to “return” at the beginning of the 21th Century in the wake of the Human Genome Project, as a bypr...

This panel presents four different examples of how historical actors in Latin Christendom and the Ottoman Empire worked within and challenged existing narratives about the epistemic value of experience. The papers comprising this panel explore multiple sites and multiple networks separated by space ...

During the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth, theories that predicted the end-of-the-world circulated internationally and were linked to astronomers. The imminence of the end-of-the-world surpassed the fin-de-siècle atmosphere, and it remained until after the ...

In this paper I will present a collection of secrets gathered between around 1660 and 1730 in the Oratorian house on the rue Saint-Honoré, the heart of Paris’s growing culture of consumption. While the identities of receipt authors and compilers cannot often be ascertained, studying the collectio...

This paper takes up the panel’s concern with the materiality of medical artifacts by examining the transnational itineraries of one psychiatric object: the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). First developed by Harvard psychoanalysts in the 1930s, the TAT prompted test-takers to provide open-ended n...

In microbial worlds, resistance is the response to selective pressures such as antibiotic environments. To understand microbial resistance scientists are acting as multispecies ethnographers seeking to narrate microbial worlds and tell the story of how and why microbial communities emerge as resista...

This panel will address the use of science and technology studies to address particular audiences, re-evaluate perceptions of failed promises, and examine how the history of science and technology can be utilized as a tool for reconsidering the future. Presenters will focus on three case studies: 1)...

The contribution of women to astronomy has been studied focusing in European and North American observatories (Kistiakowsky, 1979, Rossiter, 1984, Pérez and Kiczkowski, 2010). However, we do not know about the contribution to global projects of female South American astronomers, who have been exclu...

This paper enquires the status of late medieval botanical scholars and their capacity to create botanical illustrations. Were plant scholars in the late Middle Ages able to draw at all? Could their own drawings be helpful for the plant studies they performed? Since Antiquity and throughout the Middl...

In 1932, Professor Cassius Jackson Keyser called for “the disciplining of men, women, and children in the art of ‘postulate detection.’” An essential goal of education, he believed, was to teach Americans how to find the hidden assumptions that determine every system of thought, from politic...

The Spanish crown anticipated that the medical practices in Spain would be replicated in the New World. While there were abundant opportunities to practice medicine in Peru, the opportunities to learn medicine were limited by the lack of universities capable of awarding medical degrees and by the sh...

Premodern science considered nature through Aristotle’s definition of an intrinsic principle, driving species and individuals towards perfection, in a less or more regular manner which allows scientific knowledge. However, sometimes things go wrong—nature incidentally makes mistakes. Can natural...

This paper will analyze the epistemological interventions of Nawab Fakhruddin Khan Shamsul Umara in the field of science and knowledge production in the princely state of Hyderabad. He established a printing press in the state in 1834 and founded an institute of learning. He translated science books...

In 1624 the Wittenberg professor of medicine Daniel Sennert (1572-1637) wrote to his brother-in-law and fellow physician Michael Döring (d. 1641) expressing grave concerns about a former student who was peregrinating from university to university and denigrating Sennert’s reputation wherever he w...

During the 19th century children moved into the focus of a blossoming material and media culture. A growing market of parent advice literature, newspapers, and magazines offered information on topics ranging from baby care and nutrition to social and moral education. An increasingly broad range of t...

This paper (undertaken with Aya Homei of Manchester University) depicts how anti-parasite and family planning campaigns developed in Japan and Korea independently after the Second World War, as specifically domestic public health initiatives that directly contributed to the post-war reconstruction (...

In 1700 the Italian physician Bernardino Ramazzini published the first treatise on the Diseases of Artisans. Originally published in Latin, the text was soon translated into several languages and annotated, updated and republished several times in the course of three centuries. Ramazzini, referred i...

Literature on the use of insecticides in the tropics after 1945 is preoccupied with the WHO’s Malaria Eradication Programme. This scholarship describes a form of technological hubris in which scientists rushed to deploy the quick fix of DDT on the widest possible scale, fuelled by belief in the po...

This talk will relate discussions about human genetic variation (a key issue in the debates on human races) to the history of theoretical population genetics. In the first part of the presentation, I will analyse how two prominent statistical population geneticists, namely Newton Morton and Masatosh...

During the early modern period, the mathematical sciences dramatically upgraded its status. It went from having a secondary role and ancillary status in the mid 16th century, up to be considered the most powerful tool of scientific research by the turn of the 18th century. As recognized by a large h...

The astrophysical research of Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960) is characterized by epistemic virtues like precision, diligence, and exactitude, which he valued over expeditiousness or scope. In theoretical research these virtues were present in his development of laborious numerical methods for the fine ...

In the 16th and 17th centuries, medical students from the German-speaking territories would very often set out for Italy especially in order to gain extended anatomical and surgical knowledge. Back home, opportunities to put these additional skills into use were rather narrow, but there were some ex...

This essay explores the intimate relationship between translations and printing privileges in the early Dutch Republic (ca. 1581-1621). Printing privileges provided temporary monopoly rights to produce a variety of printed materials, including books, pamphlets, engravings, and maps; they are usually...

At the end of World War I, when the idea of a “world economy” took shape, economists on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the dream of establishing an economic world barometer. The seemingly mechanical working of new forecasting instruments seemed to allow for that dream to become reality. Thi...

Girolamo Cardano writes of how people can find themselves in love against their will: if we imagine something beautiful, we cannot withhold our love. Hence, when a beautiful form enters the imagination, the will can be submitted through the inflammation of medical spirits (Cardano then goes on to di...