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 anatomist, successively uncovering the body’s secrets. Usually these texts were uncomplicated, with one figure and one flap; but we will consider here a bizarre multi-flap, moving-part anatomy first published in Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum. This anatomy was republished in England, and by the end of the seventeenth century, it contained not outdated copies of images from a prior century, but pirated illustrations from a famous contemporary neuroscientific text, Thomas Willis’s 1664 Cerebri anatome. Yet anatomy was not the only discipline to make use of flaps, as mathematical texts such as Sir Henry Billingsley’s 1570 Elements of Euclid deployed similar pop-up page elements to illustrate geometrical concepts of surface area or volume. This paper will address the folded page, namely the ways in which flaps could be folded up, in, or out to replicate three-dimensional figures and spaces. As a corollary, I will consider the particular relationship such similar paper folding techniques invites (or provokes) between the disciplines of geometry and anatomy.

Pre-modern celestial observers had difficulty understanding the positions of the sun, Mercury, and Venus in a geocentric planetary order. Prominent ancients – Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Cicero, and Ptolemy – were inconsistent in their statements regarding the placement of the inferior planets. The same misunderstandings carried over into a plethora of medieval and Renaissance Latin manuscripts. The modern historian faces the question of how these later astronomy authors of the ninth through the seventeenth centuries diagrammatically responded to the planetary uncertainty? The answer, in many instances, was with innovation. By discussing several of these celestial diagrams, this paper demonstrates that attempts to adjudicate planetary locations resulted in a variety of novel planetary configurations: circumsolar epicycles, double and triple intersecting orbits, and implied epicycle-on-deferent schemes. Of particular focus for this presentation were unusual epicycle-on-epicycle arrangements for Mercury and Venus, which permitted a large variety of planetary orders to ensue. These planetary arrangements evolved from the fifth-century writings of Martianus Capella and Macrobius. The former sought to reconcile the ancient misgivings by suggesting that Mercury and Venus traveled in circumsolar epicycles, while the latter was widely (but perhaps incorrectly) interpreted to suggest intersecting planetary circles. These diagrams greatly impacted medieval and Renaissance ideas on planetary arrangements, including those of Copernicus. He explicitly acknowledged the role of Capella – and other Latin writers – in developing a sun-centered system that relegated the earth to planetary status.

Roger Boscovich’s career traversed much of Europe; his work, topics from astronomy to geodesy, optics to mechanics, mathematics to natural philosophy. When he put pen to paper, Boscovich deployed writing practices with a long history, from consistent partitions of the page and organizational schemes of sections and paragraphs to carefully drafted diagrams and layers of changes in the margins. One of those authors who (in Karine Chemla’s words) “design their texts at the same time they design concepts and results,” Boscovich mixed an older language of proportions with algebraic expressions in multiple variables, subjected both numerical data and mathematical relationships to tabular organization, narrated algebraic transformations in prose, and told readers what to see in his diagrams. His pen was much in action in his drafts; and his papers bear those traces. Fair copies produced by others helped to reconfigure his intentions; typesetters then invoked typographic conventions. In Boscovich’s body of work we can thus trace the fluidity of pen strokes and fixity of print in constructing the page and modeling mathematical thinking.

The United States Exploring Expedition (1838-1842) owed much of its realisation to the advocacy of Jeremiah Reynolds, a former newspaper man and public lecturer. His strongest case for the necessity of Pacific exploration were New England whalers who were said to cruise unexplored parts of the oceans and whose discoveries of uncharted islands were reported in the local press. The document that stood at the core of Reynolds’s lobbying for an expedition, however, was a table he had compiled after interviewing whaling captains in the country’s principal whaling ports. By presenting the whalers’ experience in tabular and synoptic form, Reynolds’s table helped forge the frontier figure of the ‘intelligent whaler’, a mariner who had better geographical knowledge than other seafarers. In my talk, I will discuss the paper technologies that produced the ‘intelligent whaler’ and investigate how Reynolds’s translation of ‘whaling intelligence’ from news into facts marks the beginning of the intelligent whaler’s long career in U.S.-American debates about expansionism, exploration, and science.

The paper will introduce the outbreak report as an epidemiological paper technology. Since the late nineteenth century, epidemiology has not only developed statistical instruments and stochastic models, but the formalisation of the budding discipline included also the consolidation of a consistent narrative practice. As example for this paper serves a series of outbreak reports from the third plague pandemic from 1894 to 1952. The period coincides with the formative decades of formal epidemiology as an academic discipline. Outbreak reports were a genre of communication for and between epidemiologists. Each report aimed to cover the range of complex local characteristics, which have turned a series of cases into an epidemic event. The reports collected general observations, individual case reports, mortality and morbidity statistics, brief descriptions of bacteriology, of treatment and prevention practices as well as of living conditions. They worked as places of explanation and cohesion for quantifiable data, such as case numbers, climate details or chronologies. But beyond their explanatory purpose, the reports did also reinstate and safeguard epidemiological practice as an empirical art, dedicated to fine-grained, systematic and inductive observation. The reports give deep insight into the historical formation of modern epidemiology as a broad interdisciplinary project, suspended between historical, anthropological, sociological, statistical, and medical approaches to disease. Furthermore, my paper will show that the narrative structure of the reports also sustained epidemiological reasoning as an inductive practice, based on the correlation of an open-ended range of data and perspectives, and often indifferent to questions of causation.