Around 1900, almost all European and American births happened at home, but soon after, birth moved into the hospital. Historians such as Judith Leavitt have analyzed the role of obstetrical science in this shift. New scientific insights on how to prevent infections favoured the strictly controlled birth environment only the hospital could offer. Furthermore, pregnant women strongly believed modern science could make birth safe and comfortable – a modern, 'scientific' hopsital birth was seen as a good birth; a traditional home birth was not. Thus, in the 1920s and the 1930s, birth started to move into the hospital in most western countries – with one major exception: the Netherlands. Although trust in science was high in the interwar Netherlands, the number of hospital births remained low, a remarkable contrast still visible today. In this paper, I investigate this difference, which so far, I argue, has not been sufficiently addressed. Most historical work on the Dutch birthing system focuses on the strong position of Dutch midwives, but although midwives are necessary for home births, their presence is in itself not a sufficient explanation for the lack of hospital births. In other European countries with similar numbers of midwives, home births did decline nonetheless. To figure out what made the Netherlands different, I analyze scientific textbooks, practical handbooks, medical case notes, and women's diaries. Together, these sources help me explain why, in the interwar Netherlands, the 'scientific' hospital birth did not acquire the same popularity as elsewhere.

During the first half of the twentieth-century, neurosurgeons in the US linked differential experiences of brain/intracranial tumors such as meningiomas, gliomas, lymphomas, pituitary adenomas, and craniopharyngiomas to biological difference. In 1937, for instance, Harvey Cushing wrote that “brain tumors of any kind were rare in negroes.” Having seen only four meningiomas out of some two thousand brain tumors in his practice, Cushing concluded that negroes were exempt from meningiomas because their skulls were denser and thicker than those of whites. But differential incidence of brain tumors was not only racialized, but also gendered and geneticized; the latter especially in the 1970s by pathologists like Joseph Kovi and Kenneth Earle. However, by the last quarter of the century, a more egalitarian style of thinking on intracranial neoplasms would evolve in the US, which held that these neoplasms also affected negroes. My paper argues that the evolution of this new knowledge was not an exclusively US production, but drew extensively on the knowledge produced on intracranial neoplasms by African neurosurgeons, neurologists, and pathologists like Latunde Odeku and Adelola Adeloye during the period 1960s-1980s. It examines the why and how of the production and circulation of this style of thinking from Africa to the US. Thus, by locating the evolution of this new style of thinking not in the United States, but in Africa, and paying attention to the contributions of non-Western actors to western knowledge production, my paper, contributes and extends the new scholarship on global perspectives on science.

Attempts to discover whether or not one material can be used in place of another run through the history of science from antiquity to the present. This paper gives an overview of twentieth century histories of substitute materials as a technoscientific-political project. Successful substitution typically involves a coordination between material availability, narratives of use, experimental practices to discover similarities and differences between material affordances, and regimes of testing and regulation. Substitute materials are also invested with potent narratives which connects them with political aims. During the twentieth century historians have associated substitute materials primarily with a range of political projects, notably the chemurgical movement in the USA during the 1930s, British colonial development schemes in the post-world war two period, and the ersatz economies of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. It is thus framed as arising in exceptional condition, arising with conditions of war and emergency. Substitution can also be understood as a more gradual and quotidian series of material transitions and coexistences. Examining these more chronic attempts to substitute gives a way to relate histories of chemistry to geographies of production, and their associated ideologies.

The telephone in inter-war Britain was an important tool for both the identification and categorisation of individual hearing loss. Between 1912 and 1981, the British Post Office had control over a nationalised telephone system. Linkage between telephony and hearing has long been noted by historians of sound and science and Post Office engineers in the inter-war period had considerable expertise in both telecommunications and hearing assistive devices. This talk will first demonstrate how the interwar Post Office categorised different kinds of hearing loss through standardising the capacity of its users to engage effectively with the telephone, and secondly investigate how successful it was in doing so. By utilising the substantial but little used material held by BT Archives, we can trace the development of the Post Office’s 'telephone for deaf subscribers’, and explore how it was used to manage and standardise the variability of hearing and hearing loss within the telephone system. This talk will highlight that institutional decisions about the types of measurements we prioritise and the types of bodies we choose to measure as standard have been heavily weighted with historical biases and discrimination. Examining the creation of 'normal hearing' in inter-war Britain thus allows for wider consideration of the technological construction of disability.