Abstracts Archive

It was for both science and empire that East India Company employees lugged (or rather, employed Asian porters to lug) a panoply of fragile instruments into, and specimens out of, the Himalaya in order to account for what were only just coming to be acknowledged were by far the highest mountains on ...

How international scientific cooperation played out in Cold War politics and knowledge production has been a central concern for historians of science. The connection between U.S. or Soviet technical assistance and the rapid development of science in East Asia has been noted in this context. This pa...

This paper examines a scientific career of one of the most prominent genetic engineering scientists in South Korea, Dr. Jin-soo Kim. As he often introduces himself, he is “an entrepreneur and chemist-turned-biologist.” He is quite renowned for his work on genome editing at Seoul National Univers...

This paper demonstrates how phrenological tools of character assessment were used to measure marriage compatibility in the nineteenth century. It will examine how the knowledge and practices of cranial measurement produced character “profiles" for the purpose of judging suitable marriage partners....

This paper examines the environmental history and cultural geography of the Atlantic during the Age of Exploration. How, it asks, did early modern oceanic imaginaries shape the contours of European expansion and cultural contact? From the ancient period through early modernity, numerous commentators...

Geneticists rely on working collections of data and of living organisms. Databases capture, order and communicate standardized genetic information, while stock centres make available vast arrays of standardized yeasts, bacteria, viruses, plasmids, cell cultures, animals and plants. Collections of bo...

This paper looks at records of baby height and weight in baby books in the US between 1872 and 1940. Baby books, books in which parents record information about their child, are still a familiar object in households with young children. Baby books, this paper shows, are a unique source in which we c...

Since the nineteenth century, medicine and science have been perceived as a monolithic tool for domination, inextricably linked to Europe’s imperial expansion into the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. To that end, nineteenth-and twentieth-century colonialism resulted in medical and scientific materi...

Inspired mainly by the example of Italian ‘Democratic psychiatry’, around the mid-nineteen eighties, the policies of both Dutch government and the field of mental health care turned towards the aim of deinstitutionalization. Official governmental directives included the gradual dismantling of so...

As Katherine Ott has asserted, disability is “unique in the extent to which it is bonded with technology, tools, and machines as a medium of social interaction.” Objects used by, and made for, disabled people serve as tangible evidence of lived experiences of disability—the constraints of medi...

In the mid-1970s, the Black Panther biochemist Curtis Powell pledged to publish his research only in African journals, in order to force western acknowledgment of African science. Five years before the publication of Bruno Latour’s Laboratory Life (1979), Powell was drawing on a precise underst...

This paper explores the planning, execution, and failure of the US-Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) newly initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar...

Between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, contributions to knowledge about nature depended on correspondence networks as a means for exchanging information, ideas, and specimens. The importance of these networks to the most eminent figures in science has been widely acknowledged....

Pigs, chickens and cattle in factory farms need to eat. A lot. Millions of tons of feed are shipped across oceans to make industrial livestock production possible. This creates global problems, like deforestation in the global south, manure surpluses in the global north, and competition between anim...

Over the course of the twentieth century, highland Southeast Asian indigenous societies grappled with the incursions of diverse Western imperial interests and, later, with the more imminent colonization endeavours of newly independent, development-oriened nation states. Disparaging ethnographic asse...

Obstetrical forceps loom large in the history of midwifery as the explanatory mechanism for the emergence of routine male attendance on uncomplicated labors. The forceps, however, were a dynamic object that underwent constant modifications, with incongruous versions often coexisting. In 1751 celebra...

Johannes Weigelt (1890-1948), a German paleontologist and geologist, was the first proponent of taphonomy—the study of the decay, burial, and fossilization of biological organisms. In the mid-1920s, while performing fieldwork in the U.S. Gulf Coast, he came across scores of dead cows, birds, fish,...

In the early modern period, most scholarly works (as well as many maps, instruments, etc.) included a printed dedication. Historians of science have studied such dedications mainly as a window on patronage relationships. That aspect is important, but cannot be the whole story. After all, most reedit...

Although the importance of Descartes' work for the development of physical science in the pre-Newtonian period has been extensively explored in the literature, the impact of his work on the medical and biomedical sciences has not been examined in the same detail. This has been in spite of the explic...

My paper will demonstrate how the character and the content of a discipline at a moment that it seems to have become a solid and accepted one, are still under vivid discussion. When the Fifth international meeting of geneticists in 1927 in Berlin took place, participants felt that genetics was now a...

This paper, which is also a contribution to the somewhat understudied area of the history of biography, discusses a couple of short accounts of the life of the English chemist Humphry Davy (1778-1829) and the three major biographies published in the years following his death. These latter were an �...

Despite medical advances, healthy living advice in the eighteenth century conveys a strong impression of continuity with the regimen genre from the late-middle ages and Renaissance. Indeed, most continued to be informed by a Galenic understanding of the body, particularly as regards the framework of...

The papers in this session recall the intellectually-challenging context in astronomy and astrophysics at the turn of the 20th century, when a wealth of empirical data became available, giving rise to a host of new, and quite puzzling statistical correlations, the reality of which was often deemed u...

This panel explores how dynamics of cross-cultural interactions changed from the early modern to the modern period and how such dynamics influenced the formation and interpretation of natural, medical, and cultural knowledge in different imperial contexts. Organized chronologically, from the sevente...

This paper will examine the history of psychiatry through the lens of the refugee camp, which, I argue, has served as an instrument of accumulation and extraction of knowledge about refugees and their mental (ill)health. Though the voices of refugees are often absent from the psychiatric knowledge c...

What did it mean for something to be the “material basis” of life, or heredity, permeability, or metabolism before molecular biology? What conceptions of matter did biologists rely on as they tackled new research topics? In the latter half of the nineteenth century (and well into the twentieth) ...

In the late 19th century many biologists in Central Europe turned to the field of malacology, the study of snails and other molluscs. In a period when global environments changed tremendously due to human intervention and the growth of global transport and economy, many biologists believed that snai...

Transhumanists predict that people will achieve immortality by 2045. While this quest for eternal life has been omnipresent in human history, early modern physicians, philosophers, and lay people particularly strove to identify the key to overcoming death. Between the Renaissance and the Enlightenme...

This paper traces the development and diversification of apparatus for monitoring and tracking blood sugar levels for diabetes. With the discovery and introduction of insulin in the 1920s, juvenile diabetes went from a certain death sentence to a manageable chronic disease, but one that required con...

For this session, I will present a selection from my dissertation, “Ventilating the Empire: Environmental Machines in the British Atlantic World, 1700-1850.” My overall project proposes that efforts to improve air quality have a significant history that pre-dates the industrial revolution. Alarm...