Abstracts Archive

One of the most pressing questions for the historically-minded nineteenth century was this: just how much could one trust Herodotus? Known since antiquity as ‚the father of history,’ Herodotus was also notorious for reporting improbable marvels (immense man-make lakes) and sensational tall tales...

Tools for Historians of Science
Organized Session

In the 9th century, al-Farghānī composed a work on the elements of astronomy which remained well-known for centuries during the medieval period. Through thirty chapters, he presented Ptolemaic astronomy in a way whose “rearrangement” and “rewording” was praised by medieval readers. Not bea...

Physical Sciences
Organized Session

Large-scale conflicts have long generated new practices and technologies of communication. As we have argued elsewhere (Bruton & Gooday 2016), long-distance aural communications became especially important in the First World War. In this paper we explore the new challenges of sky-borne telecommunica...

Technology
Organized Session

Contemporary models of development are the result of the encounter of different research traditions such as molecular genetics, cell biology and tissue and organ culture. While molecular genetics was a privileged focus of historical analysis, research in tissue and organ architecture did not experie...

Biology
Contributed Paper

During the Hongwu Reign (1368-1398) of the Ming Dynasty, a set of Zij was translated into Chinese under the Chinese title Huihui lifa (Chinese-Islamic System of Calendrical Astronomy). This paper will try to show how the Zij was looked upon and understood by Chinese astronomers thereafter. In view t...

Physical Sciences
Contributed Paper

Feminist scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have revealed the manifold ways in which differences of sex, race, and gender structure the production of knowledge. They show how binaries – including feminine and masculine, male and female, active and passive, emotional and rational – ...

Tools for Historians of Science
Organized Session

The panel explores different cases of the transnational scientific communication and cooperation involving the two competing Cold War blocks as well as the agents in-between. Socialist countries deemed the transnational and, in the context of the Cold War, trans-ideological scientific communication ...

Aspects of Scientific Practice/Organization
Organized Session

Historians have debated the ways in which Old World cultures were transformed, merged, and informed one another in colonial spaces like the Caribbean. My research shows that healing rituals using water were part of creolized discourses that bridged physical and spiritual worlds. This paper uses both...

Medicine and Health
Organized Session

When asked for the secret of his scientific success, Friedrich Paneth liked to refer to “serendipity”. This illustrious word had been introduced into the sociology of science by Robert Merton in the 1950ies. Since then it has become a vogue word for all kinds of accidental discoveries, but if it...

Tools for Historians of Science
Contributed Paper

From about the turn of the twentieth century, international conferences have become standard features of scientific life. Yet although they have frequently featured in the historiography, the role of such meetings has predominantly been discussed as a background against which the real action of inte...

Aspects of Scientific Practice/Organization
Organized Session

Illustrations and paper technologies contributed to and enhanced early modern science and especially the study of anatomy during the sixteenth century, not least by providing more accurate representations of the human body and allowing for the dissemination of consistent images. This paper documents...

Thematic Approaches to the Study of Science
Organized Session

Images of flayed human bodies, so-called écorché figures, occur with some frequency in artistic and anatomical handbooks from the sixteenth century onwards. Three-dimensional écorché models (‘anatomies’) sculpted in wood or wax are also occasionally listed in artist’s and collector’s inv...

Medicine and Health
Organized Session

We live in an age of innocence consciousness. Exemplified by the US-based Innocence Project (a non-profit legal network that leverages DNA evidence to overturn cases of wrongful conviction), and dramatized in popular docuseries largely devised and delivered on Netflix’s global platform, the pursui...

Thematic Approaches to the Study of Science
Organized Session

Environmental activists and environmental historians were not particularly concerned with the oceans until recent times. While transformation (and degradation) in land was clearly visible, it seemed that the ocean well could take all kinds of poison without great distress. While there was a long tra...

Aspects of Scientific Practice/Organization
Organized Session

In the 1930s two studies were published by the League of Nations which both had a large influence on the development of economics. The first was a report on the theories of the business cycle by Gottfried von Haberler, the second one a statistical test of the various theories of the business cycle b...

Social Sciences
Organized Session

When the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Agreement on Cooperation in the Field of Environmental Protection was signed in 1972, the two nations had limited previous experience in joint scientific work in earth sciences outside the International Geophysical Year. Constraints in communication, scarce access to data and ...

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Organized Session

This article takes up National Defense Education Act (NDEA) and NDEA-related calls in the late 1950s for the training of an emergent profession—the guidance counselor—which was to play an instrumental role in public schools in both the measuring and placement of students in schools by “intelli...

Thematic Approaches to the Study of Science
Organized Session

Before there were chairs, institutes and courses of geography at universities, the discipline had its institutional basis in "Geographical Societies". The purpose of these more or less amateur associations, which started emerging in the 1820s, was to promote and disseminate geographical knowledge. W...

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Contributed Paper

Over the past two decades, STS scholars have argued that the high-stakes, low-certainty conditions of much contemporary scientific research imply an urgent need for new ways of doing science. They have proposed variants such as “Mode 2 science” and “post-normal science,” which would draw pol...

Aspects of Scientific Practice/Organization
Organized Session

History of science education remains a marginalized topic, if not a neglected one, or is seen as a separate discipline apart from the history of science. This is despite the fact that science teaching and learning at all levels from primary education to university constitutes a substantial portion o...

Social Sciences
Organized Session

My paper intends to explore the impact of translation practices on the construction of female authority in one particular vernacular tradition. My approach traces how late medieval Catalan medicine articulated its own notion of female medical authority by acknowledging, adapting and erasing Latin id...

Medicine and Health
Organized Session

Boyle’s mechanistic interpretations of fire and the ‘spring of air’ are relatively well known. The elusive link between these two branches of his science—in particular his sustained and original work on the nature of fluidity—remains understudied, partly due to Newton’s long shadow in th...

Aspects of Scientific Practice/Organization
Organized Session

Recently, several projects have been dedicated to transferring film collections into the digital world and hence, some significant online-databases such as Europeana.eu have been created. However, it has hardly been examined from an epistemological point of view what problems and questions evolve wh...

Tools for Historians of Science
Organized Session

To the early modern imagination, Brazil was a land of natural and human wilderness. I investigate this metonym by focusing on the centrality of human beings and their bodies to Portuguese projects of imperial expansion. I trace changes between Aristotelian views of humanity ascribed to Jesuit missio...

Aspects of Scientific Practice/Organization
Organized Session

No other organism better represented the nebulous boundary between botany and zoology in the Victorian imagination than fungus. For the first half of the nineteenth century, it was not clear whether fungi should be classed with plants or animals. Although, by the end of the century, the taxonomic co...

Tools for Historians of Science
Organized Session

When stationed in Manila at the turn of the eighteenth century, the Jesuit pharmacist Georg Joseph Kamel found himself engaged in encounters between European and local traditions of knowledge. Based on his local experience, he produced extensive treatises of Philippine flora, which were later printe...

Thematic Approaches to the Study of Science
Organized Session

Allen’s book entitled David Hartley on Human Nature (1999) gives a careful review of the works and life of the physician and philosopher David Hartley (1705-1757). However, there has been no thorough study of the role of nerves in the naturalisation of the mind in Hartley’s work. This latter, in...

Medicine and Health
Organized Session

In this panel, we aim to discuss the study of plants in different contexts, periods, and areas from Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern world. The recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of the study of vegetation in diverse areas of human activity, thereby suggesting that the claim that ...

Medicine and Health
Organized Session

While historians most often write to an audience of fellow historians and academics, clear exceptions are made—for instance public history efforts or the development of textbooks and curricular materials. This paper will explore the use of historical analysis specifically as a tool for policymaker...

Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Science
Organized Session

The history of Atmospheric- and Earth System Sciences (ESS) in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is a desideratum in the history of sciences, compared to developments in other countries, especially the USA (i.e. Oreskes and Conway 2010, Weart 2008, Fleming 2005). Both the establishment of new in...

Earth and Environmental Sciences
Contributed Paper