Abstracts Archive

By recognizing the essential, lived dimension of the ideas people use to organize their thinking about the world, biography has the potential to restore motivating ideals to historical understanding. In this paper I will develop this thesis by considering the ways the idea and ideal of reason were s...

The staff of the Science Museum in the Second World War years were faced with a dilemma. With its first purpose-built building opened in 1928, only two decades later they already felt their displays to be very old-fashioned. The galleries devoted to evolutionary sequences of technologies divided by ...

Byzantine scribes and copyists working with manuscripts stemming from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries employed several strategies on arranging and presenting knowledge with regard to astronomy and astrology, especially reworking Greek-Ptolemaic astronomy and incorporating Islamic astronomical...

At the close of the nineteenth century, a writer in the Lancet commented that ‘Sleeplessness is one of the torments of our age and generation’. He thus articulated the perception, which had been the source of mounting cultural and medical anxiety over the previous decades, that the conditions of...

A panel discussion with the audience.

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...

Galileo Galilei’s contemporaries repeatedly compared him to other famous men, such as Archimedes, Columbus, Vespucci, and Michelangelo. With these comparisons, contemporaries enhanced Galileo's fame, status and credibility, while also creating possibilities of understanding Galileo and his scholar...

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...

The creation of The New York Botanical Garden, an International Plant Research Center at the heart of New York City—and the programs of study that followed since the 1890’s—have helped lay the foundation of ecology as a discipline in America. The Garden now connects an ever larger community of...

After conducting path-breaking experiments on introducing token economies in mental hospitals, Australian psychologist Robin Winkler spent a sabbatical in the United States (1970-1971). There, he became acquainted with anti-psychiatry and initiatives in community mental health. After returning to Au...

Animals, as defined by Aristotelian terms, are actualized in connection to their movement, potential, and purpose. Our knowledge of animals in the history of science, furthermore, as developed from this historiography, has been constrained by foci upon specific charismatic animals at work or in moti...

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries metaphors acquired biologies, and then biographies. Emerson, in 1842, said “Language is fossil poetry”; modernist poets and critics gave criteria for what made a “healthy metaphor”; and it became possible for a metaphor to die. A dead metaphor is a o...

Prevailing views cast the Pacific as a desolate, sparsely populated expanse between continents and a blank slate for the assertion of Western epistemological and territorial claims. Burgeoning East Asian scholarship, migration studies and indigenous critical works adumbrate a radically opposed view:...

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...

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 schem...

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...

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...

This roundtable asks how politics and methodology operate in interrelations between Science Studies and LGBTQ+ Studies, as well as in conversations with other Area Studies. The panel’s participants engage Women’s, Jewish, German, and Chinese Studies, but we will, together with the audience, be c...

Within museum studies, there has been a recent interest in engaging with objects and their material effects as something other than vehicles for human cultural meaning, arguing that there has been a tendency to miss out of “an examination of the physical actuality of objects and the sensory modali...

The present paper looks at the research work developed in the early twentieth century by the histologist Abel L. Salazar (1889-1946) to explore the role of visual representations in the production of scientific knowledge. Medical doctor, professor, scientist and visual artist, Abel Salazar is a mult...

The role of fiction in both understanding and interpreting the world has recently become an increasingly important topic for many of the human sciences. The next volume of Osiris focuses on the relationship between a particular genre of story-telling – science fiction (SF), told through a variety ...

The science writer Robert Ardrey began his 1961 book African Genesis with the arresting line: “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born.” But by the end of the decade, it might have been unnecessary to include the second intervening phrase. Although the “out of Asia” hypothesis of...

The question of how Thomas Kuhn’s work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has been received by the Catholic church is a topic that has garnered small bursts of attention over the last fifty years. Theologians such as Hans Küng and David Tracy have explored the possibility of analogizing pa...

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)...

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...

The German physicist Pascual Jordan (1902-1980) is renown not only for his contributions to the development of quantum mechanics but also for trying to reconcile religious and scientific world views. Science, he thought, had repealed materialism. Aiming at a wider audience, Jordan lectured at Radio ...

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 the late nineteenth century, questions regarding hygiene and public health became central to the medical, cultural and political debates in Italy. Particularly during the first few decades after the unification (1861), public health campaigns became a key element in the creation of the new kingdo...