Abstracts Archive

This talk will relate discussions about human genetic variation (a key issue in the debates on human races) to the history of theoretical population genetics. In the first part of the presentation, I will analyse how two prominent statistical population geneticists, namely Newton Morton and Masatosh...

During the early modern period, the mathematical sciences dramatically upgraded its status. It went from having a secondary role and ancillary status in the mid 16th century, up to be considered the most powerful tool of scientific research by the turn of the 18th century. As recognized by a large h...

The astrophysical research of Anton Pannekoek (1873-1960) is characterized by epistemic virtues like precision, diligence, and exactitude, which he valued over expeditiousness or scope. In theoretical research these virtues were present in his development of laborious numerical methods for the fine ...

In the 16th and 17th centuries, medical students from the German-speaking territories would very often set out for Italy especially in order to gain extended anatomical and surgical knowledge. Back home, opportunities to put these additional skills into use were rather narrow, but there were some ex...

This paper will analyze the epistemological interventions of Nawab Fakhruddin Khan Shamsul Umara in the field of science and knowledge production in the princely state of Hyderabad. He established a printing press in the state in 1834 and founded an institute of learning. He translated science books...

Ayurveda, an Indian traditional medical system is an all-embracing system of medical teachings which encompasses a number of different historical lines and layers. The term āyurveda means, literally, “the knowledge or science (Sanskrit veda) for longevity (āyus)”. There are eight branches of �...

At the end of World War I, when the idea of a “world economy” took shape, economists on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the dream of establishing an economic world barometer. The seemingly mechanical working of new forecasting instruments seemed to allow for that dream to become reality. Thi...

Girolamo Cardano writes of how people can find themselves in love against their will: if we imagine something beautiful, we cannot withhold our love. Hence, when a beautiful form enters the imagination, the will can be submitted through the inflammation of medical spirits (Cardano then goes on to di...

Forensic DNA Phenotyping (FDP) technologies aim at reconstructing the face of a suspect from samples of DNA left at a crime scene. Law enforcement agencies employ FDP-generated “DNA Snapshots” of suspects in their criminal investigations, and share these with the media. Scholars expressed skepti...

Since the establishment of the laws of thermodynamics, the allocation and efficient use of energy resources has not only been a major topic for the physical labor of man and machine. Around 1900, the efficient use of energetic resources presented an equally important issue for establishing technique...

For decades, it was widely assumed, even by some historians of science, that the notion of human races had lost any real scientific legitimacy sometime around the end of the Second World War, only to “return” at the beginning of the 21th Century in the wake of the Human Genome Project, as a bypr...

This panel presents four different examples of how historical actors in Latin Christendom and the Ottoman Empire worked within and challenged existing narratives about the epistemic value of experience. The papers comprising this panel explore multiple sites and multiple networks separated by space ...

During the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two of the twentieth, theories that predicted the end-of-the-world circulated internationally and were linked to astronomers. The imminence of the end-of-the-world surpassed the fin-de-siècle atmosphere, and it remained until after the ...

In this paper I will present a collection of secrets gathered between around 1660 and 1730 in the Oratorian house on the rue Saint-Honoré, the heart of Paris’s growing culture of consumption. While the identities of receipt authors and compilers cannot often be ascertained, studying the collectio...

This essay explores the intimate relationship between translations and printing privileges in the early Dutch Republic (ca. 1581-1621). Printing privileges provided temporary monopoly rights to produce a variety of printed materials, including books, pamphlets, engravings, and maps; they are usually...

This paper takes up the panel’s concern with the materiality of medical artifacts by examining the transnational itineraries of one psychiatric object: the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). First developed by Harvard psychoanalysts in the 1930s, the TAT prompted test-takers to provide open-ended n...

In microbial worlds, resistance is the response to selective pressures such as antibiotic environments. To understand microbial resistance scientists are acting as multispecies ethnographers seeking to narrate microbial worlds and tell the story of how and why microbial communities emerge as resista...

In the history of nineteenth-century collections of racial anthropology, a shift is detectable in the way in which skulls were collected and described. Late-eighteenth century and early-nineteenth century collections-- like those of Blumenbach-- are typological in the sense that certain races or typ...

Based on two collections of personal notebooks I will investigate the role of translation in the re-creation and reconstruction of the medical canon in seventeenth-century England. One of the results of the so-called “scientific revolution” on the traditional medical corpus was that classical me...

After World War II, the global conservation community went through a period of institutional restructuring – which culminated in the foundation of the International Union for the Protection of Nature (IUPN, later IUCN) in 1948. From the start, ecology served as the lead science of the new organiza...

In 1932, Professor Cassius Jackson Keyser called for “the disciplining of men, women, and children in the art of ‘postulate detection.’” An essential goal of education, he believed, was to teach Americans how to find the hidden assumptions that determine every system of thought, from politic...

The Spanish crown anticipated that the medical practices in Spain would be replicated in the New World. While there were abundant opportunities to practice medicine in Peru, the opportunities to learn medicine were limited by the lack of universities capable of awarding medical degrees and by the sh...

Premodern science considered nature through Aristotle’s definition of an intrinsic principle, driving species and individuals towards perfection, in a less or more regular manner which allows scientific knowledge. However, sometimes things go wrong—nature incidentally makes mistakes. Can natural...

Johann Funck's "Chronologia" was one of the most popular tabular chronologies of the early modern period with several editions following its original 1545 publication in Nuremberg. In my presentation, I will display an opening from the 1554 Basel edition of the same work to highlight the instability...

The question of female self-starvation has been widely debated in the history of medicine and religion, with scholars such as Silverman (1983) anachronistically diagnosing “miraculous maids”—women who claimed to have miraculously survived without food for extended periods of time—as early ca...

In 1624 the Wittenberg professor of medicine Daniel Sennert (1572-1637) wrote to his brother-in-law and fellow physician Michael Döring (d. 1641) expressing grave concerns about a former student who was peregrinating from university to university and denigrating Sennert’s reputation wherever he w...

During the 19th century children moved into the focus of a blossoming material and media culture. A growing market of parent advice literature, newspapers, and magazines offered information on topics ranging from baby care and nutrition to social and moral education. An increasingly broad range of t...

For centuries, people have accumulated natural things and arranged them into collections of examinable, comparable, and combinable specimens to deepen their knowledge of nature. In the last two decades, tracking the pathways of natural things through time, space, and taxonomies has become a popular ...

The German Institute for Norms (later called DIN), founded in 1917, ostensibly aimed to first fuel wartime production and later restart the German economy after the lost war. By prescribing dimensions and shapes for mass produced objects, engineers and architects constructed an entire norm system sc...

‘Laboratory animals’ and the infrastructure that sustained them were an integral part of the development of the twentieth-century biological and biomedical sciences. Until 1986, in Britain, the scientific use of animals was governed by the 1876 Cruelty to Animals Act. For 110 years—during a pe...