Abstracts Archive

In spite of the constraints of the Anglo-American nuclear monopoly in the early Cold War, Norway and the Netherlands managed to build and operate a joint nuclear reactor by July 1951. They were the first countries to do so after the Great Powers. Their success was largely due to the combination of t...

The proposed paper will narrate the story of projects to establish nuclear techniques in agriculture, focusing in particular on Africa. It aims at exploring how arrangements of nuclear and agricultural things gave birth to a third class of objects, i.e. biofacts (irradiated organisms). The questions...

Between 1918 and 1924 French doctor and cinematographer Jean Comandon (1877-1970) collaborated with prominent medical practitioners including Édouard Claparède, Jean-Athanase Sicard, and Édouard Long, to produce over fifty films of patients with neurological and neuropsychiatric conditions. Now a...

This session considers the place of slavery in early modern medicine and natural inquiry. It investigates both the many ways in which early modern medicine and natural inquiry supported the institution of slavery and the settings in which slavery was integral to the production of early modern medica...

In the first decades of the twentieth century, state administrators helmed organizations historically-unprecedented in their size and degree of centralization. Growing armies of state employees collected taxes; generated and distributed government statistics; administered fitfully-growing welfare pr...

The 1959 Antarctic Treaty declared Antarctica a zone of peace and a ‘continent for science’. A number of scholars, however, have pointed to the geopolitical factors which inevitably underlie international scientific collaboration. Whilst accepting this view, the aim of this paper is to suggest t...

The capacity of a human body to spontaneously harm itself was a major concern for medical jurisprudence in the British Raj. Those accused of crimes against the body could and did claim that the harm they were accused of was caused spontaneously by the victim’s body rather than through their crimin...

At the turn of the 20th century, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), inspired by kinetic gas theory, calculated the dimensions of the universe based on stellar velocities in the vicinity of the Solar System, giving rise to "stargas" models of star clusters -- and of the universe -- pursued from 1904 to t...

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 b...

This paper considers the overstrained nervous system as a critical component of the framework within which late nineteenth-century medical, literary, and popular culture defined itself as modern. Amidst the overwhelmingly fast pace of modern life, the nervous body emerged in this period as an elasti...

Today people increasingly use digital technologies to collect data about their body functions and everyday habits. They measure aspects such as sleep patterns, physical performance and calorie intake as well as mood and productivity, in pursuit of self-knowledge and self-improvement. This rapidly gr...

Sailing in unknown territory is a dangerous matter. To make sailing safer, sailors all over the world created maps and rutters, sharing their experience and knowledge. Early modern Chinese seafarers are no exception and we know of several Chinese maps that include warnings of dangerous places along ...

Historians often assume that physical anthropology before 1945 relied on a simple typological, descriptive method to analyze skulls and classify races, which was only successfully challenged by populational genetics after World War II. This paper revisits and complicates this history by turning our ...

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period commonly described as the Scientific Revolution, have been characterized by religious war, seasonal outbreaks of epidemic disease, and an ambitious and expanding sense of what was possible politically, religiously, and scientifically. Lived and imagi...

The broad domain of acoustics that emerged in research settings throughout the modern era is usually categorized as part of the natural sciences. Yet the study of sound is rarely interested in the formal, “hard” description of sound alone; “soft” practices of observation, experiential knowle...

Recent research in the area of drug discovery highlights both the value and challenges of utilising historical botanical sources to identify plant species with pharmaceutical potential. Focusing on herbals, this paper reflects on the use of digitisation in research that seeks to trace the exchange o...

This paper will explore the huge and highly influential natural history media output, including television, radio, encyclopedias and comics, as well as contributions to the mainstream press and scientific journals, by Felix Rodríguez de la Fuente (1928-1980), a pioneering and highly influential nat...

In the 1890s, the British sought to open the Colony of Zululand to European settlement. The country, characterised by abundant green pastures, was a paradise for cattle, but had been plagued by a livestock disease that the Zulu called uNakane (Anglicised as nagana). Its cause, Zulu farmers insisted,...

Activist Elise Ottesen-Jensen founded the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU—Riksförbundet för sexuell upplysning) in 1933; by that time she had been corresponding with American birth control activist Margaret Sanger for several years and had established a strong working relations...

Eighteenth-century birthing manuals presented the maternal body as an obstructive factor in natural childbirth. This impulse is best exemplified in visual culture, wherein infant delivery is often reduced to bare bones: the oft ill-fated interactions between maternal pelvis and fetal skull. The tend...

Through a computational examination of a textual discourse in commercial food magazine, this paper examines the expression of neoliberal thinking in Dutch food culture. A particular striking shift in western notions of what constitutes healthy food can be located in the second half of the twentieth ...

Historians of the atmospheric sciences are often quick to specify the threshold of meteorology’s modernity as the invention of meteorological instruments (most famously the barometer and thermometer) in the early 17th century. Such a narrative conceals, however, the failure of instrumental weather...

This paper studies the development of novel ideas about the human body that appeared in Atlantic slave-trading circuits during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Using governmental, corporate, and private records from archives in Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Netherlands, The United Stat...

This article analyses the intellectual legacy of the Centro de Estudos Africanos (CEA) from Mozambique ‘socialist period (1976-1990), in the scientific work of the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Económicos (IESE), a private research institution founded in 2007. The article argues that to fully gr...

The Alaska Area Specimen Bank (AASB), a large biobank located in Anchorage, holds nearly half a million samples of blood, plasma, tissue, serum, and bacterial cultures. The samples, more than ninety-percent of which were collected from Alaska Native individuals, are the cumulative result of nearly s...

For both scientific and cultural commentators at the end of the nineteenth century, the defining characteristic of the era was that of speed - whether externally in the technologies of communication, or internally as registered in accelerated modes of mental and bodily life. In this panel we explore...

The prominence of disability advocacy grew significantly after 1980. While research, assessment, and therapies for mental retardation and related developmental disabilities were traditionally in the realm of specialist psychologists, burgeoning advocacy organizations began challenging the classifica...

The League of Nations Health Organization was created as policymakers grappled with the cataclysmic consequences of two pandemics: global influenza and typhus in Eastern Europe. Contemporaries drew one understudied lesson from those pandemics: the value of information, particularly statistics, to pr...

This article examines the reception history of Jan van der Straet (Stradanus)’ Nova reperta, the iconic visual account of the modern inventions of the scientific revolution. It reconstructs how contemporary publics responded to Stradanus’ prints within Europe and across the globe. As I argue, th...

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 typi...