Abstracts Archive

In the course of their study of the heredity of flower color, William Bateson, Edith Rebecca Saunders and Reginald Punnett observed that in Sweet Peas and Stocks, the crossing of two white-flowered strains produced purple flowers. Bateson’s student Muriel Wheldale quickly recognized the potential ...

The research theme is the reception of Georg Cantor's ideas in Russia. Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky have been influenced by Georg Cantor’s ideas and wrote a paper “On the symbols of infinity” in 1904. In this paper he says that transfinite mathematics of Georg Cantor is an example of sy...

This talk aims to understand the context of production and circulation of a set of photographic plates, graphic records and astronomical drawings made in Argentina between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. I will consider not only the traditions of scientific work differenti...

All that we know about the early modern Republic of Letters, from the heterogeneity of its membership to its continued significance in the learned world of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, is based on traditional historical research: the close-reading of historical documents. Ye...

In this paper I explore the relationship between skin, skin represented as fabric, and fabric covering skin within this context of seasonality in the representation of human bodies in anatomical works of the seventeenth century. I begin with engravings by Odoardo Fialetti, commissioned by Giulio Ces...

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the medical gaze turned itself upon the child and the adolescent, promoted them as new objects of science. In both Scotland and France, an alliance between political and medical men was formed to deal with their respective demographic crisis: public...

The concept for which Uexküll is best known is his notion of the environment (Umwelt) as a species-specific subjective construction. This concept, however, takes its full meaning when situated in the context of Uexküll’s overall reflection on biology. The constitution of the perceptive and opera...

During the last decade scholars of international affairs and political scientists along with ambassadors and government officials have extensively focused on the role of diplomacy in settling nuclear issues. Yet, the programmatic separation between science and diplomacy and the instrumental use of s...

The International Hydrological Decade (1965-1974) was a UNESCO-led program of research and training in the water sciences that laid the foundation for the International Hydrological Programme, which is still active today. Inspired by the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958) and other Cold War-...

Surgeons were key agents in the medicalization of early modern Italy, where a sophisticated medical economy combined medicinal consumerism with a widespread culture of hygiene. From the modest bloodletter up to the university-trained surgeon, they provided all kinds of health and beauty treatment fo...

The presentation focuses on how insects have been represented and taught in schools and universities between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, often in relation to matters like public health, economic botany or agriculture. As argued by Massimiano Bucchi (1998), the “golden age” for such a...

No criminal defendant, in principle, has to prove his own innocence. It is enough to sow doubt about the argument that the prosecution is making: in dubio pro reo (when in doubt, for the accused). Yet suspects and their defence attorneys frequently attempt to do just that. In their efforts they may ...

The respublica litteraria, the imagined community of scholars in the early modern period, was kept together beyond confessional borders through collective ideals. These ideals were celebrated and embodied by exemplary scholars – most notably Erasmus – who served as role models for virtue and par...

This paper explores how different interpretations of the landscape and environment around two archaeological sites of 20th-century Central America (Quiriguá in Guatemala and Copán in Honduras) made these sites contested spaces. It follows thematic trends across the records of several North America...

The flourishing practice of natural history collecting, which characterized the second half of the 18th century, was supported by a major theoretical effort to define how samples should be collected, preserved and displayed. This specialized literature was mainly produced within the French academic ...

The telephone in inter-war Britain was an important tool for both the identification and categorisation of individual hearing loss. Between 1912 and 1981, the British Post Office had control over a nationalised telephone system. Linkage between telephony and hearing has long been noted by historians...

In Ten Months in the Fiji Islands (1864) Sarah Maria Smythe narrated her military husband’s recent evaluation of the strategic and economic feasibility of British plans to annex the Fiji archipelago. Her published letters described her own contributions to concurrent Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew-spo...

Much of mid-twentieth-century US food science and technology had a prospective and promissory orientation — one that combined dire forecasts of a food-scarce future with robust claims by industry to provide solutions that could mitigate the effects of the coming catastrophe. Such was the case with...

“It’s a match!” To date, the phones of 91 million persons around the globe have already buzzed with these words – the opening salvos of courtship in the world of online dating. Yet what, precisely, is a “match”? Behind the multi-billion-dollar dating industry stand programmers and statis...

This paper focuses on the use of craniotomy in the exhausting and long labor of the imperial heiress of Brazil, Isabel de Bragança, in 1875. It analyzes the arguments around the use of this technique using as its main source the medical report of that event (1876). Obstetricians performed the crani...

From the establishment of the World Health Organization in 1948, the question of technical assistance was hotly debated by Eastern European countries. Recuperating from the war and undergoing radical political change, countries of the Socialist Bloc were both recipients and donors of technical assis...

It is a historiographical orthodoxy that the 18th century witnessed the rise of a historical consciousness, partly in response to what Hazard called the crisis of the European mind. Within this rise, we can identify a particular historical sub-genre: that of History of Learning. This ‘historia lit...

In scholarship on the transmission of knowledge across different cultures in the medieval period, historians--most notably George Makdisi--have identified evidence of pedagogical similarities and differences. However, very little attention has been afforded to pedagogies associated with particular d...

In the eighteenth century, algae were wretched organisms, receiving scant attention from naturalists, who largely preferred animals as their subjects of research. This predilection held true for J. F. Blumenbach, who devoted less than 5% of his influential Handbuch der Naturgeschichte to plants and ...

My talk surveys issues coincidental to the introduction of the Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree at nineteenth-century American Catholic institutions of higher education. Starting with Santa Clara College, a Jesuit school in California that conferred a B.S. degree in 1859 and continuing to 1900 (and...

In 1971, biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin criticized the agenda that had “dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States” according to which natural selection is seen as an “optimizing agent”. Conversely, they proposed a different standpoint on evolution,...

Vinculum vinculorum amor est. Giordano Bruno’s statement, “the chain of chains is love,” served Ioan Petru Culianu, in his classic on Renaissance magic, to summarize the conception that eros is the universal principle agitating nature. The living cosmos is sentient in all of its parts; desire ...

The major historical picture for the postwar nuclear landscape is the thesis of American ‘co-produced hegemony’ (Krige, 2008). According to this picture, the US government used its access to nuclear knowledge in order to both help postwar Europe rebuild its scientific infrastructure as well as s...

Designed to study earthquakes, seismographs was from the beginning of the 20th century installed across the globe. In the 1950s it became clear that global seismic monitoring was the most reliable method to detect underground nuclear tests. In 1961, M. Ewing of Columbia University was contacted by E...