Abstracts Archive

In the mid-20th century, as GC-MS and other instrumental technologies facilitated an increasingly precise understanding of the molecular dimension of flavor alongside the development of formalized methodologies for measuring sensory experience, “flavor design” became a systematized aspect of con...

The Session aims at discussing, from different case studies, the importance of global projects in the development of astronomy during the 19th and 20th centuries. The main goal is to reflect about how institutions (astronomical observatories, maritime services, telegraphic and rail offices, etc.) ap...

This roundtable puts the spotlight on ‘generation’—the capacious conceptual framework within which issues of procreation and descent were discussed across large swathes of the globe before modernity. Eventually replaced by the apparatus of ‘reproduction’, which has grabbed most of the atte...

This paper traces a long-standing-- and perhaps surprising-- resistance to forcing air into the body. Brain death, organ transplantation, and complex life support all depend on positive pressure ventilators only developed post-war. But, already by the end of the nineteenth century, such machines wer...

Over the late eighteenth and the nineteenth century, classical music was increasingly perceived as a universal language in Western countries. At the same time, however, intensifying processes of globalization and growing historical knowledge about the musical past revealed the plurality of musical s...

A recent exhibition of medical manuscripts at the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia (IAMM) entitled Al-Tibb: Healing Traditions in Islamic Medical Manuscripts successfully raised awareness of traditional healing among Malays featuring the museum’s collection of Malay medical and divination manuscripts....

In early modern time, vegetal bodies fell under the investigations of natural philosophers, who used plants as tools to investigate nature and, even, to propose an alternative interpretation of nature and overturn the Aristotelian ontology. René Descartes’ mechanical philosophy of nature embodies...

Even by the late 1950s, the easiest way to produce a clear image of outer-space was to have someone paint it by hand. In March of 1957, this was exactly how the Boston Science Museum presented visitors with a new view of the lunar surface; installed in the Astronomical Exhibits lobby in front of the...

The paper will introduce the outbreak report as an epidemiological paper technology. Since the late nineteenth century, epidemiology has not only developed statistical instruments and stochastic models, but the formalisation of the budding discipline included also the consolidation of a consistent n...

Pre-modern celestial observers had difficulty understanding the positions of the sun, Mercury, and Venus in a geocentric planetary order. Prominent ancients – Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Cicero, and Ptolemy – were inconsistent in their statements regarding the placement of the inferior planets...

My paper explores the role played by the king’s first physician (Premier médecin du roi) in organizing and evaluating a particular form of medical experimentation, namely, clinical trials of novel therapeutic substances. Although the primary responsibility of the first physician was supervising t...

Franco Basaglia was the acknowledged leader of a vast movement of psychiatrists, patients, administrators, students, politicians and others to reform the psychiatric system in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. This movement transformed individual asylums in Italy and the treatment of patients, and led t...

This panel addresses the impact of long terms when engineers, architects, government officials, and entrepreneurs planned revenue and resources during an era of industrial expansion, war, and social engineering. While the paper tools of their trade showed single units, complete time series, smooth l...

In 1773, visitors crowded one of London’s preeminent exhibition venues in order to see two recent paintings by George Stubbs. Portraying a dingo and a kangaroo, these images were among the first to depict recently-discovered Pacific flora and fauna for a European audience. Yet Stubbs – whose pai...

This paper investigates the ambivalent character of Saturn in the context of sixteenth and early seventeenth literature on mining and metalworking in relation to desires, vices and virtues. The mythical figure Saturn, the son of Father Sky (Uranus) and Mother Earth (Gaia), was in medieval and renais...

In the late nineteenth century, new opportunities arose for practicing that most venerable and ancient of military arts—malingering. The expansion of workplace benefits made "playing sick" profitable in a range of new occupations while the growth of the workforce militated against close surveillan...

By comparing 17th-century medical dissertations we can study how the strategies of disputation and dissertation changed and migrated from one generation of students to the next. My case study is the prolific thesis writer and supervisor Daniel Sennert (1572-1637), professor of medicine and alchemist...

In the history of the circulation of knowledge certain objects may be considered as paradigmatic of the ways through which information about territories and people was produced. The namban screens and the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias – RGI, both produced in the second half of the ...

Descartes' medical reception can be separated into several phases in the seventeenth century, starting with its first introduction and extending to its sophisticated refinements. This talk examines a final moment in its reception in the Low Countries in the work of the Leiden professor Theodoor Craa...

The polemic between Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655) and the astrologer and mathematician Jean-Baptiste Morin (1591-1659) – which followed the publication of Gassendi’s “Galileian” letters De motu impresso a motore translato in 1642 – is widely regarded as a defining moment for the destiny of a...

Historians of the Space Age have pointed to the importance of space popularization, including the work of space illustrators like Chesley Bonestell and his contemporary science fiction authors and filmmakers, in selling a space future to the American public. But what was this future, and who was all...

Before astrophysics became truly physical in the 1920s, it was typically described as either "photographic" or "spectroscopic," where empirical mapping campaigns made it possible to intercompare the observed properties of the stars. From this effort, many correlations were established including the ...

The Pythagorean Archytas at the beginning of his work on music theory (fr. 1 Huffman) established a division of the mathematical sciences in astronomy, geometry, harmonics, and arithmetic which became famous thanks to Plato’s adaptation in Republic VII. Socrates praises geometry (way over the othe...

In the rapidly growing recent historical and literary scholarship on the genre of biography, a quote from Virginia Woolf has achieved classic status: "How can one make a life out of six cardboard boxes full of tailors' bills, love letters and old picture postcards?" It pointedly frames the biographe...

It is well known that the appearance of quantum mechanics caused drastic changes in sciences of substance in many aspects, such as their methodologies, objects, and disciplines. By the mid of 20th century, some disciplines—solid-state physics, chemical physics, and quantum chemistry, for example�...

This paper scrutinizes the revisions of mathematician Bernhard Riemann’s (1822-1862) 1854 habilitation lecture at the University of Göttingen. It argues that the lecture is a reflection of how mathematicians developed non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century, breaking with long-standing...

Alchemical language is an example of scientia poetica, its Decknamen are coded, ornate and instable. But alchemical language shouldn’t remain ultimate riddle it has come to represent. Couldn’t a computer bring clarity into the poetics of alchemy? After all, poetry is a system and systems can be ...

In the final year of World War II, scientists advising the U.S. government on hormone herbicide research struggled to develop censorship practices that blended conventional modes of publication with the comparatively draconian model of atomic secrecy. Botanist Ezra J. Kraus encountered this dilemma ...

The Kuroshio–––literally known as the “black current”––is the Pacific counterpart of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic. It is a west-to-east flowing warm current in the Northeast Pacific region. During the Cold War, a 13-year international program known as the “Cooperative Study ...

In December of 1822, Danish naturalist Nathaniel Wallich (1786-1854) left his home in Kolkata, and visited British colleagues in Bengkulu and Singapore on a collecting mission that was designed to unite the flora of the East Indies and India. During his months abroad, Wallich collected thousands of ...