Abstracts Archive

The question of how the pre-digital modern sciences have coped with knowledge inflation is as open as timely. Handbooks, understood as heavy, multivolume reference works claiming to present a discipline’s essential knowledge in a systematic order, were an innovation to deal with this problem, whic...

In comparative racial craniology, the foundation of physical anthropology, authoritative knowledge about racialized bodily difference was produced through intertwined projects of quantifying and visualizing cranial morphology. While craniological quantification has received significant critical atte...

A parallel development in the history of the sciences and the humanities was the structural organization of small-scale, practical, and method-oriented training by German university professors in the mid-nineteenth century. For several disciplines in the humanities and the sciences, historical studi...

In 1848, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-1898) published an article in which he defended the theory of a motionless Earth. By 1865, he had changed his position and argued that the Earth did revolve around the sun. Curiously enough, his defense of this idea is presented in his bilingual publication The Muham...

Translation plays a central role in the historiography of Islamic science and medicine. Two episodes of translation bookend the “Golden Age”: the translation from Greek to Arabic, and that from Arabic to Latin. In both processes, translation is understood as a mode of acquisition and/or loss whe...

Between 1862 and 1879, 291 letters were exchanged between the most celebrated nineteenth-century naturalist, Charles Darwin (1809-92), and self-taught, working-class gardener, John Scott (1836-80). Scott was a foreman at the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens when he first wrote Darwin to point out an erro...

In the 1960s and 70s, architects and designers looked to the sciences for inspiration and a systematic approach to shaping environments rich in information. This is particularly evident in an approach promoted by the Herman Miller Research Corporation (HMRC), a division of the iconic furniture manuf...

The expedition—as a knowledge practice and social organisation—was a fundamental way in which Europeans sought to understand the new and unknown for much of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. For historians, published expeditionary narratives are challenging sources to work with: not ...

National statistical agencies institutionalized the collection and publication of data, as well as its representation in increasingly sophisticated models, in the early 20th century. These new kinds of knowledge came to define modern quantitative social science. With them, researchers hoped to measu...

The study of emotions attracted renewed interest in the nineteenth century. Following Duchenne de Boulogne’s Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (1862) and Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), physiologists, psychologists and neurologists turned to photography and ...

Today, theoretical biology is often described as the branch of biology that employs mathematical and computational tools to model and represent biological processes in quantitatively precise terms. But it wasn’t always this way. A hundred years ago, when theoretical biology first emerged as a dist...

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” or so said Keats. Historians of science are very adept at understanding the complexities involved in translating natural phenomena into fact, and fact into truth. Less critical attention, however, has been paid to beauty and how it has shaped expectations of what...

In Japanese traditions there is continuity between nature and culture in so far as the sense of a place speaks directly to the intricate interplay between human and natural forces. This continuity is most clear in the historical practice of naming utamakura—storied places shared through literature...

The figure of Tsar Peter I of Russia (1672–1725), a reputed reformer of the early Russian state, has become a plastic signifier and conveys different kinds of historical symbolism. But it is widely agreed that the formidable pace of Petrine reforms caused a genuine struggle to construct such a lan...

At the height of the Cold War, Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, one of the most prolific American surgeons of the 20th century, made several trips to China and the USSR to survey the medical landscape on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He toured clinics and medical schools and met with barefoot doctors. ...

Arthur S. Eddington (1882-1944) certainly was one of the world’s most famous astronomers during the interwar period. For thirty years he was the director of the Cambridge Observatory and taught astrophysics at Trinity College. From 1916 onwards, he endeavored to develop a series of stellar models ...

Around 1900, Germany housed several large commercial firms for map making, such as Justus Perthes in Gotha and Velhagen & Klasing in Leipzig. The first especially had a large impact on academic climatography through its scientific flagship journal Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen. This, togethe...

This paper recovers a significant body of Julian Huxley’s early writings concerning the biology of sex determination, sex development and sexual behavior. Following the success of his studies relating to avian courtship, Huxley envisaged a more integrated approach to the study of animal behavior w...

In response to a request by the Navy’s Sick and Hurt Board to investigate the recent sickly state of HMS Foudroyant in March 1804, Plymouth Hospital Governor Richard Creyke summarised the best available advice for creating a heathy environment on board ship: “We strongly recommended Whitewashing...

The Bolsheviks seized power during the Great War and built their dictatorship through a “continuum of crisis” (Holquist), channeling the violence of total war inward. The forced collectivization of agriculture, an unprecedented and cataclysmic experiment attempting to “modernize” the country...

Throughout the 16th century the most influential scholars of the time as well as interested laypeople started collecting, sending, and amassing immense herbaria of plant specimens. In this way, plant specimens gradually gained importance and meaning, being increasingly perceived by naturalists as eq...

The Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias occidentales written by the Spanish naturalist and physician Nicolás de Monardes was published in three parts in the 1560s and ‘70s. The book dealt mainly with medical products from the New World and was widely distributed throug...

For early modern European savants, metrology was a major conceptual and practical crossroads, where antiquarian inquiries into the patriarchs’ cubit and the Roman foot met with urgent contemporary matters of commercial and scientific exchange. Translating unfamiliar but newly relevant Chinese voca...

In 1651, John French (1616-1657) offered the English reading public a new handbook: The Art of Distillation. The work represents the fruits of French’s wide-ranging reading and translating practices and includes large sections (with images) extracted from Johann Rudolph Glauber’s (1604-1670) Fur...

My presentation investigates two key concepts that both in historical and museological research need more analysis on – virtual travel and immersion – and their relationships with the 17th century English natural history collections, commonly known as cabinets of curiosity. Virtual travel is a c...

Planetary automata, also called planetary clocks, were expensive and rare masterpieces of technical ingenuity designed to show the subtle motion of the heavenly bodies according to Ptolemaic theory. These automata may justly be considered mathematical instruments for a two-fold reason: they manifest...

It is known that throughout the seventeenth century the world system proposed by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) assumed a preponderant position in the Iberian cosmological debate, affirming itself as the one with the best agreement to empirical evidence. Moreover, the Tychonian model (or variants thereof) ...

Father Claude Richard (Ornans 1589 – Madrid 1664) was professor of mathematics at the Jesuit Imperial College in Madrid (1627-1767) from 1630 until his death. He published Euclides elementorum geometricorum libros tredecim Isidorum et Hypsidem et Recentiores de Corporibus Regularibus, et Procli pr...

This paper brings together histories of science, print, nationalism and empire through the case study of a popular science monthly established by Indian intellectuals in early twentieth century north India. In April 1915, a new monthly called Vigyan appeared in the Hindi public sphere. It was brough...

In this paper I use an example from my ethnographic fieldwork on the the Dutch dairy sector to challenge some troubling claims made by those attempting to historicize contemporary capitalism. Or, to put it another way, what can livestock agriculture tell us about post-Fordist forms of capitalism tha...