Abstracts Archive

The Dutch anatomist Dr. Frederik Ruysch is best known for his artfully embalmed anatomical specimens. Between roughly 1689 and 1731, Ruysch displayed this collection inside his family home in Amsterdam. Ruysch’s house museum attracted international attention, and became an important space for the ...

To study chromosomes under the microscope they need to be spread and flattened, fixed and stained. In short, they are highly manipulated dead objects in an artificial milieu. Yet in practitioners’ eyes, chromosomes have become “hypnotically beautiful objects” (Hsu 1979) to which researchers ha...

Historians of science have explored the many ways in which 1960s radicalism disrupted the discipline of science. More recently, historians have begun to look at the 1970s as its own distinct era of transformation, one characterized as an “age of fracture” and “the great shift,” in the words ...

In his manuscript of 1818 entitled “System of radical sympathies and antipathies,” Charles Fourier claimed to have devised “the art...of finding all those persons with whom one is in complete sympathy, and of surrounding oneself with them instantly and constantly.” Unfolding across 117 pages...

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a methodological controversy emerged around the scientific problem of understanding human color vision in evolutionary terms. While the first experimental psychology laboratories were being constructed across Western Europe and North America to s...

Exhibitions are social constructions in which information and archives are selected by professionally diverse teams, whose work may be influenced by institutional and financial contingencies. In natural history museums, expography has drastically changed during the last two centuries. Scientific and...

In the past decades, historians of medicine and historians of the body have produced a considerable amount of research on the circulation and transformation of medical knowledge and practices across different social groups, while historians of science and technology have shed light on the role of ar...

Eighty years ago, in 1939, a radical collective of French mathematicians published the first installment of a monumental effort to rewrite the foundations of mathematics under the pseudonym Nicolas Bourbaki. The Elements de Mathematique, collectively planned, written, and revised, quickly became an ...

Exploring materials from the period of British administration of Tanganyika, this paper examines initiatives at controlling and preventing plague outbreaks in the areas surrounding Mwanza town in the decades following World War I (1920s-1930s). It focuses on various scientific attempts to eradicate ...

This paper explores the entanglement of slavery, medicine and natural inquiry in early modern Italy. It focuses on the healing spaces and practices that developed alongside the creation of a Bagno, a purpose built edifice that housed a large community of up to 3,000 (mostly Ottoman) slaves in the Tu...

Ever since the human mind was constituted as an object of science in the late-nineteenth century, its immateriality has remained an enduring stimulus. Curiously, for most of a century, in most of the world, making the human and the mind susceptible to scientific investigations has required the use o...

This session explores novel perspectives on publication formats in 20th century science publishing. Thereby we build on recent scholarship of print media in the sciences, yet we address a rarely looked at period that is crucial to understand current debates about publishers or media. When and why be...

This paper examines the self-measurement and self-tracking practices of one individual, François-Marc-Antoine Naville, a turn of the eighteenth century Genevan pastor and pedagogical innovator, who extensively used self-measuring instruments to choose a destiny in life and improve his moral charact...

The unprecedented speed of telegraphic communication was the source of considerable excitement across Europe during the nineteenth century. The technology, it was often held, heralded a new age of instantaneous interpersonal communication, which would simplify the conduct of business, politics, and ...

Most histories of entomology have analyzed insect eradication strategies in Europe, the U.K. and the U.S.A. This session brings together scholars conducting new research on twentieth-century entomology in multiple places, many of them settler societies: provincial China, U.S.S.R., Malaysia, Kenya an...

Since the eighteenth century, childbirth in Western medicine has been understood as a mechanical procedure consisting of a regular sequence of foetal movements through the mother’s womb. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the reasons for these movements were not yet understood. What kind o...

The boundaries between the humanities and the sciences have traditionally been seen as solid and more or less impenetrable; however, in view of the closely entangled developments of the history of (non-human) nature and the history of (human) culture they may not be as unproblematic as first thought...

Around 1445 the artist Andrea Amadio translated the plant imagery of a luxury herbal manuscript into a more extensive, stylistically-diverse illustrative cycle. This new manuscript contains the pharmacopeia of Venetian physician Nicolò Roccabonella (1386–1457), which distils traditional medical t...

In the first years of its existence between 1810 and 1815, the Royal Zoological Museum in Berlin processed just over 60 new animal specimens into its collection. In the few years following, this modest number of incoming specimens had exploded into the thousands, such that the museum’s shelves wer...

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anglo-American anthropologists conducted field expeditions to disparate regions. Some of these anthropologists contributed to the social reform efforts of a trans-Atlantic community of Progressive experts. Within this highly populated landsca...

Histories of the atmospheric sciences have explored the cultural imaginations, scientific networks, political institutions, and material objects through which knowledges of meteorology and climatology have been produced, circulated and consumed (e.g. Anderson, 2005; 2018; Baker, 2017; Coen, 2018; Ed...

This case study examines the intersections of research film and historical concepts of behavior. Based on the example of early East German bioacoustics it combines approaches from media philosophy and the history of science to discuss the relevance of film documents for an historical reconstruction ...

From its inception, assisted reproductive technology (ART) – ranging from artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation to surrogacy and egg freezing – invoked public questions of the world to come. This constellation of emerging technologies was simultaneously credited with the disruption ...

In 1969, J. R. Pierce, executive director at AT&T Bell Laboratories, called for a suspension of all speech recognition research, condemning the field as an “artful deceit” perpetrated by “untrustworthy engineers.” Automatic speech recognition, he insisted, could not be solved through en...

The British natural philosopher John Herschel (1792–1871) remains a paradoxical figure in the historiography of modern science: simultaneously recognized as pivotal in the development and professionalization of modern science while curiously under-examined. Herschel’s career spanned fields from ...

Acupuncture analgesia seemed relatively straightforward. The patient lay awake as a practitioner needled selected sites on the body to induce numbness for surgery. Numerous reports emerging from China in the 1970s featured women and men resting on operating tables, smiling into the camera, surrounde...

In close alignment to the preceding paper of the panel (Krämer), this paper explores the entanglement of nineteenth-century natural and cultural histories further. Specifically, it traces how and why nineteenth-century botanists claimed a role for themselves in the writing of cultural history. Most...

Literature on the circulation of natural knowledge in the Atlantic world offers rich discussions regarding the significance of non-European peoples in the development of colonial and metropolitan science and medicine. The Americas has been a foundational geography in this scholarship. Historians hav...

How can we envision our Star Trek future in space? Contributing to the conference theme of “Telling the Stories of Science,” this paper will discuss the intersection of audience, concepts of failure, and visions of the future as represented in the cultural history of the Space Age. Mythic vision...

As the European empires expanded to the Pacific region in the 18th century, the passages that linked the Atlantic with the Pacific Ocean began to play a more significant role in the connection and navigation of the globe. In spite of it being perceived as a remote and a dangerous environment, the so...