Abstracts Archive

In 1921 and 1922 the Utrecht-based chemist Ernst Cohen organized two informal international conferences. Their aim was to break the boycott of scientists from the former Central Powers that was the official policy of the new international scientific organizations established in the wake of the First...

The term “citizen science” has become very popular among scholars as well as the general public. The rapid expansion of citizen science, as a notion and a practice, has spawned a plethora of meanings. One of the most common usages today refers to voluntary lay participation in the production of ...

This panel explores systems of classification across the many disciplines that constitute the early sciences. It interrogates the particular ways in which historical contexts shaped how natural philosophers, scientific practitioners, and scholars organized and categorized people, plants, nature, and...

Malay-language recipes compiled in modern manuscripts, now catalogued as kitab tibb, kitab obat-obatan, and kitab mujarrabat, have become an essential part of Malay manuscript collections particularly in the Indonesian archipelago and in western Europe. These latent compilations of humoral, Propheti...

1968 is often hailed as the year that “rocked the world.” However, this historical moment is barely evaluated from the realm of medicine. “Hong Kong Flu” pandemic, one of the three worldwide flu pandemics breakout in the last century, was caused by the virus H3N2 and had infected 15 percent ...

Established in 1834 for the collection of facts, the Statistical Society of London (SSL) played a central role in the moulding of statistical facts. The SSL defined statistical facts as the aggregation of numerous observations and reduced the value of single observations to isolated facts that alone...

This paper examines how psychologists treating children as though they are little scientists helps explain the fate of recapitulationism in the human sciences. Thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries from Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel to G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey, and Jean Pia...

In the decade preceding World War II, the so-called Prague Linguistic Circle (Prague linguistic school) developed the ideas of Ferdinand de Saussure. While the original circle practically ceased to exist during World War II, its ideas were clandestinely revived and developed during the rule of the C...

How are animals to be classified? What gives unity to an animal species? What are the criteria for animals to be part of the same species? Variants of such problems are as intriguing to contemporary philosophers as they were to Scholastic scholars after Michael Scot translated three of Aristotle’s...

During the eighteenth-century, the Spanish Empire held a virtual monopoly on the production of cochineal, a lucrative red dye commodity sourced from insects grown on cacti largely in the south of modern day Mexico. The cochineal insect had been domesticated and grown by the indigenous peoples of cen...

Fundamental to the work of William Hunter and his assistants at the Great Windmill Street school in London was the collecting of anatomical preparations. Not only were these preparations vital to teaching at the school, their making provided visual and tactile information that was the basis for many...

Ulugh Beg’s 15th c. Samarqand observatory and associated madrasa is one of the most famous Islamic scientific institutions, producing astronomical observations that were not equalled until Tycho Brahe. Less is known, however, about the process of research and education at Samarqand, but a number o...

How have children defined what it is to know? In this panel, we explore how science molded children, and how children modeled science. Since the mid-nineteenth century, scientists have taken babies and young children as key sites to observe knowledge acquisition in action. Children were, the scienti...

One of the most successful natural history publications of late eighteenth-century Britain was British Zoology, authored by the Welsh naturalist, Thomas Pennant (1726–98). This book, that met four major editions between 1766 and 1812, was produced in a range of different formats and contains numer...

It is widely recognized that achieving sustainability in the twenty-first century will require a reorientation of scientific research towards “usable” knowledge, particularly when it comes to climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for instance, was created to translate sc...

Never officially enforced or renounced, Lysenkoism in socialist Yugoslavia was propagated since 1945 and lingered on well into the 1950s, even after the Tito-Stalin Split precipitated an early and dramatic de-Stalinization. In 1954, Mirko Korić (1894-1977), biology professor at the University of Sa...

This paper addresses the transnational history of British, German, and Belgian colonial environmental action to combat sleeping sickness in East Africa. Following the discovery that vector-borne diseases and tropical environments were highly interrelated phenomena, colonial scientists and doctors de...