HISTORY OF SCIENCE SOCIETY ABSTRACTS

Annual Meeting 9–12 November 2017 hssonline.org

Table of Contents Organized by Date, Time, and Session Title THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 3:30–5:30 P.M. Fact, Fiction and Popular Science In Captivity: Animal Models and Metaphors in the Modern Era Knowledge is Power? Scientific Practices, Geographies, and the Territorial State in the Eighteenth Century Romanticism and Science: Material Practices and Pursuits of Power Science on the North American Frontier: Research and Colonial Interaction in the Arctic The Politics of Science in the Federal Government: Contesting and Defining Expertise, Categories, and Research Fields The Royal Society and Early Modern Visual Culture

1 3 5 6 8 9 11

6:00–7:30 P.M. Plenary Session: Science and the Citizen in the 21st Century

13

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 9:00 A.M.–11:45 A.M. ‘Improvisation is the Rule, and Flexibility an Absolute Necessity’: The History of Science and Technology, and Technical Assistance 14 Choices and Challenges in 19th and 20th Century Genetics 16 Education and Its Audience: Crafting Pedagogy in Science, Technology, Mathematics, and Medicine 19 Natural Things and Their Environments: Early Modernity 21 Protean Matters 23 Public Health in Global Contexts 25 Scientific Intimacies 28 Technē and Training: New Perspectives on Pre-Modern Scientific and Technical Education 29 The Climate Sciences and Imperial Expansion in the Atlantic World, 1600 - 1950 31 The Edge of Human 33 What's the Difference? Comparative Approaches in the Life Sciences 35 Working and Knowing with Paper I: Paper Panopticism 38 12:00–1:15 P.M. Physical Sciences Forum Business Meeting and Distinguished Lecture 39 Roundtable: Business History and the History of Science 40 Roundtable: Diversifying the Profession: Perspectives on Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity in the History of Science 42 Roundtable: Rethinking Histories of Science and Medicine: Beyond Eurocentrism and Postcolonialism 44 1:30 P.M.–3:30 P.M. Computing and Science: Applications and Influences

46

i

Digital Humanities and the Physical Sciences Improving Early Modern and Modern Agriculture through Science Roundtable: Experiencing the Global Environment Roundtable: Perspectives on the Bacteriophages at 100 Science and the State I: Anthropology During the Cold War Science Education in the United States Taking the Long View: Time and Space in the Study of Ecological Change Thinking with Preindustrial Machines Towards a Genealogy of Scientific Misconduct Vertical Sciences and the Vertical in Science Working and Knowing With Paper II: Shifts, Transfer, and Circulation

47 50 51 53 55 57 59 61 62 63 65

3:45–5:45 P.M. Deploying Material Evidence 67 Eugenics, Medicine and Race 69 Evidence and Priority in Physics: Studies of Electromagnetic Waves and Special Relativity71 Science for Whom? Popularization for What Purpose? 72 How Evolutionary Perspectives Reshaped the Sciences of Man and Aesthetics 74 Instruments and Identity: Material Cultures and Geographies of Scientific Instrument Making in Early Modern London 76 Remaking Boundaries: Astronomy and Astrophysics in Britain 1867-1907 77 Science and the State II: Cold War Economic Orders 78 Science in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America 80 Specimens and Artifacts: Objects of Evidence in the Life Sciences 82 The Production and Reception of Science and Religion Narratives in the Anglo-American Periodical Press, 1860 – 1900 84 The Roles of Assumptions in Shaping the History of Science 86 7:00–8:00 P.M. HSS Distinguished Lecture

88

8:00–9:00 P.M. HSS Poster Reception

89

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 9:00–11:45 A.M. (Un)Enlightened Colonial Bodies: Medical Geography and Geographies of Medicine in the Long Eighteenth Century 91 Creating and Changing Scientific Institutions 93 Economic Knowledge for Socialism 95 Flashtalks 97 Hospitable Subjects: Indigenous hospitalities in the history of science 99 Life Forms 101 Making and Knowing in the Biological Sciences 103 Making their Own Waves: One Hundred Years of Women's Activism in Science and Engineering in Canada, France and the United States 105 Natural Things Beyond Their Environments: Modernity and Alienation 108

ii

Pacific Frontiers of American Science & Technology 109 Pre-Modern Experiences and the Limits of Science 111 Towards a Media History of Science, Technology, and Medicine: Precedents and Prospects 113 Transformations and Translations: Science in Korea 115 Works and Networks in pre-Copernican Astronomy 118 12:00–1:15 P.M. Forum for History of Human Science Distinguished Lecture

120

1:30–2:30 P.M. The 2017 Elizabeth Paris Public Engagement Event

121

2:45–4:45 P.M. After Origin: Rethinking Darwin's Ideas and Their Reception Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World Correcting the Record: Women in Biology, Chemistry, and Public Health German Biology and its Legacy (I): Reassessing Kant and Blumenbach Making Modern Organic Time Pharmacology and Plant Medicine in Global Context Reinterpreting Maritime Science and Navigation Scientific and Engineering Internationalism: Processes, Practices, Conflicts Sex and Medico-Legal Expertise The Emergence of Atmospheric Science: From Helmholtz to Earth System Science Virtual Realities: Libraries and 19th-Century Science and Mathematics in Britain and its Empire

122 124 126 128 130 132 134 136 138 140 142

5:00–6:30 P.M. Authority and Chemistry in Europe Canadian Science, Commerce, and Public Health Cultures and Politics of Astronomy Drawing Conclusions: Case Studies in Visual Representation Feeling, Sensation, and Perception in Global Context Islamic Science in Theory, Teaching, and Practice Music and Acoustics in Science Nutrition Science in Europe and North America On Display: Museums in Twentieth-Century North America Psychology and Its Disciplines in the Twentieth Century The Institutions and Popular Cultures of Microscopy Transforming the Species: Evolutionary Ideas in the Enlightenment and Modern Age

144 144 146 148 149 150 151 153 155 156 158 160

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 10:00–12:00 P.M. Astronomical Phenomena in the Nineteenth Century: From the Global to the Provincial 162 Between Utility and Discipline in Interwar Physics 163 Biology at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: New Approaches and Historical Legacies 165 Historicizing Resource Management 167

iii

Living Physics, Electricity, and Science Popularization: Episodes of Science in 19th and 20th-Century India 169 Making early modern medicine: transmitting practical knowledge through text and image 171 Making Legitimate Science: Cold War Investigations of the Alien and the Construction of Scientific Credibility, From Flying Saucers to Astrobiology 173 Science as Politics in the Nuclear Age 175 Structure Across the Disciplines 177 The History and Historiography of Ottoman Science 179

iv

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 3:30–5:30 p.m. Fact, Fiction and Popular Science “Natural Disasters and Public Science: Earthquakes from Lisbon to Istanbul” Geert Vanpaemel (KU Leuven) This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of public science as a specific type of science-based discourse immersed in political and social culture. It differs from academic science in its epistemological foundations, in the structure of its arguments as well as in the measure of engagement affecting the parties involved. Although public science moves on a continuous scale between the academy and the public sphere, its essential features may be so different from academic standards that scientists may feel ill at ease in this new environment. The current paper attempts to delineate more clearly the boundaries between academic and public science by analyzing the early modern debates on earthquakes as a particular type of natural disasters. These debates were fueled on the one hand by scientific knowledge derived from Aristotle’s Meteorology and Cartesian cosmology, but were framed on the other hand by the immediate needs of the surviving communities, either on a political, social or religious level. The focus will be on the modes of selection and presentation of information, on the use and the nature of authority, and on the measure of congruence or divergence between scientific understanding and popular beliefs. “Growing Patriotism: The Royal Economic Society of Guatemala, Agricultural Science, and Local Autonomy in the Late Colonial Period” Scott Doebler (Pennsylvania State University) From 1796 to 1800, members of the short-lived Royal Economic Society of Guatemala (Real Sociedad Económica de los Amantes del País de Guatemala) carried out—among other activities— agricultural and botanical experiments with the intention of creating useful contributions to the economic well-being of the region. This paper examines archival material related to these botanical and agricultural experiments as well as print sources of their semiannual public meetings. Responding to the Bourbon Reforms, the organization’s members mobilized Spanish Enlightenment discourses to bolster their credibility, to justify developing new agricultural methods, to legitimate their scientific projects, and to co-opt indigenous knowledge into the service of empire. The meetings displayed the rhetoric of ardent patriotism with practical scientific and industrial innovations, yet local elites subtly used these developments to seize a measure of control over the reforms. The organization offered avenues to criticize existing imperial structures, to undermine royal monopolies, and to access international learning networks. Agricultural and botanical science served larger political projects and furthered elite efforts to win greater local autonomy under the guise of useful imperial improvement. It was precisely this prying of control from traditional peninsular power structures that seems to have caused the operations of the organization to be THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 1

suspended in 1800, only to be restarted in 1810 in the political vacuum that eventually led to independence, only this time with an even more intense discourse of local patriotism and autonomy. “The Circulation of the Conflict Thesis as a Political Tool in Fin-de-Siècle Spain” Jaume Navarro (University of the Basque Country) Who should be in charge of “true” science in a country with a relatively meagre scientific tradition? This paper explores the ways the so-called conflict thesis circulated from its original Protestant, mainly Anglo- Saxon, milieus into the Spanish Catholic and anti-Catholic cultures of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I shall discuss the sources from which the clerical and anti-clerical intelligentsia received the arguments in their respective attempts to appropriate the legitimacy and control of science. Seldom were the likes of John Draper or Andrew White and their naturalism and materialism derived from a specifically Protestant tradition of natural theology, but Germans like Haeckel, French sociology and literary criticism as well as the anti-modernist crusade promoted by the Vatican that provided the arguments on both sides of the camp. The Spanish situation at the turn of the century, with the loss of Cuba and the Philippines to the Americans, triggered a climate of general pessimism and mutual blame in which the lack of technological and scientific culture was attributed to the excesses of clericalism, monarchism, liberalism or socialism. Except for a few exceptions, all camps in conflict presented themselves as promoters of “true” science in an attempt to legitimize their political and social agendas. “'Monographs on the Universe': Ernst Haeckel’s Evolutionary Monism in American Context, 1866- 1883” Daniel Halverson (Case Western Reserve University) Ernst Haeckel was one of the nineteenth century’s most famous and influential scientists, and science popularizers. According to one historian of biology, he was “the chief source of the world’s knowledge of Darwinism” in his time. He was also one of the chief sources of the world’s knowledge of what has come to be called, in our time, the “conflict thesis” in the history of science and religion. At the same time, he endeavored to set up his own Darwinian-romantic theology, the forgotten religion of monism, in the place of Christianity. This paper makes use of new information technologies to gather documents which have been largely inaccessible in the past, on account of the difficulty of finding and sorting them. It aims at a comprehensive discussion of Haeckel’s influence in the United States at this time – with lay people, with clerical audiences, and with other scientists. I find that Haeckel’s ideas met with a poor reception in the United States, because they faced a steep “cultural gradient,” as between the monarchical, romantic, and sharply anti-Catholic values prevalent in Haeckel’s native Prussia, and the democratic, empirical, and mildly anti-Catholic values prevalent in the United States. In the “struggle for their existence,” Haeckel’s evolutionary monism faced superior competition from evolutionary world-explanations which originated within an AngloAmerican context, and which were, in consequence, better “adapted,” so to speak, to their “environment.”

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 2

In Captivity: Animal Models and Metaphors in the Modern Era “Cochineal Growing in Eighteenth-Century Mexico” Deirdre Moore (Harvard University) In 1776, the Dominican friar Joaquín Vasco, located in Oaxaca state, Mexico, noted that the whole process of raising domesticated cochineal insects was fraught with “a thousand contingencies”. Long before the arrival of the Spanish, domesticated cochineal in Mexico had evolved to become dependent on humans to alter and protect its environment. Indigenous inhabitants had developed an intricate set of practices, highly dependent on local geography, to ensure its survival so they might use its dye. The ‘contingencies’ mentioned by Fr. Joaquín included a multitude of insect parasites of cochineal, climatic conditions, soil quality, cactus diseases and the complex set of technologies/craft practices employed by indigenous people to grow cochineal in the different micro-climates of the Oaxacan landscape in southern Mexico. Unlike its hardier wild cousin, the cochineal sylvestre, the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus) is a highly domesticated insect dependent on humans in the Mexican landscape. It cannot survive in the wild in this area for long periods of time. This paper explains how one of the most lucrative industries in colonial New Spain came to be left in the hands of native cochineal growers. In addition, unlike their natural philosophical contemporaries in 17th and 18th century Europe, cochineal growers appear to have understood insect generation in detail. Furthermore, cochineal growing involves a close insect-plant relationship - the insect co-evolved with a semi-domesticated cactus. Bound up in this history of cochineal growing are questions about the legitimacy of local science, indigenous knowledge and the anthropology of science and technology. “Neither Wild nor Tame: Feral Animals in the History of Biology” Abraham Gibson (Arizona State University) This paper will examine the unique role that feral animals have played in the history of the biological sciences. Defined as animals who were once domesticated, or had domesticated ancestors, but now live in the wild, feral animals have inspired a scientific legacy quite distinct from their closest wild and domestic cousins. My paper will show that biologists have studied feral animals as discrete objects of scientific analysis for hundreds of years, and that their opinions have changed in dramatic fashion. Comte de Buffon cited feral animals as evidence of North America’s degeneration in the late eighteenth century, and Thomas Jefferson protested that America’s feral animals were no more degenerate than those in Europe. Charles Darwin famously cited domestic animals as evidence in favor of natural selection, but few historians realize that he also cited feral animals. In fact, Darwin’s countryman, Alfred Russell Wallace, also cited feral animals when he independently articulated the exact same principle. As concern for global biodiversity intensified during the twentieth century, many biologists quit celebrating feral animals as exemplars of evolution and began disparaging them as “invasive” pests who ought to be destroyed. Most biologists continue to advocate for (or consent to) the annihilation of feral populations around the globe, though some scientists now champion the protection of some feral populations for varying reasons. The paper will close with by reviewing the

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 3

status, significance, and meaning of feral animals in several different fields of contemporary biology, including genetics, invasion biology, and reproductive biology, among others. “Hot and Smoking Dogs: Toward a New Study of Addiction” Brad Bolman (Harvard University) To understand the cause of cancer in uranium miners, researchers at Hanford taught beagles to smoke. The “dogs were addicted. They’d fight you for a cigarette. You’d open the cage and they’d jump right in your arm and stick their head in the mask. You know, put the cigarette in and light it up, boys!” The dogs were comparatively lucky: their compatriots inhaled asbestos and radon. Robert Proctor argues that inhalation experiments were popular “with the industry … because it turns out to be quite hard to give mice, rabbits, or even dogs lung cancer simply by exposing them to tobacco smoke.” If the dogs did not get lung cancer, they were nevertheless suffering obvious cases of addiction. Two packs a day could make even a beagle into a chain smoker. Despite a few public scandals, the smoking beagles have largely eluded the story of Big Tobacco and cigarettes. “What is tobacco?” asks Jacques Derrida. “Apparently it is the object of a pure and luxurious consumption.” This paper analyzes why so many dogs began participating in this luxurious consumption during the twentieth century, focusing on the pleasures of running and participating in inhalation studies. It situates these studies within a world of Cold War animal models and reflects upon the paradoxical sacrifice of animal life that the war against smoking required. “Misbehaving Ants and the Radical Challenge to Wilson’s Sociobiology” Ryan Ketcham (Indiana University) In 1975, The Sociobiology Study Group identified Edward O. Wilson’s characterizations of adaptive human behavior in his book, Sociobiology, as methodologically flawed and socially dangerous. Wilson dismissed their concerns as ideological as opposed to scientific, appealing to their preoccupation with human beings to demonstrate their bias. Wilson had been praised for his work on invertebrate sociobiology, but his treatment of human sociobiology made him the target of incendiary rhetoric and physical assault, attacks which have been crucial to Wilson’s general portrayal of his critics as unreasonable radicals. Yet the political arguments advanced by The Sociobiology Study Group were dependent upon their scientific critique. Their concerns about Wilson’s reliance on anthropomorphic metaphors and biological determinism were broadly applicable, and sensitivity to them has fostered major advancements in myrmecology, Wilson’s area of expertise. Beginning in the 1980s, animal behaviorist and MacArthur Awardee Deborah Gordon challenged Wilson’s proposal that the social behavior of ant colonies is best understood in the culturally-loaded terms of ‘division of labor’ between ‘castes’ of ants morphologically adapted to specialize in their tasks. Gordon has shown that ants switch tasks, and are better modeled as nodes in interaction networks not biologically determined by ‘caste’ membership. Wilson has not met Gordon’s challenge, although his key terms have since been re-interpreted by his apologists in creative ways. This controversy within myrmecology is a critical part of the history of the THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 4

sociobiology debates, but has been neglected by Ullica Segerstrale, the recognized historian of record for the development and defense of sociobiology.

Knowledge is Power? Scientific Practices, Geographies, and the Territorial State in the Eighteenth Century “The Spanish Monarchy as an Imperial Machine, 1765—1795” Fidel Tavarez (University of Chicago) This paper explores the implications of political economy for the geography of Spanish commerce and, more crucially, of its resource transfer, which played a key role in the transformation of the Spanish monarchy’s confederation of territories into a modern empire. Out of the conviction that a new international order was on the rise—one where trade and economic improvement, not mere military capacity, determined the power of states—a host of eighteenth-century statesmen endeavored to transform the Spanish Monarchy into a powerful commercial empire capable of competing with Britain and France. They drew on Enlightenment political economy to design a new imperial system centered on stimulating trade, production, and consumption. Because they realized that economic improvement required integration and administrative coherence, they envisioned the Spanish Monarchy as a kind of machine, with the king as its engineer and imperial officials as scientific advisors. To concretize this machine-like commercial empire, Spanish ministers embarked on an ambitious project of imperial reform that culminated with the implementation of comercio libre (free internal trade) as a replacement for the old fleet and galleon system of Atlantic trade. They expected that comercio libre would allow the metropole to control Spanish American markets, thus transforming the previously autonomous American kingdoms into dependent colonies. This paper demonstrates that this new commercial system was not a mere attempt to centralize the empire, but rather an effort to create one where none had existed before. In doing so, it ultimately uncovers how, in spite of its “liberal” proclivities, the Enlightenment idea of economic improvement was intimately enmeshed in imperialism. “Transforming the State: The Role of the Science of Geography in the Bourbon Reforms” Matthew Franco (College of William & Mary) Further exploring the theme of an “imperial machine” from the vantage point of its political publics, Matthew E. Franco examines the role that the science of geography played in the constitution of an imagined community for both the Spanish empire and the international order. As he argues in his paper “Transforming the State: The Role of the Science of Geography in the Bourbon Reforms” following defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession, government officials argued that the Spanish Monarchy needed comprehensive reform, part of which would include policies informed by the analysis of new, accurate geographic renderings of the realm. As reformers attempted to transform the Bourbon Spanish state, ministers therefore debated the nature and purpose of the science of geography. Although there existed a number of competing geographic epistemologies within the

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 5

eighteenth century Spanish Empire, the reform of cartographic centers in peninsular Spain highlights two traditions as predominant. It was the difference between these two – the community of “scientific officials” centered at the naval academy in Cádiz and the “studio cartography” of the Royal Academy of History – that gave geographic reform in Spain its unique character. These differing methodologies also spoke to different audiences. The empirical geography employed by naval officers produced data that defined the global Spanish monarchy in the eyes of foreign governments, while the historical evidence collected by studio geographers spoke to Spaniards across the empire by uniting both the peninsula and the colonies under the banner of a global Spanish monarchy. “Statistics and the Public: Information Gathering, Networking, and the Birth of Modern Political Culture” Barbara Naddeo (CUNY: The City College and Graduate Center) This paper further investigates the ramifications of data gathering for political culture, by examining the geography of information collection, transmission and networking in the Kingdom of Naples, which, she shows, yielded a public sphere whose basis lay not in its discussion of the print materials but the raw data of statistics. If not the progenitor of statistics, one of its leading exponents in Enlightenment Europe was Giuseppe Maria Galanti, an author and publisher in the city of Naples, who dedicated much of his adult life to the compilation of an encyclopedic description of the resources of the Kingdom, which was remarkable and noted in his time for its unprecedented publication of extensive data, some mined from the privy archives of royal secretaries and much solicited from an extensive network of correspondents, whom Galanti had either met or learned in the field. If Galanti’s work was remarkable in its time, it was also criticized by his own Neapolitan contemporaries, who considered it disparaging of the Kingdom’s great cultural wealth, and whose vociferous opinions have long rendered elusive the ostensible significance of his text for the political culture of the Kingdom. However, archival work on the manuscript correspondence of Galanti rather suggests that historians have been looking for clues about the political importance of Galanti’s text in the wrong places: for it was Galanti’s enterprise per se that engendered a participatory public for the science of statistics and provided for its debate about the state and policies of the Neapolitan territories.

Romanticism and Science: Material Practices and Pursuits of Power “The Bloody Poetry of War in Clausewitz” Janis Langins (University of Toronto) The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) lived during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars and the blossoming of Romanticism in science and philosophy. His major work On War is considered a classic of military literature. Contrary to the views of some excitable laymen and admirers of war in the abstract, the professional soldier Clausewitz did not think there was anything “romantic” about war. Yet a reading of On War suggests an affinity between its author

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 6

and the Romantic German philosophers of his time. This paper will attempt to identify a few of these themes and provide a summary presentation of some of the eighteenth-century context of military writing, especially of the image of Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), against which Clausewitz reacted. “Mill and Coleridge on the Commercial Spirit in Economics” Margaret Schabas (University of British Columbia-Vancouver) In 1834, John Stuart Mill remarked in private that, “on the whole, there is more food for thought— and the best kind of thought—in Coleridge than in all other contemporary writers . . . Few persons have exercised more influence over my thoughts and character than Coleridge.” Mill and Coleridge make for odd bedfellows. Not only were they at opposites ends of the political spectrum, Mill a liberal if not a socialist, and Coleridge a staunch conservative after a jejeune brush with the Jacobites, but they also drank from two different philosophical streams, Mill from British empiricism and Coleridge from German idealism. Mill endorsed the forward march of Newtonian physics, and argued that economics was a science in the same manner. Coleridge, a Romantic, found the reductionist appeal to atomism and the deductive theory of Ricardo almost repulsive. Mill was respectful of Christian belief but kept his economics entirely secular. Coleridge was deeply religious and built his economics on a duty to care for the poor and destitute. For some forty years, Coleridge wrote extensively on the political and economic debates of his day, both as a journalist and as an essayist. While there is nothing that approximates the theoretical depth offered by Mill’s economics, I will argue that there is nonetheless evidence of Coleridge’s imprint, for example the fostering of individual freedom, strong dislike of the “commercial spirit” and romantic appeals to the end of economic growth. “’These can not all have an interest for England’: Symmetry, Beauty and Poetry Unrealisable in Nature” Gordon McOuat (University of King's College) By mid-nineteenth century, it was not advisable to begin (or end) a work on natural philosophy in Britain with a discussion of beauty and the sublime – in any case, not in a serious scientific work. Although Poetry might be "Realised in Nature" in the first half of the century (Levere), by the 1830s and 40s that Romantic route was well blocked (pace Richard Owen's lingering resonances in his transcendental morphology). This paper is about one or two of those circumstances, examining the unhappy reception of Ørsted's Soul in Nature and Oken's Elements of Physiophilosophy as examples of the ways and methods in which Romantic science was given the heave-ho in English corridors of science and the consequences for science in the second half of the century and beyond. “Mobile Technologies of the Sublime: The Balloon and the Guillotine” Mi Gyung Kim (North Carolina State University)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 7

Historians of science are familiar with the performance of pneumatic chemistry as spectacle. However, the newly discovered “airs” mostly entertained the literate “public.” In contrast, the balloon mania that swept across Europe in the 1780s engendered crowds of uneducated “people.” The balloon ascent became a problematic political experiment where the authorities had to contend with the imagined, aerial empire that infused enthusiasm for science among the composite crowd. While they wished to discipline the crowd as well-behaving citizens of a scientific nation-empire, or a mass “public,” a failed balloon ascent incited a riot to challenge the status quo. Popular science in the modern sense – designed to educate the mass – began with the balloon experiment, rather than the earlier demonstration lectures. Through pneumatic studies and balloon ascents, chemistry became a frontier field of natural philosophy and consolidated a mass public to brew a cult of reason just before the French Revolution. The guillotine as a scientific killing machine mobilized this resonance of mass veneration and enthusiasm for science the balloon had generated as a “mobile theater.” Our understanding of the French Revolution should consider the continuity in state technologies, especially in mobilizing the crowd as potential citizens, as well as the discontinuity in elite ideology. Proto-romantic sentiments of the sublime and the terror were conveyed through the mobile machines – the balloon and the guillotine – that traveled to incite and to consolidate such intense sentiments for composite collectives.

Science on the North American Frontier: Research and Colonial Interaction in the Arctic “The “Forgotten” Expedition: Chronicity, Sovereignty and the Search for Inuit Cancer, 1903-1960” Jennifer Fraser (University of Toronto) Abstract to come. “Psychological Fallout: Radiation, Indigeneity, and Cold War Memories in the Alaskan Arctic” Tess Lanzarotta (Yale University) Between 1955 and 1957, scientists from the U.S. Air Force’s Arctic Aeromedical Laboratory(AAL) traveled to Alaska’s North Slope region to administer radioactive isotopes of iodine-131 to over one hundred Iñupiaq individuals. The researchers’ aim was to track thyroid activity; they hypothesized that the thyroid gland was the site of a presumed “unique racial endowment,”which allowed Iñupiat peoples to thrive in the hostile climate of the Alaskan Arctic. However,the research team led study participants to believe that they were receiving medical care, and never told them that they had been exposed to radiation. In this paper, I focus on the various responses to the iodine-131 study, after it was uncovered in1993. The researchers remained unrepentant, insisting that their project had been both harmless and essential for national security. The National Research Council immediately launched an investigation and released a report in 1996, which concluded that the study had been unethical, but THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 8

had caused no physical injuries. Study participants, the report explained, had been wronged, but not harmed.” The North Slope Borough, the region’s municipal government, responded with their own investigation, which focused on widespread anxiety about the unknowability of both the past, where instances of care might actually have been exploitation, and the future, where the risks of radiation exposure might manifest. The report referred to this state of dread as “psychological fallout.” This paper, then, reflects on the ways that harm is defined, and on who has the power to produce these definitions. “Northern Psychology: Isolation Research on the Mid-Canada Line” Matthew Wiseman (University of Toronto) Abstract coming.

The Politics of Science in the Federal Government: Contesting and Defining Expertise, Categories, and Research Fields “Keeping the ‘Flag of Science Flying:’ The National Science Foundation and the Coordination of Federal Science Policy Under Nixon’s 1973 Reorganization Plan No. 1” Emily Gibson (National Science Foundation) On January 26, 1973 President Nixon announced to Congress his “Reorganization Plan No. 1 of 1973.” Proposed as an effort to streamline the functions of the Executive Office of the President, the reorganization plan abolished the Office of Science and Technology (OST) and transferred its duties to the director of the National Science Foundation (NSF). That same day, Nixon also abolished the President’s Science Advisory Council. The scientific community viewed Nixon’s reorganization as an affront to the status of scientific expertise within the federal government. Taking this moment of contention between the Nixon administration and scientific community as its starting point, this paper will explore how NSF coordinated and maintained federal support for basic scientific research despite the surrounding political climate. An examination of internal documents, correspondence, and congressional testimony will illuminate the process by which NSF, under the leadership of Director Guyford Stever, assumed the responsibilities of OST as well as Stever’s role as Science Advisor to the White House. This paper will also consider how the agency’s mission and organization uniquely positioned it to be a crucial source of continuity for scientific expertise in federal science policy, or how, in the Stever’s words, NSF was able to “keep the flag of science flying” during a moment of political discord. This material is part of a book-length project on the NSF’s history from Sputnik through the early 2000s. “Imaginaries of Biomedicine: Disease Categories and the Reordering of UniversityGovernment Relations at the NIH” Buhm Soon Park (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 9

In 1951, Lowell J. Reed, vice president of the Johns Hopkins University in charge of medical activities, submitted to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service the committee report of a 3-year study on the impact of federal grants and fellowship on the nation’s medical schools. Amidst concerns about the compatibility of government support and academic freedom and worries about the interference of increased research activity, the Reed committee concluded: “the PHS will exercise no control over research in progress.” It then praised “the system of selecting grantees through technical study sections with review by nongovernmental advisory councils and final approval by the Federal officials ultimately responsible for the expenditure of public goods.” This was a ringing endorsement of the dual-review system—one review for scientific merits and the other for health relevance—which was manifested in the disease-oriented organizational structure of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This paper explores the emergence of specific “imaginaries of biomedicine,” the collectively held visions of health research and the academic-governmental relationship in the postwar years. I aim to show that these visions, which informed the construction of biomedical research infrastructure, were stabilized and consolidated through the rapid growth of the NIH. To this end, I analyze the external committee reviews in the 1950s and the 1960s and the NIH’s responses to their various recommendations. The material comes from my current book project on the NIH’s institutional history. “Transforming the Meaning of Applied Science: NSF Support for Computing Research, 1967-1986” Janet Abbate (Virginia Tech) The US National Science Foundation was founded in 1950 to support “pure research,” yet the definitions of pure and applied science have been historically unstable. I argue that “applied science” is in fact a political category: its changing meaning at NSF reflects debates over whether government should fund basic science or science relevant to social and economic needs. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the term “applied” was often used to signal that science was aimed at social uplift. Computer science got a foothold at NSF through arguments that computers would improve and equalize public education, and NSF launched an ambitious program called “Research Applied to National Needs.” By the late 1970s, however, the failure of RANN discredited the use of science as a social fix. The label “applied” began to disappear from NSF programs: the Directorate of “Engineering and Applied Science,” which had absorbed the remnants of RANN, was renamed simply Engineering, and the Office of Computing Activities discontinued its program for “Computer Applications.” In the 1980s, funding for applied science was reframed as an economic policy tool, especially in light of Japan’s rising dominance in high tech. NSF Director Erich Bloch criticized earlier efforts that had prioritized “social problems” over “economic competitiveness” and moved NSF’s computing programs to a new Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, headed by a former computer industry executive. Computer scientists took advantage of the interpretive flexibility of “applied science” to maintain NSF support for their field through these political changes. THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 10

“Disciplining the Social Sciences during the Reagan Revolution” Mark Solovey (University of Toronto) Shortly after a federal charter established the U.S. National Science Foundation in 1950, the new agency became a cautious but nevertheless key federal patron for the social sciences, especially for academically oriented investigations and so-called basic research. But the social sciences’ position at the agency also became a common focal point for political and scholarly debate about their scientific identity, their practical value, and the role of public funding for them. In this paper I consider how the social sciences fared at the NSF during the Reagan era. I argue that this period, marked by the surging power of a conservative agenda in American political culture and national science policy, had far-reaching implications for the standing of the social sciences at the NSF and in government and society more broadly. Briefly, overall funding for these sciences declined. They were subject to scathing criticisms from right-wing political figures and some high-ranking natural science and engineering leaders in the federal science establishment. NSF’s efforts to promote the social sciences were shaped by a measure of conservative discipline as well, as seen, for example, in the agency’s increased funding for economics and a more general determination to allign the agency’s programs with the Reagan administration’s agenda. The material discussed here is based on a chapter from my current book project on social science funding, policies, and programs at the NSF from the mid-1940s to the present.

The Royal Society and Early Modern Visual Culture “Recording Anatomical Experiments in the Royal Society Archives” Sietske Fransen (University of Cambridge) Anatomical experiments were a regular part of the meetings of the early Royal Society. And many letters reporting anatomical curiosities and experiments were received by the Royal Society for discussion in their meetings. This paper discusses the way in which these experiments were reported in the administrative books of the Royal Society. What is the balance between textual descriptions and visual material? Who were involved in the recording of these experiments? Could the Fellows rely on their own writing and drawing skills or did they make use of more skilled draughtsmen? Based on the material in the archives of the Royal Society, I will investigate the use of text and image in recording anatomical experiments. This research will help answering questions about the function of visual records in the recording experiments. Were images drawn to represent the process of the experiments? Or were they used as mnemotechnic tools? And what was the relationship between the textual description and drawing of the same experiment? What would become the primary source in the archive, the text or the image? Focussing on anatomy—a field with a long visual tradition—this paper will show that the seventeenth-century experiments and new discoveries of the human and animal body were often recorded in traditional ways of textual descriptions and drawings. From the way in which these THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 11

records were administered and archived we can subsequently understand more about the priorities and practices of the Fellows of the early Royal Society. “The Frontispiece Tradition and the early Royal Society” Katherine Reinhart (University of Cambridge) The early Royal Society had a robust printing programme. From its associated journal the Philosophical Transactions, to now famous monographs like Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, the members of the Society circulated their discoveries and new ideas in publication. In addition, they also published translations into English of several works authored by other European scientific societies, like the French Académie royale des sciences. Many of these published texts contain elaborate frontispiece engravings. Though the frontispiece to Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society of London is perhaps the most well known, the Royal Society also created new frontispiece images for many of their other publications including their translations of the Accademia del Cimento’s Saggi di naturali esperienze and the Académie royale des sciences’ Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire naturelle des animaux. Why did the Royal Society re-craft the frontispieces for these translated texts? What were these images meant to communicate to readers? And where do these images fit in relation to both the traditions of early modern frontispieces engravings and the Royal Society’s own graphic programme? By analysing the frontispieces created for their earliest published texts, this paper will consider the role of visual tradition and its relationship to scientific knowledge in the early Royal Society. “Robert Hooke and the visual world of the early Royal Society” Felicity Henderson (University of Exeter) The early Fellows of the Royal Society were almost exclusively drawn from the educated elite of Restoration England. They owned, or visited, townhouses and country estates in which were displayed collections of portraits, engravings, books, sculptures and, perhaps, scientific instruments. Yet what were their relations with the English artists and craftsmen who produced some of these artefacts? And how might these relations have influenced choices about the use of visual resources in the dissemination of scientific ideas? This paper will examine key Fellows' associations with the painters and engravers, map-makers, makers of architectural drawings and models, sculptors, printers, craftsmen and instrument-makers who produced the visual culture of Restoration society. It will sketch out the extent and nature of the Fellows' relationships with these people, in particular noting points at which exchanges of information took place. A useful case-study is Robert Hooke (1635-1703), the Royal Society's Curator of Experiments, and Surveyor to the City of London, whose personal diary illuminates some ways in which Hooke's interactions with image-makers may have influenced, or been influenced by, his work for the Royal Society. This paper will attempt to show how individuals such as Hooke mediated between the world of visual culture and the largely oral and textual setting of the early Royal Society.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 3:30–5:30 p.m. | 12

6:00–7:30 p.m. Plenary Session: Science and the Citizen in the 21st Century “Scholars and Citizen Action: The Lessons of 1848” Lynn Nyhart (University of Wisconsin-Madison) How are we to do history of science in the present era? What are our responsibilities vis-à-vis our roles as citizens and our roles as scholars? This talk argues that, in seeking answers to these questions, we can benefit from examining scientists’ actions in 1848-49, despite the very different circumstances of scientists living through the revolutions of 1848 and historians of science today. By studying the actions, and not just the words, of a few German life scientists, especially the infamous radical materialist Karl Vogt and the much more moderate botanist and cell theorist Matthias Schleiden, we gain renewed insight into longstanding arguments for the value of science and— crucially—of scholarship more generally. These scientists’ positions and their actions invite us as historians of science to integrate citizen action into our jobs as scholars, to re-examine our longstanding commitment to a neutral or critical stance toward science, and to defend science without becoming scientists’ patsies or surrogates. “Basements, Attics, and Garages: Crowdsourcing as Domestic Science in the 21st century” Bruno Strasser (University of Geneva) In the late 20th century, millions of online users became involved in "citizen science": producing scientific knowledge at home using personal computers. Instead of understanding this transformation as a redistribution of expertise, this paper analyzes it as a relocation of scientific activity in the domestic space. As Steven Shapin has argued, “one of the distinguishing marks of modern society is the radical disjunctions of residences and workplaces” (Shapin 1994, p. 409), making this phenomenon of crowdsourcing, that seemingly brings together again residences and workplaces, all the more surprising. Recent studies of “domestic science” have shown that the home has remained, however, a significant place for science throughout the modern period (Opitz et al., eds. 2016). Comparing crowdsourcing with earlier examples of domestic science in the 20th century highlights historical continuities in the gendering of space, the technological cultures, and the public identities of its practitioners. However, the promoters of crowdsourcing also forged a specific vision and moral economy of public participation, where the public was constituted of individuals acting alone from their homes, while forming a virtual crowd, supporting a more “democratic” science. “Voices of Science Activism in the Age of Trump” Adam Shapiro (Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine) From the point of view of the history of political activism and social movements, the worldwide March for Science on April 22, 2017 (in Washington DC and over 600 cities around the world)

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9 | 6:00–7:30 p.m. | 13

might be seen as significant but not unprecedented. In some respects, it is derivative of the worldwide Women's Marches that preceded it by three months. From the perspective of the history of science and its cultural impacts however, the Science March is something very different: quite possibly the largest event in science history. This tension between placing the march between different historical narratives is reflected in the diversity of perspectives on the march given by oral history interviews with participants, organizers, and critics. Dozens of oral history interviews allow us to observe the organic emergence of questions about how to frame our history, rather than imposing boundaries and categories upon our subjects after-the-fact. Reflected in this, is the wide range of answers and anxieties concerning whether the Science March has a unifying message, whether science itself can (or should) avoid being "political," and whether "science" can serve as a basis for organizing and resisting the knowledge politics of the Trumpian state and its allies.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. ‘Improvisation is the Rule, and Flexibility an Absolute Necessity’: The History of Science and Technology, and Technical Assistance “Agricultural Expertise, State Power, and the Roots of Technical Aid: Developmentalism and Territorial Rule in Hawai‘i, 1898–1930” Jessica Wang (University of British Columbia) In the U.S. context, technical aid and development have usually been treated as products of cold war foreign policy. The confluence of scientific expertise, state power, and global affairs has a much longer-term history, however, and scholars are just beginning to understand the origins of cold war era policies in an earlier era of high imperialism, as well as the interplay between domestic statebuilding and imperial governance. This paper addresses these issues by examining agriculture--a classic site for both imperial rule and cold war aid and development programs--in Hawai‘i during the first half of the territorial period. The U.S. Agricultural Experiment Station in Honolulu, the territorial government’s Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry, and the research apparatus of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association together defined and contested the structure of Hawai‘ian agriculture and its role in shaping the future of economic development in the islands. The paper will use the case of Hawai‘i to suggest how early policy experiments within America’s overseas empire provided precedents for the cold war heyday of technical aid, and to explore the ties between the national, territorial, and international contexts of expertise as an adjunct to American power. “Mutant Rice: Colonial Development and Postcolonial Technical Aid, Japan, India” Hiromi Mizuno (University of Minnesota)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 14

This paper demonstrates the dynamic and continuing relationship between colonial development and Cold War technical aid through an examination of rice breeding projects. It focuses on Tanchung 65, a high-yield hybrid rice developed in Taiwan under the Japanese colonial rule in the 1920s, and its offspring, Mashuri, a Malaysian hybrid rice developed in the 1960s and widely planted in India and Southeast Asia since the 1970s. Initially developed by Japanese technical aid agronomists under the FAO and through Japan’s Colombo Plan, Mashuri embodies the colonial genealogy of rice development that has been made invisible by the triumphant US-centered Cold War narrative (around the International Rice Research Institute) of the Green Revolution. At the same time, the story of Mashuri also shows this genealogy’s Cold-War “mutations,” as the newer variety, Mashuri Mutant, is a product of radiation mutation breeding, a joint initiative by the FAO and the IAEA, itself a kind of a mutant out of the Atoms for Peace, UN international development, and USAID. Ambitious agronomists from postcolonial Asian countries such as India cooperated internationally to create mutant rice for higher yields. I have just completed a research on Japanese technical aid and its connection to the colonial period. This paper is my new project to locate rice breeding in this context while articulating how Cold War development differs from colonial development by taking seriously the significance of nuclear research and postcolonial conditions of Asian agriculture. “Southern Technocrats Feeding the Globe: Mexico-trained Agronomists and Hybrid Seeds” Gabriela Soto Laveaga (Harvard University) As is well known, the Green Revolution was launched from the wheat fields of northern Mexico when Norman Borlaug, under the aegis of the Rockefeller Foundation, developed disease resistant hybrid wheat. These new wheat strains, shipped across the world, are the ancestor varieties of 90% of the wheat consumed today. Yet the seeds were only one part of a complex equation designed to provide food for the world. As vital to this endeavor was the human element – agronomists, molecular biologists, botanists, and bureaucrats – who traveled to train in Mexican wheat fields. Described as the “Mecca for wheat research” northern Mexico also produced and relied on an expansive web of technocrats who made scientific discovery possible and, crucially, exportable. As new strains and races of wheat were developed a broader net of global agronomists were needed to test, train, and develop more seeds suitable for any terrain. While these agricultural innovations have often been described as part of post-war development projects this paper argues that the ethos of discovery is linked not to the arrival of the Rockefeller Foundation and Norman Borlaug but to an earlier period of Mexican agricultural science renaissance. “‘Technical assistance cannot be exported, it can only be imported’: creating nuclear consumers for a developing world” Gisela Mateos (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 15

In 1958 the recently created International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) became part of the United Nations Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (created 1949), along with other eight specialized agencies. The rules to promote technical and economic development for so-called less developed countries inherited colonial actors and tactics, but also enacted guidelines applicable in the new post-WWII geopolitical order. But, as the acting director of UN Technical Assistance Operations wrote in 1959, recipient countries were often “extremely sensitive to outside interference”, and “were unwilling to agree to programs masterminded from a distance”. Thus, officials were forced to accept that ‘technical assistance cannot be exported, it can only be imported’, and the principle that “assistance is given only at the specific request of a government”. Nuclear technical assistance, comprising materials (mainly radioisotopes), skills and training, and technologies, however, were not obvious priorities for most countries. In this paper we argue that the creation of nuclear needs was a complexly staged project, beginning with the IAEA’s survey missions that traveled to Asian and Latin American countries to push for the use of radioisotopes in agricultural, medical, and industrial applications. The surveys were followed, among other programs, by two Mobile Radioisotope Exhibition trucks that visited sixteen countries in four different continents, and exploited synergies and tensions between local actors, UN Resident Representatives, and regional organization. Radioisotopes have been depicted as political instruments of the Cold War era before, but our paper will deal with their changing meanings as part of asymmetrical relations, in the context of nuclear technical assistance for development. “Technical Assistance in an Age of Distrust: IAEA Experts and Uranium Prospecting in the 1970s” Jacob Hamblin (Oregon State University) Not long after the Indo-Pakistan War of 1971, the Pakistani government enlisted the help of the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct an extensive uranium prospecting project. Using money from the United Nations Development Fund, along with geologists and engineers from the oil and uranium mining community in the United States, Pakistan drilled, sampled, and mined its most promising uranium region in the mid-1970s. And yet this was also the era of increased scrutiny of nuclear programs in South Asia and the Middle East, especially after the 1974 detonation of a “peaceful nuclear explosion” by India. The technical assistance to mine uranium, in a country suspected of planning its own nuclear weapons program, took place against the backdrop of international efforts to collect signatures for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, differences of opinion among donor nations about controlling the so-called plutonium cycle, and contentious bickering about the purpose and legitimate roles for the IAEA. Drawn from several national archives and the collections of the IAEA in Vienna, the present paper examines uses and perceptions of technical assistance during a period of unprecedented distrust among donors, recipients, and international agencies.

Choices and Challenges in 19th and 20th Century Genetics

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 16

“Morganisms—Local Choice in Late 19th century Biology, The Case of Thomas Hunt Morgan” Sean Cohmer (Arizona State University) Thomas Hunt Morgan is best known for his experiments in genetics with fruit flies of the species Drosophila melanogaster in the early 20th century. Too early to speak of organisms in terms of their status as a ‘model’, an important question to answer is how biologists experimenting during the period from 1886 to 1908 made choices about what to study in the laboratory. Less well analyzed in Morgan’s research is the variety of organisms that he experimented with at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in his early career. To understand what motivated biologists to do certain kinds of experimental work in the late 19th century, it is also important to understand why they chose certain organisms for laboratory work. Experimental organism choices matter, and these choices had a different character in late 19th century biology than in the later 20th century. Morgan’s case is an excellent illustrative example of how geographically situated—or ‘local’—organisms are a crucial way to understand how organism choices were made in experimental biology during this time. Before Morgan experimented with Drosophila beginning around 1908, he had published over 120 scientific articles, studying over 30 different organisms. His example is an extreme one, as he was an inexhaustible experimenter compared to many of his contemporaries. On the other hand, his example is representative of a broader trend in experimental organism choices through this period, from prolific and diverse in the late 19th century to homogenous and standardized into the 1910s. “Organism Choice and Epistemic Culture in Ecological Genetics” Erick Peirson (Arizona State University) During the 1960s many ecologists dramatically reconceptualized the temporal and spatial scales on which adaptive evolution could occur. New evidence and new ideas suggested that natural selection could shape local populations on time scales commensurate with those of ecological processes. That realization laid the foundation for a wide range of contemporary research that explicitly integrates population genetics with both theoretical and field-based ecological research, and facilitated the rise of so-called adaptationism in evolutionary ecology. Much of the crucial evidence and theoretical impetus for that transformation came from the work of a handful of plant genecologists in Britain, part of a larger group later known as the Ecological Genetics Group (EGG). Previous research into the investigative pathways of individual participants in the EGG suggest that biological characteristics of the organisms that genecologists studied impacted their views about the relative merits of several competing models of intraspecific evolution, generating conditions for theory change. As part of a systematic investigation of the EGG, we have analyzed the relative influence of several social and epistemic factors on organism choice at the level of the individual researcher using a probabilistic empirical model. We fit that model to heterogeneous data generated through largescale text mining and collaborative semantic annotation. In this paper, we discuss the development and application of our model of organism choice, the implications of our results for understanding

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 17

the development of ecological genetics in Britain, and the broader historiographical ramifications of our approach for research into organism choice in the life sciences. “Are Fingerprint Patterns Genetically Inherited? The History of a Transnational Research Problem” Daniel Asen (Rutgers University-Newark) This paper examines the history of "dermatoglyphics," a term coined by American anatomists Harold Cummins and Charles Midlo in 1926 to describe the scientific study of fingerprints and other ridged skin. Throughout the 20th century, dermatoglyphics researchers have attempted to use fingerprint patterning (which is partially genetically determined) to study mechanisms of human heredity, investigate "racial" populations, and diagnose congenital disorders. This paper examines the history of post-WWII research into one of the most elusive problems in dermatoglyphics: how fingerprint patterns and their component parts are genetically inherited. It focuses on the development of two roughly contemporary approaches to this question: a theory of fingerprint-pattern (arch, loop, whorl) inheritance developed by Japanese medico-legal researcher Matsukura Toyoji during the 1950s, and an approach focusing on the quantitative count of fingerprint ridges as the object of inheritance, elaborated by British geneticist Sarah B. Holt. By examining the development and impact of these research programs, this paper tells a story about the building of genetic knowledge in a scientific field long defined by high ambitions and epistemic ambiguities. While the projects of Matsukura and Holt did exemplify mid-century researchers' very real interest in using fingerprints as a source of genetic evidence in clinical and medico-legal applications, in the end they also revealed the limitations of this line of inquiry and its ambivalent value for subsequent iterations of dermatoglyphics research. The latter point, I argue, is important for understanding the discipline's long-term trajectory – and, ultimately, its decline – within the modern life sciences. “Mendel’s Two Hybridist Theories and their Intertheoretical Relationships” Pablo Lorenzano (National University of Quilmes/National Scientific and Technical Research Council) It can hardly be said that Mendel had been a proponent, even less the first proponent, of Genetics. He was actually an excellent “hybridist”. His hybridism consists of two theories: a first theory that moves on a level more “empirical” or “phenomenological” (according to Schleiden 1849: 141-146), which can be called “Mendel’s theory of the development/evolution of hybrids” (DEH), and a second theory that moves on a level more “theoretical” (according to Schleiden 1849: 146-148), which can be called “Mendel’s theory on the cellular foundation of the development/evolution of hybrids” (CFH).

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 18

The aim of this communication is to present an analysis of these two theories and of their intertheoretical relationships, carried out within the framework of the so-called Metatheoretical Structuralism.

Education and Its Audience: Crafting Pedagogy in Science, Technology, Mathematics, and Medicine “Enjoyable Geometry: Père Castel’s Pedagogical Flair and Legacy” Jean-Olivier Richard (Chemical Heritage Foundation) The Jesuit Colleges of the early modern era are generally considered to be scientifically conservative institutions, the main task of which was the formation of well-rounded gentlemen and future priests, not the transmission and fostering of cutting-edge knowledge. It is true that throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth-century, most French colleges considered the teaching of physics and mathematics a low priority. In this context, it may come as a surprise to find one of the most innovative approaches to the teaching of mathematics developed in that period within Louis-leGrand College in Paris. This presentation explores R.P. Louis-Bertrand Castel’s (1688-1757) various contributions to pedagogy and the history of science education. The main focus will be Castel’s mathematical curriculum and related courses he published for the education of the public. This paper argues that his focus on improving teaching methods for children was a milestone in the history of didactics. His chief insights were that mathematical language had to be made accessible to the lay reader and contextualized from the start by the use of concrete examples. He proposed that traditional learning methods be made more playful and more appealing to the senses and the imagination of students, so that they develop a taste for advanced studies. Though somewhat idiosyncratic, Castel’s project was influential and reflective of a broader effort, on the part of Jesuit and non-Jesuit teachers of the post-Newtonian era, to adapt their teaching to the growing public need for mathematically trained natural philosophers, engineers, and craftsmen. “What Do Textbooks Do? Changing Audiences and Aims of Nineteenth Century Pedagogical Texts in Anatomy” Carin Berkowitz (Chemical Heritage Foundation) What do textbooks do? This paper attempts to address that question through an historical examination of British anatomical texts of the nineteenth century. It first looks at pedagogical practices in anatomy prior to the advent of the anatomical textbook, the latter an invention, I contend, of the late nineteenth century. Examining the work of anatomists like William Hunter, John Abernethy, and Charles Bell, alongside London-based court cases surrounding anatomy lectures as a form of property, I argue that pedagogical texts of the early nineteenth century were understood as a part of, rather than distinct from, the research and teaching endeavors of their writers; they were not products of consensus. Like lectures themselves, they were regarded as the work of an author-lecturer who was situated in a particular local, national, and disciplinary context. They were full of what might be deemed valuable original ideas or castigated as unproven thoughts.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 19

The role of the anatomy folio, for instance, was undividedly pedagogical, scientific, career-making, and artistic in ways that were deeply related. When anatomical atlases suddenly were standardized in a smaller, pedagogically oriented, composite form and their use made routine and dispersed, most notably in England in the form of Gray’s Anatomy, it was because the worlds of pedagogy, of scientific and medical careers, and the landscape of the sciences itself had changed. The relationship of research to teaching, and the makeup of the audience for a scientific education, had changed as well. “Industrial Paternalism goes to School: Scientific and Technical Education in American Company Towns, 1840-1910” Steven Walton (Michigan Technological University) Industrial paternalism, the philosophy of control over the social life of one’s workers, has attracted considerable attention from labor, landscape, technological, and cultural historians but less so from historians of education and science. But industrial paternalism shaped the choices about scientific and technical training in the towns industrial magnates built for workers. Many indict paternalism’s imposition of will upon their workers, but in the case of science and technical education, it is harder to criticize the movement. Scientific and technical education in 19-20th -century secondary schooling has a modest literature (the literature for higher ed. abounds), including a prehistory of the Mechanics Institute and normal school movement, and science and technology education is reasonably well understood in the British context, but less so for the U.S., which picks up with Dewey’s pedagogical and philosophical reforms in the 1910s. Given the relation between perceptions of science and invention, the expansion of public education in general, and the explosion of industry, the ground was well tilled when industrialists in America set out to educate in their own company towns. The education systems and curriculum in the corporate towns—for this study, Lowell, MA (textiles; 1840-80), Calumet, MI (copper mining; 1860-1920), Pullman, IL (rail cars; 1880- 1920), and Gary, IN (steel; 1900-20)—reflect what the corporate paternal system developed for their workers. To date, only the “Gary System” has received sustained attention from historians of education, but in the other towns the curriculum has never been studied. “Viewers Like You: Seeing Science Education on Television” Ingrid Ockert (Princeton University) Could a television set be the ideal science teacher? Educators and television producers have asked themselves that question for almost 70 years. Television’s alluring promise is that it offers educators a more engaging platform than a dull textbook. Not surprisingly, educators and producers have had different ways of approaching this medium and creating long-running science television programs. In this paper, I compare two American television programs, Watch Mr. Wizard and 3-2-1 Contact! These shows aired almost thirty years apart and took dramatically different approaches to science education, from format structure to teaching philosophy. Watch Mr. Wizard, which began in 1951, proved that science shows could be fun and educational for children. Charismatic Mr. Wizard enchanted Baby Boomers and their mothers alike as he demonstrated the science of everyday

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 20

household objects. His approach was keeping with other children’s programs of the era like Ding Dong School House and Captain Kangaroo. Thirty years later, Baby Boomers were raising their own children on programs like The Muppet Show and M*A*S*H. In 1981, the creators of Sesame Street and The Electric Company launched Watch Mr. Wizard’s successor, 3-2-1 Contact! More streetwise and savvy, 3- 2-1 Contact! dismissed adult intermediaries and placed children at the forefront of its episodes. It actively promoted a vision of science inclusive of all, regardless of race or gender. By the 1980s, the designers of science education television programs had reimagined the ideal child viewer and, consequently, the ideal American scientist. The television teacher was tuned into the changing times.

Natural Things and Their Environments: Early Modernity “Metabolizing Medicinal Plants around the Mediterranean” Alain Touwaide (The Huntington) Multiple worlds were in contact around the Mediterranean and beyond, from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to China, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Plants used for therapeutic purposes traveled together with people within this vast space. Whereas traditional studies have focused on the trade of such commodities, the new transdisciplinary approach that I present here focuses on both the medicinal uses of these plants and the knowledge thereof. Based on selected, yet significant examples collected from a vast textual body generated during the period and throughout the space under consideration, the paper will show that the knowledge of the medicinal uses of plants introduced into a non-native environment (be this environment natural, human, medical, or scientific) was metabolized in different ways, with deep or partial transformations, as well as exact continuities. Going beyond the description of facts, the paper will inquire into the factors that might have contributed to the differentiated transformations in the knowledge of the therapeutic uses of plants, generating dynamic images that reflect knowledge constantly in the making as a series of reactions (possibly cumulated) generated in and by the different environments crossed by the plants “Sower of Discord: Political Use of Natural Things” Barbara Di Gennaro (Yale University) Exchanged in the Mediterranean since Antiquity, balsam was a sought-after medical plant charged with religious and medical meanings, a symbol of Mediterranean cross-cultural harmony. Its resin, called opobalsam, was used to anoint French and Jewish kings, was central in the Christian rite of confirmation and was related to Muslim miracles. Balsam was also a chief ingredient of theriac, the millenary antidote. For centuries balsam had been a powerful symbol of union among cultures in the Mediterranean, used as a precious gift among ambassadors and monarchs, but between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, its meaning changed. Balsam’s supposed dying out, its economic value on the market, and a highly competitive medical scene triggered a shift from sacred plant to a sower of discord. In 1640, Roman physicians and apothecaries became involved in a dispute about

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 21

the “true” balsam used in the production of theriac, publishing as many as 26 publications within 6 years. The dispute soon exceeded the medical milieus and spread among physicians all over the Italian peninsula and among a wider public in the streets of Rome. What was at stake? The controversy over this rare natural thing was used politically to undermine the authority of Pope Urban VIII, who toward the end of his reign was ailing and weakened by a war against the Farnese family. Scientific arguments about balsam became the tools of a political battle fought through pamphlets, philological debates, and experimental trials about the “naturalness” of a resin that few physicians had ever even seen. “To Name a Llama: Andean Animals and the Politics of Natural History, 1530-1650” Mackenzie Cooley (Stanford University) Sheep, goats, or camels—what were llamas? The Inca had systematically bred and distributed llama and alpaca throughout their vast territories. As Renaissance Europeans sought to make sense of the largest domesticated mammals of the Americas, they used different names to integrate Andean nature into a comprehensible framework of Old World animals, doing so in conflicting ways. Fascinated with fashioning American nature according to a Christian Reconquista paradigm and committed to establishing Castilian agricultural norms in Peru, the Spanish used the Castilian terms for sheep to describe camelids: males became “carneros” and females “ovejas,” often followed by some variation of “del Peru.” For non-Spanish natural historians and travelers alike, however, this was a problematic misnomer. Neither Pliny nor any other ancient author had mentioned the llama, noted Swiss naturalist Konrad Gessner. Comparing its parts to various Old World animals—not including sheep—after a specimen came to Europe in 1558, he termed it “Allocamelus.” After his six-month residence in Peru in 1595, Florentine traveler Francisco Carletti agreed that llamas were not sheep. Describing them as “montoni” (goats in Italian), he bemoaned the fact that “the Spanish very inappropriately call them sheep…they seem to me like little camels.” European perceptions of New World nature were hardly monolithic; Spanish observers were distinctly more eager than other Europeans to avoid animals associated with the Moors. Combining chronicles, natural histories, and archaeozoological evidence, this paper argues that ideas of what constituted the Christian animal kingdom influenced how European observers understood Incan domesticated animals. “Animals Out of Place: The Curious Case of Three American ‘Tigers’” Florencia Pierri (Princeton University) In 1632 Spain’s Philip IV sent a letter to the viceroy of Peru asking for “the most ferocious animals that nature breeds, like lions, tigers, bears, and the like” for the animal enclosure in his new palace, the Buen Retiro. Philip had already asked for animals to be brought back from “any foreign kingdoms where the might live,” but he had neglected the wild animals that populated his own overseas domains. This request was fulfilled in 1633, who sent to Madrid three “tigers.” This talk will trace these animals’ journey from the jungles of Guayaquil, their trip up the coast of South America to Panama, their overland trek across the isthmus, the long ocean voyage to Spain, and the arduous cart ride from Seville to Madrid. In doing so, it will show the various meanings these

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 22

animals took on dependent on their physical location and the people with whom they interacted. In Guayaquil, caught by indigenous hunters, they were the ochi that their ancestors had always hunted; on their journey from Peru to Panama, they were cargo just like any other to the Portuguese merchant hired to deliver them to Spain; for those who saw them as they traveled by cart from Seville to Madrid, they were major curiosities; and for Philip, they represented animals that could, in a fight, best their counterparts from the African continent or the East Indies, thus proving the superiority of his empire over the rest of the world. “Coffee, Intellect, and Medicine: Marsigli’s Bevanda asiatica” Duygu Yildrim (Stanford University) When Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), a Bolognese natural scientist and Catholic militant, came to Constantinople in 1679, he aimed to observe the Bosphorus to engage with contemporary discussions on oceanography. However, his interest in the Ottoman world expanded as he moved towards this intellectual trajectory, which resulted in works on the military system of the Ottomans, the currents of the Bosphorus, and medicinal uses of coffee. While working on these different subjects, Marsigli met Ottoman intellectuals in the capital. His Bevanda asiatica: Trattatello sul caffè (1685) was replete with references to one of these renowned figures, Hezarfenn Hüseyin (d. 1691-2), a contemporary encyclopedist. Marsigli’s encounter with Hezarfenn in Constantinople fits into his interest in attaining “universal knowledge,” a quest for knowledge that could rise above the specificities of time and place. According to Marsigli, Ottoman knowledge culture and Ottoman nature belonged to the universal mechanical order. His Bevanda asiatica on the medicinal benefits of coffee on the universal human body most clearly embodies this notion. This paper focuses on Marsigli’s medical epistemology through a close reading of his work. I aim to demonstrate how his selection of scholarly references from medicinal traditions was changeable according to his post-humanist discourse on the Ottomans. In turn, how did this discourse determine the epistemological boundaries between intellectual “fields,” such as medicine, geography, and history, and shape their particular observational and experimental methods?

Protean Matters “The 'Subtile Aereal Spirit of Fountains': Mineral Waters and the History of Pneumatic Chemistry” Leslie Tomory (McGill University) In the early 1740s, the British physician and natural philosopher William Brownrigg (1711–1800) advanced a robust pneumatic theory claiming the existence of various kinds of “airs,” each with its own proper chemical characteristics. The atmosphere accordingly consisted of a mixture of different fluids that shared the characteristic of permanent elasticity. When evaluated against the standard story of the rise of pneumatic chemistry and its role in the Chemical Revolution, the timing of these ideas is outstanding, implying that later elaborations of the multiplicity of airs or the view of air as a FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 23

third state of matter should be seen as the products of a longer and much more continuous history than previously recognized. The talk focuses on a central thread that contributed to such midcentury claims about the nature of airs: the analysis of mineral waters, especially in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in particular regard to what was variously referred to as the airs, exhalations, vapors, or spirits they HSS 2017 Session Proposal contained. Prominent natural philosophers, physicians, and chymists like Van Helmont, Robert Boyle, Johan Joachim Becher, Friedrich Hoffmann, Gabriel François Venel and others are shown to have diversely but increasingly considered the presence of an aerial component in mineral waters (or “aerial spirit,” to use Brownrigg’s phrase). Guided by differing motivations and modes of theoretical and practical reasoning, yet drawing on each other’s contributions, an informal community of pneumatic practitioners negotiated the physical, medical, and especially chymical dimensions of such aerial components in mineral waters. “Fluidity, Elasticity, and Activity: Chemical and Physical Airs from Robert Boyle to Stephen Hales” Victor Boantza (University of Minnesota) The notion of a “permanently elastic fluid,” which by the late eighteenth century was commonly used by pneumatic practitioners like James Keir, Tiberius Cavallo, and others, encapsulates key aspects of the history of air, as it gradually turned into a chemical species and a physical state of matter. The talk examines the evolution of early conceptions of Air in terms of elasticity, permanent fluidity, and material activity. The analysis showcases the interplay between theory and practice from early investigations of Air’s mechanical properties, through Boyle’s employment of the notion of “springiness” or elasticity, to the rise to prominence of various concepts of fluids, including aerial fluids, based on the work of Boyle, Newton, and their contemporaries. By mobilizing new accounts of ‘elastic fluids’ in the early 1700s pneumatic practitioners offered explanations based on analogies between Air and Fire. By the 1720s–30s, in the aftermath of Hales’s demonstration that air could be fixed in and obtained from solid and liquid substances, natural philosophers, physicians, and chemists introduced further distinctions between atmospheric Air and conceptions of air as an active material agent and a form of matter. By the middle of the century, increasingly prevalent references to permanently elastic fluids epitomized the culmination of these developments. This reading complements and complicates the received narrative of the rise of pneumatic chemistry as essentially driven by a chain of landmark experiments facilitated by technological innovations ranging from the air-pump to the pneumatic trough. “Corrupted Bodies and Airs: The Problem of Putrefaction in Enlightenment Europe” Margaret Carlyle (University of Minnesota) Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie defined chemical putrefaction as the final stage of fermentation, or the moment of a corrupting body’s ultimate dissolution. The German chemistphysician Georg Ernst Stahl viewed putrefaction as the last state of material division in which ‘mixts’ still conserved their integrity while approaching most closely elementary status. Informed by such

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 24

notions, eighteenth-century practitioners addressed the problem from a variety of chemical, medical, and natural historical perspectives, considering its preponderance in the animal, vegetable, and mineral realms. This paper reconstructs the efforts of an unofficial network of pneumatic experimenters to understand and control this mysterious phenomenon, empirically related to Air and heat. Their work is traced on both sides of the Channel, from influential publications to local reports and from purpose-built laboratories to makeshift workshops set up along military battlefields. Based on his study of army men who had succumbed to infectious diseases like necrosis of the flesh and scurvy, Scottish physician John Pringle published in the 1750s his chemico-medical account of putrefaction. Pierre-Joseph Macquer, a prominent French Stahlian, encouraged his pupil Mme Thiroux d’Arconville to further pursue this problem, attributed to a “septic principle.” Her association of antiseptic capacities with substances’ protective power against the corrupting influences of outside Air complemented the work of Irish surgeon David MacBride in the 1760s. The latter advanced the promise of “fixed air” as part of a unique medical matter theory that was subsequently developed in the contributions to the 1767 prize contest on the subject at the Dijon Academy. “Pneumatic Chemistry in the Making: The Writings of James Keir and Pierre-Joseph Macquer, 1766–1779” Kristen Schranz (University of Toronto) Most widely acknowledged eighteenth-century pneumatic ‘developments’ appear to prepare the way for the Chemical Revolution by French chemists in the late 1780s. Yet the making and circulating of pneumatic knowledge was often untidy and convoluted, rendering a linear progression of knowledge from Boyle to Lavoisier via various British chemists incomplete and untenable. The 1770s was a pivotal decade for pneumatic chemistry as natural philosophers, physicians, manufacturers, and civil servants on the Continent and in Britain attempted to capture, study, and validate pneumatic productions despite a lack of consensus about the nature of air(s) and the absence of a universal terminology to describe apparatus and observations. In order to understand the nuances and difficulties of pneumatic knowledge ‘as it happened’ in the 1770s we need to look beyond the iconic figures in the traditional narrative. The Scottish-born manufacturer James Keir and the French physician and lecturer Pierre-Joseph Macquer played an important role in summarizing, annotating, translating, and circulating chemical knowledge in this era. By tracing iterations of concepts, experiments, and theories in their published texts, the talk shows how Keir and Macquer represented the growing interface of pneumatic discussions between Britain and France. An examination of Macquer’s and Keir’s contributions and treatises on air(s) throughout the 1770s confirms the rapidly changing dynamics in pneumatic chemistry to show its dependence on prompt knowledge sharing via dictionaries, letters, translations, private notes, experiments, as well as networks of personal and institutional connections.

Public Health in Global Contexts “Ethnic Space and Medical Practice in Informal Empire: British Doctors and Malaria Science in Muscat, Oman: 1877-1915” FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 25

Laura Goffman (Georgetown University, Department of History) Attempts to apply emerging European understandings of disease and biomedicine to the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Arab Gulf region were an early manifestation of developing state-society interactions in the context of informal British Empire. This paper examines two texts written by British medical officers addressing malaria in Muscat that demonstrate the conjunction of science and empire with the indigenous population. The first, “Medical Topography of Muscat” (1877) by British Agency Surgeon Atmaran Sadashiva Grandin Jayakar; and the second, “Malaria in Muscat” (1916) by Major Clifford Gill. These texts exemplify how global—but Europeandominated—scientific modes of thinking about malaria interacted with local political and economic conditions and how racialized discourse regarding the local population appeared in colonial representations of medical space in Muscat. This presentation places these texts in dialogue with each other to ask, first, how did the radical change in scientific understandings of malaria (mosquitoes rather than bad air) at the global level impact the way that British agents imagined and represented race and ethnic space in Muscat and its environs? Second, what was the process of translating such medical and scientific knowledge to the indigenous community, and how did this new understanding of disease interact with local disease imaginaries? My paper argues that in the context of transformed notions of the cause of malaria, imperial medical understandings became less commensurable with local forms of medical knowledge, further crystalizing representations of racial hierarchies in terms of sanitation, health, and ethnic typologies. “The Cult of Youth: Commercialising Scientific Rejuvenation in Interwar Europe” James Stark (University of Leeds) The twentieth century saw an unprecedented increase in life expectancies in the developed world. Alongside this trend, numerous different methods of slowing, halting, or even reversing the aging process have been touted as possible ways of extending life without the need for the micromanagement of lifestyle. Focusing on the transformative interwar period, this paper asks how the different ways that people have attempted rejuvenation – the restoration of youth or the appearance of youth – have changed over time, and what they can tell us about our shifting relationship with ageing and our bodies. Whilst there were numerous different methods and products which claimed to achieve rejuvenation for the anxious ager, this paper concentrates on the central role of everyday methods, such as hormone creams, electrotherapy devices and dietary practices, and in particular the ways in which daily, domestic routines drew inspiration from spectacular and sensationalized surgical interventions which promised to make the old young. Drawing on the work of Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Chandak Sengoopta and others, I argue that our understanding of the social and physiological dimensions of ageing and rejuvenation were fundamentally changed by new anxieties about bodily and social fitness. This highly gendered process drew on scientific ideas of regeneration and development and were exacerbated by commercial interests. As a result, the centuries-old, fantastical preoccupation with elixirs, philosopher’s stones and “cures” for ageing was gradually transformed into pragmatic, everyday FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 26

solutions designed to restore lost vital force, extend fertility, and present a more youthful face to the world. “Designing America's Healthcare System: Basil O'Connor, Public Relations, and the Crusade Against Polio in America” Julia Marino (Dartmouth College) Basil O’Connor, the philanthropist who led the American crusade against polio, had a vision for national healthcare and scientific research policy. As president of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP) from 1938 to 1955, O’Connor claimed to have invented a new public health model: no non-profit had ever before or ever since launched such a complete assault on a single disease. The NFIP financed all scientific research related to polio and guaranteed free patient care to 80% of American victims. While the postwar period was a watershed moment in the expansion of the government’s role in science, Basil O’Connor deliberately set out to demonstrate that both patient care and scientific research could be provided by a non-governmental organization and that federal contributions to public health and scientific research were unnecessary. This paper will examine the tactics that NFIP leaders deployed to thwart government contributions to the polio effort on both a federal and state level to preserve the Foundation's total control. O’Connor colluded with allies in the American Medical Association to help block Truman’s National Health Plan in 1946, and in 1948, NFIP leaders lobbied in Congress against a special commission for polio research in the proposed National Science Foundation. This paper argues that O’Connor’s public relations mastery and anti-government agenda led a generation of Americans to believe that the voluntary health organizations could offer a solution to American public health challenges. “Knowledge in Motion: The Transfer of Pilates Practices from Germany to the United States” Brianne Wesolowski (Vanderbilt University) Beginning in the 1990s, the practice of Pilates resurfaced in American popular culture after spending several decades in specialized niches, mostly amongst dance communities. The name Pilates is common enough, but little attention has been paid to the ways in which Joseph Pilates’s historical contexts affected his techniques, his inventions, and his knowledge of the body. The contours of his intellectual trajectory was shaped not only by German life reform mentalities but also by his internment during the First World War at an English POW camp, where he encountered and rehabilitated wounded bodies. It was there that Pilates began to develop his own system and technologies, making use of suspension and spring tension, which he later applied to boxers in Hamburg and after 1926, to dancers, performers, and social elites living in New York City. By tracing the transnational movement of the technologies and craft knowledge inherent to Pilates’s program, I argue that he was successful in transplanting these practices to the US because his system offered a meditation on several defining tensions of modernism: between nature and artifice, between psychology and physiology, and between the individual and the universal. Moreover, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 27

because life reform tendencies had already traversed the Atlantic during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, his ideas fell on fertile ground. Thus, while historians have often described the German life reform postures as “anti-modern,” this paper will demonstrate the ways in which the mentalities that underpinned the German movement also resonated with American moderns in New York City. “India’s Polio-Free Status: A Case Study in post-Cold War Health Politics” Gourav Krishna Nandi (Yale University) This article situates the goals of India’s participation in the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in the developmentalist rhetoric of the Indian state and its ambitions in foreign policy in the aftermath of the Cold War. In 2014, India attained polio-free status in the context of a growing number of NonPolio Acute Flaccid Paralysis (NP-AFP) cases, which has annually affected more than ten thousand children in the country even after the eradication of polio. This paper shows how in the year 2000, the WHO developed a new virological scheme of classification that reduced the number of polio cases, and created a new category of paralysis, NP-AFP. While epidemiologists traced the increasing number of cases of non-polio paralysis cases in high-risk states of the country between 2005 and 2015, poor environmental sanitation and reduced state funding for research in non-polio pathogens facilitated an attitude of neglect by the state toward the disease. This article argues that the polio-free status offered the state an opportunity to establish a model global health campaign for low-and middle-income countries and accumulate symbolic capital from the developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. To that end, despite the large expenditure to eradicate polio, paralysis due to non-polio enteroviruses have been largely neglected and primary healthcare in the country has remained heavily underfunded. India’s achievement of the polio-free status, therefore, cannot be treated as the result of humanitarian domestic policy, and must be situated in the context of the state’s political goals.

Scientific Intimacies “’Drawn from Life’: The Domestic Economies of Antebellum American Geological Illustrations” AJ Blandford (Rutgers University) During the first half of the nineteenth-century geologists developed a visual language to communicate scientific ideas about the earth through their use of maps, sections, diagrams and scenic views. The material shape and visual form of these images was determined and amended through an array of collaborative relationships: among the editors and transnational readers of scientific journals in global scientific communities; between husbands and wives drafting maps at the dinner table; and in the regional transactions between notebook sketchers, copperplate gravers and stone lithographers. Historians of science have long been concerned with how networks of exchange shape scientific truths but many questions remain about the deliberative moments in which the material was made FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 28

visual in order for geological knowledge to circulate. This paper explores the intimacies that produced geological imagery in the context of two different surveying relationships: the romantic marriage of Edward Hitchcock and Orra White, who described New England’s geology; and the professional divorce of Henry Darwin Rogers and J. Peter Lesley, who worked on the first Geological Survey of Pennsylvania. These antebellum geologists balanced scientific and aesthetic concerns with questions of cost and credit. Their abstractions of strata were grounded in realities of scientific reputation and domestic responsibility. I’ll contrast these two close partnerships to consider the role of gender in the professionalization of geological labor. As surveying work went from just putting names in print to putting food on the table who got credit for her work and who got paid more for his? “Scientific Intimacy and Feminist Thought in Colonial British Bermuda” Jenna Tonn (Harvard University) Abstract coming. “Transforming Conflict into Growth: Marriage and the Making of a Science of Intimate Relationships” Teri Chettiar (University of Chicago) Abstract coming. “Personnel Business: Science, Self, and Secrets in the Mid-Century Corporation” Whitney Laemmli (Columbia University) Abstract coming.

Technē and Training: New Perspectives on Pre-Modern Scientific and Technical Education “Scholasticism and Technical Writing in Late Babylonian Medical Education” John Wee (University of Chicago) Medical commentaries from ancient Iraq (c. 4th century BCE) were copied by intermediate students already familiar with therapeutic prescriptions, who were learning about bodily conditions and behaviors from a Diagnostic Handbook. Teachers explained difficult terminology and concepts by harmonizing them with alleged parallels from authoritative writings on literature, astronomy, divination, religion, and lexicography. Complex yet predictable patterns of textual hermeneutics were repeatedly used, implying that the results accrued from closely following a method. To the modern reader, these techniques appear to be contrived, the logic circuitous, and the inclusion of non-medical content superfluous and akin to prooftexting. The notion that healers should be knowledgeable in diverse fields and universal ways of reasoning, moreover, bears some resemblance to scholastic medicine in medieval Europe, where university doctors cited their book-learning as FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 29

evidence of true insight into causes that eluded empirics with only on-the-job training. It is easy to dismiss scholastic practices, with their reliance on canonical authority and text-based ways of reasoning, as antithetical to sense experience and empirical evidence that we value in science today. Disregarding the erudite arguments and proofs constituting the bulk of our Iraq commentaries, however, we discover that they inevitably arrive at the same answers derivable in straightforward manner from therapeutic prescriptions, though the latter were never explicitly acknowledged. The trappings of scholasticism served to fashion medicine as a technē with broad philosophical and theoretical underpinnings, but did not, in fact, alter the ways healers described and categorized the sick body based on experiences in therapeutic practice. “Teaching Clinical Judgment: Methodist and Galenic Approaches” Katherine van Schaik (Harvard University) This paper asks two questions of two different schools of medical thought (Methodism and Galenism) that rose to prominence between the first century BCE and the third century CE in the Greco-Roman world. First, how did physicians decide on a specific diagnosis and treatment for a patient? Second, how did they teach clinical decision making to protégés? Using studies of modern medical decision making and human cognitive processing, I argue that the Methodist approach particularly facilitated training in the diagnosis and treatment of commoner, more acute maladies, and the Galenic approach suited chronic cases, and cases involving more clinical uncertainty. The position of particular sects or physicians regarding clinical decision making relied especially on their preferred nosological categories and their means of addressing questions of observability, two aspects of a sect which also affected its approach to the training of future practitioners. Methodists were concerned about the practical utility of their classification system: the rapidity with which a trainee could acquire and apply Methodist teaching was an important part of the sect’s appeal and, potentially, its success. Galen’s approach to nosology, however, was rooted in his deep knowledge of anatomy and his wide reading of earlier medical literature. He emphasized the importance of theorizing about what was beyond the limits of direct observation, thereby developing a nosological system in which illnesses were linked with that which was not immediately observable. This required Galen, and those emulating him, to approach decision making not only less linearly, but also somewhat less systematically. “The Vitruvian Science of Architecture: Using ‘Semantic Networks’ to Investigate the Project of De Architectura” James Zainaldin (Harvard University) At the beginning of his De Architectura (1.1.1), Vitruvius (V.) famously claims that architecture is composed not only of ‘construction’ (fabrica), but also ‘theorizing’ (ratiocinatio): the complete architect must be able ‘to demonstrate and explain constructions in accordance with reason and skill’ (res fabricatas sollertiae ac rationis pro portione demonstrare atque explicare). Despite V.’s insistence on the importance of ‘demonstration’ (demonstrare) and ‘explanation’ (explicare), it is not clear what role these activities play in his conception of architecture. Commentators have seen them (e.g.) as a

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 30

posteriori justification for architectural practice (Callebat 1994: 35), or as a coordinated effort to communicate a broader, theoretical worldview to readers (Courrént 2005). In this paper, I propose another interpretation: the terms highlight what might be called the ‘scientific’ agenda of De Architectura, namely, the proposal of a flexible system for deriving architectural practice from secure natural principles. V. models a conception of architecture that requires experiment, observation, and reasoning drawing on the principles (rationes) afforded by other branches of knowledge. In line with this panel’s intention to investigate alternative research methods for scientific and technical writing, I argue this thesis with the aid of the software Arboreal, a program that allows for the generation of sophisticated ‘semantic networks’ to visualize the distribution and association of clusters of terms in a text (Schiefsky 2015). Using Arboreal, I track ‘metascientific’ terminology in De Architectura associated with observation, analogy, experiment, and induction, and show how this language both structures the treatise and points up its ‘scientific’ dimension. “Teaching Technology across Cultures: The Patio Process in 16th-century Potosí” Renée Raphael (University of California, Irvine) European mining techniques were initially inadequate to work the ores at Potosí, the largest silver mine in the early modern world. After the mine’s discovery by the Spanish in 1545, indigenous techniques, especially the pre-Hispanic guayra (wind oven), dominated silver production in the area. As the richer ores were depleted in the following decades, so did the profits and population of the newly founded imperial city. In the 1570s, however, Pedro Fernández de Velasco arrived from the viceroyalty of New Spain with a new refining technique developed by the joint efforts of Spanish and German miners that involved the amalgamation of silver with mercury. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo heard of this new technique, termed the patio process, and encouraged its adoption by subsidizing the costs of supplies, construction, and labor. He also made provisions for instruction in the new amalgamation technique for both Spaniards and the indigenous miners forced to work the mines as part of the mita system of tribute labor. In this talk, I rely on archival documents from Potosí generated by the miners’ guild, as well as letters sent between Spain and the imperial city in the last decades of the sixteenth century, to detail these attempts at technical education. Comparison with published accounts of the amalgamation process as carried out in Potosi reveals the differences between on-the-ground technological practice and training versus that developed for an audience of university-trained readers and policy-makers.

The Climate Sciences and Imperial Expansion in the Atlantic World, 1600 - 1950 “Imperial Heat: The Colonial Climates of Southeastern North America” Jason Hauser (Mississippi State University) Early colonial forays into southeastern North America forced Europeans to confront their assumptions about the nature of the global climate. While historians have examined the ways in which their attempts to understand erratic and alien weather vacillations bred considerable anxiety

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 31

about New World environments and grew European climate knowledge, less scholarship exists that interrogates the social impact of colonial climate science in the first centuries of European expansion into North America. For Spanish, French, and British colonizers, proximity to the tropics promised agricultural and mineral wealth, but expeditions to the region found it a threat to both health and empire. Their inaccurate assessments of the climate doomed colonial projects, causing Europeans to search for ways to overcome climatic handicaps to colonization. By examining correspondence, government records, travelogues of colonizers, and promotional literature, this paper traces the process by which the subtropical North American climate emerged as an imperial impediment and economic problem for which some Europeans believed that African slavery offered a possible solution. Understanding the ways in which concerns about the New World’s climate fueled the belief that successful colonization hinged on coerced labor reveals the intimate relationship between racial and climatic considerations during North American’s early colonial history and situates early articulations of the climatic justification for slavery in their appropriate colonial context. Moreover, it reveals how imperial ambitions shaped understandings of the climate, underscoring the inextricable links between climate science and considerations of political economy. “Climate Change, Natural Knowledge, and Imperialism in the Nineteenth-Century Southeastern Borderlands” Elaine LaFay (University of Pennsylvania) Many 18th and early 19th century observers noticed a change in the climate after massive deforestation campaigns in the northeastern United States. Initially, early U.S. settlers greeted milder winters with enthusiasm, extolling the remarkable warming effects of “cultivation and improvement.” A different story, however, unfolded in the Gulf South. Drawing on climatological data, techniques to influence the local climate were given a regional slant in efforts to cool a hot climate, rather than render a cold climate warmer. This paper examines the social and technical solutions contrived in the U.S. Gulf South both to manage a malevolent climate but also to actively change the atmosphere and temperature. This is a story of human-driven climate change. But efforts to tame unruly climates were linked to efforts to tame unruly peoples. Florida’s semi-tropical wilderness, for example, harbored escaped slaves and Native Americans in a site of blatant subversion of the racial order. Climatic data bolstered arguments in favor of clearing swamplands and planting trees, which tied into the imperative to expand the southern way of life into the southeastern borderlands. Urban planners and climatologists turned to tree planting in cities along the Gulf of Mexico for reasons ranging from relief from the heat, to chilling the local climate, and, relatedly, to trying to render the hot, sickly climate hospitable for white settlement. In asking how residents attempted to impose regimentation and clarity onto unwieldy landscapes, I explore how climatecontrol projects were a means of articulating prevailing social and political hierarchies. “Exporting the Climate: Water Balances, International Development, and the Globalization of Local Environments” James Bergman (Michigan State University)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 32

In 1953, the climatologist C.W. Thornthwaite proposed to a conference on “Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” that his technique of determining water balances could identify, and help correct, “defects” in the climate. He had begun employing these techniques as a consultant for growers and processers of truck crops in New Jersey, and as the decade wore on, his efforts would expand to other parts of the world, including the Middle East, both through the efforts of his consulting business and through his leadership roles in international institutions, such as the World Meteorological Organization and UNESCO’s Committee on Arid Lands, and even the siting of nuclear reactors in Iran, Israel, and Greece. In doing this, Thornthwaite created, paradoxically, an environmental localism that was global in reach. This paper will trace Thornthwaite’s work, from his work consulting on irrigation in Mexico during World War II, to his use of wastewater from industrial farms and processing plants to “reclaim” defective land, and finally to his work with UNESCO, to “export” his techniques of water balance determination and land reclamation. In doing so, I uncover formal and informal networks of trade, diplomacy, and economic development through which concerns about climate—and climate change—traveled. Underlying these exchanges lay a growing anxiety that climate was growing less and less “balanced” in many parts of the world, especially areas of desertification and desiccation.

The Edge of Human “People Eaters: Corpse Medicine, Cannibalism, Vampirology, and the Limits of Humanity in the Early Modern World” Clare Griffin (Nazarbayev University) Should people eat people? In the early modern world, this was a serious question. Western European medical men recommended the use of various medicines made from human corpses, medicines that were anathematized and banned in the early seventeenth century Russian empire. Those same Western Europeans pathologised the behaviours and devalued the humanity of other peoples in the early modern global world by accusing them of cannibalism. In South Eastern Europe and the Greek Islands, local beliefs held that the returning human dead nourished themselves by feeding on the bodies of the living; such beliefs fascinated Western European learned society, leading to a brief peak in the study of the vampire phenomenon in scientific academies in the early eighteenth century. Often, these phenomena are discussed as to how they divided up humanity, into the eaters, the eaten, and the non-eaters. Yet such discussions also reveal something else: the bodily connection of the eaters and the eaten. Those who sought to denegrate the people eaters focused on the immorality of eating people; they did not question its utility. Indeed, the ideas of both the eaters and the noneaters seem to coincide on one vital point: there is a special nutrional, medicinal, ritual, religious, or magical value to consuming one’s own kind. People-eating does not divide humanity; rather it is fundamentally based on the unique bodily connections of one human to another. “Headhunting, Bestiality and Extinction: German Anthropology and the Fight for Philippine Independence (1870-1904)” Marissa Petrou (New York University)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 33

In the late nineteenth century, the mountain dwelling Philippine peoples known as the Negritos were of much interest to European scholars. Spanish ethnographers viewed the Negritos as a degenerate race and many German physical and cultural anthropologists considered them a transitional race between ape and human. As evidence they cited similarities in skull and skeletal formation as well as reports that the women confessed to fornicating with monkeys. The Negritos were of special interest because of their persistent independence from the Spanish colonial government. Another activity of concern in the study of the Philippines’ independent ethnic communities was headhunting, an activity which scientists sought to explain through physiognomic analysis of its practitioners. Not all anthropologists accepted this evidence or agreed with existing interpretations and thus the study of headhunting and bestiality provides the opportunity to examine debates during the founding years of the anthropological sciences. In 1889 Filipino nationalist and German-trained scientist Jose Rizal invited A. B. Meyer to join the Board of Directors of the International Association of Philippinists. Meyer’s work historicized the material culture and social practices of the many ethnic groups of the Philippines. It was this reading of Meyer’s work as a counter to the dehumanizing scholarship of the Spanish ethnologists which most attracted Filipino anti-colonialists. Through studies of headhunting and bestiality, I consider how scientists evaluated an ethnic group based on their relationships with their human and animal neighbors as a means to assess the community’s future political and biological status. “Monstrous Specialization: The Machine-Made Mind in Fin-de-Siècle France” Lily Huang (University of Chicago) In the Vocabulaire technique et critique de philosophie, laboriously hashed out by France’s leading philosophers and savants from 1900-1922, the word “spécial” receives a curt definition: “Limited, restricted.” In a work that stands out for its lack of consensus—the margins of the Vocabulaire preserve the dissenting opinions of the contributors—the word “spécial” entered the philosophical lexicon with a rare unanimity. But why is this word even here, in a technical and critical vocabulary? This paper examines the social and epistemological developments that made a seemingly unremarkable word into a term of derision in the late nineteenth century in France. “Spécial” bore the anxieties over both the specialization of knowledge and the specialization of skills for industrial work. An undisputed narrative of the history of science and social science of this period has traced the process of increasing specialization and professionalization. Less often told within this narrative are stories of the resistance to that transformation. In France, however, alongside the expansion of education programs outside of the university system and the formation of disciplines in the research university, there emerged a fear of the kind of intellect these changes could produce: limited, restricted, and—perhaps most improbably to us—mechanical, rote. For what made specialization undesirable was its association with machinery— “specialized” in the sense of fitted to a single function. This paper shows how philosophers, savants, and educators marshalled a set of human ideals against the spectre of the specialist: finesse, breadth of knowledge, and supple adaptability. “Spinning Silk into Sutures: The Decline of Japanese Raw Silk Exports and the Development of Silk as a Biomedical Material in the Twentieth Century”

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 34

Lisa Onaga (Nanyang Technical University) While the history of silk textiles is ancient and has attracted the interests of many scholars, alternative purposes of silk, such as surgical sutures, have received far less attention. Re-examining silk and silkworm as proteins can illuminate the historical paths that have produced what seem like alternative uses of silk as biocompatible medicines and tools. Viewing protein as an analytic category offers a way to translate narratives centered around the historical fabrication of silk and textiles into the realm of medicine. Applying the lens of proteins especially facilitates the examination of silk as a biomaterial, a material synthesized from a biological entity with properties of that original lifeform. The attention to biomateriality encourages a translational stance that brings the importance of tactile materiality to the critical fore. In this case, proteinaceous expressions represent the translational product of the silkworm genome and the silkworm’s interaction with the mulberry plant. Historical cognizance of how biomateriality guides biomedical and engineering research on the molecular structure of silk sheds light on how silk has been translated into macro-level constructions in medicine. Thinking with the protein enables a recognition of the importance of silk in the history of medicine. The history of a biomaterial that holds wounds together and heals scars illuminates a strategy for understanding the emergent history of biomedical silk innovations. By interrogating how non-absorbent silk sutures became massproduced by Japanese textile companies and used within the body it is possible to comprehend how silk has gained new value as biocompatible protein.

What's the Difference? Comparative Approaches in the Life Sciences “Agnes Arber’s Unity in Diversity: The Role of Analogies in Plant Morphology, Philosophy of Science, and Beyond” Andre Hahn (Oregon State University) When dealing with large amounts of observational information in the life sciences, comparative approaches have offered an initial step in bringing conceptual order. With plant morphology, the information in question is plant forms, out of which morphologists have developed conceptual types. These types have identified commonalities both internal to individual plants and across groups of plants, often times within one theory. Agnes Arber's (1879-1960) partial-shoot theory of the leaf offered one such attempt at integration. Faced with a strong movement among botanists to reorient morphology around phylogeny, Arber sought to maintain a “pure morphology” characteristic of preDarwinian morphologists like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Arber’s theory united Goethe’s identification of the “leaf” as the proteus plant form with contemporary theories identifying the shoot as the fundamental morphological unit, thus reinterpreting floral structures as analogous to both partial-shoots and metamorphosed leaves. While honing her comparative skills in plant morphology, Arber worked towards a larger perspective. For one, she integrated physiology and biochemistry into her morphological comparisons. Additionally, inspired by her mentor Ethel Sargant (1863-1918), Arber developed the use of analogical proof in morphology and identified its fundamental role in the thought of scientists FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 35

such as Newton and Darwin. By playing such a foundational role, analogy opened up the sciences to epistemic connections with other modes of human inquiry such as art and mysticism. Overall, analogy offered Arber a synthetic mode of thought which could potentially bring unity, not only to plant forms, but human thought. “Comparing Place: The Challenges of Deep Time to Ecological Reconstructions” Melissa Charenko (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Beginning in the 1910s, paleoecologists in Scandinavia and North America began reconstructing past vegetation and climate using fossilized microorganisms which served as indirect measurements of those variables. To use these microscopic proxies for historical reconstructions, paleoecologists commonly compared the genera present at a given location at different moments of time. By examining fluctuations within the different genera and accounting for their ecological preferences, paleoecologists created a picture of the changes that took place at that location. Yet conclusions in paleoecology were rarely straightforward, in part because many inferences were required to support these comparisons and the resulting conclusions.

Using a discussion of “place,” the particular ecological features of a field site, as a window into the comparative nature of paleoecology, this paper explores how ecological conclusions depended on correctly characterizing the spatial and temporal extent captured by fossilized microorganisms, which were the basis of conclusions in paleoecology. Paleoecologists knew that particular material environments affected their results. Their results were highly place-specific due to local processes like erosion and deflation. Yet, at the same time, paleoecologists recognized that the microorganisms which were the basis of their comparisons were likely not bound to the area immediately surrounding these sites as there were differential production, dispersal and preservation rates among their microscopic proxies. How did paleoecologists balance the local with the more placeless to create a robust picture of the past? What was the status of knowledge generated through these methods? This paper explores these questions. “Comparative Imperial Caribbean Botany and The New York Botanical Garden” Darryl Brock (CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College) The New York Academy of Sciences initiated the Scientific Survey of Puerto Rico in 1913, driven by the New York Botanical Garden; the project helped the Garden pursue comparative studies at multiple levels. First, evolution represented a key Garden interest. These new Caribbean collections from Puerto Rico could be compared with other Garden flora holdings from Cuba, Jamaica and even South America to characterize plant distributions and thus determine evolutionary relationships. A second basis for comparative study arose from the imperial nature of the Survey. The Garden sought to emancipate American botanical science from European type collections; accordingly, the institution paid careful attention to filling lacunae in American holdings. This had the benefit of providing a chronological basis for exploring potential speciation in that European FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 36

collections represented specimens taken fifty years to a century earlier than those made under the Survey. Finally, a third basis for comparative study rested in the expertise on the cactus (plant family Cactaceae) by the Garden’s founder, Nathaniel L. Britton. These plants represented a taxon native almost exclusively to the Americas; accordingly, Britton prepared the definitive study on them during 1919-1923 while also directing the Scientific Survey. He sought not only to define the distribution of the cactus, but to understand its evolutionary adaptations to diverse environments. The Scientific Survey afforded an opportunity to study the cactus in Puerto Rico’s key terrain, as well as its uninhabited, undisturbed islands, to compare their distribution and phylogenetic differences from specimens on the South and Central American mainland. “'Parasites, Moochers, Looters': Comparative Narratives of Adaptation in mid-20thCentury Parasitology” Rachel Mason Dentinger (University of Utah) Parasites have long had a bad rap; from freeloaders to menacing agents of disease, rhetoric has tarnished an entire mode of animal nutrition with social censure. Ayn Rand’s 1961 vision of human society illustrates this discourse, in which idealized “independent” and “productive” people are preyed upon by dependent “parasites, moochers, [and] looters.” Such analogies have intuitive appeal, especially after comparing parasitic organisms with their close kin: Who wouldn’t feel some disdain for the liver fluke, lurking in the bile ducts of its host, while its free-living planarian relative roams the pond-floor, stalking its own food? Since the early 20th century, parasitologists have regularly drawn comparisons like these, between parasites and their free-living relatives, using them to argue that parasites evolved from autonomous ancestors. This reconstruction of the history of parasitism seems to suggest freedom restricted, options constricted, and lost adaptation—all of which resonate with the cultural connotations of parasitism. However, parasitologists themselves have interpreted these comparisons differently, using them to directly challenge narratives that paint parasites as products of regressive evolution. To them, parasitism represents superior adaptation, exquisite specialization that is characterized—if paradoxically—by evolutionary simplification in anatomical and physiological features. This paper examines how mid-20th-century parasitologists in the United States and Europe used comparative methods to argue that being “independent” and “productive” was overrated. Instead, these scientists openly admired their parasitic subjects, using comparison to argue that loss of function was actually a refined form of evolutionary gain. “Coming into its Own as a Science? Comparing Human and non-Human Animal Brains in the mid-20th Century” Kathryn Schoefert (King's College London) Historical analyses of Big Data have highlighted the continued relevance of comparative approaches throughout the twentieth century, but support has not been universal. Some disciplinary traditions heavily dependent on comparison struggled to remain relevant after 1900—notably, among them, animal morphology. Repeated accusations of ‘brain mythologies’, for instance, challenged neuropathologists’ and neuroanatomists’ on-going morphological studies of human, and non-human

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 37

animal, brains. After the Second World War, comparative studies, however, found new impetus. RJM Innes and LZ Saunders thus positioned their joint-authored Comparative neuropathology (1962) as a vital counter-balance to obsessive microbe-hunting, highlighting disease analogies and arguing that comparative neuropathology had now ‘come into its own as a science’. Whereas pre-war investigators had concentrated on typical species—cat, dog, and monkey—, peers of Innes and Saunders were mapping out species diversity and normal variation within genus and family. This paper examines the state of the comparative project in the brain sciences in the 1960s, speculating on the significance of comparison for its relationships to clinical and biological disciplines. How did researchers, moreover, perceive and present their comparative approach in light of the emerging identity of the ‘neurosciences’ which lionised modelling biological processes?

Working and Knowing with Paper I: Paper Panopticism “Medical Arithmetic in Late 18th Spain: Gender, Paper Tools, and Social Ideals” Elena Serrano (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) This paper reveals the paper tools and paper systems used for tracking and tracing children at the Madrid Foundling House after 1799, when an aristocratic female association was charged with its administration. A medieval institution that stood at the heart of the city, the House received around one thousand children each year, most of whom died in its care. The Junta de damas de honor y mérito (Ladies of Honor and Merit 3 Committee) set up new hygienic measures, doubled the medical and caring personnel, and re-arranged the life in the House. Above all, the Junta ordered the heavy traffic of children by setting up a new paper system, a notebook for registering both the entrances and exits of children. Elena Serrano explores the impact of the Junta’s newly-introduced paper tool, showing that it changed ways of looking at foundlings and with it, their chances to survive. Additionally, while the notebook served to legitimate that a female body governed a contested institution, it also documented more accurate mortality rates, which lent credence to the women managers. As scholars have shown, numbers detach knowledge, the local and the personal, making it appear independent of the producer and the concrete circumstances on which it is produced. The orderly new books represented the authority and governing capacity of the Junta in this way, as a material representation of the ideal social order in which upper-class learned women played a key public role in the reform of society. “Papering Over the Female Body: Clelia D. Mosher, the Posture Sciences, and the Schematograph” Beth Linker (University of Pennsylvania) This paper examines the work of Dr. Clelia D. Mosher (1863-1940), who, as professor and director of women’s physical education at Stanford University, became a forerunner in measuring human posture through a graphic inscription device known as the “schematograph,” an apparatus that she invented in 1915 with the help of mechanical engineer, Everett P. Lesley. The device was essentially a camera obscura outfitted with translucent drafting paper which the examiner used to hand-draw an

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 9:00 a.m.–11:45 a.m. | 38

outline of an examinee’s human form. At a time of heightened enthusiasm in the clinic for other visualization technologies, such as film, camera photography, and x-rays, Mosher insisted that the act of drawing, tracing, and physical manipulating paper was essential to the advancement of the posture sciences. While the schematograph began as a distinctly gendered tool, the device would go on to be used during the interwar years in all-male institutions of higher education, elementary schools, and in the military. In these settings, scientists employed Mosher’s paper method to create a universal classificatory system of posture grading, a schema that served as physical evidence for an epidemic of slouching in America. “The Phrenological Interface: Gender, Paper Platforms, and Knowledge Negotiations” Carla Bittel (Loyola Marymount University) This paper examines gender, phrenology, and consumerism in early nineteenth-century America to uncover the role of paper in measuring, documenting, evaluating, and even negotiating the meaning of cranial characteristics, especially in relation to gender. It argues that phrenology’s paper tools, especially the phrenological chart, functioned as an “interface” for analysts and clients. As we will see, phrenological charts were interactive platforms that often blurred the boundary between producers and users of knowledge. While much has been written about phrenology, less attention has been paid to its gender dimensions. A popular, but contested science of the mind, phrenology was based on evaluations and measurements of nodules on the head; it articulated a relationship between the brain and skull, the mental and the physical, the interior and exterior. In antebellum America, phrenology articulated rigid dualistic notions of gender, and yet there was some variability, especially when it came to middle-class clients. As we will see, phrenology’s gender dualism and malleability were expressed on and through paper. Charts served as both individual character analyses and records of the phrenological encounter; charts also made phrenology an accessible, transportable, marketable science, available to both men and women. Ultimately, this study shows the vital intersection of gender and materiality in phrenological practice, and demonstrates the role of paper as a social and epistemological mediator.

12:00–1:15 p.m. Physical Sciences Forum Business Meeting and Distinguished Lecture “Exploring History In Situ: A Between the Lines First-Person Account of Berkeley’s Loss of Fermilab” Catherine Westfall (Michigan State University) In my career as a historian, I wrote about one particularly sensitive subject: the choice of Weston, Illinois as the site for what came to be called Fermilab. This was a surprising and dismaying decision for many physicists, particularly those at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After all,

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 12:00–1:15 p.m. | 39

following in the tradition of Ernest Lawrence, managers and a world-class group of accelerator builders obtained initial funding and created the first design for the facility. To add further insult and injury, the loss of this particle physics laboratory signaled the end of the era when Berkeley housed the world’s largest, most prestigious accelerators. When recently contemplating untold stories I would like to tell before retirement, I realized I am bothered by insights left out of my previously published work on the Fermilab decision, in particular what I discovered in my interactions with two key participants in that saga, Glenn Seaborg, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and Edwin McMillan, then director of Berkeley Lab. It is not that this missing information changes my published assessment or conclusions in my previously published traditional historical narratives. Instead, I present this “between the lines” story of my experiences with Seaborg and McMillan to show case the dilemmas and joys of writing in situ history. These include the difficulty of dealing with and sorting through the emotions that arise when gathering information from history makers, the discomfort that comes with telling a story people don’t want to hear, and the misunderstandings that arise with physicists as well as historians about the work I do.

Roundtable: Business History and the History of Science “Colonial Science, Imperial Business” Feng-en Tu (Harvard University) My project examines the production of scientific knowledge regarding smells and smelling in colonial Taiwan and the ways in which the scientific activities shaped, and were shaped by, the development of Japan’s fragrance industry in the first half of the twentieth century. In my presentation, I will focus on the works and activities of Kafuku Kinzō, a celebrated organic chemistry who led research team at the Central Research Institute in Taiwan and carried out various research projects on the industrial production of natural and synthetic fragrances in the interwar period. Under his leadership, the institute built a close connection with scientists in Japan’s major universities and recruited a number of young chemists from these schools. Thanks to the efforts made by these scientists, the institute not only became one of the centers contributing greatly to the botanical and chemical knowledge of fragrances in Japan but also helped Japan’s fragrance companies to advance their business in the colony and beyond. Meanwhile, these scientific activities were often intertwined with, and influenced by, both the political interests of the Japanese empire and the business interests of the Japanese fragrance companies. In short, this presentation offers a case which reveals the multi-directional flows of knowledge and the collaborations between colonial officials, capitalists and scientists within the empire. “Cryptography as Science, Weapon, and Intellectual Property” Jillian Foley (University of Chicago) Private companies like Google and Microsoft are active participants in computer security research, regularly publishing articles in peer-reviewed journals and collaborating with academic colleagues. While this may seem natural for commercial security hardware or software, the abstract foundational

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 12:00–1:15 p.m. | 40

mathematics of cryptography might have kept the field within a tight circle of mathematicians. However, private companies have also been deeply involved in cryptographic research from before the emergence of today's scientific research field in the 1970s. This talk will discuss some important relationships between early academic cryptographers, businesses, and the government, and how those relationships have shaped today's scientific community and our knowledge about cryptography. It will pay particular focus to the role of government regulations, patents, and public discussion of privacy and surveillance. “Knowledge Management and Concepts of Technology in Postwar Business” Douglas O'Reagan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) In the 1980s, a new fad swept through businesses and business schools across America: "knowledge management." In increasingly complex, multinational organizations, businesses (and their management consultants) began to see the "intellectual capital" they possessed – largely but not exclusively consisting of industrial science, patent rights, and workers' technical skills – as being at least as important as financial capital. Knowledge management (KM) was unusual in business schools fads because it resonated so strongly with both on-the-ground businessmen and academics. It sparked board room discussions and business school debates about "tacit" vs. "explicit" knowledge, social/cultural embeddedness of science, and the importance of valuing workers' inexpressible skills. This talk will trace a brief history of KM, then tie it back to a source its practitioners seem to have completely unknowingly drawn upon: a similar business and legal fad in the 1950s-1960s centered on the concept of harnessing "know-how." “Energy Matters: The Science and Economics of Power Production” David Hecht (Bowdoin College) Of the many social and political contexts relevant toward understanding the history of science, business is one of the least examined. But few areas of experience could be more important to appreciate, as economic viability is a major determinant in both the production and consumption of science. My contribution to this roundtable will draw on the history of energy to explore the interaction between economics, business, and science. Coming from a background in studying the cultural reception and appropriation of science, I treat industry as simply another venue for this sort of analysis: how and why have actors within the business sector understood technology in the ways that they have? My remarks will center on nuclear energy, as its unique organizational features make it possible to contrast technical assessments from a variety of perspectives; actors in the business, regulatory, scientific, and media worlds often tell different stories based on the same data. From there, I will expand to other examples in the history of energy, to explore how business and science co-produce each other in realms where regulatory and public oversight is not as prominent. Ultimately, I will argue that the tools of reception studies and narrative analysis hold great promise for understanding that co-production. “Drug Patenting and the Transformation of American Pharmaceutical Science, 1920–1942” FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 12:00–1:15 p.m. | 41

Joseph Gabriel (Florida State University College of Medicine) In the two decades following World War I academic scientists increasingly collaborated with the pharmaceutical industry in the quest to develop useful new drugs. Despite a tradition of skepticism toward monopoly rights, and lingering concerns about drug patents among physicians, they also began to patent their discoveries. They did so not only as a means to ensure manufacturing standards and promote the public good, as scholars such as Maurice Cassier have argued, but also to advance their own professional and personal interests. Yet as academic scientists increasingly embraced patenting, the way in which they both conducted themselves and thought about their work also changed. New concerns, such as establishing priority in publication, were introduced; at the same time, research questions increasingly focused on the discovery of patentable substances. These changes were part of a broader process through which market considerations were increasingly imported into the practice of interwar science. By the outbreak of World War II, scientific and patenting considerations had blended together to a remarkable extent within the academic research enterprise, transforming not just the practice of scientific drug development but also the resulting therapeutic objects and, by extension, the disease categories through which medicine was understood and practiced. “Getting more Women into Business” Gwen Kay (SUNY Oswego) In the early 20th century, teaching women science was often dismissed as impractical. Similarly, the idea that women would pursue a career in business was also dismissed as impractical. In the discipline of home economics, both science and business flouri

Roundtable: Diversifying the Profession: Perspectives on Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity in the History of Science “The Value of Diverse Learners and Scholars” Katrina Jirik (University of Minnesota) Often when discussing diversity, disability only comes up in the context of accommodations, and yet, once people begin engaging the topic, they often find it exists everywhere; it just hasn’t been explored. Part of my research examines the role of science in the development of American institutions for the feeble-minded at the turn of the twentieth century, which grew out of an interest in eugenics. Current historiography, most of which was not written by historians, ignores the role that the changing scientific understanding of heredity had on their development. What sparked my interest was the incongruity between the terrible institutions depicted in the secondary literature and the three to five hundred people on waiting lists for admission. My research is leading to new and differing conclusions in this field. As a member of the roundtable and a person with a disability, I bring a different perspective and ask different questions because I have a different life experience and

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 12:00–1:15 p.m. | 42

will share some of these insights. In addition, I will contribute ideas on accommodating students with disabilities in the academic classroom which will demonstrate ways to value diversity. “The Importance of Being Earnest” Donald Opitz (DePaul University) In my comments to this roundtable, I will propose a strategy for engaging diversity in history of science that makes a revisionist argument for “the evidence of experience,” in defiance of Joan Wallach Scott’s seminal 1991 critique against it. In the midst of historians’ proliferation of narratives that asserted difference based on subjects’ claimed experiences, Scott called upon historians to refocus. She called upon historians to analyze the very structures and discourses that create difference—thereby exposing the very forces that construct subjects’ testimonies of experience. As a queer historian of science, I argue instead for the utility of the “evidence of experience” in efforts to “queer” the history of science. To widen the profession’s receptivity to diversity, I suggest that the required work must integrate the radicalization of historiography with professional activism, and in this regard, it is incumbent upon the historian of science to enact queerness in both scholarship and professional engagement. I will illustrate with examples of my own work. To quote Oscar Wilde, there is the importance of being earnest beyond the text, and in this sense, then, I argue for the evidence of experience in queering history of science. “Statement vs. Practice: Antiracism Discourse in the History of Science” Sebastián Gil-Riaño (University of Pennsylvania) In this talk, I examine the tensions between antiracist discourse and antiracist practice in the history of science. As a discipline, the history of science has made important contributions towards tracking the origins of an antiracist discourse in science. Historians of race science have shown how twentieth century scientists mobilized ideas from the evolutionary synthesis in biology and the cultural turn in anthropology to challenge scientific racism. The 1950 and 1951 UNESCO Statements on Race have often figured as the most emblematic expressions of this antiracist shift in science and as the beginnings of a population based approach to human biological diversity. But what kinds of practical commitments did this discursive shift entail? Historians of the life sciences have shown how this discursive shift led to projects of genetic salvage that unwittingly replicated colonial projects of indigenous dispossession. In my own work, I examine how this antiracist shift in postwar social science legitimated a variety of projects oriented towards dismantling the ways of life of racial minorities and so-called “primitive” peoples and replacing them with the technologies and ways of life of a white Western modernity. How mid-century antiracist discourse legitimated practices that valorized whiteness as a benchmark of modernity is most evident, I argue, when we relocate the history of racial thought to the Global South. Thus, when we consider questions of diversity – a close cousin of antiracism – in the history of science, it is important to consider the ways in which diversity statements can reinforce status quo practices. “Moving from Diversity to Equity”

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 12:00–1:15 p.m. | 43

Jessica Nickrand (American Academy of Neurology) Attempts at diversity and inclusion that seek to bring voices of marginalized populations into the room are important. Historically, these efforts have been programs like affirmative action, centers for students with disabilities, and, in my own case, graduate school fellowships for firstgeneration college students. These methods are good, and we have seen marked demographic shifts in higher education because of them. But we need to push further, and work toward broad-based systems change if these diversity and inclusion efforts are meant to achieve the goals we hope that they will. I am a historian who studies race and medicine during the late twentieth century, and I now work at a community development non-profit in North Minneapolis where we work to end racial inequalities and improve community health through the provision of dignified, affordable housing and providing opportunities for increased civic participation. Drawing largely from my own research in Detroit that found black physicians were systematically excluded from educational opportunities, and therefore economic success, well into the 1990s, I argue that instead of diversity and inclusion, we must be talking about equity and justice. Where diversity in our conversation is about recognizing and accommodating differences within academia, equity ensures that there is fairness so that people representing those differences are able to thrive in a system that is still white and patriarchal. Part of the way that we can work for equity is by using our position as scholars to complete work that advances social justice and challenges hegemonic institutions.

Roundtable: Rethinking Histories of Science and Medicine: Beyond Eurocentrism and Postcolonialism “Bodies and Nature in the Black Atlantic” Pablo Gomez (University of Wisconsin-Madison) In my remarks, I will reflect on the possibilities offered by a materialist approach to broaden our understanding of the development of widely adopted and robust intellectual models about bodies and nature in the early modern Black Atlantic. In existent histories of the early modern world, African Atlantic spaces do not appear as places for the production of “real” knowledge about nature. As an answer to existent historiographical limitations, I discuss evidence related to the emergence in the sixteenth and seventeenth century of models for thinking about experiential matters, fungibility, risk, and quantification of human bodies that became widely adopted in the Atlantic, and which first appeared in slave trading circuits and African diasporic spaces. Through unsuspected linkages, this evidence challenges the homogeneity of Western historicism and a metaphysics born out of historical processes based on the notion of a universalizing nature, and a dualist ontology that separates nature and culture. “Parasciences” Projit Mukharji (University of Pennsylvania)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 12:00–1:15 p.m. | 44

History of Science, even as it has become increasingly global, continues to disregard many nonwestern forms of systematized knowledge from its ambit. Thus global histories of science frequently come to mean simply western sciences outside the west. While historians of medicine have gradually come to at least partially accept the histories of Ayurveda, Unani and Traditional Chinese Medicine as part of the field, the historians of non-medical sciences remain much less willing to allow nonwestern sciences and their alternative rationalities into their midst. I want to interrogate the politics of this exclusion and urge a greater engagement with such parasciences. “Who Should Speak for Jowar (Sorghum)?” Prakash Kumar (Penn State University) My contribution will problematize the position of experts and subalterns around agro-ecological practices from 1950s India. The tension was instantiated during a visit by the University of Illinois agronomist, Frank Shuman, who was also a Point Four expert stationed at the Allahabad Agricultural Institute to an Indian villager’s farm. On seeing sorghum planted too closely, Shuman tried to make a case for wider spacing, saying, that “if ten children were given a small bowl of rice containing only enough for two children, all would go hungry.” But the tenant’s mother-in-law dismissed the suggestion, retorting, and calling him a fool. I will use this episode as an entry point to consider conceivable planes of engagement and/or disengagement between elite and subaltern visions of agro-ecological practices. “Islam, Science and History in the Making of a Postcolony” Ahmed Ragab (Harvard University) I pose two interlocking questions. First I look at the making of Islam as an ethno-religious identity through scientific-historical narratives. I ask how narratives of Golden Ages/Decline in the history of Islamic sciences contribute to the production of Islam as a global identity connected to a special past, and the role these narratives played in the making of colonial narratives that located Islam within a Eurocentric archive. Second, looking comparatively and conjointly at Islam and Africa, and Islamin-Africa, I ask about the production of identity within the historiography of science. How the Muslim and the African construct/ed colonial and postcolonial identities both at home and in the diaspora through the articulation of worth as a dependent of scientific discourse. Here, I ask about postcolonial science as practice and identity and about the tools needed to rethink the positionality of the non-European in the telling and articulation of science and its histories. “What is Colonial Science?” Minakshi Menon (Berlin Center for the History of Knowledge and Humboldt University) In this presentation, I examine how historians of science have understood European colonialism and colonial science over the last couple of decades. Some historians of science, for instance, have defined colonial science as scientific activity carried out in Europe on “colonial resources”, as well as in

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 12:00–1:15 p.m. | 45

Europe’s trading and territorial empires. Such a definition implies that “colonial science” is done apart from the social and economic relations produced by European colonization. The occlusion, implicit in such definitions, of the life ways and knowledge forms of colonized peoples, as well as the violence that often accompanied colonial knowledge-making, I argue, results from the Eurocentrism, which is a constitutive part of our discipline. Moving beyond such Eurocentrism requires close engagement with the histories and cultures of non-Europeans, with “primary sources” in nonEuropean languages, and, as well, an ability to read against the grain of records in European colonial archives.

1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. Computing and Science: Applications and Influences “Wallace Eckert and Pure and Applied Science at IBM” Allan Olley (None) Astronomer Wallace Eckert is often referred to as the first scientist hired by IBM. He became the director of the newly created division of Pure Science at IBM in 1945. Eckert had a long history of working with IBM on his scientific projects and was a natural choice for the position. He brought with him a conception of how to carry out and apply scientific research that identified traditional models of university and observatory science as the proper exemplars for emulation. He also continued to work as a research science after becoming director of Pure science and the first Thomas J. Watson laboratory. I will detail his ideas and style of managing research as revealed in his statements at various times and the way in which he managed research at the Thomas J. Watson laboratory at Columbia. I will connect his ideas to contemporary ideas about scientific research and its application to industry, particularly the pure and applied science distinction. I will also talk about how Eckert worked to encourage the application of computers and other calculating machines to science more generally in line with his responsibilities as a researcher at IBM. Finally I will talk about Eckert's role in shaping attitudes and practices of scientific research at IBM. My sources include publications of the time, surviving correspondence and reports, interviews and later descriptions by his colleagues in memoirs and interviews. “From Mnemonics to Pseudo-Universals: Philology, Sinology, and Machine Translation” Bo An (Yale University) This paper examines one intersection between the history of language science and the history of computing in the 20th century in a global context. It traces the career of Austrian philologist, sinologist, and later machine translation researcher Erwin Reifler (1903-1965). He is now best remembered for his role in inspiring the seminal 1949 memorandum on Machine Translation by Warren Weaver. Often ignored, however, is Reifler’s work at the University of Washington dedicated to developing early models of translation machines for Russian, German, and Chinese, a

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 46

work lasted approximately for 15 years (1950-1965). And what is almost completely forgotten is Reifler’s early career as a linguist who taught Chinese etymology, mnemonics, and comparative philology in China and Hong Kong also for 15 years (1932-1947) before he moved to the US. Looking at the published and unpublished material by Erwin Reifler, the paper presents a larger picture of his work as a whole, and draws attention to the continuity between his early career in comparative philology and sinology and his later work on machine translation. I argue for the central importance of the methods and presuppositions derived from the early work to his vision for machine translation research, such as his distinction between the general and the specific machine translation. Given Reifler’s influence as one of the main advocators, this is also an argument for revisiting early machine translation research in US (1947-1966) in relation to philology and sinology and in light of the transformation of linguistic concepts such as the “universal” and the “pseudouniversal”. “The Digital Prison: Computing the Carceral State, ca. 1970” David Theodore (McGill University) This paper traces early efforts to integrate electronic computation into the history of prisons in the United States. Scholars have begun to analyze the roles of computers in the current North American prison system, especially the use of software algorithms to determine parole and predict recidivism. But they have paid little attention to the origins of these algorithms in scientific research, a moment, I claim, that created a discipline of "prison informatics" with close parallels to the contemporaneous development of bioinformatics. I will concentrate on the 6-Volume report Correctionetics, published in 1972 by the Correctional Decisions Information Project (CDIP) of the American Justice Institute. It covered three years of research, funded by a National Institute of Mental Health Grant, that developed a "total information system" capable of encoding each prisoner in an offender data file. The researchers sought ways to use the resulting database for population modeling, reintegration monitoring, and decision analysis. The paper comes from a broader project examining the role of computers in postwar prison design, operation, and management. Postwar reformers argued that imprisonment led to an increase in crime rather than a reduction, and that prisons should help rehabilitate rather than merely punish. Conceiving prison reform on a model of funded scientific research, however, simultaneously spawned new problems in data privacy and data management. How should we assess the contributions of sociology, criminology, and computer science to the making of the carceral state?

Digital Humanities and the Physical Sciences “Translational History: A Useful Metaphor for Some Kinds of “Alt-Ac” Work?” Roger Turner (Chemical Heritage Foundation)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 47

Over the last two decades, “translational medicine” has become a significant concept guiding forms of biomedical practice. For some practitioners, translational medicine means effectively adapting research into treatment practices. For others, translational medicine is about making sure research and new treatments actually reach the patients for whom they are intended. I believe the metaphor of “translational history” can be useful to historians of science, particularly those engaged in “alternative academic” careers—using their knowledge in tasks rarely experienced in typical Ph.D. programs. My presentation draws upon my work doing digital humanities at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, as a contract historian, and in curating PicturingMeteorology.com. Translational medicine is commonly understood to have three characteristics: it is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and seeks to move knowledge from “bench-to-bedside.” Similar characteristics describe effective forms of alt-ac work. At CHF, I collaborate with a team of people to translate scholarly historical research into a documentary film, and a digital interactive experience somewhere between a role-playing game and an online museum exhibition. I work with digital media producers, an exhibit designer, and a film director, advised by retired natural scientists and instrumentation engineers. We seek not to popularize scholarly findings, but to deliver them to carefully defined audiences in order to stimulate interest in history and the social relations of science. I argue that translational history can help us to make our knowledge more widely accessible, more useful to particular audiences, and more societally impactful. “The Memex Realized: Open Notes Databases Improve Historical Research and Pedagogy” John Stewart (University of Oklahoma) In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote an article for The Atlantic called “As We May Think,” in which he imagined a machine called the Memex. This desk shaped machine would display texts and record notes made by the user with a special stylus. The Memex would also record meta-data noting connections between various sources, storing all of this information on removable cards. While the stylus-touch interfaces of modern tablets and the proliferation of online media fulfill much of Bush’s technological vision, the underlying epistemic concept put forth by Bush has been largely neglected. Bush said, “The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world's record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected.” While academia is slowly moving towards open access models of publication, sharing the cognitive “scaffolding” of our theories has received far less consideration. In this presentation, I will argue that Open notes databases are necessary to enable the collaborative epistemology and progressive pedagogy proposed by Vannevar Bush. History and humanities more generally are dominated by the single-author article and monograph, so a system built to pool research notes may seem counterintuitive. But by sharing our coffee stained notebooks, idiosyncratic excel files, and shoeboxes full of notecards, we can engage in deeper and more nuanced studies in the history of science. Without sacrificing traditional academic products, we can collectively populate

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 48

searchable, interlinked reference guides that will accelerate research and model our research methodologies for the generations to come. “An automated inquiry into the communication of a research collective in early galaxy studies (1925-1980): goals and obstacles” Karin Pelte (Technical University Berlin) Alongside and after the so called “Hubble-era”, island universes in empty space made place for a perplexing variety of galactic action and interaction. This fundamental change in the central astrophysical concept “galaxy”, partly brought about by the research on “multiple galaxies”, lies at the centre of my investigation. Galaxy studies, as opposed to relativistic cosmology, still remain rather uncharted territory in the historiography. However, as Joann Eisberg has pointed out, you would hardly want to speak of a 'field'. This also seems to hold true for the pertaining research collective, whose members were not centrally organized, spread across the world, largely bound to local research conditions and highly dependent on the publication of data gathered elsewhere. Hence, for want of more formal indicators and as a complement to the study, an automated analysis of their published communication over time is supposed help define the collective and identify continuities, breaks, as well as moments of stabilization or diversification of knowledge. For this purpose, a programme was written which extracts citation data from relevant publications in the online NASA database ADS to build a citation network from. Tools such as community detection algorithms for directed networks and visualization softwares such as gephi will be applied to this network to detect such phenomena as e.g. 'topical clustering'. However, gaps in the metadata now appearing might still pose serious challenges to this kind of distant reading. “Database Thinking and Deep Description: Designing a Digital Archive of the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS)” Robert Crease (Stony Brook University) Recently, research carried out at large-scale materials science facilities in the United States and elsewhere has undergone a phase transition that affected its character and culture. Research cultures at these facilities now resemble ecosystems, comprised of complex and evolving interactional chains between individuals, institutions, and the overall research environment. This project, the result of a collaboration between myself and a digital humanities researcher, is to create a digital archive to track and map these interactional chains. It is motivated by the attempt to understand the scientific processes themselves; how inquiries into nature unfold in the modern context. It makes more quantitative an analysis of alliances than, say, Latour’s actor networks, and, via a vis performance analogy, broadens the ontology of these alliances, conceiving the research floor as a “stage” where different kinds of acts unfold shaped by a range of factors not ordinarily part of the perspective of the science policymaker or administrator. This produces a more granular, and more flexibly usable, database. The project aims to enable researchers to construct suggestive thick descriptions using the database which researchers can follow up with interviews and more research. The project aims to reveal how performances fail, fields that disappear, instruments that perform narrowly or not well, FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 49

etc. Initially we will surely be importing assumptions from the legacy databases that recapitulate traditional perspectives, but aim to make these assumptions revisable.

Improving Early Modern and Modern Agriculture through Science 'Concerning the Transmutation & Improvements of Plants': Vitalism, Alchemy, and Cornucopianism in John Beale's Agricultural Writings Justin Niermeier-Dohoney (University of Chicago) In a short, unpublished tract from 1659 (Royal Society, Boyle Papers, RB/1/34/9), natural philosopher and agricultural reformer John Beale wrote on the “transmutation & improvements of plants.” The use of the term “transmutation” was no rhetorical tool here, and Beale’s work reveals a curious and seldom addressed connection between alchemy and the agricultural improvement projects of seventeenth-century England. This paper details these correlations using Beale’s treatise as a case study of the broader influence that vitalistic alchemy had on botany, husbandry, horticulture, and the incipient “life sciences,” such as they were, in the mid-seventeenth century. Eventually a founding member of the Royal Society, Beale had previously been involved with the informal intelligencer network centered around Samuel Hartlib and the natural philosophers and reformers who associated with him, including the millenarian, utopian agricultural theorist and alchemist Gabriel Plattes. I describe Plattes’s influence on Beale in the 1650s, particularly regarding alchemy’s potential to transform natural substances like plant matter or animal manures in order to solve practical, agricultural problems such as increasing soil fertility and crop yields. I argue that those who subscribed to these vitalistic concepts, like Beale, contended that something essential to the existence of life inhered in all matter—both living and inert—and that through the proper understanding and application of these matter theories, early modern alchemists could control nature and induce it to provide a cornucopia of agricultural plenitude. “Pre-Carbon Agriculture for a Post-Carbon Future: Considering the Mustards as a Form of Early Modern Agricultural Improvement in England” Amy Coombs (The University of Chicago) My talk explores the early modern origins of one of the most potent organic farming strategies used today—the tillage of seed meals from the mustard family to kill pests. More than 400 years before the biodiesel industry reinvented the integrated manufacturing system by which Brassicaceae species are pressed to make oil and the crushed meal is tilled into the earth to suppress pathogens, an English clothier named Benedict Webb launched a similar industry to produce oil for textile finishing. His monopoly dominated markets for well over 100 years and likely changed the very soils of the early modern English landscape. Historians of the British Agricultural Revolution have largely ignored this innovation. While they explore the disbursal history, the technology was never designated a form of soil improvement. My talk makes this case. Farmers strategically used mustards as well as their meals to target pests and prepare the soil for corn. Unlike legumes and clover, which have a small, gradual benefit, modern studies show that Brassica meals compete with

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 50

chemical fumigants and deliver similar yield increases. Rapeseed introduction overlaps with poorly understood increases in grain yields that pre-date the Norfolk, enclosure, and plowing innovation, and this piece contributes to revisionist models that argue for an earlier agricultural revolution. By tracing the coupling of this technology with the drainage of the Fens, I also explore how enclosure benefited poor farmers working undesirable plots. I have been developing this project through scanned farming protocols and by linking disbursal histories to grain yield graphs, but in November I will also have archival "findings." “Who knew agricultural knowledge best? --University Scientists, Communist Agriculturalists, and Extension of Western Agricultural Science in Republican China” Xuan Geng (The Institute of Science, Technology, and Society, Tsinghua University) During the early twentieth century, there were many attempts of improving Chinese agriculture with Western agricultural science. Most of these attempts ended up with failure. Some leading Chinese Agricultural scientists with advanced western scientific trainings attributed the unsuccessful improvement to lack of scientific theories and methods. Meanwhile, some agriculturalists, especially those in regions controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, attributed the unsuccessful improvement to agriculturalists’ dogmatic belief in foreign science. My research starts with an unsuccessful extension of American crop varieties in Shanxi province (North China) in the 1920s. This extension was conducted by Outerbridge, a missionary without substantial scientific training. Then I compare two types of blames on this work: Agricultural scientists with doctoral degree from Cornell University, such as Shen Zonghan and Harry Love, criticized Outerbridge for lacking enough experimental evidence, and conducted precise experiments to prove their points. On the other hand, communist agriculturalists such as Zhang Kewei declared that “foreign agriculturalists only know so-called ‘scientific knowledge’ but failed to get familiar with real conditions in rural China”, and claimed that effective ways of improving agriculture should be found from experienced peasants. Ironically, although the scientists succeeded in breeding high-yield crop varieties through scientific research, their achievements only got limited extension due to diverse social and economic barriers; while after reforming economic structure of rural China, the communist agriculturalists often adopted scientists’ breeding achievements for extension. My research contributes to the understanding on history of agricultural science as well as scientific institution in modern China.

Roundtable: Experiencing the Global Environment “Envirotechniques of “Direct” Experience in Global Mega-Geomorphology” Etienne Benson (University of Pennsylvania) In the 1980s a number of Anglophone geomorphologists began to turn their attention to regionaland continental-scale landforms and to long-term processes of landform development. They framed this new “megageomorphology” as a revival of research interests that had been neglected since the 1950s due to the rise of process geomorphology, which privileged smallscale, short-term phenomena that could be easily measured and modeled in the field or in the laboratory. Through the adoption of

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 51

plate-tectonic theory and the use of new methods of remote sensing and computer modeling, they aimed to recover the global perspective of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century physical geography without losing the quantitative precision and mathematical sophistication of latetwentieth-century process geomorphology. However, especially in the United States, where megageomorphology came to be closely associated with space technology, their reliance on remote sensing to do so posed a challenge to traditional modes of in situ fieldwork. How could geomorphologists produce authoritative knowledge about phenomena that took place over inhumanly vast scales or in places that they had never visited? I argue that they responded to this challenge by developing “envirotechniques” that allowed them to directly experience geomorphological phenomena on regional, global, and planetary scales. “Human Bodies as Chemical Sensors: A History of Biomonitoring for Environmental Health and Regulation” Angela Creager (Princeton University) Testing of human blood and urine for signs of chemical exposure has become the “gold standard” of environmental public health, leading to ongoing population studies in the US and Europe. Such methods first emerged over a century ago in medical and occupational contexts, as a means to calibrate drug doses for patients and prevent injury to workers from chemical or radiation exposure. This paper analyzes how human bodies have come to serve as unconscious sensors of their environments, containers of chemical information determined by expert testers. As seen in the case of lead testing in the US, these bodily traces of contaminants can provide compelling evidence about dangerous exposures in everyday life, useful in achieving stronger regulation of industry. The use of genetic testing of workers by Dow Chemical provides an example of industry itself undertaking biomonitoring, though the company discontinued the program at the same time its studies indicated chromosomal damage in connection with occupational exposure to certain chemicals. In this case and others, biomonitoring raises complex questions about informing subjects, interpreting exposure in the many cases for which health effects at low doses are unknown, and who should responsibility for protection, compensation, or remediation. Further, the history of biomonitoring complicates how we understand human ‘experience’ of the global environment by pointing to the role of nonsensory— yet detectable—bodily exposures. “Average Rainfall and the Play of Colors: Colonial Climates and Global Climatology” Philipp Lehmann (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) The paper examines the co-construction of global, regional, and local climatic concepts at the turn of the twentieth century through a history of data gathering efforts in the German colonies in Africa. While governmental policies aimed at producing standardized – and thus globally comparable and economically useful – data in different environments, these efforts often tended to break down in practice. Rather than being able to turn the field into a finely tuned laboratory, both European and African data gatherers were confronted with complex and challenging environmental and institutional realities. The difficulties of meteorological work in the colonies led not only to the

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 52

production of oftenquestionable numerical data, but also to alternative strategies of recording weather conditions, which placed a higher value on individual sensory perception. “Experiential and Cosmopolitan Knowledge: The U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey during the Railroad Era” Jeremy Vetter (University of Arizona) Before global environmental knowledge producing networks and technologies, spatially extended field science at continental scale was performed by the U.S. Biological Survey, revealing similar tensions and dynamics in its mapping of distributions of birds and mammals, and its delineation of “life zones.” At the same time field zoologists of the Biological Survey produced cosmopolitan scientific knowledge, they also developed intimate, experiential knowledge of places where they traveled. I situate this continental-scale practice in context of the long-term history of global environmental knowledge, concluding that experiential knowledge lost some of its strength at continental scale and even more at global scale.

Roundtable: Perspectives on the Bacteriophages at 100 “The Discovery of Bacteriophage: D’Herelle, Twort, and Kuhn” William Summers (Yale University) The attribution of the discovery of bacteriophage to d’Herelle has a long and acrimonious history, including protracted battles in the scientific literature and even a court case in Paris. The stakes in this discovery controversy included both fame and fortune as bacteriophages seemed to be important to the growing science of microbiology as well as showing promise as anti-infectious disease therapy. I propose to consider the deeper meaning of “discovery,” “priority,” and “scientific credit,” topics of interest to both the scientist and the historian, in light of the centenary of d’Herelle’s paper and what became known as the “Twort-d’Herelle controversy.” Two seminal papers on these topics by Thomas Kuhn and Robert Merton will be the starting point for my reflections on what discovery means and how priority and credit are allocated in light of the fraught concept of discovery. “Lamarckism and Lysogeny at L’Institut Pasteur, 1919-1953” Jean Gayon (Panthéon-Sorbonne University) This paper argues that Lamarck’s concept of the inheritance of acquired characters, far from dying due to Darwin’s theory of natural selection flourished in France well into the twentieth century. Significantly it positively shaped debates surrounding bacteriophagy and lysogeny in the Pasteurian tradition during the interwar period. Félix d’Hérelle applied this conception to argue that there was only one species of bacteriophage while his adversary, Jules Bordet applied it both to develop an account of bacteriophagy as transmissible form of bacterial autolysis and to analyze the new phenomenon of lysogeny. Meanwhile Eugène Wollman deployed Lamarckism somewhat differently to achieve a particulate account of lysogeny. Eventually, in the 1950s, it was André Lwoff who along

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 53

with several colleagues resumed Wollman’s research program, liberated lysogeny and more generally, bacteriophages from Lamarckism to lay the foundations of the modern conception of viruses. “Phage Therapy in Soviet Georgia” Dmitriy Melnikov (University of Manchester) Even as bacteriologists debated its nature in the early twentieth century, bacteriophage was being put to use in treating infections. Promoted by d’Herelle and his allies, phage therapy offered a promise of a specific cure with few side effects, but its efficiency remained uncertain. In the late 1920s George Eliava, d’Herelle’s disciple, returned to his native Tbilisi, now capital of Georgian SSR, and drove the foundation of a new institute devoted to bacteriophage research, where d’Herelle himself worked briefly in the 1930s. Although Eliava fell victim to Stalin’s purges like many others, the institute survived. Sulfa drugs and mass production of penicillin sidelined phage therapy in the west, and the Soviet state rapidly set up mass production of antibiotics, yet research and trials with phage continued at Eliava’s institute. Why did phage therapy survive in Soviet Georgia? What place did it have among other therapies? And how did it serve, and how was it was shaped by, the socialist state? “Phages and the Living World in the 21st Century: From Oceans to Microbial Ecosystems in Animals” Gladys Kostryka (Panthéon-Sorbonne University) The ecological roles of bacteriophages in biogeochemical cycles in oceans, which for a long time remained ignored or underestimated, has been the subject of intense studies since the beginning of the 20th century. Taking as a starting point a recent paper by Maureen O'Malley (2016) investigating the ways in which phages, not usually conceived as "organisms" might instead be conceived as "ecological agents", I discuss scientific as well as philosophical implications of these roles. The ecological roles of bacteriophages, however, are not only crucial for a better understanding of the biogeochemistry of oceans, but also for fighting bacterial diseases. Bacteriophage therapy and the study of phages in the ecological context of microbial systems in animals has been revived recently. Taking as an example work on bacteriophages at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, this paper contrasts bacteriophage therapy in the first part of the 20th century with some aspects of actual bacteriophage therapy. “Lysogeny as Lynchpin in Understanding the Nature of Viruses” Neeraja Sankaran (Independent Scholar) The phenomenon of bacterial lysogeny––the ability of bacteria to apparently spontaneously undergo lysis and subsequently transmit this ability to successive generations––has played a vital role in understanding the nature of viruses. Discovered in 1920, the phenomenon was first wielded by its discoverers as a challenge to the idea that bacteriophages might be viruses, but by the 1950s, had come to be understood as a key mechanism of host-virus relationships. In this talk I present an early episode in the history of understanding lysogeny: the contributions of the Australian medical

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 54

scientist Frank Macfarlane Burnet who was the first to suggest that the same entity (bacteriophage) could function as both an infectious virus and a hereditary agent of cellular destruction.The British virologist Christopher Andrewes imported this idea into a fantastical "Christmas fairytale” to proposed mechanisms for how viruses might induce tumors in animals. The French molecular biologist André Lwoff’s explanation of bacterial lysogeny with his Nobel-winning “prophage hypothesis,”echoed Burnet’s explanation in molecular terms. The paper ends with the contributions of the American virologist Howard Temin, whose heretical suggestion that Lwoff’s explanation for lysogeny might operate in tumor-inducing RNA viruses proved to be correct.

Science and the State I: Anthropology During the Cold War “Cybernetics “At A Distance”: Cold War Anthropology, the RCC Project, and the Interpretation of Culture” Ian Hartman (Northwestern University) This paper highlights the role of cybernetics in Columbia University's Research in Contemporary Cultures project (RCC, 1947-1953). RCC was a military-funded effort to develop characterological profiles of Cold War national cultures and ethnic groups for the purposes of diplomacy and psychological warfare. Notable for its studies of culture “at a distance,” RCC was particularly invested in analyzing foreign film and literature as representative of cultures’ durable, psychological characteristics. I argue that cybernetics oriented these analyses by pushing RCC’s interdisciplinary anthropology into alignment with Cold War ideologies of stasis and containment. First, I trace how the involvement of Margaret Mead (RCC director) and Gregory Bateson (a significant RCC interlocuteur) in the Macy Conferences on cybernetics influenced their understandings of cultural cohesion and the role of anthropology in the academy. Next, I demonstrate how RCC meshed systems thinking with neo-Freudianism, developmental psychology, and Cold War nationalism to conceive “national cultures” as self-reinforcing circuits amenable to containment or disruption. Finally, I consider how Bateson’s formulations of “schismogenesis,” “end-linkage,” and cybernetics prompted RCC’s participants to view film and literature as homeostatic systems of interlocking thematic components indexical of broader cultural patterns. This history illuminates how systems thinking consolidated the transfer of Cold War state politics into one of the first major interdisciplinary programs for the study of art and popular culture. At the same time, it moves away from diffusionist histories of cybernetics by situating it within a wider set of contemporary anthropological discourses on systems, cohesion, and control. “The Insurgent Generation: Critical Anthropologists in the US and Mexico, 19691976” John Gee (Harvard University)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 55

This paper is part of a dissertation project that traces ideas about cultural change and expertise among anthropologists in the US and Mexico from the 1930s to the mid-1970s. It argues that controversies inaugurated by a younger generation of anthropologists in the late 60s and early 70s dramatically shifted anthropology’s attitudes toward the state, but did not fully succeed in altering its institutional positions in those countries. This history illuminates a broader intellectual shift toward suspicion of state power, and the limited capacity of intradisciplinary conflict to reshape durable institutional structures. In both cases, cohorts of Marxist and Marxist-influenced anthropologists, such as Eric Wolf and Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, accused the disciplinary mainstream of theoretical inadequacy and political negligence. On this account, anthropologists had failed in their responsibility to produce useful generalizations that could explain and confront the oppression of indigenous peoples by colonial states and the capitalist world economy. Several of these critical anthropologists rose to the top of the disciplinary prestige ladder and became intellectual agenda-setters. Critical anthropologists also attempted to reshape their disciplines’ institutional structures. In Mexico, they worked to promote new policy approaches in indigenous affairs administration, while building research centers to achieve intellectual independence. These efforts were partially successful, but the discipline ultimately retained its mixed institutional base and its substantive focus on research related to Mexican indigenous affairs. Their US counterparts, meanwhile, succeeded in generating substantial academic criticism of US government influence on the world and on anthropology, but were unable to dismantle the structures of the larger market for anthropological expertise. “Human Ecology as Cultural Diplomacy: Navigating International Politics in the Smithsonian Quadrangle, 1983-1987” Adrianna Link (American Philosophical Society) Completed in 1987, the Smithsonian Quadrangle is known as home to the National Museum of African Art, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Enid Haupt Garden, and the S. Dillon Ripley Center (named after the the Institution’s eighth Secretary). Yet throughout its planning, the Quadrangle represented more than just additional gallery space; it promised a venue for cultural exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and international diplomacy. Key to this project was the establishment of an International Center for African, Near Eastern, and Asian Cultures. Organized around the theme of “conservation” and funded by the nations represented in its programming, the Center drew upon the expertise of Smithsonian anthropologists and folklorists to promote intercultural understanding of the world’s diverse peoples. Among the project’s largest supporters were Saudi Arabian officials, who contributed five million dollars towards the construction of an Islamic Studies Center within the Institution. Following heavy criticism from members of Congress and the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, these funds were ultimately returned and precipitated Ripley’s retirement from the Smithsonian in 1984.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 56

In recounting this episode, this paper has two aims. First, it situates the Quadrangle project within larger narratives about the role of museums as diplomatic agents in international affairs. Second, it uses the International Center’s intellectual basis in anthropology and “conservation” to argue for a human-ecological approach to cultural diplomacy emphasizing the future of human survival. By framing it in these terms, this paper highlights tensions between social scientists and the state in negotiating international politics during the later Cold War.

Science Education in the United States “Science in the California State Normal School” Michael Weismeyer (University of California, Los Angeles) This paper examines California’s first normal school and specifically analyzes how science education was part of its curriculum. During the first half of the nineteenth century, education in the United States had been undergoing changes as educational reformers had introduced the system of common schools. Then, normal schools were created, providing future teachers a better and more thorough education than teachers had received in the past. As this paper demonstrates, the California State Normal School, opened in 1862, included much science in its curriculum. The students engaged with science through the school’s cabinet, museum, and herbarium, and also discussions, lectures, and field trips. The institution’s educational mission was to provide an education teachers would disseminate to California’s children, many of whom would likely never attend college. The science taught at the normal school had a potentially far greater reach than science taught at other California colleges. The normal school’s science education allowed science to be accessible to a wide swath of the California population. The science taught often had a practical purpose in mind, and the collections were California-based, helping students learn native flora and fauna that they could then teach to their future students and increase the state’s scientific literacy. While other California colleges contributed to the state’s political economy, the California State Normal School helped the state’s citizens, starting with its youngest pupils, know more about science and provided an important part of the overall educational system that would make California a more prosperous state. “A Chemist on Two Continents: Eben Horsford and Early Laboratory-Based Chemistry Instruction in the 19th Century U.S.” Sarah Reynolds (Indiana University) Although the development of the instructional laboratory in late-19th century American colleges and universities has often been regarded as an importation and adaptation of European approaches, the laboratory class also had earlier American precedents that served as a significant training ground for American scientists in the mid- to late-19th century. This paper considers the teaching and learning experiences of Eben Norton Horsford, an American applied chemist trained both domestically and abroad, who was responsible for establishing the first laboratory courses in chemistry at Harvard’s FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 57

Lawrence Scientific School in the late 1840s. Horsford had studied at the Rensselaer School (later Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), where he learned chemistry through student-led, hands-on, practical experimentation approaches pioneered by Amos Eaton. After working with the New York State Geological Survey and teaching science for several years at Albany Female Academy, Horsford became one of the first Americans to study with Justus von Liebig in his famous chemistry teaching laboratory in Giessen, where, he later claimed, “the methods pursued under the guidance of that great Teacher, were in many respects the methods I had been familiar with in the Rensselaer Institute”. By reviewing Horsford’s educational trajectory and exploring how Horsford translated his American and European training into his own laboratory teaching practices at Harvard, I examine the complicated dynamics between differing educational models and ideals that were being resolved within of American instructional laboratories. “The Association of Scientists for Atomic Education and Public Education in the late-1940s: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum” Shawn Bullock (Simon Fraser University) In 1946, the Association of Scientists for Atomic Education (ASAE) was founded by a small group of scientists, ostensibly for the purpose of educating the public about atomic energy. Minutes from the ASAE’s first meeting list “education of scientists,” “education of adult public,” and “education of school population (high school and public)” as primary activities. A “special project” was dedicated to engaging the 20,000 alumni of the International House of New York (a private residence and program for international university students and academics still in operation to this day) in thinking about atomic energy programs. The ASAE’s activities were enacted through several regional organizations, with main offices in New York. In this paper, I will trace the pedagogical activities of members of the ASAE using the lenses afforded by what educational theorist Michael Apple would call “the hidden curriculum” of the organization’s educational agendas. Apple, in part, argues that a hidden curriculum masks the conflicts that are inherent in the material being taught; thus, what is “hidden” in such educational approaches are the productive uses of debate, organized skepticism, and the political realities of civic discourse. Archival materials – including meeting minutes, memoranda, curricular materials, and letters – will be used to examine how the organization constructed atomic energy as an educational problem and why members of the ASAE considered themselves uniquely suited to this task. I will conclude by suggesting reasons for ASAE’s short, 3year, tenure. “Best Foot Forward: An Analysis of Biology Textbooks” Stephen Dilley (St. Edward's University) I analyze biology (and evolution) textbooks published in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in North America. In particular, I examine the “evidence for evolution” sections of these books. In a surprising number of cases, many arguments for evolution rely crucially on claims about ‘what God would do’ in organic history. Close analysis of these arguments reveals: first, the theology in question is essential to the arguments in which they appear. That is, the removal of a given theology-laden

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 58

premise leaves the argument in question logically invalid. Second, the theological claims in question are by-and-large not derived from creationist (or intelligent design) theology. Instead, textbook authors bring their own theology to the table. Third, their theology appears to be quite partisan. It is widely contested by major strains of prominent theological traditions (like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). Fourth, textbook authors overwhelmingly fail to provide justification for the truth of their partisan theological claims. Typically, their theology is simply asserted without support of any kind. Fifth, in many cases, the textbooks which include theological claims also assert that science relies solely on empirically-testable claims; yet their own theology-laden premises are not empirically testable. In light of these findings, I suggest that historians may have neglected the importance of theology in biology (and evolution) textbooks published recently in North America. I also suggest that educators avoid teaching problematic theology-laden arguments for evolution and instead expose students to strong arguments for evolution that do not rely on God-talk.

Taking the Long View: Time and Space in the Study of Ecological Change “Land Tenure, Land Use, and Long-Term Research: The Case of El Yunque, Puerto Rico” Megan Raby (University of Texas) Historians of science have not taken land seriously enough. Since the spatial turn of the late 1990s, scholarly emphasis on the geographies of science has become commonplace. At the same time, the history of science shares increasing intellectual territory with environmental history. Nevertheless, our field has only scratched the surface when it comes to core issues of concern to geographers and environmental historians: land tenure and land use. The history of science in El Yunque forest demonstrates why we should pay attention not just to space, but to land. Today a US National Forest and the location of the Luquillo Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) site, El Yunque was a Spanish Crown Reserve before the 1898 US invasion and occupied by Taíno into pre-Columbian times. It is most famous as the site of Howard T. Odum’s Rain Forest Project (1962-1970)–– involving the experimental irradiation of a portion of the forest––which has overshadowed its deeper and more complex history of scientific use and control over the land. El Yunque helps to reveal how field scientists come to terms with the land- use histories of their research sites, how they negotiate for the long-term use of field sites, and how their own activities shape landscapes. This paper approaches fieldwork as a form of land use, one that must be seen as contiguous with a landscape’s past and geographically adjacent uses, and one that must also be understood within larger social and legal structures of land tenure. “A Tangled Legacy: Biodiversity and Novel Environments” Anita Guerrini (Oregon State University) Although the landscape at the Coal Oil Point Reserve in Santa Barbara County, California, is often presented as an example of a natural, even a pristine, environment, in fact it is largely a novel or at

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 59

best a hybrid environment. Over 8000 years of human habitation have left abundant evidence of disturbance, but the landscape we see today is largely the result of the past 150 years of human activity, some of it by scientists. Yet the novel environment that has resulted is remarkably diverse, and by many measures, quite successful in ecological terms. This paper will examine the relationship between biodiversity and novel environments, and the clash of values between two visions of history. Restoration efforts at Coal Oil Point wish to return the area to an unspecified largely prehuman past, while historians and some ecologists wish to acknowledge past human presence and accept the current hybrid state for what it is: a natural environment deeply imprinted by human culture. “Saving Evolution in the Galápagos Islands” Elizabeth Hennessy (University of Wisconsin) Since the mid-twentieth century, the Galápagos Islands have been protected as a “natural laboratory of evolution.” Over the past 50 years, naturalists have worked to “conserve evolution,” as some have put it, in this place where Darwin found inspiration for his theory of natural selection. But just what does it mean to save evolution? Based on oral histories and archival research, I examine how Galápagos conservationists translated scientific rhetoric celebrating Darwin’s link to the islands— used to justify the new Galápagos National Park and Charles Darwin Research Station in 1959— into actionable conservation policies. To save processes of “natural” evolution in this isolated “laboratory,” conservationists focused on the health of endemic species as proxies of past evolutionary history—most notably the islands’ giant tortoises, dispersed on different islands and volcanoes across the archipelago, and understood as exemplars of evolution by adaptive radiation. Scientists thus made saving evolution a problem of ecological restoration to be solved by breeding giant tortoises and cleaning their island habitats of introduced predator and competitor species, including goats, rats, and pigs. By breeding tortoises and killing goats, conservationists sought not only to restore island ecosystems to a past state, but also to conserve a mythologized narrative about Darwinian history. While both tortoise breeding and invasive species eradication have been major conservation success stories, I argue that even their success demonstrates the limitations— conceptual, ethical, and ecological—of this approach to saving evolution in a world where isolation is a thing of the past. “'The Charm of Oxford:' Wytham Woods as a Scientific Site and Source of 'Mental and Spiritual Refreshment'” Georgina Montgomery (Michigan State University) In 1945 A.G. Tansley declared that “the British landscape owes its diverse charm, partly…to the variety of physical features in hill and valley, plain, plateau and peak, river and lake.” He went on to describe the “combination of cultivation with half-wild and wild country” as a jewel in Britain’s crown “for nowhere is there a greater variety of rural beauty.” It was these aesthetic qualities of Britain’s rural landscape that “touch[ed] one of the deepest sources of mental and spiritual refreshment.” (Tansley, Our Heritage of Wild Nature, 1945) Beauty, and our spiritual connection with outdoor spaces, also informed how a diverse range of scientists and so-called amateurs studied

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 60

the bats, badgers, blue-tits, voles, deer, and other species who made Wytham Woods, Oxford, their home. Just 5 km due northwest of Oxford city, Wytham Woods – a 4 km2 patch of woodland - has served as an ecological laboratory for the academics of Oxford since the inception of the University. Within this setting – whose charm was as beyond description as that “of a great symphony, or of a great poem” – scientific icons like Charles S. Elton conducted long-term research on animal populations. However, expertise was also held by the foresters, woodsmen, agriculturalists, and socalled amateurs who also studied the diverse species who lived in and shaped the woods. This talk will examine the role of aesthetics, scientific expertise, and local and national politics in how various species were understood and reconfigured during decades of ecological study.

Thinking with Preindustrial Machines “Roger Bacon’s Speculative Technologies” Elly Truitt (Bryn Mawr College) Abstract coming. “Philosophical Machines, Enlightened Bodies, and Artisanal Minds” Paola Bertucci (Yale University) “The philosopher is a human machine like another man, but he is a machine that, because of his mechanical constitution, reflects on his own movements. He is, so to speak, a self-winding clock”. This statement by the French philosopher Du Marsais, echoed by several Enlightenment thinkers, highlighted the internal logic of clockwork machines as models of the rational mind and the morally righteous citizen. It constituted the basis for Enlightenment projects of educational reform. The paper places this abstract conceptualization of minds and machines in the context of a rich tradition of writings by learned artisans on invention and artisanal learning. This literature emphasized the role of embodied interaction with machines as key to the inventive process and therefore to the making of useful knowledge and the pursuit of the public good. “Surgical Daedalism: Academic Alchemy and Renaissance Biotechnology” Vera Keller (Robert D. Clark Honors College, University of Oregon) Johann Ernst Burggrav, in a once widely read work, The Lamp of Life (Latin editions: 1610, 1611, 1629, 1630 and 1678; German translation: 1682) described a marvelous invention in the context of other amazing recent devices: a sympathetic lamp burning on the blood of a human patient, through which one could keep track of their health at a distance. This was a work of biotechnology, a mechanical intervention into life processes that not only promised immense power, but the inner understanding of nature’s working impenetrable to mere book-learners. Writing from the context of the first introduction of alchemy to the University curriculum under the aegis of Johann Hartmann at Marburg, Burggrav contrasted logodaedalism, the craftiness of words, with his own surgical daedalism, the mental and manual dexterity required to innovate in medicine. Yet, as few readers of

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 61

this text have noted, Burggrav did not claim to have made the lamp of life; his description was speculative, offering a language for thinking about how vital processes interact with artificial human interventions. Despite his contrast between verbal and surgical daedalism, the Lamp of Life was primarily an ingenious text, one which staged an unfulfilled promise, apotropaically enticing attacks of charlatanry from alchemy's opponents in order to refute them. Burggrav argued that Nature herself acted as a charlatan, hiding her techniques. Only by developing their own craftiness could her students hope to parse her smooth moves.

Towards a Genealogy of Scientific Misconduct “From the Bureaucratic Virtuoso to Scientific Misconduct: Robert K. Merton, Eugene Garfield, and Goal Displacement in Science” Alex Csiszar (Harvard University) This paper outlines a history of perceived abuses and dysfunctions of scientific publishing from the early nineteenth century to the 1980s, with a strong focus on the introduction of citation analysis as a measure of scholarly merit in the 1960s and 1970s. It explores the relationship between the development of tools for evaluating scientific impact by Eugene Garfield’s Institute for Scientific Information and the development of post-war sociology of science in the United States. During the 1960s, the sociologist Robert K. Merton applied the concept of goal displacement – which he originally developed in the context of the sociology of bureaucracy – to describe dysfunctional consequences of the reward system in science. In doing, Merton was formalizing and transforming what were by then long-standing concerns about the abuses of scientific publishing that stretched back to the late nineteenth century. As Garfield developed the Journal Impact Factor and other potential evaluative tools, Merton became a close advisor who insisted on the fundamental importance of the role that such metrics might play in altering scientists’ behaviour. The paper will argue that metrical misconduct ought not to be viewed as a distant by-product of attempts to measure scientific productivity, but as a central factor in their implementation and even in their acceptance. Finally, it will suggest that much current academic debate about scientific metrics has remained largely within the structural-functionalist mode of Merton, with the unfortunate result that technical questions about measuring scientific achievement have been divorced from considerations of the politics of knowledge. “When Medical Men Disappoint Institutions” Marie-Andrée Jacob (Keele University) Drawing on archival material from the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Royal College of Physicians (RCP) I examine how the British state became interested in scientific controversies, and in turn how the terminology of misconduct became a way to speak about what is seen as deviant, fake, or simply poor research. I examine how sponsors and early self-regulatory professional bodies expressed their institutional disappointment with what they perceived as dubious science on the part of medical men, and how this disappointment got translated into textual forms between 1850 and

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 62

1970. I also examine the way that the conceptualization, investigation and occasional punishment of malpractice functioned to amend the expectations of medical research. There is no direct historical equivalent to the contemporary forms of ‘correction’ and ‘retraction’ from the research record, but reports of the RCP’s Censor’s Board from the nineteenth century could provide a meaningful reading of censoring as an analogy to help better understand the contemporary work of retraction. The historical value of looking at those who have raised allegations of ‘misconduct’ does not depend on them being right, and I am not interested in drawing a line between proper and improper ways to critique scientists. Instead my attention will be focused on tracing the conceptions of legitimacy held by those who expressed disappointment with, or otherwise censured, medical men in matters of their professional and research practice. “Grey is the New Black: Misconduct and the Evolution of Scholarly Media” Alessandro Delfanti (University of Toronto) The digitization of preprint archives and the emergence of social media for academics have contributed to the renewed importance of grey literature, i.e. content that is not published in peerreviewed journals or in other officially sanctioned formats. Preprint papers, conference slides, white papers, and data publications are some of the objects that circulate in these spaces. As they provide room for the circulation of alternative scholarly content and become core communicative environments, digital services such as arXiv (physics and mathematics), biorXiv (life sciences), SSRN (law), or academia.edu (social sciences) tend to transform academic labour and affect the distribution of power in academia. In this paper I present cases that highlight how these spaces blur the contours of scientific misconduct. In particular, I will focus on cases of doppelgänger publishing venues, spam practices, bot-generated content that emerge in response to the role of digital services for the circulation of grey literature within scholarly communities. This will provide a vantage point to understand how efforts to construct and police the boundaries of science change over time and intertwine with technological evolution. We should not take at face value the rhetoric of digitallymediated openness that has become hegemonic in contemporary scholarship.

Vertical Sciences and the Vertical in Science “Mining, Mobility, and the Routes/Roots of Vertical Science in the Time of Humboldt” Patrick Anthony (Vanderbilt University) Around 1760 travel took on a new dimension in Europe as savants ventured up mountains and into grottos and mines in an unprecedented surge of vertical mobility. By the turn of the nineteenth century, enthusiasm for subterranean travel crystallized in the narrative genre of the Voyage métallurgique and the bergmännische Reise, “the miner’s journey.” And just as historians of the Annales School have suggested that annual rhythms of transhumance imbued shepherds of the early modern period with unique conceptions of space and time, so I argue in this paper that patterns of vertical mobility in mines encouraged new ways of thinking about nature in the late Enlightenment.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 63

This way of thinking is particularly palpable amongst German savants of Alexander von Humboldt’s generation, many of whom zealously devoted themselves to the mining industry. If, as historians have argued, Humboldt’s way of thinking ultimately became the cornerstone of a “vertical consciousness” in nineteenth-century science, this study shows how Humboldt drew upon and contributed to a pre-existing mode of vertical thinking generated by late eighteenth-century mining. Borrowing James Clifford’s terminology, I conceive of mines as powerful sites of “dwelling/traveling”—fixed locations that offered dynamic mobility, the “routes/roots” of a vertical conception of nature. After examining this late-Enlightenment surge of subterranean travel and the industrial impulses undergirding it, I demonstrate how Humboldt and his contemporaries translated into scientific knowledge the physical experience of vertical mobility. In this underground—and underappreciated—episode in the history of science, experience was epistemology. “Transposed Places, Mountain Faces: Local Knowledge and British Mountaineering in the Alps and Himalayas, 1821-1938” Sarah Pickman (Yale University) David Chambers and Richard Gillespie have articulately called for new thinking about “local knowledge” that goes beyond simply equating this concept with indigenous communities or colonized locales. So what can happen when local knowledge moves across different geographic spaces? If it doesn’t have to reside inside the original informant, but can effectively be transferred to others, at what point does it then become, simply, knowledge? This paper uses British mountaineering in the Alps and Himalayas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as case studies to probe these questions, examining what it means for knowledge to be local and how Alpine knowledge became the general and portable practice of mountaineering. It draws on the writings of both mountaineers and guides, particularly of Matthias Zurbriggen, a native of Switzerland who served as a guide to early British expeditions in the Himalayas. The paper examines the precise skills and information that mountain guides were expected to have and how they pushed the limits of the “local.” Rather than relying only on their quotidian understanding of their native landscape, Sherpas became the preferred Himalayan climbing guides by learning an imported system of skills and behaviors developed in the Alps. Ultimately, the paper will argue that unpacking the concrete knowledge, skills, or assets in question is crucial for understanding the different levels at which “local-ness” operates in any context, and will ask whether there is a useful distinction between “local knowledge” and “knowledge” full stop. “Andean Man and the Astronaut: Space, Race, and Cold War Altitude Physiology” Jordan Bimm (York University) In the early Cold War, the United States Air Force (USAF) School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) forged a relationship with physiologists at the Institute for Andean Biology (IAB) in Lima, Peru. In exchange for grant money and expensive equipment like altitude chambers, the Peruvian experts arranged for USAF experts in the nascent field of space medicine—the practice of selecting and

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 64

protecting humans being sent to outer-space—to perform risky experiments on high-altitude indigenous miners thought to be specially adapted to labour in low-pressure environments. The Air Force experts—led by former Nazi physiologist and mountaineer Bruno Balke—believed the bodies of the indigenous miners held clues to conditioning future astronauts to the artificially-thin atmospheres of future spacecraft. Beginning in 1954, Balke compared the performance of Peruvian miners in pressure chambers to his own efforts to maximally acclimatize to altitude in the Andes. Balke’s Peruvian hosts, led by Alberto Hurtado promoted the indigenous miners as examples of a pre-colonial “Andean Man”, a sort of exceptional human unique to the region that confounded traditional medical categories of normal and pathological. Balke, on the other hand, viewed them as useful curiosities, whose unique physiology he hoped to appropriate in constructing the astronaut as a new kind of military “superman”. Contrasting the history of these two views reveals the colonial roots of high-altitude physiology as an expeditionary science constructed around an evolving conception of race, and assumptions about evolution and “the future of humanity” that persist in the field of space medicine. “The Case of the Algatron; or Coping with Shit in Space.” David Munns (John Jay College, CUNY) Abstract: Forget liquid oxygen or neutron engines, what was really going to power manned space travel was algae. As the space race ramped up after 1957, the problems of creating a livable environment in space moved to the forefront, in particular the issue of waste both respiratory (CO2) and bodily (urine/feces). Two sanitary engineers from U.C. Berkeley proposed ‘The Algatron.’ The Algatron was a bioregenerative solution, using suspended algae in a controlled environment the algatron system would take human waste and feed it to algae whose own waste would then be consumed by the human space-farers. Moreover, the Algatron was a product of the underappreciated movement of biologists as late as the 1960s to develop conceptions of nature and technological systems that embraced nature’s feedback cycles and looked to understand its overall complexity. They lost out to a biology that was fundamentally reductionist and medicalized: by 1965 NASA had removed biological systems from its space vehicles and astronauts were condemned to poop in plastic bags and store the waste for return to earth and medical testing. In short, the categorization of biological “waste” represents a moment when biology faced a clear choice between methodologies, and so allows us access to what drive the biologists towards one and away from the other, namely towards a medicalized biology of reductionist molecules and away from an ecological biology of integrated whole organisms.

Working and Knowing With Paper II: Shifts, Transfer, and Circulation “A Letter is a Paper House: Home, Family, and Natural Knowledge in Early Modern England” Elizabeth Yale (University of Iowa)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 65

In this contribution, I examine the role of paper in the household of the seventeenthcentury British naturalist John Ray, a buzzing, living laboratory. Naturalists came from London and other faraway towns to visit, and daily the post brought correspondence from across Britain and Europe. A consideration of the Ray household, and the roles that 5 John Ray, Margaret Ray, and their daughters played in natural history, the family business, leads us to a more expansive view of what counts as scientific labor in the early modern household. Even if they were not closely involved as researchers, women’s labor and presence were integral to the provision of scientific hospitality, which was the foundation of collaborative scientific work, particularly in natural history. Women’s roles in creating the spaces for natural philosophical endeavor were reflected in their representation in male naturalists’ correspondence. Looking beyond John Ray’s death, following naturalists’ papers into their afterlives, I find a second feature of the family contribution to science: widows catalogued, ordered, and made male naturalists’ papers available for archival preservation and posthumous publication. In the process of editing and publishing posthumous papers, a natural philosophical widow might become more publicly visible as a scientific actor. But women might also be made less publicly visible as scientific actors, their contributions obscured. Whether scientific widows became more or less visible as knowledge-makers, their cases ultimately make clear the stakes, for early modern men and women, in representing the pursuit of natural knowledge as a gendered, domestic enterprise. “Papering the Household: Paper, Recipes and Everyday Technologies” Elaine Leong (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) The early modern household was filled with paper. In kitchens and stillrooms, it lined cake tins and glass funnels, delivered ointments and salves to the body and preserved precious fruits, cakes and materia medica. In the library and the study, it not only served as the carrier for inscription practices but paper technologies such as notebooks and loose slips enabled householders to sort, categorize and express their ideas about the human body and delineate boundaries between areas of knowledge. The ubiquity of paper use across different spaces, labor sets and knowledge spheres within the household enables us to examine a wide range of quotidian practices, juxtaposing information management strategies with bodywork and food production. Following the paper trail, this talk investigates the interconnected epistemic and hands-on practices used by householders to shift and filter, contain and shape both knowledge and things. Based on analysis of early modern household recipe collections, the talk examines the various paper-based everyday technologies outlined in the texts whilst, at the same time analyze how paper technologies were utilized to codify recipe knowledge. The focus on 6 the household as the location of these practices offers the opportunity to consider anew the construction of gender hierarchies in the production of knowledge. By recovering these practices, I offer a fresh perspective on everyday technologies in pre-modern medicine and science. “At-Home Census Compilation: Paper, Data, and Technologies of Orderliness” Christine von Oertzen (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 1:30 p.m.–3:30 p.m. | 66

In 1871, the Prussian census bureau introduced a new, movable paper tool, allowing for the sorting and compiling of data in highly complex ways. The census bureau incorporated homebound middleclass spouses and other relatives of their workers into the workflow of manual paper and data work, nurturing a workforce that required circulating tons of paper between the bureau and at times hundreds of different homes scattered across and beyond the city limits of Berlin. Von Oertzen explains why this laborious procedure was considered essential and valued necessary: Prussian officials commissioned the sorting and counting of data for the census to housewives keeping what they called an orderly home. The paper examines the spatial, social, and epistemic 7 implications of this assessment, showing that the state targeted the housewives’ mental skills and their technologies of orderliness in the parlors of private homes where such virtues were most vividly displayed. At the interplay between the micro- and macropolitics of everyday life and the workings of governance, the state’s paper technology and its skilled at-home applications show how gender principles were woven into the very fabric of the Prussian state.

3:45–5:45 p.m. Deploying Material Evidence “Django's Phrenologist: Science, Slavery, and Material Culture, 1791-1861” James Poskett (University of Cambridge) Eustache Belin saw the violence of slavery and revolution first hand. Born a slave on the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1773, Eustache spent his youth toiling in the sugar mills. But amidst the Haitian Revolution of 1791, he escaped to Paris. Incredibly, in the 1830s, a French phrenologist took a cast of Eustache’s head. Over the next thirty years, Eustache became a focal point for discussion of African character. Phrenologists wanted to understand the relationship between the African mind, slavery and revolution. In this talk, I follow the bust of Eustache as it travelled back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. In doing so, I show how a single phrenological bust was deployed by both supporters and opponents of abolition. More broadly, this talk suggests that the history of science and race needs to be understood as part of a history of material exchange. “The First Geo-Chronology of Ancient Egypt and the Antiquity of Man, c. 1850-61” Meira Gold (University of Cambridge) British geologists of the early 1850s deliberately and cautiously avoided the topic of human antiquity. This tactic was a social exercise to distance themselves from a large body of popularisers— biblical literalists, antiquarians, and philologists—who were more than eager to address the question of recent historical time. Geologists had evaded the human question for decades, partly because there had never been a credible opportunity to correlate geological changes from past epochs with those that took place during historical periods of known dates, and again with observable changes in the present. Leonard Horner, twice president of the Geological Society of London and Vice-President of the Royal Society, sought to address this problem by investigating Nile silt deposits on monuments

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 67

at the archaeological ruins of Heliopolis and Memphis in Egypt. His objective was to compile a geochronology of ancient Egypt to connect “the earliest historical with the latest geological time.” Jointly-funded by the Royal Society and Egyptian government, the excavations were directed by Horner from afar and carried out by engineer Joseph Hekekyan in Egypt. Horner’s sensational conclusion in 1858 that humans had existed in Egypt from at least 11,517 BC was shocking to many. This talk will consider the mixed reception of Horner’s “Egyptian research” among Egyptologists, biblical critics, geologists, and prehistorians to understand how it engaged with crossdisciplinary debates about the age of the earth, the age of the human species, and the authority of Scripture. “Scale: A Material History of Medicine, Disease and Diagnosis” Karin Tybjerg (Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen) This is a history of medicine that takes its point of departure in the stuff of medicine. More specifically in the specimens of human bodies studied to produce medical knowledge. From 18th century onward medical doctors and researchers have preserved and investigated human material and the collections of specimens and samples provide a material trail that can be followed to produce new lines of sight through the history of medicine. This paper takes its point of departure in the exhibition The Body Collected at Medical Museion in Copenhagen, which displayed human material from embryos in bottles to biobank samples. The ordering principle – scale – prompted a new, material way of thinking about medical history in the 18th-21st centuries. The principle of scale draws on the materiality of the objects, but at the same time mirrors a historical shift in medical interest towards smaller and smaller units. In this way it becomes possible to see changes in medical science through the specimens collected and investigated. The paper provides a material reading and development Jewson’s famous paper “The disappearance of the Sick Man in Medical Cosmology 1770-1870” (1976), which pointed to changes in the units of body under investigation. The paper will show how the concept of scale can be used to elucidate continuities such as the importance of collecting in medicine, as well as changes such as where disease was thought to be located and when patients were diagnosed. 'Please Consult Your Dentist': Early Forensic Odontology and the St. Francis Dam Collapse of 1928 Vicki Daniel (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Shortly before midnight on March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, spilling twelve billion gallons of water into Southern California’s San Francisquito Canyon and killing 471 people. Anticipating a series of death claims against the city of Los Angeles, which owned and operated the dam, officials in neighboring Ventura County initiated an unprecedented identification effort, combining the traditional method of sight recognition with a nascent form of forensic odontology.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 68

Using coroner’s records and photographs, inquest transcripts, claims files, and medical literature, this paper argues that the St. Francis disaster has been overlooked as a turning point in disaster identification history; by looking at Ventura County Coroner Oliver Reardon’s pursuit of dental identifications, we gain insight into how forensics first entered the disaster morgue before World War II. The St. Francis identifications reveal the critical importance of political and legal frameworks in adopting new identification methods, as well as the improvisational way dental identifications evolved in the American context. This paper will show that dental identifications earned a place in disaster because of their alignment with, rather than their distinction from, the traditional practice of sight recognition. At the same time, dental identification also elevated the coroner to the role of primary identifier and foreshadowed significant changes to come in disaster identifications, especially the reconceptualization of identification as a data-driven practice in which experts, not families, possessed primary authority.

Eugenics, Medicine and Race “Social Mendelism: Races, Genes and Cultural Anxieties” Amir Teicher (Tel Aviv University) Historical accounts of German and American eugenics routinely confer Darwin’s evolution-throughnatural-selection, with its related concepts of struggle, competition, and survival, the role of eugenic’s foundational scientific theory. In these accounts, Mendelism is usually equated with ‘hereditarianism’ or ‘genetic-reductionism’ and symbolizes the final rejection of the inheritance of acquired characters. However, much more than simply a theory of ‘hard heredity’, Mendelism provided a set of ideas, terms, tools, metaphors, images and descriptions of dynamic processes, which not only had tangible impacts on the scientific study of human and biological diversity, but also left a clear imprint on cultural perceptions and on the social imagination as well. Particularly in Germany, Mendelian thought became pivotal for for reshaping fundamental social perceptions after 1900. Notions such as purity and disease, racial difference and social harmony, hereditary burden and medical danger were all re-formulated in light of Mendelian teaching. After 1933, these changes influenced directly Nazi racial-hygienic policies, from the sterilization of the mentally ill to the extermination of Jews and other ‘racial aliens’. Using diverse archival sources - scientists’ notebooks, schoolchildren’s exams and teacher’s manuals, films and other popular media and finally hereditarycourts’ proceedings and governmental correspondences - I will explore the various manifestations of Mendelism in German bio-political thought and analyze the social impacts the rise of modern genetics had on German society from 1900 to 1945. “’Not Punishment, but Protection’: Eugenics, State-Sponsored Social Welfare, and Industrial Dislocation in North Carolina 1929-1941” Dana Landress (UC Berkeley) Between 1929-1941, American eugenic practices and ideologies were critical to state-sponsored social welfare programs, which measured the adaptability of recent agricultural migrants to urban

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 69

industrial centers, quantified the employability of welfare recipients through mechanical aptitude examinations, and organized industrial training schools for impoverished youth to prepare them for work in cotton textile mills. As one prominent eugenicist remarked, “many of them [unemployables] have a high grade of deficiency…these unfit cannot master abstractions but can often be made into efficient workers.” Social welfare programs, such as those sponsored by the North Carolina State Board of Charities and Public Welfare, administered funds for the “socially inadequate,” worked closely with the Eugenics Board to recommend individuals for sterilization, and allocated significant financial and social resources to the state’s eight industrial training schools. Many industrial training schools required students to receive sterilizations prior to their authorization for work in factories or mill villages. While southern states often left eugenics practices to the discretion of local agencies or individual social workers, all operated on the premise that ‘inherited’ biological traits, such as productivity, adaptability, and efficiency, made some groups more effective than others at navigating social and economic life during the Great Depression. This paper seeks to contribute to the standing literature on American eugenics with an argument about the centrality of industrial dislocation and the crisis of unemployment to eugenics practices in the decade following the stock market crash of 1929. “Recovering Race in the History of Medicine in Twentieth-Century Mexico” Steven Server (University of Chicago) Race has been increasingly relevant in studies aiming to investigate the history of medicine in the Anglo-American context. But what is the status of race in Latin American medicine, a context in which societies have insisted upon their racial democracy, for almost as long as their nations have embraced Western biomedicine? Is the ambivalent or outright missing consideration of race as an analytic in the history of medicine in Mexico a reflection of Mexico’s success in creating racially universal medical approaches? I suggest—based on the work of contemporary social scientists—that the answer is a resounding “no.” In this paper, I argue that race is a salient, if sometimes subtle, factor in the history of Mexican medicine. By rereading of some crucial primary sources in the history of medicine in Mexico of the twentieth century, particularly those dealing with indigenes and Chinese immigrants, I suggest that the racial dynamics of health have often been a hidden referent in analyses of health. I identify what I call “rhetorics of naturalization” employed by historical actors to link the cultural and the biological, and in so doing, to essentialize and naturalize the social. In this way, the cultural has come to behave as race does, while health officials, doctors, and politicians have been able to shunt critique away from the sensitive zone of biological race. I hope that this paper may shed further light on the racial disparities of health, both historically and in contemporary medical practice. “Caring for the Diseased Nerves of Africa: The Evolution of the Neurosciences and a New Egalitarian Style of Thinking on Human Difference and Susceptibility to Neurological Diseases in Nigeria, 1962-1995” Frank Blibo (Harvard University)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 70

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, certain American and European physicians/scientists linked the unequal distribution of neurological diseases between blacks and whites to differences in the anatomical structure of their nervous systems. In 1938, Harvey Cushing wrote that Negroes did not suffer from meningiomas because they had thicker meninges that protected them from cranial injuries. British physicians working in colonial Africa between the 1930s and 1950s held similar assumption. In 1944, Gelfand, from Southern Rhodesia wrote, “gliomas are rare in the Native.” However, four years later, Davies, reporting from the Mulago Hospital in Uganda, argued that although gliomas “are supposed to be seen rarely in Africans,” however, “at Mulago they are the commonest brain tumors.’” From Cushing’s Negroes in North America to Gelfand’s “Natives” in Rhodesia, these claims can be interpreted as calling attention to a particular condition of black peoples:their nerves are insusceptible to neurological diseases. Drawing on the new literature on social neuroscience, the paper contends that what made neurological diseases invisible among African Americans and Africans was not biological difference but health inequities in Jim Crow America and Colonial Africa. In 1962, the Rockefeller Foundation invested into the neurosciences at the University College Hospital-Nigeria. With this, three Nigerian neuroscientists-Odeku, Adeloye, and Osuntokun-worked consciously to make neurological diseases of all types visible among Nigerians,leading to the emergence of an egalitarian style of thinking on neurological diseases and an overthrow of the racist ideology that linked susceptibility to the disease to biological difference. What this shows is the consequences of (un)equal distribution of health resources on neuroscientific knowledge production.

Evidence and Priority in Physics: Studies of Electromagnetic Waves and Special Relativity “Tackling Wired Waves in Heinrich Hertz’s Electromagnetic Experiment: Theory, Materiality, and Exploratory Trial” Chen-Pang Yeang (University of Toronto) Heinrich Hertz’s “discovery” of electromagnetic waves in 1887 is one of the most famous historical experiments. In the popular account, key to this experiment was detection of the induced spark intensity’s spatial variation between a spark-gap generator and a metal reflector. This variation not only demonstrated the wavelike feature of the induced sparks, but also helped determine their speed of propagation, which confirmed James Clerk Maxwell’s theory. In this paper, we focus on a trial Hertz undertook right before his reflector-instigated experiment: production of interference between the electromagnetic action in air and that along a metal wire. Hertz first identified the wavelike features of the induced sparks from this “wired-wave” trial. But the experimental result showed different speeds of propagation for the wireless and wired waves. According to the standard narrative, this result was wrong; Hertz quickly moved to the reflector setup; and Édouard Sarasin and Lucien de la Rive in Geneva showed the equivalence of both wave velocities in 1893. We argue that Hertz’s wired-wave experiment warrants a closer historical investigation for three reasons. First, the different speeds of propagation encouraged Hertz to modify, not vindicate, Maxwell’s theory. Second, Hertz’s shift from the wire-based to the reflector-based apparatus was motivated by different

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 71

material conditions of the two experimental systems. Third, this shift also marked the evolving nature of Hertz’s electromagnetic experiment as an exploratory tool for novel scientific effects. To examine these historical aspects, we will supplement studies of textual sources with hands-on work to replicate Hertz’s wired-wave experiment. “Some Overlooked Mathematical Issues in the 1905 paper on Special Relativity” Jon Freeman (Retired from NASA-Glenn Research Center) There is both uncertainty and confusion concerning the historic development of the special theory of relativity. We analyze the derivation of the Lorentz Transformations given by Einstein in 1905. After sufficient detailed study, we conclude that the derivation is internally inconsistent; therefore, he was aware of the transformations at the time of writing of his remarkable paper. Though the derivation is flawed, it does not affect the concepts he put forth. The observations given here will help resolve a long-standing dispute over the priority of the discovery of various parts of the theory. The priority (which is presently concentrated with Einstein), may need to be slightly redistributed between Einstein, Lorentz, Poincaré, Larmor, Voigt, and perhaps others. “Einstein and the Michelson-Morley Experiment: The Context of Justification Revisited” Shannon Abelson (Indiana University, Bloomington) John Stachel has argued that within the context of justification, Einstein regarded the 1887 Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment as evidence for the special theory of relativity. While I concede that Stachel has offered a strong prima facie case for this reading of Einstein’s position, I think that much more may be said on this matter. I revisit the question of whether Einstein regarded the experiment in this way, making substantial reference both to the structure of the special theory as it is presented in his 1905 paper and to Einstein’s philosophical views and what they reveal about his dispositions toward theory, evidence, and justification throughout his life. I argue that there are three grounds on which one may call into question Stachel’s interpretation: 1) the special theory renders the luminiferous ether superfluous, and thus an experiment that suggests the nonexistence of such a substance is evidentially beside the point; and 2) as Don Howard has argued, Einstein’s hybrid positivist and holist views concerning evidence and justification indicate that he would have considered measurements as evidence only insofar as they bear on the theory as a whole; and 3) as Harvey Brown has shown, the structure of the special theory did not include an explanatory picture of the dynamics underlying rods and clocks, a fact of which Einstein was aware. I argue that it therefore did not fully explain the results of the Michelson-Morley experiment. The picture that emerges from these examinations is considerably more complex than previously thought.

Science for Whom? Popularization for What Purpose? “Popular Science in Early Chinese Periodicals: The Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi) and the May Fourth transition, 1915-1925”

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 72

Hsiang-Fu Huang (Academia Sinica) The Ladies' Journal (Funü zazhi), published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai, was the most prominent women’s magazine in early twentieth-century China. In addition to discussing women's issues, the journal also aimed to promote "useful" scientific knowledge to female readers. It contained a wide spectrum of popular science coverage ranging from chemistry to horticulture. Most of the authors or translators were non-elite popularizers rather than specialists who received formal scientific training. Their writings can be analyzed in both the contexts of "Epic Agenda" (to promote women's learning in the service of the nation) and "Everyday Agenda" (to enhance quotidian household life through new scientific knowledge and educational methods). This paper analyzes the science coverage in The Ladies' Journal as a specimen of the complex transformation in Chinese society and culture during the May Fourth era. The outbreak of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 made a significant impact on the direction of The Ladies' Journal. The journal had a series of reforms to its editorial staff and theme, making a shift from the education of household knowledge to the promotion of women's liberation. This shift, however, undermined its science coverage to some extent. “Poetic Science: Popularizing Scientific Knowledge through Verse” Melanie Kiechle (Virginia Tech) In the nineteenth-century United States, a number of popular scientific and medical journals aimed to appeal to audiences of both educated lay people and trained scientists. Poetry on scientific topics often made its way into publications such as Manufacturer and Builder and The Sanitarian, in between articles that detailed the most recent scientific and medical discoveries. These poems were often poor by literary standards but, like the articles they were published alongside, shared recent discoveries and promoted new actions. The perils of improper plumbing appeared in verse, as did miasmas, germs, and disinfectants. Scientific topics also made their way into the poetry published in popular journals such as Harper’s Weekly and Godey’s Lady’s Book, where the authors were primarily popular poets rather than scientists and physicians. Despite the difference of authors, these poems covered similar topics and were widely reprinted, disseminating discoveries and recommending new behaviors to the middleclass audiences of these publications. This paper argues that poems popularized science through their very form. Simple meter and rhyme facilitated memorization and recitation, a common method of instruction in schools. Poetry, like formal articles, was also a space for debate: dissenters responded in verse, challenging new knowledge through reference to the efficacy of traditional methods. By following discussions of new knowledge through the poems of trade and popular journals, we can see how scientific knowledge entered highand low-brow culture by appealing to existent practices, engaging humor, and employing dialectic. “Biologizing the Synthetic A Priori: Ernst Mach and Popularization as Epistemic Practice”

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 73

Zachary Barr (University of Chicago) This paper examines Ernst Mach’s popular works, situating them within the context of his broader attempts to articulate a fully naturalized epistemology. More specifically, this paper first examines Mach’s vision of scientific knowledge and method as social and biological phenomena, whose legitimacy was to be judged in terms of utility rather than truth. The paper then tracks the ways in which this perspective on knowledge and scientific practice informed his views on popularization, arguing that he construed the latter as a scientifically important and productive form of mediation and translation between experts and non-experts. The paper concludes by arguing that Mach's perspective on popularization was symptomatic of a politically inflected vision of how the scientific community should be structured, which perspectives should be included in making and evaluating scientific knowledge, and which should be excluded. “From Christian to Capitalist: How popular science for children instilled societal norms and morals” Michael Laurentius (Department of Science and Technology Studies, York University, Canada) What is the purpose of science education and literature for children? Within this paper, I will argue that science popularisation aimed at children was one of prescribing and (re-)enforcing social norms and morals, rather than simply a means of interrogating the natural world. To do so, I will focus on the late Victorian and the early to mid-Cold War eras within the Anglo-American sphere of culture and influence. Through examining a variety of primary and secondary sources, I found a remarkably similar character in the moralising tones used throughout science popularisation. The chief difference being that within the Victorian context, science popularisation sought to encourage the construction of the good Christian, while within the Cold War context, the goal was rather the good citizen, steeped in modernist, liberal American ideals. My thematic comparison will be three-fold. Firstly, the moral and ideological framing of science popularisation with its focus on the construction of the image of the naturalist/scientist. Secondly, the gendered nature of science and science popularisation during both periods; how was science overwhelming and even aggressively framed as a masculine pursuit and what role existed within it for girls and women? Lastly, I will examine how edutainment and the spectacle were intimately intertwined with science popularisation, as well as their approach to the notion and purpose of childhood? Ultimately, this paper seeks to use the growing literature found within the study of Victorian print and science culture as a historiographical framework to approach similar topics within the Cold War period.

How Evolutionary Perspectives Reshaped the Sciences of Man and Aesthetics “Evolutionizing and Collectivizing” Snait Gissis (Tel Aviv University) FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 74

In the period from the mid 19th century to the late 1920s biologists, social thinkers, sociologists and psychologists dealt methodologically and epistemologically with issues related to collectivities, collective frameworks, and sociality, but this in the face of the prevalence -- if not the predominance- of an individualist perspective. In the various, newly emerging fields of psychology/neurology several influential figures, and in particular Herbert Spencer, John Hughlings Jackson, Théodule Ribot, Sigmund Freud, in their explanatory mechanisms of selected features of individuals assumed relations of dependency of individuals on collectivities. They posited collectivities as necessary relational components in the construction and constitution of individuals. I will show that their connecting mechanisms were evolutionary, and had explicit Lamarckian / neo-Lamarckian features. Furthermore, their deployment of the collectivity was conceived as supplying the grounds for claims of necessity and universality, and in this way making their psychology a science. “Sensory Fusion: Evolutionary and Synesthesia in Fin-de-Siècle Europe” Robert Brain (University of British Columbia, Vancouver) One of the most auspicious points of contact between neo-lamarckian psycho-physiology and fin-desiècle artworlds came with questions of synesthesia, the sensory pathology à la mode around 1890. Vanguard artists devoted to a Wagnerian ideal of a total work of art pursued aesthetic mechanisms to stimulate multiple sensory modalities as a means of overcoming the alienation imposed by division of labor in arts. The artists’ fascination with sensory fusion encouraged scientists and medical doctors to reconsider various pathologies of synesthesia, especially so-called color hearing. For some, colorhearing was a rare gift of exquisitely organized nervous systems; for others it was merely an accidental abnormal connection between the optic and acoustic brain-centers. Because color hearing appeared to have a hereditary component, some scientists sought its source in evolutionary development, arguing that it was an abnormal developmental differentiation of sensory functions. This paper will consider some of the evolutionary theories of synesthesia, especially those of biologists Felix Le Dantec and Raphael DuBois, who saw synesthesia as a vibratory, imitative capacity of protoplasm and lower organisms, which when recovered through artistic experience produced a healthy reintegration of the senses and, ideally, a means of fortifying the social bond. Others disagreed, like neurologist and cultural jeremiah Max Nordau, for whom synesthesia was a “retrogression" from "the height of human perfection to the low level of a mollusk," and those scientists and artists who valorized it were therefore the worst harbingers of the coming age of Degeneration. “The Scale of Modern Warfare: Instinct, the Individual and the Crowd in the Great War” Debbie Weinstein (Brown University) During the early twentieth century, numerous scientists and social commentators drew on evolutionary theory to explain why people fight wars. This paper examines contrasting physiological and psychological invocations of evolution and human nature in the causes of war that, taken together, highlight the complexity of early twentieth-century thought about the relationship between individual instincts and collective behavior. On one hand, physiologists such as Walter B. Cannon

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 75

argued that armed combat between nations represented an aggregation or scaling up of individual physiological processes. Cannon’s publications on the physiology of emotions such as fear and hunger included reflections on the implications of his laboratory research about the adaptive fightor-flight response for societal conflict. By contrast, social psychologists such as Gustav Le Bon and William McDougall focused on the dynamics of groups themselves as essential features of warfare. Le Bon asserted the relevance of his earlier work on crowd psychology for understanding both military morale and home front attitudes in the psychology of the Great War. McDougall similarly emphasized group processes and the group mind in his postwar analysis of how to prevent the horrors of war in the future. Cannon, Le Bon, and McDougall thereby exemplified alternative perspectives on the relationship between instinct, human nature, and social processes, between the one and the many, which became particularly acute issues in the context of the unprecedented destruction wrought by World War I.

Instruments and Identity: Material Cultures and Geographies of Scientific Instrument Making in Early Modern London “Scientific Instrument Makers and Material Identities in the Metropolis” Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin (University of Cambridge) This paper explores how scientific instrument makers in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century London fashioned social and professional identities through diverse material cultures. The significance of artisans who designed and crafted scientific instruments, and constructed experimental apparatus, has been acknowledged by instrument specialists (e.g. Taylor, 1954; Turner, 1994), but the wider cultural importance of these craftsmen, and their strategies of self-promotion, have been largely overlooked within histories of culture and science. Studies of artisanal identities and material cultures have also focused upon Italy, Germany and the Netherlands (Pamela Smith, 2006). Taking the commercially and intellectually diverse metropolis of London as its focus, this paper shows how makers of scientific instruments articulated skill and knowledge through the design, materials, and precision of the hand-wrought tools themselves. In addition, the material collections of the city’s livery companies, including paintings, textiles, and the interior decoration of livery halls, reveal how collective professional identities were presented to civic audiences. Drawing on the under-researched collection of scientific instruments held at the Science Museum, London, and the material culture collections of the city livery companies, to which most scientific instrument makers belonged, this paper uncovers the centrality of material things to the commercial and social advantage of city artisans. “The Spectacle Makers’ Company and London’s Scientific Institutions” Rebekah Higgitt (University of Kent) Historians of science are well acquainted with many of the Fellowship and Masters of the Worshipful Company of Spectacle Makers (f. 1629), and with some of the occasions on which they interacted with sites of elite scientific knowledge, including the Royal Society, Royal Observatory

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 76

and Board of Longitude. In general, however, they have been considered individually, and the extent to which these men used the Company to develop a collective identity and presentation of themselves externally has been overlooked. Historians have also more often noted quarrels among Spectacle Makers’– whether between former masters and apprentices (e.g. Baker, 2017) or the Company as a whole and Peter Dollond (Gee, 2014) – than their more collective, ceremonial or outward-looking roles. In large part this is because the role of London’s Livery Companies in trade regulation was in decline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In particular, the nature of the instrument trade meant that makers found it necessary to work and find credibility well beyond their guild (Stewart, 2005). Yet the guilds persisted and, in the case of the Spectacle Makers’, were represented by many eminent scientific instrument makers. This paper will attempt to resituate some of the well-known names within the craft and civic contexts of the Spectacle Makers’ Company, considering what role it played for them, the extent to which it helped to develop a collective identity for opticians and optical instrument makers, and whether this played a role when artisans cooperated, negotiated and consulted with scientific institutions. “London Instruments Overseas: the International Use and Reputation of Eighteenthcentury London Scientific Instruments” Noah Moxham (University of St. Andrews) This paper examines the circulation of scientific instruments from eighteenth-century London, and their role in projecting an idea of London as a scientific metropolis. It explores the various uses for which instruments were circulated – among other things, as showpieces, as a means of standardising observations between localities, or to promote particular scientific ideas. Various types of institutions as well as private individuals were involved in this circulation, including the instrumentmakers themselves, official scientific bodies, and the joint-stock trading companies. In many cases the interested parties – the sender, recipient, and user, to say nothing of sponsors and intermediaries – had competing ideas about the purpose of the circulation, especially where instruments circulated across borders: an attempt to gather useable international meteorological data, for instance, could also be read, and resisted, as an effort to impose one nation’s standards upon others. Equally, the high international reputation of the London instrument trade could be exploited by organisations such as the Royal Society to bolster their own reputations by metropolitan association with a profession its members tended to treat as ancillary at best. By exploring the circulation of instruments beyond the city of their making, and by taking a holistic view of that process, this paper hopes to provide an outline for thinking about how a metropolis might signify in early modern and enlightenment science.

Remaking Boundaries: Astronomy and Astrophysics in Britain 18671907 “James Clerk Maxwell, Christian Doppler and William Huggins: Rupturing Astronomy's Boundaries of Acceptable Research” Barbara Becker (University of California, Irvine)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 77

Bolstered by words of encouragement from James Clerk Maxwell, English astronomer William Huggins (1824-1910) acquired a new, highly dispersive spectroscope in November 1867 in order to test the applicability of Doppler's principle to starlight. It was an effort fraught with overwhelming mensurational and interpretive difficulties. But the small shifts in stellar spectral lines he observed convinced him that this novel method could aid astronomers' efforts to map the heavens in threedimensional space. In this paper, I show that although Huggins's ground-breaking observations were crude and wildly inaccurate, the rhetorical means by which he persuaded his contemporaries that he had, in fact, accomplished what he claimed altered the landscape of astronomical practice and triggered a permanent rupture in the boundaries of acceptable research in professional astronomy. “Balfour Stewart, Edward Sabine and Solar Physics in the 1860s: A Case Study in the Nature of Scientific Conflict” Lee Macdonald (Museum of the History of Science, Oxford University) Physicist Balfour Stewart, superintendent of Kew Observatory near London (1859-1871), used data on sunspots collected there to derive theories connecting solar activity with magnetic variations on Earth and planetary alignments. It has been argued that Stewart resigned from his position at Kew in 1869 because his theory-driven methodology clashed with the approach favoured by Edward Sabine and other influential members of Kew Observatory’s governing committee, which rested on collecting and tabulating vast quantities of data with relatively little attempt at sophisticated analysis. In this paper, I show that Stewart’s resignation needs to be seen in the context of contemporary events, notably the suicide in 1865 of Meteorological Department director Robert FitzRoy. Sabine, in partnership with Francis Galton, used posthumous criticism of FitzRoy’s work as a pretext for making Kew Observatory the nerve centre for land meteorological observations in Britain. The resulting changed nature of Stewart’s workload was at least as important a factor in his resignation as his purely scientific disagreements with Sabine. I conclude that to understand scientific conflicts such as that between Stewart and Sabine, we must consider the important role played by such incidental factors, which are often non-scientific. “Alfred Russel Wallace and Popular Astronomy” Robert Smith (Unversity of Alberta, Edmonton) In the last fifteen years of his life, Alfred Russel Wallace wrote extensively on astronomy for broad audiences. Most significantly, he played a major public role in the debates on extraterrestrial life in the decade of the 1900s. Wallace adopted the position that intelligent beings of the same order as humans were not to be found beyond the Earth and he thereby set himself against most British astronomers and science popularizers. In this paper, I will examine why Wallace took such a strong stand against extraterrestrial life and why humans were, for him, “the unique and supreme product of this vast universe.”

Science and the State II: Cold War Economic Orders FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 78

“Productivity in Transatlantic Relations: A Statistical Measure between the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Marshall Plan” Corinna Schlombs (Rochester Institute of Technology) This paper examines the statistical measure of productivity in transatlantic relations. In the 1920s, the young economist Ewan Clague was among a group of officers at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) who developed productivity measurements of output per worker to assess the impact of new technologies on industrial production. Moving away from narrative accounts, Clague devised productivity indexes that measured increases in productivity. While the indexes presented a seeming objectivity, Clague argued that there was no “immediate and direct” connection between productivity and the wages paid in an industry. Two decades later, however, officers for the Marshall Plan’s Productivity Program demanded that gains from productivity be shared equally between industrialists, workers and consumers. In 1946, Clague had been appointed BLS commissioner, and in this function, he brought productivity measures to the Marshall Plan’s Productivity Program and Technical Assistance Program. A programmatic core of the Marshall Plan, it carried the concept of a dynamically growing economy to European countries. Promising higher standards of living through higher productivity, it also sought to lure European workers away from Communist promises. BLS officers conducted productivity surveys of European economies that provided seemingly objective— although, at least from the Europeans viewpoint, highly contestable—assessments of European productivity. Based on BLS and Marshall Plan records at the US National Archives, this paper calls into question the seeming quantitative objectivity of productivity measurements, revealing integral political assumptions about economic and labor relations that served at shaping European economic orders in the emerging Cold War competition. “U.S. Labor’s Modernizing Mission: Exporting Industrial Pluralism in the “Development Decade Jeff Schuhrke (University of Illinois at Chicago) In the post-World War II decades, industrial relations scholars and modernization theorists in the U.S. crafted a set of ideas about the centrality of labor in international development. Industrial pluralism— the political and legal paradigm that defined U.S. labor relations from 1945 to the 1970s, emphasizing class collaboration, productivity, and limited state intervention—was one of the defining features of what social scientists, labor leaders, and liberal policymakers in the 1960s considered to be “modern.” They endeavored to export this paradigm to the global South in the name of development and antiCommunism. By fostering the rational, collaborative, modern ethos of industrial pluralism, U.S. liberals believed unions in developing countries would bring workers into harmony with employers and the state for the sake of national prosperity and stability, without surrendering their freedom or sacrificing their wellbeing. The scholarship of industrial relations experts and modernization theorists would lend intellectual credibility to the AFL-CIO’s everexpanding Cold War interventions in the global South in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, whatever potential this labor-centered vision of modernization might have had to create a more just and prosperous world had been largely undermined by its own contradictions and shortcomings.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 79

“Intergenerational Innovation: Reinterpreting Past Failures in Brazil’s “Infant” Industry” Beatrice Choi (Northwestern University) This paper investigates the history of Brazil’s failed computer industry in the late 1980-90s and follows the industry’s discursive “afterlife” in subsequent government initiatives responding to the contemporary climate of global innovation. Brazilian technological actors involved in the domestic production of computers during the dictatorship suffer under the “reserva de mercado” protectionist policy intended to foster the industry through import substitution industrialization (ISI). I argue that following Brazil’s premature flops as an “infant” industry (Luzio 1996), successive endeavors in local computer innovation negotiated its terms in technology transfer that built upon postcolonial concerns of epistemological legitimacy and economic dependency (Medina et. al 2014). Furthermore, contemporary initiatives refracted these Cold War legacies through local innovation to embrace the Brazilian cultural disposition towards experimentation as a means of national identitybuilding (da Costa Marques 2015). While recent initiatives align more with understandings of digital inclusion, open access, and peer production (da Silveira 2013), I posit that cultural interpretations of Brazil’s failed computer innovation or “informatics” sector gain traction today precisely because they arose under conditions of political, economic, and epistemological constraints. In fact, contemporary technological initiatives such as government-sponsored collaborations, incubators, and makerspaces take on the challenges of global innovation by adhering to the Brazilian cultural expectation to experiment with underappreciated parts and pieces—or as locals say, to build gambiarra (Lagnado 2002). In this paper, I advance an intergenerational view of innovation discourses that evolve in Brazil from a period of forced experimentation during the military dictatorship to one of entrepreneurial play.

Science in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America “National Consolidation through Science-Based Public Education: The Prehistory of Alexander Dallas Bache, 1828-1842” Axel Jansen (German Historical Institute Washington DC) Alexander Dallas Bache was a key architect of American scientific institutions in nineteenth-century America. As the superintendent (director) of the U.S. Coast Survey, he helped shape the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) during the 1850s and he became the first president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1863. This paper explores the prehistory of Bache’s engagement on the federal stage by considering his work as president of Girard College for Orphans in Philadelphia, as the first principal of the city’s Central High School before 1842, and as a leader of the Franklin Institute. Considering Bache’s later prominent role, how did this early work eventually qualify him for national leadership? On the basis of Bache’s correspondence, this paper will develop the idea that Bache, a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, sought to live up to his family’s deep commitment to helping build an American national state by developing institutions rooted in principles of scientific rationality. In the 1830s, Bache sought to advance his goals by

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 80

shaping local institutions dedicated to expanding knowledge and to transmitting such knowledge through public rather than private education. Considerable pushback against his ideas in Philadelphia marked the political limits of Bache’s vision for science dedicated to the political “sovereign”. His career would continue on the federal plane in Washington DC after 1842 but his early experience had translated into an awareness of the particular challenges for a public role of science in America. “Looking Outward: The U.S. Naval Observatory and its International Expeditions, 1849-1878” Steven Dick (Former NASA Chief Historian) The U.S. Naval Observatory, founded as the Depot of Charts and Instruments in 1830, became the de facto national observatory for the United States in 1844 with a Congressional appropriation, new buildings and instruments, and Matthew Fontaine Maury as its Superintendent. Within five years the U.S. Navy sponsored a series of wide-ranging international astronomical expeditions with connections to the Observatory. The first, the U.S. Naval Astronomical Expedition to the Southern Hemisphere, was headed by James Melville Gilliss during the period 1849-1852 and resulted in six hefty volumes of results and the founding of the Chilean National Observatory, still active today. This was followed by a series of solar eclipse expeditions to Peru (1858), Washington Territory and Vancouver (1860), the Behring Straits (1869), Gibraltar and Sicily (1870), as well as a large effort inside the United States for the 1878 eclipse. But the most elaborate expeditions were those sent around the world in 1874 and 1882 to observe the extremely rare transits of Venus. Taken together these efforts reflect a desire to increase the scientific reputation of the United States, all the while balancing the practical needs of the Navy and the nation with the desire to advance pure scientific research. The expeditions may also be viewed as part of the age of exploration, the celestial analog of the American push westward. “Civil War Medical Photography and the Shaping of Professional Practice” Shauna Devine (Western University) On May 21, 1862 Union Surgeon General William Hammond issued a circular letter directing doctors to send medical and surgical specimens to the new Army Medical Museum. Physicians were asked to look for the seat of disease in organs and tissues, to study lesions and learn pathology. Within this project, unique and interesting cases were documented through medical photography. Physicians were able to capture images of illnesses and demonstrate the specificity of disease forms. Seeing the limitations of localized pathology, some physicians developed new tools such as microscopy, histology, and photomicrography (photography using a compound microscope) to elucidate pathological and physiological processes. Many photographs show the progression of specific treatments and the various stages of diseases. They also demonstrate routine procedures, interesting and unusual cases, and even operative and post-operative details. The photographs taken to preserve a medical record of the war, to help determine the amount of postwar pension payments, but most importantly to learn from Civil War bodies, proved an important stimulus for the

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 81

development of scientific medicine. Civil War photographs provide a rich resource for understanding 19th century medical practice, how physicians learned, how knowledge was produced, the shaping of professional practice and the scientific possibilities of medicine. Through an examination of medical photography during the American Civil War, this paper seeks to give greater historical and epistemological reflection on the development of scientific medicine in the later nineteenth century. “Weighing in on Whiskey: The National Academy of Sciences and Spirit Meters in the Making of the Modern Administrative State” Daniel Kevles (Yale University) The National Academy of Sciences was established in March 1863 by an act of Congress virtually in the dead of night. Eager to demonstrate its value to the federal government, and legitimate itself among the numerous scientists who counted its creation a backdoor coup, it willingly signed up to help the Treasury Department collect excise taxes on domestically distilled spirits. Established to finance the Civil War, the levy was directly proportional to the percentage of alcohol in the spirits. The Treasury Department wanted a “spirits meter” that would determine the percentage but provide a read-out in “proof,” which was the measure of the whiskey trade. More than that, the Department also wanted the Academy to figure out how to prevent the distillers from spiriting away the spirits before they could be assessed for taxes, a practice that it estimated was costing the government millions of dollars a year in lost revenue. This paper will fist touch briefly on the Academy’s problematic position at the time of its founding, then cover identification of a suitable spirits meter, its fix for the problem of cheating, and the tempestuous fate of its recommendations among the distillers and in the Congress. It will also show that in the end the Academy demonstrated its utility in providing the kind of technical information and technologies that were essential to the functioning of the emerging administrative state in an industrializing society.

Specimens and Artifacts: Objects of Evidence in the Life Sciences “Bodies in Spirit: Anatomical Preparations, Embryology, and Cosmologies of Nature 1780-1840” Sara Ray (University of Pennsylvania) The anatomy museum of John Hunter (1728-93) was filled with tiny bodies preserved in spirits. These were fetuses at varying stages of gestation: John and his brother William had pioneered techniques of anatomical preparation that allowed for the mysterious, feminine process of generation to be brought under Enlightened, scientific view. This paper addresses the materiality of early embryology by examining how anatomists-- the comparative and the surgical-- interpreted fetal preservations within competing philosophies of nature at the turn of the nineteenth century. In particular, the paper uses the work of Hunter and of the Dutch anatomist Willem Vrolik to probe how fetal preservations-- both series representing normal development and collections of “monstrous births”-- spoke to larger scientific debates about natural laws, deep time, and transformation that

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 82

historians have more often associated with the geology and natural history of this period. Vrolik was a comparative anatomist and physiologist who did pioneering work in the field of teratology, or abnormal embryonic development. His museum situated his embryological work within a medical cosmology encompassing much of nature beyond the confines of the human body. The materiality of the embryo itself demanded this: what did similarity in embryological development suggest about human-animal closeness? What might monstrous births suggest about the transformation of species? By focusing on these museum collections, the paper will consider these tiny bodies as pieces of evidence about the nature of Nature in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. “Visualizing the Prodigy of the Vegetable World: On the Discovery of the Corpse Flower in Nineteenth Century Sumatra” Elaine Ayers (Princeton University) In May of 1818, the young naturalist Joseph Arnold trekked into the staggeringly hot rainforest outside of Padang, Western Sumatra, on the botanical expedition that would seal his fate. After hiking through “impenetrable forest” for almost a week, one of Arnold’s hired Sumatran guides discovered what the naturalist described as “the greatest prodigy of the vegetable world”: a flower so large and monstrous that Arnold feared scientific disbelief. The flower measured several feet in circumference and emitted what Arnold described as “precisely the smell of tainted beef.” The discovery of Rafflesia arnoldi, the largest flower in the world—now affectionately named the “corpse flower” because of its unsavory fragrance, began what became one of the strangest instances of botanical evidence, or lack thereof, in history. Arnold and his team proved unable to preserve the flower to ship back to experts in England; the flower’s petals rotted before they could bring it back to camp, their paper proved too small to accurately illustrate the whole plant, and all that remained of it, pickled in spirits, was the plant’s spongy pistil. By following the plant’s failure to travel across oceans, I will examine how naturalists have communicated intangible qualities like scent and horror, and how botanical knowledge is created when traditional forms of evidence are missing. That Rafflesia has captured botanical imagination for two centuries without ever growing outside of Southeast Asia points to the ways in which knowledge is created and communicated in impossible situations. “Evidence of Creation, Creation of Evidence: The Ambiguities of the Chambered Nautilus” Laurel Waycott (Yale University) “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 has been paid to beauty and how it has shaped expectations of what the truth looks like. This study explores how one aesthetic element—the notion of pattern—came to be a vital tool in the interpretation of nature. This study combines cultural history with the history of science to examine how patterns shape the stories we tell about nature. I explore one of these patterns, the spiral, through a case study of the chambered nautilus, a ubiquitous symbol at the

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 83

union of art and science. Decontextualized from its native waters in Melanesia, the shell of the nautilus has traveled through Western culture for centuries, picking up new meanings along the way. In the nineteenth century, the nautilus was cited as evidence in numerous debates, most notably as evidence both for and against divine creation. From one perspective, the ever-growing spiral shell was the perfect endorsement of teleology. From another, it was proof that nature’s beauty was a result of problem-solving skills, honed through evolution. Debates were shaped by public perception of the organism, which took the cross-section of the chambered shell as an emblem of personal growth. This study therefore takes the conversation about evolution and creation in a new direction by exploring the influence of biology in attempts to understand individual growth and cultural change. “Proving Prehistoric Man: Interpreting Geological and Archaeological Evidence in Interwar East Africa” Emily Kern (Princeton University) In 1939, the director of the Ugandan Geological Survey, geologist E.J. Wayland, authored a confidential report on the status of geological and archaeological research in British East Africa. Originally sent to Uganda at the end of World War I to prospect for mineral resources in service of the future of British industrialized warfare, he instead became fascinated with the problem of ‘Stone Age Man’ in East Africa. In his report, Wayland described the evidence for the succession of prehistoric human cultures that had occupied the shores of the ancient precursor of modern-day Lake Victoria, arguing that it was impossible for natural forces to have produced distinctive flakes of stone and shell discovered at numerous sites in Uganda and Tanzania; rather, these fragments were detritus from tool-making by prehistoric humans. Coupled with new data gained on the history of the region’s geological formations, including the East African Rift zone, Wayland’s work suggested startling new conclusions about the long history of human settlement and cultural activity in Africa. These arguments also forced geologists and archaeologists to reconsider their narratives of the geologically recent migration and settlement of the African continent, which assumed that prehistoric human peoples had entered Africa from the north before dispersing throughout the continent. In this paper, I consider the relationship between macro-scale geological evidence and micro-scale archaeological knowledge, arguing that Wayland’s research allowed human history to be correlated with geological evidence, leading to new conclusions about human antiquity and patterns of prehistoric migration.

The Production and Reception of Science and Religion Narratives in the Anglo-American Periodical Press, 1860 – 1900 “A Seat at the Table: Publishers, Periodicals, and the Agendas of Science and Religion” Sylvia Nickerson (York University)

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 84

This paper will examine how two British publishers—Alexander Macmillan (1818-96) and John Murray (1808-92)—either opened up or closed down debates on topics intersecting science and religion in the periodicals they published. In both the politically conservative Quarterly Review (1809) as well as the liberal monthly The Academy (1869), publisher John Murray attempted to limit debate on the question of Christianity, evolution and their reconciliation. While the Quarterly negatively reviewed authors whose science challenged traditional Christian world-views, The Academy aspired to cover both science and theology while representing “no party in Religion or Politics”. Edited by Charles Appleton, The Academy broke convention from the Quarterly in several ways, and the diversity of views Appleton sought to represent proved too controversial for Murray, who dumped it in 1870 after refusing to publish a review of the anonymous book, The Jesus of History (1869). Alexander Macmillan, by contrast, encouraged heterogeneous perspectives within his periodicals Macmillan’s Magazine (1859) and later, Nature (1869). Developed out of Macmillan’s social scene in London, Macmillan’s Magazine, edited by Charles Masson (and closely managed by Macmillan), translated the debate and discussion around the publisher’s table into print. On the pressing topics of liberalizing Anglicanism and modernizing British society, Macmillan gave science a seat at the table, with Macmillan’s Magazine and Nature representing a range of perspectives from scientific authors who advocated atheistic to religious views of evolution in book and periodical form. “A Failed Reconciliation: J. W. Draper, A. D. White, and the Reception of their Historical Narratives in the Periodical Press” James Ungureanu (The University of Queensland) Historians of science usually trace the origins of the “conflict thesis,” the notion that science and religion have been in a constant state of “conflict” or “warfare,” to two nineteenth-century works— John William Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). While these two works have been designated by historians as founding the conflict thesis, there has been little research on how contemporaries responded to these historical narratives. This paper examines the early reception of these narratives by considering the extensive commentary they received in British and American periodicals from 1875 to 1900. Examining a selection of this material reveals three key aspects of this reception. First, more religiously liberal readers welcomed these narratives as genuine attempts at reconciling science and religion. Second, the more religiously orthodox, while also recognizing their conciliatory intentions, nevertheless accused Draper and White of instigating conflict. Finally, a younger generation, who were further removed from the kind of religious upbringing Draper and White enjoyed, appropriated their narratives to demonstrate that religion had always been in conflict with science. Thus this paper aims to show that while Draper and White had a more nuanced position about the history of science and religion than has been contended by the secondary literature, their religiously liberal views had the unintended consequence of creating in the minds of their contemporaries and later generations the belief that science and religion have been and are at war.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 85

“Debating the Deeper Harmonies of Science and Religion in the Victorian Periodical Press: The Reception of J. R. Seeley’s Natural Religion (1882)” Ian Hesketh (The University of Queensland) While much has been written about late nineteenth-century narratives that promoted an inevitable clash between science and religion—thereby producing the so-called conflict thesis—less well known is the fact that these narratives competed directly with studies that promoted a theme of harmony and reconciliation. One such narrative was the anonymous Natural Religion (1882), the longawaited sequel to the sensational Ecce Homo (1865), written by the Cambridge historian John Robert Seeley. Whereas in the earlier controversial study, Seeley sought to modernize Christianity through an historical analysis of Jesus Christ’s humanity, in Natural Religion he sought to make apparent what he called the “deeper harmonies of science and religion.” He did so by situating Christianity within a larger history of religious and scientific thought, one that presented a naturalized Christianity as the necessary next stage in the progressive development of English civilization. Natural Religion is therefore a wonderful illustration of how some liberal religious thinkers sought to engender a reconciliation between science and religion at a time when the conflict thesis was just emerging. At the same time, the reception of the book in the periodical press shows just how difficult it was to establish any sort of consensus concerning the construction of a modernized and scientific Christianity. Moreover, while Natural Religion gained a large readership because it was written “by the author of Ecce Homo,” its connection to its much more enthusiastic and orthodox predecessor meant that it could only fail to meet the high expectations of its many readers.

The Roles of Assumptions in Shaping the History of Science “The Deep Historical Roots of Development and Evolution: Dental Morphological Evolution” Kate MacCord (Marine Biological Laboratory) At the close of the 19th century, debate arose around the nature of mammalian dental morphological evolution. This debate, which pitted paleontologists against embryologists, surrounded two theories: the tritubercular and concrescence theories. The former was formulated by the American paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Henry Fairfield Osborn during the 1880s. The latter was proposed by the German embryologist, Carl Röse, in 1892. Both of these theories explained the morphological development and evolution of mammalian teeth, but did so in very different ways. Cope and Osborn’s tritubercular theory arose from fossil evidence and described a pattern of morphological transition over an evolutionary timescale. Meanwhile, Röse’s concrescence theory arose from embryological evidence and described how mammalian teeth formed on a developmental timescale. While the theories were not prima facie incompatible, the proponents of these theories saw their work as conflicting. This conflict lay not in the formal statements of either theory, but within assumptions about things like homologies, types, and the nature of the relationship between development and evolution that these researchers held as part of their scientific

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 86

worldviews. This paper presents the history of this debate between proponents of the tritubercular and concrescence theories, and lays out how unstated assumptions led to conflict between two theories that were not logically incompatible. By tracing this history and teasing out the assumptions that were backgrounded in the research programs of Cope, Osborn, and Röse, this analysis will show the pivotal role that unstated assumptions can play shaping in the history of science. “Where is the Cradle of Humankind? Geographical Assumptions in Fossil Debates” Paige Madison (Arizona State University) When anatomist Raymond Dart announced the stunning discovery of a fossil “man ape” from South Africa in 1925, his colleagues were skeptical. Dart’s fossil—a small primate skull he had nicknamed the Taung baby—defied contemporary theories of human origins; namely, the prevailing assumption that humankind had emerged in Asia, not Africa. Though this geographical assumption factored into the Taung debate over the next two centuries, it was almost never addressed. Ultimately, however, this assumption played a large role in the Taung fossil being swept aside as an uninteresting gorilla, rather than a human ancestor. It would be decades before Taung resurfaced as a potential human ancestor, precisely the “man ape” Dart had imagined. This paper examines the role the underlying assumption of the geographical location of human origins played in the Taung debate in the mid-twentieth century. This issue of location was infused with political and cultural undertones that went unaddressed while playing a formative role. This paper will contribute to the growing body of literature that emphasizes the processes that render an object meaningful as it moves across borders and boundaries, from field sites to laboratories, and across continents and oceans. Rare and delicate scientific objects such as Taung that have the potential to shed light on a topic as personal as human history provide particularly useful example for revealing cultural and political tensions in the construction of scientific knowledge. “Assumptions of Authority: How the Story of ‘Sue’ Enlightens a Contemporary Controversy in Paleontology” Elizabeth Jones (University College London) Dinosaur fossils are simultaneous sources of interest to paleontologists and the public for their scientific, entertainment, and commercial value. They are also a source of controversy. Scholars have documented the emergence of American paleontology regarding the role of fossil collecting as it evolved from an amateur to an academic practice. Scholarship has also discussed how the cultural or commercial value of fossils has caused competition between individuals and institutions. However, scholars have not addressed the contemporary controversy in America over fossil ownership with attention to how relationships between academic, amateur, and commercial fossil collectors shape paleontological practice. This talk focuses on the case of “Sue,” the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever excavated. Sue, discovered by the Black Hills Institute of Geological Research in 1990, was confiscated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then auctioned and purchased for $8.36 million by the Field Museum with finances from McDonald’s and Disney. This talk explores the role of

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 3:45–5:45 p.m. | 87

assumptions in paleontological practice involving issues of who has authority to access and analyze fossils, especially exceptional fossil finds with high media and monetary value. Through examination of legal and historical documentation, and oral history interviews with fifteen academic, amateur, and commercial fossil collectors, I use Sue’s story to demonstrate how assumptions of authority shape science. I argue that assumptions concerning authority are an underlying but unexamined cause of controversy affecting the production of knowledge in paleontology, not only in the case of Sue, but throughout the history of paleontology on a national and global scale.

7:00–8:00 p.m. HSS Distinguished Lecture “Greening the Great White: Encounters of Knowledge and Environment—and the Northern Turn in the History of Science” “Sverker Sörlin (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) When, in 1993, Trevor Levere at the University of Toronto published Science and the Canadian Arctic very little modern history of science had been devoted to the region. Local ways of knowing in the Arctic had been studied by anthropologists since the days of Franz Boas and there was a long tradition in many countries to chronicle the history of exploration as a series of adventures and patriotic deeds, also when explorers were scientists or scholars, such as Fritdtjof Nansen, Knud Rasmussen, or Georgy Sedov. Even as interest grew in colonial and postcolonial science since the 1960s little attention was paid to science in the Arctic. This has now changed completely. Since the 1990s, and most especially during and after the International Polar Year in 2007-2009 there has been an explosion of research among historians on the Arctic and the circumpolar North, and a sprinkling on Antarctica as well. This growing interest reflects geopolitical concerns: waning sea ice due to climate change, pressures on local and especially indigenous populations, traumas and tensions but also hopes of a region which has drawn attention for its rich energy and mineral resources, and its potential for shipping and commerce. The “bellwether North” has become a metaphor, signaling the wide geophysical ramifications of the changes in the Arctic, as earth systems “teleconnections” link these with CO2 emissions in the industrialized world and with effects on tropical monsoons. In this lecture I will present and reflect upon this ongoing ‘Northern turn’ in the history of science. I will argue that it is expanding and enriching the agenda of history of science in several dimensions: through the interest in culturally diverse ways of knowing the earth and its elements; through the approaches towards the science of global change and the politics of global challenges; and, perhaps most pervasively, through the growing interaction between the multiple strands of history – environmental, technological, diplomatic, and the history of science – that are coming together near the poles, signaling the emergence of a relevant, integrative, and transformative environmental history of science.

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 7:00–8:00 p.m. | 88

8:00–9:00 p.m. HSS Poster Reception “On the Logic of Labor: EDSAC and the History of Open-Source Software (OSS)” Jonathan Penn (University of Cambridge) From 1946-58, the University of Cambridge sponsored the construction of EDSAC, the world’s first practical stored-program digital computer. Due to a combination of financial, spatial and administrative constraints imposed by the university, EDSAC’s chief architect, Maurice Wilkes, made the relatively novel decision, when compared to competing computer projects, to invite staff, students and outside collaborators to operate EDSAC in exchange for the sub-routines—an early form of programming code—they generated. The creation of a centralized library of sub-routines made Wilkes' system self-refining, since shortcuts and errors could then be identified collaboratively. This policy gave Cambridge an unanticipated advantage in midcentury computing: free errorchecking. While other institutions struggled to address coding errors, Wilkes’ team benefit from a low-cost, bottom-up solution. I argue that Wilkes' approach, immortalized in 1951’s The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, the first-ever guidebook on programming, bridges EDSAC to the history of open-source software (OSS), whose roots have otherwise been traced back only to the mid-1950s in America. “Not Just Any Map Will Do: Map Usage in the Site Selection of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Large-Scale Interferometers” Tiffany Nichols (Harvard University) This paper explores the use of maps in identifying sites for placement of large-scale interferometers by LIGO and affiliated researchers involved in the site selection process which has been overlooked in research directed to the history of gravitational wave detection. Specifically, I seek to show the content portrayed in maps led to placement of the interferometers in unexpectedly noisy areas. Although the topographic maps provided the information to determine the flatness of the land, a highly sought after quality for the sites, these maps did not provide sufficient information concerning localized disturbances that would affect the ability of the interferometers to detect gravitational waves. These decisions necessitated engineering solutions that would stabilize the interferometer to avoid masking gravitational waves which deform the spacetime fabric on the order of 1 x 10^-22 characteristic strain. Surprisingly, due to the unexpectedly noisy sites, the engineered solutions allowed for increases of sensitivity in the magnitude range of 1 x 10^-22 characteristic strain, which resulted in the detection event on September 14, 2015. “The Association of Scientists for Atomic Education: Creating a Curricular Network in the Early Cold War” Shawn Bullock (Simon Fraser University) FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 8:00–9:00 p.m. | 89

This poster will be designed to supplement paper proposal (submission 1011, The Association of Scientists for Atomic Education and Public Education in the late-1940s: Uncovering the hidden curriculum). The short thesis of my poster will be that the Association of Scientists for Atomic Education (ASAE) developed a robust curricular network within a short 3-year time frame immediately following WW II, and that this network functioned allowed ASAE to function more as a political organization than an education organization. The ASAE's base of operations was New York City, although there were several regional offices that were often in competition with each other. The poster will use a backdrop map of the USA to highlight the particular curricular activities in each geographic region. Photos of curricular materials will be included, pending permission of an archive. The poster will entreat observers to consider the ways in which ASAE's goals of educating scientists, the adult public, and the high school and college population stimulating the formation of multiple, sometimes competing networks of curriculum initiatives within the continental United States during the early Cold War. “The Grid Adapts: Translating Territory in the Lower Mississippi Valley 1803-1845” Julia Lewandoski (University of California, Berkeley) After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the United States struggled with the massive task of taking possession of the former French and Spanish colony of Louisiana. Central to the work of imperial transition was converting landholdings from French and Spanish idioms into the visual language of the United States Public Lands Survey System (PLSS). Yet translating land tenure from one empire to the next entailed much more than changing units from arpents into acres. This poster displays the efforts of U.S. land surveyors in early nineteenth century Louisiana, as they struggled to locate land records, negotiated with uncooperative landowners, and extensively adapted the rigid grid of the PLSS to accommodate existing cadastral patterns. In particular, it reveals that because of the intimate links between land tenure and land measurement, U.S. surveyors had to alter the process by which they measured properties. Instead of following linear PLSS meridians, they found that the only workable way to establish existing boundaries was by meandering Louisiana’s bayous as their French predecessors had done. Land surveying is often held up as a quintessential technology of modern state mastery over territory, one that abstracts and obscures local particularity. Yet in Louisiana, it was improvisational, locally accommodating, and bound by the legacy of prior empires. The new maps that U.S. land surveyors made reflect—visually and technically—the distinctively local imperial legacies of the Lower Mississippi Valley. “George Stokes and the Royal Society’s editorial and refereeing processes, 18531885: the data” Aileen Fyfe (University of St Andrews) This poster will facilitate more widespread discussion with the results presented in our 'contributed paper'. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 10 | 8:00–9:00 p.m. | 90

The Royal Society of London was one of the learned societies which incorporated refereeing into the editorial practices of its journal publication during the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, the use of confidential, written referee reports for some papers was well-established for the Philosophical Transactions. But which papers were sent to referees? How many referees? And who were the most influential decision-makers? Previous scholars have examined the history of individual papers published (or not) by the Society. In this paper, we attempt to sketch out the bigger picture, and to look beyond the formal guidelines (as previously examined by one of us), at the actual editorial practice. From 1853, the secretaries of the Royal Society of London maintained a ‘Register of Papers’, recording the fate of every paper read to the Society, including referee names, dates and final decisions. We have been analysing this data computationally, with a focus on the period of secretaryship of the physicist George Stokes. We will present a social network analysis of the people who were active in Royal Society publishing, as authors, referees and ‘communicators’; consider what we can learn from the statistical patterns in the data; and reveal some intriguing differences of practice between the biological and physical sciences. “Dominating Desert Frontiers: Mars, the American West and Democracy” Daniel Zizzamia (Harvard University) Mars and the western frontier share much in common in the American imagination. Frontier analogies have held a particularly special place in conceiving of an extraterrestrial future. Examples include NASA’s 1965 Railroads and the Space Program’s direct ap “Diagnosing Demons: Witchcraft, Demonic Possession, and Melancholia in Early Modern Western Europe” Sarah Lewin (Mississippi State University) When misfortune struct early modern European communities, people looked toward supernatural explanations for their plights. Frequently, a person acting against the norms of a community became the subject of scrutiny for disrupting the natural world.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 9:00–11:45 a.m. (Un)Enlightened Colonial Bodies: Medical Geography and Geographies of Medicine in the Long Eighteenth Century “‘They dyed miserably in heaps’: Reports from Colonial Jamaica” Katherine Johnston (Beloit College) Abstract coming.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 91

“‘A little Heterodox’: Polygenism, Race-Science and ‘Race-Medicine’ in the British Enlightenment” Suman Seth (Cornell University) In 1735, the former naval surgeon John Atkins penned what must be considered one of the more striking understatements of his age. In A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies, he described the difference between the physical appearance of the inhabitants of Guinea and that of “the rest of Mankind”: “tho’ it be a little Heterodox,” he acknowledged, “I am persuaded the black and white Race have, ab origine, sprung from different-coloured first parents.” Polygenism was, of course, considerably more than a little heterodox. Unusual in his polygenism, Atkins was also unusual both in spending very little time in relating his heterodoxy to Biblical views and in proffering his most detailed remarks within a medical text. The fact that Atkins espoused polygenism in the same work in which he described diseases peculiar to native Africans led one of the few scholars to consider his texts in any detail to suggest that one might find “connections between concepts of race and concepts of disease.” That Atkins gave up on his polygenism in a later edition of the Navy-Surgeon (1742) without significantly changing his etiological understanding leads me to the opposite conclusion. In the 1730s, I suggest, environmentalist understandings of physical difference were beginning to change. Environmentalist understandings of disease, however, particularly with regard to the diseases of warm climates, were not. Atkins provides us with a fine example of a trend that would continue for the majority of the century: the widening gap between ‘race-science’ and ‘race-medicine.’ “Constant Change: Culture, Health, and Race in the Revolutionary United States” Sarah Naramore (University of Notre Dame) According to accepted eighteenth-century physiology, human bodies, health, and cultures lived in a tenuous balance with their environment. Despite this seemingly clean narrative, it grew up in a sea of contradictions and challenges from the realities of colonialism. Notably, the reality of different peoples living in the same location despite cultural and physical variation. In the United States climate alone could not clearly account for human difference. White, black, and American Indian peoples inhabited the same regions but exhibited, from the perspective of White intellectuals, clear differences. At the same time, the self-conscious development of a new republican nation by those same white intellectuals altered the way they thought about their own physical and cultural distinctiveness. This paper analyzes American physician Benjamin Rush’s environmentalist view of health and culture while exploring racial difference. Looking at his ethno-physiological oration, “An Inquiry into the Natural History of Medicine Among the Indians of North-America,” I show how Rush’s thoughts about “racial” characteristics developed in the North American colonies, and later independent states. In it, Rush compares American Indian physiology and culture with that of the British as an exercise in demonstrating the relationships between climate, culture, and health.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 92

Although written in 1774, Rush included it in his anthologized medical texts as late as 1802. Its persistence demonstrates Rush’s dedication to a fluid notion of “race.” Furthermore, it shows how in becoming “American,” inhabitants of European descent sought a physical and cultural balance between the “savage” and “decadent” informed by medical knowledge. “‘The Uncertainty of Living’ on Hudson Bay: British and Indigenous Bodies and the Healthfulness of Cold” Emelin Miller (University of Minnesota) The historiography of disease and bodies in the eighteenth century has largely focused on the relationship between health, environment, and empire in the context of the Tropics. Inspired by this fruitful scholarship, this paper addresses the philosophy of healthy bodies in the Far North. From Hudson Bay Company letters and publications, British fur trader-naturalists in the North American Arctic made clear their insistence upon the theoretical “healthfulness” of northern climates. However, these proclamations of the Arctic’s benefits to human health were unevenly distributed. Though the British felt a historical and climatological kinship with northern climes, identifying as northerners and settling in the north since the sixteenth century, they insinuated that the British body and lifestyle was ill-suited to Arctic regions. British fur traders complained of frequent afflictions by a multitude of illnesses while describing the miraculous stoutness of indigenous peoples, communities who, in Britons’ view, were never ill or possessed cure-all remedies, despite conveniently ignored records of epidemic disease, starvation, and frostbite. This talk explores the intellectual, medical and socio-cultural rationale for these contradicting testimonies of climate and healthfulness. Contrasted with eighteenth-century medical ideas about warm climates, it becomes clear that the British imperial mindset upheld a threshold in which civilized bodies could thrive, leading to similar portrayals of non-white bodies in both cold and hot regions. I argue that these proclamations of northern healthfulness, despite contradicting testimonies of illness and disease, reveal one way in which British imperial strategies for ‘improvement’ were upheld by theories of natural history and medicine regardless of the realities of Arctic living.

Creating and Changing Scientific Institutions “George Stokes and the Royal Society’s editorial and refereeing processes, 18531885: the data” Aileen Fyfe (University of St Andrews) The Royal Society of London was one of the learned societies which incorporated refereeing into the editorial practices of its journal publication during the nineteenth century. By the 1850s, the use of confidential, written referee reports for some papers was well-established for the Philosophical Transactions. But which papers were sent to referees? How many referees? And who were the most influential decision-makers? Previous scholars have examined the history of individual papers published (or not) by the Society. In this paper, we attempt to sketch out the bigger picture, and to look beyond the formal guidelines (as previously examined by one of us), at the actual editorial SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 93

practice. From 1853, the secretaries of the Royal Society of London maintained a ‘Register of Papers’, recording the fate of every paper read to the Society, including referee names, dates and final decisions. We have been analysing this data computationally, with a focus on the period of secretaryship of the physicist George Stokes. We will present a social network analysis of the people who were active in Royal Society publishing, as authors, referees and ‘communicators’; consider what we can learn from the statistical patterns in the data; and reveal some intriguing differences of practice between the biological and physical sciences. [Note, we would like also to present a poster with the visualisations of the data; and it would be ideal to have presented the paper before the poster session, to facilitate discussion of the poster.] “The convoluted road towards the Metre Convention” Frans van Lunteren (Leiden University/ Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) On 20 May 1875 representatives of seventeen nations signed an international treaty, the Metre Convention, in Paris. Its aim was the replacement of the existing French metre and kilogram artifacts by new international standards, as well as the establishment of an international Bureau of Weights and Measures and several international organizations associated with the Bureau. The convention was the hard-fought result of difficult negotiations, both during the preceding years and even the preceding days. These negotiations were not merely a reflection of the new balance of power in Europe after the Franco-Prussian war. They also pitted the interests of science against those of commerce, French against German standards of precision, the metric system against the imperial system, and state science against scientific individualism. The French scientists involved were deeply divided over the desirable outcome of these negotiations. The most adamant French opponents of a permanent international bureau found an unexpected ally in Johannes Bosscha, the Dutch secretary of the Permanent Committee that was originally founded to oversee the activities of the intended international bureau. His correspondence provides us a glimpse of the issues at stake. “Neuroscience Research in the Max-Planck-Society and a Fragmented Appropriation of its Distorted Past - Some Legacies of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society after 1948” Frank Stahnisch (University of Calgary) During the founding years of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), there had been several obstacles for a “normalization process” in the contemporary neuroscience field. Beginning with the planning period for the reopening of the former "Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science," which under the chairmanship of Max Planck (1858-1947) took three years after the Second World war had ended, the para-university research society named in his honour was eventually established in 1948. During the postwar period, however, neuroscience as a new interdisciplinary enterprise remained scarcely represented in West-Germany for almost twenty years. There are three major reasons for this development: first, the forced emigration of Jewish neuroscientists after 1933. Second, German university structures had countered interdisciplinary research based on an over–focus on medical research disciplines. And third, the international SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 94

isolation of German scientists became a major obstacle to the implementation of new research fields. While looking at the time from the creation of the relevant MPIs, 1948, to the establishment of the Presidential Research Program on the History of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society, this paper examines trends and strategies of an appropriation of the MPG’s distorted past. It draws on archival materials from the MPG (Berlin), as well as from specialized institutes in Munich, Frankfurt, and Cologne, while including oral history information from former members of the MPG. The project is aligned with the "Presidential Commission on the History of the Max Planck Society;" and its kind support for this historical research is thankfully acknowledged. “With Fond Regards from the Doom Boys – Science, Technology, Pessimism, and Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth” Zachary Loeb (The University of Pennsylvania - History and Sociology of Science) In 1955, the Princeton Inn was the site of a conference that was ahead of its time. Organized by the geographer Carl O. Sauer, the historian Lewis Mumford, the zoologist Marston Bates, and sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, this event brought nearly eighty scholars together to contemplate, as the title of the conference summarized, Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth. Attendees at this interdisciplinary gathering discussed how advances in science and technology had allowed humans to alter their world in the past, how they were changing it in the present, and what the consequences would be for the future. And though not all of the attendees were in neat agreement about the significance of “man’s role” or the implications of his “changing the face of the Earth,” the symposium was permeated by a certain woebegone tonality. The conference was ahead of its time, but many of the participants were convinced that humanity was already running out of time – leading one conference attendee to playfully deride others as “doom boys.” Drawing upon original archival research, this paper emphasizes the ambitions of the conference’s organizers to, as Sauer put it, argue that “science must continue to work humbly within a natural order and its limits.” And though this conference has largely been forgotten, it is still relevant, for the event was a pessimistically prescient one that addressed many of the questions that animate contemporary debates about the Anthropocene.

Economic Knowledge for Socialism “Economic Knowledge in Socialism: Forms, Integration, Isolation” Till Düppe (Université du Québec à Montréal) In this introductory essay, we present an overview of the different forms of economic knowledge that emerged in Cold War socialist countries. Two partially conflicting epistemic hierarchies apply: the first is the hierarchy inherited from the pre-socialist era that favors formally driven sciences as a model for scientific practice; the second hierarchy is imposed by the imperative of MarxistLeninist political economy, which was driven largely by ideas rather than techniques and was supposed to SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 95

inform all scientific activities; it required next to an ideological commitment also that all scientific activities result in economic advances in building up a socialist society. In open and implicit debates several disciplines had to redefine their agenda, and renegotiate their disciplinary relationships. In this context, we can observe a mobilization of many disciplines in providing economically relevant knowledge (often summarized under the notion “economic cybernetics”), which even meant a certain methodological eclecticism; the risk to fall into disgrace by the Party system, however, pushed specialization as well as abstraction as a means of protection and thus disintegration of economic knowledge. In addition, a heavy jargon papered over this disintegration of knowledge, and reinforced the isolation of the epistemic sphere from the West. This mobilization, disintegration, and isolation of various forms of economic knowledge was reinforced by the creation of various institutions that brought this knowledge about, and created a fundamental in-transparency of economic knowledge in socialism. “The Strange “Career” of Scientometrics: East-West Competition and the Coproduction of Knowledge in the Cold War” Elena Aronova (University of California, Santa Barbara) This paper focuses on West-East transfer and exchange that shaped the new field called scientometrics – the quantitative analysis of science most prominently associated with citation indices. The term “scientometrics” was adopted by Eugene Garfield as a calque from Russian “naukometriia,” which was, in turn, coined by the champion of Garfield’s Science Citation Index (SCI) in the Soviet Union, Vassilii Nalimov. Using the SCI, which was sent by Garfield to the AllUnion Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), Nalimov applied Garfield’s method to analyze Soviet science. While Garfield founded his own Institute for Scientific Information modeling it on Soviet VINITI -- regarded with envy by science planners in the US and UK in the 1950s and 1960s -- Nalimov and other researchers at VINITI avidly followed American literature on information technologies, reproducing and further developing ideas and approaches related to information processing. Scientometrics, initially promoted by few peculiar individuals on each side of the “curtain” was legitimized when a journal devoted to new field was established in 1978. The journal epitomized the transnational beginning of the field: printed by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the journal had four editors-in-chief (two Americans, one Soviet and one Hungarian scientist). By following the strange “career” of scientometrics back and forth between the US and USSR, the paper highlights the role of West-East transfers and mutual reinforcements in the development of this field. “Programming the USSR: Optimization as Political Struggle” Ivan Boldyrev (University of Bochum) In the wake of Stalin’s death, many Soviet scientists saw the opportunity to promote the importance of their methods for the engineering of economic prosperity in the socialist state. Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986) was one of them, and would later stand for the use of mathematical methods in Soviet economics. The established class of the orthodox economists and planners,

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 96

however, first had to be convinced. Kantorovich was a key activist in academic politics that led to the increasing acceptance of ‘programming’ economic efficiency in the USSR. Many factors were at work, including Kantorovich’s persona, his networks, and academic allies in the rather peculiar Soviet institutions of knowledge. Who and for what reason supported Kantorovich? Who and for what reason was troubled by his approach? And was this discourse unique to the socialist context, or an expression of a shared Cold War spirit? “The Generation of the GDR: Economists at the Humboldt University of Berlin Caught Between Loyalty and Relevance” Till Düppe (Université du Québec à Montréal) The German Democratic Republic (GDR) existed for 41 years. This gave time for a single generation to spend their entire professional lives in this state—namely those born in the early 1930s who carried the hopes of this state. With Karl Mannheim’s notion of generations as a unit in the sociology of knowledge in mind, this essay describes this generation’s typical experiences from the point of view of a particularly telling group: economists at the Humboldt University in Berlin. I present their socialization in Nazi Germany, their formative years in the aftermath of WWII that led to their choice of a politically-driven profession, their studies during the first years of the GDR, when Stalinism was still the dominating dogma, and their commitment to a state career when writing their dissertations and habilitations. Ready to shoulder Honecker’s regime, their daily lives as professors was characterized by continuing attempts to reform teaching and research. In 1989 the ultimate reform transpired, and encompassed the end of the state as well as their professional careers. This narrative historicizes, on an experiential level, a tension often noted in GDR research, that between the ideological and productive functions of knowledge in socialism, that is, between loyalty and relevance.

Flashtalks “Rivaling Oxford: The Teaching of Astronomy at the University of Paris in the 13th and 14th Centuries” Joseph Baxley (University of Notre Dame) The Astronomy curriculum at the University of Paris remains to a large extent undetermined. The medieval Arts professors left little indication in their statutes as to which books students were expected to read, unlike Oxford and Cambridge. However, building off of the manuscript study done by Olaf Pederson and looking at contemporaneous descriptions of Astronomy at the University of Paris, it appears possible to reconstruct both the place of Astronomy with respect to the other sciences and the material that a medieval student was expected to know. This is the purpose of my current project “The Scientists' Wars: Cold War Politics and Nuclear Futures in Leo Szilard's Fact and Fiction”

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 97

Anna Dvorak (Oregon State University) In my dissertation I find it just as important to understand the political and diplomatic climate Leo Szilard was operating in, and against, as it is to understand the science behind the development of the atomic bomb. Szilard stood at unique intersection in the history of the atomic bomb and decisions surrounding its development, use, and proliferation, but he also turned to fiction to present his ideas when he believed people were not fully accepting the gravity of the situation or just plain ignoring it. This naturally allowed him some creative license and means that separating the truth from the fiction is essential to understanding Szilard’s arguments, but for Szilard reality and his fiction were closely linked. “Romancing the Vital Essence: Iatromechanical Sturm meets Naturphilosophie Drang in Studies of the Brain” Alexander Greff (University of Minnesota, TC) Romanticism and natural philosophy collided in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. The metaphysical tenets of Naturphilosophie - transcendentalism, organicism, and a love of poetic description - exercised new influence over the development of medical knowledge. In the physiological studies of a Werther-esque young doctor, August Winkelmann, we see the strange merging of Enlightenment vitalism, iatromechanism, and medical police, which typified the Sturm und Drang of Romantic Natural Philosophy. “Not Just Any Map Will Do: Map Usage in the Site Selection of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Large-Scale Interferometers” Tiffany Nichols (Harvard University) This paper explores the use of maps in identifying sites for placement of large-scale interferometers by LIGO and affiliated researchers involved in the site selection process which has been overlooked in research directed to the history of gravitational wave detection. Specifically, I seek to show the content portrayed in maps led to placement of the interferometers in unexpectedly noisy areas. Although the topographic maps provided the information to determine the flatness of the land, a highly sought after quality for the sites, these maps did not provide sufficient information concerning localized disturbances that would affect the ability of the interferometers to detect gravitational waves. These decisions necessitated engineering solutions that would stabilize the interferometer to avoid masking gravitational waves which deform the spacetime fabric on the order of 1 x 10-22 characteristic strain. Surprisingly, due to the unexpectedly noisy sites, the engineered solutions allowed for increases of sensitivity in the magnitude range of 1 x 10-22 characteristic strain, which resulted in the detection event on September 14, 2015. “New Methods in Examining Historical Intersections in Land Use Change and Emerging Diseases” Emily Webster (University of Chicago) SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 98

This talk will introduce my nascent research project on the relationship between land use change and emerging diseases in the nineteenth century British Empire, particularly in Melbourne, the British Isles, and Bombay. By examining the impact of British regional and urban development on existing and newly-introduced ecologies, I will ague that the evolutionary theory of niche construction provides a unique lens through which to examine the cultural and ecological pressures that contribute to the success of particular microbial life within newly constructed human environments. I will also assert that the application of this distinctly biological framework allows for a more holistic and multi-scalar approach to studies in the history of human-microbial interaction. “Botanical Gardens: The Physical and the Perceptual” Reba Juetten (University of Minnesota) Botanical gardens are physical spaces and defined places but they are also complex conceptual entities. When glimpsed from the perspectives of their botanical researchers, international plant collectors, horticulturalists, education staff, tourists, and “Philology as a way of Knowing” Kristine Palmieri (The University of Chicago) Philology has frequently been referred to as Queen of the Sciences. But how was this title earned and why? This flash talk outlines the scope of my dissertation research, which explores the constitution of philology as a recognizably modern discipline thr

Hospitable Subjects: Indigenous hospitalities in the history of science “In Polite Company: Pueblo Management of Ethnographic Data Collection” Adam Johnson (University of Michigan) When an entourage of Anglo anthropologists arrived in the pueblo of Zuni, New Mexico, in 1879, Palowahtiwa made sure the newcomers felt welcome and provided for. As the governor of Zuni, Palowahtiwa managed his community’s relationship with outsiders, and in this case even adopted one of the visiting Anglos, Frank Hamilton Cushing, lodging him at his house and clothing him in Zuni garb. Pueblo governors had long managed outsiders, and when anthropologists swarmed to the Southwest at the turn of the century, strategies were already in place for controlling ethnographic data collection. Pueblo gestures of hospitality, for instance, ensured that someone was always present with a visiting anthropologists—both to assist them throughout their stay and to watch over them. Anthropologists, however, increasingly worked to pull back the curtain on the “secrets” that Zuni and other Pueblo people appeared to hold. In this paper, I examine the role of the Pueblo governor as a manager of ethnographic inquiry, faced with cavalier anthropologists and probing questions about private ceremonial details. The increasing anthropological interest in Pueblo ceremonialism had, by the 1920s, heightened concerns in Pueblo communities for privacy. In SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 99

response, some anthropologists sought to remove the structuring conditions of visiting the pueblo, and instead arranged clandestine meetings with individual informants in hotel rooms and ranch kitchens, away from the watchful eyes of their community. “The Invention of Participant Observation: A Host–Guest History of Science” Isaiah Wilner (Harvard University) Between 1879 and 1922, Western investigators of non-Western societies abandoned their assumption of an Archimedean standpoint, experimenting with the value of embodied knowledge— physical participation in the practice of culture creation—to derive insights from the intellectual ecosystems of their hosts. This paper reveals participant observation as an Indigenous invention. Behind every anthropologist who codified the crossing of the mind/body binary there exists an Indigenous interlocutor who has been erased from that knowledge-making process, screened out of the history that Indigenous people initiated. On America’s Northwest Coast, that person is George Hunt, whose enculturation into the gift-giving system of his adopted people, the Kwakiutl of Fort Rupert, British Columbia, created the conditions of possibility for Franz Boas’s groundbreaking investigations into culture. It was Hunt who initiated Boas into the knowledge known as “potlatch,” taking him from the colonial construction of Self and Other to the reciprocal relation of Host and Guest. The education of Boas by Hunt alters our understanding of who holds the pen, thus who holds the power, in the anthropological encounter. It also calls attention to the history of erasure that is our intellectual inheritance, preventing us from recognizing the foundations of scientific knowledge by marginalizing the minds of people of color. If the method of participant observation adumbrates the contributions of human science to modernity, and if Indigenous people played a key role in making the method, then the so-called subjects of scientific study are in fact agents in the creation of modern knowledge “Strangers on an Island with no Beach: Pitcairn Islanders, physical anthropology, and the places of captivation” Adrian Young (Denison University) When American physical anthropologist Harry Shapiro came to Norfolk Island in 1923 and Pitcairn Island in 1924 to conduct anthropometric measurements, he found people well-accustomed to receiving—and managing—their visitors. Both islands were home to the descendants of Tahitian women and the British mutineers of the Royal Navy vessel Bounty, and their inhabitants’ status as the racially-hybrid inheritors of a much-mythologized story made them well known across the Anglophone world. During the 19th and early 20th-centuries, Pitcairn islanders hosted many visitors who came to write about their lives and their pasts. They received Shapiro according to the same well-rehearsed practices of hospitality, making possible certain forms of invasive anthropometric work while safeguarding other forms of knowledge as out-of-bounds. This paper will situate Shapiro’s fieldwork and his ensuing critiques of interwar racial science within the history of hospitality in Pitcairn and the Pacific. On many islands, the beach served as a pivotal site of crosscultural encounter, but Pitcairn has no beach. Rather, these small, inaccessible, and cliff-bound

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 100

island communities developed their own unique methods with which to welcome those who came to scrutinize them. As the inheritors of one of Britain’s most famous imperial myths, they worked to make their home islands into spaces of “captivation,” ready to capture the benevolent interest of their investigators. “Hosting Indigenous Subjects: Scientific Hospitality in the City and the Lab” Rosanna Dent (McGill University) The residents of the Xavante Territory of Pimentel Barbosa in Central Brazil have decades of experience receiving researchers. Entangling their scientists and anthropologists in affective and kin relations, villagers have cultivated strategies to compel reciprocity in many forms. As personal relationships and scholarly agendas have developed, since the 1990s researchers have increasingly found it necessary to return the favor of hospitality. This paper examines how researcher-subject kinship extends beyond the space of the Indigenous territory to look at what happens when it is the scientists who host their subjects. Xavante interlocutors have traveled to urban spaces in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Porto Alegre, and New York City. They have visited genetics laboratories, participated in public cultural events, and stayed in hotels or at their scientists’ homes. Welcoming Xavante subjects has implied new kinds of labor for researchers, and shifted relationships that previously existed primarily in “the field.” Scientists’ invitations to their Xavante subjects make plain the emotional and political stakes of hospitalities in urban spaces. They respond to scientific controversies over the use of Indigenous biosamples, critical approaches to the notion of “informed consent,” but also to the affective ties developed over years of collaborations in anthropology, human ecology, and public health. When the typical researcher-subject hospitality is reversed, the intimate basis of human sciences research becomes clear.

Life Forms “Learning from the Rules of Nature” Yulia Frumer (Johns Hopkins University) In 1928 Nishimura Makoto built the first modern Japanese robot. Nishimura was not an engineer but a marine biologist and journalist. Prior to his embarking on the robot project, the Columbia University graduate was teaching at the Imperial Hokkaido University and conducting research on marimo—spherical moss balls that inhabited the cold, secluded waters of lake Akan. The marimo posed a series of questions. Were they animals or plants? Were they one organism or many? How did they reproduce and what caused them to die? It was while researching marimo that Nishimura — also an editor of a surrealist literary journal— saw the Japanese performance of Čapek’s R.U.R. which introduced the word “robot” and framed artificial humans as oppressed servants destined to overthrow humankind. Nishimura was excited about the prospect of artificial humans but dismayed by their portrayal, which he found contrary to what he knew about the workings of nature. Determined to build his own artificial human, Nishimura named his project Gakutensoku — “Learning from the Rules of Nature,” and sought design inspiration from the physiological processes

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 101

of the animal and plant kingdoms he observed in his research as a biologist. My talk explores the particular understanding of “life” that Nishimura developed in his research on marimo and examines his attempts to embed this understanding in the design of his robotic creation. “The Iron Lung Patient as New Life Form” Dora Vargha (University of Exeter) The iron lung ward of the Heine-Medin Post Treatment Hospital, founded in the late 1950s in Budapest, Hungary was one of the largest and longest running respiratory wards for polio patients in Europe. In a state-funded healthcare system, the ward treated and cared for long-term respiratory patients from their childhood through their adulthood, from the late 1950s for over four decades. In the post-war context of a terrible experience of dehumanization in the recent past on the one hand, and a strong belief in technological and scientific progress of the future on the other, iron lung patients in Eastern Europe raised questions about the definitions of human life. This paper examines how respiratory patients living with and inside breathing machines challenged medical practice, perceptions of the human body and behavior, prompting medical professionals to term the iron lung patient as a “new life-form”. I argue that the unprecedented and new condition of mechanically assisted bodily function in long-term medical care opened discussions on, and new interpretations of the limits of the human body, its life cycle and the social and biological functions it fulfills. Respiratory patients in this sense were not seen as disabled, but as humans who could not be fitted into the concept of human life as it was known – a perception that could simultaneously be liberating and highly discriminating. “Transfish: The Multiple Origins of Transgenic Salmon” Hallam Stevens (Nanyang Technological University) AquAdvantage Salmon was approved for human consumption by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2015 after a twenty-year deliberation. The fish – with inserted genes promoting rapid growth and cold resistance – was the first transgenic animal designed for eating. Using oral history interviews with scientists as well as documentary sources drawn from the FDA, Securities and Exchange Commission, and published technical accounts, this talk will outline the development of AquAdvantage Salmon from its origins in the 1970s until its approval. This is a story of multiple forms of transference and transversion. First, like other transgenic organisms, the production of AA Salmon involved the crossing of genes from several species of fish (Atlantic Salmon, Chinook Salmon, and Ocean Pout). Second, the research that led to AA Salmon crossed over not only between academic and commercial work, but also between animal model organism biology, genetic engineering, and genetic modification of foods. Third, transforming AA Salmon into a successful product involved tightly controlling the gender of the fish, ensuring that reproduction could not take place. Fourth, AA Salmon depended on a transnational movement of fish, people, and research products between Singapore, Canada, the United States, and Panama.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 102

Such a trans telling of this fish’s story suggests the complex, hybrid, and multiple origins of twentyfirst century technoscientific productions. AA Salmon emerged from a set of productive mismatches between fish, geography, commerce, and science. The eventual approval of AA Salmon by the FDA involved the simultaneous destabilization of binaries of male-female, center-periphery, and animalplant. “Turning to Stone” Sophia Roosth (Harvard University) Geobiology is a scientific field that combines the tools, methods, and theories of the earth and life sciences to study the co-evolution of Earth and its biosphere. I follow and work alongside these researchers and allied scholars in fields of micropaleontology, biogeochemistry, and astrobiology as they travel the world in search of Precambrian fossils that they hope can further scientific understandings of the origins of life on Earth as well as the ways researchers might seek life forms elsewhere. In this paper I report on recent fieldwork in Montana in which three geobiologists and I visit the outcrops that remain of a pre-Cambrian shallow ocean that stretched from Montana to Saskatchewan 1.4 billion years ago. As I discover, geobiologists travel to road-cuts and outcrops to compose a time that is fractured and dislocated, juxtaposed and disjointed, a time told in and by stone. Drawing upon recent anthropological and queer theoretical accounts of time, as well as science fictional literary devices, I read these texts in tandem with and against geobiological storytelling to amplify a temporal “theory out of science” that operates against cultural-historical and anthropological conceptions of time as linear, millenarian, continuous, and accelerative. Finally, I read geology, ethnography, and science fiction as textual triplets that use temporality (“going elsewhen”) as a medium for projection, retrojection, and extrapolation – for coeval estrangement.

Making and Knowing in the Biological Sciences “Experimental Making and Analytical Knowing: The History of DNA Synthesis” Dominic Berry (University of Edinburgh) In the past few decades an effort has been made to establish a new field of the biological sciences under the broad umbrella of synthetic biology. A number of scholars have already contributed to the historical understanding of this community, but in my own social and historical investigation I have been particularly inspired by John Pickstone’s ways of knowing and making. While synthetic biologists themselves often emphasize an unbounded world of imaginative biological possibility, their laboratory life is characterised by efforts to improve platforms to make such work possible. In short, they are often experimenting with ways to make and make better. At the same time as they emphasize their powers to create, they also make claims to knowledge production. Where they are often unclear about what kinds of knowledge are being produced, I offer Pickstone's category of analysis. In sum I present of a history of synthetic biology that characterises it as an epistemological programme of reform that extracts value from the movement between experiment and analysis, making and knowing.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 103

“Wild Toxicity, Cultivated Safety: Aflatoxin and Kōji Classification” Victoria Lee (Ohio University) In 1960, over 100,000 poultry in England died from an unknown disease named Turkey X. Investigators linked the disease to peanut meal in the turkeys’ industrial feed, and identified the cause as a toxin produced by the fungus Aspergillus flavus. Following the Turkey X outbreak, “aflatoxin” emerged as a powerful carcinogen, which especially damaged the liver and clearly affected numerous animal species including trout and rats. New anxieties highlighted aflatoxin—produced as the mold grew on nuts and grains during storage—as a serious potential hazard to humans, including people who either consumed affected animals, or ingested aflatoxin directly in their own food, perhaps in the course of eating a diet indigenous to particular regions. As part of the research after 1960 to understand the risks posed by aflatoxin, mycologists focused on distinguishing molds within the Aspergillus flavus taxonomic group that were toxigenic from those that were not, a difficult task because the A. flavus group included a large number of microbial isolates. Among them were the varieties known as kōji, which were widely used in the Japanese brewing industries to make sake, soy sauce, and miso. Consequently, Japanese scientists attempted to establish kōji varieties as a distinct group from A. flavus, constructing an evolutionary narrative in which human cultivation had created a non-toxigenic, domesticated species different than its toxigenic wild relative. By tracing their work, this paper explores the ways in which classificatory practices of microbes and their use in making food defined and shaped each other. “The Great Leap Making and the Accumulative Knowing: Insulin Synthesis During the Early Cold War” Vivian Ling (Independent Scholar) In the 1950s, when the genetic code was still unknown, the studies of proteins through their synthesis captured the attention of a number of biochemists. Particularly, Panayotis Katsoyannis in the United States, Helmut Zahn in Germany, and a large team in the People’s Republic of China independently set out to synthesize insulin, a 51-residue polypeptide. As the three teams worked within disparate social and political environments, scientists involved held differing visions, which not only shaped the specific ways these projects were organized, but also different designs of making insulin, which revealed different aspects of the molecule’s structure, function, and its synthesis in vivo. How did the political and material dimensions of these three groups related to these ways of making and knowing of insulin? This paper addresses the question by focusing on the Chinese team while comparing it with other cases. Particularly, the Chinese project was initiated primarily to gain national glory, which mobilized a large number of research institutes and a military style of cooperation in its early stage. The Great Leap Forward, often interpreted as an industrial and agricultural disaster, actually unleashed researchers’ motivation and creativities so that they could quickly achieved the synthesis in the early 1960s through trials and errors with different methods of splitting disulfide bonds and reconstituting the whole structure. This was different from the design rationales demonstrated in both American and German cases, in which insulin synthesis was viewed as either a challenging problem for biochemistry or primary research toward making synthetic fibers. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 104

“How the Artificial Cell Invented the Cell Membrane and Other Colloids, 1864–1935” Daniel Liu (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) Suggestions that colloidal precipitates were either artificial forms or mimics of life stretch all the way back to the seventeenth century, when “chemical gardens” were alternately serious alchemical endeavors and popular chemical diversions. In the 1860s, however, precipitations of copper ferrocyanide and boiled glue dropped in tannic acid became the analogical and material bases for two of the most important research questions biology: the physical causes of plant growth, and the problem of the cell’s selective powers of permeability. In this paper I will argue that the modern theory of the cell membrane as a semi-permeable barrier must be traced to Moritz Traube’s 1867 claim that such colloidal precipitations were in fact “artificial cells,” and Wilhelm Pfeffer’s adaptation of Traube’s artificial cell as an experimental tool to investigate osmosis and plant-water relations. Pfeffer’s use of a Traube’s artificial cell was experimentally and conceptually narrow, yet it quickly became the theoretical and cognitive prototype for the cell membrane—during a period when the anatomical existence of the cell membrane was widely disputed among biologists. Yet the canonization of cell membrane theory was but one of the many afterlives seventy years of research on what one commentator called the “physiology of Traube’s copper ferrocyanide cell.” I argue that Traube’s artificial cell redefined the cell and even life itself as a controlled relationship to its environment, that it reinforced the divide between plant and animal life, and that it became a graveyard of materialist philosophical speculation about the nature of life.

Making their Own Waves: One Hundred Years of Women's Activism in Science and Engineering in Canada, France and the United States “Les normaliennes de la rue d’Ulm : A Long Struggle for Gender Equality with an Unexpected Impact” Anne-Sophie Godfroy (Université Paris Sorbonne & Université Paris Est Créteil) The Ecole Normale Supérieure rue d’Ulm in Paris, is one of the most famous institutions in France. The school used to a boys’ school and had a girls’ counterpart, the Ecole Normale de Sèvres. The aim of this paper is to present the different periods of the struggle towards gender equality at ENS and to question the unexpected impact of the merging of Ulm and Sèvres in 1985. Between 1910 and 1939, 44 women students entered the male ENS, but they obtained the official status of student only in 1926. The reason for being allowed to enter the boys’ school was because curricula were not similar, but equal access to knowledge was acknowledged by the law. The second period opened in 1939. The female director of Sèvres, Eugénie Cotton, a feminist activist, a communist and a resistant had struggled to develop scientific laboratories and research in Sèvres. With similar curricula, there was no more reasons for girls to study at Ulm. Anyway, the merging of the two schools was considered as the next symbol of equality. A third period is opened in 1985 with the merging of Ulm and Sèvres. It was pushed by alumnae who became politicians and top civil servants and came to power during the first term of President Mitterrand. After merging, the number of female

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 105

students and female professors declined dramatically, especially in science. This outcome had not been anticipated, but nobody would imagine going back to quotas or separate schools. “Kinds of Activism by American Women Scientists” Margaret Rossiter (Cornell University) Before 1969 the only kind of activism used by American women scientists was for an individual to write a letter-to-the-editor of a newspaper or journal protesting inaccuracies or misconceptions in a recent article. They were more systematic at forming groups of their own, setting up prizes and fellowships, and striving to work individually to exceed expectations so that they might be seen as an “exceptions.” Yet even if successful for an individual this strategy would not change “the system.” But in 1969 a small group of women from Yale University adopted a tactic from the civil rights movement – the somewhat confrontational “sit-in.” Led by Yale‘s Mary Clutter and Virginia Walbot several persons “sat in” at the council meeting of the AAAS, demanding an office for women. Eventually this was agreed to. Supported by outside funding and led by political scientist Janet Welsh Brown this new Office of Opportunities staged events, wrote reports, and compiled rosters, and built up a coalition that lobbied the U.S. Congress for funds for special programs for women. Eventually (1980) they got Congress to pass the Women in Science Bill that created several educational and training programs. They might have gotten even more had they made appropriate financial contributions to key members of Congress. These were all a positive kind of ladylike protest – petitioning for support for nurturing, philanthropic, and constructive activities – rather than other more confrontational tactics. “The Challenge of Exercising Power by Women Scientists in Power: University Presidents & Women Activists in the 2005 Debate on the Under-representation of Women in Science” Pnina Abir-Am (Brandeis University) The year long debate on the under-representation of women in science in 2005, (triggered by L. Summers' efforts to "explain" its causes by three “hypotheses” such as the women's innate lesser fitness for science, their presumed lack of interest in demanding jobs due to family issues, and socialization into immutable gender roles) provided many opportunities for leadership in a key aspect of gender inequality. However, the response of public figures, both women and men, was timid and limited. Following a brief historical example of Dorothy Hodgkin's leadership in creating an "empire of the dispossessed" in the 1940s-1970s; (i.e. a lab made of women, colonial, and refugee scientists with which she achieved a sole Nobel Prize) the talk examines the strategies of women scientists who played a key role in this debate. It focuses on how University Presidents Susan Hockfield of MIT and Shirley Tilghman of Princeton (both molecular biologists) built a coalition with Stanford President John Hennessy, (a computer scientist) yet limited their public pronouncements to a defense of junior women scientists only. The talk seeks to clarify how the prior experience of these women scientists in power (e.g. their own career trajectories, roles in policy SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 106

making) both enabled and constrained their performance of sudden leadership on a public issue that long reverberated not only in the US but also world wide. The talk concludes with drawing lessons from their experience in better preparing women scientists of this generation for related challenges in the future. “Processing an Upgrade: Grace Hopper and Beatrice Worsley’s Activism for Women in Computing, 1945-1972” Jennifer Thivierge (University of Ottawa) Grace Hopper is a well-known American computer scientist who began her long and distinguished career during the Second World War. Her advocacy work encouraged women to become involved in the new field of computing, one that was expected to be a ‘natural fit’ for them. Her story is a testament to the long legacy she built as a computer scientist in the United States. Considered as Hopper’s Canadian counterpart, Beatrice Worsley also paved a path toward the recognition of women in computer science. At the request of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1967-1970), Beatrice started to identify and collect the names of female computer scientists of her day. Her sudden death in 1972 put an end to this task, but this paper will discuss her previous efforts to bring women in computer science. Beatrice’s activism tended to focus on her status as the first Canadian female computer scientist, but she deserves to be recognized for her contribution to the history of Canadian computing. Comparing Worsley and Hopper will highlight the main features of their respective trajectories as well as the specific contexts in which they pursued their activism. “’Looking Forward, Looking Back’: The Activism of Women Scientists and Engineers in Canada, 1989- 2010” Ruby Heap (University of Ottawa) The quote above is the title of a 1992 address by University of Toronto Professor Ursula Franklin, a reputed scientist and well-known Canadian feminist activist, on the impact of the murder of fourteen female engineering students at Montréal’s École Polytechnique, on December 6, 1989. Looking forward, she explained, the tragedy was a catalyst that led to an increased public awareness of the continuing problem of women’s under-representation in science and engineering, and to a new wave of mobilization within the community of women scientists and engineers in Canada. This paper will discuss the main features of this new phase of activism during the two decades following the Montreal Massacre. It will look back at its roots in the pioneering efforts of a first generation of activists who established several advocacy groups and organizations and campaigned for the equal participation of women and men in science and engineering. Their successors engaged for their part in a fertile period of institutional activism, which was supported by the state, the universities and the private sector. A new and broader leadership also emerged, which shaped agendas for change across the country. The period was also marked by the growth of francophone activism in Canada and the development of international collaborations. Finally, the paper will discuss the relationship between the women’s movement and this new phase of women’s activism in science and engineering.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 107

Natural Things Beyond Their Environments: Modernity and Alienation “Permanence and Transience: New Zealand Natural Objects in Translation” Sally Kohlstedt (University of Minnesota) Explorers inevitably gathered evidence of their travels, including both natural specimens and human artifacts, most often crafted from natural materials. Some such objects eventually became familiar and even symbolic as they moved from place to place and were interpreted by various audiences. Certain New Zealand items, particularly the beautiful Pounamu (greenstone) hei-tiki, became prized by visitors from the time of Captain Cook and among seafaring merchants and captains. They subsequently became part of the collections that would eventually be opened for public exhibition. In many ways, the greenstone itself remains remarkably unchanged, volcanically-produced, finegrained nephrite so strong that it was also used for weapons. Physically shaped by expert Maori, the carvings in this stone have meant quite different things to other observers over time and in particular locations, sometimes explicitly stated but in other instances given meaning by their location in collections and in exhibition. The hei-tiki, in particular, seemed a heathen god to some who observed it in the late eighteenth century, was viewed as representative of a stone-age people by early anthropological commentators, and quite recently has taken on new significance as craft when placed in art exhibits. Such objects, important in the gift culture of the Maori before Euro-American encounters, maintain the resilience of their origin even as they enable multiple meanings to inquisitive observers. “The Posthumous Lives of the Giant Sloth: The Megatherium’s Path from Artifact to Idea” Anna Toledano (Stanford University) In 1787, on the banks of the Luján River somewhere in modern-day Argentina, a Dominican friar happened upon a fossil. The bones belonged to an animal unlike any creature he had ever seen. He sent them to Madrid, the seat of the Spanish Empire, where this beast—a giant sloth, soon to be of the genus Megatherium—was the first fossil skeleton to be put together and mounted in a museum. Juan Bautista Bru, the artist who assembled it, drew a paper-based representation of his work that traveled across the European continent. These revolutionary illustrations sparked international interest in the Spanish Megatherium and further encouraged its afterlife. The specimen generated studies not only in Spain but also in France, the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century intellectual figures including Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Richard Owen, and Thomas Jefferson took interest in this strange object of natural history. These naturalists reinvented the habits of the giant sloth, further disembodying the Spanish Megatherium to represent its species as a whole. Finally, the interaction between science and religion in Victorian England removed what physicality the giant sloth had left. Victorians reimagined the prehistoric animal as characterizing the Christian sin of slothfulness even more than its modern, tree-bound counterpart. This paper will chart these afterlives of the giant sloth—as a physical object in a SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 108

museum, as an evolved and extinct species, and as an intangible literary trope—to demonstrate how in death a natural thing can grow into something much larger than it was in life. “’Living Fossils’: Pelvic Bones and Fertile Wombs as Objects of Natural History in Semi-Colonial Egypt” Taylor Moore (Rutgers University) In 1935, Egyptian gynecologist Naguib Mahfouz dissected the vagina of an Egyptian woman named Henhenit. The urinary fistula lodged between her genital apparatus and urinary tract, he believed, served as evidence that gynecological diseases had plagued women from “time immemorial.” Henhenit’s pelvic region, while well preserved, was over two thousand years old. Despite its age, her womb and the bones encasing it were the keys to a fertile reproductive future for the newly independent nation. Yet, Henhenit’s womb was not the only female Egyptian body under scientific scrutiny. As medical students examined skeletal remains, anthropologists conducted anthropometric surveys on the bodies of living women in Upper Egypt. La femme pharonique, as she was dubbed, was the perfect specimen for early twentieth century scientists--a ‘living fossil.’ Her skeletal structure, particularly the size and shape of her pelvic bone, was said to be an atavistic trait characteristic of ancient Egyptian women. Unlike Henhenit, these women could be observed in the flesh as part of their ‘natural environment,' a region deemed immune to the passing of time. This paper examines how the pelvic bones and wombs of Upper Egyptian women took on new scientific and cultural meanings in the first half of the twentieth century as scientists and social reformers ‘returned to the womb’ to answer questions of Egyptian natural history, social Darwinian theories of race, and neo-Malthusian hopes to decrease the country’s infant mortality rate. It explores how the bodies of Upper Egyptian women, both living and deceased, became specimen of scientific inquiry in museums, dissection halls, and in the field. “When Coral was British: Tracing Victorian Ownership through International Exhibition Narratives, 1851-1862” Anne Ricculli (Drew University) Abstract coming.

Pacific Frontiers of American Science & Technology “In the Wake of the Whalers: American Intermediaries on the Arctic Edges of the Pacific World, 1880-1940” Andrew Stuhl (Bucknell University) Abstract coming.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 109

“American Soldiers and the Production of Scientific Knowledge in the Philippines” Amy Kohout (Colorado College) When we think of imperial science, perhaps we think of top-down bureaucracies aimed at systematically gathering information designed to efficiently exploit the resources of their colonies. But this structure assumes an established empire. What does imperial science look like during imperial formation? How is knowledge about science and nature produced in a “new” place? This paper situates American soldiers stationed in the Philippines as producers of scientific knowledge during the first decade of the twentieth century, amidst the transition from military occupation to more formal American imperial government. I focus on both formal military expeditions tasked with topographical (strategic) and biological surveying and more informal natural history work done by soldiers in their less-structured time. I use these soldiers—and their field books, notes, correspondence, and specimens—to explore the intersection of ideas about science, nature, and empire in both the Philippines and the United States. (After all, these soldiers followed their letters and specimens back across the Pacific to the United States.) In particular, I track the work of Major Edgar Mearns, an army surgeon who organized expeditions, collected for and corresponded with Smithsonian curators, and founded the Philippine Scientific Association during his tours in the Pacific. Major Mearns and his colleagues make visible both formal and informal processes of scientific knowledge production in the Philippines. Their work—and their interest in the natural history of archipelago—also help me to make an argument for expanding our frame for the American frontier across the Pacific. “Science and Settler Colonialism in Hawaii National Park” Ashanti Shih (Yale University) This paper explores the relationship between American science, conservation, and settler colonialism in the formation of Hawaii National Park, the first national park in a United States territory. In the early twentieth century, Euro-American scientists framed the proposed park as a “national asset” comparable to Yosemite and Yellowstone. They advised the area be put under federal control to benefit American tourism, science, and spirit, effectively tying the exotic Hawaiian landscape into the sublime nature of the American West. According to this view, federal management was needed to protect Hawai‘i’s “vanishing” flora and fauna and to ensure the long-term study of the islands’ volcanoes. Hawai‘i was a “remote island” uniquely vulnerable to biogeographical change and a “natural laboratory,” perfect for studying “species mixing.” Scientists’ expert claims over Hawai‘i’s nature resulted in the transfer of former Hawaiian crown lands to the Department of the Interior’s National Park Service in 1916. I argue that this created a permanent, state-sanctioned space for ecological research, prioritizing a particularly western scientific way of knowing nature and form of environmental management. Consequently, it disrupted the existing practices and epistemologies of two other groups: native Hawaiians who had traditionally stewarded that land, and Asian plantation laborers who subsisted off that land during labor strikes. In exploring the complex relationship between the Park Service, settler scientists, Asian immigrants, and native Hawaiians, I recapture

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 110

diverse ways of knowing Hawai‘i’s nature and explore how ecological science, through its universalizing claims to expertise, has helped justify American settler colonialism in the Pacific. “Crossroads of American Sovereignty: Suffering and Spectacle in the Nuclear Pacific” Mary Mitchell (Purdue University) During the summer of 1946, the US military conducted the first post-war nuclear weapons detonations on Pacific islands over which it did not hold sovereignty. “Operation Crossroads” took place as policy-makers debated whether the United States should take the mid-Pacific islands it occupied at the end of World War II as US territories or give them over to the UN as an Americancontrolled trusteeship. Crossroads’ widely publicized nuclear weapons tests intervened at a critical moment as the United States considered what form its Pacific imperialism should take in an atomic age. This paper uses the media spectacle of Operation Crossroads to explore what nuclear weapons and their effects meant for competing visions of American sovereignty and power in the postWorld War II Pacific. Approaching Crossroads through the records of its planners, through media accounts, and through citizens’ protest letters, the paper traces the contours of an emerging debate about the locations and meanings of nuclear suffering. It argues that US military officials attempted to reframe the destructive effects of technologies abroad on others peripheral to the US polity as the new price of technological and scientific modernity. Advancing science and technology, they argued, supported the United States’ moral claim to an expanded presence in the Pacific. Some US citizens’ resisted this narrative, however, as the operation opened new controversy over the value of life and the meanings of suffering in American democracy.

Pre-Modern Experiences and the Limits of Science “‘Science’ of the Elements? Theory and Practice in Stephanus’ Alchemical Works” Vincenzo Carlotta (Humboldt Universität Berlin) Greco-Egyptian and Byzantine alchemists called themselves ‘philosophers’ and some of them were even committed to placing their own discipline within the broader framework offered by the philosophers of their times. Yet whether this meant that these alchemists were truly successful in harmonizing their discipline with the contemporary speculation on nature remains to be addressed: Was ancient alchemy primarily conceived of as a science, namely as a branch of philosophy, or as a discipline in its own right? To what extent was the theoretical foundation of alchemy influenced by the practices of alchemy? Although many different approaches were displayed by Greek alchemists in reply to these questions, the alchemical works – falsely or not – attributed to Stephanus of Alexandria (6th-7th c. CE) present a particularly interesting case. He explained alchemical transmutations by making a synthesis of the Platonic theory of the geometric structure of the elements on the one hand and Aristotle’s analysis of metals as mixtures of two different exhalations on the other. Thus, Stephanus proposed his own definition of the ultimate constituents of the physical substances, and questioned the structure, role, and properties of the four traditional

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 111

elements of philosophical physics. Stephanus’ discussion of these fundamental aspects of reality within an alchemical context offered a new explanation of nature, whose elaboration requires to be clarified. The purpose of my paper is to begin to shed light on the ambiguous definition of Greek alchemy by considering Stephanus’ exciting case in its own right, and by thinking about its potentially long-term implications “No Science of the Divine? The Turn to the Physical Sciences in Late Medieval Jewish Thought” Yehuda Halper (Bar Ilan University) Like their Christian and Muslim counterparts, medieval Jewish Aristotelians understood the Metaphysics to contain or at least point to the most complete human understanding of God. Accordingly, many scholars from all three traditions took metaphysics to be the chief science and the ultimate goal of all scientific undertaking. Yet despite this exalted status, the prevailing attitude in Hebrew discussions was that its attainment by humans is quite limited. Thus, we find relatively few Hebrew commentaries on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and detailed discussions of its contents in other contexts are much rarer than we might expect. This attitude may be due to Moses Maimonides, the most important Jewish medieval thinker, whose Guide of the Perplexed focuses, inter alia, on the limitations of human knowledge of the divine. Following Alfarabi, Maimonides and many other Jewish thinkers saw the human scientific endeavour as reaching its peak in political science or a science of the Law, a view that colluded well with Rabbinic and Talmudic approaches to study and learning. Other thinkers took the limitations of metaphysics as a spur to study physics and astronomy, the “second best” sciences which were considered necessary preconditions for the study of metaphysics. Here we shall examine two such thinkers, Levi Gersonides (1288–1344) and Hasdai Crescas (1340- 1411), who turned to physics because of the limitations of metaphysics. Yet such limitations also called into question basic principles of natural science, leading them to re-examine those basic principles as well. “A Science of the Living Body? Knowledge of Animals and Humans from Albert the Great to Konrad Gessner” Katja Krause (Durham University) Can animals be known scientifically? The Latin medieval sage, Albert the Great, was deeply committed to providing a positive answer to this question. In 1251, he presented a comprehensive natural scientific programme to the Latin West for the first time, which built upon, but went well beyond, the corpus Aristotelicum. In his Physics, Albert insisted that all natural sciences be studied in the proper order, and he assigned the study of animals its righteous place among them as “the completion of the natural sciences.” Yet when he finally commented on the Stagirite’s De animalibus in the early 1260s, Albert went well beyond Aristotle’s text. For in Albert’s eyes, the science of animals (scientia de animalibus) was not limited to their non-rational representatives, but necessarily had to include their rational counterparts as well. Albert’s procedure to put this in place was to include large parts of Galenic-Avicennian medical knowledge on anatomy and physiology into his

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 112

science of animals, thus widening its subject matter considerably to include Latin medieval theoretical medicine (medicina theorica). To what extent, however, did Albert’s inclusion of medical material influence later generations in the De animalibus tradition in its sixteenth-century revival in Pomponazzi and Ficino as well as in the early modern Humanist Conrad Gessner, whose Historia animalium dealt with animals in an increasingly descriptive manner? The purpose of this paper is to shed some light on the novel methodological approach to the science of animals in Albert’s De animalibus and on its longue-durée history. “Sciences of Matter? Knowledge of the Material Substrate in the two Bacons” Nicola Polloni (Durham University) Separated by more than three centuries, the figures of Roger Bacon (ca. 1220 - ca. 1292) and Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) are exemplar cases of the problematic relation between philosophy and science. Both attempted to revolutionize the scientific method of their day by criticizing causes of error, albeit under opposite circumstances. On the one hand, Roger attacked the ‘scholastic method’ as entangled in the passive use of philosophical authorities rather than in knowledge- making based on experience. On the other, Francis elaborated a new speculative method which, in his eyes, could supersede the Aristotelian tradition grounded on late scholasticism, which included Roger’s views. Both thinkers thus studied physics with their peculiar interest, yet both had to also address the problem of matter as the irreducible root of physical reality. Roger lamented the lack of a detailed discussion on matter in the Aristotelian corpus, whereas Francis stressed the excesses of the Aristotelian approach to physics in answering the question of the knowability of matter, that is, if matter in itself—rather than what is material—can be known. My paper will focus on this fundamental aspect of the history of a “science of matter” in the Middle Ages and in the Early Modern Period. In particular, I will show how and why the birth of the “science of matter” would require the definitive sacrifice of the philosophical notion of matter proper to the Aristotelian tradition, and replace it with a quantitative (and thus mathematizable) concept of matter.

Towards a Media History of Science, Technology, and Medicine: Precedents and Prospects “Dictaphone, Radiopager, Telehealth: Media Technology as Medical Technology” Jeremy Greene (Johns Hopkins University) A cardiologist in Portland learns to monitor the aberrant rhythms of his patient’s heart via a wireless device. In Omaha, a team of specialists conducts a complex neuropsychiatric evaluation of a woman confined to a mental hospital in another part of the state, using an interactive viewscreen. In the middle of the night, a Cincinnati pediatrician tests out a brand-new technology to listen to the chest of an ailing boy miles away, without leaving his own bed. These three scenes are set not in the near future, nor the present day, but in the past: in 1964, in 1957, in 1879. And yet they are part of a broader omission in our collective history and historiography: that communications technologies like the telephone, the radio, and the television were often rapidly adapted as medical technologies as

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 113

well. This talk seeks to reanimate the hopes and fears stirred by earlier visions of electronic medicine, to explore the technical, logistical, existential and moral concerns that became palpable when older analog media were introduced into medicine. In turn, I suggest that a broader media history of medicine can help to reframe current debates over the promise and perils of digital health by examining the continuity--and change--in the successive challenges posed by a series of older "new media" in medicine from the late 19th century to the present. “Film, Television, and Medium Specificity in Postwar Biomedical Science Education” Scott Curtis (Northwestern University) An important insight for a media history of science is that no one medium—whether it be writing, imaging, or other types of notation or recording—dominates and defines exhaustively the process of communication. Moving images function differently than still photographs or graphs or the written word and vice versa. The pressing historiographical question, then, is how do these media function, and what difference does the choice of medium make? This is not a question media scholars often ask with regard to scientific imaging, or one historians of science often ask with regard to media; most discussions treat all media as equally transparent conveyers of a message without considering how the formal properties of the image might affect our interpretation of any message or indeed the researchers’ own understanding of their object of study. To approach these questions, this presentation will compare the use of film and television in medical schools and laboratories after WWII. It will demonstrate that researchers and educators were indeed sensitive to formal properties, such as the density, grain, and clarity of the image, as well as to the different capabilities of the technologies. This paper argues that researchers had their own implicit or explicit theories of medium specificity, which are essential factors in explaining historical patterns in the scientific use of media and therefore should heighten our sensitivity to the formal specificity of media in the history of science and medicine. “Crossing Boundaries: Audio-visual Media in the Mind Sciences of the Child” Felix Rietmann (Princeton University) Over the last forty years in the mind sciences of the child and infant mental health, audiovisual media have become ubiquitous tools for scientific study, educational training and clinical care. Video, sound, and motion recordings guide psychological assessments, contribute to therapeutic interventions, and structure both research projects and daily routines. This paper engages with the historical origins of these practices and their historiographical implications for the history of science and medicine. I argue that a new way of thinking about, looking at, and caring for infants emerged and spread in child psychology, psychiatry, and pediatrics in the USA and Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Both articulation and dispersion of this vision, across disciplines and in culture at large, were intimately bound to the clinical and epistemic possibilities offered by audiovisual media. I will suggest that these media functioned as versatile tools that crossed and lowered intellectual and spatial, as well as disciplinary and institutional boundaries. The paper thus proposes that a historiographical focus on media offers an opportunity for shedding light on links and

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 114

entanglements of scientific, medical, and cultural practice. At the same time, such a focus requires careful and contextualized attention to the particularities and properties of media-in-use. The talk reflects on how the history of science and medicine can here benefit from recent approaches in film and media studies. “Mirroring Anthropology: Media Theory in Papua New Guinea” Katja Guenther (Princeton University) Funded by the Australian government, the American anthropologist Edmund Carpenter set out in 1969 to Papua New Guinea. He considered one of the indigenous populations there, the Biami, to be “living ancestors” in the sense that they had not been exposed to the media of modern western civilization. Most importantly, due to the absence of stagnant water in their environment, the Biami were “mirror-naïve.” Carpenter wanted to perform a number of “reflexivity studies” to test the media theories that he had developed over the previous decade in collaboration with Marshall McLuhan. He introduced the Biama to playback video, photographs and mirrors, to measure the corrupting effects of media on their psyche and culture. As he conducted the experiments, however, Carpenter came increasingly to doubt the ethics and epistemology of his research project, placing himself at the center of a divisive debate within anthropology about its role and professional research norms. He shut his study down after only one year and never submitted his report to the Australian government, whose policies of assimilation had made him increasingly suspicious. By examining the complex influence of geo-political forces in the postcolonial world and disciplinary developments in anthropology on the emergence and development of media theory, this paper reflects upon the latter’s meaning and potential, and considers its advantages and limitations in the study of the history of science

Transformations and Translations: Science in Korea “Skilling Toil: a new form of artisanship in papermaking in late Chosŏn Korea” Jung Lee (Ewha Womans University) Paper in pre-modern Korea was known for its unique qualities of a white glossy surface and clothlike strength, becoming an important item in tributary exchanges and private trade. The unique material of paper mulberry and related technical innovations, including toch’im, the repeated beating of just-produced paper that provides sizing and fulling effects, were crucial to this fame. However, scholar-officials, who integrated papermaking as a state production system for the important provision of administrative and tributary needs, made toch’im a corvée, even penal labor, thus dismissing it as simple toil. Their dismissal is not unique. Historiographies of technology are generally silent about toil, focusing instead how we invented ourselves out of it. However, papermakers in late Chosŏn Korea chose to identify their artisanship with toch’im and eventually succeeded in securing recognition for that toil. By examining this skilling of toch’im, this paper changes and contemplates the historiographical silence concerning toil. It overcomes the archival silence accompanying the embodied skill by tracing SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 115

toch’im’s contours through its changing associations with the social and material entities of society that were being reshaped. It thus re-situates toil within the interconnected transformation of society and technology in a Korea that was ‘modernizing’ in various ways. “Science, State, and Spirituality: Creationism in South Korea, 1981-1999” Hyung Wook Park (Nanyang Technological University) I analyze how scientific creationism became a major social movement in Korea during the late twentieth century. As Ronald Numbers claimed, Korea became "the creationist capital of the world, in density, if not in influence." Borrowing historical literature on developmental state and the postWestphalian conditions, I argue that this growth reflected Korean creationists' pursuit of their own desire (rather than that of the state and dictators) in the age of globalization and post-developmental state. I will show that creationism, imported from America, offered them a means to defy both religions and sciences constructed within the constraints of Korea's developmental state, which embodied its Confucian legacy, military dictatorship, and postcolonial experiences. In creationism, members of the Korean Association for Creation Research (KACR) found a means to overcome their lower cultural status in this country, and to become conservative intellectuals in their local Christian communities, which in turn fostered their participation in the global creationist movement. To women in KACR, creationism gave an opportunity to contest gender discrimination in both churches and academia, which were shaped under the developmental state. In explicating these issues, I utilize Peter Beyer's theory of "post-Westphalian conditions" that accounts for how late twentieth-century religions transformed themselves within global mass media and new entertainments and loosened their ties to the states that had patronized them in their "Westphalian" past. I will thus explain why it has been so hard to dismantle creationism, which formed a new postWestphalian spirituality that overcame Korea's old limitations rooted in its developmental state. Vitality of Empire”: Demographic Studies by Keijo Imperial University in Colonial Korea in 1930s” Ji-young Park (Seoul National University) Previous studies regarding scientific institutes of the Japanese empire have focused only on either a purpose of the scientific institutes as a means for imperial control or their activities to constitute a transnational academic network, but both of the characteristics are two sides of the same coin. This paper intends to show how the both characteristics of the scientific institutes of the Japanese empire are related to each other by taking the demographic studies by Keijo Imperial University (KIU) established in Korea under Japanese colonial rule in 1930s as an example. Analyzing the research themes that the demographers of the KIU shared with other demographers in the Japanese empire and the alteration of those themes in the colonial Korea, this paper reveals the followings. First, the demographic study by the KIU was derived from a project for introducing medical science of the United States of America that was promoted in a close relationship with Johns Hopkins University. Second, demographers at KIU shared the goal for calculating the fundamental “vitality of Japanese people” with other demographers in the Japanese empire. Third, they have altered their original

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 116

methodology to determine the “vitality” of not only Japanese people emigrated to Japanese colonies, but also natives of the colonies, due to the imperial expansion policy of the Japanese GovernmentGeneral of Korea. To conclude, this paper argues that the demographic research by the KIU was an attempt to make a consistent statistical frame for calculating the “vitality” of each ethnic group in the entire Japanese empire. “Reconfiguring Korean Birds : Bird Conservation and the Discourse of Extinction in South Korea, 1956-1973” Hanah Sung (Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Seoul National University) This presentation explores the role of Korean ornithologists in reshaping the idea and practice of bird conservation in South Korea from the 1950s to 1970s. Historians of science have recently demonstrated that ornithology was developed in the emerging regime of bird protection in the early twentieth century in the United States and European countries. Moreover, they have shown that ornithologists took a critical role in developing the idea of wildlife conservation in national and the international levels. In South Korea, after the Korean War, there were two governmental agencies managing wildlife: Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry working on wildlife census, and Ministry of Culture and Information which designated mammals, birds, and fish as Natural Monument. Since the 1960s, the Korean Institution of Ornithology in Kyung Hee University, the first ornithological research institution in South Korea, participated in both sectors to produce the knowledge of Korean birds. By analyzing the practice of the Korean Institution of Ornithology, I will maintain that the ornithologists group of the Kyung Hee University, who could make a connection with scholars abroad, as well as with the Korean governmental agencies, introduced the discourse of extinction from the international community of ornithologists and translated it into one that fit into the Korean context. By focusing on these Korean ornithologists as a translator of the international discourse of extinction, this presentation contributes to the understanding of the establishment of ornithology as a scientific discipline, and the interconnection between the scientific knowledge of birds and environmental concerns in Korea. “The Construction of 'Autism Epidemic' in Korea” Hawon Chang (Seoul National University) The 'autism epidemic', which started in developed countries such as the US and UK, is emerging as an important social issue in more and more countries. In Korea, the number of children diagnosed with autism has increased dramatically since the mid-2000s. But there is still disagreement among experts over the diagnostic criteria for autism. Autism is becoming an epidemic in Korean society. In Korea, a latecomer of autism sciences, how is the number of children with autism increasing? How is the medical authority about autism constructed? How is the role, responsibility, and experience of Korean mothers changing? How is the concept of autism changing?

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 117

This study analyzes how the modern conception of autism and the discourse of early diagnosis lead to the practices of Korean mothers, in order to understand a phenomenon of autism epidemic in Korea. The discourse of various actors, obtained through a multi-sited ethnography including indepth interviews with ‘autism experts’ and participatory observation of the Internet communities of parents with children with or at risk of autism was analyzed.

Works and Networks in pre-Copernican Astronomy “The Vagueries of Transmission: Case Studies on the Circulation of Islamic Astronomy” Jamil Ragep (McGill University) That Islamic astronomy exerted a considerable influence on pre-modern European astronomy is not in dispute. It has been difficult, however, to trace the exact trajectories by which that influence was effected in all cases; consequently, the argument that parallelism, rather than influence, is as good or better an explanation of similar models or theories has gained plausibility when evidence of direct transmission is lacking. In this paper, we will examine several cases that indicate a wide range of examples of possible influence of Islamic astronomy on European savants. These include: 1) the transmission of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) lunar model to the Byzantine scholar Gregory Chioniades (d. ca. 1320); 2) the possible influence of Ṭūsī’s device for producing rectilinear oscillation from rotating spheres on Nicole Oresme (d. 1382); 3) the anticipation by ʿAlī Qushjī (d. 1474) of the proposition in Regiomontanus’s Epitome of the Almagest showing how to transform Ptolemy’s epicycle models into eccentric ones; and 4) the virtual identity of some of Copernicus’s models with those of Ibn al-Shāṭir (d. 1375-6). In all these cases, Islamic influence has either been denied or downplayed, usually based on a parallelism argument that goes as follows: working in traditions with a common source (i.e. Greek astronomy), it is “natural” that Islamic astronomers and their European counterparts would come up with similar solutions to perceived problems. We will argue that such arguments are inadequate and that despite the “vagueries” of transmission, it offers a far more plausible explanation. “From Marāgha to Trabzon: Transmission of Astronomical Parameters by Gregory Chioniades – An Analysis of ‘the Tables of 1093’” Sajjad Nikfahm-Khubravan (McGill University) At the beginning of the 14th century, Gregory Chioniades of Constantinople traveled to Azarbayjān where he came to know the Islamic astronomical corpus. Returning to Byzantium, he brought many astronomical texts. Among these texts is a series of astronomical tables for calculating planetary positions, which David Pingree called “the tables of 1093.” Three copies of these tables are extant in the Vatican and Florence libraries. These tables, whose Islamic origins has been acknowledged, but not determined, relate to a genre of Islamic astronomical writing known as “zīj.” The tables of 1093, which are calculated using the double-argument planetary equation tables and hence are easy to use, but complicate to calculate, are the subject of this paper. Up to now the nature and origins of these

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 118

tables remained unknown. I present here an analysis of these tables, extract their underlying parameters, and speculate about their origins. “A Fusion of Tables: John Chortasmenos and Persian Astronomy” Anne-Laurence Caudano (University of Winnipeg) By 1300, Byzantine astronomers admitted that Ptolemy’s astronomical tables were outdated and did not yield precise results. Some, therefore, sought to improve the results of their calculations by looking for other texts. Among the Persian, Latin, and Jewish works adapted in Greek in the 14th and 15th centuries, the Persian tables and methods were the most studied. Within this corpus, the Byzantines were mostly familiar with Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī’s Zīj-i Īlkhānī, through George Chrysokokkes’ Persian Syntaxis (ca. 1347), a version of which also circulated in Latin by the early 15th century. While some astronomers embraced these tables exclusively, others developed means to improve the Greek tables by combining them with Persian data and methods. These attempts are crystallized in the work of the patriarchal notary John Chortasmenos (fl. c. 1408-1415), whose compendia of astronomical texts and exercises include a number of eclipses calculated with the Greek and the Persian methods, as well as with an original, but awkward, system that mixed both. His manuscripts also tie him to the proto-Plethon tables (c. 1414), based on Persian parameters but later developed on an entirely new model by George Gemistos Plethon. Chortasmenos did not travel far from Constantinople, but he belonged to a tightly knit network of Byzantine astronomers / diplomats / theologians with a wider international reach that, notably, included Plethon, Bessarion and Isidore of Kiev. As such, he participated actively in the astronomical studies and exchanges that took place in the Mediterranean at the time. “Networks and Exchange Between the Ilkhanids and the Byzantine Empire” Robert Morrison (Bowdoin College) The astronomy of the Ilkhanids reached the Byzantine Empire in two ways. First, the scholar Gregory Chioniades traveled to Marāgha in the late 13th century and received information on both theoretical and mathematical astronomy. The information about mathematical astronomy was the basis for a few zījes that Chioniades produced in Greek. Chioniades also learned about some of the developments in theoretical astronomy due to scholars associated with the Marāgha observatory. Scholars have understood this exchange of information about theoretical astronomy to be most significant for investigations about the background of European Renaissance astronomy. Second, another Byzantine scholar, George Chrysococcès, who traveled to Trebizond in 1347 to learn about Persian astronomy (i.e. from Marāgha), produced the Persian Syntaxis, a work later translated into Hebrew. A Jewish scholar from Constantinople, Mordechai Khumṭiano (d. 1485-90) authored a Hebrew text entitled Peirush luḥot Paras (Commentary on the Persian Tables), a defense of astronomical tables based on those produced under the Ilkhanids at Marāgha and Tabriz. There is no doubt that material from Ilkhanid zījes played a role in the scientific culture of Romaniot Jews and Byzantine Christian scholars. This presentation focuses on how Khumṭiano defended the Persian method against those of Ptolemy, who was favored by Byzantine scholars such as Isaac

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 9:00–11:45 a.m. | 119

Argyros. It examines an Almagest commentary due to Khumṭiano and his student Elijah Mizraḥi for any trace of theoretical astronomy from Marāgha and, finally, explores the extent to which a fifteenth and sixteenth-century scholarly network in the Eastern Mediterranean facilitated this exchange. “Immanuel Bonfil’s Book of Six Wings: The Circulation of Astronomical Knowledge over Three Centuries” Richard Kremer (Dartmouth College) Written around 1340 in Hebrew at Tarascon on the Rhône, the Sepher Shesh Kenaphayim (Book of Six Wings) presents six tables for predicting eclipses, largely based on the parameters and methods of al-Battani. This work, composed by the Rabbi Immanuel ben Jacob Bonfils, enjoyed considerable distribution and remains extant in 90 Hebrew manuscripts, 12 Greek manuscripts (translated in 1435), three Latin versions (translated in 1406 and 1437), and one lost Slavonic translation made in Kiev. In the 1630s, Gassendi and Peiresc had a Hebrew version that Solomon Azubi, a rabbi in Carpentras, translated into Provençal. Very few sets of medieval astronomical tables diffused through this number of languages, astronomical communities, and centuries. In this paper I will examine the contexts for the Greek, Latin and French translations of Bonfils' tables and will ask why these tables might have moved so easily given the existence, over these three centuries, of better known, competing astronomical tables.

12:00–1:15 p.m. Forum for History of Human Science Distinguished Lecture “Infrastructure of Not-Counting” Michelle Murphy Roundtable: Thematic Fields and Rethinking the Canon for Early Modern Science “Early Modern Science as a Visual Pursuit: Where are the Maps?” Surekha Davies (Western Connecticut State University) Historians of science and of art have increasingly drawn from one another other in pursuit of new sources and methods with which to think about science as a visual pursuit. Some have turned their questions to the map. Where they have examined the epistemic quality of maps, they have largely focused on maps as purveyors of topography, or on the physical features of geographical space. Yet, maps remain to be incorporated into broader conversations about epistemic images and the culture of the diagram. For example, the epistemic work done by images on maps, rather than by maps as images, has received little attention. In a 2015 review essay in Renaissance Quarterly, Alexander Marr explored several questions that animate work at the intersection of art and science. But understanding epistemic images and examining the intersection of the traditional histories of art and

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 12:00–1:15 p.m. | 120

science are not the same thing. Illustrations on maps have played only a very limited part in the disciplinary – perhaps one might even say disciplined – fields of early modern science and history of art. The epistemic significance of these images has gone almost unnoticed. This presentation asks how narratives on the visual cultures of early modern science might be reconceived in order to pay attention to the epistemic significance of maps. “The Scientific Revolution: The Iberian Question” Hugh Cagle (University of Utah) In recent years, history of science has begun to acknowledge the importance of practices, disciplines, and participants beyond the mathematical spheres in the making of new knowledge. Many scholars have been uncovering early modern botany, natural history, artisans, women, and physicians, and are investigating the ways in which empire, expansion, and colonization made new spheres of empiricism and collecting possible. The turn to the Atlantic in the historiography of the Scientific Revolution, however, has yet to absorb the revolutionary implications of Iberian overseas expansion. In the historical profession more broadly, the Atlantic turn has highlighted the importance of the trans-imperial and transnational circulation of peoples, objects, and ideas. Yet narratives of the Scientific Revolution still remain predominantly northern European or national in scope. How can the turn to the transnational and global help us change the heuristic uses of the category of the Scientific Revolution? “Indigenous Studies: It’s Not About the West and the Rest” Marcy Norton (George Washington University) This presentation proposes that the scholarship around the formation of early modern science needs to pay greater attention to the role of indigenous agents and ontologies in the Americas. It asks how we might understand the nature of the historiographical roadblocks and consider innovative methodological and hermeneutic approaches. Early modern natural history and natural philosophy are utterly entangled with European encounters with non-European cultures. However, despite some notable exceptions, Native Americans and indigenous ontologies remain marginal in these histories of science. Building from my recent essay, “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” (Colonial Latin American Review, 2017), I discuss some of the root causes of this neglect, such as assumptions about epistemology that presume impermeability, and suggest methodologies that might allow better integration of indigenous studies and the history of science.

1:30–2:30 p.m. The 2017 Elizabeth Paris Public Engagement Event “Moral Witnessing in the History of Science” Alice Dreger

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 1:30–2:30 p.m. | 121

When I was leaving New York for Indiana University to pursue a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science, my mother—a Polish survivor of World War II—said to me that she hoped I would pursue Philosophy rather than History. With Philosophy, she said, you could be useful to others. Not so, she suggested, with History. This talk is a response to my mother, twenty-seven years later. (Sometimes it takes a while to get your argument together.) It is an exploration of the work of historians of science who have opted sometimes to consciously use our discipline to try to help people in need, including those who have been harmed and those who disproportionately risk future harm. My own work has been composed of two major topics: the biomedical and social (mis)treatment of people born with atypical anatomies, including people with intersex and dwarfism and those born conjoined; and activist attacks on scientists whose work has upset various identity-based groups. Experiences in these areas have led me to think a lot about the power of history as a form of witnessing but also about the significant dangers of mixing caring with scholarship. In this lecture, I’ll draw on my own work as well as that of other historians of science who have labored in the history of research, biomedicine, and environmental and climate science, to raise some considerations about this kind of endeavor. It seems especially important for us to explore these issues as we enter a period of righteousness about science, and it seems especially important for us to think about how harmful are simplistic histories of good and evil, particularly in the History of Science. In other words, it feels like it’s a good time for some philosophy. (But we can call it historiography, and not tell my mother.)

2:45–4:45 p.m. After Origin: Rethinking Darwin's Ideas and Their Reception ‘Living Mingled’: Darwin’s Botany, Race, and Reproduction in Nineteenth-Century America” Tina Gianquitto (Colorado School of Mines) This paper examines both Darwin’s experiments involving cross- and self-fertilization and popular responses to those experiments in U.S. periodical literature. The paper places Darwin’s studies of dimorphism and his conclusions about intercrossing, fertility, and common ancestry into the context of discussions about race, miscegenation, and civil war in the United States. Darwin argued that dimorphism, or differentiation from a simpler to a more complex form, developed as an evolutionary adaptation to prevent weak self-fertilization and promote robust cross-fertilization. Sterility marks individuals who have so diverged over time as to be reproductively distinct from each other, while fertility serves to denote evolutionary kinship. Darwin’s argument powerfully undercut the rhetoric of anti-abolitionists, who argued that the races of man were distinct and separately created. It also shows how evolutionary support for monogenetic theory provided a platform for later reformers to

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 122

argue for racial equality. Darwin’s studies into cross-fertilization re-emerged toward the end of the 19th century in the U.S., anchoring anti-nativist, anti-immigration arguments. “Diagramming Evolution: The Case of Darwin’s Trees” Greg Priest (Stanford University) From his earliest student days through the writing of his last book, Charles Darwin drew diagrams. In developing his evolutionary ideas, his preferred form of diagram was the tree. An examination of several of Darwin’s trees—from sketches in a private notebook from the late 1830s through the diagram published in the Origin—opens a window onto the role of diagramming in Darwin’s scientific practice. By diagramming, Darwin could simultaneously represent both observable patterns in nature and conjectural narratives of evolutionary history. He could then bring these natural patterns and narratives into dialogue, allowing him to explore whether the narratives could explain the patterns. But Darwin’s diagrams, and the historical narratives they embodied, did not represent series of events that he claimed had actually occurred; instead, they were conjectural, schematic and probabilistic. Nevertheless, he believed that his diagrammatic narratives explained fundamental aspects of the evolutionary process. By examining Darwin’s diagrammatic practices, we can better understand how he conceived of evolutionary explanation, and how diagramming contributed to the emerging science of evolutionary biology. “Group Selection and Individual Selection in Darwin's Explanation of Altruism” Anne-Marie Gagné-Julien (Université du Québec à Montréal) Did Darwin think of group selection as a possible mechanism that could explain the evolution of altruistic traits even if he sees organisms as the principal units of selection? It is possible to distinguish between three different answers to this question. (1) Some deny that Darwin ever invoke group selection and that he sticks to individual selection (i.e. Ghiselin 1969). (2) Most commentators argue that Darwin invokes group selection to account for mutual aid and altruism (i.e. Borello 2010). (3) Some go further and defend that by using group selection, Darwin has to contradict the principle of organismic selection to explain the emergence of altruistic traits, a contradiction that he would only accept in order to explain the evolution of human morality (Gayon 1992, Ruse 1980). In this paper, I will argue for an interpretation that fits between (2) and (3). The two main theses of this paper are as follows: (1) there is no major discontinuity between The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) about how Darwin conceives organismic selection and the possibility of group selection; (2) even if Darwin conceives group selection as acting against individual interests, he sees this process as compatible with the primacy he gives to individual selection. The second thesis has generally been missed by commentators. For Darwin, group selection doesn’t contradict the principles of individual selection. In this paper, I want to put forward the compatibility that Darwin tries to articulate between individual and group selection. “Translation and Transmutation: The Origin of Species in China” SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 123

Xiaoxing Jin (University of Notre Dame) Darwinian principles do not develop in isolation from the people who use them. The earliest references to Darwin in China appeared in the 1870s through the writings of Western missionaries who provided the Chinese with the earliest information on evolutionary doctrines, with Christian beliefs encoded into their texts. Meanwhile, Chinese ambassadors, literati and overseas students contributed to the dissemination of evolutionary ideas with modest effect. The “evolutionary sensation” in China was, instead, generated by the Chinese Spencerian Yan Fu's (1854-1921) paraphrased translation and reformulation of Thomas Huxley’s Romanes lecture, Evolution and Ethics, in 1896. It was from this source that “Darwin” became well-known in China—although it was Darwin’s name, rather than his ideas, that entered the discussions of the Chinese intellectuals. The Origin of Species itself began to receive attention only at the turn of the 20th century. Nonetheless, the translation process was haphazard between 1902 and 1920, with the full text of the sixth edition of the Origin published only in September 1920. The translator, Ma Junwu (18811940), incorporated non-Darwinian doctrines, particularly Lamarckian, Spenserian and Huxleyian principles, into his edition of the Chinese Origin. This partly reflected the importance of the preexisting Chinese intellectual background. In this paper, I will elucidate Ma Junwu's culturallyconditioned reinterpretation of the Origin, and situate his transformation of Darwin’s principal concepts—variation, adaptation, the struggle for existence, artificial selection and Natural Selection—in China's broad historical context of the first two decades of the 20th century.

Animals in the Early Modern Atlantic World “There is the Sea, Vast and Spacious: Slavery, Natural History, and Collections of Marine Life in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic” Christopher Blakley (Rutgers University) This paper questions how individuals engaged in the slave trade and slavery in the British Atlantic exploited their position and access to enslaved collectors to accumulate specimens and descriptions of marine animals throughout the eighteenth century. Collecting animals below the waterline for patrons offered agents of the slave trade, such as clerks and surgeons, routes to status as naturalists. Such individuals often coerced enslaved people, especially those with a reputation for diving, to capture distant and dangerous fauna. For others, including clergy and poets, gathering sea creatures presented opportunities for cultivating friendship with slaveholders, leisure, and literary celebrity. Through case studies from the Gambia River, Río de la Plata, and the West Indies, this paper investigates collectors who acquired animals such as sea lions, electric rays, and murexes to intrigue their patrons. Asking how these individuals accumulated animals reveals how commercial, scientific, and literary networks assembled under slavery produced and circulated knowledge in natural history. Using travel accounts, natural histories, and an unpublished manuscript, I ask how aquatic animals in particular became central to natural history as objects of curiosity, beauty, and mercantile projecting. Moreover, the paper highlights the hazardous labor of enslaved assistants in producing these collections. Uncovering exchanges of fauna between elite collectors at the metropole and individuals at slave trading forts, during expeditions for slaving companies, and on plantations in the SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 124

colonies demonstrates how slavery facilitated transatlantic networks of information and the ways in which animals appeared in passages to credit in early modern science. “The Flounder and the Ray: Flattening Natural History in the Eighteenth Century” Whitney Barlow Robles (Harvard University) This paper explores flatness as a method of specimen preservation, a mode of seeing, and a way of animal being in eighteenth-century natural history. Focusing primarily on the British Atlantic, I examine how and why naturalists dried and flattened organisms—such as fishes, corals, snakes, and insects—in order to understand and preserve them. I investigate several collections of fish specimens that were slit in half, dried, and then pressed and sewn or varnished to paper like plants. These specimens literalized the widespread period metaphor of the “page” or “book” of nature, serving as objects of natural theology as well as scientific paperwork. While naturalists would use this technique to standardize nature and render watery worlds (and extensive empires) visible, the habits and material form of fishes could encourage such preservation or confound it, revealing how animals actively shaped what humans learned about their objects of study. I also draw from food history and material culture studies to consider how craft knowledge—such as familiarity with cooking fishes— informed natural historical practice, and I trace struggles between scientists who wanted to preserve their animal specimens and other human and insect actors who wanted to eat them. Finally, I recount my own attempts to make a flattened fish specimen in this tradition using instructions from the 1740s and a European seabass from the grocery store, considering how we might understand historical craft practices by reconstructing specimen preservation techniques and conducting our own embodied investigations of animals. “Amerindian Natural History in the “Aztec Encyclopaedia Iris Montero Sobrevilla (Brown University) At the time of encounter between European and Amerindian cultures, natural history was undergoing profound transformations, fuelled by a renewed interest in the classical iterations of knowledge associated with Aristotle and Pliny. Aristotelian models, discussing concepts such as the scala naturae, served as a template on which to superimpose questions about the New World. Aristotelian framing in works such as Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias helped address a variety of epistemological challenges and assured successful reception, including prompt translation and multiple editions. Plinian models, on the other hand, in their encyclopaedic ambition, often used a proto-ethnographic methodology and negotiated with native views of nature. These works also tended to be longer and, often due to their heavy native imprint, to remain in manuscript form. This indigenous imprint is never more evident than in the treatment of animals. This paper explores the extent of indigenous intervention in natural historical projects in the sixteenth century, focusing on the Mexica or Aztec people of New Spain and their role in shaping the Florentine Codex, often labelled ‘the Aztec encyclopaedia.’ Through the case of the hummingbird, a paradigmatic New World animal, I argue that the notion of indigenous natural history takes on new meaning in the Florentine Codex. No longer referring only to the descriptive genre of historiae applied to the

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 125

natural world, it came to signify a history where nature, and animals in particular, were central actors, and where human narratives were intertwined and indistinguishable from those centering nonhuman subjects. “’To Deaden the Memory’: Bestiality and Animal Erasure in Colonial New Spain, 1563–1821” Zeb Tortorici (New York University) This paper explores how records of the crime of bestiality—amply recorded and documented in Mexican and Guatemalan colonial archives—can be used by historians to articulate the complex interrelationship between colonialism, environmental change, and human-animal interactions. Based on a corpus of 119 criminal cases and 25 Inquisition denunciations of bestiality throughout New Spain between 1563 and 1821, I explore how these records are demonstrative of environmental change and historical subjectivity in colonial Latin America. With the glaring exception of one case—in which a thirteen-year-old Maya boy named Pedro Na was caught having sex with a Mesoamerican turkey (gallina de la tierra) in 1563 in Mérida, Yucatán—these cases implicate only European domesticated animals such as donkeys, mares, dogs, mules, cows, goats, and sheep. This significant fact challenges colonial tropes and stereotypes that bestiality was an act perpetrated largely by native peoples due to their deviant desires and inherent “rusticity.” This record set also allows us to historicize particular animal deaths, given that colonial authorities ritualistically killed nearly all of the animals implicated in bestiality cases while meting out comparatively lenient sentences to the human offenders who initiated such acts. In the language of the courts, colonial authorities sought to “deaden the memory of the act” through the eradication of the physical evidence—the body of the nonhuman animal—at the same time that they assiduously recorded and transcribed the details of the crime within the documents that eventually ended up in Latin American historical archives.

Correcting the Record: Women in Biology, Chemistry, and Public Health “Margaret Fountaine: A Gentlewoman of Science” Leore Green (Tel Aviv University) Margaret Fountaine (1862-1940) was an extraordinary female entomologist at a time when women were largely excluded from the British scientific community. She published fifteen articles in entomological magazines, was a member of two scientific societies – one them was the most important entomological society in Britain at the time, the Royal Entomological Society of London – and took part in entomological meetings and international congresses. How did she manage to do all that? I claim that the answer lies in her class, her access to imperial resources, and her social networking. All of these allowed her to travel around the globe, and collect knowledge and rare specimens at exotic places to which most entomologists did not have access. This privileged knowledge gave her an advantage – it was crucial to her acceptance as an expert within the

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 126

entomological community. However, had she been of a lower class than her upper-middle class, it is doubtful whether she would have been accepted, and it is certain that she would not have been able to travel in the same way. So far, most scholarship on the subject of women in natural history and the life sciences in the Victorian and Edwardian period have focused on women’s roundabout contributions, through botanical illustration for example. In my research I analyse those women who acted from within the mainstream scientific community itself, and Fountaine is an excellent case-study of one such woman, and of the complexities of gender, class, and even imperialism inherent in the research of these women. “Creating a Narrative for Public Health’s Role in Society” Rebecca Johnson (Laboure College) In the early twentieth century, the narrative by experts helped to justify the need for institutionalized public health and its growing authority in American society. Priscilla Wald argues that medical experts’ power to shape disease outbreak narratives enabled them to designate who was healthy, who was diseased, who was safe and who was dangerous. However, the power of narratives and their afterlives to determine the role that public health plays in American society remains largely unexamined. Using Dr. Sara Josephine Baker, director of New York City’s Bureau of Child Hygiene, as a lens, this study explores the importance of an organizing narrative for the long-term effectiveness and support of American public health. I draw attention to aspects of the historical and cultural context in which Baker was working and writing to contextualize her narrative for public health and to illustrate the impact that contextualized narrative has on the practice of public health. Baker believed that scientific knowledge can be cooperatively utilized by individuals and institutions for the wellbeing of society, but only if all constituents – politicians, citizens, charitable organizations, medical experts, and the press – can recognize a unifying and evolving narrative for its role in society. At a time when American mothers and infants do not have equal access to preventative care, and the role of government in preventative care is still questioned, Baker’s use of narrative provides a potentially “usable past” for the trajectory of preventative health services for American mothers and babies in the present and future. “Working Around Nepotism: Married Women in Biological Research, 1920-1950” Marsha Richmond (Wayne State University) American women began to enter academic biology in increasing numbers in the early years of the twentieth-century, once barriers to their obtaining a university degree in science were systematically dismantled. By the 1920s, many even pursued advanced degrees under some of the most prestigious biologists in the country. Yet, while receiving a Ph.D. in zoology or botany could provide a satisfying sense of personal accomplishment, it yielded no guarantee of attaining a subsequent career in science. Indeed, for most women in science, visible and invisible obstacles thwarted their attempts to obtain positions in universities, research institutes, government agencies, or industry.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 127

Among the various social practices that hindered equality of opportunity for women in science, none was more nefarious than anti-nepotism regulations, which prohibited universities from hiring faculty spouses. Given that by the 1920s, mixed gender graduate programs were leading to marriages and more duel career couples in science, anti-nepotism rules were particularly odious. While they may have served a legitimate function in politics, in academics they successfully prevented the wives of faculty members from being hired at the same institution, no matter how distinguished their qualifications. This paper examines the strategies employed by three women who held MS degrees and PhDs in biology—Lilian Vaughan Morgan (1870-1952), Helen Redfield Schultz (1900-1997), and Sally Hughes-Schrader (1895-1984)—that allowed them to circumvent anti-nepotism rules and pursue successful, if formally unacknowledged, research careers in biology.

German Biology and its Legacy (I): Reassessing Kant and Blumenbach “Blumenbach, Kant and the Rise of German Biology” Andrea Gambarotto (Université Catholique de Louvain) Since the publication of Timothy Lenoir’s seminal monograph about teleology and mechanics in nineteenth-century German biology, the vast majority of scholarly work dedicated to this historical period has addressed the emergence of biology in Germany using the vocabulary introduced by Imre Lakatos to discuss the methodology of scientific research programs. In fact, the idea of a KantBlumenbach “teleomechanical” research program for biology, which was first formulated by Lenoir in 1982, is still largely endorsed in recent studies. I argue that this notion of a Kant-Blumenbach research program is inadequate to account for the rise of biology in Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. In fact, Kant did not consider biology a proper science, i.e. treating its objects wholly according to a priori principles, because such consideration of living beings for him implied teleological principles, and in his view, teleological principles have a regulative (i.e. heuristic) character that make them insufficient to ground a theory. Despite Kant’s denial, in the late eighteenth century the term “biology” began to appear in the works of several naturalists, the most important instance being in the monumental Biologie, oder Philosophie lebenden für Natur und der Naturforscher und Ärtzte (1802-1822) by Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus. My talk addresses the following question: what happened shortly after Kant’s denial to induce naturalists like Treviranus to label “biology” the scientific field concerned with physical life as a natural phenomenon? “What’s an Organism among Friends? Reassessing Blumenbach and Kant’s Intellectual Relationship” Ryan Feigenbaum (History of Science Society) Scholars continue to find a critical moment for the history of biology in Blumenbach and Kant’s intellectual relationship. Yet, the terms of that relationship remain contested. Did Blumenbach implement the methodological best practices suggested by Kant, arming a generation of life scientists with them in the process? Or did Blumenbach take Kant’s philosophical positions in name only,

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 128

having already come to his own methodology long before reading Kant’s work? Foregoing interpretations that answer questions such as these have focused on the possibility of Kant’s influence on Blumenbach, while largely ignoring or denying the latter’s possible influence on the former. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this view by asserting that Kant did owe Blumenbach an intellectual debt, as Kant himself acknowledged in the only letter he ever sent to him in 1790. Analysis of the language and logic of §64 of the third Critique reveals that Blumenbach’s essay on the formative drive is an essential source for Kant’s preliminary definition of organized being. Moreover, Kant’s remark in his letter that Blumenbach provided a successful model for the unification of mechanical and teleological principles is not empty praise, but rather indication that the Bildungstrieb concept offered a true source of this unification―one that Kant utilized in his own work thereafter. Hence, Blumenbach was essential to Kant’s philosophy of the organic world, which reaffirms the indispensability of this intellectual relationship for any understanding of the epistemic foundations of biology. “Kant’s Preformationism Revisited: Implications for Interpreting the “Kantian Legacy” in Natural History” Phillip Sloan (University of Notre Dame) In a 2002 paper “Preforming the Categories: Kant and Eighteenth Century Generation Theory,” I argued that a careful reading critical texts underlying Kant’s argument for the necessity of the categories indicated his clear endorsement of a form of biological preformationism—the KeimeAnlagen theory—which seems to have been Kant’s own theoretical creation. Criticisms of these claims by some Kant scholars (e.g. Marcel Quarfood, 2004) have challenged this argument. Further studies and discussions in the literature (Zammito, Mikkelsen) have, in my view, served to reinforce, rather than weaken, my arguments. In this paper I will revisit my earlier arguments against the criticisms raised since 2002, and I will provide a deeper positioning of these arguments against the embryological theory of the late eighteenth century. The goal will be to elucidate more deeply the degree to which Kant’s encounter in the late 1780s with Johann Blumenbach’s changed views on biological preformationism may or may not have altered Kant’s own sophisticated version of this theory, with implications for his concept of categorical necessity and its bearing on his heritage in natural history. “Does Kant abandon Natural History in the Critique of Judgment?” Peter McLaughlin (Universität Heidelberg) Kant made a somewhat idiosyncratic distinction between natural history and natural description, naming what everyone else called historia naturalis ‘Naturbeschreibung’ in contrast to his own favored discipline ‘Naturgeschichte’. There was a model of sorts for this in the division of labor between Buffon (histoire) and Daubenton (description) in the Histoire naturelle project. In the Methodology of the Critique of Judgment (§79) Kant seems to reverse course, placing his own efforts squarely within natural description and characterizing natural history as “an adventure of reason” to which sometimes even the best minds unfortunately succumb. In this talk I will look for

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 129

an explanation of this reversal in the view of the organism (in §65) as the analogue of art and life, such that the idea of the whole is not viewed as if it were the ground of the phenomenon, but merely as the cognitive ground of its unity.

Making Modern Organic Time “Drip Drip Drop goes the Factory Clock: Ecology, Climate, and the Design of American Cotton Mills, 1830-1870” Kate Wersan (University of Wisconsin-Madison) While the factory clock occupies an iconic place in the historiography of industrialization, during the nineteenth century many Americans also pursued increased productivity, discipline, and efficiency by rejecting the regular units of the clock and seeking to align their labor more closely with the rhythms of the natural world. In this paper I argue that for cotton mill managers and operatives, as well as the inventors of American water-powered textile machinery, the goal of “perpetual production” required a closer relationship with the natural environment, and a deep, though often narrow, knowledge of local ecosystems. In water-powered cotton mills, ecology was a form of timekeeping, and harmony with nature another name for efficiency. This paper suggests that the mid-nineteenth century factory building developed as a technology to interpret and correlate processes in the natural environment (inputs), monitor them continuously based on predetermined, standardized, and universalized processes (programs), and produce place-specific temporal information that could then be used to organize and regulate labor within the mill (outputs). Necessitated by the biology of the cotton plant, the ecology of labor in the mill, and the mechanics of water-powered cotton machinery, the very structure of a mid-nineteenth century cotton factory became a tool of anticipation: an organic timekeeper and a type of early analog computer. Far from suggesting that the synchronicity with natural processes these timekeepers enabled created more humane work environments, this line of argument helps us understand many of the subtleties of mid-century contestations over factory work schedules, expertise, and machine intelligence. “Arresting the Finger of Time: Temporality, Mobility, and the Science of Artificial Refrigeration, 1860-1900” Rebecca Woods (University of Toronto) By the close of the nineteenth century, mechanical refrigeration was widely celebrated as a triumph over the natural world. By harnessing the novel science of thermodynamics, steam-powered refrigerating engines forestalled putrefaction in animal flesh, dairy, and eventually fruit. Doing so, they seemed capable of reordering time and space. This paper examines contemporary claims of this nature, arguing that nowhere was the impact of artificial refrigeration more apparent than in the context of the British Empire, where it effectively redrew the map, pulling the pastoral “ghost acres” of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada—as well as Argentina and the United States—closer to metropolitan Britain. Equally, mechanical refrigeration appeared to bring time itself under the aegis of mankind, reordering traditional seasonality (for example, by making antipodean lamb available to

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 130

British diners in December as well as in April) and forestalling the effects of death (rot and decay) if not death itself. Yet claims made on behalf of the novel technology—by statesmen, scientists, boosters and engineers—were often overblown. Early efforts to apply novel refrigeration technology to colonial trade routes were plagued by technological failure. Breakage was commonplace, and even where machinery functioned properly, frozen cargo was always vulnerable to the vicissitudes of climate, on land (especially in the Australian colonies) and at sea. Thus, although the technology promised to make “climate, seasons, plenty, scarcity, [and] distance...all shake hands,” according to an early Australian booster, the new arrangements of time and space ostensibly ushered in by refrigeration technology were partial at best. “Excavating Planetary Time: G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Making of a Biosphere” Leah Aronowsky (Harvard University) In the mid-1940s, Yale ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson began an ambitious research project: to survey and assemble all existing knowledge about the planetary phosphorus cycle. Stemming from his career-long effort to pioneer the discipline of biogeochemistry, Hutchinson’s survey focused primarily on the cycle as mediated by guano, the phosphorus-rich animal droppings produced by seabirds and heralded the world over as a potent agricultural fertilizer. As part of his research, Hutchinson aimed to develop the natural history of colossal guano deposits that had accumulated on islands off the coast of Peru. These deposits had long ceased to exist—an effect of industrial-scale extraction during the 1860s international Guano Rush—but Hutchinson was able to reconstruct these deposits by using a historical photograph. Using the guano’s geologic-like layers of stratification captured in the image, Hutchinson outlined an absolute chronology for the origins of these deposits, ultimately concluding that the formations were relatively young in age. This paper charts Hutchinson’s efforts to survey the planet’s guano-mediated phosphorus cycles, arguing that, in placing the guano deposits on the same timescale as human—rather than geological—history, the ecologist subtly rebuked theories of history as applied to the human realm: prevailing scientific interpretations cast the guano deposits as essentially prehistoric, a hypothesis that was, I show, in keeping with theories of history that cast “primitive” nations like Peru as literally living in a different time. By contrast, Hutchinson used his findings about the natural historical timescale of phosphorus to implicitly argue for the coevalness of cultures. “Matter of Time: Making and Measuring the Ovarian Reserve” Jenna Healey (Queens University) Within the context of reproductive medicine, the “ovarian reserve” has become a popular term to describe the number and quality of germ cells remaining in the ovary. Beginning in the early 1990s, the ovarian reserve was deployed clinically to forecast a female patient’s chances of conceiving, with or without the use of assisted reproductive technologies. Fertility specialists have argued that ovarian reserve is a better predictor of conception than chronological age alone, building on the assumption that reproductive tissue ages at a different rate than the rest of the body. This paper will examine the

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 131

history of the “ovarian reserve” to understand how biologists and physicians have ascribed a unique temporality to reproductive tissue. Asserting that a patient’s ovarian age could diverge from their chronological age required a reconceptualization of the ovary as particularly vulnerable to the passage of time, as well as to toxic environmental exposures that could accelerate the aging process. This temporal vulnerability was inevitably gendered: while the ovary was understood to be in a constant state of decline, the continuous generation of sperm cells made them invulnerable to aging, an assumption that has only recently been challenged by studies of the male reproductive system. The increasing use of assisted reproductive technologies in the 1980s and 1990s allowed the oocyte to become an independent object of study, while cultural concerns about the ticking of a woman’s “biological clock” encouraged the development of several competing methods for quantifying and measuring ovarian age.

Pharmacology and Plant Medicine in Global Context “Reporting on Exotic Materia Medica: The Portuguese Viceroy’s 1596 Report on Indian Medicinal Plants” Oana Baboi (University of Toronto, IHPST) How early modern European colonial agents, missionaries, and travellers preserved their health while living in the tropical climates of Asia? As many Jesuits sent on evangelical missions to India had difficulties adapting to the new environment and helplessly watched their bodies succumb to unfamiliar diseases, they became eager to learn about local healing practices. Only a few manuscript sources survive today to give evidence of Jesuit missionaries’ involvement in acquiring information on indigenous materia medica and therapeutic practices. One such rare manuscript belonged to François de Rougemont (Belgium, 1624-China, 1676). Entitled Breve Compendio de Varias Receitas de Medicina (Brief Compendium of Various Medicinal Recipes), the manuscript contains an extraordinarily rich collection of botanical notes and healing recipes he collected while traveling from Europe to his mission post in China. While passing through Goa, he acquired an official report on Indian plants with healing qualities. Drafted at Philip II’s order, the report is indicative of the Iberian Empire’s interest in surveying the natural sources available in its overseas territories and the secrecy surrounding such sensitive information in the early modern times. Referencing the copy of the report collected by Father François de Rougemont, my paper discusses the construction of medical knowledge in the contact zones and its circulation in the 17th century between Asia and Europe. “Of Rarity, Honesty and Usefulness: Pierre Pomet and the Issue of Choosing Drugs in Paris by 1700” Laia Portet Codina (University of Cambridge) Organizing nature and systematizing information became pressing concerns to seventeenth and eighteenth-century savants. Within a context of rapid accumulation of knowledge and materials, SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 132

print and scholarship played determining roles in the selection of not only what was important to know about drugs but also which substances were worthwhile reaching for and deserved scholarly attention. Printed catalogs of drugs, medical books, pharmacopeia and botanical treatises affected and reflected the globalization of the pharmaceutical market by assisting the systematization of exotic plants and conditioning their incorporation into European medical traditions. This paper tells the story of an early modern treatise of drugs written by the Parisian grocer-druggist Pierre Pomet (1658-1699) with the aim to assess the globalization of the medical marketplace of Paris and its immediate impact upon print culture and learned practices. It explores the relationship between types of expertise and principles of classification and how they constricted both scientific inquiry and consumption by analyzing the inner structure of the book and its place within early modern literature. Which materials were considered drugs? How were drugs identified and classified? How were they sold? Who studied them and why? By focusing on the Histoire Générale des Drogues and its author, this research sheds light on the paramount, and yet overlooked issue of choosing drugs in a city every day more fascinated by and suspicious of the world beyond its walls. “Traditional Indian Plant Medicine: Western Notice and Mainstreaming” Rajesh Kochhar (Punjab University Mathematics Department) Practical considerations compelled the British Indian medical establishment to take serious and sustained notice of the traditional Indian healthcare system (Ayurveda). Imported medicines were very expensive and ran the risk of deterioration during long transportation time. Most plants and shrubs described in British Pharmacopeia were not to be found in India. Many patients who came to European doctors had previously been treated by local practitioners with indigenous preparations or drugs known only by their vernacular name. In the first stage missionaries, medical men Indologists sat with with the traditional physicians for information. In the next stage, Indians with Western education became assistants to Europeans, and then researchers in their own right taking care to follow the methodology taught to them. . An authoritative work titled The Indigenous Drugs of India, prepared in 1867 by Kanny Lall Dey became required reading for European medical men in India. In course of time Indians became researchers in their own time, using the new methodology. In 1877, Udoy Chand Dutt extracted a Materia Medica from Sanskrit medical texts, giving only those details that arise as ‘a result of observation and experience’ and omitting those that are ‘the outcome of an erroneous system of pathology and therapeutics’. During the heyday of the colonial empire, Indians were very keen to validate their traditional knowledge in the Western eyes. It was with a great sense of achievement that the ‘British Pharmacopoeia authorities were at last prevailed upon to find a back seat for some Indian drugs in the Addendum’, published in 1900. “Cocktails and Fairy Tales: Angelo Mariani's "Contes" and Health Advertising in Early Twentieth Century Europe” Emily Beaton (University of Toronto)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 133

Vin Mariani — wine combined with the South American coca leaf— was introduced to Europe by pharmacist Angelo Mariani at the end of the nineteenth century. Coca is a plant native to the Andes and has long history of use in South America, and travelers to Peru in the 1800s reported back to Europe and the United States, lauding it as a “miracle drug.” What makes Mariani’s product unique was his original advertising strategy in the form of stories, or Contes. While he did exploit the traditional avenue of poster advertisements and testimonials, the Contes helped shine a spotlight on Mariani’s product. The Contes were written by popular authors and always featured Vin Mariani and coca in a starring role. These stories were a powerful form of advertising for Mariani, and they provide a useful avenue to investigate how the health benefits of coca were marketed to the European populace. This paper asks how Vin Mariani brings together medicine and consumer culture in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. It argues that Mariani’s Contes made credible the health claims of Vin Mariani. Two of the fourteen Contes, Pervenche and Un Chapitre Inédit de Don Quichotte will be analyzed to understand how the choice of imagery and other literary elements contributed to the marketing of a highly desirable product to Europe’s nineteenth- and early twentieth-century consumers. Through their fictitious narratives, these works emphasized that the product had specific health benefits and allowed the coca plant to be dissociated from the nonEuropean “other.”

Reinterpreting Maritime Science and Navigation “British Navigation as Science and Practice, 1673-1761” Jason Grier (York University) As the reach of European mariners lengthened between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the tools of navigation became increasingly sophisticated. From the perspective of instruments, mathematics and astronomy, navigation appears to have become increasingly ‘scientific’ during this period and its history can be told as a narrative of a transformation from simple instruments and localized knowledge to complex tools, mathematization and universal knowledge—a story which culminates with John Harrison’s chronometer and the ‘solving’ of the longitude problem. Yet, from the perspective of navigational practice, by and large little actually changed during these centuries. While it is true that ever more sophisticated instruments were developed, day-to-day navigation continued to rely primarily on dead-reckoning even after the perfection of Harrison’s chronometer. In this paper I will focus on the example of Edmond Halley’s Paramore voyages, especially his famous dispute with his lieutenant Edward Harrison, as well as evidence of the daily practice of navigation that can be found in logbooks in order to consider contrasting views of eighteenthcentury navigation as science and practice. “Seeing like a Circumnavigator: Early Nineteenth Century French Ships of Discovery as Centers of Calculation” Ralph Kingston (Auburn University)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 134

Discussing “centers of calculation,” Bruno Latour describes French explorer Lapérouse’s landing at Sakhalin. Lapérouse, Latour tells us, was interested in accumulating data to bring to France, not in analyzing his encounters. Mapmakers in depots and zoologists and botanists in natural history museums would process the information instead. Lapérouse saw Sakhalin. Back in Europe, scholars and scientists traveled across continents, climates, and periods by walking through a gallery and opening some drawers. This paper challenges this monopoly given to metropolitan calculation, the strict distinction between science in Paris and in the field. A ship was more than an instrument that “scribbles the shape of [countries].” Expeditions certainly collected. They noted, sketched, accumulated specimens. Shipboard scientists, however, did not forgo the opportunity to produce analyses. Early nineteenth century explorers ignored their instructions. Big decisions in terms of what should be pursued were made at sea. And, although metropolitan naturalists like Georges Cuvier were keen to disparage their efforts to be more than collectors, travelling naturalists dissected and described; they compared, combined, classified, and catalogued. Circumnavigators, in particular, carried observations from landing to landing. Crossing continents and climates, navigating place and space, they developed scientific theories and sought out proofs. Moving through the ocean, the ship was a center of calculation, studying places and people at a distance. Explorers forged a body of knowledge distinct from that produced by metropolitan scientists using their collections after their return. “Knowing the Ocean: the HMS Challenger Expedition and the Origins of the Ocean as a Scientific Space” Emma Zuroski (University of Auckland) In 1872 HMS Challenger set sail on a four-year circumnavigation of the globe with the goal of conducting the most complete and systematic exploration of the deep sea ever pursued. Touted as an emblematic success of Victorian science and continually identified as the beginning of modern oceanography, the Challenger expedition is a fundamental historical moment in the conception of the ocean as a scientific space. But what does it mean to know the ocean? While many historians have discussed the significance of the expedition for early oceanography, far fewer have examined the ways in which the form and function of the expedition established the dominant ways of knowing the ocean that have persisted into the twenty-first century. The history of the expedition demonstrates how the burgeoning political trend towards cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century lingers in our conception of the ocean as simultaneously a global space, a scientific object and a vast set of territories. In this talk I will examine the ways in which early scientific knowledge of the ocean was co-constructed with the methods of studying it. By historicizing the expedition, and locating early scientific studies of the ocean within trends of nineteenth century natural history, we can begin to understand the origins of the multitude of ways of knowing the ocean. Scientific Fisheries”: Social Organization and Working Culture at the Naples Zoological Station 1880-1913” SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 135

Katharina Steiner (University of Zurich) As the world’s first marine biological research center, in the late nineteenth century the Naples Zoological Station gained model status. This institution has always been considered a center for laboratory-based research, in particular experimental embryology. In recent historiographical discussion of the Station, we continue to read that field research was not carried out there. In my article, I argue that both field and laboratory research were practiced and that these practices were mutually interacting. On the basis of an investigation into the conceptual and practical execution of the “scientific fishery” research program, I show that the Station’s directors successively developed institutional structures for field-research. Field and laboratory were closely interlinked through a range of working steps taking in the sea, the Station’s laboratories, and working areas outside the scientific institution. The scientific fishery was the locus for a process transforming materia prima, freshly dredged material, into an object of research: e.g. a process moving past the micro-slide culminating in a published zoological illustration. My article offers an alternative historical view of the Naples Zoological Station by focusing on its permanent employees. The interweaving of field and laboratory in the concept of the “scientific fishery” was mirrored in the Station’s personnelstructure. The fishery carried out its activities through close cooperation of actors from various national origins, social milieus, and levels of professional experience. The differences manifest here were sharp, involving educational level, areas of expertise, and income. But these differences supported the Station’s emergence as a model European scientific research institution.

Scientific and Engineering Internationalism: Processes, Practices, Conflicts Universal Engineering: Technological Experts’ Claims for Nationalist and Internationalist Citizenship during the Interwar Period” Heidi Voskuhl (University of Pennsylvania) Engineers’ efforts to constitute themselves as a new professional group (and political and cultural elite) during the “Second” Industrial Revolution (c. 1870 to 1930) was both a national and a global phenomenon. Engineers set down accreditation rules for their professional knowledge and ethical codes, constituted themselves in associations and interest groups, developed curricula at a range of institutions of learning, lobbied governments for social and political recognition, and popularized engineering knowledge and practices. They forged institutional bonds within nation-states and across the globe, through international engineering associations and sustained migration. In my paper, I analyze how engineers relied in this process on distinctly internationalist ideas and principles, connecting them to their newly developed models of engineering knowledge and practice, their concerns for social recognition and social mobility, and their concerns for their respective nation states (and the publics in them) in a period of massive economic, diplomatic, and military crises. I first look at how ideas of internationalism were negotiated as essential parts of engineering knowledge and practice, which elevated the status of engineer as role model for both nationalist identities and functional internationalist institutions and agreements. Second, drawing on the

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 136

examples of Germany and the U.S., I study ideological tensions between engineers’ claims for bourgeois cosmopolitanism, engineers’ claims about the knowledge and ethos of their profession as supposedly universal and global, and the aggressive nationalisms and regionalisms of engineers’ newly founded professional organizations. “Joint Disagreements: Chemical Information, Chemical Naming, and Internationalism as Process, 1919- 1930” Evan Hepler-Smith (Harvard University) The standardization of nomenclature and terminology is often taken for granted as typical subject matter for international cooperation. But what were the affinities that bound nomenclature reform and international organizations together in the first place? This paper will investigate this question through a study of nomenclature reform activities of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) between 1919 and 1930. During these fragile early years of IUPAC, an organization that has since come to play a prominent role in global chemistry, the development of international standards for naming chemicals was a signature task justifying the Union’s existence. This paper argues that nomenclature took on this role for two reasons. First, nomenclature was bound up with providing access to chemical information, a matter of universal concern to academic and industrial chemists. Second, nomenclature was a good subject for disagreement. Lying at the intersection of language, information, chemical taxonomy, and publishing, naming proved a fruitful site for chemists to pursue a wide range of aims informed by diverse values and interests. IUPAC rules of nomenclature did not take hold in an especially broad range of nations and settings, but their development did cement IUPAC as a good place for working out political, economic, intellectual, and economic disagreements among chemists. This paper thus contributes to the historiography of scientific internationalism and of scientific information by showing how concerns about information impelled a process of international cooperation that constituted an enduring organization. “Cooperation or Collaboration?: DIN, Nazi Germany, and the Finnish Construction Industry” Nader Vossoughian (New York Institute of Technology) Like scientific and bibliographic organizations, standards organizations have played a significant role in promoting internationalist causes. Nation-states rely on them to broadcast national economic interests globally. Corporations partner with them to gain access to foreign markets. Economic policymakers use them to enforce globalization. Managers use them to maintain quality across national and linguistic boundaries. This presentation addresses the history of standards organizations, internationalism, and quality control in the field of industrial engineering. I consider the emergence of the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), founded in 1917. During the last two years of World War II, Germany's Nazi government used DIN to export its economic, military, and political goals. This represented an unlikely union, as DIN remained a private non-profit corporation throughout World War II, an unusual level of independence in Nazi Germany. I argue

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 137

that DIN gave Nazi officials an informal channel for coordinating with private companies throughout Europe. It made it possible for a company to cooperate with the Nazis economically without giving the appearance that it was collaborating politically. Agreements between DIN, Germany's Nazi government, and the Finnish lumber and construction industry illustrate this dynamic. The Finnish construction industry made important contributions to the mass production of Nazi camp barracks and emergency shelter design during the latter half of the war. I explore how these relationships may have influenced the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC), raising broader questions about the relationship between standardization, politics, and globalization in 20thcentury culture. “The Thaw in the Pole: Cold War Science and Showcasing at the Siberian Sciencecity and Antarctic Expeditions (1955-1964)” Ksenia Tatarchenko (University of Geneva) This paper contributes to the session’s focus on the making of international science by revealing how the Cold War highlighted a key ambiguity of Soviet science: producing universal knowledge in socialist ways. We now know that circulating people, ideas, and artifacts operationalized, breached, and occasionally transcended geopolitical divisions. This paper adds another dimension to such entanglements – Big Science as spectacle. It argues that showcasing was a constitutive element, not an accidental byproduct, of Khrushchev-era massive investment into ostensibly civilian scientific infrastructures across Siberia and Antarctica. In 1957, the year of Sputnik, the Soviet press announced the creation of the first Siberian science-city, Akademgorodok, and the images of “Ob,” the flagman of the Soviet expedition sailing south for the third time, proliferated. The aim here is not only to correct misleading historiographic claims conflating remoteness with “freedom" and deStalinization with deSovietization, but to explain the very size of the historical record associated with these projects. Situated across the globe, Siberian science-cities and Antarctic bases were presented in an unexpectedly similar way, as model scientific communities. Both locales enticed numerous visitors to record and share their experiences. Yet such visitors often passed over a key aspect of these sites – the co-dependency between the openness of international science and the secrecy regimes of national defense. Akademgorodok had many ties to “plutopias,” the closed cities of the Soviet nuclear program, and Antarctica's international “science and peace” to the Arctic's cold war frontier.

Sex and Medico-Legal Expertise “Sexual Forensics before Forensics: Investigating Sexual Crime in Early Modern Britain” Seth LeJacq (Duke University) This paper explores the medico-legal investigation of sexual crimes in early modern Britain. Britons harbored deep concerns over sexual violations against both male and female victims as well as strong fears of false accusations. Legal commentary had long considered such crimes as among the most difficult offenses to know and prove, and alongside written law and traditional practice required

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 138

“strict” physical proofs, especially when it came to the capital felonies of rape and sodomy. Yet while continental Europe had a significant corpus of forensic medical knowledge and practice bearing on these crimes, British practitioners by contrast had little by way of formal training, academic specialization, or any general organization within this area of legal medicine. Scholars working on related topics have long assumed that medical evidence was essential to these trials based on isolated examples that featured “expert” medical witnessing, but we in fact know little about the bodily evidence that featured in them, and who created legally important--and convincing--bodily knowledge. Drawing on a broad survey of British trial records from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth, including manuscript records from a range of courts and a variety of published trial accounts, this paper shows that the state of forensic medicine and strong cultural and professional pressures against engaging deeply with sexual crimes generally inhibited forensic practice in this area among officially-sanctioned practitioners. Laypeople instead provided the vast bulk of bodily evidence, and investigations and trials therefore provide us a rare window into complex lay understandings of sex, sexuality, and sexual crimes. “The Science of Child Sexual Abuse in Nineteenth-Century France” Claire Cage (University of South Alabama) Child sexual abuse emerged a distinct criminal category in France during the mid-nineteenth century as a result of changing as conceptions of childhood and sexuality. While child sexual abuse was a prevalent problem, most forensic experts devoted little attention in their written works to the subject. Nonetheless, there were a considerable number of cases of child sexual abuse in which medico-legal experts intervened, although the degree to which their reports and testimonies were decisive in the prosecution or conviction of those accused of sexual assault is difficult to determine and quantify. Doctors frequently found no evidence of sexual abuse when called upon to examine child victims. They also called into question the reliability of children who reported sexual abuse, and some published studies concerning children’s propensity to lie. Some prominent medico-legal experts who published works on the subject of child sexual abuse strongly warned fellow medical practitioners to avoid mistaking the signs of masturbation or poor hygienic practices among the lower classes for the signs of sexual abuse. While some medico-legal experts expressed confidence in their ability to determine whether sexual abuse occurred, others were less certain and more circumspect about their involvement in cases for which they had little experience or training and for which the signs of abuse were ephemeral in nature. Through their interventions in child sexual abuse cases and public proclamations on the subject, medico-legal experts played an important role in shaping attitudes toward sexual assault and the criminal prosecution of these cases. “Criminal Responsibility and Sexual Psychopathy in late-Victorian Britain” Catherine Evans (University of Toronto)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 139

In the late nineteenth century, European physicians with interests in psychiatry and the burgeoning field of criminal anthropology published works that described what German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing called ‘sexual psychopathy.’ In court, medico-legal experts could call defendants’ legal responsibility into question by diagnosing them with a sexual disorder that perverted their desires and afflicted them with irresistible, pathological compulsions. This paper explores how the concept of sexual psychopathy inflected British debates about criminal responsibility in the late nineteenth century. British civilization seemed, to some Victorian medical and scientific commentators, at risk of a biological and social degeneration brought on by rapid modernization and imperial overreach. Sexual deviance, consistently described as a product of physical and psychological decadence, sharpened this anxiety. Like the controversial ‘moral insanity’, which warped a patient’s emotions and judgment while leaving his cognition intact, sexual psychopathy seemed to suggest that a person could be insane without experiencing the theatrical delusions or intellectual impairment presumed in the criminal law definition of insanity. This more expansive understanding of insanity, favored by psychiatrists, struck many jurists as an attack on their authority in cases of violent or sensational crime. Histories of criminal insanity tend to emphasize its mitigating and exculpatory dimensions, especially in murder cases. However, sexual psychopathy cut both ways. Defendants found not guilty by reason of insanity traded the ostensible certainty of judicial punishment, meted out in fixed terms of imprisonment or, for some, in the promise of death, for indefinite detention in asylums.

The Emergence of Atmospheric Science: From Helmholtz to Earth System Science “Helmholtz as a Leader of Atmospheric Science: From Krakatoa to Count Zeppelin” David Cahan (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) This paper highlights the intellectual and organizational leadership that Hermann von Helmholtz provided to atmospheric science from the volcanic eruption of the island of Kraktoa (1883) to Count Zeppelin’s attempt to get support for his “rigid airship” (1894). After Krakatoa, Helmholtz responded with a triad of papers (1888-90) on the dynamics of the atmosphere. He effectively transferred an old hydrodynamic concept of his from the Earth’s waters to its atmosphere. This reflected, it is argued, his uncanny ability at creatively mixing disciplines, in this case using thermodynamics and hydrodynamics to better understand surfaces in the atmosphere and on the oceans. The paper also indicates Helmholtz’s organizational leadership in meteorology (atmospheric physics). First, at the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Second, through his good contacts with two of meteorology’s important figures (Georg von Neumayer and Johann Kiessling). Third, as an expert advisor in atmospheric science to others (Samuel Pierpont Langley, the Royal Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam, and the German Reich) in granting awards for work devoted to the study of atmospheric science and, in the case of Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin, for financial backing for his “rigid airship.” “Vilhelm Bjerknes, Complexity, and the Gordian Knots of Meteorology” SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 140

James Fleming (Colby College) Abstract coming. “Prince Albert I of Monaco and the Conduct of Meteorology at Sea” Penelope Hardy (Xavier University) Beginning in the 1880s, Prince Albert I of Monaco used a series of custombuilt, ocean-going yachts to do science at sea. Equipped with well-appointed laboratories, the yachts accommodated scientists from across Europe, who were invited by the prince to participate in scientific cruises in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Arctic. The biological and oceanographic work Albert coordinated was recognized widely, including with a 1913 Nobel Prize to the scientist who discovered anaphylaxis onboard and the 1918 Alexander Agassiz Medal from the US National Academy of Sciences for Albert. Yet Albert and his yachts were also key to the establishment of meteorological techniques for exploring the atmosphere above the oceans. This paper examines Albert's efforts to adopt and refine the technologies of shore-based meteorology for shipboard use in the first decade of the twentieth century. With the help of German meteorologist Hugo Hergesell, he developed shipboard meteorological procedures, continually improving his technology to enable their safe and effective conduct from the deck of a ship at sea. He publicized his efforts and his innovations broadly. He called on both scientists and crowned heads of Europe to participate in scheduled international observations and to establish programs in their own countries. This paper thus places Albert's shipboard meteorology alongside other international scientific efforts at the beginning of the twentieth century, and explicates it as part of his larger program to promote international scientific efforts that understood the ocean-atmosphere as a global system. “Hedging Your Epistemology and Hiding Your Metaphysics: Conceptions of Prediction and Control in Early Earth System Science” Jenifer Barton (University of Toronto) In a NASA-formed committee led by the mathematical modeller Francis Bretherton, a group of Earth and environmental scientists worked from 1983 to 1988 to detail an interdisciplinary research program to study the Earth as an integrated system comprised of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, and lithosphere. This program, called Earth System Science, drew on systems thinking and cybernetics to pose and elaborate a new concept: “the Earth system.” Some scholars have interpreted systems thinking as being implicated in an ethos that emphasizes management and control. In this interpretation, certain and final knowledge of a system was believed possible. This knowledge would then facilitate total control and management of the system, as well as the complete prediction of future states of the system. In this paper, I argue that this was not the aim of Earth System Science as it was conceived by those working around Bretherton in the 1980s. Systems need not be understood as being in-principle fully knowable, and uncertainties need not imply epistemic gaps that could, in principle, be filled. Using the case study of the early development of Earth System Science, this paper will draw on Andrew Pickering’s more recent cybernetic work and Chunglin Kwa’s distinction between Romantic and Baroque conceptions of complexity to argue for SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 141

another interpretation of systems, one that incorporates uncertainty and potential unknowability. The Bretherton Committee’s conception of the Earth as a system that could never be known with complete certainty entailed that, for at least all practical purposes, total control and prediction of the Earth system could never be achieved.

Virtual Realities: Libraries and 19th-Century Science and Mathematics in Britain and its Empire “The Place of Knowledge at India House” Jessica Ratcliff (Cornell University and Yale-NUS College) Since the late-seventeenth century, India House on Leadenhall Street in the City of London had been the center of the East India Company’s European world. Around the corner from the Royal Exchange and abutting Company warehouses and a large tannery market, India House contained the apartments and offices of Company directors and administrators. It was where shareholders met and tea and textiles were auctioned. It was also where a sprawling collection of books, papers, maps, charts, globes, specimens and other information from across Asia and the Middle East steadily accumulated. By 1800 a library and museum had formed within India House. The museum functioned both as the central archive for the Company and as a semi-public resource, with limited access granted to non-shareholders. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the East India Company’s library and museum would grow to contain one of the largest collections of information on Asia in Europe. What was the place of this virtual Asia within the worlds of the East India Company? In this paper, I explore how this question was answered by three generations of librarycurators: Charles Wilkins (1749-1836), Thomas Horsfield (1773-1859) and John Forbes Watson (1827-1892). I argue that it was in their conceptions of different ‘publics’ that their visions were most distinctive. I also suggest that the shifting place of knowledge at India House was part of a broader process in which a new idea of ‘public science’ was taking shape. “The World to be Found in De Morgan’s Library” Joan Richards (Brown University) In 1839, two babies were born on Gower St in London. The father of one was Augustus De Morgan, Professor of Mathematics at University College London. The father of the other was Charles Darwin, fresh from his circumnavigation of the globe. Both men were Cambridge educated and, at the time their sons were born, deeply engaged with the London scientific community. Yet they lived in two different worlds. When Darwin was at Cambridge, he went tramping through the fens in search of beetles and birds. In contrast, when he was an undergraduate De Morgan would go “foraging for relaxation” among the books of the Trinity College Library. After Cambridge, Darwin constructed his understanding of the world from the specimens he had collected on his voyage; De Morgan built his from the equally far-flung set of books he had collected for his personal library. Darwin surely spent as much time in his home library as De Morgan did in his, but his world was only weakly described in books. In De Morgan’s books, however, was to be found a vivid world of

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 142

meaning. There was nothing arbitrary about either the books or the words contained in De Morgan's library and he spent decades examining, manipulating, and re-ordering them to fit the world-historical narrative of which they were individual representatives. Following De Morgan into his library will take us to a world of reason as richly diverse, fundamentally ordered and real as Darwin's. “The Search for Sanskrit Mathematical Works: Networks of British Indologists and Mathematicians (1780-1840)” Dhruy Raina (Jawaharlal Nehru University) The foundation of the Asiatic Society of Bengal marks a landmark in the institutionalization of modern science in South Asia and the networks associated with the Society as well as its journal, JASB were central to the South Asian region history of sciences. Associated with the foundation of the Society and its career were a group of scholar administrators whose writings were central to the inauguration of British Indology, as well as to the history of `Indian’ mathematics. Between 1780 and 1840 a group of Indologists that included Samuel Davis, Ruben Burrow, Henry Colebrooke, Edward Strachey and John Taylor set the turf for the history of `Indian’ mathematics. The Scottish mathematician John Playfair responded to this work and inadvertently set out a research agenda comprising a sequential search for families of manuscripts, including the search for the `origins of an Indian geometry’. This not only entailed a procedure for translating and interpreting texts, but of establishing trust with local scholarly communities and translators. This paper reviews texts from this period that subsequently played a role in shaping the `canon of Indian mathematics’. More importantly, it argues that the histories produced within the network of British Indologists were valorized through the associated networks of British mathematicians that included George Peacock, Augustus De Morgan and George Boole. Through these networks, the Indian mathematical tradition was constructed as an algebraic one and a set of texts that constituted its canon was established. “Artisanal Mathematicians and Provincial Libraries” Kevin Lambert (California State University Fullerton) In this paper, I will explore the importance of two provincial libraries for the development of Victorian mathematics. The first is a subscription library, Bromley House, which was established in 1816. The Nottingham subscription library is well known in the history mathematics because of George Green, a miller, who began to subscribe to the library in 1823 and who would eventually publish An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism, a foundational work in mathematical physics. The second library is the Lincoln Mechanics Institute Library, founded in 1833, and which would provide resources for George Boole, the some of a shoemaker, to become a leading Victorian mathematician. Examination of the libraries, the books they contained, and the roles of influential members such as local baronet, Sir Edward Bromhead, who helped mentor the talents of both Green and Boole, will show the important role the material environment plays in the development of mathematicians. In particular I

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 2:45–4:45 p.m. | 143

will use the example of Boole to show how some English mathematicians in this period practiced a kind of mathematics that depended upon the investigation of operations performed on what might be understood as virtual objects. These objects could be mathematical symbols, such as d/dx or forms of textual reasoning such as the syllogism. The virtual reality these objects might be said to occupy was contained in books available from libraries or circulated between members of the local learned community.

5:00–6:30 p.m. Authority and Chemistry in Europe “The Chemical Eschatology of a German Paracelsian” Amadeo Murase (Seigakuin University) This paper will shed light on the chemical eschatology of the German Paracelsian Paul Linck (fl. ca. 1600). He was a coeditor of the first complete edition of the Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493/94– 1541). As an assistant to the main editor Johannes Huser (ca. 1545–1600/01), Linck participated in his editorial activities to collect and edit Paracelsus’s voluminous texts, which were published in ten volumes in Basel from 1589 to 1591. For this edition, realized under the patronage of the Elector of Cologne, Ernest of Bavaria (1554–1612), Linck composed several poetical works dedicated to the Swiss physician. Focusing on his major work, "Rechter Bericht von den Dreyen Seculis" (1599/1602), I will throw light on Linck’s natural theology and its eschatological dimensions. Based on the Paracelsian matter theory of "tria prima", his ideas were elaborated in line with a religious dimension, which emerged among Paracelsians around 1600. I will thus locate Linck’s work and eschatology in a broader context of the Paracelsian movement of the early modern age. “Or Does It Explode? Coal Dust in French and British Mining Doctrine” John Murray (Rhodes College, Memphis Tenn.) This essay considers the status of coal dust in European mining doctrine. From the early nineteenth century coal dust, along with methane, appeared to play a role in mine explosions. Up to 1882 research on coal dust in Britain and France proceeded in tandem, but in that year an article appeared in Annales des Mines that brought French consideration of coal dust to a halt. For a quarter century French researchers pursued questions of methane only, while British research continued on both methane and coal dust. In 1906, an explosion immediately attributed to coal dust killed over a thousand miners at Courrières. French mining authorities quickly redirected research towards coal dust. We consider the career of the ‘coal dust hypothesis’ or poussièrisme in both countries. The shifting status of this hypothesis illustrates questions of authority, national differences in scientific assessment, and the importance of scale in testing at the laboratory versus at the mine.

Canadian Science, Commerce, and Public Health

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 144

“Compare and Contrast: The Context and Impact of Canadian International Geological (1913, 1972) and Mathematical (1924, 1974) Congresses” David Orenstein (Toronto District School Board, Retired) Starting in 1857 with the Montreal Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Canada has hosted a series of varied and important international scientific congresses. This paper looks at the higher level similarities and differences for the context and impact of two pairs of such congresses. The International Mathematical Congress came to Toronto in 1924 when the American Mathematical Society had to rescind their offer to host that year. Before World War I, U. of T. had successfully hosted the International Geological Congress in 1913. Toronto was prepared to handle the short notice, having hosted the AAAS in 1921. it was also preparing the 1924 Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. In the wake of the highly successful Expo '67, the World's Fair in Montreal celebrating Canada's Centennial, geologists and mathematicians returned to Canada. The IGC was held in Montreal in 1972 and the ICM at Vancouver's University of British Columbia in 1974. While the earlier pair of congresses illuminate the changes wrought in the world's scientific communities by the upheaval and carnage of World War I, both 1970s congresses reflected the Cold War confrontation between the the United States and the Soviet Union along with the allies of both. “Glacier Naturalism and Claiming Canada's Mountains” Dani Inkpen (Harvard University) Canadian historians have shown how in the late-nineteenth century the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and the federal government promoted a national myth according to which the railway stitched together a vast geography, bringing the west into confederation. Historians of science have had little to say about this history, but not for lack of relevance. In this paper I show how early glacier study in North America was enmeshed in the production of this national myth, which used glaciers to sell the idea of Canada. The first systematic studies of glaciers on the continent began in the 1880s in the Rocky Mountains and Selkirks of western Canada; after 1885, access to this terrain was facilitated by the CPR. These studies were natural historical, relied heavily on photography, and were made by mountaineering naturalists and tourists; after 1907, increasingly by members of the Alpine Club of Canada (ACC). For founding members of the ACC, glacier study was explicitly patriotic, a way of “claiming Canada’s mountains for Canada”—possessing knowledge of glaciers brought them and their terrain into the nation. Yet, non-Canadians also contributed to this myth through their entanglements with the CPR. The CPR provided glacialists with passage, equipment, and free labour; in return, glacialists made their photographs and studies available to the railway. The same photographs and studies used to introduce glaciers to learned audiences in Philadelphia and New York graced the promotional material of the CPR, which proclaimed possession of “50 Switzerlands in one!” for the new nation. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 145

“How Ontario’s Health became Public, circa 1882” Kenton Kroker (Science & Technology Studies, York University) While the “bacteriological revolution” might have transformed biomedical research, its impact upon the principles and practices of late-19th century public health is less certain. The stock-in-trade of public health quarantine, patient isolation, mass vaccination, health surveillance invoke questions regarding the limits of state power over its citizens. Public health is political. But public health is also a field of expert knowledge. This dual nature makes public health an exceptional object by which historians can examine the interactions of scientific knowledges public spheres. These interactions can be codified as a response to a deceivingly simple question: how did health of populations become public? Following Barbara Gutman Rosenkrantz’s classic 1972 study of public health in Massacheusetts, I describe the evolution of public health in Ontario during the 1880s as a locally-negotiated attempt to harmonize natural and social worlds. Ontario, like Massacheusetts, was home to a powerful public health bureaucracy. But its vast, rural character, its geological diversity, its geographic situation as an international crossroads, its powerful position within confederation, and its economic reliance upon forestry heavily shaped the way scientific experts framed the public’s health as a question of scientific governance. The morality of hygenic behaviour, like germ theory, certainly played a role. But so, too, did meteorological accounting, colourful maps, newspapers, lay testimony, sawmills, dams, fouled air, free postage, status-seeking physicians, and forms purloined from neighboring Michigan. Place, it seems, mattered to Ontarians. Experts responded by “scaling up” public health from its urban origins to better promote its cause.

Cultures and Politics of Astronomy “Multiple Sources of Data in Late Babylonian Astrology” M. Monroe (University of British Columbia) The astrological sources preserved on cuneiform documents from the Hellenistic period in Mesopotamia give evidence to creative and dynamic re-interpretation of earlier forms of scientific knowledge. Traditional forms of knowledge which had previously been contained within separate canonical streams of tradition were now modified and combined by the scholars of Uruk and Babylon into new and interesting configurations. This paper will look at the strategies behind this practice and suggest that explicit format and structure on the written medium facilitated the combination of these data sources. The transition from linearly structured scientific data, i.e. lists of phenomena, to tabular layouts allowed the ancient scribes to articulate systems of knowledge that took advantage of multiple levels of reading and interpreting. The rows and columns of the astrological tables of this period provide a structure on which to hang diverse sets of data pulled from texts concerning medicine, religion, daily life, and other forms of divination. The cells of a table were positioned in relation to more points of data than previous lists of information. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 146

The use of zodiac represents a paradigmatic shift and perhaps served as the initial impetus to reorganize these texts. The invention of zodiac facilitates developments in astronomy and astrology in the Late Babylonian period through its regularization of celestial locations. The mathematical formulation of certain zodiacal schemes of organization suggest a formulaic approach to the articulation of systems of knowledge during the Hellenistic period in Babylonia. “Bruno, Galileo and the Heresy of the World Soul” Alberto Martinez (University of Texas at Austin) Several prominent early Copernicans believed that Earth is animated by a soul. I will show that this belief had been denounced as a heresy by various Christian authorities since antiquity, including Church Councils and treatises on heresies. Yet in the Renaissance it was defended by Giordano Bruno, William Gilbert, Kepler, and by Galileo's advocate, Tommaso Campanella. The Earth moved because of its soul. This pagan belief contributed to the Catholic opposition against the Copernicans. In the 1590s, Bruno's "Pythagorean doctrine" that a spirit animates the Earth, annoyed Inquisitors such as Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. Bruno's belief in the World Soul was one of the major heresies that led to his execution in 1600 by being burned alive. Subsequently, Cardinal Bellarmine rejected this belief several times. Yet in 1615, Galileo supported it. In 1616 the Congregation of the Index of Forbidden Books prohibited the "Pythagorean doctrine" that Earth moves. Moreover, immediately after Galileo's trial of 1633, Melchior Inchofer, the Jesuit theologian who provided the strongest critiques against Galileo for the Inquisition, vigorously condemned the Copernicans for the heresy of the World Soul-- in an extensive, unpublished manuscript. Inchofer insisted that this heresy had been condemned by the Church. “British Imperial Network of Astronomy and Timekeeping in the Late Nineteenth Century” YUTO ISHIBASHI (Chuo University) This paper will examine the large-scale attempts for standardization and unification of time through the transplantations of time-dissemination technologies in the late-nineteenth-century British world. It begins by discussing the emergence of an imperial network of astronomical observatories established in some growing colonial cities in India, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and other regions. These institutions served for astronomical and meteorological observations, determination of longitude and latitude, terrestrial surveying, measurement of time, and other practices. Almost all these observatories were closely connected to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, from which they derived important information and advice through George Biddell Airy, Astronomer Royal. Airy’s notable influence can be seen elsewhere too in the management of colonial observatories, such as in the appointment of astronomers, selection of scientific instruments, and the devising of programs of observations. In particular, this scientific connection between the metropolis and colonies effectively operated in an effort to transplant time-signaling and horological technologies into colonial cities. This paper tries to illustrate how the latest knowledge and techniques for standardisation of time

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 147

were transferred in the astronomical network, thereby contributing to the discussion relating to the close relationship between time-keeping and imperial expansions.

Drawing Conclusions: Case Studies in Visual Representation “Diagramming Scientific Knowledge in Early Modern China” Nathan Vedal (Harvard University) A mainstay of the present day scientific journal article is the figure, which visually depicts the data and conclusions of a paper. But the visual representation of information is not a new phenomenon. Recent research on medieval and early modern scientific knowledge production has identified the central position of cosmological diagrams as tools for the synthesis and presentation of knowledge. Occupying an uneasy position between the hermetic tradition and science, such diagrams have often been dismissed as occult tools geared more toward perceived magical properties than the generation of scientific knowledge. This paper draws evidence from a renaissance of cosmological thinking in 17th century China in order to demonstrate the ways in which diagrams provided new methods of presenting and validating scientific knowledge in the early modern world. In particular, this paper will examine a 17th century Chinese compilation of cosmological diagrams, which was intended to provide an improved basis for scholarly analysis and the presentation of information in several fields, such as astronomy, medicine, and philology. In addition, I will analyze a set of hybrid diagrams that emerged as a result of the interactions between Chinese scholars and Jesuit missionaries, which highlight both shared and differing approaches to “visual thinking” throughout the early modern world. Situating these diagrams within a context of 17th century intellectual culture, I argue that the use of diagrams in early modern scientific scholarship emerged as a response to new anxieties about objectivity and the limits of human observation. Visual representations were believed to provide an infallible basis for generating and conveying scientific knowledge. “Visual Illusion and Visual Thinking in Roger Penrose's Art, Psychology, and Physics” Aaron Wright (Stanford University) The British physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose is well-known for his contributions to General Relativity and Cosmology, as well as for his interactions with the Dutch artist MC Escher. Penrose's work is characterized by an extensive use of diagrams of spacetime, many of which represent an entire infinite expanse with a single bounded figure (as discussed at HSS 2010). In this presentation, I argue that specific forms of visual reasoning which were applied to Penrose's spacetime diagrams were rooted in a variety of Penrose's earliest publications, which he co-authored with his father, the geneticist Lionel Penrose. These publications, in the 1950s, include academic articles on the psychology of perception and visual illusion, and recreational mathematics puzzles. In psychology, Penrose and Penrose were particularly drawing from the American psychologists Hadley Cantril and Adelbert Ames. In this paper I show a continuity among the activities of drawing, building, and seeing visual illusions and the activities of mathematics- and physics-representation.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 148

Feeling, Sensation, and Perception in Global Context “Seeing Ice Over Time: Ice Atlases and the Cartography of Dynamism” Alexis Rider (University of Pennsylvania, HSS Dept.) This paper explores how evolving ways of doing science in the Arctic—both practically and epistemologically—transformed the region from an “empty” space, reserved solely for explorers, to a dynamic region whose changeability—both spatially and temporally—are crucial to understanding the natural history of the earth as a whole. While this transformation took place over the long twentieth century and relied on an increased capacity to look above, below, and into ice, this paper focuses on one example of the changing perception of the Arctic: Charles Swithinbank’s Ice Atlas (1960). How can one map an ice pack, a surface that grows and shrinks annually, and varies in thickness each year? Essentially, how can one map a surface that is dynamic and inconsistent both in area and in depth? Swithinbank turned to the ship logs of every vessel that had visited the region since 1900, from the days of sail to the era of ice breaker, arguing that records of navigability could be translated into ice conditions. The result is an atlas that captures changeability over time in a static object, thus revealing the importance, in the mid-twentieth century, of understanding the dynamism of the ice pack as a system. It is only when the vitality and fragility of the region was understood that the crucial role of the poles in the global system—and as metaphor and metonym for climate change— took hold. “Senses, Intellect, and Exceptional Children at the turn of the 20th century European and Russian Human and Medical Sciences” Kai Mishuris (University of Michigan) In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, “the child” emerges as an object of scientific and medical exploration as part of the broader attempts to understand human origins, the working of memory and the unconscious. The notions of the child and reason were traditional antithetical. The late nineteenth century observers of childhood saw children as fundamentally irrational and spontaneous being, driven by bodily senses rather than reason. Given the raw spontaneity of the child's mind, what did the students of childhood mean when they wrote about child's intellectual capacities and talents? Examining European and Russian corpus of medical, psychological, and educational treatises, the paper will examine the role of the senses in the understandings of talent and exceptional ability in children. It will pay special attention to the interplay between the notions of intuition, talent, and the unconscious in the construction of the prodigious mind. “’What is this Feeling?’ Locating Peripheral Sensation in China and Germany (19311955)” Lan Li (Columbia University)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 149

Touch proved difficult to capture at the periphery of the body. Simultaneously an action and reaction, at once a moment and a memory, physiologists inscribed lines on skin to define distinct areas sensitive to pressure and temperature, only to find their embodied experience impossible to articulate. By joining approaches in postcolonial STS and critical cartography, this paper investigates the ways in which historical actors adapted a range of scales—national, transnational, regional, and personal—to elaborate on cultures of epistemology and historical ontology. In particular, this paper compares two historical attempts to locate, map, and fix sensation. The first case centers on a medical reformer named Cheng Dan’an in Shanghai who famously published a series of photographs of inscribed meridian paths on a nude model in 1931. The second case study centers on German neurologist Otfrid Foerster’s production of dermatome maps also inscribed on nude human models in 1933. I argue that the inscription of a line—a graphic line that lacked form, texture, and tangible quality—captured a kind of ontology that straddled accuracy and approximation. These lines took on many different meanings when they were curved, straightened, thinned, thickened, broken, colored or shaded. A close study of body maps allows us to understand a range of medical practice and medical theory that remains multiple and contingent. How did physiologists represent sensations in the body that shift over time and differ among individuals? What were the ways in which these forms of dynamic representations serve to articulate scientific knowledge?

Islamic Science in Theory, Teaching, and Practice “Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ and its Extensive Commentary Tradition: What it indicates about the Teaching of Theoretical Astronomy within Islamic Societies” Sally Ragep (McGill University) This paper will discuss Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-hayʾa al-basīṭa, an extremely popular elementary astronomical work on Ptolemaic astronomy, and its extensive commentary tradition. Composed in Arabic in the early 13th century in the region of Khwārizm in Central Asia, a period often considered as one of scientific stagnation, Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ was studied well into the 19th century as a way to provide a general picture of God’s creation. It was also used as a propaedeutic for more advanced astronomical texts. I have identified over 60 commentaries, super commentaries, glosses written to elucidate the base text, and translations into Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew; these derivative works and the original are represented by thousands of extant manuscripts. This long-lived commentary tradition shows, among other things, that even after “European science” came on the scene, Islamic scholars were attempting to seek approaches that could accommodate the older Islamic scientific traditions along with new (jadīd) scientific developments. Moreover, by tracing the influence of Jaghmīnī’s Mulakhkhaṣ and ensuing commentaries, this paper aims to provide strong evidence of a continuity of scientific learning within Islamic societies that sees Islamic science not as mostly a solitary venture, but rather a social endeavor. “Appeals to Natural Philosophy in Islamic Astronomy: When, Why, and Why Not?” Scott Trigg (University of Notre Dame)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 150

Islamic astronomers’ limited reliance on Aristotelian natural philosophy has often been discussed in the context of theological objections to philosophy. Granting the existence of particular criticisms of specific philosophical claims, recent work (e.g., Griffel 2009) has shown that even some of the most influential Islamic critiques of philosophy still allowed for the acceptance of a great deal of philosophical concepts and principles. With this in mind, my presentation explores instances in which astronomers invoked natural philosophical principles in support of their claims, and compares the use of these principles in relation to the use of observational evidence. Important topics range from the question of the Earth’s motion or stability and the causes of the motions of the celestial orbs to the notorious equant. Drawing in particular on commentaries by Fathallah al-Shirwani and Ali al-Qushji, two astronomers from Ulugh Beg’s Samarqand observatory who were later associated with the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, this paper highlights the role of theoretical questions and debates in texts and commentaries throughout the 13th-15th c. astronomical enterprise. I suggest that disciplinary boundaries and established hierarchies of knowledge, rather than theological concerns, may account for why astronomers relied on natural philosophy on certain occasions and not others. “Quantifying Religious Difference: A Thirteenth-Century Mathematical Treatise on the Borders between Arabic Medicine and Latin Moral Philosophy” Nicholas Jacobson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) Five medical compendia found in manuscripts at the Bodleian Library and Chetham Hospital in Manchester contain the same Latin treatise in which a method is offered explaining how to mathematically quantify natural qualities found in compound substances. Because the treatise was collated with medical texts positively identified to the thirteenth-century arts professor and natural philosopher Roger Bacon, a scholarly consensus emerged that the treatise was also written by Bacon. More recently, Bacon’s authorship has been challenged. These arguments are based mainly upon a fine-grained textual analysis of the document in which scholars concluded that the language did not match Bacon’s authentic medical vocabulary and conceptual framework. In this paper, I argue that the treatise may yet be authentic, especially because the vocabulary, though it does differ from his medical work, in fact, matches other discussions on compound substances found in the natural and moral philosophy of his 1267 Opus Maius. The treatise also is suggestive of contemporaneous Arabic medical theory - specifically that of al-Kindi's and Ibn Rushd's - with which Bacon was familiar, and that he seems to have integrated into his moral philosophy – particularly his treatment of religious difference and social ethnography in book 7 of the Opus Maius. If the treatise is authentic, it offers an important insight into the mathematical processes Bacon used to quantify a civil science in the thirteenth-century that defined religious law in terms of measurable compound virtues analogous to compound pharmaceuticals in medieval Arabic medicine.

Music and Acoustics in Science “Homo Musicus: The Early Modern Musical Conception of the Human Being” Edward Barnet (Stanford University)

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 151

How did the homo musicus, or the use of musical models to understand human physiology, shape 17th and 18th century physicians’ and natural philosophers’ understanding of vital function? In this paper, I will argue that music filled a central epistemic role in early modern physiology by providing explanations for phenomena of life, which remained necessarily beyond the reach of the physician’s observations or the anatomist’s scalpel. Music had long been associated with physiological inquiry through the Pythagorean and Platonic traditions of musica humana, which described the human body as a microcosm of the macrocosmic harmonies of divine creation. By the end of the 17th century, however, the rise of mechanistic natural philosophy, coupled with the rise of the fibre as the basic element of living tissue, promoted an entirely new way of imagining the human body through music. Indeed, homo musicus was essentially a sounding instrument, composed of a network of vibrating fibres and nerves. Vibration first appeared as a possible mechanism of vital function in the 17th century and rapidly grew in prominence during the first half of the following century. In fact, in 18th century physiology, the physical characteristics of vibration became synonymous with the criteria of good health. In this paper, I will focus in particular on the tradition of homo musicus as it developed in 17th and 18th century France, where research into sensibility frequently relied on the underlying model of resonance – as Diderot’s musical speculation in Le Rêve de d’Alembert demonstrates. “The Acoustical Paradox: How Music was Unmoored and Set Adrift from Science in the Seventeenth Century” Adam Fix (University of Minnesota) From antiquity up to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, music was ever-present in mathematical and philosophical thought. Known variously as “speculative music” or “harmonics”, the science of music in the premodern world encompassed far more than the audible art form recognized today, and revolved around a simple question: why do musical sounds please human ears? However, as physico-mathematical theories of sensation supplanted traditional notions of natural and human harmony, an intractable paradox began to haunt philosophers attempting to bridge the epistemological chasm between physical and sensory phenomena. The mechanical philosophy reimagined the ear as a drum that received pulsations of sound, but proved ill-equipped to explain how this ear generated pleasures and passion in the soul. Thus the core problem of speculative music—explaining audible pleasure in rational terms—became unanswerable. Descartes, Mersenne, and Huygens, three prominent mechanists, explored the consequences of the acoustical paradox, with each realizing that their sciences could not explain the full range of experiences invoked by music. This incompatibility between music and science led to the birth of a new science of sound— known as “acoustics”—and the relegation of music to the domain of fine arts, where it has remained ever since. This talk is about the powers and limitations of the new sciences, and about what the natural philosophers of the scientific revolution chose to consider proper, scientific knowledge. “From “Special Intelligence” to “Fundamental” Investigation: Controversy, Acoustics and a National Laboratory (1920s Britain)” SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 152

Fiona Smyth (Trinity College Dublin) In 1923, at the request of the Government of India, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) in Britain, authorised the instigation of a specialist research stream. Its purpose was to investigate problems in architectural acoustics specifically related to the new Assembly Chamber then under construction at Imperial Delhi. Ancillary to the set research agenda in building science, the research was considered to be a singular excursion, ‘a matter of practical emergency’. Architectural acoustics had not featured on the government research agenda before, and it was envisaged that experimental work would be concluded within a matter of months. However, events surrounding the design and construction of the Chamber were to prove catalytic for subsequent scientific research in architectural acoustics in Britain. The building itself was regarded as a scientific experiment (from drawing board to construction), and, rather unusually, scientists as well as architects were involved in its design. In the process, architectural acoustics was re-categorised from ‘special intelligence’ to ‘fundamental’ investigation, becoming embedded into a national programme of government-funded research. This paper examines the acoustic design of the Chamber at Delhi, and the manner in which a series of controversies surrounding its design and construction stimulated a national programme of building science research.

Nutrition Science in Europe and North America “Vagaries of Variability and Practices of Precision: Developing Methods in midNineteenth-Century Nutritional Physiology” Elizabeth Neswald (Brock University) This paper traces the methodological development and tensions of early nutritional physiology. Scattered studies of nutritional physiology and nutrition can be found in the first half of the 19th century, but the methodological foundations for the field were not laid until the 1850s and 60s, primarily through the work of Carl Voit. While Voit's early experiments refined the "input-outgo" methods of his predecessors without introducing substantial new elements, his pursuit of experimental precision enabled him to demonstrate that this approach was productive for the study of basic metabolism. Paradoxically, the continuing pursuit of precision became itself a stumbling block for generating knowledge about the variable objects and materials of nutrition experimentation - foods and bodies -, creating a fog of highly specific data out of stifling experimental redundancy. Voit's experiment reports, composed in part in collaboration with Theodor Bischoff and Max Pettenkoffer, show how he struggled to reconcile the demands of precision in laboratory science with the treacherous variability of his experimental material and the overwhelming amounts of data it produced. This paper will look at how Voit's position evolved over the course of a decade (18571867) from emphasizing the need for precision to explicitly addressing its epistemological and practical limits for the study of variable objects and, finally, to nutritional physiology becoming one of the first life-sciences to introduce statistical methods to its experimental arsenal. SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 153

“Taste, Nutrition Science, and Consumer Culture in the Development of Kellogg’s Health Foods, 1890 - 1909” Lisa Haushofer (Harvard University) Intensifying scholarly interest in the histories of food and capitalism has recently prompted historians of science and medicine to reexamine the relationship between nutritional scientific knowledge and the emergence of a consumer culture around food. In these works, the role of taste has largely been regarded as gradually diminishing in the context of nutrition science, while its importance grew in the realm of marketing consumer products. Overall, however, these two processes are largely described as separate. This paper seeks to bring together the processes of creating nutritional knowledge and of developing products for a consumer market with the emergence of new ideas about taste. Focusing on some of the most successful health foods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, those produced by the Kellogg brothers and their health food enterprise, the paper examines the role of taste in the creation of two particular groups of products, so-called peptonized and peptogenic foods. Using in-house correspondence of food experiments conducted at the Battle Creek laboratory, as well as scientific and promotional literature, I show how Kellogg and his collaborators sought to reconcile their nutritional and promotional goals by simultaneously invoking elaborate scientific and consumerist notions of taste. Appealing to scientific authority and consumer demand, I argue, allowed them to cast taste as both, antagonistic to pleasure, and conducive to it. Understanding this interplay of scientific and consumerist notions of taste is crucial to appreciating the interdependent relationship between nutritional scientific knowledge and the development of market capitalism more broadly. “Crafting “a Yardstick for Good Nutrition”: Social Values and Scientific DecisionMaking in Wartime Nutrition” Hannah LeBlanc (Stanford University) In 1941, the National Research Council announced the Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs), the government’s first quantified dietary standard. The RDAs would have implications for everything from school lunches to the poverty line to military rations. How did the RDA committee decide on this all-important standard? In this paper, I examine the production of nutrition knowledge during World War II by reconstructing the experimental and decision-making processes that enabled the creation of the RDAs. I show that discoveries about vitamins over the previous twenty years created uncertainty about nutrition knowledge and optimism about nutrition’s possibilities, feelings heightened by the crisis of war. Determining the RDAs raised questions both philosophical and practical: was the goal of nutrition the absence of diseases like rickets, or some yet-unknown possibility for vigor? What was the best way to account for the country’s diversity? How could you tell if a horse suffered from night-blindness? Historians of food during World War II have considered the RDAs primarily for their role in scientific communication to the public; few have appreciated how fraught their creation was. The results were determined as much by nutritionists’ vision for a vigorous nation as they were

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 154

by experimental outcomes. The RDAs, in turn, affected how national leaders perceived the home front and the policies they crafted to address its short-comings. Far from an isolated scientific process with social outcomes, the RDAs demonstrate the mutual constitution of politics and science, and the constant cross-talk between nutrition research and the social exigencies of wartime America.

On Display: Museums in Twentieth-Century North America “Married to the Field: Gender, Authority, and Institutional Culture at the Field Museum during the ‘Heller Affair.’” Matthew Laubacher In 1925, the Field Museum instructed its Assistant Curator for Mammals, Edmund Heller, to lead an African expedition to observe and collect gorilla specimens. He requested, and attained, permission for his wife, Hilda Hempl Heller, a microbiologist and emerging naturalist, to accompany him on the expedition. Sending both Hellers was seemingly beneficial to the museum: Heller was an accomplished expeditionary naturalist with extensive collecting experience in Africa, and Hempl Heller’s expertise had been invaluable on previous expeditions. After a promising start, the expedition ended in explosive allegations: she accused him of having a psychotic break, needing time in a sanitarium, and threatening her life. Alarmed, the Field Museum demoted Heller and gave her command of the expedition only to reverse course once Heller protested, accusing Hempl Heller of betrayal, mutiny, and referring to her as a “villainous snake.” Hempl Heller fled Africa for Chicago, where she met with Museum administration to discuss the situation. Shortly thereafter, Heller was abruptly recalled and summarily forced to resign – officially due to sloppy accounting on the expedition, but unofficially due to the Museum administration’s embarrassment about the affair and the surrounding negative publicity. Later correspondence reveals that Heller’s inclusion of Hempl Heller on expeditions was due as much to his possessive and paternalistic mindset as it was for her scientific expertise. The “Heller affair” sheds light on contemporary attitudes of gender vis-à-vis patriarchal, scientific, and institutional authority, and demonstrates how the Field Museum enabled – and later, exacerbated – a toxic situation half a world away. “‘A Perfect Birthday Present from the American People to Themselves’: Shaping the National Air and Space Museum, 1969–1972” Jieun Shin (University of Minnesota) Planning the National Air and Space Museum (NASM) of the Smithsonian Institution from 1946 to 1976 reflected the shifting balance between displaying aeronautics and space science as commemoration and education. While the earliest attempt to build the National Air Museum in 1946 and consequent exhibit plans in the 1950s sought to memorialize American technological prowess, growing public antagonism to military-related technology during the 1960s pushed advocates to emphasize public education. Despite having an impressive collection of aeronautical memorabilia, the museum took more than twenty years to gain Congressional authorization due to SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 155

limited staffing, competition with other Smithsonian projects, and budgetary limitations due to the Vietnam War. In 1969, in the wake of the successful Moon landing, the media, military, and Congress pushed the Smithsonian into action. To respond to the public and political pressure, the Smithsonian integrated the two missions of the museum, commemoration and education, to promote an appropriation bill to build the NASM in 1972. First, the Smithsonian linked the opening of the NASM in July 1976, which represented America’s great technological achievements from the Wright Brothers to Apollo, to the bicentennial celebration on the National Mall. In addition, the Smithsonian highlighted NASM’s new role in public education in the Space Age by including a planetarium as “a powerful teaching tool to explain the relationship of man to his universe.” Thus, the final plan for the NASM reflected how technology could be used not only to celebrate but also to educate about America’s air and space heritage. “North American World's Fairs and the Re-Invention of the Science Museum in the 1960s” Arne Schirrmacher (Humboldt University, Berlin) Focusing on the United States and Canada the question is addressed to which extent world’s fairs contributed to new ways of display in science museums of the 1960s. With the 1967 Canadian Centennial not only Expo 67 in Montreal showcased science and technology but also Ottawa’s new Science and Technology Museum as well as the Ontario Science Center, which opened two years late in 1969 and which was one of the first of its kind. At the same time San Francisco’s Exploratorium was hailed as a novel kind of a Museum of Science and Art, with a strong focus on perception, and became the model of what today has spread worldwide as science centers. While for Canada the simultaneity of world’s fair and new museum conceptions is apparent, I will show that also in the US new institutions like the Exploratorium, the Pacific Science Center and even the Smithsonian’s Museum of History and Technology of 1964 (now National Museum of American History) have strong connections to the 1960s North American world’s fairs which took place in Seattle 1962, New York 1964 and Montreal 1967. Ultimately, it was the reaction to the Sputnik shock and, at least for the US, a failed exhibiting strategy at the first postwar Expo at Brussels in 1958, which reinvigorated science display techniques at the 1960s North American fairs and in museums, including interactive and participatory science centers.

Psychology and Its Disciplines in the Twentieth Century “Alfred Lehmann and the Establishment of Modern Psychology at the University of Copenhagen, 1890–1918” Jörgen Pind (University of Iceland, Faculty of Psychology) Psychology, as a modern experimental subject, had an early start at the University of Copenhagen through the pioneering efforts of Alfred Lehmann (1858-1921). Lehmann was educated as a natural scientist but his interest in psychological topics was aroused early on. After finishing his education, he spent the winter 1885-1886 in Wilhelm Wundt’s laboratory of psychology in Leipzig. Here he

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 156

carried out the first experimental study of visual contrast. Upon his return to Copenhagen he established, at his own expense, a Laboratory of psychophysics, one of the earliest laboratories of psychology. This was overtaken by the University of Copenhagen in 1893 where Lehmann had become temporary docent of psychology in 1890. Lehmann was a prolific researcher, mainly concentrating on psychophysiology but also known for his work in applied psychology and especially for his critical stance towards parapsychology. In this talk I will give an overview of Lehmann’s career and discuss his efforts in establishing psychology as a separate field of study at the University of Copenhagen. It had been possible to major in psychology at the University of Copenhagen as part of a master’s degree in philosophy from the latter half of the nineteenth century. Through Lehmann’s efforts, psychology was established as an independent field of study in 1918. “The Fragmentation of Clinical Psychology: Prestige and Purpose in a Heterogeneous Field” Andrew Hogan (Creighton University) The sub-discipline of clinical psychology grew significantly in size and prominence during the 1940s and 1950s. Its expansion was largely driven by government investment and planning to increase the number of mental health professionals available to war veterans. Clinical psychology soon became the largest division of the American Psychological Association. Though clinical psychology remained deeply rooted in the basic research oriented discipline of psychology, most of its newly trained graduates left academia to enter private practice. By the 1980s, those who remained in academic positions lamented that clinical psychology had become highly fragmented in its interests, methodologies, and purposes. While clinical psychology retained a plurality of APA membership, researchers within the sub-discipline increasingly aligned themselves with other sub-disciplines: including the more empirically oriented developmental psychology, or the social activist ambitions of community psychology. This paper contributes to growing interest in the history of psychology. While a few historians of medicine have examined longstanding postwar tensions between clinical psychologists and psychiatrists, there has been little attention given, among historians of science, to the growing postwar divisions within clinical psychology. Focusing specifically on debates over the proper management of mental retardation in the late-20th century, my presentation argues that purpose and prestige were closely linked in the increasingly fragmented field of clinical psychology during this era. Practitioners who retained the traditional approaches of academic psychology maintained a dominant position in the field, while those with more socially oriented methods and goals were increasingly marginalized or encouraged to leave behind clinical psychology entirely. “The Cybernetic Effect: The Origins of Soviet Psychology of Thinking” Ekaterina Babintseva (University of Pennsylvania) It was not until 1971 when psychology became represented at the Soviet Academy of Sciences by a separate and solid institute. Despite a long history of research in the physiology of nervous system

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 157

and child development, psychology remained a marginalized pedagogical discipline until the 1970s in Russia. The status of psychology changed with the interference of Aksel Berg, the founder and the chairman of the Council of Cybernetics. A former Deputy Minister of Defense in charge of radar, Berg created the institute whose task was to study information retrieval, reception, transport, storage, processing, and control in the human and the machine. Additionally, the institute solved practical needs as it assisted in the development of computer-based education and studied problem-solving skills in a machine operator. This paper seeks to showcase how the cybernetics movement led to the institutional establishment of the field of psychology in the USSR. Many scholars have shown how computing and cybernetics provided other sciences with new metaphors and concepts, but only a few went further and demonstrated how cybernetics influenced the practice of science. I argue that it was the boom of Soviet cybernetics that elevated Soviet psychology from a pedagogical discipline to a scientific field. This transformation became possible as cybernetics and military-related technical problems oriented Soviet psychological research towards thinking and information processing. This paper draws on archival documents from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, as well as published work that appeared in Russian journal Issues of Psychology in the 1960s-1970s.

The Institutions and Popular Cultures of Microscopy “Micrographia in Context: Hooke on the Genealogy of Insects” Jeremy Schneider (Princeton University) This paper reconstructs Robert Hooke’s conjectures on the genealogy of insects in his Micrographia (1665). I argue that the relationships of kin and ancestry form a central message of his microscopic drawings and observations of insects. Section 1 is a brief introduction situating the argument. Section 2 places Hooke’s theorizing within the Royal Society’s debates about “generation” and shows how he develops his theory of an Ur-insect in his investigations of “mites,” culminating in the concept of a “prime parent.” Section 3 shows how Hooke integrates into mechanical philosophy the notion that insects are the members of the same family despite the diversity of their appearances. His conceptualization of insects as living machines allows him to trace a common blueprint within the anatomy of gnats, flies and ants. This shared blueprint is taken—although with limitations—as direct evidence of a prime parent, which provided the original plan. Section 4 illustrates how the anatomy of the crab serves Hooke as an universal reference-frame to outline the crustaceous blueprint that underlies all of the creatures already discussed as well as spiders, lice and “water insects” like crabs, shrimps and lobsters. Hooke delineates, in effect, the morphology of what we now call “arthropods” and argues that these creatures are different instantiations of one and the same blueprint. Section 5 investigates how Hooke’s genealogical studies of insects connect up with his studies of the Earth’s long history, emphasizing how his ideas about environmental change and fossils shape his conception of animals’ (family) history. Section 6 concludes with some contextualizing observations.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 158

“Circulating Microscopy: The Quekett Microscopical Club, the Postal Microscopic Society, and Microscopic Periodical Culture” Meegan Kennedy (Florida State University) The role of professional societies in the development of modern science and scientific journals is well-established (Yeo; Gross, Harmon, Reidy). Currently, scholars are turning their attention to working-class and amateur researchers, and popular science.

The Microscopical Society of London was founded in 1839 to promote microscopical science, chartered as the Royal Microscopical Society in 1866. In 1865, the Quekett Microscopical Club was founded as an amateur alternative (“club”) to the RMS. But the divide was blurry: the membership overlapped, and Quekett meetings often consisted of outings and comic songs as well as informative sessions. If the RMS and Quekett circulated microscopy through their meetings, both also did so by publishing journals. The Transactions of the Microscopical Society of London appeared in 1844, replacing an earlier journal. A reader’s suggestion in Harkwicke’s Science Gossip, taken up by M. C. Cooke, sparked the Quekett, whose Journal of Microscopy began in 1868. The title of “circulating microscopy” best belongs to the Postal Microscopical Club, educating provincial microscopists from 1873. The PMS not only produced a journal but its members met virtually, via postal circulation of microscopic slides along various “circuits.” This paper examines the status of the amateur microscopist when he (or she) circulates in midVictorian science. What is the role of the Quekett Club, balanced between professional society and casual ramble? How does a society constituted postally contribute to a scientific community founded on the authority of witnessing? And how do amateur microscopy periodicals testify to their societies’ origins and ambitions? “Popularizing Instruments: The Microscope and Scientific Knowledge in Republicanera China” Noa Nahmias (York University) In 1935, popular science writer Gao Shiqi (高士其 1905-1988), published an article in a Shanghai journal titled “What if I cannot Afford a Microscope?” In it, he did not offer practical advice on how one can see microbes without a microscope, but rather put forth his vision for popularization of science in China: one that centered on the widespread and daily use of scientific instruments such as telescopes and microscopes. Gao’s call to popularize not only scientific knowledge, but scientific instruments, opens up the question of what role modern science would play in people’s lives, and what role the people would play in making science in modern China. This paper argues that

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 159

scientific instruments, both as discursive figures and as physical objects, were a key element in defining what popular science meant and who would be its audience. This paper adopts the term “popular science” while also building on James Secord’s formulation of “science as communication”. To that end, it shifts the focus to the question of how audience engaged with scientific instruments – what kind of access was afforded to what groups in the public. I draw on examples from periodicals, books and exhibitions, to show how instruments were used to define and delineate the role of audiences and the scope of scientific knowledge. I argue that popular science was being constructed by writers and editors as a unique realm of knowledge to be used differently by different publics.

Transforming the Species: Evolutionary Ideas in the Enlightenment and Modern Age “Visions of Species: Perspective and Enlightenment Definitions of Species” William Nelson (University of Toronto) The famous French naturalist Georges Buffon is recognized by historians of science as being the most important interpreter of biological species in the eighteenth century. His reliance on the criterion of fertile interbreeding to determine biological species set the terms by which most of his contemporaries understood the scientific concept and the natural object. More than a logical universal, or a combination of like individuals, species for Buffon was the historically unfolding succession of individuals linked through reproduction. This immanent and historical approach to species was an important development, yet Buffon never resolved the exact relationship between species as an unchanging and essential category of nature and species as a chain of linked and similar individuals changing and unfolding in time. My paper will analyze Buffon’s most brilliant and complex attempt to resolve this problematic relationship, particularly focusing on his use of techniques of imaginative visualization. Employing an unusual mode of philosophical fiction, Buffon created an epistemology of imagined perspectives, asserting that we can only know species through a type of double vision in which we see species as a complex object that can only be grasped through the harmonic mediation of two images. Shifting back and forth between the perspective of an individual human and the entirety of the human species, Buffon attempted to draw readers into an unusual way of seeing that was also a way of knowing. “Creative Evolution: Bringing Bergson Back into the Modern Synthesis” Emily Herring (Univeristy of Leeds) In the first decades of the 20th century, French philosopher Henri Bergson was an international celebrity. His philosophy of “duration” was discussed in most intellectual circles and, although his metaphysical take on biological evolution, developed in Creative Evolution (1907), was often dismissed as non-scientific, it appealed to many biologists who saw Bergson as raising the status of their science by giving it philosophical significance.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 160

In this paper, I criticise the preconceived notion that Bergson had no impact whatsoever on the founders of the Darwinian Modern Synthesis. It is true that some architects of the Synthesis like Ernst Mayr and George Simpson were explicitly hostile to Bergson’s philosophy of life, labelling him a vitalist. However, several of Bergson’s ideas, for instance the criticism of Laplacian determinism or the idea that human intelligence is the result of a form of adaptation, seemed attractive, or at least did at some stage of their careers, to founding members like Julian Huxley, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Ronald Fisher or Sewall Wright. Through my study of the reception of Bergson’s Creative Evolution among the architects of the Synthesis I challenge the notion, recently defended by, among others, Denis Walsh, that the Modern Synthesis was a purely mechanistic and reductionist enterprise. The aforementioned biologists came from different scientific, political and philosophical backgrounds and drew on Bergson in different ways. By taking their philosophical and ideological inclinations seriously, new light will be thrown on our understanding of the origins, and subsequent influence, of the Modern Synthesis. “Human Ecology and the Development of New Theories of Cultural and Biological Evolution” Emilie Raymer (Johns Hopkins University) This paper will use the work of cultural geographer Carl Sauer, historian James C. Malin, anthropologist Julian Steward, and sociologist Howard W. Odum to explore how twentieth-century American social scientists fashioned new theories of cultural evolution which deconstructed the dichotomies between “savage” and “civilized” that nineteenth-century social Darwinians had established. Rather than conceptualizing cultural evolution in a hierarchical and unilineal manner, Sauer, Malin, Steward, and Odum argued that the regions humans inhabited influenced their development. They conceived of evolution as a multilinear process and thought in terms of “cultures” rather than “culture,” which had a significant impact on how racial differences were conceptualized. Whereas previous theories of cultural evolution had argued that evolution was racially stratified, with Anglo Saxons representing a higher stage of development, Sauer, Malin, Steward, and Odum asserted that because evolution was regionally-specific, races that occupied the same area were more alike than they were different. Sauer, Steward, and Malin studied Native Americans in the Western United States and contended that indigenous and white groups shared cultural similarities, while Odum studied black “folk” culture in the American South. Historians have maintained that due to the development of Boasian culture in anthropology and behaviorism in psychology, evolutionary concepts lost their appeal for social scientists in the early twentieth century, not to regain popularity until the 1970s with the rise of sociobiology. However, I will argue that Sauer, Steward, Malin, Odum, and others utilized ecological methodologies to construct important and overlooked models of cultural evolution, which influenced contemporary and successive biological and social scientists.

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 11 | 5:00–6:30 p.m. | 161

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 10:00–12:00 p.m. Astronomical Phenomena in the Nineteenth Century: From the Global to the Provincial “Paper Comets: Prophecy, Panic and Public Judgement in the Nineteenth Century” Jim Secord (University of Cambridge) During the first half of 1857, the urban populations of Europe and the United States were warned of a comet, predicted to arrive on the 13 of June, which would destroy civilisation and perhaps the Earth itself. The most remarkable feature of this terrifying celestial object, however, is that it never appeared. It is the perfect example of a paper comet: any panic it caused could not be because it was observed in the heavens, but because it was read about in the newspapers or heard about through conversation with people who had. Its existence depended on literacy and knowledge of the news. My discussion is will be in three parts. I will first discuss the role of comets in print in in general terms, in the process showing how the announcement of this particular comet came to be made. Second, I will focus on the role of astronomers and astrologers, an especially important issue for relating expert knowledge to other forms of understanding. And third, I will look at the question of “panic” in relation to the effects of mass journalism and the possibility of individual judgement within the crowd. Here we will see how the debate about astronomy was used to illuminate problems of democracy in relation to scientific expertise. “Global Astronomical Expeditions and the Longing for Simultaneity” Anna Henchman (Boston University) This paper explores the longing to grasp the feeling of simultaneity at a distance between 1850 and 1890, as it manifested itself in both British astronomical exploration and literature. This is a period when coordination at a single moment in time from disparate positions on the surface of the globe was almost within grasp, but still maddeningly elusive. My paper examines several literary techniques for representing simultaneity: cross-cutting; juxtaposition of separate conversations or scenes; and uniting distant characters through the view of a shared object, such as a battle, a storm, or a star. It links these literary techniques with the extensive materials produced before and after the Transits of Venus in 1874 and 1882. Engineering expeditions to view the Transits of Venus from across the globe involved a tense balance of collaboration and competition--multiple players, multiple positions, complex prediction and planning, controversy over methods, and a lengthy process of compiling results. Attempts to freeze moments invite us to isolate the shifting angles of vision at play in a finite set of relations. At its most successful simultaneity—astronomical or literary—makes visible a set of relations the relative

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 162

motions of which otherwise involve far too many variables to visualize, whether those relative motions involve the chance alignments of planets or shifting arrangements of characters. “Provincial British Astronomical Societies and Their Journals” Bernard Lightman (York University) The question for provincial astronomical societies that formed in the 1890’s was how to work out their relationship to the British Astronomical Association (BAA). The periodicals of two of them, the Leeds Astronomical Society and the Astronomical Society of Wales, will be the focus of this paper. They included Journal and Transactions of the Leeds Astronomical Society (1893-1922), Journal of the Astronomical Society of Wales (1895-1897), and the Cambrian Natural Observer (1898-1910). Since the BAA had established itself as the national society for amateurs, the provincial organizations conceived of their purpose as building a local community of observational astronomers, and this was reflected in their journals. Their readership was primarily society members, many of whom interacted in person frequently. There was no need for a correspondence column, the tool used by previous journals for amateurs, to connect to their readers. Instead, these periodicals emphasized the sharing of observations. In comparison to the BAA publications, the provincial journals were more permissive of unorthodox astronomical theories and of discussions of religious themes. “A Science Fit for the Chapel: Astronomy, Communities of Science, and the Nature of Knowledge in Wales, 1805–1914” Jake Bridges (University of Alberta) This paper analyzes astronomical practice and the dissemination of knowledge on astronomy in Wales during the nineteenth century. I compare developments in Wales to those in England, Ireland and Scotland. A study of Welsh perceptions of astronomy and astronomical phenomena helps to understand what British astronomy meant to both astronomers and the public, and I examine how astronomy was used differently to conform to Welsh preconceptions of nature and the universe. Scientific interests in Wales have been dismissed by previous scholars for a number of reasons, including the bible-centric nature of Welsh society and difficulties of incorporating scientific terminology into the Welsh language. I instead argue that astronomy played a significant role in Welsh society as evidenced by the popularity of astronomical lectures, scientific societies and scientific journals, and the cultural prominence of local astronomers. Leading lecturers and astronomers such as Edward Mills, Eleazar Roberts, and John Jones were wildly popular individuals who were culturally celebrated and represented in poems, songs, and literature. The cultural role of Welsh astronomy was created in an environment which differed from the rest of Britain in terms of government control and levels of institutionalization and professionalization, while the interplay between the Welsh and English languages influenced how astronomical knowledge was disseminated in lectures, publications, and the scientific societies.

Between Utility and Discipline in Interwar Physics SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 163

“Channels of Influence on Interwar Physics” Shaul Katzir (Tel Aviv University) Building on examples discussed in the “interactions of interwar physics” workshop at the CEU, the other papers in this session, and a few published studies and on my own research on piezoelectricity, this talk attempts at a survey of the manners by which physicists directed their research to topics of interest for users and developers of technologies, and the channels by which societal groups directed scientists to study topics pertinent to their interests. Discussing a few cases were scientists studied questions relevant for practical design in fields likes aerodynamics, acoustics and the study of electrons, I will show that their study fitted not only the utilitarian but also the disciplinary logic and that this overlap was crucial for their study. Yet, the choice of subjects relevant from utilitarian logic, rather than non-relevant ones followed particular channels of influence. Some of them were quite subtle, like the general, but new, notion that scientific research could and should support study of technology, which facilitated scientists’ choice of topics relevant to technology. Institutes for fostering research applicable to technologies, many of them novel, left clearer traces. Industrial, state and public laboratories had clear interests in developing particular technologies (e.g. telecommunication, aviation, high-voltage) and directed research to pertinent topics. Through material assistance, and by providing a considerable body of knowledge for further scientific research, the forces beyond these interests shaped also academic research. “Industrializing Electrons: Free Electrons, Undirected Research and the Cosmic Origin of Electronics in Germany” Falk Müller (Goethe Universität) Many physicists working in industrial laboratories felt patronized by their academic colleagues. In light of the privileges granted to industrial researchers in terms of equipment and payment these feelings were partly due to a phantom pain caused by a romanticized image of academic research. Nonetheless, researcher tried to create opportunities for free or undirected research in industrial laboratories as well. In this paper, I want to discuss the relation of concepts of independent research with the choice of research projects. I will focus on ways of presenting and utilizing electrons at the Research Institute of the German electro technical company AEG in the interwar period. In this period (stretching into the early war period), researchers attempted to develop electron optics into a new branch of physics that allowed for the development of technical appliances and at the same time gave researchers the feeling to contribute considerably to the development of physics as well. “Mathematics and the Wireless World” Scott Walter (Université de Nantes) One of the most remarkable technological developments of the 1920s was that of the vacuum tube. The crucial properties of the vacuum tube, as Balthasar Van der Pol pointed out with respect to the triode oscillator in 1920, stem from retention of nonlinear terms in the differential equation describing the circuit containing the triode. Solving the resulting equation, however, was a great

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 164

challenge. My paper compares the techniques employed by Van der Pol, Alfred Liénard, and others to capture the behavior of vacuum tubes and other nonlinear oscillating systems in the 1920s. Out of the Labyrinth of Recipe Commerce”: Dielectric Breakdown, Tacit Knowledge, and the Disenchantment of Applied Science” Karl Hall (Central European University) The manufacture of insulating materials was crucial to the expansion of electrification in the 1920s, when ambitious researchers hoped to develop a science of high-voltage insulators, briefly signaling the “dawn of industrio-physics.” Their hopes turned out to be premature. No immediate predecessor to materials science emerged in this border area where physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering overlapped, and these nominal failures subsequently vanished from narratives of modern physics, though some of the protagonists were well versed in atomic theory. But this was more than a matter of brute empirical intractability in the early days of the quantum theory of solids. This episode, properly situated in the industrial research laboratory, can tell us much about the shifting meaning of “applied science” between the wars—and what patent lawyers have to teach historians about the “artisan, handwork character of science.”

Biology at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century: New Approaches and Historical Legacies “Alexander von Humboldt: Between Enlightenment Vitalism and Romantic Naturphilosophie” Peter Reill (UCLA) In this paper, I will analyze the position of Alexander von Humboldt in the transition from late eighteenth-century vitalism to German Romantic Naturphilosophie. Rather than placing Humboldt in either camp, I will argue that he attempted to mediate between them, producing a form of science that partook of basic positions derived from vitalism, which he developed during his years in Germany and Paris, but also included positions drawn from Naturphilosophie’s desire to create philosophically informed comprehensive and unifying sciences such as biology. In the process, Humboldt forged a vision of science that over time stood in stark contrast to the emerging sciences of the nineteenth century that increasingly emphasized disciplinary separation and specialization. Thus, his last and most influential work, Cosmos, (which developed themes already present in his Ansichten der Natur) though a best seller amongst the educated reading public soon was dismissed by scientifically-trained specialists as “mere” popular science. By the beginning of the twentiethcentury, Humboldt was virtually removed from the pantheon of great scientists, especially in nonGerman speaking lands. Only recently has there been a reevaluation of his larger scientific program, leading many to argue, as Wulf claims, that he “invented the web of life, the concept of nature as we know it today.” Though I believe such a claim exaggerated, this paper will trace the manner in which Humboldt combined elements of both Enlightenment vitalism and Romantic Naturphilosophie to construct his unique view of science and nature.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 165

“Kielmeyer: Nature’s Experiments” Joan Steigerwald (York University) In the years around 1800 several publications appeared attempting to define a science of life. Assertions of the need for a science of life emerged in the context of anxieties over the disappearance of a distinct domain for life, in the face of encroachments from the physical sciences that claimed to answer that question. The articulations of that domain were accordingly also an attempt to delineate what life is not, or to demarcate a boundary between the living and nonliving. Works by Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus explored these questions by drawing attention to the material conditions of organic vitality, and tracing physiological functions in the simplest forms of life. This paper examines Karl Friedrich Kielmeyer’s contributions within this context. He proposed regarding the different relations of organic powers in different individual organisms and in different natural kinds as “nature’s experiments” with viable and abiding forms of life. That nature produced different living forms or relations of powers and processes under different physical conditions suggested that purposeful living organisms were not given, but formed from the materials of the world. Kielmeyer also investigated experiments on the spontaneous generation of life. His project for a comparative physiology and the history of life thus drew upon nature’s own experiments as his experimental system. Although Kielmeyer’s sketches of such a project remained unpublished, his lectures were widely circulated, and contributed to the questioning of the limits and viable forms of life at the turn of the nineteenth century. “Lamarckiana” Jessica Riskin (Stanford University) My subject is the politics of the emergence and spread, between about 1740 and 1820, of two major, related ideas: first, the idea of biology as a distinct science of life, and second, the idea of what we would now call “evolution,” but I will call it “transformism” to avoid reading aspects of later theories back into these early ideas about species-change. The person who chiefly pioneered both of these ideas was the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, author of the term “biology” and of the first theory of species-change and professor of natural history at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris. In 1802, Lamarck defined “biology” as one of three parts of “terrestrial physics,” the part comprehending everything to do with living bodies, especially their organization and its “tendency to create special organs.” In other words, the idea that living things compose and transform themselves was central to this original definition of “biology.” The paper will examine the political history of these conjoined ideas, transformism and a science devoted to its study, which carried with them an atmosphere of materialism, radicalism and anti-clericalism. This atmosphere became especially troubling toward the end of the nineteenth century to people such as the German Darwinist biologist August Weismann, who offered a definitive new interpretation of Darwinism that eliminated any whiff of Lamarckism. He and other neo-Darwinists were so successful that even today, Lamarck’s name is still in bad odor. His ideas themselves cannot tell us why; only their history can do that.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 166

“On the Progress Physiology Has Made since Haller: Ignaz Döllinger and the Legacy of the Eighteenth Century” John Zammito (Rice University) Ignaz Döllinger (1770-1841) was decisive in consolidating the experimental physiology of the eighteenth century to lay the foundations for the disciplinary practices of the nineteenth, as one of his most notable publications makes clear in its very title: On the Progress Physiology has made since Haller (1824). He stood at the forefront of his generation in life science, and thus his conception of the field – and his sense of the philosophy of science that it required – can be taken to capstone the whole development which made Naturphilosophie not only congenial but generative for emergent biology. He clearly drew his philosophical orientation from the Naturphilosophen but he also advanced experimental physiology after the fashion of Haller. Indeed, he embodied the decisive continuity from Albrecht von Haller through Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Christoph Heinrich Pfaff, Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Christian Reil and Gottfired Reinhold Treviranus, to the generation of his own students, Karl Ernst von Baer and Heinz Christian Pander, as well as to their key contemporaries, Johannes Müller and the discoverers of cell theory, Matthias Schleiden and Theodor Schwann, with whom no one can doubt that biology as a special science had taken form.

Historicizing Resource Management “Local Animosity and Elite Support: The Decline and Fall of the St. Vincent Botanic Garden” J'Nese Williams (New York Botanical Garden, Vanderbilt University) In 1800, Britain had a few botanic gardens in its colonies, though that number swelled to over a hundred by the century’s end. The colonial botanic gardens cultivated economically and medicinally valuable plants and managed the transfer of these plants throughout the empire. As a result, they were part of an imperial system directed toward profit and “improvement,” with Kew Gardens its head. As scientific institutions, the colonial gardens were also concerned with the creation and dissemination of plant knowledge. Though the proliferation of botanic gardens throughout the British Empire suggests that they were largely successful institutions, continued support of any particular garden was not a foregone conclusion. This paper looks at a particular botanic garden in St. Vincent, from its glory days in the late eighteenth century to the withdrawal of government support in the 1820s to explore questions of government support of science and the relationships between scientific institutions and their local communities. The literature on the British colonial gardens focuses on the overall expansion and success of an imperial system. The St. Vincent Garden was one of these success stories until ongoing skirmishes with the local community over land and authority led to its demise. By looking closely at a specific example of failure, this paper demonstrates that despite the appearance of strong central oversight, government support of colonial science was always contingent on local factors.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 167

“Sugar Beets and the Rise of Mathematical Statistics in Agriculture” Theodora Dryer (UCSD) Between 1918 and 1940, an international community of statisticians and logicians reimagined agrarian work as a modernist project that relied on algorithmic thinking in its procedures. This paper examines the international mathematical statistics community of the interwar era as they worked to strengthen and build national agrarian economies amidst the uncertainties of economic depression. At the heart of this story is the sugar beet. Sugar beet breeding was symbolic of good agriculture and statisticians in western countries like England and the United States became interested in the mathematical planning logics of Poland, Hungary, and the Soviet Union by virtue of their strong sugar beet production. At the level of discourse, sugar beet breeding was often used to promote mathematical statistics in agrarian planning to the international community and at the level of practice the sugar beet field became an ideal laboratory for new methods in mathematical statistics. Early twentieth century sugar beet breeding became a statistical project at the center of land reform, agrarian science, and statecraft. In the history of mathematical statistics, study of sugar beet planning breaks from the focus on Anglophone developments and emphasizes the importance of transnational exchange during this time. The shared interest in mathematical statistics across Europe, the United States, and beyond, allowed new mathematical methods in agrarian planning to be exchanged throughout the world. Into the late 1930s, support from the international mathematics community allowed Eastern European and Jewish mathematicians to emigrate as tensions in Europe mounted. “The German Sugar Beet Industry and Appraisals of Health: A Case Study in Agricultural Practices and Food Quality” Carolyn Taratko (Max Planck Institue for the History of Science/ Vanderbilt University) This paper examines the production of the sugar beet in nineteenth-century Germany. Large-scale beet cultivation involved intensive and mechanized practices for an export-oriented industry and grew in scale over the course of the nineteenth century in Germany the result of concerted efforts to refine cultivation practices. Because it was unprofitable at a small scale, and the operation of sugar refineries was untenable without access to large capital, beet cultivation ushered in an age of industrial agriculture. This paper explores this development and charts the concern of government officials, nutritionists, and social reformers who were ambivalent, and at times hostile to the labor practices on sugar beet farms. The depressed wages of laborers on these large estates, and their recruitment of foreign, primarily Polish workers, was said to degrade the overall quality of the product. Disapproval for the labor practices was thus tied to a negative appraisal of the quality of the sugar produced, along with general anxieties about overconsumption of sugar. This episode provides a case study that opens up an exploration of 3 how the circumstances of food production became reflected in assessments of health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “High and Low Modernisms in Colombia: Sugarcane Breeding and State Management in the 1930s”

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 168

Timothy Lorek (Yale University, New York Botanical Gardens) Colombia’s subtropical Cauca Valley is today the country’s primary sugarcane growing zone. Seen from the air, the valley’s rectangular fields of the monocrop grass grow between perfectly straight access roads, offering a geometric visual of the “high modernist” landscape as described in James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998). Long before the ascendency of this geometry, however, contradictory and often competing visions of the valley’s agricultural and scientific future became intertwined in state management practices. This paper juxtaposes programs for sugarcane breeding and genetics research to those for agricultural extension and education during the global depression of the 1930s. As state investment and subsidization of the corporate sugarcane industry increased through breeding programs and international partnerships with the USDA, a high modernist landscape emerged in tandem with large-scale irrigation projects designed for the benefit of this growing sector. At the same time, the Colombian state and regional government continued to channel funding into agricultural education and extension services in line with the agrarian populism of the global 1930s, described as “low modernism” in Jess Gilbert’s Planning Democracy (2016). This paper presents the tensions between these contradictory visions of agrarian modernity and traces the scientific details of sugarcane breeding programs and their consequences for state management of a changing landscape.

Living Physics, Electricity, and Science Popularization: Episodes of Science in 19th and 20th-Century India “Living Physics, Non-Living Physics, Indian Physics: Jagadish Chandra Bose” SOMADITYA BANERJEE (Austin Peay State University) Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) was a very influential physicist cum plant physiologist living in colonial India. Being mentored by a Belgian Jesuit Father Eugene Lafont at St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, Bose was instrumental in mentoring the first generation of Indian physicists—most notably Satyendranath Bose, Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman and Meghnad Saha. He established the Bose Institute in Calcutta in 1916. His initial scientific work focused on the generation and reception of electrical waves from 1895 to 1902. Later, between 1903 and 1934, Bose switched his research to electro-physiology—i.e. how plants respond to external stimuli. He earned a D.Sc from London University in 1896 and was honored with a knighthood in 1917. However, there has been precious little work on J.C. Bose apart from an isolated monograph by Subrata Dasgupta in 2000. Historians of science working on South Asia have preferred to focus on the Indian nuclear program with an emphasis on Indian physicist Homi Bhabha and Jawaharlal Nehru—the first prime minister of independent India. This paper aims to show that science in South Asia had a humbler yet romantic origin, similar but independent of the 'naturphilosophie' movement in Germany. Focusing especially on Bose’s career, I will argue that in spite of having an indigenous side, Bosean science also displayed multifarious influences which cannot be neatly conceptualized. Instead, one needs a multi-dimensional analysis SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 169

which takes into account the cultural influences as well as the content of science to appreciate the origins of this romantic Indian science. “‘The Free Side of the Meter’: Improper Use of Electricity and Middle-class Identity in Urban Colonial India” Animesh Chatterjee (Leeds Trinity University) This paper follows recent works on users and non-users of technologies to explore the ‘improper use’ of electric supply in urban colonial India. The term ‘improper use’ is used broadly here to refer to a variety of practices that electric supply companies believed to be interferences to their property. These included theft of electricity by bypassing meters, breaking seals on electric meters, or using electricity for purposes other than that for which it was supplied to the customer. The paper argues that such non-prescribed uses of electricity, studied by scholars as forms of resistance to a new technology, were becoming increasingly common within the middle class, and were linked to class politics in colonial India. Considering some of the diverse motivations that led to such practices, this paper will argue that prescribed and non-prescribed uses of electricity supply were parallel to and contiguous with the historical rise of the Indian middle class based on contradictory stances on colonial rule, Indian nationalism, domesticity and the meanings of respectability. This paper, through an examination of newspaper reports and documents of the colonial administration, aims to provide new perspectives on the history of technology and modern Indian history by studying how consumers, suppliers and promoters of electricity interacted during the early days of the electrification of urban colonial India. “Modernity, Women and Science- Reading Vernacular Popular Science Literature in India 1847-1957” Urmila Unnikrishnan (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) The paper is located within the framework of the history of science popularisation and feminist history of colonial science. It examines science related literature in Malayalam (a language in South India) women’s magazines between 1847and 1957, and tries to contextualise it within the history of the construction of the modern women. I try to explain that science was an integral part of the process of construction of the modern women and we see an assertion of this in women’s magazines. Scholars of gender history in India consider women’s magazines as an important source to understand the formation of gendered subjectivities under colonial rule. These magazines served an important role in the institutionalisation of the modern domestic space and the establishment of women within it. They have been understood variously as sites for casting and recasting the ideal of women, articulation of agency of women, and also as sites for negotiating nationalist patriarchal concerns. However, the role of science in engendering these discourses is overlooked, and a large number of science articles in these magazines go unnoticed. The fact that this lacuna persists despite a rich body of feminist studies of science hints on the disjuncture between the history of women and history of science, especially in colonial context.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 170

This study on science literature in women’s magazine helps toward covering that gap and also underlines the relevance of vernacular popular science literature in the history of colonial science. Focusing on the vernacular also contributes to counter the dominant nationalist frames of history of science. “Readership, Approaches and Science Popularization in Hindi in Colonial India (1860–1947)” Pooja Mishra (Jawharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) History of science as a discipline provides a significant hold to understand the evolution of any civilization or society as whole. There has been various historiographical concern within the history of science, and popularization of science is one of those concern. The proposed paper is about popularization of science in Hindi. Historians of social history of science in colonial India have revealed the responses toward the introduction of modern science in colonial India, how it was perceived, assimilated and disseminated by the recipient culture. This involves investigating the different socio-cultural contexts of the adaptation and dissemination of science in culture. To unearth the social roots and contexts of science it is necessary to study the processes and actors involved in the vernacularisation of Western scientific knowledge. Thus, the discussions entail studying the science education in Hindi in North Western Province, the availability of sources in terms of textbooks, the relation between textbook production and education system, and its expansion. This discussion provides a context to understand the emergence of science education in Hindi. Majorly, the relationship between science education, print culture and Hindi nationalism is discussed. It follows the account of ascent of Hindi as a language, its acquiring the status as a prominent language of the region, and its incorporation into the education system as medium of instruction. This in turn entails an exploration of the institutions and intellectuals involved in the popularization of science.

Making early modern medicine: transmitting practical knowledge through text and image “The Architecture of the Body: From Anatomy to Surgery” Cynthia Klestinec (Miami University) The role of techne and the rise of the technical arts in the Renaissance has received considerable attention (e.g. P. Smith, P. Long, among others), medical techne, by contrast, is underdeveloped. The techne of medicine differed from that of the technical arts because its object was the body and the body’s health, and yet, in the sixteenth century, the technical arts supplied a vocabulary for medical techne, for the art of medicine. In a range of sixteenth-century Latin and Italian texts, the surgeon’s technical skill is expressed through 2 analogies to architecture. Surgeons manipulated the body’s architecture, and their work was articulated in light of men who both conceived and built architectural fabrications. Not only did the architectural analogies, which originated in Galen,

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 171

emphasize the usefulness of anatomical knowledge to medical practice, but they indicate how surgery acquired an artisanal character by the late sixteenth century. “Visual Representations of Tactile Knowledge: Early Modern Japanese Images of Bone Manipulation and Abdominal Palpation” Daniel Trambaiolo (Hong Kong University) Japanese understandings of human body structure underwent a radical transformation over the course of the eighteenth century. Historical accounts of this transformation have generally privileged its visual aspects, especially the new ways of looking at the body developed and popularized by scholars of “Dutch studies” (rangaku). However, the eighteenth century saw not only the emergence of new ways of looking at the body, but also new ways of touching and manipulating it: bone-setting methods derived from Chinese sources, techniques of physical manipulation for intervening in difficult births, and the conviction that disease could be more reliably diagnosed by palpation of the abdomen than by the pulse-taking techniques that had traditionally been privileged by Chinese style doctors. Although true mastery over these forms of tactile knowledge required direct personal experience, authors of manuscripts and printed books sought ways to convey their knowledge through images accompanying their texts, aiming to help viewers understand the connections between internal structures and the external appearances of intact living bodies. I argue that by paying close attention to the visual language of these images, we find unexpected connections among the different forms of tactile knowledge that flourished prior to and alongside the emergence of European-style anatomy, suggesting a new interpretation of the eighteenth-century transformation of Japanese ideas about body structure. “Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Distillation Manuals and the Making of Vernacular Medicine in Early German Print” Tillmann Taape (University of Cambridge) In the early 1500s, Hieronymus Brunschwig, a surgeon and apothecary from Strasbourg, published the first printed manuals on pharmaceutical distillation, written in his native German. Brunschwig was more craftsman than scholar and drew extensively on his handson experience as a distiller and shopkeeper as well as medical and alchemical texts. In this paper I investigate how texts and practice shape Brunschwig’s understanding of nature and the human body, and his expertise of making medicines. By close reading of Brunschwig’s practical instructions, I argue that he articulates an artisanal way of knowing based on direct engagement with materials and processes, through the body and its senses. I show how his 3 books combine this approach with alchemical ideas about the ‘quintessence’ of things to produce reliable remedies which are safe for the use of laypeople. Considering the books as remarkable printed objects in themselves, I explore how they endeavour to communicate the embodied knowledge of making medicines to a wide audience beyond medical specialists, through the innovative use of print technology in text and image. As I will show, Brunschwig’s works were seminal among the earliest vernacular publications, and tell a story about

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 172

distilling remedies, producing printed books, and the making of the vernacular medical tradition at the eve of the Reformation. “Wood, Plaster, Texts and Acquaintances: Making Anatomical Models around 1800” Marieke Hendriksen (Utrecht University) Around 1800, anatomical models were not yet mass produced, but made in small numbers, from a variety of materials. We know that medical men frequently collaborated with visual artists and craftsmen to realize such models, yet we know very little about these collaborations. This paper investigates and compares the role of printed texts, images, and one-on-one instruction in the making of plaster and wooden anatomical models in two case studies: the creation of plaster models in Edinburgh and the making of wooden models in Philadelphia. By the late eighteenth century, there were strong ties between these two medical centers, yet approaches to making anatomical models were very different. While plaster casts could be produced in relatively large numbers and were fairly cheap, wooden models took much more time to make, could not be reproduced on a large scale, and were much more expensive. However, an analysis of plaster casts and wooden models in Edinburgh and Philadelphia collections suggests this did not define the choices anatomists made. On the contrary, by the early nineteenth century, we see comparable percentages of plaster and wooden models. Combined with my reconstruction of plaster modelling based on Pole’s 1790 Anatomical Instructor, I use this analysis to argue that it is a misunderstanding that plaster casting was an easy and widely used option. Finally, I will discuss how collaborations in the production of these plaster and wooden models were reflected in the textual recording and transmission of techniques for anatomical modelling.

Making Legitimate Science: Cold War Investigations of the Alien and the Construction of Scientific Credibility, From Flying Saucers to Astrobiology “UFO Reports as Information Pollution: Managing Science and Security in Cold War America” Adam Dodd (University of Queensland) This paper offers an account of how, collectively, UFO reports came to function as a form of “information pollution” (Rayner 2012) for military, intelligence and scientific institutions in Cold War America. As a kind of noise or interference, UFO reports, and the apparently anomalous “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966) they sought to describe, endangered the emerging aerospace/national security ambitions – including, at times, the telecommunications systems – of the very institutions tasked with resolving the UFO problem. In the interests of both aerospace/national security and the preservation of institutional integrity, UFOs were framed as a “non-phenomenon” (Wendt and Duvall 2008), rendering UFO reports all but redundant. UFO sightings and reports continued, but state institutions effectively “tuned them out” through strategies of “denial, dismissal, diversion and displacement” (Rayner 2012). The implicit procedure of ignorance as organizational

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 173

strategy is perhaps most officially expressed in the USAF-funded Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (1969), a sprawling, internally inconsistent document of a deeply dysfunctional research committee. The report’s swift, unanimously positive reception by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences, and indeed its effective removal of the UFO problem from the purview of the physical sciences, should be regarded as a triumph of “agnogenesis” (Proctor and Schiebinger 2008) buoyed by a broader climate of “antiepistemology” (Galison 2004) in which ignoring UFOs, rather than investigating them, had become the institutionalized consensus of the scientific community by the late 1960s. “Belief, Proof, and Pure Science: Understanding Scientific Consensus and Dissent through Cold War UFO Studies” Kate Dorsch (University of Pennsylvania) The scientific consensus at the end of twenty years of official investigation through United States Air Force-organized projects was that the study of UFO phenomena had produced nothing of serious scientific interest, and that the studies should be discontinued. Interest in “flying saucers” dropped off precipitously following the publication of the USAF’s Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (1969), and serious scientific study of the phenomena was largely considered dead. This story, however, obscures the small-but-vocal group of scientists who advocated for serious study of the phenomena, in both the years leading up to and the decade following the publication of the Final Report. Drawing on rich archival sources, this paper discusses the efforts of “true believer” establishment scientists to keep the study alive. It will focus especially on the social and political tools leveraged by these scientists to mobilize the American public and the U.S. federal government to their cause and the efforts of these scientists to be ‘popularizers’ of scientific UFO studies. This paper also explores how “true believer” scientists (or, to borrow a phrase from historian Christopher Donohue, “dissenting scientists”) – namely Dr. James E. McDonald and Dr. J. Allen Hynek - utilized the modes and methods of their disciplines to argue for comprehensive study of the phenomena as an example of true “science” – open-minded, curious interrogation of a phenomenon, freed of any preconceived ontological suppositions. “Articulating the Alien: The Constraints of Astrobiology” Luis Campos (University of New Mexico) While earlier conceptualizations of life in the universe often envisioned a plurality of worlds “peopled with various forms of life” or “tenanted by living creatures,” the contemporary field of astrobiology orients itself instead around questions of “habitability.” How might we better understand this important shift from little green men to little green microbes and beyond? In this paper, I suggest that astrobiologists’ longstanding efforts to avoid the specter of sensationalism not only reflects a deep-seated quest for scientific legitimacy, but has structured the very science of the field. Ongoing contestations in astrobiology about the border between the respectable and the fanciful, and between science and science fiction, are not only perennial but productive for astrobiology’s efforts to articulate the alien. Building off Steven Dick’s claim that “UFOs and science

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 174

fiction are two ways of working out the biological universe world view in popular culture,” in this paper I trace how efforts as diverse as SETI and efforts to detect biosignatures of life elsewhere have simultaneously sought to sideline older concepts of alien life even as they have actively and successfully integrated “alien” perspectives into their approach. By examining the contributions to astrobiology of investigators like Drake, Lovelock, Margulis, Sagan, and even Simpson (a selfdescribed “addict” of science fiction) I will explore how some key advances in mid-twentieth-century astrobiology have resulted from shifts in perspective first enabled by speculative fiction, suggesting a more complex and more productive intellectual engagement of astrobiology with science fiction than has heretofore been recognized. “From Prophets and Crackpots to Victims and Survivors: How Contact with Aliens Was Pathologized” Greg Eghigian (Penn State University) While the first reports of flying saucer sightings appeared in 1947, it was not until the 1950s that witnesses began claiming to have encountered extraterrestrial visitors. Throughout the fifties and sixties, the reports of “contactees” tended to emphasize the shyness and philanthropic intentions of extraterrestrials. Over the course of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, however, the stories increasingly revolved around traumatic encounters with coercive aliens engaged in performing human experiments. From the beginning, close encounter reports were greeted by most observers with a great deal of skepticism. While critics often dismissed the first generation of contactees as “crackpots” and questioned their motivations and lucidity, some witnesses cast themselves as modern day messengers and prophets, even if most steered clear of the public eye. Starting in the mid-1960s, ufologists started citing reports of “hostile incidents” involving extraterrestrials, culminating in tales of alien abduction. With the second generation of contactees, psychiatrists and psychotherapists began to play a more conspicuous role both within and outside alien abductee circles. Broad accusations of insanity framed in vernacular terms were increasingly replaced by applications of specific clinical diagnoses – most often post-traumatic stress and personality disorders – at the same time that witnesses began founding self-help support groups. This paper, based on extensive archival research, discusses how the alien contact phenomenon was increasingly psychopathologized over time. The evidence shows that not only critics and clinicians, but also contactees and their advocates, contributed to this development.

Science as Politics in the Nuclear Age “The Man in the White Lab Coat: Civil Defense, Scientific Expertise, and the Challenge of Public Opinion” Sarah Robey (Idaho State University) In the early Cold War, American civil defense agencies struggled to convince citizens to take measures to protect themselves in the event of a nuclear war. Policymakers imagined Americans as ignorant and apathetic, and framed scientific expertise and instruction as an antidote to this problem

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 175

of public opinion. Civil defense agencies employed specialists in a range of fields and publicized scientific research relating to nuclear survival, all the while using generic fictional scientists to deliver such information to the public in civil defense media. By positioning themselves as nuclear experts, civil defense policymakers attempted to manage their image as public safety authorities. However, these officials promoted civil defense expertise against the backdrop of growing public skepticism about the role of nuclear science in American society and politics. Accusations of nuclear espionage, disloyalty, scientific oligarchy, and government secrecy stood in stark contrast to civil defense messages of benevolent knowledge and rational preparation. Thus the public reception of civil defense plans became subject to a range of shifting cultural ideas, images, and expectations about scientific expertise. This paper argues that the increasing public ambivalence about nuclear science in democracy contributed significantly to a decline in public trust in civil defense programs. As new authorities emerged who questioned the efficacy of civil defense practices, they also cast doubt on the wisdom of nuclear policies and the authority of the state more broadly. “How to Sell a Neutron Bomb: Captain John Morse and Technopolitical NetworkBuilding, 1958- 1964” Annie Adams (Cornell University) “Mr. Cohen’s concept could fill the need as a politically acceptable weapon within the fiscal limits which apply, and without the devastating side effects feared by so many.” So wrote John H. Morse, a strategic planner for Aerojet General Corporation, in a 1961 letter describing his colleague Sam Cohen’s neutron bomb concept to General Lauris Norstad, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander. The bomb as Morse described it was a small, “discriminatory” nuclear weapon that could resolve the challenge of defending Western Europe against Soviet invasion without destroying the very territory requiring protection. Yet the neutron bomb was highly controversial. The benefits Morse extolled were hardly self-evident, even to officials endorsing continued nuclear weapons development over a testing agreement. In this paper I will use a combination of technopolitics (Hecht 2009) and Matthew Evangelista’s theory of the directional nature of nuclear weapons innovation in the U.S. (Evangelista 1988) to analyze Morse’s promotion of the neutron bomb. How did Morse practice technopolitics to advocate for a “more usable” nuclear weapon during the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis? How did Morse leverage his technical expertise as an engineer, military background an Air Force Captain and the head of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Section, and his political experience as aide to AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss in his efforts to construct a network of support for the neutron bomb? This paper will draw from the John H. Morse papers and from digital repositories maintained by the National Security Archive, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and the Gale Declassified Document Group. “A Conspiracy of Ignorance: The United Kingdom, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and Nuclear Winter” Anthony Eames (Georgetown University)

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 176

In 1983, Ronald Reagan’s announcement of the Strategic Defense Initiative and the revelation of the Nuclear Winter thesis by the TTAPS committee spelled trouble for the British government’s commitments to minimum deterrence and nuclear cooperation with the United States. As British society engaged both issues, the representation of underlying scientific concepts became a battleground for pronuclear and antinuclear proponents. Combatting the emerging scientific consensus in support of Nuclear Winter and in opposition to SDI proved particularly challenging to the Thatcher government. The Thatcher government rejected participation in Nuclear Winter conferences and studies on the grounds that research on the issue was preliminary, but simultaneously justified its participation in SDI by emphasizing the research benefits of the program and downplaying potential military applications. The inconsistency with which Thatcher the politician applied the scientific method to research on nuclear issues undermined the credibility of Thatcher the scientist. To shore up public and scientific support for its nuclear position, the Thatcher government dispatched experts from the Aldermaston Weapons Research Laboratory into communities across the U.K to oppose scientists supporting nuclear disarmament. The resulting insider versus outsider dynamic accelerated the politicization of British science and shattered public confidence in civil defense schemes, the notion of deterrence, and Thatcher’s image as a scientist, which had all been employed to allay public fear of nuclear war.

Structure Across the Disciplines “Structuring the Imagination under the Banner of Science” Mary Kuhn (University of Virginia) In 1789 Erasmus Darwin made a literary and scientific splash with his taxonomic poem “The Loves of the Plants.” Darwin wrote the poem to “Enlist the Imagination under the Banner of Science” in order to teach readers an easy way to learn the Linnaean classes of plants by describing the sex organs of flowers as young maidens and male suitors. By the early nineteenth century, novelists and poets were conversely enlisting science under the banner of the imagination to naturalize courtship plots by characterizing young female characters as women on the cusp of “blooming” into sexual maturity. In short, literary and scientific structure became mutually supportive as literature applied scientific ideas to social narratives, and science used literary techniques to communicate important concepts. Taxonomic botany’s role in substantiating courtship plots in nineteenth-century literature has been well acknowledged, but this paper will consider how other structural elements of botany impacted literary plots in the nineteenth century. In particular, it will look at the ways that writers found in certain botanical structures—including structures of botanical thought—the basis for political critique. “Making Sense of Shapes, and Shapes of Sense: Structuring Smell, Vision, and Taste in the Late Nineteenth Century” Michael Rossi (University of Chicago)

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 177

Is the sensation of color a trapezoid or a sphere? What are the coordinate points of vanilla ice cream? Where does frankincense sit in space, relative to the dimensions of “fragrant, ethereal, putrid, spicy, resinous, [and] burned” ?

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, groups of researchers across a number of rapidly consolidating fields — particularly in psychology and psychometrics — began attempting to ascribe order to the apparent chaos of the human sensorium through the use of simple shapes: spheres, cones, tetrahedrons, cubes. Although not uncontroversial — William James was skeptical of such endeavors, and reviewers of Hans Henning’s “smell prism” expressed perplexity when they tried to understand his system -- these efforts had far-reaching results. The nineteenth century idea that human beings possess a “color space," for instance — typically viewed as cubical or spherical — is a baseline assumption in much contemporary work in color standards, computer graphics, and perceptual psychology. This paper examines the formal aspects of these attempts at structuring the unruly sensorium. It focuses in particular on the ways in which the creation of structures for sensations such as vision, smell, and taste demanded acts of translation: from registers of sight to touch, for instance, or registers of space to vision. The techniques through which researchers described senses as things that were at once tangible and intangible -- concrete and abstract -- provides a window more broadly into the ways in which structure becomes manifest as a formal property of sensing observers, and of objects (and subjects) of scientific observation alike. “Between the Natural and Human Sciences: What was Structuralism?” Isabel Gabel (University of Chicago) The influence of structuralism in the nineteen fifties and sixties is indisputable. As an approach to the human sciences, it was characterized by an impulse towards disciplinary autonomy from the natural sciences. For structural anthropology this meant, for example, rejecting the idea that cultural practices could be explained in purely functional or biological terms. In this regard biology came to be seen anathema to structuralism, and this important period in the history of the human sciences is often retold as part of a rejection of biologism using the tools of structural linguistics. But when in 1953, the eminent philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty declared that “Saussure, the modern linguist, could have sketched a new philosophy of history,” he was deploying a concept of structure deeply informed not just by linguistics, but by biology as well. This paper maps the entwined histories of biological and linguistic concepts of structure in the mid-twentieth century, arguing that historians have been too quick to accept structuralists’ own accounts of their practices. Prior to the arrival of structural linguistics in France in the early fifties, Raymond Ruyer had, for example, published several works on the philosophy of structure. These works, which would later influence a generation of thinkers, deployed a biological concept of structure to resolve the problems posed by strict mechanist philosophy. As this paper shows, a transdisciplinary ideal was inseparable from the structuralist project of disciplinary autonomy. SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 178

“The Axiom of High Modernism” Alma Steingart (Harvard University) The quintessential twentieth century American social sciences were deeply committed to both scientism and cross-disciplinary universal theories. While both tendencies preceded World War II, scientism and universality did not dominate the American academy until the postwar era. In a generation that historian Hunter Heyck terms the “high-modernist social sciences,” American anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and economists interpreted all social phenomena in terms of structure, system, and function. While historians have noted that the postwar transformation of the social sciences was characterized by an increased adoption of mathematics, mathematics tout court is an insufficient explanation. Further, it has remained unacknowledged that the high modernist social sciences primarily embraced axiomatic reasoning. Following Theodore Porter, historians understand the midcentury mathematization of the social sciences almost exclusively in terms of quantification, whereby “trust in numbers” was commensurate with objectivity. However, I argue that when postwar social scientists annexed mathematics for use in their theories of social behavior, they did so not by quantifying the phenomena they sought to explicate, but by axiomatizing them. In the interwar period, social scientists emphasized the empirical and quantitative aspects of their work. That is, before World War II mathematization was tightly linked with measurement and observation, and the goal of such methods was to obtain statistical data for their own sake. The postwar mathematization of the social sciences had a different flavor – in economics, sociology, and political science, mathematics served not only as a computational tool, but a theoretical one as well. Axiomatic reasoning was crucial in this capacity.

The History and Historiography of Ottoman Science “Science, Occupation, and Secularization: Transformations in Ottoman Egyptian Pedagogy, 1205–1240 AH/1791–1830 CE” Edna Bonhomme (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science) During the late eighteenth century, Egypt went through a set of political and economic ruptures that reconfigured power amongst the local and foreign rulers. This paper considers a series of intellectual and pedagogical transformations in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Egypt that was connected to the patronage system, the quantity of books published, and the transfiguration of science. H�asan al-ʻAt�t�ār and ʻAbd al-Raḥmān al-Jabartī were two Egyptian scholars who helped to reformulate Ottoman Egyptian scholarship during the French military occupation and the modernization projects under Muḥammad ʿAlī. Eighteenth-century scholars such as H�asan alʻAt�t�ār were captivated by European science and becoming more secular while al-Jabartī was more skeptical of European’s presence in Egypt. I argue that a) the major political shifts in Egypt opened up space for ʿulamāʾ and especially H�asan al-ʻAt�t�ār who consolidated a syncretic intellectual tradition (in natural science and medicine but also across a range of other fields), b) that this new SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 179

tradition was neither a revival of Islamic knowledge nor an imported European knowledge but was constituted of syncretic forms, and c) that this was the context for the much-remarked upon emergence of the Arab renaissance. This was possible because there was a qualitative shift in scientific thought in Ottoman Egypt during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries within the Egyptian state. This paper will highlight some of his key texts with the aim of closely examining the vacillating balances of knowledge and power. “Out of Many, One: Idea of Unity of A Science in the Ottoman Empire” Kenan Tekin (Yalova University) After the translation of Greek philosophical corpus into Arabic, Muslim scholars reshuffled various issues including the discussion of the idea of science, which used to be discussed in the book of demonstration in the Organon of Aristotle, and also partly in the Metaphysics. Post-classical Muslim scholars put a great deal of thought into what makes a particular discipline a science. This is evident from the fact that they placed such discussions right at the beginning of scholarly works, i.e. the introduction (muqaddima) of scientific books. Hence, a scientific discipline be it religious or rational, was introduced by the aspect of unity that was crucial for defining the science. In fact, this practice became quite well established that by the fourteenth century previous works which did not include this information were normalized through insertions in commentaries. For instance, Athir al-Din al-Abhari’s Isagoge, one of the most famous and popular summas of logic, lacked that information. Therefore, in his commentary on this summa, the Ottoman scholar Molla Fenari remedied this situation by not only presenting the subject matter, purpose and utility of logic, but also by providing an argument for doing so. Fenari’s brief discussion on the need for introducing students to a science by its aspect of unity, be it essential or accidental, became a subject of commentaries and glosses in the following centuries. Based on this overview, the paper argues, unlike the modern concerns with methods, post-classical Muslims propagated a metaphysical notion of science. “Problematizing the Beginning of Ottoman Science Studies: Historiography in Turkey’s Early Republican Period” Hasan Umut (McGill University) One of the earliest and most important works on the Ottoman experience of science was published by Adnan Adıvar in 1939 under the name La Science chez les Turks, whose enlarged version appeared a few years later in Turkish as Osmanlı Türklerinde İlim [Science among the Ottoman Turks]. Though it points out a number of significant scientific and intellectual topics in Ottoman history, and is still useful for the field, its approach is largely Eurocentric. Accordingly, since the Ottomans allegedly could not keep up with the newly emerging modern science, their science was afflicted with stagnation, and eventually with decline. Moreover, he describes Ottoman science as “the deficient and sometimes incorrect continuation of science in Arabic and Persian languages.” In this paper, considering the fact that Adıvar has been influential, to varying degrees up until now, on directions of the literature that has been produced after him, I will problematize his narrative of

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 180

science among the Ottomans, discussing some of the basic assumptions upon which his work relies. I will argue that Adıvar’s approach that centralizes the European experience of science, by which he marginalizes and even orientalizes the Ottoman experience, can be better understood by paying close attention to the political and intellectual challenges he faced in his checkered life, which witnessed the political transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 12 | 10:00–12:00 p.m. | 181