1998 HSS ANNUAL MEETING
PROGRAM ABSTRACTS

Meeting Program | Abstracts

Abstracts are arranged alphabetically.
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David
Kaiser (Harvard University)
"Berkeley Physics in the Fifties: Loyal Theorists and Appropriate Assignments"

Physicists at the University of California at Berkeley faced unusual challenges in adjusting to the postwar scene. A McCarthy- era loyalty oath decimated what had been the nation's leading prewar center for theoretical physics, and within one year all of the theorists on faculty were either fired or had resigned in protest. The unceasing rush of incoming graduate students, and the inability to attract "first-class" theorists even years after the oath controversy, shaped particular constraints on how theoretical physics could be practiced and taught there. There was no room for overly "abstract" ruminations, which offered little apprenticeship opportunities for the "stranded" graduate students. Successful young theorists had to provide just the right kind of thesis problem to their students-not "unduly difficult or too time-consuming." As hiring and firing records make clear, the high-flung reaches of theorists' speculation were thus hemmed in by pedagogical realities.

Lucy Jayne
Kamau (Northeastern Illinois University)
"William Maclure and his Clients: The Hazards of Patronage"

Client/patron relationships are relations of power. The client is subordinate and therefore often at the mercy of the patron. The hazards of this relationship can be seen in the histories of four men. Born in Scotland in 1763, William Maclure, known as "the Father of American Geology," became extremely rich. He retired to devote his time to science and other interests. Maclure not only carried out his own research he also sponsored the research of others, most notably the American naturalist Thomas Say, the French artist and naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesueur, and the Dutch geologist and chemist Gerhard Troost. These men had already published important work before they joined forces with Maclure, and all had promising futures. Institutional professional scientific positons were rare in the nineteenth century. Maclure's patronage seemed to make it possible for these men to carry out thier work. However, patronage renders clients subject to the whims of their patrons. Maclure was both mercurial and irascible, and in the end his patronage proved highly destructive. In 1826, Maclure joined forces with Robert Owen in Owen's utopian communal society at New Harmony, Indiana. His three clients had no choice but to follow him. New Harmony's communal society dissolved in 1827, but Maclure retained a financial interest in the property, and his clients found they could not leave this remote village. Say continued to work but his output was considerably diminshed. The conditons under which he worked may have contributed to his early death. Lesuuer never published again. Only Troost was able to salvage his profesional life, because he was able to break off the relationship with Maclure. Maclure's exercise of the power he held over Say, Lesueur and Troost severely damaged their lives and their work.

Lee B.
Kass (Cornell University)
"Fact, Fiction and Faulty Memories: Documenting Barbara McClintock's Life and Work"

Telling stories about each other is a strong tradition among scientists, and this custom is passed on from teachers to students. Historians use these accounts to lead them to documents that confirm or refute these legends. Distinguished scientists are often asked to recount their lives and work as memoirs or oral histories. These chronicles are usually recorded from memory at an age far removed from the events, and without written verification of the incidents. I am writing an intellectual biography of Barbara McClintock, Nobel Laureate 1983. I have used stories and legends about her as leads to archived correspondence academic records department, employment, and performance records, and other appropriate institutional manuscripts previously unknown. Many documents refute the anecdotes and myths that have been told with delight about McClintock's life and work. I will present documentation that contradicts stories regarding McClintock's undergraduate experience at Cornell, legends that women were not admitted to Cornell's Plant Breeding Department in the 1920's, popular beliefs regarding the timing of McClintock's cytological identification of the 10 chromosomes in corn, and myths that McClintock left the University of Missouri in 1941 because she was denied tenure.

Jordan
Kellman (Princeton University)
"Maritime travel and the Paris Academy of Sciences"

In this paper, I will propose a new perspective for interpreting the goals, methods, organization and achievements of the early Paris Academy of sciences: French interest in maritime travel. From the Academy's inception under the minister of state and of the navy, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to its most celebrated achievement in the eighteenth century, the measurement of the size and shape of the earth in 1735, the maritime ambitions of French ministers inspired, justified and propelled the Paris Academy to the forefront of early modern science. While the commercial and technological benefits that the crown expected to derive from the Academy are well known, the particular emphasis of its founders and leading lights on the improvement of naval and commercial maritime travel has scarcely been studied. In this paper, I will first briefly sketch the maritime voyages undertaken under the auspices or recommendation of the Paris Academy during its first 75 years, indicating briefly their tradition al significance in the history of science. I will then trace the maritime inte rests of the French crown, from Colbert in the 1660s through his successors, the Pontchartrains and Maurepas, in the 1740s, focusing on the technical and theoretical advantages they hoped would derive from organized, sponsored scientific research. Within this framework, I will propose a reinterpretation of the voyages and the Academy's structure and activities over this period in light of the mercantilist, maritime interests of the French royal ministers who oversaw and funded the Academy's activities. This section will focus on the career of Europe's leading astronomer at the time, Gian Domenico Cassini (Cassini I), who was recruited by Colbert to lead the Academy's astronomical research at the observatory, and trained a generation of Europe's leading astronomers. Cassini also personally oversaw many of the Academy's most significant improvements in navigation, seafaring, marine cartography, and directed most of the Academy's early mariti me voyages.

Kathy
Ketchum & Jan Sigler (Paseo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts)
"WGBH's Science Odssesy: Collaborative high school teaching of evolution"

In 1997, a group of Kansas City public institutions (public library, public television station, and a magnet high school) applied for and received funding from WGBH "Science Odyssey" program (funded by NSF) to encourage innovative science teaching. With this funding, they organized a "Science Camp" for fifth graders a monthly series of "Science Saturdays" for kids at public libraries a five-day "Tec Treck" camp for girls and several teaching units for high school science classes. History of science and web-based resources were used in all these venues. With her collaborator (a social studies teacher), biology teacher Ketchum will describe her development and teaching of a two-week unit on evolution for sophomores at her magnet high school.

Peggy Aldrich
Kidwell (Smithsonian Institution)
"Cohorts, Elites and Communities: A View of Lankford's AMERICAN ASTRONOMY"

In his volume AMERICAN ASTRONOMY: COMMUNITY, CAREERS AND POWER, 1859-1940, John Lankford draws together years of research on the social history of the American astronomical community. What unexpected patterns and unusual insights emerge from this extensive work? To what extent can it be used as a model for studying other scientific and technical communities? How much has the data collected and presented been shaped by contemporary data processing technology and statistical methods?

Scott
Kirsch (University of Oklahoma)
"Place and Progress in the Natural and Social Sciences: John Wesley Powell in Washington and the American West"

This paper explores how two overlapping strands of discourse, progressivism and evolutionary thought, were constituted reciprocally with processes of American expansion and development in the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Including but not limited to the scientific and political work of Major John Wesley Powell, I discuss scientific fieldwork in the West in biology, ethnography , anthropology, geography, and geology, and draw connections to the epistemic bases for much of this work in evolutionary theories (and to its political bases in Washington institutions as well). This study thus raises questions about the traffic of ideas between the natural and social sciences, and between the production of scientific knowledge and its practical application. That the reconnaissance and surveying of new western lands, and of recently subjugated peoples, could be pursued equivalently as matters of science has enormous significance for our understanding of both the history of science and the history of the American West, yet too little is known about these connections.

Kim
Kleinman (Missouri Botanical Garden/Webster University)
"Edgar Anderson: Interdisciplinary Authority on What Was Not Known About Corn"

Acknowledging others as authorities on what was known about corn, Edgar Anderson of the Missouri Botanical Garden suggested his expertise concerned what was not known about corn. With typical wit, he was indicating an interest in a wider range than those asked by authorities such as his Harvard classmate, the geneticist Paul C. Mangelsdorf. Anderson wanted to know what is "Zea mays"? What is its origin? and What is its agronomic importance. To pursue these synthetic questions, he collaborated not only with geneticists and taxonomists, but also with agronomists, geographers, archaeologists, seed companies, and anthropologists. Tracing these associations illuminates Anderson's unique contribution to corn biology and his interdisciplinary approach to science in general.

John
Krige (Centre de Recherche en Histoire des Sciences et des Techniqu)
"Constructing Credibility at/of CERN: The Boson Bonanza"

Recent work by social historians of science has drawn our attention to the mechanisms whereby scientific truth-claims are produced, legitimated, and diffused, unraveling the relationships between authority, reliability and trust among persons in the stabilization of knowledge. This paper shifts the focus of analysis off the individual onto the laboratory. Based on archival sources, interviews, and videotapes, it explores a process of knowledge construction at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics. In the mid-1970s, CERN's management realized that the facility had a poor scientific reputation. Under pressure from the physics community, and from its patrons, it gave top priority to a search for the W and Z bosons predicted by the Standard Model. It also carefully put in place the infrastructure and mechanisms needed to ensure that reliable, reproducible, and trustworthy results would be obtained-results that would enhance personal reputations and build the laboratory's credibility and authority as a world center.

Alan D.
Krinsky (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
"Let Them Eat Horsemeat!: Politics, Food Sciences, and Dietary Practices in Nineteenth-Century France"

A coalition of French scientists, philanthropists, and government officials joined together in the second half of the nineteenth century to promote the slaughter and consumption of horses for human consumption. In the face of considerable resistance, these people pursued goals of both legalization and public acceptance of the practice by means of scientific, philanthropic, and political arguments, as well as through publicized "hippophagique" banquets attended by prominent citizens who were offered a variety of dishes prepared with horsemeat. Leading members of the Society for the Protection of Animals played an important role in organizing the banquets and promoting horsemeat consumption. They used scientific and other claims in the face of what they took to be a crisis of dangerously low daily and annual consumption of meat by the French, particularly in comparison with the British and other Europeans. In this paper, I intend to use the debate over the nutritional and political value of horsemeat to examine larger issues of food science and dietary practice in shaping a modern understanding of what it takes to eat "nutritiously."

Gary
Kroll
(University of Oklahoma)

"The Explorers Club and the American Search for New Frontiers"

This paper proposes to analyze The Explorers Club, a gentlemen's organization organized with the aim of patronizing exploration as a scientific practice. The Explorers Club was a peculiar organization. More than just a gentlemen's watering hole, the Club also took on the overtones of a scientific society and a secret fraternal order. This curious pastiche of science, recreation, and manhood ritual evinces a number of phenomena that characterized fin-de-siecle American culture. More than anything else, the Explorers Club was a manifestation of what David Wroebel has called "frontier anxiety." In 1890, the Census Bureau declared that there was no longer an American frontier line, the possible ramifications of which Frederick Jackson Turner made abundantly clear. American expansion had been carried out to its fullest extent. There was no longer a "safety-valve" for the preservation of American democracy. Those activities associated with American virility were also becoming extinct: pioneering exploration, the confrontation with the unknown, and inevitable conquest and taming of the wilderness. In short, half of historic wilderness/civilization dualism no longer existed. America was now a civilized region. Now, whether or not there actually was a frontier is not the issue. Wroebel's point is that many Americans perceived the closing of the frontier one of their responses was to search for new frontiers to conquer. The Explorers Club was born out of this impulse. This essay first surveys the character of the Explorers Club, basically who the members were and what they did. I then move on to support my thesis that the Club was a manifestation of frontier anxiety. By way of doing this, I will show how members' thoughts and practice of exploration intersected with other social phenomena like the dominance of corporate efficiency in early 20th-century America, the development of progressive conservation measures, and the birth of mass-culture. The story of the Explorers Club is also about a certain crisis in masculinity. The transition to a new corporate order problematized gender identity. Where would maleness be tested in the relatively sedantary life of the business executive? What were the parameters for proper male behavior? These questions were worked out in the context of exploration, an activity which functioned as an antidote for gender confusion. Finally, this is a story about science and society in the early twentieth-century. Many of the Explorers Club's members were credentialed "scientists," but more important, all members believed that the practice of exploration was an important element of science. Despite the enormous growth of experimental laboratory-based science in the early part of the century, explorers seldom waivered in their belief that the best way to know nature was to actively explore nature in the field. In short, this essay is an analysis of why these men thought a club devoted to exploration was important to their lives. While I make no claims to an exhaustive history, my task here is to "thickly" describe the Explorers Club as an organization designed to negotiate a number of important changes in American social history (from guilded businesses to corporations, from wilderness to garden, from natural history to experimentalism, from authentic to artificial, from culture to mass-culture, also, dealing with the feminization of American culture).

Andris
Krumins (Institute for the Hist. and Phil. of Science and Technology)
"The Origin and Reinterpretation of Gauge Theory"

Gauge invariance was introduced by Hermann Weyl in 1918 in the context of his proposed unified field theory, an extension of general relativity in which gravitation and electromagnetism would be united. Weyl thought that in order to have a truly infinitesimal geometry, it must be possible to choose the scale of measurement at each point in space at will. His plan was to relate electromagnetism to this new kind of invariance, just as Einstein had connected gravitation with an invariance with respect to general continuous transformations of the space-time coordinates. This new theory was very appealing, in that a fundamental conservation law, the conservation of charge, followed naturally from scale invariance. Mathematically, the theory was beautiful, but its direct application to gravitational theory turned out to be unacceptable. A decade later, however, after the birth of quantum mechanics, gauge invaraince was totally reinterpreted. Its mathematical structure was regarded not as a scale invariance, but as a phase invariance, and this invariance would eventually turn out to be a powerful tool in the development of quantum field theory, which is used to model the strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces, that is, all the fundamental forces except for gravity. Gauge theory thus sprang out of an attempt to generalize a successful theory of gravitation to a purely local, field-based picture of nature, and it wound up instead at the heart of present conceptions of non-gravitational interactions. This paper will analyze the origins of gauge theory and its reinterpretation as an example of how physical theory can be shaped by mathematics, in this case, the mathematics of symmetry.

Robin L.
Mackie and Gerrylynn K.
Roberts (The Open University)
"Rapprochement?: Academic-Industrial Relations in British Chemistry, 1918-1943"

At the end of the nineteenth century, the institutional structure of the profession of chemistry in Britain reflected the refining of occupational distinctions within the chemical community as the number of "chemists," both educated and employed, increased rapidly. By the early 1880s, the coalition of chemical interest groups which had formed the Chemical Society in 1841 began to fragment and new, separate institutions were set up to represent the interests of "practising" chemists, especially consulting chemists (the Institute of Chemistry, f. 1877) and chemists working in industry (the Society of Chemical Industry, f. 1881). The establishment of these separate bodies was underpinned by a rhetoric first articulated in Britain in mid-century, stressing the importance of pure science as the foundation for all chemical activity, be it academic, consulting or industrial. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, both the rhetoric of the profession and its institutional development were dominated by emphasis on rapprochement. On the one hand, academic chemists were concerned to establish the national significance of formal scientific education and to find places for their graduates. Therefore, they stressed the practical relevance of their work. Leading industrialists on the other hand, increasingly aware of the necessity of scientific research, sought to harness the achievements of academic scientists. At an institutional level, various attempts were made at co-operation in the interwar years, but co-operation was fraught with difficulties. This paper explores the basis of this shift from institutional separation to rapprochement within the British chemical profession by examining the education and careers of it members as defined by the composition of its three principal institutions. Using a large collective biographical database, it explores the extent to which the traditional distinctions between academic, professional or consulting and industrial careers were reflected in the experie nce of the sample individuals and in the social structure of the institutions. Indeed the paper suggests that the traditional categories describe neither the constitution of the institutions nor the individual profiles of their members. Employment patterns and spheres of activity, including those involving government, were far more fluid than generally recognized. A further issue is whether the apparent rapprochement reflected more accurately the leadership of the profession, as represented by the councils of the various societies, than that of the ordinary members. By exploring the social structure of the chemical community, this paper aims at a clearer understanding of intraprofessional relationships in this crucial period for which relations between science, government and industry have been much debated.

Cherilyn S.
Lacy (Hartwick College)
"Gender and the Limits of Medical Science in Late Nineteenth-century France"

Throughout most of Western Europe the professional ranks were restricted to men, and many male physicians defended this gender-based exclusivity with the argument that women might be predisposed for nurturing but were not suited for scientific endeavor. In practice, however, much of the actual treatment (whether or not it was prescribed by a physician) was administered by women. This was true not just in the case of nurses or midwives, whose role in medical care was acknowledged because of their occupational identity, but also of a patient's female family members to whom physicians often delegated the manual labor of medical care. This paper will examine how the boundary between scientific and non-scientific activities in medical treatment was drawn in France between 1880 and 1914 by physicians and authors of girls' domestic science manuals. The French context is particularly relevant to this question because of all physicians in Europe during the nineteenth century, the French were arguably the most vocal and active in defending their professional jurisdiction over healing. In the rhetoric of French physicians who wrote treatises on the role of mothers in family medical care, women were portrayed as being capable of maintaining a hygienic environment in their homes or applying simple treatments according to a doctor's instructions, but diagnosis and prescription required scientific training which was beyond the purview of women's "natural" aptitudes. The assistance of female relatives in caring for patients was lauded as essential and beneficial, but these caregiving activities were defined as something other than medicine because they did not require a serious scientific background. During the nineteenth century, certain physicians sought to overcome the perception that medicine was an art rather than a true science, largely because they faced competition from folk healers and "quacks" who claimed to possess their own special "healing art." For Bernard, the distinction between empirical med icine and scientific medicine was a distinction between irrational, haphazard guesswork and rote repetition on the one hand, and rational, systematic observation and experimentation on the other. And although this argument was directed primarily at physicians to persuade them to reform their own approach to medicine, many doctors employed the same distinction between scientific medicine and empiricism to disqualify the healing activities of non-certified practitioners-including women who cared for sick family members. The opposition between scientific and "empirical" medicine was integral to the professionalization of medicine because it gave physicians criteria by which to identify and legitimize the boundaries between themselves and other healers. Because the application of a treatment was often left to women within a patient's household, physicians advocated including at least a rudimentary hygienic and medical instruction in girls' domestic science textbooks. Doctors also favored this education because they perceived women as the chief transmitters of the very folk superstitions and empirical medicine which they sought to suppress. Consequently, many French physicians wrote manuals designed to disseminate basic scientific notions of health and the treatment of disease to a non-professional readership. Yet educating women too well in medical procedures presented the danger that they would substitute their own judgment for that of the physician and take medical treatment into their own hands. It was this danger that inspired much of the rhetoric of female deference to male scientific expertise which characterized the medical lessons in domestic science manuals.

Mark
Largent (University of Minnesota)
"Vernon Kellogg and the Science of Bionomics, 1900-1915"

Vernon Kellogg (1867-1937) was a Stanford entomologist in the early 20th century whose research portrays the complex ways in which 19th century naturalist traditions incorporated new experimentalist approaches and hereditary concepts. Early in his career Kellogg focused on describing and classifying his subjects, but influenced by Mendelianism, he eventually developed an interest in applying the new understandings of heredity and evolution to his taxonomic work. Kellogg founded the Department of Bionomics at Stanford in which he analyzed an order of insects that are parasitic upon birds. From this bionomic research developed what E. O. Essig later called "Kellogg's Law," the claim that close taxonomic relationships between insect parasites are indicative of close evolutionary relationships between their hosts. A careful analysis of Kellogg's early 20th century works demonstrates the ways in which new experimentalist approaches combined with, instead of obliterating earlier naturalist traditions.

Hsian-Lin
Lei (University of Chicago)
"From Changshan to a New Antimalarial Drug: Re-networking Chinese Drugs and Excluding Traditional Doctors"

This paper investigates the discovery of a Chinese drug within the context of the struggle between traditional and Western-trained doctors in China in 1920s and 30s. In order to exclude traditional doctors from the Project of National Public Health, Western-style doctors insisted on the importance of scientific research in to Chinese drugs and cited the discovery of a new antimalarial drug, changshang, as a successful case of this new approach to Chinese medicine. I would argue that the discovery of changshang was in fact a re-networking process (i.e., dissociating Chinese drugs from their traditional network and then assimilating those drugs into Western-style doctors' socio-technical network) and that it cannot be properly understood without taking into consideration the particular social context in which the discovery was made. By means of this case study, this paper will address the larger issues of scientific discovery and the contact between Western and indigenous science.

Mark S.
Lesney (Center for the History of Recent Science, George Washington University)
"Managing Monocots, Making Maize: Biotechnology From A to Zea"

From the beginning of modern biotechnology, monocots-the grasses, including rice, wheat, and corn (Zea mays), our greatest food sources-proved recalcit rant to the new research techniques. The could not easily be grown in tissue culture could not be genetically transformed by Agrobacterium could not regenerate fertile plants. They did not form protoplasts, or their protoplasts would not divide or regenerate. Most plant biotechnologists bemoaned these difficulties and worked in other, easier systems, reaping the benefits of early success. But a significant contingent pressed on with monocots, reflecting tensions between the old and new agriculture, between old and new funding sources. Their research was driven by pre-W.W.II interest in hybrids, by post-war protein and food crises, by commercial plant breeding, and the quest for scientific prestige. The pursuit of maize biotechnology carried on with high-lysine corn, cytoplasmic sterility and transposons, and the promise of nitrogen fixation. By the late 1980s, scientist in industry and land-grant universities succeeded in the real goal of genetically engineering, the regeneration, maize and other monocots. Their success resulted, not simply from the behavior of experimental systems, but from a complex mix of societal demands, financial imperatives and the quest for career rewards.

Tanya
Levin (Johns Hopkins University)
"Contaminating Space: Project West Ford and Scientific Communities, 1958-1965"

From 1958 until 1965 the MIT Lincoln Laboratory worked on a military communications experiment which involved injecting a belt of copper needles to act as dipoles into earth orbit. The U. S. Air Force and Defense Department supported this project, called West Ford, because the project promised to deliver a secure and reliable system to transmit messages. Some optical and radio astronomers protested the belt because they feared that the dipoles would interfere with research. Other astronomers and scientists looked positively upon the project primarily because of the fields in which they worked, the funding they received, and the contacts they maintained. West Ford casts light upon the struggle between different scientific communities, the way in which scientists compartmentalize state and professional responsibilities (1), and the nature of scientific advising during the Cold War. The project also points to a unique type of environmental consciousness, different from, and earlier than, the mid-1960s popular movement.

Theresa
Levitt (Harvard University)
"Clothing the Naked Eye: The Scientific Photography of François Arago and Jean-Baptiste Biot"

When the Dageurreotype was introduced to France in 1839, the scientific community reacted with enthusiasm to what they perceived as a promising new instrument. FranÙois Arago and Jean Baptiste Biot, the Académie des Sciences' leading authorities in the optical sciences, took a particular interest in the development and application of the Daguerreotype. Both of them echoed the common refrain that the Daguerreotype was the successor to the microscope and telescope, but for each that statement carried with it a host of different implications about the relationship between human observer and his instrument. Each man lectured on and published an extensive account of the instruments used in astronomical observations. In both instance they included a section on human vision in their discussion telescopes. For Arago, the point was to include the eye as part of the instrument, working in conjunction with the telescope lenses to produce an intelligible image. For Biot, the eye served as a model of the most perfect of optical instruments, operating in the same way as a telescope, but fundamentally distinct from it. A similar division can be seen in their attitude towards the Daguerreotype. In the scientific uses he envisioned for the process, Arago always saw it as a way of extending the range of the human observer, without doing away with him. Biot saw the Daguerreotype as recording something fundamentally different from what the eye perceived. The silver nitrates reacted to "chemical rays" which were physically distinct from the "visible rays" that affected the retina.

Shang-Jen
Li (Imperial College, University of London)
"Perfect Adaptation, the Harmony of Nature, and the Natural History of Parasites: Patrick Manson's Study of Filariasis in China"

This paper analyzes the early parasitological research of Patrick Manson (1844-1922), the so called 'father of tropical medicine.' While serving as a medical officer to the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs (1866-1883), Manson conducted his research on elephantiasis and identified the mosquito as the intermediate host of filarial worms. This was the first discovery which elucidated the role of insects in the transmission of human parasitic diseases. In this paper I demonstrate that Manson's methodology was observational and the framework of his reasoning was natural historical. He relied on the pre-Darwinian concepts of perfect adaptation and the harmony of nature in his investigation of the filarial life cycle. This paper elucidates how the difficulties that Manson encountered in China contributed to his conception of Mansonian tropical medicine. It points out the significance of the connection between natural history and tropical medicine, and situates Manson's work in the context of the historical transition from museological science to laboratory science.

Susan
Lindee (University of Pennsylvania)
"The repatriation of atomic bomb victim body parts to Japan: Natural Objects and Diplomacy"

In the fall of 1945 American teams in Japan collected autopsy materials from atomic bomb victims, sending these materials for storage to a military pathology laboratory in Washington D.C. Twenty-eight years later-after protracted scientific and political negotiation-these materials were returned to Japan and to Japanese scientists. In this paper, I explore how and why atomic bomb victim remains were repatriated, considering the status of these materials as natural objects that could reveal scientific truth and as diplomatic objects that both Japan and the United States could use in negotiating their post-war relationship. I attend particularly to the management of these humble and unappealing bodily things-to filing systems, autopsy protocols, ownership questions, and diagnostic uncertainties. I suggest that science as a functioning system of production makes things natural, not only with ideas but also with clumps of wax, preservatives, and filing systems. And in my case, these systems make manifest both biological and political meaning. The same processes of filing, classification, storage and dispersal that make an extracted liver capable of revealing biological truth also reveal its relationship to power.

Steven J.
Livesey (University of Oklahoma)
"Commbase: Collective Biography and Teaching the Middle Ages"

Over the past generation, there has been a revolution in both computers and the ways historians use them. Then, a handful of historians used mainframe computers, usually with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) or self-written programs. Today, most historians use microcomputers on their own desks, but usually for word processing. There is, however, a growing body of historians whose wider use of computers spans both research (collection, organization, retrieval, and presentation of data) and teaching (presentation, simulation, modeling, and instructional programs). In this paper, I propose to discuss the project on which I am currently working and its pedagogical application. The project involves a biographical database focused on the authors of two fundamental groups of medieval texts: commentaries on Aristotle's works, and commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences. The paper will describe the structure of the database and its creation and provide some samples of its use in teaching undergraduate and graduate students.

Pamela O.
Long (Independent Scholar)
"Openness and Secrecy in the "Occult" Traditions of Early Modern Europe"

Recently several historians of science focusing on the early modern period have reemphasized a point initially elaborated by Robert Merton, namely that "science" in the modern sense was a creation of the nineteenth century. They have taken some care to use actors' categories (e.g., "natural philosophy," rather than "science" to avoid imposing modern conceptual categories inappropriately onto the past. In this paper I suggest that the same criticism can be made of the phrase "occult disciplines." Here I follow the suggestion of Brian Copenhaver, that "hermetic" is used far too broadly and loosely, and that the concept of the "occult disciplines" in the modern sense was also created in the nineteenth century in a context that, on the one hand, contrasted it to "scientific" disciplines, and on the other associated it with modern occultists. Copenhaver suggests that "hermetic" should be used in a stricter sense, but that "occult disciplines," although anachronistic for the early modern period, is still useful. I disagree. In this period, "occultus" was a straightforward Latin work that meant "dark" or "hidden." Hidden secrets of nature, such as occult forces, constitute one aspect of the neoplatonism that influenced these four figures. Yet "occult" cannot be used ubiquitously to describe their writings in general. At times, each of these authors suggested openness, and in addition openly explicated their knowledge of occult forces. Some suggested the desirability of esoteric groups, others did not. I suggest that the values of openness and secrecy must be explored within the particular contexts in which these authors wrote. These values are in fact quite different from those developed in late antique neoplatonism (to which these authors were heir), and were diverse among the four figures as well. Openness and secrecy were influenced by patronage, authorship, censorship, and the threat of being accused of heresy. This paper explores explicit values and practices, not as predetermined aspects of "occult disciplines" but in terms of the writings of specific authors and contexts.

Paul
Lucier (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
"The Strange Case of the Albert Mineral: Science, Industry, and the Law in the Production of Natural Knowledge"

The Strange Case of the Albert Mineral: Science, Industry and the Law in the Production of Natural Knowledge In 1850, two brothers uncovered a strange bituminous substance in Albert county, New Brunswick, Canada. Over the course of the next twenty years, the mineral would become grounds (literally) of three different industries: illuminating gas, kerosene, and petroleum. It would also become the disputed property in several contentious patent trials in Canada, Britain, and the United States. And finally, it would be the subject of scientific controversy among chemists, geologists, and mineralogists for nearly fifty years. In the course of these various disputes, the substance would be re-classified many times, from a type of coal, to a kind of asphalt, to a form of petroleum, and eventually as a hydrocarbon called Albertite. Why such difficulties in deciding what it was? This paper discusses how the commercial value, legal definition, and scientific classification of this substance were all created simultaneously. For historians of science the case of the Albert mineral illustrates the means by which science, industry, and the law work together and against one another to produce natural knowledge.

Abigail
Lustig (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)
"Altruism and the possibility of progress in Darwin's Origin of Species and Eliot's Middlemarch"

Two of the greatest conundrums presented to the nineteenth century by the Origin of Species were the question of progress in life's history and the applicability of Darwinian ideas about species and history to human affairs. I discuss Darwin's often contrary views on teleology in the Origin and connect them with his discussion of the impossibility of altruism as a driving force in evolution. I then turn to the interpretation of Darwin made by one of his most acute contemporary readers, George Eliot, and her grappling with the humanistic implications of a dysteleological world in Middlemarch. Eliot accepted the tenets of a contingent, Darwinian historiography, distasteful as they were an element common to both works is the emphasis on the counterintuitiveness of evolutionary historiography. I conclude that, whereas Darwin was unable to join logically the ideal of progress in evolutionary history with contingent, necessarily ateleological mechanisms (in the Origin he swerves back and forth between the two), Eliot found a loophole allowing for progress in human history in the possibility of informed human altruism.

Edward
MacKinnon (California State University Hayward)
"Schwinger's Quantum Field Theory: Trajectory of a Methodology"

Julian Schwinger systematically developed quantum physics as a phenomenological system, an attempt to describe basic reality through concepts and mathematical formalisms. He accepted Bohr's measurement-based interpretation of quantum mechanics and redeveloped the Dirac formualtion of quantum mechanics as an algebra of measurement operators. Quantum electrodynamics and quantum field theory were developed, not as independent theories, but as extensions of quantum mechanics based on the assumption that operator fields supply a basis for microscopic descriptions. This methodology required a systematic development based on variational principles and Green's functions, rather than the shortcut of second quantization. By 1964 Schwinger had extended the method to a systematic treatment of weak and strong interactions. He treated "particle" and the systematic classification of particle properties as a phenomenological level to be correlated with a theoretical level based on operator fields and the constraints that came from quantum mechanics and symmetry principles. This worked well for weak interactions, supplying the earliest form of electroweak unification, but not for strong interactions. This methodology precluded accepting quarks and particles as basic theoretical, rather than phenomenological, concepts. This motivated Schwinger's rejection of the quark model and quantum chromodynamics. His alternative, source theory, never won general acceptance.

Kristie
Macrakis (Michigan State University)
"Computers and Espionage in East Germany"

While the first paper in this session is on the early years of the semi-conductor industry, I focus on computers in East Germany since the inception of the richly funded and strongly supported "Computer Program" in 1977. I argue that scientists, scientific institutes and government officials worked hand in glove with the Ministry for State Security (MfS or "Stasi") -- East Germany's intelligence and secret service agency -- to support the Politburo's dream of achieving world class stature in the area of computers. The paper outlines the main features of the "Computer Program" including the major players in science, industry and the state while showing the way, and extent to which, the Ministry for State Security took part. It also reveals that prestigious Western firms willingly and enthusiastically contributed to illegal and clandestine activities.

David Farm
Madden (Ohio State University)
"From Experts to Social Scientists: The American Anthropologists, 1929-1963"

This paper will seek to document the ways in which anthropologists defined their discipline prior to the Second World War and how the ways in which anthropologists defined their discipline changed after the war. My research argues that, prior to the war, anthropologists held themselves to be experts in an empirical and eclectic body of knowledge comprised of four fields, archeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology. This body of knowledge and the research methods and empirical facts subsumed under this body of knowledge functioned as boundaries to anthropological inquiry. After the war, anthropologists modified their ideas about what constituted proper anthropological research. They argued that grand theories should provide hypotheses to test against empirical evidence. They also contended that theory should link fields of knowledge, indeed that the discipline should coalesce around theory rather than around a body of knowledge that, to the younger anthropologists, seemed to be an arbitrary configuration. In effect, they attempted to emulate the epistemology of the "hard sciences." This shift in epistemology belied a shift in values on the part of American anthropologists. Anthropologists no longer placed value upon strictly empirical research conducted by experts, who had mastered the techniques for empirical research and the facts subsumed under a body of knowledge. Instead, they wished to participate in the culture of science, best articulated and embodied by the physicists, that dominated the postwar American academy.

David D.
Magnus (Univ. of PA Center for Bioethics)
"The Development of the Concept of Genetic Disease"

The concept of genetic disease has passed through many stages and taken on many different meanings in different contexts. This paper sketches the development of the concept from the early 20th century to the present. As the concept has developed in recent decades it has expanded to include more traits. Some of the implications of this expansion will be briefly discussed.

Jane
Maienschein (Arizona State University)
"Practical History: Beyond Social Context"

Science involves doing as well as thinking, and it is currently popular to talk about the importance of "practice" for science. For recent science, science studiers talk about "black boxing" techniques and some have studied such practices by becoming sociologist-participants and looking over shoulders in the lab. Larry Holmes has walked through every Line of Hans Krebs' lab notebooks and discussed them with Krebs to follow the reasoning and practice. Several decades ago, the historian of medicine Edwin Clarke called for engaging in "practical history" by (re)producing experiments to understand the assumptions make in scientific practice. Should we be driving participation further? And not as participant-observers looking on at the minutiae of interactions in laboratory, but much closer than that. In other words, should we test the possibility in history of current science of actually learning and productively using the instruments and other tools, in a live piece of a current research project? This paper will scrutinize the various ways that historian/philosophers have sought to get at scientific practice and will argue that we will do better science studies (and better science education) if we understand the workings of science with more and richer engagement in the science itself.

Robert J.
Malone (History of Science Society)
""To Take This Trouble No Inducement Could Be Proposed": Thomas Jefferson and William Dunbar"

"Philosophical vedette at the distance of one thousand miles, and on the verge of terra incognita of our continent, is precious to us here." Thus wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1801 in his first letter to William Dunbar, a planter/philosopher who lived near the Natchez settlement in the lower Mississippi River Valley. Having labored for science for nearly three decades as he lived on the edge of the United States, Dunbar's correspondence with Jefferson offered Dunbar a chance to be seen by the world, to share his research with those who cared about science as deeply as he. The Jefferson-Dunbar correspondence reveals an important element of patronage on the frontier. He could not offer Dunbar money, Dunbar had plenty of that staple, but Jefferson could burnish the Scot's scientific reputation and give an ambitious man wider recognition. Jefferson's respect could also help Dunbar maneuver through some tight political corners during a time when Republicanism was sweeping the land. As Jefferson fully recognized, the fundamental inducement that Dunbar wanted was the gratification of contributing to the promotion of science. For his part, Jefferson enlisted the help of a philosophical vedette who would provide him with the first scientific date of the newly acquired Louisiana Territory.

Constance
Malpas (History of Science Society)
"The History of the Pseudencéphale, or, How one Head lost its Mind"

Among the diverse monstrosities described in Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's encyclopedic Traité de tératologie (1832-1836) was a class of malformations the author dubbed Pseudencéphales, or "false-brained" formations. Although similar in many regards to the class of "brainless" or anencephalic formations, the Pseudencéphales were judged by Geoffroy to be a distinct category of monstrosity, chiefly on the weight of his conviction that the vascular tumor replacing the brain in such malformations was in fact a vestige of the foetal brain. By denying that this tumor represented a new and genuinely abnormal formation, Geoffroy was able to justify inserting the class of pseudencephalic malformations between the class of exencephalic monstrosities, in which the brain is present but located outside the cranium, and the class o f Anencéphales, and so succeeded in preserving the integrity of the teratological series his classificatory scheme was designed to illustrate. Geoffroy patterned his taxonomy of developmental deviations on a classification of cranial malformations originally published by his father in 1821, and subsequently reprinted in the latter's Philosophie anatomique des monstruosités humaines (1822). Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's early efforts at systematizing deformity were motivated in part by a desire to demonstrate that the method best suited to recognizing the order inherent in monstrous forms was that of comparative anatomy his Essai d'une Classification (1821) was a polemical work intended to cast doubt on the rationality of medical nosologies, and, more especially, the ability of physicians to perceive the transcendental unity of animal forms. The reasons for Et. Geoffroy's hostility to what one may in this context justifiably characterize as a distinctly medical "gaze" are many, and will not discussed in this paper. What will be discussed is Geoffroy's systematic-and finally systematical-attempt to circumvent pathological theories of mon strous formation by offering an alternative, zoological interpretation of morphological variations. This paper examines the way in which strategic personal and political choices (about what counts as evidence and about what kinds of difference are meaningful) are translated into apparently neutral and putatively natural taxonomic systems. It is intended to illuminate one of the practices-namely, taxonomic systematization-which has proven most successful in effacing the personal and contingent content of the shared and "public" knowledge that we call science.

Nancy Farm
Mannikko (Michigan Technological University)
"Scientists or Businessmen? Local Engineering Clubs and Professional Identity During the Gilded Age"

American engineers are often portrayed, in the words of historian Bruce Sinclair, as "politically inflexible, socially awkward, culturally limited, and ethically inert." Only a handful of scholars have questioned the origins of this image, and those scholars have tended to examine the history of elite engineers and the national professional societies. Such an approach may have presumed a homogeneity of interests that did not exist. This paper explores the rise of local engineering organizations during the Gilded Age in the United States and explores their role in shaping the occupational identity of the professional engineer. Just as regional scientific societies helped to reinforce the professional orientation of American scientists, so, too, did local nonspecialized engineering clubs and societies reinforce the emerging professionalism of American engineers. Previous studies of local engineering clubs, such as Carroll Pursell's "The Technical Society of the Pacific Coast," have implied these groups faded away following the formation of local chapters of engineering societies organized along strict disciplinary lines, such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Rather than disappearing, however, many local clubs were actually founded and thrived contemporaneously with the growth of the national societies. In this paper I suggest a simple taxonomy to distinguish between the several different types of engineering societies that emerged during the Gilded Age and show how they reinforced the identity of the engineer as an objective, detached man of science rather than as a tradesman or mechanic.

Jordan D.
Marche, II & Theresa A. Marche (Indiana University & University of Wisconsin-Madison)
"A "Distinct Contribution": Gender, Art, and Scientific Illustration in Antebellum America"

Western European constructs of the nature of art and the relationship between genius and art making hindered women's participation in the fine arts for generations. In antebellum America, however, a convergence of factors arising from developing print technologies and scientific pursuits, especially descriptive natural history, created demands for scientific illustrators that far outstripped the supply of available male artists/engravers. Ironically, the same social constructs of female accomplishments that barred women from participation in the fine arts also provided women with precise rendering skills needed for scientific illustration. These themes of preparation and opportunity are examined in the lives of Orra Hitchcock, Lucy Say, and Helen Lawson. Their lives and works reflect the emergence of scientific illustration as a profess ional discipline and its gradual removal from the domestic sphere to the commercial realm.

Seymour A.
Mauskopf (Duke University)
"Commentary on: Comparative Perspectives on Academic-Industrial Relations"

[the following is a description of the session as a whole:] The question of academic-industrial relations in chemistry have been a subject for discussion for many years, at least since the pioneering work of John Beer and Lutz Haber during the late 1950s. That work established organic chemistry and the German coal-tar dye industry of the late nineteenth century as a model of a successful "symbiotic" relationship between science and technology, or more precisely between academic chemists and industrial chemists who established a close, mutually profitable relationship of cooperation on many levels. In the decades since, much of the historical work on the development of the chemical industry has been done by business historians who focused on the level of the industry or the firm some work has also been done on the founding and development of professional groups and organizations, generally within the context of historical-sociological studies of "professionalization." Yet even for Germany and Britain (the focus of most of the early work), and far more for other nations, many aspects of academic-industrial cooperation or conflict in chemistry during the twentieth century remain obscure, their details only beginning to emerge from industrial and academic archives during the last decade. We propose to approach the probelm of academic-industrial relations in chemistry not simply in the framework of industrial or corporate history, or the history of professional organizations instead, we will go "below" these to the level of the individuals themselves who made up the corporations and professions. We will examine their interrelationships critically and comparatively, looking at the cases of Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, and Russia/USSR during the first half of the twentieth century, with background analysis in some cases for the late nineteenth century as well. The comparative approach will illuminate how the academic-industrial relationship worked in nations with very different political, economic an d social conditions, as well as different styles of scientific and technological development. Moreover, by taking an approach from the "bottom up," in part with the help of databases of individual chemists as well as correspondence and other unpublished archival documents, we will be able to test the rhetoric of professionalization and academic-industrial symbiosis that became increasingly powerful during the years after the First World War, and we will reexamine previous historical generalizations that were largely based on a "top down" approach incorporating the rhetoric and data produced by professional and business organizations as well as governments.

Stuart
McCook (The College of New Jersey)
"The Fragile Frontier: Botanical Exploration in Costa Rica, 1880-1940"

Although the heroic age of exploration was almost finished by the beginning of the twentieth century, much of the world remained relatively unknown. The scientific survey, rather than the voyage of exploration, characterized the new generation of scientific field research. Where earlier voyages of exploration had mapped the broad outlines of the shape of the earth, later surveys sought detailed and definitive knowledge of these areas. Surveys were particularly difficult in the tropics, where small groups of scientists faced the challenge of mapping and cataloguing a seemingly endless stream of new plants and animals. In Costa Rica, the expansion of the scientific frontier closely followed the ex pansion of the economic frontier. In the mid-nineteenth century, Costa Rica's coffee economy began to grow explosively. Plantations were established throughout the Central Valley. By the start of the twentieth century, Costa Ricans had begun to explore the coastal lowlands, areas which had long been ignored. The botanists who began to map the country's flora were part of this economic and intellectual expansion, which was itself changing the landscape of Costa Rica. Although botanists began with the traditional project of mapping the country's natural plant formations, they very quickly realized that these formations were being destroyed. This process reveals one of the key characteristics of modern scientific exploration: the rapid recognition that nature itself was fragile and rapidly changing. Scientific surveys, then, were increasingly aimed at documenting the structure of Costa Rica's natural world before it disappeared completely.

Susan
McMahon (University of Alberta)
"The Politics of Botany: John Ray's Catalogus Cantabrigium (1660)"

The work of the natural philosopher, John Ray (1627-1705), was informed by the political, religious and social events of mid-seventeenth century England. Ray's university career began in 1644 during the civil war and ended with his refusal to subscribe to the Act of Uniformity in 1662. During this crucial period of intellectual development, Ray laid an enduring foundation for the critical study of plants and also enuciated views on God and nature, later published as The Wisdom of God Manifest in the Works of Creation. My paper examines Ray's sojourn at Cambridge, the establishment of a sympathetic network of friends and associates, and his decision to accept ordination in the Church of England. I argue that all of Ray's actions must be understood in political terms therefore his first published work, the Catalogus Cantabrigiam (1660) must also be read within Ray's own political culture. The Catalogus should be seen not merely as a scientific text which successfully elevates its contents above the partisan divisions in English society, but as a literary text which clearly identifies Ray's personal values through the pious celebration of nature, the evocation of Anglican quietism, and the promotion of social order and harmony. As a text which came to embody the religious and political ideals of Restoration England, the Catalogus provided a model for uncontentious inquiry into nature which Ray successfully translated into the disciplinary practice of natural history and enable Ray himself to become one of the most important natural philosophers of the late seventeenth century.

Suzanne M.
Moon (Cornell University)
""Applying Science" to Colonial Development: Agricultural Experiment and Demonstration in the Netherlands East Indies, c. 1905"

With the establishment of the Netherlands Indies Department of Agriculture in 1905, the colonial government called for an institution whose purpose was to improve so-called Native agriculture-peasant farming-and by so doing improve the social welfare of the Indies Natives (a colonial legal term for indigenous Malays). As director of the new department, Melchior Treub chose to follow a now-familiar ideology of science: scientific knowledge would be produced by experts in controlled experiments and the results would then be unproblematically applied to real world problems. Treub divided the department into rigorously separated experiment and demonstration fields, in which knowledge was produced at the first, and disseminated at the second. I will argue that Treub's implementation of this scientific ideal was designed both to establish and protect the credibility of scientific approaches to "Native development," but also to achieve the desired improvements in social welfare without threatening the colonial tradition of "indirect" rule. Before 1905, colonial interventions in the Indies Native agriculture had often failed, producing a peasantry who were quietly resistant to European suggestions, and colonial officials who doubted the work of scientists not familiar with the conditions of the Indies. Treub's idealized model of knowledge production answered official doubts by creating local experiment fields run by European scientists with experience in the Indies. The rigors of experiment and scientific expertise would guarantee that only the most reliable and efficacious knowledge would be later applied to agricultural problems. Yet this scientific approach, which might sway colonial officials, held no authority for peasants. Treub's one-way model of knowledge production allowed him to solve this problem by drawing on the authority of Native leaders and reinforcing the time-honored tradition of indirect rule. Throughout the 19th century, a small Dutch bureaucracy interacted directly only with an elite Native leadership, relying on them to administer Dutch law and policy to the majority of the population. Treub proposed to spread agricultural improvements in a similar way, presenting demonstrations only to Dutch-educated Native leaders. Farmers would adopt these improvements based on their respect for the authority of their leaders. Since implementation meant simply "applying" science, scientists did not need to interact with Native farmers the mselves, success was guaranteed by the earlier work of experimental science. When the improvements succeeded, as Treub was sure they would, Native leaders would increasingly accept scientific authority. Their own authority with Natives, which had recently started to diminish, would be bolstered in turn, reinforcing both agricultural science and the traditional system of indirect rule in the colony.

Michael A.
Morse (University of Chicago)
"Celts, Early Romantics, and the Peopling of Britain"

During the course of the eighteenth century, the question of the peopling of Britain became tied to the ancient Celts, a notion developed in an uneasy synthesis of linguistics, historical scholarship, antiquarianism, and traditional chronologies. At the beginning of the century, when the Celts were first proposed as the original inhabitants of Britain, they were defined as the parent culture of all of Europe. As the century progressed, the Celts became identified exclusively with the language family encompassing Welsh, Gaelic, and Breton, and with the religion of Druidism. This transformation has often been attributed to the development of Romanticism. This paper argues that Romanticism in itself is not a satisfactory explanation for the changing ideas about the Celts and seeks to flesh out the process through which the narrower definition came to dominate, within the framework of changing approaches to Britain's earliest history.

Peter B.
Murray Jones and Linda Ehrsam
Voights (Kings College, Cambridge University & University of Missouri, Kansas City)
"A New Research Tool for Ancient and Medieval Science: The Electronic Thorndike Kibre Project"

The single most important research tool for medieval science from 500 AD to 1500 AD-and, indeed for ancient science that survived in Medieval European writings-is the Catalogue of Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in Latin (TK) by Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre. This work, which catalogues and identifies surviving texts by opening words (incipits), appeared in 1937, was revised in 1963, and supplemented in 1965, 1968. The aim of the e-TK project is the revise and update an electronic version of this research tool. It will supplement TK with subject fields, newly discovered texts and many more references to manuscript witnesses to these texts. For the first time one will be able to search this tool by manuscript to see how texts traveled together in anthologies. Data in TK will be corrected on the basis of examination of manuscripts, beginning with those in London, Oxford and Cambridge, and with the help of contributors worldwide. TK entries have been parsed and entered in electronic format by Kevin Kile working under the sup ervision of Linda Voigts and Patricia Kurtz in the U. S. The second stage, supplementing and rivising TK, has begun work at Cambridge University under the direction of Peter Jones. The Wellcome Trust has funded a three-year postdoc toral fellow, Anna Somfai, to supplement the data in this relational database (eTK). An international Advisory Board advises on the project and encourages the invo lvement of all scholars of medieval science in transforming TK into the even more valuable corrected, supplemented, and electronically searchable eTK.

Andrea
Murschel (University of Chicago)
"Kepler, Galileo and the Motivation for a New Theory of Observational Instrumentation"

With his Astronomiae Pars Optica (1604), Kepler believed that he had developed the subject of astronomical observation to its limits. He had considered every possible aspect of observation-the nature of light, image location, reflection, parallax, luminosity, shadows, eclipses, instrumentation and even the workings of the eye itself-and he expressed his intention never to return to optics again. Galileo's discoveries with the telescope, however, immediately brought Kepler back to the questions of optics and observations. He lost no time before publishing two works in direct response to the Sidereus Nuncius (1610): the Dissertatio cum Nuncio sidereo (1610) and the highly developed Dioptrice (1611). Although the Dissertatio serves mainly as a rhetorical affirmation of the Sidereus Nuncius, the Dioptrice is clearly the technical counterpart to Galileo's work. In this short book Kepler prepared a comprehensive mathematical theory of observation instrumentation and created the foundation for all optical instruments until Newton. In this paper I show that Kepler's motivation in returning to optics was not merely his intellectual curiousity about the telescope. Frustrated with his inability to solve Galileo's anagrams and the get a telescope for himself, he was desperate for an explanation of this new instrument, which made his coverage of observation in the Astronomiae Pars Optica less than complete. The geometical proofs in the Dioptrice demonstrated to Kepler himself how the telescope could show him things he could not see. But more importantly, these proofs supplied the means Galileo had not provided to justify telescopic observations to the dissenting Aristotelians and to certify for them the existence of things they would see.

Anne
Mylott (Indiana University)
"Sex and the Single Pollen Cell"

The nucleated cell is a fundamental unit in modern biology. It emerged from researches into ferilization in flowering plants. I show how botanical ideas a bout metamorphosis and development informed Matthias Schleiden's 1838 cell theory, as he transformed those traditional approaches to individuality and generation. Schleiden integrated all those elements into a vision of the plant with multiple layers of individuality, rich homologies between cryptogams and phanerogams, and distinctively botanical, radically non-sexual, generative interactions between individuals.

Barbara Ann
Naddeo (University of Chicago)
"The science of man as the science of men: Anthropology in the Kingdom of Naples, 1760-1800"

This paper examines the chief human scientific works of four of Naples' most notable philosophes-namely, Antonio Genovesi, Francesco Longano, Francesco Antonio Grimaldi and Francesco Mario Pagano. Although part of the canon of Enlightenment literature in Italy, these works have fallen into near obscurity, due to the prevailing historiographical interpretations of the Neapolitan Enlightenment, which have alternatively upstaged its reform-minded pamphlets and political-economic tracts, concrete projects of reform and short-lived fascination with Newtonian science. This paper shows that the "scienza dell'uomo," like its French and Germankin, too was primarily concerned about the incidence of the physical on the moral, be that the significance of man's bodily constitution or environment for his temperament, passions and, indeed, emotional state of being. Among the aims of this paper, then, is to unearth more evidence for that medical vision of man and society which the historiography has just recently begun to explore. But rather than tally the score of resemblance and difference between Neapolitan and Continental medical anthropology, this paper focuses on what I believe to be the substantial differences between "la scienza dell'uomo" and its contemporary Continental affiliates. Unlike the most successful examples of German "anthropology" and Montpellier's "science of man," la "scienza dell'uomo" was not written by and for doctors but by philosophes whose agenda was essentially political. Their studies were the expression of the more fundamental conviction that physiology was the key to knowledge about behavior of both man and society. Taking stock of the socio-political features the philosophes described in physiological terms, this paper thus shows why physiology lent itself to the science of man and society in the Eighteenth Century Kingdom of Naples.

Lynn K.
Nyhart (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
"Science, Art, and Authenticity in German Natural History Displays"

Between 1880 and 1914, German natural history museums took up a new task: to become sites of mass public education about nature. Emblematic of this new mission was a new exhibit form known as the "biological group," which typically placed a number of animals of the same species together in lifelike poses, often accompanied by representations of a "natural" setting-a branch, a tree stump, soap flakes for snow; occasionally, these features were fully integrated into scenes with painted backgrounds in the American diorama style. Although biological groups were ubiquitous, in their most elaborated form as theatrical diorama scenes they were subject to sharp criticism as "unscientific." This paper examines why this was so. The introduction of biological group displays brought to the surface scientists' assumptions about the gap between science as true and art as fictive-here the issue of "authenticity" played a crucial role in debates over the value of these exhibits. These displays also articulated a perceived difference between rational learning (what students and researchers did) and learning by "Anschauung," or visual stimulation (what children and "the public" could do). By reinforcing these assumptions, biological groups-though generally acknowledged as successful in introducing schoolchildren and "the masses" to their natural surroundings-tended to deepen the split perceived by many museum scientists between the production of research knowledge of nature and the ability of "the public" to grasp scientific concepts. Paradoxically, then, in Germany the effort to make natural history museums sites of both research and popular education worked to widen the gap between elite and popular science, rather than to bridge it.

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