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In 1914, the Harrison Act regulated the sale of certain drugs, including cocaine, for the first time in the United States at the federal level. The passage of this bill was based, in part, on the understanding of white Americans of the black male cocaine user as a crazed, homicidal maniac. This image of the "negro cocaine fiend" stands in stark contrast to that of the white cocaine user as physically and sexually degenerate and enfeebled. This paper will explore the origins of these two images in terms of two major ideological trends of late nineteenth century science: scientific racism and the beginning of the eugenics movement, and the emergence of the disease model of addiction. These two trends intersected in early medical understanding of cocaine addiction, leading to different understandings of black and white habitual cocaine users. Furthermore, these medical images were informed by both the emergence of a mass consumer culture and the ideological structures of race, gender, and class relations during the period. Medical discourse, in turn, influenced the broader social context by giving scientific legitimacy to racially specific images as a means for medical practitioners to increase their own public authority. Medical authorities were at the forefront of fueling the fears of white America over the "negro cocaine fiend."

In 1629, a set of seven short theological poems appeared in print under the unassuming title of "Septem Sidera". The poems, dedicated to Galileo's future nemesis Pope Urban VIII, were issued by a professor of theology at Cracow, who claimed to have discovered them as manuscripts from the hand of Copernicus in the Warmian archives. In the 19th century, however, these poems were dismissed as spurious, largely on the grounds that a scientist such as Copernicus was unlikely to have had much facility in the poetic arts, and they have not appeared in editions of Copernicus's works since that time. I will briefly examine the extant documentation concerning these poems and then move to a more general survey of the frequency with which other contemporary astronomers, particularly in cities such as Nuremberg and Vienna, both produced works of poetry and made a point of emphasizing their poetic as well as mathematical skills. Without necessarily resolving the question of the authorship of the "Septem Sidera," I will argue that the prevalence of astronomer-poets in the late-15th and early-16th centuries, as well as the emphasis placed on a distinction between these two genres in later periods, offers suggestive insights into evolving beliefs concerning the function and purpose of the mathematical arts.

The concept that sunlight consists of a multitude of individually colored rays, put forth by Marcus Marci von Kronland (1595-1667), was one of the most controversial theories regarding the physics of light to emerge during the seventeenth century. This theory had the explanatory potential to account for spectral colors observed in both the natural atmospheric rainbow and experimental prism trials. Historians have credited Isaac Newton for this theory, but disagree over the caused for its adoption. Although Marci's 1648 Thaumantias preceded Newton's publication by twenty four years, historians who focus on theoretical sufficiency have faulted and dismissed Marci for his nescience of Snel's law of refraction and for his imprecise mathematics. Although theory provides a powerful standpoint from which to organize histories of optics, it is nonetheless contingent upon specific historical practices actors engaged in. Marci's case exemplifies the role that practice played for early modern natural philosophers who crafted observations into experience-based truth claims. In this paper I argue that Marci's focus on the spagyric arts of alchemy influenced him to view the rainbow as a natural separator of spectral colors that inhere to light. His unprecedented theory sharply rebutted the prevailing claim that the rainbow was an effect of mixing white light with varying densities of moisture and shadows in rain clouds. Marci's two-pronged legitimating strategy juxtaposed theory to practices of geometry, alchemy, and medicine. on one hand, he subjected his prism studies to geometrical analysis in order to create per se relations between individual spectral colors and angles of incidence and refraction. On the other hand, Marci interspersed his text with alchemical and medical experiences of reading color change as a natural indicator of purification. Drawing upon alchemical practices, Marci specified the sequence of colors that metals undergo in stages of transmutation as an indicator of increasing purity. Changes in skin color that accompany wound healing evinced the same ordering of colors that the rainbow displayed. This paper investigates these and other examples of Marci's attempt to naturalize the production of spectral colors in order to arrive at an understanding of how medical and alchemical practices influenced his construction of observations in optics.

This paper illustrates how Beatrix Potter's lifelong studies as a naturalist informed the "little" books for which she is so well known. The paper will fall into three brief sections: (1) Potter as naturalist. (2) Victorian fabling and the idea of animal intelligence. (3) Potter as a Victorian storyteller who utilized her own scientific knowledge in her fiction for children. My basis for the first discussion will be a review of Potter as a mycologist for the latter Potter as the tale-teller of the story of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.

The cybernetic movement of the late 1950s became a vehicle of de-Stalinization of Soviet science and society. During the Stalin era, such groups as the Lysenkoites had protected their interests by erecting epistemological barriers between scientific disciplines and thus severely limiting the use of mathematical methods in the life sciences and the social sciences. Soviet cybernetics emerged as a cross-disciplinary project aimed at breaking these disciplinary barriers. Reformist scientists aspired to replace the vague and manipulative language of Stalinist discourse with the "precise" and "objective" language of cybernetics. They claimed that cybernetic models of control via feedback and communication as information exchange had universal applicability, and called for applying mathematical modeling and computer simulation to a wide range of scientific and social problems. Soviet cyberneticians sought a new universal foundation of scientific objectivity in the rigor of mathematical formulae and computer algorithms. In contrast to Stalinist discourse, they put forward this computer-based criterion of objectivity as professedly non-ideological, non-philosophical, non-class-oriented, and non-Party-minded. Based on the archives of Soviet academic institutions and the recently open Communist Party archives, this paper argues that the new notion of objectivity had profound political, as well as cognitive, implications.

In my talk I will discuss the growing 19th century judicial distrust of scientific expert testimony. First I will show that by the 1860, the evidence of scientific witnesses already became the object of general derision in England. Then, I will argue that this "general derision" resulted largely from the overwhelming success of Victorian science in promoting the scientific method as a superior norm of truth, or, at least, of certainty, and the impartial man of science as the best keeper of this truth. Once one believed these claims, then the zealous opposition among the scientific witnesses could only be interpreted as a sign of moral corruption.

This paper describes an approach to computational modeling of scientific discovery that recognizes and incorporates features of discovery and discoverers that historians, sociologists and psychologists consider to be important. These include the facts that scientists work with and in the context of work by other actors, and that they work with a continually changing set of material, conceptual and other resources. The paper describes the assumptions underlying each of the basic models that comprise the simulation, and will discuss these. The approach and the resulting computer simulation of Faraday's work will be described and some results of the simulations will be presented. Interpretation and evaluation of the complex behaviors generated by it will be given, in order to invite comparison with the approaches taken by other contributors to this session and to stimulate discussion of evaluation criteria for science simulations, drawn from disciplines such as history, sociology and psychology.

National History Day, the nation's leading history education program, offers pre-college teachers an excellent tool for project-based assessments of their students' knowledge. Using primary and secondary sources, students conduct research related to an annual theme and present their findings in traditional or creative papers, museum-style exhibits, original dramatic performances, or multimedia documentaries. The students may enter their projects in contests, where history educators and professional historians evaluate their work and provide feedback. The theme is always broad enough to allow students to pursue research in whatever area of history interests them, and many choose topics in the History of Science. The theme for 1999, in fact, was "Science, Technology, Invention in History: Impact, Influence, Change," to be followed in 2000 by "Turning Points in History: People, Ideas, Events."

This paper will compare different cases of "ideologically-correct sciences": attempts by the state, or at least some representatives of, or forces within the state, to not only use science, but also to transform it into a more ideologically-acceptable form. Thus, in the French Revolution, Jacobins called for a "democratic," not "aristocratic" science in the Soviet Union, Bolsheviks called for a "Marxist," not a "bourgeois" science in Germany, National Socialists called for an "Aryan," not a "Jewish" science in Japan during the second world war, ideologues called for a nationalistic, "Japanese" science, not an "international" science in post-World War II USA, politicians and some scientists called for an "anti-Communist" science, not an "international" science and during Mao's Cultural Revolution, Red Guards called for a "people's" science, not an "elitist" science.

Public anatomy was an important part of public culture in early modern Europe. In this paper, the Edinburgh anatomy lectures of Alexander Monro primus (1697-1767) are used to illustrate the concept of public anatomy as "moral theatre," in which dissection and vivisection served to raise moral questions about life and death. At the same time, the Glasgow philosopher Francis Hutcheson discussed the question of compassion, and proposed that witnessing acts of cruelty gave an opportunity to experience compassion and therefore was justified. I suggest that Monro and Hutcheson shared the view that the main purpose of public anatomy was to serve as a "virtuous performance."

In the midst of an unpopular war fought far from home, and riddled with doubt about the ability of the republic to assimilate its significant immigrant population, patrician Americans preached the virtues of consensus. "No hyphens!," they cried, arguing that loyalty and patriotism demanded an end to each and every manifestation of immigrant difference. Immigrants, many hoped, would lose themselves in an emergent, powerful state patriotism, in loyalty not just to the English language, or to the nation, but to the race–to whiteness even more specifically. As one of the foremost leaders of the eugenic move to restrict immigration--and as a prominent superpatriot–Madison Grant brought his thirst for eugenics and his commitment to restriction together in his veneration of the "ivory whiteness" of the Nordic "race." But Nordicism, despite its roots in Grantian eugenics, was an integral part of a rapidly emerging consensual culture of "absolute whiteness," in which immigrants (previously understood as racially distinct) were no longer envisioned as different. This new, remarkably popular sense of race, I argue, was rooted not just in science, not just in an evolving political economy of racial difference, but also in a new visual sense of what race looked like. The visual markers of race, in short, had been transformed.

Michael Levitt recently commented that his successful modeling of the structure of bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor in vivo had cost half a million dollars for two weeks of processing time on a supercomputer in 1986, but the same task could be accomplished for about eighty cents worth of electricity on a PC today. Although the details of this rapid development in automation might not have been predicted in the 1950s, early proponents of computer applications in the life sciences envisioned a time when cheap, powerful, digital computers would be as common place in the laboratory as compound microscopes were. This instrumentation of the computer would make possible fundamental discoveries about the structure, function, and evolution of important macromolecules. It would also, advocates claimed, fundamentally alter scientific work. Computers would perform some tasks more efficiently than humans could, and they would perform other tasks that were impractical for even large research teams to accomplish. The ubiquity of computers would mean that these changes would occur not only at major computing centers, but in virtually all biological laboratories. This paper examines the motivations for using (or not using) computers to study the structure, function, and evolution of proteins. It also examines the early claims of computational biochemists and some of the consequences of their preliminary attempts to compute the structures and evolutionary histories of protein molecules.

Senior Soviet physicist Abram Joffe made his research on the electric strength of materials the centerpiece of his institute's practical contributions to Soviet industrialization and electrification during the First Five Year Plan. This research prompted much commentary abroad, e.g., "students of the solid state have long been tantalized by rumors of revolutionary scientific (as well as political) experiments in Russia." An earnest young Communist physicist even treated dielectric breakdown as a kind of metaphor for the Great Break itself, or Stalin's willful proclamation of wholesale transformation "on all fronts of socialist construction" in 1929. Though dielectric breakdown was a hideously complicated bulk phenomenon far removed from the quantum mechanics of single particles, after the initial successes of the quantum mechanical electron theory of metals in the late 1920s there was considerable hope that it might yet be incorporated into a larger synthesis of solid state theory. Dielectric breakdown thus became an unexpected laboratory site for contesting a complex set of experimental, theoretical, industrial, economic, ideological, and cultural concerns, with important consequences for the Soviet physics community during the Stalin era.

As scientific disciplines became increasingly defined in post-Civil War America, credibility within professional scientific communities became an ever more important factor in the success or failure of the scientist. The backyard or garage chemist was on the way out. Nowhere was this more the case than in America's rural regions where funds for research, facilities, and even formal education could make the scientific career very elusive in light of more rigorously defined professional criteria. More than this, however, was also the need for the aspiring scientific professional to establish an identity within his social community while simultaneously gaining professional recognition. In this paper I propose that professional laboratory practices facilitated and contributed to establishing the scientist's personal identity in his life outside the laboratory as sure as recognized laboratory results contributed to professional success. More specifically, I cite the example of the Western Reserve University chemist Edward Williams Morley, and the manner in which his search for the atomic weight of oxygen did more than just establish the gas's atomic weight, cementing his own reputation in the scientific community as one of the century's finest chemists. His fourteen-year investigation also played a major role in shaping his position in the non-scientific community of Hudson and Cleveland, Ohio in the last decades of the nineteenth-century.

Cumulative representations are images capable of combining and preserving graphically information gathered over repeated cycles of observation and/or extended geographical areas e.g., terrestrial and lunar maps, star charts, and botanical illustrations. Such images are dynamic with regard to content yet stable with regard to convention i.e., details of a map or star chart change as more information is added yet the emerging continents and constellations remain recognizable as long as certain conventions of representation are followed. I will argue that cumulative representations are most readily produced within the social and institutional structures of legally constituted corporations engaged in long-distance activities overseas trading companies, religious orders active in the missions, and scientific academies capable of mounting overseas expeditions. These various long-distance corporations faced broadly similar problems of how to train (or retain) competent agents, deploy them in remote regions, and obtain from them trustworthy reports. While the dynamic content of cumulative representations depended upon the ability of long-distance corporations to sustain repeated cycles of remote observation, their generic stability depended upon the inculcation and enforcement of conventions. Cumulative representations were thus simultaneously expressions of the global mobility of a corporation‚s agents and its ability to enforce local conventions of representation. My examples will be taken from series of maps made by the Spanish Casa de la Contratación de las Indias , the chartrooms of the V.O.C., and members of the Society of Jesus. The simultaneous existence of several European-based long-distance corporations provided an inter-organizational field that sustained both friendly and hostile exchanges of natural knowledge, a field that effectively enhanced the robustness of Europe's long-distance sciences.

During the Progressive Era, the New York City Department of Health proclaimed its mission to protect public health in the motto "Public health is purchasable. Within natural limitations a community can determine its own death rate." Scientists, physicians, and reformers believed that bacteriology–germ theory's most promising offspring–together with modern methods of disease prevention and public education could forestall the inevitable. The principle obstacles were the infectious diseases spread to the white middle class via direct and indirect contact with the poor and with immigrants, both of whom inhabited the city's slums. However, with time and money, both public and private health reformers believed that science and education would protect the public good. Shocked by statistical studies of infant mortality, health care reformers set out fix several different "problems." In Columbus Hill, a predominantly black neighborhood in Manhattan, they elicited the assistance of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor and, along with other private agencies and the mothers within the area, worked to eradicate the root causes of infant mortality. In the Mulberry district of Manhattan–an Italian community–intensive health care reform likewise undertook to lower the number of infant deaths. In both cases, infant mortality decreased as a result of reformer's efforts. And while health care reformers inevitably cited the root causes of infant mortality as "racial," they also marked somewhat different causes in each case--noting the dangers of syphilis in the African-American community of Columbus Hill and the predominance of congestive diseases, such as tuberculosis, in the immigrant slums of Mulberry. The statistical decline in infant death rates for both neighborhoods thus masked the underlying racialism of the New York City Department of Health and the AICP. The rise of germ theory occurred during an unstable period where sanitary, eugenic, epidemiological, hereditarian, and environmental thought competed for supremacy among health care reformers and the general public. The complicated juggling of various approaches to race and science, moreover, reveals that the racial dynamic of eugenic health care reform–tempered by the paternalistic ethos of professionalism–also illuminates the different approaches to African-American and immigrant communities.

A number of Nobel Laureates in England and Europe worked closely with their scientifically trained wives in the first decades of the twentieth century, producing numerous joint publications in their early careers: Robert and Gertrude Maud Robinson in England, Andre and Marguerite Lwoff in France, August and Marie Krogh in Denmark. In contrast to other famous couples like the Curies and the Coris, the wife's role diminished as the husband's position increased in importance. For biographers of these Nobel laureates, the wife forms part of the backdrop to the husband's life, pushed out of the spotlight by male collaborators and students in spite of her continuing importance in her husband's laboratory or the development of an independent line of research. Through a comparison with other scientific couples and Nobelists working with non-spousal collaborators, a solution to the mystery of the vanishing wife is sought through an examination of scientific hierarchies and gendered roles.

Manilius' 'Astronomica' is a renowned poem in classical scholarship, having attracted major interventions by Joseph Scaliger, Richard Bentley, and A. E. Housman. This paper discusses Bentley's edition (1739) in the context of early eighteenth-century relations between science and humanism. Astrology itself was discredited among the learned by this time, but astronomy (on which astrology depended) was in a post-Newtonian afterglow of respectability: Bentley read the 'Principia' in preparation for his work. Yet Bentley's actual editorial methods were emphatically those of the late-humanist philological culture to which he belonged, centering on linguistic and metrical criteria and even identifying alleged interpolations on the grounds of style. I suggest that Bentley sought methodologically to distinguish his work from recent editions of ancient technical texts by scientists, for example Isaac Barrow, David Gregory, and Edmund Halley.

This paper examines the ideological content of science books written by scientists for the French reading public in the second half of the nineteenth century. In this period science was perceived as a means of national regeneration, especially after France's humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), a defeat ascribed to the superiority of German science. This led to a strong pro-science campaign designed to win public support for government funding of science. Creating a favorable public image of science was seen as essential for national rejuvenation. This campaign took many forms, one of the most efficacious being books written for the public by French scientists. They were attempting to make science more appealing to the public; in the words of one of them: "to coat the edge of the cup of science with honey." My paper is based on an examination of some of these popularizations by scientists such as the entomologist Jean Henri Fabre, the geographer Élisée Reclus, the astronomer Camille Flammarion, the chemists Louis Figuier and Gaston Tissandier, and the physiologist Paul Bert, among others. I emphasize the ideological assumptions that were common to all these science books and which made them extremely popular with the public. Flammarion's L'Astronomie populaire, for example, sold 100,000 copies between 1880 and 1900. I focus my paper on the common ideological positions taken in these books, stressing among others those of nationalism, a defense of a hierarchical class structure, and a strong anti-feminism. I demonstrate that these popularization efforts to bolster science with the public were also ideological weapons in defense of the status quo.

Undecided by the expert opinions of artisans and mathematicians (including Galileo's), the Venetian Senate voted in 1593 "to experiment"(experimentarsi) with a new rowing system on a prototype war galley. In fact, the Arsenal had supported experimental undertakings by inventors and mathematicians throughout the sixteenth century, sometimes to the disgust of the artisans whose domain the Arsenal normally was. Archival records show that the Venetian Arsenal was the place for experiments which were of potential moment to the state milling and hydraulic models as well as weapon-related inventions were built and tested there. The constant need to "make space" for new inventions in the Arsenal, and the near constant interference of self-styled philosophers and mathematicians no doubt made the Venetian Arsenal the ideal setting for Galileo's Two New Sciences. This paper will investigate the meanings of "experiment" within the precincts of the early modern arsenal--meanings which straddled the borders between speculation, technical know-how, and state imperative, and which offer an additional layer of understanding to our picture of experimental philosophy in this age. The essay will focus on the Venetian Arsenal, but with significant connections to other Italian state and private arsenals, and with some comparison to the English magazine at Vauxhall and the Parisian Arsenal.

In common parlance we all have a sense of what a standard is. The standard metre is a metal bar in Paris having the length of exactly one metre. A computer standard is what ensures compatibility. A standard can be high quality (up to the standard) or dull (pretty standard). In fact, the word standard is now applied to a great diversity of phenomena (and the French/German norm/Norm to an even greater). Is this a quirk of the development of modern languages or do standards have something in common? This paper will outline the history of water and radiation standards and identify commonalities: the consensus they support, the discipline they require, the infrastructure sustaining them and the codifications they facilitate. It will argue that standards have ramifications of considerable impact, and that as such they provide wonderful levers for the historian of science.

For many decades, historians of science concentrated almost exclusively on chronicling the lives and achievements and institutional, arrangements of scientists in Western Europe and the United States. In general, historians of women in science and "gender and science" theorists followed their example. Until recently most work on women scientists has focused on the situation in western Europe and North America, and has implicity or explicity assumed that the observations made for those regions will hold true for the rest of the world. Yet transnational research, especially on less-studied areas, often reveals the inadequacies of generalizations that are based on a small sample of women scientists in relatively few countries. For example, an important obstacle to women in science in most industrialized counties is the expectation that they will need to devote tremendous time and energy to childcare during the years when they should be advancing their scientific careers. However, if women belong to a culture in which the extended family typically provides childcare, or if they belong to a class that can afford to pay for nannies, then the obstacle that looms so large for most North American or European women is absent. This paper will discuss some of the ways in which research on less studied parts of the world can highlight the complex interactions of gender, culture, and class, and thus illuminate differences as well as similarities in women's participation in the sciences. Examples will be drawn from the history of women in science in Russia, Vietnam, and central Africa.

Much of the recent historiography on Robert Hooke has highlighted his work in mechanics (both celestial and terrestrial), instrument-making, architecture and microscopy. The role he played in the history of anatomy and physiology, however, has never been adequately addressed. In this paper I intend to examine Robert Hooke's anatomical and physiological experiments, performed both privately and before the Royal Society. A significant percentage of his experiments were of an anatomical nature, and these-in good Baconian fashion-were often performed multiple times in order to perfect the procedures and widen the understanding of the physiological processes in question. Therefore, drawing on Hooke's diaries, his published works, and such classic sources as Birch's History of the Royal Society, and The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, I will explore a dimension of Hooke's work which I feel has not been adequately emphasized. First, I examine the nature of each of his physiological experiments, particularly those dealing with respiration, blood transfusion, and anatomical dissections. I will especially consider the connections between Hooke's experiments with respiration and those with the air pump. The latter are often seen as falling within a separate research program which is non-physiological in nature, but this is a notion which I question. Second, I look at the connection between Hooke's microscopial research and his anatomical interests, again sketching a more holistic picture of his work. Finally, the case of Hooke will contribute to a larger argument about the role of medicine in the history of science, and the need to reassess the disciplinary boundaries which have been imposed on the seventeenth century. The interaction between the medical community–particularly the Royal College of Physicians–and the Royal Society is addressed, and Hooke's role in both of these institutions is considered.

The withdrawal of the United States from the joint U.S.-French Russian Bion Project, which used rhesus monkeys in the conduct of space research, occurred as the result of extensive lobbying and eclectic coalition-building by strident animals rights groups. The fact that NASA withdrew from the Bion project was broadly perceived as a "victory" for the animal rights movement, when in reality, this retreat was occasioned by a lucky coincidence of synergies between liberal animal rights activists and conservative budget cutters on Capitol Hill. Bion is an international project using the unpiloted and retrievable Russian biocosmos satellite developed to perform detailed studies of how biological systems, including non-human primates, respond to the absence of gravity. The United States has conducted cooperative research with the Russians using these spacecraft since 1975. Over 150 scientists from across the United States had experiments flown on the eight missions which preceded Bion 11 (flown in 1996) and Bion 12 (scheduled to be flown in 1998, but abandoned by NASA on April 22, 1997). The history of the cancellation of this project is replete with political intrigue. The NASA veterinarian at the Ames Research Center, Dr. Sharon Vanderlip, resigned on March 20, 1995, alleging that NASA Ames displayed "arrogance and blatant disregard for policies, regulations and animal welfare." As a result of the allegations, NASA halted all animal experimentation, pending a thorough review. During the course of this review, issues relating to the Bion project surfaced, and Dr. Vanderlip contacted the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal (PETA). On June 15, 1995, PETA wrote the first of many letters to NASA Administrator Dan Goldin, requesting that he cancel the Bion program. PETA sent similar letters to all members of the House and Senate subcommittees responsible for approving NASA's budget. In addition, PETA contacted the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, every member of Congress, Carl Sagan, Jane Goodall, the owner of the Houston Rockets, and the media at large. As is the case with organized protest movements, PETA staged sit-ins, protests, letter campaigns, and occupied the NASA Administrator's suite during and Advisory Council Meeting in October, 1996. After enlisting the help of an organization, Taxpayers For Common Sense, PETA helped forge an unusual coalition on Capitol Hill, consisting of liberal democrats, opposed to animal experimentation and fiscal conservatives who joined in the goal of cutting the $33 million for the flights of Bion 11 and 12 from the NASA budget. In December, 1996, when one of the monkey subjects died following its return to Earth from the Bion 11 mission, NASA convened another review panel. On April 22, 1997, NASA suspended its participation in primate research on the Bion 12 mission, and has since canceled the contract. Both PETA and NASA claim victory. This paper analyses the dynamics of NASA's cancellation of this program of peer-reviewed science, the conceptual framework of social protest movements and the marriage of ideology and expediency on Capitol Hill, all of which lead to the abrupt termination of this effort. Sources include NASA and PETA primary documents, including FOIA requests, press reports, legislative histories, and interviews with both Congressional and NASA staff.

The paper will demonstrate, first of all, that the logic of Durkheimian sociology and ethnography, together with the new linguistics advanced under Meillet and Saussure beginning in the 1890s, divided the epistemic ground of social science into two segregated domains: the static and the dynamic. The paper will then go on to demonstrate that through this was achieved, in French ethnographic discourse, a reconfiguration of the concept of the "primitive," which was closely related to simultaneous developments in the discourse of colonial administration. In the latter domain, colonial theorists spoke of "association" in ways which structurally resembled the premises of the new sociology, and in which certain the implication of certain of these premises were made explicit for the management of the various colonies of the French Empire.

Scholarly work on Jesuit science in China has largely concentrated on the introduction of European bodies of knowledge and technical practices to the intellectual and cultural environment of late imperial China. The unidirectional trajectory underlying such studies is particularly striking in the case of Jesuit astronomy, a topic still haunted by the specter of Copernicanism, the Galileo affair, and the consequences of these issues for the transmission of scientific knowledge from Europe to China in the early modern period. In this paper, however, I turn to the movement of Jesuit science from China to Europe, focusing especially on astronomical and allied cartographical work carried out by Jesuits working in China and subsequently published in Europe. Texts such as Thomas Gouye's Observations physiques et mathématiques (1688, 1692), François Noel's Observationes mathematicae, et physicae (1710), Etienne Souciet's Observations mathématiques, astronomiques (1729), and Ignatius Kögler's Observationes eclipsium, variorumque caelestium congressuum (1745) reveal neither a homogenous Jesuit program of astronomical work in China, nor a monolithic approach to preparing these Jesuit materials for European readerships. Instead, I propose that these texts should be read as products of more localized processes of observing, recording, editing, and publishing. These processes only sometimes mapped onto Jesuit administrative divisions, institutional formation, and internal structures of communication and control. Political allegiances, patronage claims, schools of technical practice, and of natural knowledge rooted in the world of the early modern European lay savant were also crucial elements in structuring such processes.

James Clerk Maxwell's 'Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism' (1873) is generally looked upon as a work of theory–indeed, as the foundational work of field theory. Yet George Chrystal, who worked closely with Maxwell at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the 1870s, declared in an 1882 review of the second edition of the book that it was "in the strictest sense a Treatise on Electrical Measurement." What did Chrystal mean by this, and what role did a concern with electrical metrology actually play in the structure and workings of Maxwell's 'Treatise?' Maxwell had first been drawn into electrical metrology in 1862, when as a young professor of physics at Kings College London he joined the British Association Committee on Electrical Standards and began a long and intense collaboration with Fleeming Jenkin and others on the determination of the standard of resistance, the ohm. The committee had been formed the previous year at the urging of Jenkin, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin), and several others who had been active in cable telegraphy, and it sought to serve both electrical scientists and engineers by developing a unified and reliable system of electrical units and standards. The work of the British Association committee had wide and lasting ramifications throughout electrical science and technology. Not least, it had deep effects on Maxwell's own thinking. His exacting work in measuring the ohm, and the careful paper he and Jenkin drew up for the 1863 committee report, "On the elementary relations between electrical measurements," left many traces that showed up later in the 'Treatise.' In particular, I will argue that Maxwell's metrological work helped cement his shift in the mid-1860s away from inventing hypothetical microscopic mechanisms and toward formulating macroscopic laws that would, as he said in the 'Treatise' (p. viii) be subject to "verification by actual measurement."

During the early nineteenth century German investigators of nature and physicians attempted to remedy the lack of camaraderie and collaboration on scientific projects by forming the Gesellschaft deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte (The German Association of Investigators of Nature and Physicians, henceforth the Association) in 1822. Lorenz Oken, who orchestrated the formation of the Association, wished to define the role of a German investigator of nature and physician within the context of the politically fractured German territories. By drawing upon one of Germany's most prestigious cultural activities, music, Oken hoped to unite German investigators of nature and physicians. Such a unification, Oken argued, would benefit German science and medicine as well as serve as a spark to ignite political unity throughout the German territories, whose splindered nature deeply pained and embarrassed him. Music, in the form of folk songs and a secularized cantata composed by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy for the Sixth Annual Association Meeting in Berlin, formed a crucial component of the meetings, serving as the medium through which Germans could express shared emotions and values, and construct their cultural identity. These songs underscored the importance of the collective, which could work together in harmony toward fulfilling common goals, particularly German unification. Music became the key element of the sociability of the German savant at a time when the German Republic of Letters was searching for a unique identity, arguing for a social and intellectual space distinct from German artisans and savants from other countries, particularly Britain and France. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century the Association came to define the role of the Naturwissenschaftler within culture. Culminating in the Bildungsbuergertum, German scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz epitomized the educated scientist and bearer of German culture, and a training in music was major component of their Bildung.

Immediately following WWI, a number of British politicians made public their opinion that British science had failed the nation in its moment of need. They feared the days of Britain's scientific leadership were over. They felt that the surprising length and difficulty of the war was partially attributable to the failure of British industry to supply the military needs of the country. Politicians contrasted British production problems with the perceived success of Germany's chemical industries. German industry was seen as more scientifically innovative both before and during the war. This conviction led politicians from both parties to argue that it was in the interest of the British nation to rebuild its base of scientific knowledge production, as well as to attempt to rationalize its industries. This paper details the role of the British government in setting up institutions for supporting scientific research in the 1920s. I focus on three organizations for fostering scientific research, all created in response to the fear of a British scientific decline. In 1924, Parliament set up the Committee on Industry and Trade, led by Lord Arthur Balfour, to survey the states of various industries. Balfour drew on his longtime friendship with Lord Rutherford in examining the so-called science-based industries. At the same time, the government set up two different types of agencies to support scientific research. The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) was founded as a funding and coordination agency in 1922. The DSIR oversaw a number of laboratories, including the National Physical Laboratory. As its name suggested, the DSIR was oriented toward both fundamental and industrial research. The British government also established seed money for several Research Associations, which were industry-specific and focused on applications of science to industry. The government gave them the mission of performing collaborative research on widely-applicable problems, with the intent of making them independent and eventually funded by the industries they supported. This variety of different agencies led to numerous disputes over the ownership of various research projects between the DSIR, Research Associations, and universities. In the final analysis this paper compares this military-industrial-academic complex with the more familiar US model of the Cold War period.

Between 1942 and 1965, small groups of psychologists, social scientists, and technologists worked with the United States Air Force to improve the capability of enlisted men and officers to perceive, interpret, and act upon audio and visual data from electronic communications gear and radar scopes. Since both humans and machines were essential elements in these military operations, "man-machine" interactions became an important activity of military-funded psychological research. With their flexible processing capabilities, Air Force computers became a versatile toy for well-placed researchers such as George Miller, Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, Oliver Selfridge, J. C. R. Licklider, and Ulric Neisser. Used both as a tool and a model, the computer allowed them to express theories in the unambiguous language of programs, and to speculate about the information processing capabilities of the human mind. These new approaches led directly to the replacement of behaviorism as the dominant tradition in American psychology by cognitive psychology. This paper will describe the changes to the scientific practices of these researchers based upon their reaction to the appearance of the computer.

Leibniz's arithmetical quadrature of the mid-1670s offered him an important heuristic for the development of many of his most famous metaphysical and physical doctrines. In the proof he combined the legitimization of infinite series as real mathematical knowledge with the creation of infinitely many infinite series from infinitely many "vantage points." This proof and its epistemological justification illustrated and helped circumscribe, for Leibniz, human ability and human fallibility. Humans could, Leibniz held, know the area of the circle, a sign of their spiritual nature, but they could only grasp a single infinite representation at a time, whereas God seized all infinite representations and vantage points of the circle simultaneously. In the following years, Leibniz drew upon the details of the proof and its epistemological justification in framing a number of important doctrines, including the infamous principle of "expression." This paper focuses rather on the arithmetical quadrature as a key component in the extension of properly philosophical thinking and practice into the world. Actually going through the proof, Leibniz argued, helped lead one to "account" for one's "assets" and "deficits"–mental, physical and spiritual. More than that, Leibniz viewed his new systematic algorithmic/arithmetical practice as the first step in a ladder of exercises for improving one's personal "account" towards greater knowledge of self and world. Leibniz's quadrature of the circle offered proof about the circle, proof of human capacity, and a systematic means to begin reaching that capacity. In short, they offered good reasons for his infamous optimism.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Canadian Defence Research Telecommunications Establishment (DRTE) set out to construct a new type of scientific satellite. The 'topside sounder,' as it was known, would extend the use of panoramic ionograms —'pictures' of the ionosphere used extensively in ground-based research—to study the previously unobserved 'topside' of that region. This iconic extension by satellite was critical to the larger Cold War attempt to establish both cognitive and technological control over the strategically crucial Canadian North. The success of the project, and of the larger military and cultural aims it supported, rested on the question of reliability. The novel satellite had to be deployed, by an organization inexperienced with satellite technology, as a scientific instrument operating reliably in the hostile environment of near space for a period of one year. In constructing the reliability of the topside sounder, DRTE engineers drew on an emerging military philosophy, championed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and designed to ensure the extreme reliability of electronic equipment operating under the rigourous demands of the Cold War. The physical and cultural infrastructure that ensured the construction of reliable military machines was marshalled towards the construction of a reliable scientific satellite, with all this implied for the nation that both were designed to serve.

Between November 1905 and March 1921, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, through its Board of Charity and Board of Health, operated a leprosarium on Penikese Island. About seventy-five acres in size, Penikese Island is one of the four Elizabeth Islands located in Buzzard's Bay, which along with Cape Cod Bay and Nantucket Sound form the Cape Cod peninsula. During its sixteen-year operation, the Penikese Island leprosarium cost the Commonwealth $360,000 in public funds and housed thirty-eight patients--thirty-two men and six women and all of them immigrants to the United States. For most of its existence, the leprosarium served solely as a site where Massachusetts residents diagnosed with leprosy were forcibly isolated and ostensibly treated for their condition. But between March 1912 and May 1917, Penikese Island also served as a research site for medical students and physicians from Harvard Medical School and its Department of Pathology who were searching for a leprosy cure. The answer to the question of why Massachusetts would devote significant public funds and enormous political and administrative energies to establish and to sustain a hospital for thirty-eight patients, who most physicians believed had an incurable tropical disease, reveals much about the state of public health and medical knowledge and practice in the early twentieth century. In particular, the story of the Penikese Island leprosarium demonstrates the power that the popular and the medical perceptions of a disease continued to exert in the development of public health policy at a time when physicians and public health officials were appealing to the authority of laboratory science as the arbitrator of public health practice. Furthermore, Massachusetts' attempts to control leprosy suggest that the trust and the belief placed in Progressive ideals about science, social management, and social welfare transformed the relationship between the state and the individual, as public interests were protected and were advanced often at the profound expense of individual civil liberties.

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