1999 Preliminary Abstracts
HSS Semisesquicentennial Anniversary
1999 Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

3-7 November 1999

Meeting Program

Please Note: All abstracts are arranged alphabetically. If you are a participant and would like to make changes to your abstract, please e-mail the changes to the HSS Executive Office at hssexec@u.washington.edu.

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Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie
University of Oklahoma

To look at one thing and see another: Two women geologists, Ida Ogilvie and Maria Ogilvie-Gordon

During the Victorian era we find numerous cases in which women have been able to enter science through the socially acceptable avenue of art as "women's work." This strategy is especially common in botany, where we find many women illustrating books, painting flowers, and compiling herbaria. It is my contention in this paper that women in other scientific fields also use artistic perspectives in order to succeed in their various sciences. The form that "art takes in science may vary from subject field to subject field. It may be as straightforward as illustrating textbooks or it may involve more complex perceptual abilities. I will use geology and specifically the work of two women geologists, Ida Ogilvie and Maria Ogilvie Gordon to illustrate the use of an artistic perspective in geology. I postulate that this perspective takes the form of the ability to visualize in three dimensions. From studying the papers of these two geologists, it is clear that, whether or not they illustrated their own papers, each must have been able to describe verbally what they saw in their mind's eye. After briefly describing the lives of each woman. I will analyze several papers of each, describing how an artistic perspective is vital to geologists.

Janet C. Olson
Northwestern University Library

'A Fantasy of Magazine Science': American Popular Magazines and the Eugenics Movement, 1900-1924

Historians of the eugenics movement in the United States have commented on the abundant popular discussion of eugenics that occurred during the Progressive Era. These historians, however, have based their analysis of eugenics mainly on the publications of scientific organizations and on documents relating to eugenic legislation. As a result, the analytical focus has been on the leaders of the movement rather than on the public reception of eugenics as a potential social welfare solution. The wide coverage of eugenics in middle-class magazines is a gauge of the response to eugenic thought, and helps explain the extent, and the limits, of the movement's success. The heyday of the eugenics movement coincided with the proliferation of popular magazines, which attracted precisely those middle-class readers whose support the eugenics movement needed: the armchair scientist, the college-educated homemaker, and the wide-awake citizen. Between 1900 and 1924, more than one thousand articles relating to eugenics appeared in magazines ranging from the Atlantic Monthly to the Ladies Home Journal. The majority of the articles were written by men, who were careful to acknowledge women's vital role in perpetuating good stock. These writers proposed eugenics as a scientific, practical, and patriotic way to preserve the "American race." Anti-eugenic articles questioned the eugenicist's science, raised civil liberties issues, and lamented the passing of romantic love. Overall, while most of the middle-class, magazine reading public was receptive to the eugenicists's hereditarian views, it was hesitant to concede to the State control over procreation.

Margaret J Osler
University of Calgary

The Canonical Imperative: Rethinking the Scientific Revolution

This paper will consider the formation of the canon of key individuals and subject-areas that have formed the heart of traditional accounts of the Scientific Revolution. I will argue that the formation of this canon reflects the interests and concerns of the modern historians rather than the concerns of early modern natural philosophers. I will argue that a contextualized understanding of early modern natural philosophy gives a very different picture from that found in the traditional accounts of the Scientific Revolution.

Katherine Pandora
University of Oklahoma / Dept. of the History of Science

Varieties of Historiographic Experience: Writing Intellectual and Cultural Histories of American Science

The topic for this paper presentation is a consideration of historiographic trends in intellectual and cultural history in the history of American science, and their implications for future work in the field. In the fifteen years since the landmark Osiris volume on "Historical Writing on American Science" edited by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter, this area in the history of science has been marked by enormous vitality both in terms of contributions and the variety of methodological approaches that are being experimented with. Issues to be discussed include the impact on intellectual and cultural histories of American science by interest in such topics as scientific rhetoric, visual representation, questions of "body" and "place", and the challenge to traditional frameworks by the emergence of such interdisciplinary perspectives as science studies and popular culture studies. Also to be addressed is the question of diplomatic relations between the intellectual and cultural history of American science and American history, and the issue of writing for audiences outside the field of history of science.

Mary Brown Parlee
MIT

Visible bodies and invisible work: Gender, scientific authority, and the institutionalization of the neurosciences at MIT

The neurosciences began to assume stable institutional forms as a new discipline in the 1960s. One site was Department of Psychology (now Brain and Cognitive Sciences) at MIT, founded in 1963. A visitor to the department and its laboratories during the 1960s would see approximately 50 people working, women and men in roughly equal numbers, at highly-differentiated well-coordinated tasks. Yet as Shapin observes of the "invisible technician's" work in Boyle's laboratory, participants routinely drew and enacted evaluative contrasts that rendered some kinds of work and some workers invisible in the community of "scientists" and in the formal body of scientific knowledge produced through collective activity. (Contrasts, for example, between scientist, technician, support staff manual skill, mental creativity research work, administration scientific authorities, interchangeable employees.) I use archival records and interviews to examine the concrete activities of four women who did very different kinds of work in the department in order to explore some ways boundaries were constructed (rhetorically, institutionally, interpersonally, materially) to produce such contrastive categories and their associated (in)visibilities. Following D. Smith (1987), S.L. Star (1991), and Lenoir (1997) I consider the role played by female bodies and assumptions about gender in stabilizing these boundaries, rendering some kinds of work "invisible," and institutionalizing a new disciplinary program in neuroscience.

Wade E. Pickren
American Psychological Association

APA Archives and the APA Public Information Campaign Since WWII

In 1998, the American Psychological Association took steps to revitalize its archives program. A Director, trained in the history of psychology, was hired. The goal is to develop the APA Archives as a resource for the Association staff, its members, and the historical research community. This paper discusses the rich historical resources of the APA Archives available to scholars. These resources are illustrated through the exposition of the APA's public information campaign that began after WWII. Leaders of American psychology became increasingly concerned about the public reception and understanding of the science and profession of psychology. APA sought to influence the public image of psychology through scientific journals, press, newspapers, and books. In the 1960s, APA first considered a popular psychology magazine as a means to promote accurate understanding of the field. This eventuated in the purchase of Psychology Today in the early 1980s. APA ownership of Psychology Today became a financial and organizational disaster, eventually costing the Association its ownership of three office buildings in Washington, DC and contributing to the split between psychological scientists and practitioners. Although this experience made APA officials chary of ownership of popular media, the Association continues its attempts to significantly influence public understanding of psychology.

Clara Pinto-Correia
Universidade Lusofona de Humanidades e Tecnologias (Lisbon, Portugal)

God Under the Lens

This communication examines the impact created in the seventeenth century by the introduction of the microscope in the study of life sciences, from the viewpoint of the religious fervor it entailed. In a scientific scene where most pioneer microscopists were devout Christians, the microscope seemed to be revealing to man three fundamental Divine lessons, all of them smoothly fine-tuned with the basic tenets of Christian faith: 1. The microscope as God's tool of awe. If it was arguable, from the taxonomist Karl Linnaeus to the popularizer Abbe Pluche, to claim that God had created nature for human enjoyment, reverberating his immense power in nature's awesome diversity, the inception of a brand new world, equally complex and equally grandiose but staged at an extra level of apparent difficulty due to its minuteness, could be read as one more message of God's immensity, hidden from our eyes until we were ready to grasp it. 2. The microscope as God's tool of redemption. As Abbe Senebier would claim, the fly is very vile to our eyes but becomes much more embellished under the microscope. Likewise, bees may be apparently meaningless creatures (Buffon certainly thought so), but according to Swammerdam "the power of God is mathematically expressed therein." The same applied to spiders, vipers, fleas, teaching us that God's redemption is possible even for his minutest repugnant creatures. 3. The microscope as God's tool of modesty. If we compare under the lenses the splendor of the butterfly's wing with the shabbiness of the man-made razor, we are thought to remain modest about the limited reach of our ability to mimic God's perfection. As Malebranche reminds us, the geometry of God was a sobering lesson for humans due to the failure of our senses to perceive it in its entire perfection. All good Christians should remain modest, and the microscope made them remember that.

Hans Pols
Max Planck Inst. for the History of Science, Berlin

Henry Herbert Goddard, Feeblemindedness, and the Debate on Citizenship

At the turn of the 20th century, far-reaching debates on the nature of American citizenship took place. Previously, citizenship had been a relatively straightforward issue: it depended on the country which had issued your passport. From the turn of the century on, groups of concerned citizens started to formulate a rather different perspective on citizenship: it was not something one had, but something one needed to acquire through persistent effort. American citizenship entailed a number of character traits that were not necessarily present in recent immigrants, who had come from countries with a political culture radically different from that of the United States. Progressives of all stripes organized Americanization courses, published their viewpoints, and designed lesson programs on citizenship to be taught in schools. In this paper I intend to investigate the role that intelligence played within this debate and how a number of psychologists, among them H.H. Goddard, intervened in this debate to transform it along psychological lines. Central questions were: what is the nature of recent immigrants that makes their integration in American society potentially problematic? Goddard, and with him many other psychologists, focused on the presumed lack of intelligence of individual immigrants and immigrant groups. In this way, they naturalized the requirements of American citizenship as the inherent qualities of human beings.

Thomas Potthast
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

Origins and obstacles of bioethics: ecologists and morals in Germany as compared to North America, 1930-1960

The science of ecology in the 20th century has been closely linked both to moral concerns about the state of nature and to the appeal to nature as a source of moral orientation. This paper is devoted to the period preceding the formation of environmental ethics as a domain, one domain of bioethics, in the late 1960s. Before the 1960s, moral concerns also played a major role in the work of some leading ecologists. In Germany, Karl Friederichs (1878-1969) and August Thienemann (1882-1960) linked moral issues to their outlines of ecology as a "synthesizing" science of nature. Nevertheless, the impact of ecology on both conservation practices and environmental ethics in West-Germany was quite limited. By contrast, the relation between ecology and environmental ethics in North America seems to have been much closer. A reconstruction of the practices and different approaches to ecology and ethics of Friederichs and Thienemann will be compared with the scientific and moral discourses of the Chicago School of Warder Allee and with postwar and Cold War "New Ecology", focusing on their relation to environmental ethicists such as Aldo Leopold.

John Powers
Indiana University

History and Alchemy in the Chemical Work of Herman Boerhaave

Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) was one of the most famous and influential medical and chemical teachers of the early eighteenth century. As a medical professor in Leiden, he taught chemistry and pharmacy to (literally) hundreds of medical students, who subsequently spread the teachings of (as Macquer described him) "that immortal Boerhaave" across Europe. But in a seeming contrast to his pedagogical work, Boerhaave was also an avid reader of alchemical texts, and he conducted numerous alchemical experiments, some lasting as long as fifteen years. In this paper I shall argue that Boerhaave's chemical pedagogy and alchemical work were not at odds with one another, but that his alchemy was part of a larger pedagogical project: to collect and reveal ancient chemical secrets hidden in alchemical texts. The key to this enterprise was an interpretation of the history of chemistry, which held that the "true" chemical art was known fully to the ancients, but had been corrupted over the centuries. For Boerhaave, the aim of the modern chemist was to recover via literary scholarship and experimentation the bits of valid chemical knowledge handed down, yet corrupted and concealed in alchemical texts. Ultimately, this paper will provide an example of how eighteenth-century chemists absorbed alchemical practices and ideas into their work, refashioning them to suit their own disciplinary agendas.

Lawrence M Principe
Johns Hopkins University

Experiment in Chymistry and the Notebooks of George Starkey

Experiment and experimentalism are aspects of seventeenth-century science which have rightly received a great deal of attention from both historians and philosophers. Indeed, the distinctive character of "modern" science is often bound up with the centrality and rigor given to experiment. Alchemy has generally not been viewed as a partaker in the experimental tradition in a rigorous sense published texts often give little indication of what (if anything) alchemical practitioners were doing in their labs. The felicitous survival of the laboratory diaries of George Starkey (alias Eirenaeus Philalethes), however, gives us an otherwise unobtainable view of the methodologies of one of the most industrious and influential of early modern seekers after the alchemical arcana maiora. This paper treats the contents of these notebooks, showing the interplay between text and experiment as well as between theory and practice, and remarks upon the treatment of experimental failure, and some of the characteristic distinctiveness of chemical experiment which largely persists to this day.

Yakov Rabkin
University of Montreal

Science and Totalitarianism

This paper will compare sciences in different "totalitarian" societies, including Mussolini's Italy, Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, and Mao's China. In contrast to Walter Grunden's paper, this paper will compare science policy and practice in a broad sense, including national versus international imperatives in science, and science in a transition from, and into totalitarian societies.

Peter J. Ramberg
Johns Hopkins University

Representational and Exemplary Models in Stereochemistry, 1874-1900

The early history of stereochemistry offers an excellent lens for examining the various roles played by models in the development of nineteenth century organic chemistry. The most obvious models in chemistry are molecular models, three dimensional objects as direct representations of the gross physical characteristics of molecules, and graphical, less direct representations that convert the three dimensionality of molecules to the two dimensions of paper. For individual chemists, however, the meaning and use of such representational models could be quite diverse, and depended on their philosophical commitments and personal research trajectories. The first part of this paper will examine the various uses and meanings given by stereochemists to representational models. The second part will treat the less obvious, but no less important, implicit use of individual chemical compounds and their behavior as exemplary models for extrapolating more general laws of chemical behavior. Historians of biology have long recognized that in biological research, individual species such as fruit flies or mice serve as exemplary models, or even as "instruments, " for constructing general biological theories. Chemical theory is constructed in a similar way from the behavior of certain individual chemical compounds. Treating chemicals as "instruments," I will argue, helps to create an epistemology of chemical experimentation that will address the curious historical fact that the theoretical content of chemistry grew dramatically throughout the nineteenth century without the appearance of conventional instruments.

Jeffry L Ramsey
Oregon State University

Interpreting the 'Mona Lisa' of Chemical Reactions: Explanation, Mechanism and Methodological Values

From the 1910s until the late 1940s, chemists were unable to provide what they considered to be a consistent and compelling mechanism for the photochemical reaction between hydrogen and chlorine. One Nobel-prize winning chemist referred to this seemingly simple reaction as the 'Mona Lisa' of chemical reactions, and another prominent chemist noted despairingly that 'each [researcher] has his own mechanism' for the reaction.' An examination of the history of attempts to explain the reaction supports a claim that, in this discipline at this time, explanation was accomplished by citation of mechanisms rather than derivation from universal laws. In addition, researchers employed a variety of methodological values to choose between competing plausible mechanisms. I make some attempt to articulate the basis for the choice of different values by different researchers.

Alberto Guillermo Ranea
Universidad Torcuato Di Tella

Galileo's authority and its role in 17th. century natural philosophy

According to a well established tradition in history of science, G. W. Leibniz appealed to some results of Galileo's mechanics in order to refute the Cartesian equation of force and quantity of motion. Since to most historians of science, Galileo's authority in the development of physical science appears as an indisputable matter of fact, it has very often supposed that Leibniz took Galileo's formulae as an authoritative doctrine. The evidence from authors such as the highly influential François Blondel shows, however, that Galileo's authority was far from unquestionable among important intellectual milieus of the last quarter of the 17th century. Blondel's objections to the scientific status of the Galileian laws of free fall would have caused the angry debate between Leibniz and Denis Papin. Moreover, most of the natural philosophers who, according to Leibniz, allegedly belonged to the Cartesian party (l'Abbé Catelan, Claude M. Deschales, G. Borelli) or have independently committed similar errors (H. Fabri) have also given a special treatment in their books to Galileo's Mechanics. Thus, we have to invert the received order of factors: instead of rely for support on Galileo's authority, Leibniz's Dynamics would have contributed to its establishment in a milieu and at a time still dominated by different versions of Cartesianism.

Diederick Raven
Department of Anthropology

Zilsel's Project on the Emergence of Modern Science

In the early 40s, the Austrian émigré Edgar Zilsel published a number of important and well known essays on the emergence of science. These essays have given rise to the so-called Zilsel-thesis. Zilsel however also published several shorter and far less known essays which were directed particularly against the efforts of South-West-German Neo-Kantians, whose understanding of the natural sciences Zilsel found deeply flawed. The two sets of essays appear not to have much in common, but a closer look at Zilsel's life and work prior to his arrival in the United States (1939) reveals that they are in fact connected. The essays on the emergence of modern science are a case study aimed at showing that law-like explanations in history are possible, as the other set of essays had argued in the abstract. I want to show that Zilsel's failed Habilitationsschrift (post-doctoral dissertation), which he submitted at the university of Vienna in 1923, set the agenda for all of his subsequent work. My reconstruction of Zilsel's project of the emergence of modern science will reveal the overarching motive in Zilsel's work, namely, to argue the modernity of the socio-historical sciences.

Peter D Reffell
University of Leeds

Sciences of management, technologies of organisation: humans and machines in the early development of the computer in the US 1900-1930

The organisational infrastructures that held together the emerging bureaucracies of early twentieth century America played an important role in the shaping of the modern computer. Most obviously, the various forms of mechanical technologies (typewriters, calculators and tabulators, etc.), which were developed to administer these organisations, are recognised as being crucial to the later development of the mechanical computer, circa 1945. Less recognised in the history of computing, are the army of clerks and managers that filled these workplaces, the new professionals who proposed ways to organise these people, and the role of the new organisational technologies within this complex human network. This paper will examine the relationships between the human operatives and the technologies that formed these new centres of information processing. How did the organisational infrastructure of these early information-processing centres affect and shape both the development of the mechanical computer, and the various theories of computation that emerged alongside? By looking at the position of women, the role of scientific management and the integration of organisational technologies within the office workplace, this essay will show how the techniques and practices of information processing in these early information centres were carried over into development of the mechanical computer, and computational theories such as cybernetics. Most importantly, this essay will underline the importance of the development of new relationships between people and technologies in the shaping of the computer.

Carsten Reinhardt
University of Regensburgh

Reinventing Nuclear Magnetic Resonance for Chemistry: Herbert S. Gutowsky Between Disciplines and

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) was the principal example of the introduction of instrumental methods in both chemical research and routine analysis. Discovered by physicists shortly after World War II, NMR was soon transformed into a technique more suited to chemical than to physical research. One of the crucial figures in this process was the physical chemist Herbert S. Gutowsky at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. Originally interested in a more physically oriented direction of NMR, Gutowsky and his research group were at the forefront of inventions that made the application of NMR in organic chemistry and biochemistry possible. In the historiographic literature, the cause of the take-off of NMR in chemistry is derived mainly from the inter-action of instrument-building companies and large, university-based research groups. The example of Gutowsky and his research group shows, first, that successful research and innovation was possible in a provincial laboratory that had no direct involvement with an instrument manufacturer and, second, that the way Gutowsky identified his role-disciplinarily and organizationally-strongly influenced the practice and methodology of his research program.

Hans-Joerg Rheinberger
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science

After Mendel and Beyond

Carl Correns (1864-1933) came to recognize Mendel's rules between 1894 and 1900 while trying to find out the mechanism of xenia, that is, the direct influence of the fertilizing pollen on the mother plant. After 1900, all while campaigning for the proper recognition of the work of Mendel, Correns quickly began probing the limits of Mendelian inheritance. In my paper, I will show how Correns' research problems were shaped in the process of an experimental program of probing these limits. I will retrace his trajectory between 1900 and 1912 which led Correns to increasingly consider what he regarded as cases of cytoplasmic inheritance.

Richard E. Rice
James Madison University

Hydrating Ions in St. Petersburg and Moscow, Ignoring Them in Leipzig and Baltimore

During the latter part of the 19th century, Mendeleev's hydrate theory dominated Russian thinking about the nature of solution. This did not change significantly after the appearance in 1887 of the "physical" theory of solution, with most Russian chemists becoming opponents of dissociation theory. Two notable exceptions were Ivan Alekseevich Kablukov (1857-1942) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kistyakovskii (1865-1952), both students at St. Petersburg University in the 1880s. After a komandirovka by each of them in 1889 to Ostwald's laboratory in Leipzig, Kablukov and Kistyakovskii independently proposed that hydration is complementary, rather than contradictory, to dissociation. Kablukov's proposal of ionic hydration was more of a suggestion, which he repeated several times in his 1891 dissertation at Moscow University. Kistyakovskii, however, developed a quantitative model of solute-solvent interactions based on the van der Waals forces operating within a sphere of influence of water molecules around an ion. A description of this model appeared in an appendix to his 1890 paper in Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie on double salts, which he had studied in Ostwald's laboratory. Neither Arrhenius nor Ostwald was influenced by Kistyakovskii's work, and nearly two decades passed before Harry Jones, professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, finally enunciated the sanctioned union between hydrates and ions. Although Jones overcame his earlier antipathy to the concept of hydration, he explicitly rejected any contribution from Mendeleev and other proponents of earlier hydrate theory, maintaining that his extension of dissociation theory was already implicit in Arrhenius' 1887 formulation. While Kablukov's work probably remained unknown in the West, Kistyakovskii's did not. I will examine some of the attitudes of the proponents of dissociation theory toward proponents of hydrate theory and discuss some possible reasons for chemists in Leipzig and Baltimore to ignore the work of chemists in Russia at the end of the 19th century.

Robert J. Richards
University of Chicago, Fishbein Center for History of Science

The God of the Origin: Darwin's Romantic Transformation of Nature

Most historians writing today, and not a few of Darwin's own contemporaries, have portrayed the nature that Darwin fashioned in his theory of evolution as cruel, sterile, bereft of values: indeed, as a machine. But a consideration of the origins of Darwin's conception of nature and a careful examination of the depiction of nature in his Origin of Species suggest quite a different picture. Darwin himself recognized that his experiences while on the Beagle voyage had been filtered through a lens ground by his incessant reading of Alexander von Humboldt's romantic account of his own travels to South America. The conception of nature stemming from Darwin's experiences had none of those machine-like qualities usually assumed. On the contrary, the nature that appears in the Origin has those traits that had been traditionally attributed to God, but among romantic writers transferred to nature. Darwin's romantic conception, the conception that structures the theory of evolution as found in the Origin, represents nature as intelligent, omniscient, morally concerned, value-laden, and infinitely creative. Consequently when Darwin went to construct human moral activity in the Descent of Man, he could construe that activity not as ultimately selfish but as intrinsically altruistic. The God of Abraham had become the romantic nature of Darwin.

Marsha L. Richmond
Wayne State University

Richard Goldschmidt's Epigenenetic Interpretation of Mendelism

Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958) turned from cytology to genetics in 1909 after reading Wilhelm Johannsen's Elemente der exakten Errblichkeitslehre (1909). In 1911, he gained prominence in this new field after publishing the first textbook of animal genetics in Germany. His research on the mechanism of sex determination in moths, which continued for the next two decades, provided interesting data that appeared to link the hereditary factors to the developmental process. Although considering himself a "Mendelian," Goldschmidt was nonetheless a prominent critic of the mainstream particulate conception of the gene held by other Mendelians. The present paper examines Goldschmidt's earliest writings in genetics (1909-1912) and contrasts his "epigenetic" interpretation of Mendelism with the "preformationist" approach of other geneticists. It explores how concepts prominent in the late nineteenth-century biology helped to shape the earliest theories of heredity in the critical period between the rediscovery of Mendel's work (1900) and the publication of the chromosome theory of heredity in Morgan, Sturtevant, Muller, and Bridges, The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity (1915).

Michael NMI Riordan
Institute for Particle Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The Termination of the Superconducting Super Collider

The Superconducting Super Collider, a high-energy physics project initiated in 1983 and terminated by Congress ten years later after almost $2 billion had been spent on its construction, offers historians a unique opportunity to study the dynamics of "big science" and federal support for such projects. Beginning its construction phase in 1989 with strong Administration and Congressional support, the SSC was terminated in 1993 by a resoundingly negative vote in the House of Representatives. After recounting briefly the key events in this erosion of support, this paper will discuss the complex of reasons for this striking reversal. Among them are the end of the Cold War and subsequent popular demands to reduce the federal deficit, apparent mismanagement of the project by its advocates, their inability to communicate its esoteric scientific purposes, its popular perception as a "quark-barrel" project, and lack of significant foreign contributions. The net impact of all these centrifugal forces was to shred the once solid base of support that the SSC had earlier enjoyed. The paper concludes by trying to determine whether such a reversal can be attributed to intrinsic elements in the U.S. approach to funding big-science projects.

Jessica G Riskin
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Moving Anatomies

Mechanical models as tools for anatomical research caught the interest of surgeons and natural philosophers in France beginning in the 1730s. This interest was closely tied to the professionalization of surgery ˆ the Academic Society of Surgery was created in 1730, and accompanied by curricular reforms in the universities. These developments provoked a rivalry between doctors and surgeons over the relative importance of their crafts. Doctors argued that surgeons were mere technicians who worked with their hands and not their heads surgeons sought to demonstrate the theoretical utility of surgical mechanics and handiwork. This meant, in part, providing mechanist explanations of bodily processes, accompanied by mechanical models. Later in the century, another source of mechanical anatomical models emerged, when the design of automata spawned the development of prosthetic devices. The paper discusses the philosophical and cultural implications of these applications of mechanization to medicine.

Christopher Ritter
University of California, Berkeley

The Impulse to Visualize and Meaning-in-Practice: Chemical Models, 1857-1874

Beginning in the latter part of the 1850s, a remarkable bloom of chemical models arose. Butlerov, Couper, Crum Brown, Dewar, Erlenmeyer, Frankland, Havrez, Hofmann, Kekulé, Loschmidt, Naquet, Wurtz, Wilbrand, and many other chemists as well, developed or used graphical methods of representing chemical combination. Two aspects of the rise of these systems of graphical representation in chemistry compel deeper historical scrutiny. First, this presentation will fashion a broad view of visualizing impulses, both within and external to chemistry, independent of the fidelity to actual atomic arrangement of any particular system. Second, I will explore the meanings of these early graphical representations visualizing impulses prove to be crucial to recovering the different meanings and representational practices attached to these systems. And different meanings there were, and they depended upon who was speaking and representing, to whom re-presentations were made, and how and when they were accomplished. While chemists brought differing investigative and philosophical commitments to representation and the debates about atomism, didactic practices of representation as well as material properties of models themselves came, inter alia, to sustain the full structural import which models eventually attained. (It remains important to emphasize, however, that a focus on structural fidelity easily obscures the meaning attached to other practices of graphical representation). Finally, this approach to visualization and meaning-in-practice contributes to understanding how a central concern of nineteenth century chemistry changed from chemical affinity to molecular structure, and chemical practice shifted from a textual to a visual basis.

Michael F Robinson
University of Wisconsin

Blonde Eskimos and Yellow Journalism: Reforming the Arctic Narrative in Progressive America

By 1900 over twenty American expeditions had ventured north into the Arctic, and the exploits of polar explorers had become a staple diet for American readers. Explorers offered interviews, published narratives, and lectured before the prestigious institutions of American science as well as in less lofty forums. Through these diverse sources, Polar explorers emerged as symbols of American identity, and the Arctic itself as a sublime and imposing terrain upon which explorers acted out nationalist dramas. Eskimos remained scenery in most of these dramas, depicted as "children of Nature" who occasionally moved on to the center stage in order to support, or be contrasted against, American Arctic protagonists. This paper examines shifting perceptions of Eskimos and Arctic explorers in America, focusing on a series of highly publicized scientific and ethical controversies which erupted in the scholarly and popular press in the first decades of the twentieth century. I argue that these controversies (which include the display of Eskimo skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History, the value of Eskimos testimony in the Peary-Cook North Pole debate, and the discovery of "Blonde Eskimos" by Vilhjalmur Stefansson) undermined the traditional "narrative formula" of Arctic exploration in which Arctic explorers operated as dispassionate and honorable witnesses.

Alan J. Rocke
Case Western Reserve University

Organic Analysis in France: Apparatus, Method, Theory, and Style

In an unplanned international collaboration, J.L. Gay-Lussac and J.J. Berzelius invented the first practical method of combustion analysis of organic compounds in the years 1811-15. In a curiously parallel haphazard international collaboration during the years 1826-34, Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Justus Liebig vastly improved it. Focusing especially on the work of Gay-Lussac and Dumas, I examine the development of organic analysis in France, and inquire as to how matters of scientific theory and experimental style are bound up with the evolution of apparently more concrete issues of apparatus and analytical method.

Kirill O Rossianov
Institute for History of Science and Technology

Traveling with Bolsheviks: Field Work, Expeditions, and their Patrons

The field work of scientists has attracted much attention of the historians of science during the recent years. Russia has a long tradition of expeditionary study of its vast territory, its flora, fauna, and of its peoples, which goes back to the eighteenth century. In this paper, I analyze how a number of expeditions, which were organized by the Soviet Government following the Bolshevik revolution, helped reestablish the connections between science and the State as its main patron. Nikolai Gorbunov, the Chief Secretary of the Soviet Government and the key patron of Soviet science in the 1920s, played a main role in the organization of a big number of geographical, botanical, anthropological, and other expeditions, which were sent by the Government to various regions of the Soviet Union, to Pamir, Mongolia, Africa, and to other parts of the world. Together with several other prominent Bolsheviks, he personally participated in the expeditions to Pamir, and was later elected a member of the Academy for his contribution to geographical science. In this respect, the expeditions served the purposes of social and cultural contact between the scientists and their Bolshevik patrons, which the both sides needed. These contacts had significant impact on shaping the institutional structure of Soviet science. As major events, I analyze the transformation of Russian Academy of Sciences into the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1925, and the organization of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), which had grown out of the collecting expeditions of Nikolai Vavilov.

Helen M. Rozwadowski

"Fish know no national frontiers": Internationalism and environmental pragmatism in European marine science

In 1902 eight northern European nations banded together to form the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), an institution devoted to scientific investigation of the marine environment and its inhabitants as well as promotion of "rational" use of oceanic resources. The Council convened in the midst of an energetic internationalist movement whose proponents were regularizing transportation and communication across national lines in many sectors. Within the sciences, applied sciences and field sciences proved particularly susceptible to international organization. To ICES founders, international cooperation in hydrography and marine biology appeared the only logical response to the challenge of investigating the dynamic ocean environment. This paper examines the relationship of marine science to the internationalism movement of the turn-of-the-century. While historians of science have often considered the development of 20th century science with regard to nationalism, I will investigate the extent to which marine science was influenced by the intense internationalism of that time. I will also, however, acknowledge the practical, environmental aspect of international cooperation in this field, namely that the international character of ICES was prompted in part by characteristics of its objects of study–the ocean environment and its inhabitants, migrating, floating or rooted. In addition, the challenge of integrating national scientific programs of many countries demanded a significant amount of attention to standardization of equipment, methods and analysis. The international character of the organization, therefore, profoundly influenced the development of marine science from early in the 20th century.

H. Darrel Rutkin
Indiana University

Galileo Astrologer: New Perspectives on his Early Career

It is now well known that Johannes Kepler–and Regiomontanus–were astrologers and that Isaac Newton was an alchemist, yet, even such an open minded scholar as Charles B. Schmitt could state quite baldly that Galileo "certainly must have had little to do with the astrological tradition of the Tetrabiblos." In fact, Galileo was a practicing astrologer during a significant part –if not all–of his extensive career. In this talk I will survey the evidence I have found concerning the place of astrology in Galileo's long and distinguished career, in his studies and teaching at both Pisa and Padua, and in his patronage practices. I will focus, moreover, on several of the 20 plus autograph horoscopes to be found in ms. galileiana 81 at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, including his own, his two daughters', and his friend and patron, Gian Francesco Sagredo's. These horoscopes–and their attendant "worksheets"–indicate a high degree of technical astrological proficiency. In order to understand Galileo accurately within his proper context(s), we must take into account all of the relevant evidence we possess. My talk hopes to make a preliminary contribution to this endeavor.

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