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Please note that these abstracts are subject to change. All abstracts will be printed in the final meeting program. If you would like to make corrections, please e-mail the changes to hssexec@u.washington.edu by 25 May!

Igor Yu. Popov St.-Petersburg Branch of the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences
Analysis of a Prototype of "case study"

In numerous modern "case studies" very different aspects of the history of science are considered - biographies, scientific papers, social conditions, philosophy, etc. Is it necessary to analyse in every research "interconnected" histories in the unity and interaction or it would be better to separate them? This problem was stated at least 1500 years ago. Socrates, a historian of Vizantium, apologised to the readers for writing not only the history of church, but military one too. In a treatise he described the history of religious thought, the conflicts of bishops, political and military events. This historian explained the reasons of this fact: first, he tried to establish facts, and secondly, he did not like to bore a reader. Thus, he indicated the main sources of modern methodology: passion to collecting facts and not to the analysis with definite aim, and a desire to make a treatise more available and interesting for the readers, that is to sell it more expensively. Does this note anticipate modern methodology or "modern" methodology means the returning to the level of development of science that had to be passed many centuries ago? Studying history of evolutionary biology I came to the second viewpoint. It is very difficult to reveal the history of biological thought, because it is always described with the analysis of biographies, social and political conditions, and philosophy. The analysis of interconnected histories does not make clear the evolutionary problems and twists the characteristics of historical processes. For example, crisis and victories of Darwinism are described very often. The first "crisis" was caused by genetics in 1900-1920-s, the second - by new ideas on saltacionism. Analysis of papers on biology demonstrates that during "first crisis" there were a lot of active Darwinists and a lot of Antidarwinists, who did not consider genetics seriously. During the following "period of victory of Darwinism" there were a lot of serious critics of it. Finally, concepts claiming to cause "the modern crisis" do not contradict Darwinism. At least the last 150 years Darwinism, Lamarckism, Orthogenesis, Saltacionism coexisted in evolutionary biology.

Gregory M. Radick University of Cambridge
Victorian Society in Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection

One master narrative in the history of evolutionism goes roughly as follows. Up to the eighteenth century, European societies were static, and people pictured nature as static. Then came the "dual revolution", the French revolution and the industrial revolution, after which societies and pictures of nature alike went dynamic. So much is commonplace, and, broadly speaking, uncontroversial. The difficulty lies in the detail. How, exactly, are we to explain this symmetry? I shall explore this issue with reference in particular to the theory of evolution by natural selection. At two points -- Darwin's appeals to Malthusian population pressures and to Smithian division-of-labor notions -- Darwin's theory and the dual revolution intersected. More generally, there is a close and oft-noted match between, on the one side, the social and economic doctrines favored within Darwin's class, and, on the other side, the Darwinian picture of natural improvement through competition among individuals. The challenge is somehow to explain these connections without explaining them away, and yet without prescinding wholly from the evidence. I shall attempt to meet this challenge by attending to social dimensions of the explanatory constraints under which Darwin worked. I shall suggest furthermore that Darwinism intersected most fully with the dual revolution not in Darwin's theory of natural selection, but in Galton's.

Nicolas Rasmussen University of California, Berkeley
Plant Hormones in War and Peace: Science, Industry, and Intellectual Property in the Development of Herbicides in 1940s America

This piece describes the emergence of "hormone" herbicides from academic plant physiology research in America of the late 1930s and 1940s, attending especially to the role of interactions between university scientists, industrial concerns, and government agencies (particularly in World War II military contracts). It also describes the postwar marketing of these chemicals as agrichemicals and as lawn treatments for suburban consumers, in economic and ecological context. Comparisons between the patterns of commercialization of plant physiology and of molecular gentics half a century later are drawn, and an argument advanced for a broadening of historiographic perspective on the rise of biotechnology, based on links between plant physiologists, molecular geneticists, and other practitioners of life science belonging to the loose category of "molecular biology" in the 1940s.

Volker R Remmert University of Mainz, Germany
Galileo and Racial Theory: History of Science and Political Legitimation in the Third Reich

In 1938 a booklet on Galileo was published (Galilei und die Inquisition) which argues that just as the Church did wrong in condemning Galileo and the Copernican system in 1633 it did wrong in condemning Nazi racial theory in the 1930s. The book was a tremendeous success both with the press and economically. The story is a highly visible but by no means singular example of how the history of science could be employed to legitimize Nazi policies. Another example would be the struggle about the nationality of Copernicus which, of course, had a longer tradition. Naturally the discussion of these questions gives rise to the question of the 'independance' of the history of science - past, present and future.

David A. Riley University of Manchester
"Science Lectures for the People:" Problems in the Public Understanding of Science in 19th Century Britain

This study explores a key development in scientific education for the public given by leading scientists of the third quarter of the nineteenth century, such as T. H. Huxley, J. Tyndall and W. Carpenter, among many others. It is based primarily on a series of their lectures coordinated by Henry Enfield Roscoe, Professor of Chemistry at Owens College Manchester in north west England between 1866 and 1878. Several themes will be explored. Firstly, the links between members of the scientific community throughout Britain and the reasons for their interest in developing public lecturing is investigated. Secondly the public reception of such lecturing schemes and how this developed in Manchester and nationally from the mid nineteenth century is a key focus. Particular emphasis will be placed on the accounts of the Manchester lectures, which appear to be one of the only full published records for this new development. Because they appear to be a verbatim account based on shorthand notes, it is argued that close textual analysis of them (and other local journals and newspapers) can tell us a great deal about the public reception of science at this time the limitations of such analysis will also be examined. Finally the variety of uses this scientific education had will be explored, from concerns over the utilitarian development of the economic base to its relationship with various radical political stances and its philosophical and religious relations.

Colin Russell The Open University
Where Science Meets Technology: The Special Case of Chemistry?

During the 20th century chemical history has followed the trend of chemistry itself several decades previously. History of chemistry, once dominant in the history of science, has now been marginalised to the periphery. It has also undergone a strange bifurcation. The chemical history that is being produced is either a highly conceptual study, often very internalist; or it is an examination of developments in industrial chemistry, with strong social and even environmental emphases. There is little evidence that the two historical communities are much in touch with other, and chemical history thus becomes a classic case of the modern science/technology division, having inherited the weaknesses of such an artificial polarisation. In no other major area of history of science is such a trend so obvious. Yet the major figures in chermistry's long history have, until the quite recent past, been equally at home in pure and applied chemistry. The paper will argue that a decline in the history of chemistry may be reduced by some deliberate bridge-building between the two constituencies. Areas where this is likely to be successful include studies of British academic chemistry in the late 19th century, of German industrial chemistry in the 20th century, and of global attention to chemistry and the environment in our own time and the previous 200 years.

Tom Scheinfeldt University of Oxford, Museum of the History of Science
Constructivist Historiography: Some Implications for Science Museums

Repeatedly it seems that science museum exhibitions have slighted history. Rather than presenting science as a historically grounded and contingent human pursuit, museums have most often chosen to exhibit science as a linear and positive progression of objects or a set of 'disembodied' or 'transcendent' theoretical principles. This situation has led to recent questions of whether or not science museums can take history seriously. Current developments in the historiography of science, however, seem uniquely positioned to introduce historical perspectives to science museum galleries. Constructivist emphases on instrumental, practical and social contexts as constitutive of science and its history seem to present museums with a fresh opportunity to take history seriously. In both nature and substance, the specific and material concerns of constructivist historiography seem tailor-made for the specific and material medium of the museum exhibition. Moreover, n! ot only is the museum display medium well suited for communicating these new ideas, instrumental, practical and constructivist historiography may also present science museums with the chance to make unique and important contributions to constructivist scholarship in their exhibitions. Just as ethnographic approaches and the experimental reconstruction programme have contributed to a new appreciation of operative knowledge and a deeper understanding of how laboratory practices and material resources interact in the production of natural knowledge, these same constructivist sensibilities, if applied in the practice of the history of science, might allow science exhibitions a similar role as locations in which historians can interact with the materials, practices and settings that are their recent concern. Rather than simply distilling the ideas of written historiography for a popular audience, rather than existing as a location for the secondary conveyance of historical scholarship, these new perspectives may allow museum exhibitions to stand as primary research in their own right.

Anne Secord Cambridge
Botany on a Plate: The Role of Illustration in Dishing up Knowledge

Increasing attention is being paid to visual thinking and the ways in which scientific illustrations convey knowledge. In this paper I focus on a very particular use of illustrations in the highly visual science of botany during the first half of the 19th century, namely the role of pictures in recruiting new participants in the science of botany. I suggest that, in the largely private scientific world of early nineteenth-century Britain, authors and both popular and university lecturers shared the same problems in making botany simultaneously attractive and scientific. Illustrations played a crucial role in this quest because, for all the evidence of the lavish production of botanical plates in this period, few were able to afford such works. The impact and novelty of illustrations could thus be utilised in introducing novices to the study of botany. However, this use of pictures was contentious, leading to debates over the ways in which words and images constituted knowledge and of the role of pleasure in intellectual pursuits. While recent studies have stressed visual representation as a critical element of science and considered its relation to the written word for conveying information, I shall consider the nineteenth-century preoccupation with the mind and mental faculties in relation to corporeal responses to explain concerns over the role of images and the process of recognition. By considering botanical illustration in this way, I will argue that popular botany in the first half of the nineteenth century was defined by many expert botanists as the means by which private individuals could best be encouraged to extend their well-known aesthetic appreciation and love of plants to an active and participatory pursuit of the scientific practices of botany.

Michael W. Seltzer Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Historiography and Our Cultural Understanding of Science

In this paper, I consider the following broad question from an interdisciplinary viewpoint: how should we characterize and understand the scientific and technological activities conducted by humans? More specifically, my aim is to argue that historiography--defined appropriately--is not just a concern for some historians, but is a primary concept, the successful explication of which is fundamental to finding an adequate answer to the above and related questions. To argue my point concerning the relationship between historiography and our cultual understanding of science, I do the following: (1) I first consider briefly the differences between two often conflicting worldviews, modernity and postmodernity. My goal is to argue that an appropriate version of historiography, constitited from a postmodern perspective, is necessary for an adequate understanding of the sciences in our cultures. (2) I then move on to the argument that historiography is a key concept for our understanding of science. How we view the relationships among our understandings of past, present, and future is a significant cultural construct, and it guides our understanding of the place of science and technology in history and in our culture. I consider the views of Hans-Joerg Rheinberger, Joseph Rouse, Andrew Pickering, Jacques Derrida, and others in this connection. (3) Next, I narrow the argument to consider experimental sciences and technologies, and I introduce the concept of the technological infrastructure of science (TI), derived from the work of Joseph Pitt. As an historiographical construct, TI, I argue, makes sense of the contact between our human technologies and "reality" (the subject matter of the natural sciences), such that an adequate notion of scientific practice, and of our cultural understanding of science, can be attained. The TI, a combination of material and social cultural components, I construct from the fundamentals of postmodern historiography and I argue that this is essential for an adequate understanding of science. (4) I then turn again to the question of why historiography matters. I argue that how different assumptions about science become cultural constructs depends crucially on what fundamental worldview prevails in our culture or subculture(s). Depending on the worldview, different questions get asked, different stories are told, and the different assumptions inherent in the guiding worldview mold how we view scientific activity and, as Richard Burian has argued, how scientists actually practice science. (5) Finally, I conclude by considering the following question: if my argument concerning the relationship between historiography and science is compelling, then what do we do? How do we change or affect something as complex and pervasive as our very cultural assumptions? I offer suggestions, both practical and bold, for changing our understanding of science; these suggestions involve explicit discussions of historiography, education, academia, and how we view the concept of "truth" in our cultures. I end with a brief conjecture concerning how we view truth, and what bearing that has on the questions at hand. I invoke the views of Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking in this connection.

Tatyana B. Shashkina Russian Academy of Sciences
Bell Founding as a Testing Ground for Developing a Methodological Approach to the Science vs. Craftsmanship Problem

The place of craftsmanship in the history-of-science studies is evaluated in a contradictory way. On one hand - as a sphere of material culture - craftsmanship is presented as an empirically developed technology with an acknowledgement of its role as a raw material for scientific investigation and with an appreciation of the importance of aesthetic sphere (music, architecture, sculpture) as an experimental basis for theoretical speculation. On the other hand - from the point of view of cognitive means (and in this sense as a contribution into the history of science) - it is an almost unreserved qualification of craftsmanship as an elementary trial-and-error empiricism, "ad hoc techniques", "blind practice", "cookbook recipes", "mnemonic rules", craft "secrets", "incommunicable skill", "techniques not transmissible by words", etc. However, a monographic multidisciplinary investigation of technical lore created within such an ancient centuries-old musical craft as bell founding led us to present it as a continuous tradition of purely non-reflective traditional thinking in several specific forms and as a continuous transition of this thinking into the forms of typically reflective scientific and engineering thought. Another main result of our studies aimed at placing this lore into a history-of-science perspective is an elaboration of several methodological techniques which draw on systematic application of principles borrowed from two subdisciplines of anthropology - the science of folklore and ethnolinguistics, both for written sources and for material artefacts of bell-founders' craft, and it will be the chief purpose of this paper to report on these techniques as they proved to contribute to the understanding of bell founding in the large context of scientific vs popular culture.

Suzanne Le-May Sheffield Dalhousie University
Beyond Popularization: Women Naturalists Exploring Science

Nineteenth-century women naturalists are very often found filling the role of science popularizer. Much historical investigation has been under-taken to reveal the extent and importance of the scientific work of women. Studies of women's science writings have revealed much about the nature of popular science in this period -- its retention of natural theology interests, its presentation of alternative views of nature, and the importance of such works as educational tools for women, children and the working-class. However, an emphasis on popular texts has led to the misapprehension that most women naturalists were only interested in popularizing others' work. Through a case study of Margaret Gatty (1809-1873) and Eleanor Ormerod (1828-1901), I will show how personal correspondence in the second-half of the nineteenth century reveals an added dimension to the study of women popularizers. Gatty and Ormerod were consummate popularizers, but their interests and ambitions stretch beyond their popular works to their own scientific studies. Such women used their personal correspondence networks to become part of the "professional" scientific community. Through their correspondence they explored and announced their scientific ideas and discoveries and gained reputations that moved them beyond that of popularizer. Exploring correspondence opens a new window on the history of women popularizers, a window that reveals a blurring of strict dichotomies of popular and professional and male and female. In their private correspondence the self-effacing popularizer gives way to the boldly opinionated scientist -- a scientist respected by her peers.

Sujit P. Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge
Probing Bounds: Collection, Natural History, Missionaries, and Pacific Islanders

It is now common to speak of collections and collectors in the history of science, and yet there is some uncertainty about how far these terms can stretch. Is the scientific mode of gathering, naming, classifying, planting, growing and displaying restricted to objects that are inanimate and natural? If an individual is termed a natural historical collector, what relationship does he or she have with the desired collection? In the early nineteenth century at least a dozen Pacific islanders arrived in London. They were on occasion put in cages, portrayed without clothes, and spoken of as wild animals. Most were placed in the protection of the London Missionary Society, whose supporters were keen to win them to the Christian faith. Natural historical themes occurred repeatedly in missionary literature: individuals were seen to be just like trees, for example. The state of the soil and the living waters of the spirit were said to determine spiritual growth. The physical was related to the spiritual. Missionaries may thus be termed as collectors of souls and collectors of natural historical specimens in relation to their attempts to convert the Pacific islanders, as this paper will argue. The boundaries between the inanimate and the animate and the human and the animal were constantly navigated, even amongst the evangelicals. Indeed the founders of the London Missionary Society were in close correspondence with Sir Joseph Banks and consulted him on how best to civilise their wards. Not only do the distinctions between natural history and soul saving appear problematic, then, but also those between men of science and evangelical missionaries.

George Smith Tufts University
Newton's Principia in the Philosophy Curriculum

From the point of view of those engaged in empirical research, the fundamental problem of doing science is to find ways of turning data into evidence. As the blurb on the new translation indicates, I regard the Principia as "the perfect work for illustrating how science, at its best, succeeds in turning data into decisive evidence." My talk will describe a full year course I regularly give undergraduates and graduates on the Newtonian revolution. In the first semester we trace the emergence of a set of salient questions in astronomy and mechanics during the century leading up to the Principia, especially emphasizing the work of Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Huygens, and ending with Newton's initial discoveries. In the second semester, we read the Principia from cover to cover, examining how evidence was marshaled to answer these questions either in the work itself or in its immediate aftermath. The central issue throughout the two semesters is, how did we ever come to have high quality evidence in any science? Newton himself thought he had found a new "more secure" approach to doing empirical science and intended the Principia to illustrate it. The best way of grasping this new conception is to read the Principia cover to cover in the historical context of the science preceding and immediately following it. The talk will describe the course, how it addresses the problem of making the Principia accessible, and why it is appropriately part of the philosophy curriculum.

Michael C. Soller University of California, Los Angeles
History, Memory, Emotion: Episodes in American Historical Practice

Historians don't remember: they read, criticize, sort, dissect, analyze, paraphrase, juxtapose, and contextualize. Normal people remember constantly, though they also distort, falsify, essentialize, and detemporalize. The segregation of history from memory serves an important function in historical practice. Yet memory is "hot," as one historian told me. Through interviews with history professors and graduate students and readings I have pursued two recurring themes of "memory talk": historians' use of memory to explore academic practice, including questions of evidence, audience, and criticism and the connections between emotion and memory. Other fields conduct different memory talk, and I compare uses of memory in psychology, library science, and anthropology, among other fields. The pairing of history and memory allows historians to consider interdisciplinary definitions of emotion and selfhood. But in persisting to view memory as false, individual, and emotional and history as collective, critical, and sober, historians postpone questions about the kinds of knowledge they produce and their own positions as inquirers. Historians of science such as Sharon Traweek and Donna Haraway who have been forthright about such questions recognize that fields pursue not just knowledge but also self-knowledge. I briefly trace the memory/history split through several episodes: the invention of scientific history in England and Germany in the late 1800s the criticism of history, from Maurice Halbwachs and Collingwood at mid-century to anthropologists in the 1970s and '80s and today's practitioners and the history and science wars of the early 1990s.

Emma Spary Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte
By Design: Shell Prints and an 'Aesthetics' of Scientific Illustration

This paper might be described as an experiment in historical seeing. By looking in detail at one scientific genre, the eighteenth-century conchological work, I want to explore the relations between texts which purport to capture the true nature of Nature, and the genres and styles of illustration of natural objects. My aim is to break with those existing historiographies of the scientific illustration which assert either that we cannot 'read' scientific images at all, or that images of natural objects are transparent representations of the natural which do not need to be explicated. I shall focus upon a particular tradition of European conchological publications between the 1730s and the 1780s, which subsequently became discredited as being too artful. I will suggest that the tools for writing a history of scientific illustrations can be acquired from the writings of reception theorists and historians of the book about the fashioning of a community of competent readers, as well as discussions of the interpretation of visual images by semioticians and sociologists of knowledge.

David A. Steinberg Saa Institute
Concomitance and Complementarity - Common Paths to a Modern Science

John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911), the creator of scientific neurology, invoked what he termed a doctrine of concomitance to explain the relationship between mutually exclusive evolutionary structures of brain and mind. Though he ultimately rejected the most general form of this relation, it contains the implicit notion that mind and brain are two manifestations of a single unknown process. In 1925, the mathematical structure of non-relativistic quantum mechanics was completed, superseding the empirical observations and ad hoc assumptions of the old quantum theory. It was quickly realized that this formalism contained significant interpretive difficulties. An attempt to resolve these problems led Niels Bohr (1885-1962) to formulate the notion of complementarity in which a quantum mechanical description manifests itself through a pair of mutually exclusive classical ideas - e.g., particle and wave. The close congruence of these two organizing principles - one forming the basis of modern neuroscience, and the other the basis of modern physics - is remarkable. This study will explore the similarities, and raise the question of whether the ideas of concomitance and complementarity are specific examples of a more general principle that can be applied in the history of science.

John Suppe Princeton University
The Tandem Bicycle Ride: Exponential Growth of Science and the Academy in the 19th & 20th Centuries

The exponential acceleration of scientific activity--doubling in geometric progression like compound interest--has been widely observed since the pioneering work of Derek Price in the 1950s. For example, the rates of publication and the numbers of journals, authors, PhDs and even astronomical observatories and known chemical compounds have shown remarkable exponential growth since the 19th century or before. However not all instances of exponential growth show the same dynamics and intrinsic or extrinsic causes. New subdisciplines, research programmes, or revolutions typically show very rapid exponential growth, often triggered by specific events, and lasting for at most a few decades followed by saturation. The doubling times have been as short as a few years or less, often with a strongly intellectual impetus for growth. Examples of this rapid growth and saturation include the glacial, plate tectonic and string revolutions and the subdisciplines of isotope geochemistry. In contrast the larger disciplines that form academic departments, such as physics, geology or mathematics, have grown at more modest exponential rates that have been relatively constant for the last two centuries. It is perhaps less widely appreciated that non-scientific academic disciplines show the same long-term exponential growth as science. It is remarkable that the rates of publication in history, philosophy, physics, geology and mathematics show nearly identical exponential growth for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, except for short-term transient differences. This observation shows that the dominant long-term controls on the growth of scientific activity must be strongly linked to those of the academy as a whole. The causes of this linkage and growth will be discussed. We are all academics on a tandem bicycle ride.