Meeting Program

Abstracts
• A-C
• D-F
• G-J
• K-N
• O-R
• S-U
• V-Z

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.

Go to previous page

During the Cold War, American analysts were confronted with the difficult task of penetrating the security apparatus of the Soviet Union in order to make technical capability assessments. One method used was that of electronic intelligence gathering (elint) through the use of high tech passive electronic receptors. Between 1948 and 1962, scientists and engineers at the Naval Research Lab proposed and developed an evolutionary series of elint techniques for penetrating the Iron Curtain. This developmental chain resulted in the launch of the United States' first electronic intelligence gathering satellite (GRAB) in 1960. Developed at a dual purpose basic/classified research facility, these programs were concealed through the operation of parallel unclassified basic research studies. They demonstrate the dual nature of Cold War R&D in black and white.

Antedating the establishment in the 1530's of a tradition in practical mathematics, centered around the academic center of Louvain and the commercial and printing metropole of Antwerp, was a debate on the great conjunction in Pisces in February 1524. In the Low Countries, several Louvain students such as Albert Pigghe, Thomas Montis and Cornelius Scepper made substantial contributions to this discussion. The pan-European expectation of a new Flood which this conjunction brought about has mainly been studied in its Italian context, and/or from its social and theological implications. Although these elements are clearly present in the Northern contributions, the debate can also be studied as an 'internal' evaluation of techniques and practices which were common in the domain of late medieval and renaissance astrology. In my paper I would like to highlight the main issues and consequences of the 'fear of the Flood' from this alternative perspective. Shortly after having left Louvain for Paris, Albert Pigghe in several ways initiated the debate in the North by relativizing the importance of Abu Ma'Shars theory of great conjunctions for mundane astrology. One strategy he followed was to link this theory with highly popular annual prognostications based on the technique of so-called revolutions. This introduced a highly important social element in the debate, enabling us to have a better view on the social structure of astrological practice at the time. On the other hand Pigghe based his theoretical criticism of revolutions on the inadequacy of astronomical practices based on the Alphonsine tables. Two and a half years after Pigghe, Thomas de Montis published a text which shows the impact of the debate in the strictly academic context of the Louvain faculty of Arts> Another contemporary, Cornelius Scepperus, followed suit with an extensive tract summarizing the previous opinions, and taking them to a conclusion somewhat akin to Pico's influential Disputations. This in turn was significant for astrological aspects of the forementioned Louvain renaissance of practical mathematics, practiced under the supervision of the well-known Reinier Gemma Frisius.

In the years since the publication of the 1985 Osiris volume on American science, the social and cultural history of medicine and the relationships between medicine, science, and technology have grown increasingly prominent in historical writing. My paper will explore recent historiographical trends in the social and cultural history of medicine in the United States, with a particular emphasis on the use of disease as a means to illuminate human problems in the medical and biomedical sciences. Other topics will include race, gender, and medicine, popular ideas and the history of disease, technology and medicine, and the connections between medical practice and social context.

Recently, E. O. Wilson has seized the word "consilience" from deep within the history of science and emblazoned it across the cover of his best-selling book, which proclaims, among other things, the unification of science and literature. Although he borrows his title and key term from the history of science--indeed, from the first professional historian of science--Wilson's interest in the history of science is slight. He evidences no desire to understand Whewell's term within its own context he rather wishes to appropriate it as a useful label within the context of a late-twentieth-century debate over "neo-Darwinism" and reductionism. One could argue that Wilson is "wrong," that he shouldn't get away with this move–except that he already has, putting the literary historian of science in the awkward position of fussy antiquarian. Why, indeed, read Whewell today? In the linguistic game that is being played here, what does the original context matter? A fully contextualized reading of Whewell's word shows that it was deeply embedded in visions of the ultimate unification of literature and science that were very different from Wilson's, ranging from Bacon's "First Philosophy" to Darwin's "tree" of evolution. In nineteenth-century America, Ralph Waldo Emerson developed the possibilities of the first, and Henry David Thoreau of the second, each exploring a kind of literary science, or science-imbued literature, where neither is "reduced" to the other because both make use of Whewell's crucial insight that "Facts involve Thoughts, for we know Facts only by thinking about them." Whewell's unity is thus "a formative act exerted by the understanding," rather than Wilson's transcendent reading of nature's truth. Ironically, Darwin's evolutionary tree is the very story/image that Wilson relies on, but by stripping it of its historical context, Wilson eliminates the key role of the story-teller, whose thought constructs fact, removing Wilson's twentieth-century science back into the realm of the very natural theology that only seemed to be crumbling in Whewell's day.

In 1742, the well-respected London bookseller Robert Dodsley published The microscope made easy, the first scientific book by Henry Baker, then a recently elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Four years later, instrument maker George Adams published the Micrographia illustrata, an elaborately-illustrated tome designed as an accompaniment to his microscopes. But, as Baker subsequently charged in his correspondence, large sections of Adams' text were copied almost word-for-word from Baker's book. This incident illuminates many issues of interest to historians of science, such as the hazards faced by the scientific author in the highly-competitive world of the eighteenth-century English book trade, the role of publication in securing scientific authority, the social construction of scientific credibility, and the commercial and conceptual relationship between the scientific instrument and the scientific book.

This paper reveals relationships between the philosophy of Francis Bacon and the founding of English commercial and colonial joint-stock business enterprises such as the Virginia, East India, and Newfoundland Companies. It confirms that Bacon was a member and participant in these organizations and that Bacon specifically asked that merchants, and the companies they worked for, help him to build the foundation for a new experimental science by collecting a global natural and experimental history. This paper also suggests that the new 'joint-stock' form of corporate structure, as part of their financial risk management efforts to protect the capital of investors, strongly encouraged and supported 'scientific' methods of navigation, geography, cartography, botany, medicine, and shipbuilding.

The publication of Maxwell's Treatise in 1873 marked the culmination of almost twenty years of work by Maxwell on theoretical and experimental electricity. Since graduating in 1854, he had devoted much of his research effort to recasting Faraday's novel conception of electric and magnetic lines of force in the form of a mathematical field theory based on a dynamical ether and the conservation of energy. During the 1860s, Maxwell had also served on the British Association Committee on electrical standards, an experience that familiarised him with the instruments and techniques of experimental and industrial electricity. Maxwell wrote the Treatise largely as an advanced textbook on the theory, instrumentation and experimental foundations of electricity and magnetism, couched in terms of his field-theoretic approach. By the time the book was published, moreover, Maxwell had been appointed to a new chair of experimental physics in Cambridge, which required him to offer public lectures on electromagnetic theory to students of the elite Mathematical Tripos and to direct research at the Cavendish Laboratory. Despite Maxwell's presence in Cambridge and the pedagogical nature of his book, however, his students and colleagues in the university found the Treatise extremely difficult to understand. In this paper I shall argue that the production of a stable and consistent meaning for the Treatise was a highly protracted and collective activity in which Maxwell himself played little active role. It was the mathematical coaches (especially Edward Routh) who systematised and taught the mathematically advanced though physically straightforward sections of the text, while W.D.Niven (in intercollegiate lectures at Trinity College) tried to comprehend and to teach the more theoretically innovative sections of Maxwell's work. I shall argue that it was in Niven's classroom that a local 'Maxwellian' reading of the Treatise was developed and propagated, and that the work of the most prominent Cambridge Maxwellians of the early 1880s (J.H.Poyning and J.J.Thomson) needs to be understood as a product of their Cambridge training with Niven. I shall argue as well that the research undertaken by Poynting and Thomson was further shaped by the problem-based nature of their training with Routh, and by mathematical methods drawn from the wider community of Cambridge mathematicians (most notably Lord Rayleigh).

Nathan Reingold attempted to clarify the historical dialogue about amateurs in nineteenth century science by suggesting a change in terminology. His effort failed, however, and limited additional understanding has since emerged in this field. While historians in several scientific disciplines have illuminated the interface between emergent professionals and amateurs during the process of professionalization, there has been little attention to the continued involvement amateurs following completion of that process. In this paper, I will discuss the organization of amateur astronomy in the United States in the 1930s, some three decades after the professionalization of the discipline. Avocational astronomy that was, at the turn of the century, fairly directed towards scientific contribution, had instead become divided. Most of the participants were now focused on telescope making, and on the recreational aspects of astronomy. There remained, however, a much smaller coterie of individuals and organizations that committed themselves to scientific contribution. This suggests that the traditional bicameral categorization of the discipline into professional astronomers while lumping and ignoring all other participants as amateurs, likely obscures or glosses over a rich and interesting sub-disciplinary history. A more complex mode of categorization is suggested, one which recognizes that the large recreational component of participation in astronomy is not science, and that recreational participants are therefore not amateur astronomers. This principle may also be usefully applied to clarify the roles of participants in the era prior to professionalization.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Scottish universities were famous throughout Europe and North America for their achievements in the fields of science and medicine. But only a century before, the universities of Scotland had been somewhat provincial institutions with little claim to distinction in the realm of the natural sciences. This paper will consider why the cultivation and dissemination of natural knowledge came to figure so prominently in the curricula of the five Scottish universities during the long eighteenth century. In particular, it will show how natural knowledge was seen as an adjunct to religion in the academic context. The paper will also explore how the value of politeness and the related ideal of the gentleman shaped the incorporation of natural knowledge into the Scottish university curricula.

Cybernetics, defined by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener in 1948, is the study of communication and control in the animal and machine. Throughout the 1950s, cybernetics gained adherents and became a valuable source of ideas for thinking about the relationships between organisms and machines. Historians of science have recently shown an interest in the light that cybernetics can shed on human-machine relations. In their excitement, however, they have neglected any examination of the nascent political thinking that sustained the cybernetic movement in the post-war period. The devastating effects of automation and militarism inspired in many thinkers an effort to define and protect the truly human against apparent technological excess. For some, cybernetics offered a way to do this. It is ironic that these cyberneticists saw such bright promise in a field that grew out of a wartime antiaircraft project. Yet they believed that through cybernetics, they could pursue science while maintaining a critical stance towards much scientific work and the roles of science and technology in Cold War culture. But cybernetics was not simply pure-science boosterism many of its adherents were attracted to cybernetics precisely because they had lost their innocent faith in science and technology. They sought a way to rehabilitate science, to instill in it lofty aims without the spectre of a fully automated, militarized world. By drawing on Wiener's published and unpublished writing and the transactions of the conferences held on cybernetics in the 1950s, I develop an account of the political thinking that sustained the cybernetic movement.

One of the ways that Germany sought to reform its crisis-ridden colonial empire was by sponsoring and applying a wide range of social- and natural-scientific research. After 1907 colonists, following the lead of the new colonial secretary, Bernhard Dernburg, shifted their focus from correcting specific problems in the German protectorates to broad colonial reform. An important part of this reform was the development of what Dernburg called "scientific colonialism," a totalizing discourse that incorporated earlier linguistic, sociological, agricultural, and natural historical research into a science that would master the entire space of the colony. In this paper I will explore the ways in which the Colonial Institute in Hamburg, which opened in 1908, sought to realize Bernhard's program of "scientific colonialism" by transforming the colony into a scientized space, fully mastered by European discourse. I will also look at the way this totalizing colonial discourse functioned in East Africa and New Guinea, which sought both to promote and to apply scientific colonialism to a greater extent than any other German colony. I hypothesize not a totalitarian net of metropolitan discourse but rather a complex history of power and resistance, of local knowledge and European science. The goal of this paper is to consider the applicability of the concept of power-knowledge in the context of colonial science, a context particularly revealing of the strengths and weaknesses of Foucault's analysis. On the one hand, the colonies–above all the German colonies–were spaces subordinated to European discourses. On the other hand, the power-knowledge that characterized colonial discourse was precisely not human science in the sense discussed by Foucault. The colony was grasped as nature, subordinated to German culture. The sciences of colonialism were sciences that grasped the whole landscape and not merely the individuals who inhabited it. "Scientific colonialism," then, departed from the subject-creating sciences discussed by Foucault, and points toward a significant gap in his theorization of knowledge-power, a gap resulting perhaps from his provincial focus on Europe.