Events for April 2008
April 1, 2008
David Caruso, Chemical Heritage Foundation
“Sustaining Biomedical Science: Government Funding, Private Foundations, and the Lives of Scientists in the Late Twentieth Century”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:-00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
The science of biomedicine in the United States has been heavily impacted by waxing and waning governmental funding; private foundations have provided much needed support for budding scientists in the late twentieth century. This talk will explore some of the issues surrounding the changes in biomedical science by looking more closely at the lives and practices of the recipients of Pew Biomedical Scholar Awards from 1985 to 2001.
April 2, 2008
Julie Sochalski, School of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania
“Policy, Politics and the International History of Nurse Staffing Ratios”
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, History of Nursing Seminar Series | Visit site »
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: 3R Conference Room, Claire Fagin Hall
Information: ehweiss@nursing.upenn.edu
This presentation offers an historical analysis of the political and policy process that led to the adoption of nurse staffing ratios in hospitals, the concurrent role these processes played in motivating a research agenda on the effects of nurse staffing levels on patient outcomes, and the relationship between the resulting evidence and the resulting policy initiatives.
April 4, 2008
Apparatus XY: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Gender, Sexuality and Science
History of Science Program, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 11:00 a.m. - 5:45 p.m.
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
To register, please contact Amy Shortt at shortt@princeton.edu or by phone at 609 258 6705.
Graduate student conference. Please note that this event is being held in conjunction with the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology which is scheduled for the following day, Saturday, April 5, from 9 a.m - 5:30 p.m.
April 5, 2008
Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology
History of Science Program, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 8:45 a.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
To register, please contact Amy Shortt at shortt@princeton.edu or by phone at 609 258 6705.
The Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology has been organized and coordinated by scholars in the history of biology in the Northeast for over four decades. The mission is to foster a sense of community and provide a forum for sharing and critiquing graduate research by peers from a variety of institutions and backgrounds. Note that on Friday, April 4, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. there will be an additional graduate student conference, Apparatus XY, featuring seven papers on gender, sexuality, and science. See the web site, http://hos.princeton.edu/, for details about both programs.
April 7, 2008
Oliver Gaycken, Temple University
“A Modern Cabinet of Curiosities: George Kleine and the Educational Film”
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2008 Workshop | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:15 p.m.
Place: 337 Logan Hall
April 10, 2008
Babak Ashrafi, Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science
“Using the Ether to Save Quantum Mechanics”
Philadelphia Area Seminar on the History of Mathematics (PASHoM) | Visit site »
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Villanova University
As Max Born fled Germany in 1933, he started a research project in which he used concepts and methods from ether theory to reformulate classical electrodynamics in order to produce a quantum electrodynamics. In this talk, Ashrafi will describe the circumstances that led Born to leap backwards in order to try and leap forwards, what he and his collaborators achieved, and what this episode tells us about the history of the development of quantum mechanics.
April 10, 2008
James A. Schafer, Drexel University
“An Introduction to the Social History of American Doctors, 1850-Present”
Drexel University, Great Works Symposium | Visit site »
Time: 6:00 - 7:20 p.m.
Place: Disque Hall, Room 108, 32nd & Chestnut Streets, Drexel University
Free and Open to the Public
For more information contact Scott Knowles, works@drexel.edu
April 11, 2008
Willow Roberts Powers, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
“Modernity and Tradition in Indian Country”
The Friends of the American Philosophical Society Library | Visit site »
Lecture, Reception, and Book Signing
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Place: Benjamin Franklin Hall, 427 Chestnut Street
RSVP: sduffy@amphilsoc.org or 215-440-3400
Willow Roberts Powers, author of Navajo Trading: The End of an Era, is an anthropologist, currently Research Associate at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, NM. She is a longtime consultant on archival and cultural preservation projects for several tribes and Pueblos and continues to be involved with San Juan Pueblo. One of her interests is the politics and intersection of oral and written traditions.
Life for Indian people today is not only connected to tradition, but also highly modern. Ceremonies and beliefs continue with enormous vitality, while computer technology is absorbed with gusto. Tribal leaders take up traditional governance, as well as tackling the same problems all societies face, including education, jobs, law and order, and relations with neighbors. The preservation of culture does not necessarily involve a return to the past, but rather a blending of modernity with cultural difference. Perhaps this is one reason why the National Museum of the American Indian puzzles some visitors. This lecture will describe modernity, from the perspective of the American Southwest, as illustrated in activism, land issues, and art.
April 14, 2008
Sherry Turkle, MIT
“Cyberintimacies / Cybersolitudes”
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2008 Workshop | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:15 p.m.
Place: 337 Logan Hall
April 15, 2008
Benjamin Cohen, University of Virginia
“Science and Farming and Satire, Oh My!”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
This presentation will be about satire and science (much of it chemistry), using the farm and other agricultural sites as the basis for discussion. It is a discussion about the early stages of a project Cohen has begun that seeks to place representations of cultural responses to scientizing nature into deeper historical context. His interest is in the cultural resistance to new knowledge practices; satire and fiction provide evocative, and sometimes funny, examples of such contestations.
Benjamin Cohen is an environmental historian and science studies scholar in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Virginia. His book, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil, and Society in the American Countryside, will be published later this year by Yale University Press. He is also the coauthor of the blog The World’s Fair, which can be found at scienceblogs.com. Cohen maintains a wide interest in the converge
April 16, 2008
Matthew D. McHugh, University of Pennsylvania, School of Nursing
“A Framework for Public Health Policy Evaluation Research”
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, History of Nursing Seminar Series
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: 3R Conference Room, Claire Fagin Hall
This presentation will outline a framework for the evaluation of public health policy. The framework orients research objectives within the normative, political, and historical considerations necessary to justify and develop policy that improves public health without unacceptable tradeoffs.
April 17, 2008
Arthur Allen, Paul A. Offit, Ian Frank, Thomas M. Vernon
“Living in the Vaccine Era: Controversy and Science”
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia | Visit site »
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Place: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Register online at http://www.collphyphil.org/prog_calender.htm
The Mabel A. Purdy Program, co-sponsored with the Section on Medical History and Section on Public Health. Speakers include: Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine’s Greatest Lifesaver; Paul A. Offit, M.D., Chief, Division of Infectious Diseases, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Professor of Pediatrics and the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and author of Vaccinated: One Man’s Quest to Defeat the World’s Deadliest Diseases; and Ian Frank, M.D., Associate Professor, Infectious Diseases, Director, Anti-Retroviral Clinical Research and Director of Clinical Care, Penn Center for AIDS Research. Moderated by Thomas M. Vernon, M.D..
April 18, 2008
Amy Slaton, Drexel University
Race and the Construction of Scientific Aptitude in the ‘Post-Civil-Rights’ U.S.
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, Regional Colloquium
Please download and read the paper in advance.
Location: The Historical Society of Pennsylvania
1300 Locust Street (directions, accessibility)
Time: 3:00 - 5:00 p.m., with social hour and light dinner afterward
Your RSVP to info@pachs.net would be appreciated.
Please download and post the poster.
Abstract: Since the 1980s, the idea that race plays a role in patterns of U.S. educational or occupational attainment has become less widely acknowledged among policy makers. Anti-affirmative action movements, the celebration of academic “standards,” and the general suppression of race as a category of social analysis have contributed to this shift. All such trends are based on the idea that we have moved, as a nation, closer to some ideal of a perfect meritocracy, in which one’s race would have no impact on one’s intellectual or economic potential. Yet, in science and engineering fields at least, notions of different innate capacities among students persist, and, this paper argues, continue the work of differentiating aspirants on the basis of race. We can identify university science and engineering programs that strive to offer enhanced opportunities to “disadvantaged” populations (African American, Hispanic and Native American students), but which nonetheless support commitments to racialized ideologies of scientific aptitude formulated long before the civil rights era. In these programs, even well intentioned educators black-box learning processes in science and engineering. Achievement thus becomes associated with students’ innate proclivities in a way that naturalizes the historical attainments of majority students, and the lack of attainments by minority students. The evacuation of social-structural factors from explanations of student success, and failure, in science and engineering helps to cement such associations. Examples will be drawn from teaching initiatives at Texas A&M University (TAMU) under the recent presidency of Robert Gates that show such processes in action. This paper will also describe selective innovations at TAMU that have at moments managed to counter these hidden, but powerful, vestiges of traditional race-based metrics of talent.
This colloquium is made possible by an educational grant from Merck & Co., Inc.
April 19, 2008 - May 3, 2009
“Witnessing Evolution”
University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology | Visit site »
“Surviving: The Body of Evidence,” a new, interactive exhibition that explores the process of evolution and its profound impact on humans, continues at the University Museum through May 3, 2009, before beginning a national tour. “Witnessing Evolution,” the fourth segment of the exhibition, allows visitors to meet up with famous naturalists from several centuries. A series of interactive “sound chairs” feature seven famous scientists—-including Carolus Linnaeus (1701-1778), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Joseph Leidy (1823-1891), and Mary Leakey (1913-1996)--who offer their perspectives and their sometimes- revolutionary ideas “in their own words.”
April 21, 2008
Susan Lederer, Yale University
“Henry Beecher’s ‘Bombshell’: Research Ethics and Omissions circa 1966”
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2008 Workshop | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:15 p.m.
Place: 337 Logan Hall
April 22, 2008
Maria del Pilar Zazueta, Columbia University
“Mexi-Cola versus Coca-Cola: The Soft Drink Industry and Local Business Innovation in Twentieth-Century Mexico”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
April 23, 2008
History of Women’s Health Conference
Pennsylvania Hospital | Visit site »
Times: 7:30 a.m. to 2:15 p.m.
Place: Zubrow Auditorium, Pennsylvania Hospital, 800 Spruce Street
“Women’s Influence in Health Care: Women as Medical Agents and Medical Advocates for Themselves, Their Families and Society”
To register, contact Stacey Peeples, Curator-Lead Archivist for Pennsylvania Hospital’s Historical Collections, 215.829.5434 or peepless@pahosp.com
April 24, 2008
Jean Whelan, University of Pennsylvania, School of Nursing
“The Nursing Profession: Past Accomplishments, Persistent Problems, Furture Projections”
Drexel University, Great Works Symposium | Visit site »
Time: 6:00 - 7:20 p.m.
Place: Room 108, Disque Hall, 32nd & Chestnut Streets, Drexel University
Free and Open to the Public
For more information contact Scott Knowles, works@drexel.edu
April 28, 2008
Sarah Tracy, University of Oklahoma
“High Life: Ancel Keys, Human Fatigue, and the International High Altitude Expedition of 1935”
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2008 Workshop | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:15 p.m.
Place: 337 Logan Hall
April 29, 2008
Karen Reeds, Independent Scholar
“New Jersey Herbs and Old World Herbals”
The American Institute of the History of Pharmacy and the Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers University
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: Multi-purpose Room B, Cook Campus Center, Rutgers University, 59 Biel Road, New Brunswick, NJ
Information: hayesr@rci.rutgers.edu; 732-445-2675, x605
Karen Reeds is a Visiting Scholar, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and a member of the Princeton Research Forum. Her talk on April 29 is the 19th Annual David L. Cowen Lecture in the History of Pharmacy.
April 30, 2008
Symposium: Medical History as Personal Experience
University of Pennsylvania Libraries | Visit site »
Location: Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, 3420 Walnut Street
Symposium: 2:00 - 4:30 p.m., Class of ‘55 Room, 2nd Floor
Reception and Display: 5:00 - 6:30 p.m., Rosenwald Gallery and Lea Library, 6th Floor,
Information: jpollack@upenn.edu or 215-898-7088
Distinguished faculty, practitioners, and students will share their experiences as teachers, researchers, and activists in the health field. Speakers include Dr. Rosemary Stevens, Dr. Keith Walloo, Dr. Fitzhugh Mullan, Malika McCray, and Merlin Chowkwanyun. The symposium will be moderated by Dr. Ruth Cowan (Penn History and Sociology of Science) and followed by a reception and viewing of “Treasures from the U.S. Health Activism History Collection.” This display, comprising items donated by Dr. Walter J. Lear, will be on view in the Rosenwald Gallery through May 3.
April 30, 2008
Beth Linker, Ph.D., Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
“(Wo)manly Workers: Gender and Rehabilitation in World War I”
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania, History of Nursing Seminar Series | Visit site »
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: 3R Conference Room, Claire Fagin Hall
World War I Rehabilitators contended that the conventional Victorian notion of womanhood—defined as a nurturing mother-type figure—would be dangerous to the rehabilitation movement, for such a woman might pamper the disabled man, diminishing his will to work. The ideal woman, according to one rehabilitator, would instead exert a “firm but kindly discipline” over disabled men to get them to the point of self-sufficiency. This paper will explore both how female medical aids (physical therapists, occupational therapists, and nurses) and rehabilitating soldiers reacted to this demand.