Events for February 2009
February 2, 2009
Perrin Selcer, University of Pennslyvania
“Do Epistemologies Have Politics? Science for a World Community After WWII”
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:15 p.m.
Place: 337 Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
February 3, 2009
Matthew Shindell, University of California, San Diego
“World War I: Harold C. Urey’s First Primer on Chemistry and Society”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org
During World War I, American chemists and chemical engineers came to the aid of their country and the Allies by going to work for then-expanding American chemical companies. One such chemist was a young and as yet undistinguished Harold C. Urey. Urey’s papers are relatively silent about his wartime work at the Barrett Company or how this work might have influenced his ideas of the science/society relationship. However, a look at chemical journals from the time shows that chemists were actively interpreting the social and political meanings of their wartime work. This talk attempts to summarize some published discussions from 1917-18 and argue how they might have influenced Urey’s later positions.
Matthew Shindell is a Ph.D. student in history of science and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. Shindell is currently working on a biographical dissertation about the American physical chemist Harold C. Urey. Shindell’s work focuses on Urey’s role as a public scientist—particularly the work Urey did in public lectures to negotiate the relative roles of science and religion in society, and how Urey’s positions changed in different social and political contexts.
February 9, 2009
John McNeil, Georgetown University
“Lord Cornwallis v. Anopheles Quadrimaculatus: Mosquitoes, Malaria, and the American Revolution”
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:15 p.m.
Place: 337 Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
February 10, 2009
Cai Guise-Richardson, Iowa State University
“The Somatic Mask and Nervous Housewife: Marketing Valium in the United States”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org
In retrospect Valium is remembered as an anti-anxiety drug over-prescribed to women for temporary but normal stresses of living. Compared to tranquilizers of the 1950s, Valium ads in the 1960s tried to highlight the drug as a treatment for nervous, psychosomatic, and somatic disorders. The “Somatic Mask” campaign was an effort to present Valium as a safe and scientifically proven compound useful for widespread conditions associated with tension, stress, and anxiety. Strangely, more gendered advertising appears in the 1970s, when the role of gender socialization in the creation and labeling of mental illness is more contentious.
Cai Guise-Richardson is about to defend her dissertation at Iowa State University. Although her interests range from vulcanization and early rubber industry, to chrome tanning and its relation to footwear design, to developments in Gilded Age microbiology, her dissertation focuses on how Valium was developed, discovered, and tested in the context of late-1940s and 1950s medical theory. She is now in the process of adapting the dissertation into a book, tentatively entitled Emotional Aspirin.
February 10, 2009
Bennett Lorber, M.D., Temple University School of Medicine, Moderator
“Bacterial Resistance, MRSA, and You: How Medical History Can Inform Health Policy in the 21st Century”
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and Philly.HealthInfo.org | Visit site »
Time: 6:15 p.m.
Place: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
RSVP
Learn more about this growing concern and what you need to know for yourself and your family. Speakers: Patrick J. Brennan, MD, Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President, University of Pennsylvania Health System; Sarah S. Long, MD, Chief, Section of Infectious Diseases, St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children and Professor of Pediatrics, Drexel University College of Medicine; and Amy Cheng Vollmer, PhD, Professor of Biology, Swarthmore College and President, Waksman Foundation for Microbiology. Moderator: Bennett Lorber, MD, Immediate Past Chief, Section on Infectious Diseases, Thomas M. Durant Professor of Medicine, and Professor, Microbiology and Immunology, Temple University School of Medicine.
February 11, 2009
Greg Radick, History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds, UK
“Ashley Montagu: A Darwin Critic at Rutgers in the Age of McCarthy”
Rutgers New Brunwick Department of History and the Rutgers University Libraries | Visit site »
Time: 1:00 p.m.
Place: Scholarly Communications Center, Teleconference Room, Alexander Library, Rutgers, New Brunswick
Information: James Delbourgo, jdelbourgo@history.rutgers.edu
“Darwin was no less a child of his time than we are of ours.” So wrote the Rutgers anthropologist Ashley Montagu, in a remarkable but little remembered 1952 book on Darwin. For Montagu, it was crucial that people stop believing that Darwinian science had shown them to be competitive animals. His book argued that animals are by nature cooperative, and that Darwin’s “fundamental error” in this matter was due to his immersion in Victorian imperialism and industrial capitalism. Although Montagu’s book was well received, some have seen links between the leftwing stance expressed there and his departure from Rutgers in 1955, when the country--Rutgers included--was in anti-Communist mood. Making use of previously unexamined documents, this talk will reconsider Montagu’s interpretation of Darwin’s science, explore the wider intellectual and political project that led him to write his book, and show that, if anything, it was his reputation as a defender of the Darwinian “law of the jungle” that made for administrative anxiety at Rutgers.
February 11, 2009
Julie Fairman, Ph.D., F.A.A.N., R.N.
University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
“Race as a Category of Analysis in Research”
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: 2U Conference Room, Room 2019, Claire Fagin Hall
University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
February 13, 2009
Harold J. Cook, The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London
“Creating a Medical Movement in the Early Enlightenment: Chinese Medicine, the Jesuits, and the Dutch East India Company”
Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 10:15 a.m.
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Commentator: Benjamin Elman, Princeton University
Copies of the paper are available by contacting Jennifer Houle at jhoule@princeton.edu one week before the date of the seminar.
Professor Hal Cook is the Director of The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL. In his academic work, he continues to investigate subjects related to early modern English medicine, but now gives most of his energy to medicine and natural history in the Dutch Golden Age in an attempt to reassess the relationships between the beginnings of a world-wide trading system and a world-wide exchange of information about nature.
February 15, 2009
“Darwin Day and Evolution Teach-In”
University of Pennsylvania Museum
of Archaeology and Anthropology
| Visit site »
Time: 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Place: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 3620 South Street
This free afternoon program features short “teach-in” talks in galleries by renowned experts as well as curator-led tours of the Penn Museum’s evolution exhibition, “Surviving, The Body of Evidence,” funded by the National Science Foundation.
The Darwin Day celebration is part of the city-wide “Year of Evolution” series of exhibits and special programs sponsored by Philadelphia’s cultural organizations. PACHS member institutions participating in the Museum’s Darwin Day event include the Academy Natural Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Wagner Free Institute of Science, in addition to the University of Pennsylvania.
February 16, 2009
Rob Kohler, University of Pennsylvania
“Wildlife Ecology: A Residential Field Science”
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:15 p.m.
Place: 337 Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
February 17, 2009
Bruce Seely, Michigan Technological University
“Technology Transfer in Historical Perspective”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org
Technology transfer has attracted the attention of scholars in many academic fields, including historians of science and technology. This talk will explore some of the patterns in that scholarship, highlighting the deeply multidisciplinary nature of that scholarship and the range of academic fields that explore the diffusion of knowledge and technology. The paper will draw from the author’s experiences as editor of an interdisciplinary academic journal in this area.
Bruce Seely is a historian of technology who has written about the history of engineering education and American transportation history and policy. He has coedited the journal Comparative Technology Transfer and Society since its inception in 2003. He is currently dean of the College of Sciences and Arts at Michigan Technological University.
February 19, 2009
Paul Wolfson, West Chester University
“After Galois, What?”
Philadelphia Area Seminar on the History of Mathematics (PASHoM) | Visit site »
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Villanova University
Many accounts of the nineteenth century theory of equations emphasize the contributions of Abel and Galois and the resulting shift towards abstract algebra. Nevertheless, some followed other lines of research. Mathematicians had originally introduced a resolvent equation as a step towards solving a given equation by radicals. After Galois’ theory became known, mathematicians still studied resolvent equations, but now with new aims. This talk is the outgrowth of my attempt understand the background to one of the late manuscripts of Arthur Cayley that were previously discussed by Dr. Weintraub.
February 23, 2009
Bryn Williams-Jones, University of Montreal
“Whither Personal Information in an Era of Recreational Genomics?”
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:15 p.m.
Place: 337 Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
Co-sponsored by PennCIGHT (Center for the Integration of Genetic Healthcare Technologies)
February 24, 2009
Steven C. Turner, National Museum of American History
“Calamine: A New Look at James Smithson’s Most Famous Paper”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.
Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org
James Smithson has historically been regarded as a second-tier scientific figure, and the impact of his work has been thought to be minimal. However, when considered in a broader historical context his work takes on a new significance. Smithson’s investigation of the zinc ore “calamine” is a good case in point. Here Smithson was working on a long-standing English metallurgical problem, but his work had unintended consequences for Napoleonic France.
Steven C. Turner is a curator of physical sciences at the National Museum of American History. He is currently researching the scientific work of James Smithson, founder of the Smithsonian Institution. As part of that project Turner is replicating Smithson’s experiments with the tools and techniques of a late 18th century chemical laboratory.
February 25, 2009
Constance Putnam, Ph.D.
Independent Scholar
History of Nursing Seminar Series: “Semmelweis’s Argument with the English Contagionists:
Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Place: 2U Conference Room, Room 2019, Claire Fagin Hall
University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
February 27, 2009
Elly Truitt, Bryn Mawr College
Necromancy, Celestial Divination, and the Introduction of Arabic Science into England, c. 1080-1180
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 p.m., followed by social hour and light dinner
Place: The Library Company of Philadelphia, 1314 Locust Street
Directions: www.librarycompany.org/about/access.htm
William of Malmesbury, writing in the first quarter of the twelfth century, recounted a story, based on earlier sources, about Gerbert of Aurillac. According to William, Gerbert used astral science to create an oracular head. Yet the earlier sources that William quoted ascribed Gerbert’s talking head to demonic, rather than celestial, magic. This important change reflects the introduction of texts on astral science and divination into western Europe, specifically into England in the early twelfth century, while pointing to contemporary concerns about the intellectual and moral legitimacy of divination.
Elly Truitt is assistant professor in the History Department at Bryn Mawr College. She specializes in Medieval History and Science and Medicine.