Events for December 2009

December 1, 2009 - December 1, 2010

From Pastels to PDA’s:  Medical Education from the 18th to the 21st Century

Pennsylvania Hospital Historic Library & Gallery | Visit site »

Information:  215-829-5434

“From Pastels to PDA’s” displays sixteen of Jan Van Rymsdyk’s anatomical drawings together for the first time. Long before the use of the X-ray, CAT scan, ultrasound and digital technology, the use of images played an important role in the medical education of students. Anatomical illustrations were cutting edge in the eighteenth century, and Jan Van Rymsdyk was known as one of the best anatomical illustrators in the world. Van Rymsdyk has kept his stature over the past two and a half centuries. These illustrations were created with crayon making them very susceptible to damage, however, they survived a trip across the ocean in 1762 to become a center of the medical education young men received.

In a letter dated April 7, 1762, Dr. John Fothergill stated, “I need not tell thee that the knowledge of anatomy is of exceeding great use to Practionors in Physic and Surgery & that the means of procuring Subjects with you are not easy.” Medical education was about to change forever in Philadelphia.  Fothergill further offered his opinion that the drawings “not to be seen by every Person but with the Permission of a Trustee & for some small Gratuity for the Benefitt of the House.” Heeding Dr. Fothergill’s warning, the drawings were viewed on a limited basis and carefully housed to protect them. Today, as 247 years ago, the drawings are viewed on a limited basis making this exhibit a rare treat for the public.

December 1, 2009

Abigail Schade, Columbia University

Squeezing Water from a Stone:  Perceptions of Groundwater in al-Karaji’s 11th-Century ‘Treatise on the Extraction of Hidden Waters’

Chemical Heritage Foundation | 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

Baghdad mathematician al-Karaji wrote his treatise, sometimes called the “oldest hydrology textbook,” on the characteristics of groundwater in the 11th century. Experts in the modern field of geohydrology have praised Karaji’s work as remarkably accurate. Since Karaji’s work focused on traditional methods of groundwater drilling in his native Iran, this how-to manual provides a glimpse of historical agricultural techniques and hydrological expertise usually not available to the historian in such detailed written form.

This topic is part of Abigail Schade’s dissertation on traditional technologies of groundwater irrigation in arid regions of the ancient and medieval world. This dissertation in international/global history is being completed in the Department of History at Columbia University, where Schade is a Whiting Fellow for the 2009–2010 academic year.  She held a Dissertation Research Fellowship from the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science (PACHS) during summer 2009. 

December 2, 2009

Christine Hallett, University of Manchester

‘Death and the Maiden’:  Purity and Self-Sacrifice in the Image of the First World War Nurse

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

The First World War was one of the most horrific conflicts of modern times.  Vast numbers of largely-inexperienced volunteer-soldiers were exposed to its highly destructive weaponry with devastating consequences.  The trauma they experienced was both physical and emotional.  Descriptions of First World War field hospitals have likened these institutions to butcher’s shops and charnel-houses.  Into these scenarios came trained and volunteer nurses - pristine in their white dresses and flowing veils - projecting an image of unsullied and invincible purity.  This paper will examine the myths and realities that lay behind this untouchable image of the First World War nurse and will consider the ways in which nurses engaged with the horrors of war, and with its physical and emotional consequences.  It will focus on the conflict that was created by their efforts to present themselves as pure, fearless and morally incorruptible, as they faced the grim realities of their experiences.  Finally, it will consider the self-sacrificing nature of nurses’ behaviours in staging these performances and will examine the consequences of these efforts of ‘self-containment’.  Christine Hallett, PhD, is Senior Lecturer and Director of the UK Centre for the History of Nursing and Midwifery, The School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, University of Manchester, Manchester, England.

December 2, 2009

Philip Scranton, Rutgers University & Hagley Museum and Library

Histories and Historical Ethnographies of Technical Practice: Creating Jet Propulsion in the US and France

Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science | Visit site »

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Join scholars from the area at the Regional Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine to to discuss Philip Scranton’s comparative study of jet engine development in the U.S. and France.  Commentary by Stuart W. Leslie.

Please note special day.  Please download and read the paper in advance. 

Philip Scranton is University Board of Governors Professor, History of Industry and Technology, at Rutgers University, and he is Director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society at the Hagley Museum & Library.

Stuart W. Leslie is professor at the Department of History of Science and Technology at Johns Hopkins University.

Abstract:For about six years Philip Scranton has been working on reconstructing the technical and organizational dynamics that underlay the development of a literally propulsive innovation--the jet engine, which commenced as a military device and within a decade began to reshape first civilian aviation, then global migration (of both people and microbes). The standard storylines are narratives of technical progress, based on upbeat newspaper and magazine stories and a handful of memoirs. Yet this framework was the result of retrospective rationalization of a nearly-chaotic and profoundly non-linear process, which was also secret, as it represented one element of emergent Cold War initiatives (which the US hardened into “weapons systems").

Jet engines proved an extravagantly-difficult technology, for though they resembled structurally the steam turbines which powered factories and electrical plants, they had to be light enough for liftoff and sustained flight, reliable under a range of stresses not found on the ground, and durable despite intense heat, vibrations, and turbine speeds of 10,000 rpm. The US course to operable jet propulsion involved repeated failures, vast expense, and, crucial to this project, virtually perpetual redesign, retrofitting, contract revisions, and at times explosive conflicts between the military and corporate contractors (and their subcontractors). France, by contrast, acquired Nazi engine designs and an “équipe” of 160 engineers and technicians from BMW, but had neither the funds nor the resources to experiment on a grand scale as were US developers. Yet both were richly messy projects, in which intense engineering innovations and rapid shop-floor revision of an unstable technology took place in the absence of anything like adequate scientific understandings of metallurgy, fluid dynamics, heat transfer, combustion, and stress failures in materials. Hence, here the significance of reconstructing technical practice is especially salient, for this entire exercise in innovation inverted the often-cited linear sequence in which scientific understandings are applied to technical problems and yield progress.

Having completed the bulk of his research on the American trajectory, ca. 1943-65, he turned to researching the French attack on jet propulsion puzzles. In winter and spring 2005-06, he spent eight weeks at the Archives de l’Armée de l’Air in Paris, with the goal of reconstituting technical practice in a nation politically and financially at a polar opposite to the US, yet with a strong tradition of technical excellence and innovation. The paper for PACHS will draw on both sets of records and will contrast US and French technical and organizational practice for jet engine building.

Its relevance to ethnography arises because these labor-intensive initiatives were stunningly complex, and because the actors had no choice but to work on a sustained trial and error basis. It thus becomes valuable to use technical documents to help reconstruct actors’ situations, dispositions and efforts looking forward in the 1940s and 1950s facing a Cold War (which they couldn’t know was actually going to be Cold) and technological challenges with layers of unknowns, including unknown unknowns (at time T1) which exploded into sudden significance (at time T2).

Second, unlike a current-day ethnography, this research proceeds through exploring historical sources, which suggests a useful question: what can the form and content of documents (including technical reports, engineering change orders, drawings, et al.) tell us about how actors conceptualized the efforts and the problem sets that had to be addressed in moving across error-filled innovation spaces.  Thus the paper will compare and contrast innovation strategies, along with the values and structures informing them.

December 2, 2009

Peder Anker, New York University

Spaceship Earth

Department of History and Program in History of Science, Princeton University | Visit site »

Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University

Abstract. Why did scientists and lay people alike in the 1970s talk about the Earth in terms of a Spaceship? And in what way did this frame the environmental debate? With a point of departure in the famous earthrise image, this lecture reviews the history of “spaceship earth.” The photo came to represent a dream of a globe in ecological harmony, yet it was taken by a crew of astronauts sent out in space to demonstrate the superiority of the United States in a world divided by Cold War tensions. Spaceship earth was not a vague analogy or metaphor, but that it reflected instead efforts to build a closed ecosystem within the spaceship in order to secure the health of astronauts. In other words, the Earth was literally understood as being construed as the spaceship and the environmental havoc was caused by humans not behaving like astronauts. Environmental ethics became an issue of trying to live like astronauts by adapting space technologies such as bio-toilets, solar cells, recycling, and energy-saving devices. Technology, terminology, and methodology developed for spaceships became tools for solving environmental problems onboard Spaceship Earth. Spaceships came to represent the rational, orderly, and wisely managed contrast to the irrational, disorderly, and ill managed environments on Earth.

Peder Anker is Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

December 3, 2009

Victoria Saker Woeste, American Bar Foundation

Henry Ford:  Unmasking the Self-Made Myth

Research Seminar Series, Hagley Museum and Library | Visit site »

Time:  6:00 p.m.
Place:  Copeland Room, Hagley Library

Papers presented in this series ae unpublished works in progress and are circulated in advance to seminar participants.  To join the seminar email list and obtain copies of the papers, contact Carol Lockman at clockman@hagley.org or call 302-658-2400, ext. 263.

December 7, 2009

Mara Mills, University of Pennsylvania

Hearing Aids and the History of Electronic Miniaturization

Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »

Time: 3:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Place: Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennysylvania

December 8, 2009

Matthew Shindell, University of California, San Diego

From the Small-Town Chapel to the Cathedrals of Cosmopolitan Science: Harold C. Urey, Religion, and Isotope Chemistry

Chemical Heritage Foundation | 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

This talk will consider Urey’s religious upbringing in the Brethren Church and his lifelong struggle with religious ideas. Although Urey became an atheist early in life, his work as a public spokesman for science indicates that he carried many of these ideas (and perhaps a rural attitude toward morality and family life) into his later life and incorporated them into his understanding of science’s ideal role in public and political life. Because he participated in the great demographic shift of the 20th century from rural to urban life, a study of Urey’s life and career promises to illuminate the effects that this change in lifestyle, along with participation in more cosmopolitan scientific circles at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago, may have had on the development of the 20th-century “scientific conscience.” I argue that Urey’s biography is thus an opportunity to analyze, question, and refine the presumed secularization of American society and science during the 20th century.

Matthew Shindell is a Ph.D. candidate in the history of science and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is currently writing a dissertation concerning the life and career of the American physical chemist Harold C. Urey. This dissertation has received support from the National Science Foundation, the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the UCSD Science Studies Program.

December 8, 2009

Rosamund Purcell

Vegetable Lambs and Elephant Birds:  Classifying the In-Between

Friends of the Library, Bryn Mawr College | Visit site »

Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: Carpenter Library 21, Bryn Mawr College
Information:  610-526-6576 or SpecColl@brynmawr.edu.

Rosamond Purcell’s extraordinary photographs and installations of natural history specimens have been featured in numerous books and exhibitions that explore the interaction of art and science. Her work includes three books done in collaboration with the late Stephen Jay Gould, and an exhibition, “Two Rooms,” which featured a reconstruction of a 17th-century cabinet of curiosities.  Her most recent book is Egg and Nest (Harvard University Press, 2008).

Some reoccurring themes in Purcell’s work include the drive to collect and classify, the decay of objects and beings, and the fluid boundaries between art and science. Her work has ranged from examining natural history collections, photographing disintegrating game dice in Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck with Ricky Jay (Quantuck Lane, 2002), exploring a junkyard belonging to an eccentric antiques dealer for Owls Head (Quantuck Lane, 2003), and recreating the cabinet of curiosities of the 17th-century Danish scholar Ole Worm. Running throughout these works is the artist’s interest in personal and scientific collections, and the choices of display and categorization which are manifested in them.

The documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has written, “Rosamond Purcell is one of the great photographers. She has captured the history of objects by photographing them in romantic decline – books scourged by worms, petrified food-stuffs, biological specimens gone wrong, the inexorable entropic winding down of everything.”

Following the lecture there will be a reception and viewing of the exhibition “Darwin’s Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the ‘Origin of Species’ “ in the Rare Book Room of Canaday Library.

The lecture and exhibition are sponsored by the Friends of the Library. The exhibition is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., in the Rare Book Room in Canaday Library, through February.

December 9, 2009

Patricia D'Antonio, University of Pennsylvania, School of Nursing

American Nursing:  A History of Knowledge, Authority and the Meaning of Work

Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing and the Office of Nursing Research, School of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »

Time: 12:00 p.m.
Place: Rm 216, Claire Fagin Hall
Note departures from the usual time and place.

Information: ehweiss@nursing.upenn.edu

Abstract. This new interpretation of the history of nursing in the United States captures the many ways women and men reframed the most traditional of all gender expectations—that of caring for the sick—to create new possibilities for themselves, to renegotiate the terms of some of their life experiences, and to reshape their own senses of worth and power.  Patricia D’Antonio looks closely at this history—using a new analytic framework that captures the diversity of nursing and a rich trove of archival sources—and finds complex, multiple meanings in the choices of women and men who chose a nursing career

Patricia D’Antonio, PhD, FAAN, RN, is Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing.

December 10, 2009

John W. Dawson, Pennsylvania State University, York

Development of Compactness

Philadelphia Area Seminar on the History of Mathematics, Villanova University | Visit site »

Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Room 103, Mendel Science Center, Villanova University

Abstract. During the early decades of the 20th century the notion of a compact topological space arose as a generalization of results obtained in studies of the topology of the real line (in particular, the Heine-Borel theorem). Somewhat later, what is now called the Compactness Theorem for first-order logic was proved by Godel as a lemma in his proof that every first-order axiom system is semantically complete. But for years thereafter connections between the two notions of compactness lay unrecognized and applications of compactness in logical contexts were not pursued. This talk will survey how the Compactness Theorem eventually came to be regarded as a fundamental tool in model theory and algebra, and will explore why recognition of it’s usefulness was so long delayed.

December 11, 2009

John McNeill, Georgetown University

Lord Cornwallis vs. Anopheles Quadrimaculatus, 1780-1781

Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University | Visit site »

Time:  10:15 a.m.
Place:  211 Dickinson, Princeton University

John McNeill is University Professor in the Department of History at Georgetown University and Interim Director of the Mortar Center for International Studies.  He is the author of Mosquito Empire:  Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914.

December 15, 2009

Richardson Dilworth, Drexel University and Philadelphia Historical Commission

Urban Infrastructure Technology and Suburban Autonomy in American Political Development

Chemical Heritage Foundation | 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

Central-city infrastructure development in the 19th and 20th centuries, in areas such as sewerage, water supply, street lighting, and street paving, was an important cause of suburban municipal autonomy by the time of the Great Depression. Suburban autonomy was in turn an important factor in the racial and economic transformations that were visible in central cities by the 1950s, in the overall decline in central-city populations on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and thus in the radically changed position of cities in American politics after World War II. My talk traces the path from urban technological development and diffusion, to the changing legal jurisdictional structure of metropolitan regions, to the changing role of urbanization in national politics and policy making.

Richardson Dilworth is an associate professor of political science and the director of the Center for Public Policy at Drexel University. He is the author of The Urban Origins of Suburban Autonomy (2005) and the editor of two books: The City in American Political Development (2009) and Social Capital in the City: Community and Civic Life in Philadelphia (2006). In 2008 he was appointed by Mayor Michael Nutter to serve on the Philadelphia Historical Commission, where he is chair of the Historic Designation Committee.