Events for February 2010
February 1, 2010
Patricia D'Antonio, University of Pennsylvania, School of Nursing
Rethinking the History of Nursing
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
February 2, 2010
Roger Horowitz, CHF Cain Fellow and Hagley Museum and Library
Kosher Nullification and the Chemical Transformation: Dilemmas of Science and Kosher Law
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
Free and open to the public.
The application of kosher law to modern food was a reciprocal process, forcing changes in both kosher law and in the foods that sought kosher status. The problem was that modern food undermined the strict principles of separation that made food kosher, as processing innovations and food chemistry blended together ingredients that were problematic to observant Jews. Yet establishing kosher standards for these new products was not obvious since kosher law contained a raft of exceptions to the strict principles of separation. This presentation will discuss several of the most controversial ingredients in modern food from the standpoint of kosher law and how the debate over their chemical composition determined, ultimately, their kosher status.
Roger Horowitz is associate director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library, as well as executive director of the Business History Conference. From September 2009 through May 2010 he is a Cain Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. He has published widely on the food industry, with Putting Meat on the American Table (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) his most recent contribution. His talk is part of a project on the modern history of kosher food in America.
February 3, 2010
James Delbourgo, Rutgers University
Divers Things: Collecting the World Under Water
Program in Histoy of Science and the Colonial Americas Workshops (CAW), Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
To request a copy of the precirculated paper, send an email to mfanfair@princeton.edu.
Abstract. What did it mean to go under water in the early modern era? “I do not pretend to have visited the bottom of the sea,” wrote Robert Boyle in 1670, but that did not stop him from writing at length about the depths. Indeed, the same can be said of Jules Verne. This paper examines late seventeenth-century English travelers and natural philosophers’ accounts of the submarine, in a period when diving projects proliferated due to dramatic new fortunes being made in Caribbean salvage. It begins by examining the significance of aquatic objects and perceptions of the deep in a providential framework that united the biblical Flood with contemporary natural disasters such as the 1692 earthquake in Port Royal, Jamaica. It argues that in addition to exemplifying connoisseurial fetishization of transformations between nature and art, collections of aquatic curiosities constituted a providential imperial chorography of the submarine. The paper goes on to situate collectors’ power to transform nature into art in relation to their ability to coerce the extraordinary capacities of Asian, American and enslaved African divers. Finally, it explores the shift from self-extension through human surrogates to the construction of prosthetic devices, in particular diving bells, linking programs of submarine knowledge at the Royal Society to entrepreneurial salvage projects, and attempts to colonize the depths by transforming the underwater world into dry land.
February 8, 2010
Cori Hayden, University of California-Berkeley
Same but Different: Generic Medicines and the Politics of Pharmaceutical Equivalence
Department of History and Sociology of Science and Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Place: Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennysylvania
February 9, 2010
James R. Voelkel, Chemical Heritage Foundation
The Digital Edition of Isaac Newton’s Alchemical Papers: Challenges and Promises
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
The Chymistry of Isaac Newton (www.chymistry.org) is a large-scale project funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities that will make all of Isaac Newton’s alchemical manuscripts available in an on-line edition. Initial transcriptions of all available manuscripts have been made and are in the final stages of editing. James Voelkel, who has been intimately involved with the project for many years, will discuss the technical difficulties of creating an on-line scholarly edition as well as the promises of digital humanities.
James Voelkel is curator of rare books at the Chemical Heritage Foundation and a senior advisory editor to the Chymistry of Isaac Newton Web project.
February 9, 2010
James Elkins, Art Institute of Chicago
Visual Practices Across the University
Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, New Brunswick, NJ | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: Alexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall
Information: info@cca.rutgers.edu or 732-932-8426
Evidence and Explanation in the Arts and Sciences: Distinguished Lecture Series
Today’s university employs a wide range of image-making and image-interpreting practices: doctors, lawyers, scientists of all sorts, engineers, humanists, and social scientists all produce images and make arguments about them in different ways. This talk assesses the state of scholarship on links between art and science, arguing that it is possible to consider images in various fields without using tropes from the humanities or social sciences as explanatory tools—in other words, by letting the different disciplines speak in their own languages.
February 10, 2010
Kara Clevinger, Temple University
‘Keeping a Comfortable House’: Moral Treatment for the Insane in the 1840s
The McNeil Center for Early American Studies, Brownbag Seminar Series | Visit site »
Time: 12:30 - 1:45 p.m.
Place: Seminar Room 105, McNeil Center, 3355 Woodland Walk (34th and Sansom Streets)
Papers are circulated in advance, for copies, please contact the McNeil Center office, mceas@ccat.sas.upenn.edu.
Kara Clevinger, a doctoral candidate in the English Department at Temple University, was the recipient of a PACHS Dissertation Research Fellowship in fall 2009.
February 12, 2010
Terry M. Christensen, PACHS Visiting Fellow
Twin Sons of Different Mothers: John Wheeler, Edward Teller, and the Cold War Quest for Peace through Military Hegemony, 1948–1983*
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, Regional Colloquium
Log in to RSVP for this event.
Join scholars from the area at the Regional Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine for a discussion of science and Cold War politics. Commentary by Erik P. Rau.
Time: Discussion, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.,
followed by social hour and light dinner
Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation
* Apologies to the late Dan Fogelberg and his collaborator Tim Weisberg for the unauthorized use of their very appropriate title.
Please download the paper and read it in advance.
Abstract
“There is not a whit of difference in the politics of Edward Teller and John Wheeler, and yet, [within the physics community] Teller didn’t have any friends and Wheeler doesn’t have any enemies.” [Paraphrased remark of former Wheeler student and co-author, Kenneth Ford, to this author on Wed, 23 Nov 2005, 30th St. Station, Philadelphia, PA. For the record, Ford also considered Edward Teller to be a friend.]
In the wake of his testimony at the J. Robert Oppenheimer hearing and, in light of his consistent call for an expanded arsenal of strategic weapons, Edward Teller became one of the most controversial scientists in modern memory. Indeed, Teller was widely perceived to be the primary role model for the title character in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove. Though John Archibald Wheeler supported Teller and agreed with him on every major issue related to defense, including the Oppenheimer testimony, Wheeler was nonetheless highly regarded among his peers. This paper examines the biographical circumstances and philosophical basis for the reasoning that led these eminent physicists—each of whom believed he was acting in the interests of long-term peace—to support a series of increasingly complex, expensive defense initiatives in the face of resolute and often vociferous opposition by the vast majority of their colleagues.
February 15, 2010
Brian Balogh, University of Virginia
The Origins and Legacy of the Associative State in Modern America
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
February 16, 2010
Robert D. Hicks, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Bringing Physics to Physicians
Chemical Heriage 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
Founded more than two centuries ago, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia carries National Historic Landmark status as the birthplace of medicine in the United States. The main historical assets owned by the college are its historical library, once the primary medical reference library in the United States, and the Mütter Museum, founded 150 years ago, a collection of anatomical and pathological specimens and medical instruments. One feature of the collection is the cabinet of mementos, a “repository of historic souvenirs,” which was assembled a century ago by Robert Abbe, MD. The cabinet’s mementos include a quartz piezo-electric apparatus presented by Marie Curie and made by Pierre Curie. A tool for measuring the strength of an electron discharge from radium, this relic seems out of place. Why is this device part of a cabinet of medical mementos? How and why was this apparatus enshrined as a relic of medical history, and why did the college seek a memento from Marie Curie, who presented it to the college in person? This presentation explores the curious presence of Curie’s gift.
Robert Hicks is currently the director of the Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library and the William Maul Measey Chair for the History of Medicine at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Before this he was the Roy Eddleman Institute Director for Interpretation and Education at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. (He is also very fond of leeches.)
February 16, 2010
Rebecca Skloot, Author
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The Wistar Institute, Author's Series | Visit site »
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Place: The Wistar Institute, 36th & Spruce Streets
Reading and book signing.
Event is free, but space is limited and registration is required.
RSVP by February 11.
About the Book: Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells taken without her knowledge became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the effects of the atom bomb; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning writer, and a contributing editor at Popular Science magazine. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR’s RadioLab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW, and her writing appears in The New York Times Magazine, O: The Oprah Magazine, Discover, Columbia Journalism Review, Prevention, and many others. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, her first book, will be released on February 9, 2010.
February 17, 2010
Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University (Fellow, Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton)
Science and Craft: An Experiment in Reconstructing Early Modern Knowledge
Program in History of Science, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Note: There is no pre-circulated paper for this talk.
This informal seminar will discuss examples in which various kinds of knowledge have been reconstructed through re-enactment of techniques and processes, in order to consider how such reconstruction can be employed as a source by historians to gain insight into the material and mental world of the past.
February 18, 2010
Steven H. Weintraub, Lehigh University
On Legendre’s Work on the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity
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. As is well-known, Legendre was the first to state the Law of Quadratic Reciprocity in the form that we now know it (though an equivalent result had earlier been conjectured by Euler), and he was able to prove it in some but not all cases, with the first complete proof being given by Gauss. In this talk we trace the evolution of Legendre’s work on quadratic reciprocity in his four great works on on number theory, from 1785, 1797, 1808, and 1830.
February 22, 2010
Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia
The Iceberg and the Cathedral: Power, Nature, Artifice, and Encounter in London and the Inuit World
Department of History and Sociology of Science and Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Note change of time and place.
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 3260 South Street
February 23, 2010
Jo Ann Caplin, CHF Société de Chimie Industrielle (American Section) Fellow, Science Television Workshop
Is She or Isn’t She--A Leonardo
Chemical Heriage 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
Jo Ann Caplin took Oxford Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp on a journey to see a work that might or might not be by Leonardo da Vinci. She recorded the work in scans of 240 million pixels that were blown up. Then they traveled to the “vault” where the work was stored. Come with us on this journey of discovery and find out . . . is she or is she not a Leonardo? Carbon-14 techniques, fingerprint analysis, and new computer technology helped verify the “author” of this work.
Jo Ann Caplin, the Société de Chimie Industrielle (American Section) 2009–2010 Fellow, is doing research and filming on the relationships between science and art for her PBS series “Science+Art.” Caplin is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning producer, as well as a former professor and distinguished chair at Ithaca College. Currently, she is a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the science of Leonardo da Vinci and on science writing concentrating on genetics. She is president of the Science Television Workshop.
February 24, 2010
Emily Johnson, Doctoral Student, Yale University
“Who Would Know Better Than the Girls in White?” Nursing Imagery in Postwar Advertising, 1945-1950
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
Abstract: Examining nursing imagery in the period after the Second World War, scholars have concluded that nurses were generally portrayed as threatening, oversexed, and pitiful characters, representing contemporary opposition to women’s labor force participation. Johnson’s analysis of advertisements in mass-market magazines challenges this interpretation by demonstrating that nurses regularly appeared as trustworthy advisers and that they were depicted performing skilled work including dispensing medicine and assisting in surgery. Acknowledging a complicated relationship between the nurse in postwar advertising and contemporary domestic ideology, Johnson argues that these images are critical to understanding the full range of nurses’ representation in postwar mass culture.
February 24, 2010
Peter Galison, Harvard University
What Machines Demand: Ink Blots and Purposeful Circuits
Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, New Brunswick, NJ | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: Alexander Library Pane Room, 169 College Avenue, College Avenue Campus
Information: info@cca.rutgers.edu or 732-932-8426
Evidence and Explanation in the Arts and Sciences: Distinguished Lecture Series
Long before Rorschach, ink blots were a training device for the imagination, a parlor game where people could share with each other all that they saw in the mysterious prints. By the late 19th century, the blots had become a specific test of the faculty of the imagination--the way the recollection of number series tested for the faculty of memory. Hermann Rorschach changed that, transforming the prints into a probe of the unconscious ways we perceive the world. I want to know what had to be assumed about the self for this test to take the form it did. And conversely, once the test became one of the great master metaphors of our time, how does it shape the way we understand our selves? The focus will then shift to Norbert Wiener’s electro-mechanical feedback-designed anti-aircraft gun to probe the origins of cybernetics and to explore the nature of the self demanded by the objects of this new science. What is, after all, intention--the very fabric of the will-based self that for so long dominated “das Ich,” and how did Wiener aim to replace intentionality with machinic loops?