Events for March 2010
March 1, 2010
Adelheid Voskuhl, Harvard University
The Mechanics of Sentiment: Automata, Artisans, and Sentimental Selfhood in the European Enlightenment
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
NOTE: This Workshop has been CANCELLED.
Time: 3:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Place: Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennysylvania
March 2, 2010
Ann Norton Greene, University of Pennsylvania
Horses at Work: Harnessing Power in Industrial America
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science and The Library Company of Philadelphia
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Join us for a Public Lecture in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine| Times: | Reception, 5:30 p.m. Program, 6:00 p.m. |
| Place: | The Library Company of Philadelphia 1314 Locust Street |
March 2, 2010
Daniele Cozzoli, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Between Business History and History of Science: The Franco-American Connection That Led to the Discovery of Antihistaminic Drugs
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.
This talk is part of an in-progress investigation on the history of the discovery of the antihistaminic drugs and of chlorpromazine, one of the first psychotropic drugs. Antihistaminic drugs were discovered by two different research teams in the late 1930s and early 1940s: Daniel Bovet’s team at the Pasteur Institute and Bernard Halpern’s team at Rhône-Poulenc. His talk will stress the scientific and economic connections between French and U.S. pharmaceutical firms, which led to the synthesis of the first antihistaminic compounds. First, he will reconstruct the work of Daniel Bovet’s team on antihistamines at the Pasteur Institute and the work of Bernard Halpern’s team at Rhône-Poulenc. Second, he will explain the indirect role played by Merck & Company in the development of Antergan and Neo-Antergan at Rhône-Poulenc, as well as the role played by Rhône-Poulenc researchers in the development of Antihistine at Ciba Pharmaceuticals. Finally, he will use this case study to draw more general conclusions on the role of the history of science and of business history in the making of the contemporary pharmaceutical research system.
Daniele Cozzoli obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and is currently the “Ramon y Cajal” fellow (tenure track) at the Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona. He has published a book on Descartes’s philosophy of science, as well as a number of papers on Mersenne’s optics and on the philosophy of mathematics in the sixteenth century. At present his researches are mainly devoted to the history of twentieth-century pharmacology, along with work on a book-length project on Daniel Bovet’s scientific work and on a couple of papers on the history of the Italian Health Institute and on the discovery of antihistamines. He is also researching Ismaël Boulliaud’s optics and Alessandro Piccolomini’s astronomy.
March 3, 2010
Merlin Chowkwanyun, Graduate Student, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
Radical Health Activism from the War on Poverty Era to the Age of Austerity (1961-1975)
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. From the early 1960s to the late 1970s, neighborhood activists, health professionals, and radicalized hospital workers mobilized around the issue of health equality across the country. Their demands included changes to student experience in the health professions, an end to exploitative relationships between private medical centers and public hospitals, and increased constituent input into how health care facilities were run. With New York City as a focus, this presentation examines the movement’s formation during the War on Poverty years, its shift to more radical politics, and its implosion in the mid-1970s with the onset of the metropolitan fiscal crisis and internal fissures within ranks. The presentation engages with the growing literature on the origins of health activism, conceptions of patient dignity and health care rights, and the political turbulence of these decades.
March 5, 2010
Marvels and Ciphers: A Look Inside the Flask
Chemical Heritage Foundation | Visit site »
Grand Opening Celebration
Time: 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Place: Chemical Heritage Foundation
“Marvels and Ciphers” opens the door to reactions—both chemical and personal. For centuries, with means ranging from alchemy to quantum-enabled technologies, scientists have struggled to understand the material world—with varying degrees of success. Public responses to scientific debate and discovery are even more varied. A single breakthrough can elicit fascination and hope as well as anxiety and fear. With paintings, photographs, books, and cartoons, “Marvels and Ciphers” explores the inevitable social complexity of scientific pursuits.
Marjorie Gapp, CHF’s curator of art and images, will present an in-depth look at “Marvels and Ciphers” at 6:30 p.m. on March 5.
Click here for Museum visitor information.
March 8, 2010
Richard Holmes
Civic Science Lecture: “Romantic Science”
Chemical Heritage Foundation | Visit site »
Time: 6:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Place: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut Street
Open to the public; fee. Register online by March 2.
Information: Nancy Vonada, 215-873-8226, nvonada@chemheritage.org
In The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes chronicles the riveting breakthroughs that launched the Romantic Age of Science. From Humphry Davy’s near-suicidal gas experiments to William Herschel’s discovery of Uranus, Holmes deftly captures the thrill of scientific exploration at the turn of the 19th century—and shows its impact on Romantic writers like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats.
Richard Holmes is the author of Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer; Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage; Shelley: The Pursuit (for which he received the Somerset Maugham Prize); Coleridge: Early Visions; and Coleridge: Darker Reflections (a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist). Holmes writes and reviews regularly for various journals and newspapers, including the New York Review of Books. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy. He received an honorary Litt.D. from the University of East Anglia, where he was appointed professor of biographical studies in 2001.
CHF’s Civic Science Lectures explore chemistry as a cultural endeavor and encourage public discussion of science.
March 9, 2010
Alberto Cambrosio, CHF Cain Conference Fellow, McGill University
Protocols, Networks and Conventions: New Forms of Objectivity and New Biomedical Practices in the (Post)genomic Era
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 evolution of Western medicine since World War II may be described as a realignment of biology and medicine that has in turn been accompanied by the emergence of a new type of objectivity—regulatory objectivity—based on the systematic recourse to the collective production of evidence. Collaborative forms of work, such as extended networks, expert groups, and consortia, increasingly frame the structure of biomedical activities. This collective turn is especially visible in two domains: genomics—where the production of knowledge relies not only on very large-scale collaborative projects, such as the Human Genome Project, but also on a motley collection of cooperative groups specializing in a given pathology or specific genes—and, more traditionally, clinical trials, in particular in the field of oncology, where new protocols and therapies emerge from large-scale, multicenter clinical trials performed by long-established cooperative groups, such as the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group in the United States and the European Organisation for Research and Treatment in Cancer. In this talk Cambrosio will focus on a new kind of large collaborative clinical trial that emerges at the intersection of these two domains. These kinds of clinical trials raise issues about the redefinition of national and international collaborative links between clinicians and researchers from different disciplines and between public research organizations and biotechnology start-ups.
Alberto Cambrosio has been a professor at McGill University’s Department of Social Studies of Medicine since 1990. His area of expertise lies at the crossroads of medical sociology and the sociology of science and technology. His work focuses on biomedical innovation (in particular, on the application of molecular biology and genomics to the diagnosis and the therapy of cancer) and on the social and historical dynamics of biomedical regulation, objectification, and standardization. His publications include Exquisite Specificity: The Monoclonal Antibody Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1995) and Biomedical Platforms: Realigning the Normal and the Pathological in Late-Twentieth-Century Medicine (MIT Press, 2003), both coauthored with Peter Keating. He was one of the guest editors of a recent special issue of Social Studies of Science on “Biomedical Conventions and Regulatory Objectivity” (October 2009). He has recently submitted a book manuscript (also in collaboration with Peter Keating) titled Cancer on Trial: The Rise of Oncology as a New Style of Practice.
March 9, 2010
Evelyn Fox Keller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Climate Science, Truth, and Democracy
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, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ
Information: info@cca.rutgers.edu or 732-932-8426
Evidence and Explanation in the Arts and Sciences: Distinguished Lecture Series
An impasse of credibility currently prevails in the US around the issues of climate change that threatens to paralyze citizens and experts alike. Much of the internet, radio talk shows, and popular television is flooded with challenges to the credibility and trustworthiness of climate scientists, and even the prestige press (e.g., NY Times and NYRB) has, in an effort to adhere to their traditional ethic of “balance,” has contributed to the widespread misimpression that climate scientists are deeply divided about both the extent of the dangers we face and the relevance of human activity. Not knowing who or what to believe, not knowing how to assess the costs of inaction, the natural response for most people is to do nothing. Meanwhile, the evidence of the seriousness of the problem continues to mount. Most climate scientists, even though extremely concerned, have been reluctant to weigh in on these (often acrimonious) public debates, instead seeking recourse in the particular authority granted them by “peer review,” and fearing that going outside, beyond the reach of peer review, might undermine their credibility. The effect is that the debate that rages in the public domain remains unchecked for intellectual or scientific reliability. The situation is dire, for, given that we live in a democratic state, the possibility of any effective action depends absolutely on the consent of a properly informed public. The questions I want to pose are therefore of two kinds: The first concerns the role of expertise in a democratic society, the ways in which lay citizens can responsibly participate in policy decisions, and the question of how a lay reader is to decide who and what to believe. The second concerns the nature and limits of the climate scientist’s particular responsibility in this political and social situation.
March 15, 2010
Matt Stanley, New York University
Past as Prediction: Victorian Scientists on Ancient Eclipses and the Power of Science
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
March 16, 2010
Joris Mercelis, CHF Doan Fellow, Ghent University, Belgium
Leo H. Baekeland and the Translation of Technology
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.
March 17, 2010
Sonya Grypma, Associate Professor, Trinity Western University, BC, Canada
China Confidential: Ethical and Methodological Challenges of Conducting International Historical Nursing 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
Abstract: Researchers poised to commence work on the as-yet-unwritten history of American missionary nurses in China ought to be mindful of a growing expectation that serious research on China missions must go beyond the conventional reliance on English-language data generation and interpretation for an English-speaking audience. Building on ongoing research on the role of missionary nurses in the development of modern nursing in China, and based on a series of interviews recently conducted in China of participants with ties to a former Canadian mission hospital, this seminar explores ethical and methodological challenges of international and intercultural historical research in nursing.
March 17, 2010
Roger Horowitz, Chemical Heritage Foundation and Hagley Museum and Library
The Chemistry of Kosher
Chemical Heritage Foundation and the National Museum of American Jewish History | Visit site »
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Place: Chemical Heritage Foundation
Advance registration is required by March 12.
Approximately half the items in American supermarkets are certified kosher. What led the food industry to embrace kosher laws and rabbis to study food chemistry? Did modern food change kosher, or did kosher change modern food? CHF Fellow Roger Horowitz, examines the science behind kosher, including the controversial cases of Coca-Cola and Jell-O.
CHF’s Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry hosts a community of visiting fellows who establsh CHF as a leading research center in the history of chemistry and related sciences, technologies, and industries. The “Fellow in Focus” program spotlights research projects that deepen historical perspective and reveal chemistry in unlikely places.
Roger Horowitz is associate director of the Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society at the Hagley Museum and Library and a Gordon Cain Fellow at CHF.
March 18, 2010
Eisso Atzema, University of Maine
Beyond the Compass: On the Mechanical Construction of the Conic Sections
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, there was little concern in Apollonius’ Conics about the actual “mechanical” construction of the conic sections. In fact, it is not entirely clear whether there ever was an interest in Classical Antiquity in any tool that would draw a given conic section in the same way one can draw a circle with the help of a compass. There certainly was an interest in such a tool among Muslim mathematicians. In Renaissance Europe, a number of mathematicians suggested various mechanical ways to construct the conic sections as well-although no actual drawing devices seem to have been built. In this talk Atzema will outline the most important proposals for the mechanical construction of the conic sections and sketch their historical context. He will discuss one particular construction in more detail and pursue it history from the early 17th century to the mid-20th century
March 19, 2010
Erika Lorraine Milam, University of Maryland
From Fish to Man: Negotiating Human Nature with MACOS
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, Regional Colloquium
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Join scholars from the area at the Regional Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine for a discussion of efforts in the 1960's and 1970's to teach the science of human nature. Commentary by Henrika Kuklick.| Time: | Discussion, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m. followed by social hour and light dinner |
| Location: | The College of Physicians of Philadelphia |
March 22, 2010
W. Bernard Carlson, University of Virginia
Nature, Business, and Personality: Explaining Nikola Tesla’s Efforts to Broadcast Power Around the World, 1890-1905
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
March 23, 2010
Karen Snetselaar, St. Joseph's University
Charles Darwin the Experimental Biologist
American Philosophical Society Museum and Pennsylvania Horitcultural Society | Visit site »
Times / Locations:
5:00 - 6:15 p.m., view Dialogues with Darwin in Philosophical Hall, 104 South Fifth Street
6:30 p.m., Lecture in Franklin Hall, 427 Chestnut Street
After the lecture, APS Museum Director and Curator Sue Ann Prince will offer a curatorial tour of the exhibit.
Fee. To register and purchase tickets, please contact Carol Dutill, 215-988-8869 or cdutill@pennhort.org.
Charles Darwin is recognized world-wide for developing and disseminating ideas on evolution and natural selection. His work as an experimental scientist is less well-known. As a botanist, Darwin carried out a number of elegant experiments directed at understanding such wide-ranging topics as plant movement in response to light, mechanisms by which plants prevent self-fertilization, and responses of insectivorous plants to different food sources. As a gentleman scientist, Darwin did many of his experiments in his house or on the surrounding grounds, often involving his children in the activities. This talk will describe some of these botanical experiments and their impact on future plant biologists.
Dr. Karen Snetselaar is Professor and Chair of Biology at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. She is a botanist whose research is focused on plant symbiosis and fungi and has published extensively in science journals. In addition to her teaching responsibilities at Saint Joseph’s University, Dr. Snetselaar directs a program that brings hands-on science into Philadelphia elementary school classrooms. She has been teaching for the Wagner Institute since 1997 as a member of the adult education faculty and through the GeoKids program, a partnership with four elementary schools.
March 24, 2010
Susan Brandt, Temple University
Medical Education or Spectacle? Dissecting the Body Politics of Jan Van Rymsdyk’s Anatomical Drawings
Pennsylvania Hospital, Historical Collections | Visit site »
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Place: Zubrow Auditorium, Pennsylvania Hospital
Free and open to the public.
RSVP to Stacey Peeples, Curator-Lead Archivist, Pennsylvania Hospital, stacey.peeples@uphs.upenn.edu or 215-829-5434.
In 1762, when Dr. William Shippen, Jr., brought Jan Van Rymsdyk’s anatomical drawings and plaster casts from London to Philadelphia, he also conveyed new ideas about the superiority of dissection-based medical education and a culture of medical spectatorship. As university-trained physicians like Shippen launched their medical and obstetrical practices, they used their mastery of anatomy to differentiate themselves from the myriad of female midwives and other healers that populated Philadelphia’s competitive, consumer-driven medical marketplace. Shippen advertised a course of anatomical lectures for medical students and “for the Entertainment of any Gentlemen,” featuring the “curious Phaenominon” of the “Gravid Uterus” illustrated by Van Rymsdyk. The Pennsylvania Hospital board encouraged this “entertaining and profitable” venture, which launched Shippen’s successful career. (Quotations are from The Pennsylvania Gazette, 11 November 1762.)
In 1763, Shippen invited the public to view human dissections at his Anatomical Theater. While Philadelphians were fascinated with dissection demonstrations, Shippen’s lectures also provoked shocking rumors that he had procured desecrated corpses from grave robbers. This lecture will interrogate the problematic boundaries between the deceased body as a sacred relic, a medical educational tool, and the object of titillating bodily spectatorship. As the controversies over current exhibitions like “Body Worlds” indicate, debates over the propriety of dissected human bodies on public display remain unresolved.
This is the second lecture in a series highlighting Pennsylvania Hospital’s exhibition, “From Pastels to PDA’s: Medical Education from the 18th to the 21st Century.” Susan Brandt is a Family Nurse Practitioner and Temple University doctoral student in History.
March 25, 2010
Gerald Kutcher, The State University of New York at Binghamton
Fast Neutrons for Cancer Therapy: A Case Study of Failure
Program in History of Science, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: 210 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Note: There is no pre-circulated paper for this talk.
Abstract. In the 1930s, Ernest Lawrence claimed that the unique properties of neutrons produced by his cyclotron preferentially killed cancer cells. In collaboration with his brother John and the Radiologist Robert Stone, human trials were initiated at Lawrence Livermore and showed promising early results. Nevertheless by the early 1940s patients were suffering from such severe toxicity that Stone publicly announced in 1947 that neutrons were unsuitable for cancer therapy. Yet, shortly following World War II, the Medical Research Council of the UK agreed to provide financial support for the development of a cyclotron at the Hammersmith Hospital in London. Although the primary purpose of the unit was to support experiments in radiobiology, by the late 1960s, after a number of bitter internal battles, the cyclotron was committed primarily to cancer therapy with neutrons. Following a series of clinical trials, the clinical leader of the project, Mary Catterall, reported that neutrons provided significant advantages over conventional x-rays, particularly for cancers of the head and neck. During the same period, the MRC built a second cyclotron in Edinburgh, and in a series of papers the Edinburgh team reported that neutrons had little or no advantage over x-rays in controlling tumors while they continued to produce troubling late complications. A major controversy ensued – the so called battle of the dueling cyclotrons – that rapidly escalated from exchanges in the medical literature to bitter and personal attacks in the popular press, and to a widening range of protagonists including the office of Prime Minister Thatcher. Neutron therapy was badly discredited in the UK, and funding for neutron programs suffered worldwide, especially in the US. The story of the failure of neutron therapy is more than a tale of operatic proportions. Its failure opens out for us some of the characteristics of medical research practices. For example, the neutron story tells us much about the important role of the social in clinical trials. It also shows us not only how neutron technologies were taken up and transformed by its users, but how human cancers were reconfigured, constructed so to speak, as suitable candidates for therapy with the evolving neutron machines.
March 29, 2010
Gwen Ottinger, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Black Boxes and Clear Buckets: Environmental Justice and the Politics of Scientific Instruments
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
March 29, 2010
Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania
Touching the Matter of Privacy
Department of English, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 5:15 p.m.
Place: Lea Library, 6th floor of Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania
Dead men tell no tales. But if you tell tales about them, you may be committing a tortuous violation of their transmortem right to privacy. Various courts in the U.S. and elsewhere have held that, under certain circumstances, a decedent has a cause of action against a living person, which may be brought by the decedent’s proxy or representative. These legal provisions have helped create an atmosphere of considerable irresolution in secular society surrounding questions of postmortem interest and harm. Can the dead suffer harm as a consequence of what we, as historians, do with information about them? Does personhood persist beyond death? Or does death render a person something entirely other: a corpse, an inanimate object, what Thomas Jefferson in 1824 called mere matter unendowed with will, the ghostly effect of limited testamentary power? Most recently in the U.S., this irresolution has manifested itself in relation to the matter of privacy protection in the domain of personal health information.
The test-case is Richard Nisbett (1753-1823), at various points a resident of London, the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, and Philadelphia, who suffered a mental breakdown and was admitted to the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1800, where he remained until his death. Nisbett wrote extravagantly of sea voyages he claimed to have taken with Captain Cook and other adventurers. He also produced vivid watercolor illustrations and maps of these fantastic voyages, some of which are archived at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, where access to them is unrestricted. However, due to provisions of the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), enacted in 2003, one crucial document relating to Nisbett’s manuscript casebook kept by Samuel Coates, one of the caregivers at the hospital, is no longer freely accessible to researchers. The protection of patients’ (and their descendants’) right to privacy is HIPAA’s aim, and it makes no distinction between Nisbett, who died almost two centuries ago, and you or me living today. The new legislation thus has a double effect: it frustrates historical research on early American health and medicine, and it raises provocative questions about privacy and historiography. Who owns and administers the past? To what degree are we, as historians, bound to consider Nisbett’s privacy, whether according to his conception or ours?
Max Cavitch is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also a Council member at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and a member of the Collaboration Committee of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and Penn’s Department of Psychiatry. He is the author of a book, American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (2007), and of various essays and articles on American literature, transatlantic literary relations, poetics, and film.
March 30, 2010
Barbara Traister, CHF Allington Fellow, Lehigh University
Alchemy for Everyman: Practical Advice on Finding the Philosopher’s Stone
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.
March 31, 2010
Jessica Martucci, Doctoral Student, Departmentof History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
A Woman Should Know: The Role of Nurses in the History of Breastfeeding, 1950-1978
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. For most of the second-half of the 20th century, nurses and doctors were formally taught very little about how to successfully assist a mother with breastfeeding. Despite their lack of education, however, nurses were routinely left in charge of overseeing the feeding of newborns – whether they were bottle-fed or breastfed. In this talk, Martucci explores how nurses, as both women and healthcare professionals, positioned themselves as breastfeeding experts in the hospital and in the press.