Events for April 2010
April 2, 2010
Fa-Ti Fan, State University of New York at Binghamton and Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
‘The People’s War Against Earthquakes’: Science, Natural Disasters, and Mass Politics in Communist China
Rutgers University
Time: 11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.
Place: Van Dyck Hall, 301, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Pre-circulated paper; for a copy, contact James Delbourgo, jdelbourgo@history.rutgers.edu
Abstract: China experienced a series of major earthquakes in the 1960s and 70s. In response to the threat of earthquakes, earthquake prediction became one of the most important and urgent scientific programs in China. Guided by scientific ideas as well as political beliefs, the Chinese developed theories and practices of earthquake prediction based on everyday observation, and the Communist state recruited the masses for this purpose. This paper examines mass participation in earthquake prediction in Communist China with an emphasis on the epistemology underlying the techniques of observation and prediction.
April 5, 2010
Karen Detlefsen, University of Pennsylvania
Ideas and Institutions: Some Thoughts on Women’s Role in the Emergence of Modern 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
April 7, 2010
History of Women’s Health Conference 2010
Pennsylvania Hospital, the University of Pennsylvania , and the International Council on Women's Health Issues | Visit site »
“The Female as ‘Invalid’: Medical Diagnosis and Women”
Times: 7:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Place: Pennsylvania Hospital, Zubrow Auditorium, 800 Spruce Street, Philadelphia
RSVP by April 1 to Stacey Peeples, 215-829-5434 or peepless@pahosp.com
This conference is free and open to the public
The Pennsylvania Hospital will host the fifth annual History of Women’s Health Conference focusing on women’s health issues from the late 18th century to the present.
The keynote speaker will be Rosaly Correa-de-Araujo, M.D., M.Sc., Ph.D., Director of the Office of the Americas within the Office of the Secretary, Office of Global Health Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Her presentation will be “Cities and Women’s Health: A Global Perspective on Equality Across Gender, Race/Ethnicity, Age and Disability Status.”
The closing speaker will be Randi Hutter Epstein, M.D., a medical writer and adjunct professor of journalism at The Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University. She will speak about her book, Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank, specifically highlighting the rise of the maternity hospitals in urban areas using the New York Lying-In as an example. Her talk will explore how these homes for the “deserving poor” transformed into major medical centers offering state-of-the-art care.
April 7, 2010
Pat Morris, Royal Holloway, University of London
A History of Taxidermy
The Wagner Free Instiute of Science | Visit site »
Times: 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.; Lecture at 5:30 p.m.
Place: The Wagner Free Institute of Science
This special Weeknights at the Wagner lecture is presented in conjunction with Observatory, Brooklyn, NY.
What makes taxidermy so interesting? Whether encountering thousands of specimens in a museum, or just a few in a hunter’s trophy collection, viewing taxidermy is captivating. Dr. Pat Morris will explain his theories about why people find the display of mounted animals to be so fascinating. Dr. Morris is a leading British mammal ecologist who has been researching the history of taxidermy as a lifelong hobby. He has traveled throughout Europe and the USA seeking out interesting taxidermy specimens and stories.
His presentation will consider taxidermy from its roots as a business in the 19th century, reviewing the history of stuffed animals, and attempts to find the oldest surviving specimens. Dr. Morris will also explore the diverse and amusing uses of taxidermy - including major museum exhibits, stuffed pets, hunting trophies, animal furniture, and squirrels playing cards. His lecture will also discuss the confused and changing public attitudes toward taxidermy.
Dr. Pat Morris will speak in the Institute’s historic lecture hall at 5:30. The museum will stay open late (4 - 7 PM) for this event. In conjunction with the lecture there will be an exhibition in the Wagner’s museum of work created by Animal Sculpture students from the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial.
Dr. Pat Morris retired from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2002 where he was a Senior Lecturer in Zoology and oversaw research on mammal ecology. He has published many books and scientific papers and has been featured regularly in radio and TV broadcasts. The history of taxidermy has been a lifelong interest. He has traveled widely, with his wife Mary, seeking interesting taxidermy specimens and stories. Their home in England holds the largest collection and archive of historical taxidermy in Britain.
April 7, 2010
Maaike van der Lugt, Université Paris Diderot (Paris 7) / Institut universitaire de France
Generatio: Procreation, Heredity, and “Bioethics” in Medieval Europe
Program in History of Science and the Program in Medieval Studies, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: 230 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Note: There is no pre-circulated paper for this talk.
Abstract. The central place of genetics in contemporary biology can make it easy to forget that a general, coherent, and “hard” concept of heredity has developed only recently, over the course of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. How did societies that had no clearly defined concept of heredity explain the differences and similarities between parents and off-spring, and, more generally, conceptualize the way in which organisms, especially human beings, acquire their characteristics?
Van der Lugt will concentrate on the ways in which medieval scholars answered these and related questions and analyse the conceptual tools they forged and used to discuss them. The scholastics invented the concept of hereditary disease — which would play a crucial role in the development of modern theories of heredity — by transferring the traditional, legal sense of the adjective (related to the transmission of goods) to the biological realm. Even so, generation (generatio), not heredity (hereditas) was the central concept in the medieval life sciences. The idea that the mixture of substances provided by parents (seeds, menstrual blood) determines the appearance and sex of the child coexisted, without contradiction, with the conviction that environmental and behavioral factors also play an important part. Now common distinctions between heredity and development, between the acquired and the inherited, have only limited relevance here.
Generatio wasn’t just the stuff of scholastic speculation. As is the case today, debates about the mechanism of procreation, the nature of the substances involved, and the development of the seed into a viable human being had larger moral, legal and practical significance. I shall address several of these issues: whether abortion must be equated with murder, the treatment reserved for “monstrous” births, and the extent to which there was room, within the medieval concept of generatio, for eugenetics.
Maaike van der Lugt is a Visiting Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton.
April 12, 2010
Sigrid Schmalzer, University of Massachusetts-Amherst
Hairy People, Peking Man, Bigfoot, and the Case for a Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China
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
April 12, 2010
Michael Hagner, ETH Zurich - Swiss Federal Instiute of Technology
What is Dippoldism? On Sex, Crime and Education in Germany, c. 1900
Program in History of Science and the Department of German, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: East Pyne Building, Rm 010
Note: There is no pre-circulated paper for this talk.
Abstract. This lecture deals with an influential criminal case that took place in Germany in the early 20th century. A law student from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, who had been engaged by the director of the Deutsche Bank to tutor his sons, was accused in the death of one of his two charges. The autopsy of the corpse showed multiple signs of bodily mistreatment. The tutor was arrested, and the subsequent trial was one of the most spectacular in Wilhelmine Germany. The lecture will briefly reconstruct this case and then analyze in greater detail the controversial discussion it provoked in criminology, pedagogy, psychiatry, and among the general public. In sexual science, this case led to the invention of a new pathological category – “dippoldism”, from the name of the tutor, Andreas Dippold – designating sexual arousal from applying corporal punishment to children. Before this case became canonical as a subcategory of sadism, it underwent several transformations, which gave evidence of its complexity. The topic is highly relevant to current debates and demonstrates how the different and interwoven layers of complex cases in the history of science can only be adequately dealt with by an approach that spans several different disciplines.
This event is co-sponsored by the Eberhard L. Faber 1915 Memorial Fund in the Humanities Council, the Department of German and the Program in History of Science at Princeton University.
April 13, 2010
Chin Jou, National Institutes of Health
How the Calorie Leapt from Chemistry Lab Obscurity to Diet-Culture Eminence
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.
Chin Jou discusses the history of the calorie starting with chemist Wilbur Olin Atwater’s (1844–1907) experiments using bomb and respiration calorimeters in the 1890s. She then examines how the calorie became central to a new diet culture, as legions of young middle-class women took up calorie counting in the 1910s and 1920s. The talk also underscores the ways in which the concept of the calorie transformed our vision of food, causing us to focus on the number of calories in a particular food item rather than on the food itself, and speculates on why calorie counting became such a popular and enduring means of weight management.
Chin Jou received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2009, after defending her dissertation, “Controlling Consumption: The Origins of Modern American Ideas about Food, Eating, and Fat, 1890–1930.” She is currently a DeWitt Stetten Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Biomedical Sciences and the Technology of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health.
April 15, 2010
Alan Gluchoff, Villanova University
The Introduction and Spread of Nomography in America, 1900-1950
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: Nomography can be roughly defined as the theory and methods by which numerical evaluation of ordinary functional relations can be accomplished geometrically. (The slide rule is a simple example of one such method.) It was established as a mathematical discipline in 1899 by Maurice d’Ocagne (1862-1938), an accomplished French engineer who synthesized earlier work on this subject. His 1899 volume “Traite de Nomographie” is a systematic development of the construction and use of what came to be called nomograms (variously called charts, alignment diagrams, intersection diagrams, or abaques) for use in computations in diverse engineering disciplines. While the use of nomograms to aid in calculation became widespread in Europe in the following years, the mathematics associated with their construction received attention as well. This resulted in articles in mathematical journals and a mention of the field by Hilbert in connection with problem 13 of his list of 23 problems of 1900. Nomograms have been described by one writer as the “fractals of their day” due to their relation to mathematical law and visual appeal.
This talk attempts to survey how nomography was introduced into the United States in the years following the publication of d’Ocagne’s book, looking at its debut in the various communities of mechanical, civil, and electrical engineers, scientists, and mathematicians, with special focus on the latter. During the period from 1900 to 1950 mathematicians such as Frank Morley, E. H. Moore, T. H. Gronwall, O. D. Kellogg, Lester Ford and Edward Kasner concerned themselves with popularizing, extending, and using the ideas of nomography. The subject was taught in colleges and technical institutes, often out of textbooks written by the instructors. It appealed to all types of mathematical people: pure researchers, college professors and high school teachers, and had its enthusiasts among algebraists, geometers and analysts. Nomograms became particularly popular as a graphical method for solving polynomial equations of degree five or less, and found a place in the changing nature of college algebra during this time. We also will mention some mathematical obstacles which occurred as they came into wider use in scientific, engineering and industrial settings.
April 15, 2010
Jonathan Rees, University of Southern Colorado
Inventing the Cold Chain: Technology and Marketing in the 19th-Century American Natural Ice Industry
Hagley Museum and Library | Visit site »
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Place: Copeland Room, Hagley Library
To be placed on the mailing list to receive the paper, contact Carol Ressler Lockman, clockman@hagley.org.
Research Seminars sponsored by Hagley’s Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society’ are held on the second Thursday night of the month during the academic year. The audience is drawn widely from Hagley’s membership, scholars and researchers, students in the Mid-Atlantic area, and the general public. Papers are circulated in advance. An informal reception at 6 p.m. precedes the commentary and discussion at 6:30 p.m.
April 16, 2010
Carin Berkowitz, Cornell University & PACHS Dissertation Writing Fellow
Rhetoric, Reform, and Revolution: Making “British Medicine” in Early Nineteenth-Century London
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, Regional Colloquium
Join scholars from the area at the Regional Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine for a discussion of the rhetoric of reform in British medical science and education during the early 19th century.
Time: Discussion, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.,
followed by social hour and light dinner
Location: The Wagner Free Institute of Science
Please download and read the paper in advance.
Abstract. During the first three decades of the 19th century, many proposals were circulated regarding reform in medical education. These proposals became numerous and their proponents very vocal by the 1820s, in great part due to the dialogue and audience generated by medical periodicals. While historians have often recognized the radicals of the reform movement, the movement itself was broad and comprised many groups. Those that emphasized practical skills and systematic education, and that might therefore be portrayed as more conservative when compared with their more radical experimentalist brethren, had more immediate success in shaping what constituted medical science and medical education in Britain, though they have often been overlooked. This paper evaluates the rhetoric of medical reform, examining reform through the eyes of its proponents. Conservative reformers, who wanted to refashion or improve medical education in London, wanted to do so in ways they considered particularly British—by emphasizing therapeutics and practice, by continuing what they represented as British traditions of philosophical anatomy and deductive physiology, and by promoting competition among decentralized educational institutions. These conservative reformers should not be mistaken for conservative members of the establishment. They based their medicine in the classroom and in practical attainments, and they used rhetorical distinctions between revolution and reform to advocate for reform in a conservative, restrained, British fashion.
April 19, 2010
Michael Yudell, Drexel University
Making Race: Biology and the Evolution of the Race Concept in 20th-Century American Thought
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Place: Room 345, Academic Wing, University of Pennysylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
[Note change in location]
Co-sponsored by the Department of History and Sociology of Science and the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania
April 20, 2010
Yoshiyuki Kikuchi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Emperor’s Chemists at War: Joji Sakurai during the Russo-Japanese and First World Wars, 1904–1919
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.
World War I (1914–1919) has been given an important place in the historiography of chemistry in the twentieth century, especially for its role in triggering the mobilization of chemical expertise for war purposes. In this presentation Kikuchi aims to modify this global picture by applying it to the case of Japan. He will argue that the involvement of civilian chemists with war-related research activities began there much earlier, during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), by focusing on the R&D of tear gas by Joji Sakurai, one of the elite chemists in Meiji, Japan. Kikuchi contends that these two wars transformed Sakurai from a civilian chemistry professor into a national figure at the crossroads of science, technology, and the military, who significantly influenced the course of development of the Japanese scientific research system in the interwar years.
Yoshiyuki Kikuchi was awarded his B.A. and M.Sc. in history of science from the University of Tokyo, and then a Ph.D. in history of science from the United Kingdom’s Open University in 2006. In 2008–2009 he was the Sidney M. Edelstein Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Currently, Kikuchi is a postdoctoral fellow in the History of Modern Physical Sciences, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
April 26, 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 Pennysylvania | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Place: 337 Claudia Cohen Hall
April 27, 2010
Matteo Martelli, CHF Edelstein Fellow, University of Bologna, Italy
‘Natural and Secret Things’: The Alchemical Work by Pseudo-Democritus in Its Greek and Syriac Tradition
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 treatise ascribed by Byzantine manuscripts to Democritus is the oldest alchemical work known in the Western world. The reconstruction of this treatise allows us to understand the origin of Greek alchemy and its relationship to ancient craftsmanship (both Egyptian and Persian). In addition, by studying this writing—which was translated into Syriac and Arabic languages—we can follow the first steps taken by the Middle Eastern culture toward assimilating the heritage of Greek scientific knowledge.
Matteo Martelli’s early research focused on Greek alchemy, with particular regard to its beginnings, and was preparation for his Ph.D. dissertation in Greek philology. In addition, during a research stay in Paris, at Unité Propre de Recherche du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he widened the scope of his inquiry to include the Syriac tradition. He is now completing the critical edition of the alchemical writings by Pseudo-Democritus, with an Italian translation and commentary.
April 28, 2010
Michael Yudell, Assistant Professor, Department of Community Health and Prevention, Drexel University
A History of Blame? Autism Spectrum Disorder Etiology Research Since 1943
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: There remains, despite myriad claims to the contrary, no known etiology of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), and little historical understanding of the diagnosis. From blaming parents to genes to vaccines and vaccine ingredients, the search for what causes ASDs has produced more condemnation and controversy than a definitive understanding of the group of developmental disorders under the ASD umbrella. This talk explores the early history of the search for the etiology of ASDs. Once diagnosed as childhood schizophrenia and a host of other neuro-psychiatric disorders, autism was first named by the psychiatrist Leo Kanner in 1943 as a disorder of “disturbances of affective contact.” Yet, before the end of the 1940s Kanner abandoned a biological explanation for the disorder for a purely psychogenic one. Kanner’s new description of autism etiology laid blame squarely on bad parenting. From Kanner was born what would become one of the most destructive and reviled theories of autism etiology—the refrigerator parent or, more commonly, mother. In Kanner’s view, autistic children were “kept neatly in refrigerators that did not defrost. Their withdrawal seems to be an act of turning away from such a situation to seek comfort in solitude.” This view of autism dominated the medical and psychological fields for almost three decades, led most prominently by the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. It was not until the 1960s that the refrigerator parent hypothesis was challenged in any significant way. Biological and environmental theories of autism etiology did not become the dominant approach in research until at least the 1970s and 1980s. This talk will explore the history of etiologic research of ASDs and explore the shifts between biological, psychogenic, and environmental explanations for the disorder from the 1940s through the 1970s. The paper will consider both the social and scientific forces behind changing approaches to the etiology of the disorder.
April 29, 2010
Kathleen Sands, University of Maryland and Thomas Edison State College
Demon Possession and Exorcism: Medical Explanations?
F. C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia | Visit site »
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Place: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Although modern people often dismiss demon possession and exorcism as fantasy or superstition, these two phenomena actually exist. They transcend time and culture, with documented cases appearing in virtually every part of the world, in every religion, and in every century of recorded history. Explanations for their occurrence are offered by theologians and anthropologists, but what about physicians? What medical explanations exist to account for the suffering of people who think they are possessed by demons and the success of exorcism in relieving these same sufferers? Join Kathleen Sands for an illustrated lecture exploring the medical history of demon possession and exorcism.
Kathleen Sands, Ph.D., is a humanities professor at the University of Maryland and Thomas Edison State College. She is also the author of Demon Possession in Elizabethan England and An Elizabethan Lawyer’s Possession by the Devil: The Story of Robert Brigges. Her work has been anthologized in a popular university textbook, The Witchcraft Reader (second edition), edited by Darren Oldridge.