Events for October 2010
October 4, 2010
Susan Strasser, University of Delaware
Herbal Medicine and Herbal Commerce in a Developing Consumer Culture
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Place: 337 Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennysylvania
October 6, 2010
“A Lady Alone”: Elizabeth Blackwell, First American Woman Physician
Drexel University College of Medicine, Legacy Center | Visit site »
Time: 5:00 p.m.
Location: Falls Center, 3300 Henry Avenue, Philadelphia 19139
[Former site of Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania]
This one-woman, one-act play marks the opening of the traveling exhibit on ”Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrting America’s Women Physicians.” A reception will immediately following the performance.
October 9, 2010
Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Medicine
Department of History and Program on the History of Science, Technology, Environment and Health, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ | Visit site »
Times: 8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Place: Rutgers University, New Brunswick
The Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Medicine is organized and coordinated by graduate students across North America working in fields related to the history of medicine. Our mission is to foster a sense of community and provide a forum for sharing and critiquing graduate research by peers from a variety of institutions and backgrounds. There is no fee for the Seminar, but registration is required.
For further information, email Bridget Gurtler and Dora Vargha at jasmedconf@gmail.com, and return to this listing in the fall for additional details.
October 12, 2010
James Rodger Fleming, Colby College
Fixing the Sky: Historical Perspectives on Weather and Climate Control
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lunch Talk | 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 presentation examines the tragicomic history of rainmakers, weather warriors, and climate engineers, arguing that history matters in pressing issues of current public-policy concern and technical decision-making.
James Rodger Fleming is a historian of science and technology and professor of science, technology, and society at Colby College. Fleming recently held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the Smithsonian Institution, the Roger Revelle Fellowship in Global Stewardship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a public-policy scholarship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. In the spring of 2011 he will convene a Gordon Cain research conference on the history of atmospheric chemistry at CHF.
October 13, 2010
Susan Strasser, University of Delaware
Herbal Medicine and Herbal Commerce in a Developing Consumer Culture
Program in History of Science, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Co-Sponsored by the Program in History of Science and the Program in Women and Gender Studies
Note: There is no pre-circulated paper for this talk.
Cick here for more information.
Abstract. Until the mid-twentieth century, all American doctors prescribed herbs and chemicals extracted from them; many plants had long histories of effective use in clinical practice, though only a few were as powerful as the synthetics that eventually supplanted them. Prescription coexisted with self-dosing and herbal commerce with backyard medicine; people used what would now be considered mainstream and alternative systems simultaneously. The trade in medicinal plants was based in a broader international commerce that sourced and traded a wide range of natural substances to manufacturers. As chemists isolated molecules from plant material and developed synthetic substitutes, the drug industry created standardized products; scientific progress was incorporated into a larger vision that celebrated the modernity of consumer products. Commercialized relationships to, and commodified perceptions of, nature and bodies were central to that vision.
Susan Strasser, Richards Professor of American History at the University of Delaware, is the author of Never Done: A History of American Housework, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, and Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim foundations, the German Historical Institute, the Harvard Business School, the American Council of Learned Societies, Radcliffe College’s Bunting Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Cultures of Consumption Programme, Birkbeck College, University of London.
October 13, 2010
Gerry Oppenheimer, CUNY & Columbia University
Framing the Framingham Heart Disease Study
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
Information: ehweiss@nursing.upenn.edu or 215-898-4502
Abstract. Following World War II, the search for the causes of coronary heart disease (CHD), the leading cause of death in the United States and Great Britain, profoundly changed the purview of epidemiology, shifting its primary focus from infectious disease to chronic disorders. When CHD epidemiology is presented historically in the U.S., it often becomes the story of the successful, long-running Framingham Heart Disease Study, initiated in 1947. Framingham becomes a kind of “founding myth,” a New England town in which altruistic, white, ethnically diverse citizens, forward-looking local doctors, and a group of intensely curious physician-scientists cooperate to tease out the causes of epidemic CHD. This act of historical simplification leaves in Framingham’s shadow the other significant cohort studies begun in the 1940s and 1950s, and the generation of CHD studies and clinical trials that followed. It misrepresents the missteps and contestations that are part of any scientific endeavor, especially the debates over the role of risk factors (a term coined by Framingham) and whether any actually caused heart disease and were therefore vital to its prevention. At least as important, it masks the central role of federal public health policy which created and funded Framingham and without which a CHD epidemiology of cohort studies and multi-center clinical trials would not have existed.
Gerry Oppenheimer is Professor of Public Health at the City University of New York and the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University
October 14, 2010
John Tresch, University of Pennsylvania
The Experiments of Edgar Allan Poe
The Wagner Free Institute of Science | Visit site »
Visit the Museum: 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
Lecture: 5:30 - 7:00 p.m.
Edgar Allan Poe is usually thought of as a fantasist, more at home in the realm of imagination than the world of fact and reason. Yet many of his tales of mystery and the grotesque show the impact of the scientific and technological discoveries of his day.
This talk will reveal a lesser-known side of Poe. After being expelled from Jefferson’s University of Virginia, Poe received some of the best scientific training available at the time as a cadet at West Point. He later worked as an early science journalist, reporting and evaluating new discoveries and inventions to readers curious about the universe and hungry for novelty. Poe took special pleasure in debunking scientific hoaxes, such as the Chess-playing Turk, and even more in inventing his own.
Poe’s writings share his age’s enthusiasm for Natural History and the classification of specimens (gold bugs and others); for electricity, magnetism and mesmerism; and for theories about the origin and destiny of the solar system. The obsession of many of his best-loved tales is nothing other than the exploration of the power and the limits of calculation and reason.
Poe invented and contributed to new, scientifically-influenced literary genres--the detective story and science fiction. This talk will consider the literary experiments of this singular author, in both familiar and lesser-known works, as a reflection --and critique--of a society being transformed by science and industry.
John Tresch is Assistant Professor in History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of The Romantic Machine: Technology and Metamorphosis in Paris, 1821-1851 and is currently working on a book on Poe and American Science.
October 18, 2010
John Harley Warner, Yale University, and James M. Edmonson, Dittrick Medical History Center
Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, 1880-1930
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Section on Medical History | Visit site »
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Place: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
RSVP
Co-Sponsored by the Section on Medical History and the Section on Arts and Medicine
This presentation centers on John Harley Warner’s and James Edmonson’s recent book, which compiles and discusses photographs of dissection scenes made by medical students, a little-know but distinct genre. Featuring 138 rare, historic photographs, Dissection is a “landmark book” (Ruth Richardson) that reveals a startling piece of American history, the rite of passage into the mysteries of medicine captured in photography.
From the advent of photography in the 19th century and into the 20th century, medical students, often in secrecy, took photographs of themselves with the cadavers that they dissected: their first patients. The photographs were made in a variety of forms, from proud class portraits to staged dark-humor scenes, from personal documentation to images reproduced on postcards sent in the mail. Poignant, strange, disturbing, and humorous, they are all compelling.
These photographs were made at a time when Victorian societal taboos against intimate knowledge of the human body were uneasily set aside for medical students in pursuit of knowledge that could be gained only in the dissecting room. Dissection, writes Mary Roach, “documents—in archival photographs and informed, approachable prose—a heretofore almost entirely unknown genre, the dissection photograph.”
October 19, 2010
Rebecca Miller, Harvard Graduate School of Education & PACHS Dissertation Research Fellow
Crafting the Two Cultures: Identifying and Educating Future Scientists and Non-Scientists in America, 1910–1970
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lunch Talk | 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 professionalization of science in the late 19th century introduced the enduring conception of “scientists” and “non-scientists” as distinct types of people with different educational needs. In subsequent decades, educators engaged in a systematic quest to codify, normalize, and apply ideas about the unique characteristics of each group and how each was expected to make use of scientific knowledge.
This presentation examines how 20th-century U.S. educators constructed and effectuated the notions of “future scientist” and “non-scientist” as entities distinct in makeup, educability, and civic responsibility. It will analyze how these distinctions took shape through the science curriculum, psychological testing and assessment of scientific identities and aptitudes, guidance and vocational counseling, and research on science curriculum and pedagogy. It will further consider how the articulation and enactment of educational differentiation in science both shaped and responded to changing views of the nature of the scientific enterprise and its place in society.
Rebecca B. Miller is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on the role of education in mediating the relationship between science and society. Prior to her graduate studies, Miller conducted research on intracellular transport at Princeton University and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, worked as a freelance science writer, and developed online courses in science and medicine for Columbia University.
October 20, 2010
Karen P. Merrill, Williams College; Tyler Priest, University of Houston; Paul Sabin, Yale University
The History of Oil in America: Before and After the Gulf Spill
Princeton Modern America Workshop and Princeton Environmental Institute | Visit site »
Time: 4:30 - 6:30 p.m.
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Information: maxtell@princeton.edu
This year’s Deepwater Horizon incident on the Gulf Coast was historic in its geographic scope, environmental impact, political significance, economic fallout, and legal consequences. This symposium will bring together leading political historians of the American environment to discuss the impact of the recent Deepwater Horizon blowout and spill on contemporary American environmental politics, while also placing the incident into the broader historical context of U.S. energy policy, technology, consumption, and business practices.
Panelists:
Karen R. Merrill, Professor of History, Williams College
“Oil, the Gulf Spill, and the Challenge for Political History”
Tyler Priest, Director of Global Studies, C.T. Bauer College of Business,
University of Houston
“Deepwater Horizons: The History and Prospects of Offshore Oil in the
United States”
Paul Sabin, Assistant Professor of Environmental History, Yale University
“Crisis and Continuity in United States Energy Politics”
Commentator: Michael Oppenheimer, Albert G. Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs, Princeton University
October 21, 2010
Betty Mayfield, Hood College
Women, Mathematics, Euler and Undergraduates
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
October 22, 2010
Nathan Ensmenger, University of Pennsylvania
Is Chess the Drosophila of AI? A Social History of an Algorithm
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science, Regional Colloquium
Join scholars from the area for the Regional Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine for a discussion of the role of computer chess in defining the identity and research agenda of artificial intelligence.Please download and read the paper in advance.
Time: Discussion, 4:00 - 5:30 p.m.,
followed by social hour and light dinner
Location: Benjamin Franklin Hall, 427 Chestnut Street
Commentary by Hyungsub Choi.
Abstract: Since the mid-1960s, researchers in computer science have famously referred to chess as the “drosophila” of artificial intelligence. What they seem to mean by this is that chess, like the common fruit fly, is an accessible, familiar, and relatively simple experimental technology that nonetheless can be productively used to produce valid knowledge about other, more complex systems. But for historians of science and technology, the analogy between chess and drosophila assumes a larger significance. As Robert Kohler has ably described, the decision to adopt drosophila as the organism of choice for genetics research had far-reaching implications for the development of 20th century biology. In a similar manner, the decision to focus on chess as the measure of both human and computer intelligence had important and unintended consequences for artificial intelligence research. This paper explores the history of computer chess as an experimental technology and the ways in which the decision to focus on chess shaped the research agenda of artificial intelligence for several decades. More broadly, it attempts to open up the virtual black box of computer software—and of computer games in particular—to the scrutiny of historical and sociological analysis.
Nathan Ensmenger studied engineering and applied mathematics at Princeton University and the history of science at the University of Pennsylvania. His current research interests are aimed at reintegrating the history of the “information revolution’’--very broadly defined to encompass a wide range of 19th and 20th century scientific, technological and social developments--into mainstream American social and cultural history.
Hyungsub Choi is Manager for Electronics, Innovation and Emerging Technology Programs at the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
October 23, 2010
Native and Newcomer Medicine in New Sweden, 1638-1750
American Swedish Historical Museum, Swedish Colonial Society, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, et al.
The 10th Annual New Sweden History Conference
Times: 9:00 a.m. - 1:40 p.m.
Place: Bartram’s Garden, 54th and Lindbergh Streets, Philadelphia
Registration (fee) through the American Swedish Historical Museum
Morning Presentations, 9:45 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.:
Joel T. Fry, curator, Bartram’s Garden,
“European Medical Theory and Practice of the 17th and 18th Centuries”
Cara Lee Blume, former cultural heritage program manager, Delaware Division of Parks and Recreation,
“ ‘Splendid and Miraculous Medicines’: Healing Practices of the Lenape People”
Peter R. Christoph, senior editor of the documentary series, New York Historical Manuscripts,
“The Barber-Surgeons of New Netherland--and, Probably, New Sweden.”
Afternoon Presentation, 1:00 - 1:40 p.m.:
Karen M. Reeds, independent historian of science and medicine,
“‘This remedy universally extolled’: Pehr Kalm on New Medicines for New Sweden”
Optional tour of Bartram’s Garden with Joel Fry, emphasizing medicinal plants and their uses.
Conference partners: American Swedish Historical Museum, Swedish Colonial Society, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, all of Philadelphia; the New Sweden Centre, Wilmington; and Trinity Episcopal (Old Swedes’) Church, Swedesboro, New Jersey. The conference is supported by a generous grant from the Barbro
Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.
October 25, 2010
Laura Stark, Wesleyan University
Charting Evidence: Patient Records and the Making of Ethical Research at NIH circa 1960
Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 5:30 p.m.
Place: 337 Claudia Cohen Hall, University of Pennysylvania
October 26, 2010
Vangelis Koutalis, University of Ioannina, Greece
Humphry Davy’s Last Days: The Chemist as a Philosopher and a “Dreamer of Dreams”
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lunch Talk | 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 last printed work of Humphry Davy, entitled Consolations in Travel or the Last Days of a Philosopher (London: John Murray, 1830), was written not long before its author’s death. In the book the famous British chemist sets a series of dialogues, asking questions about the history of civilization, the history of creation, the possibility of science itself, and the very possibility of things. It is evidently a philosophical discourse, but not of an arbitrarily speculative kind, since it incorporates detailed scientific descriptions and is based on then-current theories, covering a broad range of disciplines.
Daydreaming plays a significant role in the deployment of the narrative. The book begins with a vision, a reverie of Philalethes, a persona that functions as one guise for Davy himself. Then another persona comes into play, named “The Unknown,” who stands, as we can plausibly assume, for the ideal Ego of Davy: the chemical philosopher who far from being confined in the apothecary shop or the “kitchen,” where useful applications are to be prepared, contemplates nature, reckons nature in terms of becoming, indulges in astonishment, and feels pleasure “in contemplating the order and harmony of the arrangements belonging to the terrestrial system of things” (p. 243). Some decades after Lavoisier had chased the metaphysicians out of the domain of chemistry, the ideal Ego of Davy keeps claiming the subjective position of a philosopher, keeps endorsing via contemplativa, revealing thus an unexpected—from our standpoint—affinity with the theosophist-chymists of the Renaissance. Instead of being just a token of Romantic literary inclinations or an outcome indicative of Davy’s retirement from the strenuous daily round of an active chemist, his Consolations illustrate a kind of consciousness, pertaining to reveries and also essential in scientific inquiry (lest this inquiry be negated), that Ernst Bloch has designated as “anticipatory”: the chemist, studying “those operations by which the intimate nature of bodies is changed” (p. 247), advances, as is the case with all waking dreams, into a world to come, a field of real possibilities for a better life. Davy’s last book is not the farewell of a specialist, of an experienced puzzle-solver, but the testimony of a traveler, of a Homo Viator, remaining in a state of hope, striving to keep his nearness to “that evening star of light in the horizon of life, which, we are sure, is to become in another season a morning star, and it throws its radiance through the gloom and shadow of death” (p. 222).
Vangelis Koutalis is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Ioannina (Greece). His research work centers on the question of how in different historical periods chemical experimentation has been developed in conjunction with philosophical conceptualization. Subjects under study include the emergence of Renaissance alchemy or chymistry under the horizon provided by occultism, the dissemination of chymistry in Greek-speaking communities of the Ottoman Empire from the 17th to the 18th century, and, turning to a later period, the persistence of some eminent experimenters, such as Joseph Priestley and Humphry Davy, in the philosophical dimension of chemistry. Koutalis is a CHF 2010-2011 Allington Fellow.
October 27, 2010
Meggie Crnic, University of Pennsylvania
City Children in the Hinterlands: Environmental Remedies for Urban Children, 1870-1930
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
Information: ehweiss@nursing.upenn.edu or 215-898-4502
Abstract. This paper examines the health and lived experiences of Philadelphia’s children in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the environmental therapies used by physicians, nurses, and social workers to remedy children’s health problems. I argue that physician and philanthropists utilized a range of environmental interventions, including sending them to seashore hospitals and country convalescent homes, as antidotes to the industrialized urban environment and as a means to Americanize immigrant children.
Meggie Crnic is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History & Sociology of Science at Penn.
October 27, 2010
Medical History Society of New Jersey, Fall Meeting
Medical History Society of New Jersey | Visit site »
Time: 3:30 - 8:45 p.m.
Location: Nassau Inn, 6 Mercer Street, Princeton, NJ
Registration
3:30 - 5:30 p.m., Meeting
Talks on Civil War tourniquets, self-publishing in the history of medicine, the life of Sir Peter James Kerley, history of New Jersey hospitals, and medical philately.
6:00 p.m., Cocktails and Dinner
7:30 p.m., 8th University of Medicine and Dentistry
of New Jersey Foundation Lecture
“Saving Sickly Children: The Tuberculosis Preventorium in American Life, 1909-1970”
Cynthia A. Connolly, Ph.D., R.N., P.N.P.
Associate Professor of Nursing
University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
October 27, 2010
Jay Kirk, University of Pennsylvania
Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great Animals
The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia | Visit site »
Times:
5:30 p.m. View rarely seen specimens, photos, and field sketches from pioneering Academy explorers
6:30 - 7:30 p.m. Talk and book-signing
Place: The Academy of Natural Sciences
RSVP to 215-299-1060 or reservations@ansp.org
Spend an evening with author and Philadelphia resident Jay Kirk as he discusses his newest book, Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve The World’s Great Animals.
In this epic account of an extraordinary life lived during remarkable times, Kirk follows the adventures of the brooding genius Carl Akeley who revolutionized taxidermy in the late 19th century. Akeley’s artistic methods were used in natural history dioramas across the country, including the Academy of Natural Sciences.
Kirk’s nonfiction has been published in Harper’s, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. His work has been anthologized in Best American Crime Writing 2003 and 2004, and Best American Travel Writing 2009 (edited by Simon Winchester). He is a recipient of a 2005 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
Starting at 5:30 pm, visitors are invited to view rarely seen specimens and hear the stories behind the Academy’s own dioramas. See photos and field sketches from the pioneering Academy explorers who followed in Akeley’s footsteps.
October 29, 2010
Stewart B. Nelson
Sabotage in the Arctic: Fate of the Submarine “Nautilus”
American Philosophical Society | Visit site »
Library Lecture and Book Signing
Times: Reception, 5:30 p.m.
Lecture, 6:00 p.m.
Place: Benjamin Franklin Hall, 427 Chestnut Street
RSVP to sduffy@amphilsoc.org
In 1931, newly elected APS member Sir Hubert Wilkins (1888-1958) leased and extensively modified an O-12 class submarine to undertake an expedition to the North Pole to gather scientific information. His sponsors included American millionaire Lincoln Ellsworth and newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. The mission was ill-fated through delays, accidents, and perhaps even sabotage. By late August 1931, the submarine had maneuvered to the edge of the Arctic ice cap and was able to dive beneath a few floes. Upon its return, however, the Nautilus suffered damage from storms and engine failure and was scuttled off the coast of Norway. Nelson’s book, set in the 1930s, recounts the ambition and intrigue of this daring expedition in the world’s first Arctic submarine.
The records from Wilkins’ expedition are housed in the APS Library collections. In 2005, Dr. Nelson, an oceanographer, ocean explorer, and former president of the American Oceanic Organization (and a past recipient of an APS Lewis and Clark Grant for Exploration and Field Research), was co-leader and scientific advisor of the expedition that successfully rediscovered the Nautilus.
Dr. Nelson has participated in a wide variety of projects in all the world’s oceans. He has worked from ships, submarines, submersibles and commercial blimps. He continues to be involved in consulting work for both the maritime and cruise industry, as well as the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. He has worked with such organizations as the Office of the Oceanographer of the Navy, Naval Oceanographic Office, National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, National Alcohol Fuels Commission, and Mid-South Energy Project. His globe-spanning activities have taken him to more than 100 countries, as well as such waters as the Red Sea, Mediterranean, Adriatic, Black Sea, North Sea, Baltic Sea, White Sea, Kara Sea, South China Sea, Coral Sea and the Caribbean. Dr. Nelson has ventured into the frozen wastes of the Arctic and “walked twice around the world” on the ice-covered continent of Antarctica.