Events for September 2012
September 6, 2012
Workshop
Artifacts, Aesthetics, and Authority
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science
September 6-7, 2012.
This workshop and the accompanying planned volume will explore authority, epistemology, and aesthetics in the history of anatomy and medicine in a series of case studies centered on a wide range of visual material, and covering diverse aspects of the production and circulation of artifacts and visualizations. It draws together a number of North American and a few international scholars whose training and affiliations are not only in the history of medicine and/or science, but also in art history and museum practice. The papers presented would investigate roles of images and objects in the formation of the anatomical sciences from the eighteenth through the twentieth century in popular culture and medical pedagogy, in orthodox institutional contexts, as well as in nonacademic spaces. They look at practitioners’ own understandings of dissections; the role of specimens in anatomical knowledge production; and the use of anatomical atlases as circulating objects whose aesthetics established authority for their authors.
Organizers
Eva Åhrén, National Institute of Health
Carin Berkowitz, Chemical Heritage Foundation
All panels will take place in Franklin Hall (427 Chestnut St., Philadelphia) in the Fels Room and Presidents’ Room
Day 1:
1:30-2:30pm Introductory Remarks: Carin Berkowitz and Eva Åhrén
2:30-5:00pm Session 1: Anatomical Specimens at Work
- “The Work of a Good Specimen: Frederic Wood Jones’ Intellectual and Rhetorical Uses of Human Specimens”
Lisa O’Sullivan, New York Academy of Medicine
Commentary: Eva Ahren and Anna Maerker - “Making Anatomical Collections Useful, Or, Why the Knoxes Knocked Waxes (and Preparations)”
Anna Maerker, King’s College London
Commentary: Nico Bertoloni Meli and Erin McLeary - “The Pathology of War: Museum Collecting During the Great War”
Erin McLeary, Independent Scholar
Commentary: Shauna Devine Lisa O’Sullivan
Day 2:
9:30am-12:00pm Session 2: Seeing, Depicting, and Knowing
- “The Surgeon’s Seeing Hand: Teaching Anatomy to the Senses in Britain, 1750-1830.”
Carin Berkowitz, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Commentary: Lisa O’Sullivan and Nico Bertoloni Meli - “The Rise of Pathological Iconography: Baillie, Bleuland, and Their Collections”
Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Indiana University
Commentary: Ellery Foutch and Eva Ahren - “Seeing, Knowing, Showing: Specimens and Visualizations in the Anatomical Work of Anders and Gustaf Retzius, 1830-1919,”
Eva Åhrén, National Institutes of Health
Commentary: Erin McLeary and Carin Berkowitz
1:30-3:00pm Session 3: Anatomy and Health
- “Science, Disease and Representation: Medical Photography during the American Civil War, 1861-1865,”
Shauna Devine, Duke University
Commentary: Anna Maerker and Ellery Foutch - “Dissecting the Perfect Man: Anatomical Representations of Bodybuilder Eugen Sandow”
Ellery Foutch, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Commentary: Carin Berkowitz and Shauna Devine
3:30-4:30pm Commentary and concluding discussion: John Harley Warner
September 13, 2012
William J. Astore, Pennsylvania College of Technology
One Size Doesn’t Fit All: The Perils of Developing “Big” Software Systems for the U.S. Military
Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology | Visit site »
Time: 3:00pm
Location: 300 Gilman Hall, Homewood campus
September 13, 2012
Ira Rutkow
The Civil War: How It Impacted the Future of Medicine in America
Section on Medical History, College of Physicians of Philadelphia | Visit site »
Time: 6:30pm
Location: College of Physicians of Philadelphia
During the Civil War, America’s physicians learned about diseases and their clinical manifestations on a scale never before possible. The war created surgeons from doctors who previously had minimal operating experience. Physicians who had minimal background in treating complex illnesses and communicable infections experienced a lifetime of practice in several years of camping, marching, and conflict. America’s healers acquired administrative skills not feasible in antebellum America. For the first time, the nation’s physicians organized ambulance corps, assembled hospital trains, served on draft boards, resolved questions of medical manpower, and designed, staffed, and managed vast general hospitals. Finally, the scale and urgency of the war imposed much needed comradeship and discipline. “The constant mingling of men of high medical culture with the less educated had value,” wrote S. Weir Mitchell, “and the general influence of the war on our art was, in this and other ways, of great service.” Physicians familiarized themselves with disease and injury on an individual plane while the profession unified on a national level.
September 14, 2012
Paul Teller, University of California, Davis
What Is It to Give an Ontology?
Departments of History and Sociology of Science and Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania
Time: 3:00-5:00pm
Location: 402 Claudia Cohen Hall
September 17, 2012
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College
From History to Biology and Back Again
Department of Anthropology, Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania | Visit site »
Time: 12:00pm
Location: University Museum 345
Crossroads Recent developments have made the internal and external boundaries of anthropology increasingly nebulous. The growing specialization of subfield niches raises questions about what holds together anthropology’s “sacred bundle”, while interdisciplinary collaboration poses questions about what constitutes the essence of the discipline. To investigate these issues—at once classic and novel—this year’s colloquium series turns to scholars who negotiate intersections in their work. Some speakers study topics that bridge the discipline’s four subfields, carrying on the legacy of previous generations in fresh ways and exploring the unique opportunities that new developments have opened up. Other speakers study topics that lie at the crossroads of anthropology with other disciplines including biology, psychology, and law. In every case, the speakers present new answers—and new questions—regarding the paths that our discipline ma!
y take at this pivotal moment.
September 18, 2012
Peter Galison, Harvard University
Wastelands and Wilderness
LaFayette College
Time: 8:00pm
Location: Colton Chapel, LaFayette College
The lecture will address the ways one of modernity’s most significant technologies, nuclear power, requires us to grapple with the demands of managing radionuclide-filled lands thousands of years into the future. Removing parts of the earth in perpetuity - for reasons of sanctification (so-called “wilderness") or despoilment ("wastelands") - redefines a central feature of the human self - our relation to nature - presenting us in a different relation to the physical world, and raising irreducible questions about who we are.
September 19, 2012
Cynthia Connolly
New Drugs, Old Problems: The Sulfonamide Revolution and Pediatric Nurses, 1936-1949
Barbara Bates Center, University of Pennsylvania
Time: 12:00-1:30pm
Location: Room 2019, Floor 2U, Claire Fagin Hall
Abstract: This seminar uses patient records from Baltimore’s Sydenham Hospital to explore the therapeutic revolution “on the ground” as sulfonamides replaced therapeutic sera in the treatment of two infectious diseases in children in the 1930s and 1940s: meningococcal meningitis and pneumococcal pneumonia. A close reading of patient records tells something very different from an examination of reports in medical journals. The latter focus on the success [or failure] of new treatments; the former reveal the challenges of making them work and the many different clinical decision points involved. The patient records also show the personal responses of clinicians observing children recover from once uniformly deadly infections. The idea that children, and especially newborns and young infants, reacted differently than adults to drugs and required distinctive dosage calculation and medication administration methods, had long vexed clinicians in terms of applying that understanding in practice. The sulfa drugs were no exception. But this paper contends that caring for infants and children receiving the agents made unique demands on nurses that differed from the work of caring for adult patients. The differences arose from age-related responses to the pathogenic organisms and the particular challenges of administering sulfonamides to the pediatric patient and monitoring youngsters for adverse reactions. As a result the nursing protocols developed for infants and children receiving sulfonamides not only laid the groundwork needed a few years later for the adoption of penicillin, they forged the template for postwar pediatric nursing in the United States and the contours of American pediatric nurses’ phenomena of interest going forward. This study is important for multiple reasons. First, both scientific accounts of therapeutic reform and traditional historical narratives of antibiotic development often overlook sulfonamides in favor of penicillin. Second, an appreciation of the “real time” experience of nurses struggling to adapt to a new treatment paradigm within a short window of time is meaningful and the rich data set afforded by the Sydenham records provides a case study to address this issue. Third, the normative experiences of pediatric patients and the practitioners caring for them must be distinguished from adult patients and their health care providers. This perspective has been underdeveloped in nursing and medical historiography.
September 20, 2012
Kevin Siena, Trent University
Rotten Bodies: Plague, Putrefaction and the Poor in Seventeenth-Century England
Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology | Visit site »
Time: 3:00pm
Location: Seminar Room, 3rd floor, Welch Library, East Baltimore campus
September 20, 2012
Gregg Mitman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Ecological Imperialism Revisited: Entanglements of Disease, Commerce, and Knowledge in a Global World
The Program in History of Science, Princeton University | Visit site »
Time: 4:30pm
Location: 211 Dickinson Hall
September 20, 2012
Dave Richeson, Dickinson College
The Four Problems of Antiquity
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: We discuss the history of the four famous problems of antiquity: squaring the circle, trisecting the angle, doubling the cube, and constructing regular n-gons. There is a long and fascinating history of mathematicians’ failures to solve the problems using the compass and straightedge and their successes at solving them by other means (marked straightedges, conic sections, transcendental curves, mechanical devices, etc.). Like all great mathematical problems they pushed mathematics forward, culminating in the proofs that they are impossible to solve using the Euclidean tools.
September 20, 2012
Cristina Turdean, University of Mary Washington
’A Casino’s Nerve Center’: The Development of Computer Systems in Casinos.
Hagley Museum and Library
Time: 6:30pm
Location: Copeland Room, Hagley Library Building
The seminar is open to the public and is based on a paper that is circulated in advance. Those planning to attend are encouraged to read the paper before coming to the seminar. Copies may be obtained by emailing Carol Lockman, clockman@Hagley.org.
September 22, 2012
Civil War Hospital Day
Mütter Museum, College of Physicians of Philadelphia | Visit site »
Time: 10:00am-4:00pm
Location: College of Physicians of Philadelphia
During the Civil War (1861-1865), Philadelphia became the second largest hospital city (after Washington, DC) in the North. Ambulances and carts transferred wounded soldiers from arriving trains and ships to hospitals in and around the city. Blue uniforms were seen on every street: many military encampments surrounded Philadelphia. Troops paraded through streets on their way to war.
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia will evoke the atmosphere of medical wartime Philadelphia during the war years on Hospital Day. At the College, museum visitors will find a garrison of soldiers from the 3rd Regiment, United States Colored Troops. The presence of these soldiers highlights their history and connection to Camp William Penn, the first and largest training center for United States Colored Troops during the war, located just north of Philadelphia. Hospital Day will highlight the extraordinary contribution and experience of black soldiers during the war by focusing on their health and mortality. Several medical re-enactors, both men and women, will present displays about the wounds and diseases afflicting all soldiers, and their treatment. The Medicinal Plant Garden at the College will be set up as a temporary hospital.
Visit with the soldiers and the nurses and physicians who looked after them. Learn about the medicines used and techniques of surgery for battle wounds from re-enactors and the College’s Karabots Junior Fellows. Discover what hospitals were like. Support the troops! Find out if you have what it takes to be a Civil War soldier-or a doctor!
This educational event will serve as a precursor to a new Mütter Museum exhibit about the medical dimension of the Civil War, scheduled to open in 2013, Broken Bodies Suffering Spirits: Injury, Death, and Healing in Civil War Philadelphia.
Event free with Museum admission. Sponsored by the Mütter Museum of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia.
September 24, 2012
Angela Creager, Princeton University
The Atom and the Ecosystem
Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Time: 3:30pm
Location: 337 Cohen Hall
September 25, 2012
Jan Golinski, University of New Hampshire
Humphry Davy: The Experimental Self
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture | Visit site »
Time: 12:00pm
Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation
Humphry Davy (1778-1829) was a chemist, a philosopher, and a poet, in an age before the designation “professional scientist” existed. He invented his own identity in the course of a brilliant career in early-nineteenth-century England, making his reputation as a genius of science through his performances as a chemical lecturer and discoverer. Alongside his public identity, Davy also engaged in intense exploration of his private subjectivity through self-experimentation and literary work. My research focuses on how Davy fashioned himself, both as a social being and as an individual consciousness.
Jan Golinski is a professor at the University of New Hampshire, where he served until recently as Chair of the Department of History. He is the author of Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 (Cambridge, 1992), Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Chicago, 2005), and British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago, 2007). During the fall of 2012, he is the Gordon Cain Distinguished Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation.
September 27, 2012
Margaret Garber, University of California, Fullerton
The Academy of Curiosi: Chemical Correspondence & Other Curiosities in the Holy Roman Empire 1650-1750
Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology | Visit site »
Time: 3:00pm
Location: 300 Gilman Hall, Homewood campus
September 28, 2012
2012 Introductory Symposium
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science
The Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science invites faculty, graduate students, fellows, and other scholars new to the area to present brief summaries of their work in the history of science, technology and medicine.
Time: 9:00am-5:00pm, social hour to follow
Location: Library Company of Philadelphia (directions)
The Philadelphia area is home to exceptional resources and a vibrant scholarly community. Students and scholars from around the world arrive each year to visit some of America’s oldest scientific institutions and to study their rich collections of rare books, manuscripts and artifacts—often unaware of the exciting research being done by others in the area, sometimes mere blocks away. This annual symposium is an opportunity for scholars new to the field or new to the area to learn about each others’ work, to meet each other and to exchange advice about research, writing and area resources. We will also invite several librarians and archivists to introduce themselves and their collections to participants.
The symposium will be on Friday, September 28 at the Library Company of Philadelphia with ample opportunity for informal discussion over food and refreshments.
9:30 Welcome
Babak Ashrafi
Executive Director, Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science
9:40 Session 1
“Scientific Agriculture” and Political Economy in the Antebellum United States
Ariel Ron
Library Company of Philadelphia
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Program in Early American Economy and Society
Science in the Early Republic’s Borderlands
Cameron B. Strang
University of Texas at Austin
Monticello-McNeil and Friends of the McNeil Center Dissertation Fellowship
Plants and Peoples in the French Atlantic World
Christopher M. Parsons
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Barra Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship
Medical Jurisprudence in Late Nineteenth-Century American Society
Friederike Baer
Pennsylvania State University, Abington College
Children in Glass Houses:Toward a Hygienic, Eugenic Architecture for Children during the Third Republic in France (1870-1940)
Gina M. Greene
University of Pennsylvania
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health And Society Scholar
New Kid On the Block: Medico-Military History and Its Importance in the American Historical Framework
Jenna M. Krier
West Chester University
Popular Medicine and Remedies of Infectious Disease in London and the US Colonies 1600 - 1800
Nicole Salomone
Independent Scholar
11:10 Introduction to the Collections of the Hagley Museum and Library
Erik Rau, Director of Library Services
11:25 Session 2
moderated by Ronald Brashear
Arnold Thackray Director, Othmer Library of Chemical History, Chemical Heritage Foundation
The Hinchman Conspiracy Case: 19th Century Roots of American Mental Health Law
Cristina Hanganu-Bresch
University of the Sciences
Franklin Grant, American Philosophical Society
Mutiny’s Bounty: Pitcairn Islanders, Anthropologists, and the Making of a Natural Laboratory in the South Pacific
Adrian Young
Princeton University
Fellowship from the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities
A Method Only
Henry M. Cowles
Princeton University
Graduate Prize Fellowship, Princeton University Center for Human Values
Patronage, Public Science, and Free Education: The Wagner Free Institute of Science 1855-1900
Matthew White
University of Florida, American Philosophical Society
PACHS Dissertation Research Fellowship
Circles of Science: Women in Scientific and Literary Culture in Early Modern Italy
Meredith K. Ray
University of Delaware
More than ‘Waifs and Strays of a by-gone Flora’: The History of Paleobotany and its Relevance for Twenty-First Century Science
Dawn M. Digrius
Stevens Institute of Technology
A Bond Rather than a Barrier: Constructing the St. Lawrence Seaway, An Environmental History
Jeffrey Brideau
University of Maryland
PACHS Dissertation Writing Fellowship
Dark Futures: Environmental Catastrophes and American Childhood in the 1970s
Rebecca Onion
PACHS Postdoctoral Fellowship
1:30 Introduction to the Collections of the Franklin Institute
John Alviti, Senior Curator of Collections
1:45 Session 3
The Opulent City and the Sylvan State: Art and Environmental Embodiment in Early National Philadelphia
Laura Turner Igoe
Tyler School of Art, Temple University
PACHS Dissertation Research Fellowship
Color in the Age of Impressionism: Technology, Commerce, and Art
Laura A. Kalba
Smith College
Edelstein Fellowship, Chemical Heritage Foundation
The History of Collections: Ornithology at the Academy of Natural Sciences
Julie Reich
Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University
Little Tobacco: The Business and Bureacracy of Tobacco Farming in North Carolina, 1920-1980
Sarah Milov
Princeton University
A World of Exchange: Medicine in France and the Eastern Mediterranean
Edna Bonhomme
Princeton University
Harnessing the Modern Miracle: Physicists, Physicians and the Making of American Radium Therapy
Aimee Slaughter
University of Minnesota
PACHS Dissertation Research Fellow
Nuclear Medicine and the Ethics of Uncertainty
Jeffrey Womack
University of Houston
The Patient Labor of American Medicine: A History of the Consumer Medical Thermometer
Deanna Day
University of Pennsylvania
Price Fellowship, Chemical Heritage Foundation
3:25 Introduction to the Collections of the Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing
Tiffany Collier, Center Adminstrator
3:40 Session 4
Chymistry, Corpuscular Medicine, and Controversy: The Ideas and Influence of Daniel Sennert (1572-1637)
Joel Klein
Indiana University
Edelstein Fellowship, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Fortified: The Secret Science of Food
Catherine Price
Freelance Journalist
Société de Chimie Industrielle Fellowship, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Chemical Industry, and Chemical Workers in France, 1845-1884
Andrew Butrica
Doan Fellowship, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Rules of the Name: A History of the Systematic, Rational Nomenclature of Organic Chemistry
Evan Hepler-Smith
Princeton University
Attribution for the Discovery of Carbon Monoxide: Priestley, DeLassone, or Cruickshank?
Kevin C. Cannon
Pennsylvania State University, Abington College
Creating a Symbol of Science: The Standard Periodic Table of the Elements
Ann E. Robinson
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
PACHS Dissertation Writing Fellowship
Herdegen Fellow, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Chemical Diagrams in the Late 19th Century
Ari Gross
University of Toronto
Allington Fellowship, Chemical Heritage Foundation
5:00 Social Hour