Events for December 2012
December 3, 2012
Michael Stolberg, University of Würzburg
Medical Popularization at the Bedside. How 16th-Century Physicians Explained Diseases to their Patients
Johns Hopkins Program in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology | Visit site »
Time: 1:30pm
Location: Seminar Room, 3rd floor, Welch Library, East Baltimore campus
December 3, 2012
Rachel Plotnick, Northwestern University
Behind the Button: Thinking Historically about Tactile Interfaces
Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Time: 3:30pm
Location: 337 Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
December 4, 2012
Susan Johnson-Roehr, RCHA Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Landscapes of Labor at the Jaipur Astronomical Observatory, c. 1728-1743 CE
RCHA Tuesday Morning Seminar Series, Rutgers University
Time: 11:00am, lunch to follow at 12:30pm
Location: RCHA Seminar Room, 88 College Avenue, New Brunswick, NJ
Commentator: Carla Yanni, Department of Art History, Rutgers
If you are planning to attend the seminar, copies of the paper can be requested by email: rcha@rci.rutgers.edu
December 4, 2012
Ian Beamish
Agricultural Reform in Print and Practice: Slavery and the Metcalfe Plantation Enterprise
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture
Time: 12pm
Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation
In the decades before the Civil War planters in the American South were anxious about the economic future of their region, despite the incredible expansion of the cotton economy. The agricultural reform movement, which many planters saw as the one way to keep the plantation South from falling behind the industrializing Northern states, laid out many grand ambitions for a complete renewal or overhaul of plantation agriculture. Historians have long dismissed agricultural reform as a complete failure since it did not realize its lofty goal, but this approach obscures the significant changes wrought by agricultural reform. This talk will explore how the intellectual and scientific debates within the reform movement were translated to daily plantation practice, using the case of the Metcalfe family plantation enterprise in Mississippi from the 1840s through the Civil War. The Metcalfe family owned thousands of acres of cotton land and held hundreds and hundreds of slaves on their plantations, all of whom felt the results of the Metcalfe family’s interest in agricultural improvement keenly.
Ian Beamish is currently completing his dissertation “Saving the South: Printing Agricultural Reform in the American South, 1819–1865” in the history department at Johns Hopkins University. He is in residence at the Chemical Heritage Foundation for 2012–2013, completing his dissertation.
Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.
December 4, 2012
Carey Myers
Medieval Medicine
Jefferson University History of Medicine Series
Time: 12:00pm
Location: Curtis 213, Jefferson University
The Dark Ages represent a good example of a perfect storm against human intellect. The conspiring forces included: 1) The rise of Christianity (which shifted interest from this life to the “after” life); 2) The loss of Greco-Roman wisdom that followed the fall of the Roman empire (in fact, the very loss of the Greek language in the West, which will only be reintroduced in the 15th century with the arrival of refugees from Constantinople… which, in and of itself might have actually been the trigger for the Italian Renaissance); and lastly 3) The stultifying influence of Galenic theories.
The result was a thousand year long freeze on medical and scientific thought.
There were a few sparks of light (the Medical School of Salerno, Byzantium, and the Arabic centers that gave us Maimonides, Averroes and Avicenna), but overall the Dark Ages were pretty dark.
The lesson for us is that civilization is thin and fragile, and can easily slip back into anarchy and chaos.
Please join us on Tuesday as we revisit the Dark Ages. We will offer drinks and desserts but lunch is on your own.
December 6, 2012
Jason Jackson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Political Economy of Foreign Direct Investment: Constructing Economic Interests and Policy Preferences in Post-War India and Brazil.
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.
December 7, 2012
Eden Medina, Indiana University
Cybernetics and the Chilean Road to Socialism
Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Time: 3:30pm
Location: 337 Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
December 11, 2012
Deanna Day
Black Boxing Women: The Computerization of Natural Family Planning and the Consequences of an App-Driven World
Chemical Heritage Foundation, Brown Bag Lecture
Time: 12:00pm
Location: Chemical Heritage Foundation
Personal medical care in the 21st century is increasingly organized around the principle of quantified self-surveillance; the standard biomedicalization narrative describes how a technologically implicated tracking impulse moves from the domain of professionals into the hands of lay users as tools become cheaper, smaller, and more accessible. This talk historicizes this trend by examining the practice of natural family planning, a method of determining fertility that has been practiced since the early 20th century but has become increasingly computerized in the last two decades.
Performing the intimate work of charting daily symptom tracking has enabled practitioners to understand natural family planning as a holistic and natural approach to health care, while at the same time they increasingly came to describe their bodies as “walking biological computer[s].” In the early 21st century this metaphor of the body as a computer has become literal: computerized fertility thermometers seek to incorporate the interpretive labor of natural family planning (previously performed by individual women) into the black box of their processors, reducing output to a single point—a red or green light. The computerization of natural family planning did not result in less work for women, however, or in a more reliable awareness of their internal chemistry, as manufacturers of thermometers like the Lady-Comp claim. Instead, by altering what kind of data women receive about their bodies, computerized thermometers merely re-form women’s bodies and reconfigure their relationships to them and their medical tools. New bodily expectations and gendered labor practices result.
Deanna Day is a doctoral candidate in history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania, where she researches the history of consumer medical technologies. Her dissertation research centers around the roles of gender and patient labor in the history of the medical thermometer.
Brown Bag Lectures (BBLs) are a series of weekly informal talks on the history of chemistry or related subjects, including the history and social studies of science, technology, and medicine. Based on original research (sometimes still in progress), these talks are given by local scholars for an audience of CHF staff and fellows and interested members of the public.
December 12, 2012
Toby Jones, Rutgers University
An Ecology of Global War
Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Time: 3:30pm
Location: 337 Cohen Hall, University of Pennsylvania
December 13, 2012
The College of New Jersey’s Sarnoff Collection website
The College of New Jersey
The College of New Jersey is pleased to announce the launch of the Sarnoff Collection website at http://tcnj.edu/sarnoff, including an on-line database that provides broad access to images and information about this internationally important technology and history collection.
Named in honor of David Sarnoff, long-time chairman of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), founder of the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), and renowned pioneer in radio and television, the Sarnoff Collection at TCNJ comprises over 6,000 artifacts that document major developments in communications and electronics in the 20th century.
The Sarnoff website includes a searchable database complete with catalog records and images of more than 800 artifacts. Visitors to the site are able to search by object type, manufacturer, date, materials, and key words, and can view high-resolution digital photographs alongside each entry. Every record in the database includes a comment box, and website visitors are encouraged to comment upon the collection and to share their knowledge about these complex technological artifacts.
The cataloging of the Sarnoff College is a major project that has been undertaken by TCNJ’s staff and students with the guidance of consulting scholar Dr. Benjamin Gross. The College will continue to augment the online database with information and images of additional artifacts as well as new research on the collection.
The mission of the Sarnoff Collection is to utilize these extraordinary artifacts to inform and inspire students of all ages and the public at large about innovations that have transformed the world and that continue to impact contemporary technology and communications.
December 13, 2012
Steven Weintraub, Lehigh University
Gauss’s proof of the irreducibility of the p-th cyclotomic polynomial
Philadelphia Area Seminar on the History of Mathematics, Villanova University
Time: 6:00-8:00pm
Location: Mendel 103, Villanova University
Abstract: The irreducibility of the cyclotomic polynomials is a basic result in number theory. There is a well-known and easy proof irreducibility of the p-th cyclotomic polynomial, for p a prime, due to Schoenemann/Eisenstein (1846/1850). But this result was first proved by Gauss in the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. We present Gauss’s beautiful and intricate proof. Not only is this proof interesting in itself, it also sheds light on what was and was not common knowledge among mathematicians of the day.