Browse

About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom, and the History of Writing Scientifically is a long-term history of scientists’ methodological discussions about experimentation in the life sciences. It directs attention to working scientists’ methods discourse, its history and meanings, and its functions in scientific publications. The term “methods discourse” comprises all kinds of methods-related statements in scientific writing, including explicit commitments to experimentalism, descriptions of protocols, and justifications of methodological concepts and strategies. The book examines the complex trajectory of methods discourse from the mid-17th to the early 20th century through the history of snake venom research. Because experiments with poisonous snakes were both challenging and controversial, experimenters produced very detailed descriptions and discussions of their approaches, making venom research uniquely suitable for a long-term history of methodological thought and the various factors impinging on its development. The book offers an analytic framework for the study of methods discourse, its history, and the history of how experimenters organized and presented their thoughts about methods in writings about their experiments.

Technology demands uniformity from human beings who encounter it. People encountering technology, however, differ from one another. Thinkers in the early twentieth century, observing the awful consequences of interactions between humans and machines—death by automobiles or dismemberment by factory machinery, for example—developed the idea of accident proneness: the tendency of a particular person to have more accidents than most people. In tracing this concept from its birth to its disappearance at the end of the twentieth century, this book offers a unique history of technology focused not on innovations but on their unintended consequences. It shows that as the machine era progressed, the physical and economic impact of accidents coevolved with the rise of the insurance industry and trends in twentieth-century psychology. After World War I, psychologists determined that some people are more accident prone than others. This designation signaled a shift in social strategy toward minimizing accidents by diverting particular people away from dangerous environments. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, the idea of accident proneness gradually declined, and engineers developed new technologies to protect all people, thereby introducing a hidden, but radical, egalitarianism. Lying at the intersection of the history of technology, the history of medicine and psychology, and environmental history, this book is an ambitious intellectual analysis of the birth, growth, and decline of an idea that will interest anyone who wishes to understand how Western societies have grappled with the human costs of modern life.

The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. Aesthetic Science revises this interpretation, showing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. Seeking to obtain knowledge of the natural world through their senses, they practiced a science that depended on harnessing the embodied pleasures and pains arising from sensory experience. The book therefore demonstrates that judgments of taste and the pleasures of aesthetic experience had a central role in the emergence of what we now understand as scientific objectivity. It shows that scientists of the later 17th century sought to obtain consensus not only about facts, but also about the pleasures and pains arising from embodied encounters with nature. It thus concludes by calling for a new approach that pays close attention to the role of aesthetic experience in the history of science. Indeed, it argues not only that the sciences of the 17th century had a far more significant role in the emergence of aesthetics and art criticism than has so far been recognized, but also that the conceptual resources of taste and aesthetic judgment can make a major contribution to our understanding of the formation of consensus in scientific communities.

Over the last several decades, paper maps have been gradually displaced by new electronic navigation systems like GPS. For many geographic tasks, the map’s familiar god’s-eye view from nowhere has thus been exchanged for the much more embedded experience of electronic coordinates, with a new focus on geographic points rather than large areas. This book argues that this shift in geographic knowledge should be seen quite broadly as a change in both the macro-politics of territory and the everyday micro-politics of geographic space. It presents the history of the mapping sciences in the twentieth century through three of its most important global projects – the International Map of the World, the Universal Transverse Mercator grid, and the Global Positioning System – and traces a widespread retreat from the authority of representational maps in favor of the pragmatism of GPS and its many predecessors. It also questions the usual understanding of globalization as a battle between national territory and global networks. The advent of GPS does not mean that territory is losing its relevance, but rather that there are now new forms of territory – pointillist, non-exclusive, and provisional – that may or may not align with the sovereign space of states. Conceived narrowly, this book is a deep history of GPS and its relationship to earlier forms of mapping. But more expansively, it is also a cultural and political history of geographic space itself.

What distinguished the true alchemist from the fraud? This question animated the lives and labors of the common men—and occasionally women—who made a living as alchemists in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Holy Roman Empire. As purveyors of practical techniques, inventions, and cures, these entrepreneurs were prized by princely patrons, who relied upon alchemists to bolster their political fortunes. At the same time, satirists, artists, and other commentators used the figure of the alchemist as a symbol for Europe's social and economic ills. Drawing on criminal trial records, contracts, laboratory inventories, satires, and vernacular alchemical treatises, this book situates the everyday alchemists, largely invisible to modern scholars until now, at the center of the development of early modern science and commerce. Reconstructing the workaday world of entrepreneurial alchemists, the author shows how allegations of fraud shaped their practices and prospects. These debates not only reveal enormously diverse understandings of what the “real” alchemy was and who could practice it; they also connect a set of little-known practitioners to the largest questions about commerce, trust, and intellectual authority in early modern Europe.

What actually took place in the private laboratory of a mid-seventeenth-century alchemist? How did he direct his quest after the secrets of Nature? What instruments and theoretical principles did he employ? Using, as their guide, the previously misunderstood interactions between Robert Boyle, widely known as “the father of chemistry,” and George Starkey, an alchemist and the most prominent American scientific writer before Benjamin Franklin as their guide, the book reveals the hitherto hidden laboratory operations of a famous alchemist and argue that many of the principles and practices characteristic of modern chemistry derive from alchemy. By analyzing Starkey's extraordinary laboratory notebooks, the book shows how this American “chymist” translated the wildly figurative writings of traditional alchemy into quantitative, carefully reasoned laboratory practice—and then encoded his own work in allegorical, secretive treatises under the name of Eirenaeus Philalethes. The intriguing “mystic” Joan Baptista Van Helmont—a favorite of Starkey, Boyle, and even of Lavoisier—emerges from this study as a surprisingly central figure in seventeenth-century “chymistry.” A common emphasis on quantification, material production, and analysis/synthesis, the book argues, illustrates a continuity of goals and practices from late medieval alchemy down to and beyond the Chemical Revolution.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, American cities began to go dark. Hulking new buildings overspread blocks, pollution obscured the skies, and glass and smog screened out the health-giving rays of the sun. Doctors fed fears about these new conditions with claims about a rising tide of the “diseases of darkness,” especially rickets and tuberculosis. This book tracks the obsession with sunlight from those bleak days into the twentieth century. Before long, social reformers, medical professionals, scientists, and a growing nudist movement proffered remedies for America's new dark age. Architects, city planners, and politicians made access to sunlight central to public housing and public health, and entrepreneurs, dairymen, and tourism boosters transformed the pursuit of sunlight and its effects into a commodity. Within this historical context, the book examines questions about the commodification of health and nature and makes a contribution to the histories of cities, consumerism, the environment, and medicine.

The eighteenth century saw the creation of a number of remarkable mechanical androids: at least ten prominent automata were built between 1735 and 1810 by clockmakers, court mechanics, and other artisans from France, Switzerland, Austria, and the German lands. Designed to perform sophisticated activities such as writing, drawing, or music making, these “Enlightenment automata” have attracted continuous critical attention from the time they were made to the present, often as harbingers of the modern industrial age, an era during which human bodies and souls supposedly became mechanized. This book investigates two such automata—both depicting piano-playing women. These automata not only play music, but also move their heads, eyes, and torsos to mimic a sentimental body technique of the eighteenth century: musicians were expected to generate sentiments in themselves while playing, and then communicate them to the audience through bodily motions. The author argues, contrary to much of the subsequent scholarly conversation, that these automata were unique masterpieces which illustrated the sentimental culture of a civil society rather than expressions of anxiety about the mechanization of humans by industrial technology. She demonstrates that only in a later age of industrial factory production did mechanical androids instill the fear that modern selves and societies had become indistinguishable from machines.

This book explores contemporary worries over eating through the lens of the history of science and medicine. It shows how appetite, once a matter of personal inclination and everyday life, from around 1750 became an object of science, something to be managed by knowledgeable experts. At the same time it traces the disturbing story of how forms of troubled eating once seen as symptomatic of many illnesses emerged as independent diseases called “eating disorders.” The study begins by examining the traditional view, upheld by physicians and philosophers for centuries, that individual appetite was the surest guide to healthy eating. It then shows how investigators in diverse disciplines began arguing that eating and digestion were processes comprehensible and manageable only by science. The study also shows that new claims about the fallibility of appetite and the necessity of scientific guidance of eating choices prompted fierce disputes between mechanists and vitalists, experimentalists and bedside physicians, localists and holists, and instinctivists and anti-instinctivists, struggles over appetite and eating that have never been resolved. The author concludes that, far from solving what many called the “mystery” of appetite, centuries of research into its “normal” and “pathological” functioning have shown that appetite, like love and other deeply human realities, is extraordinarily complex and not readily susceptible to manipulation by self-styled experts. Restoring respect for appetite would help, the study concludes, to allay its proliferating discontents, the eating anxieties that beset ever more individuals in our time.

This book analyzes the conflicting paradigms and interpretations that have governed the study of the emotions from the 1960s to the present. It seems obvious to the majority of today's researchers and commentators that the affects, defined as a limited set of phylogenetically old, indeed universal "basic emotions," are inherently independent of cognition or meaning. They are not "about" objects in the world but rather are reflex-like discharges of "affect programs located subcortically in the brain. Such a claim has underwritten hundreds of experiments and research papers, as well as arguments to the effect that under the right conditions our emotions tend to leak out in the form of characteristic involuntary facial movements. The body does not lie. But what if those claims are erroneous? What if emotional states and actions cannot be segregated experimentally into six or seven "basic emotions" with distinct facial expressions? What if, on the contrary, emotions are meaningful, intentional states that are intrinsically conceptual and cognitive in nature? In short, how sound is the evidence for the existence of the basic emotions and what are the stakes involved in alternative accounts of affective behavior? The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique examines this experimental and interpretive conflict for the light it throws on some of the most fundamental issues not only in the cognitive and neurosciences but also the humanities and social sciences today.

Since the Enlightenment, alchemy has been viewed as a sort of antiscience, disparaged by many historians as a form of lunacy that impeded the development of rational chemistry. But this book exposes the speciousness of these views and challenges widely held beliefs about the origins of the scientific revolution. Tracing the alchemical roots of Robert Boyle's famous mechanical philosophy, the book shows that alchemy contributed to the mechanization of nature, a movement that lay at the very heart of scientific discovery. Boyle and his predecessors—figures like the mysterious medieval Geber or the Lutheran professor Daniel Sennert—provided convincing experimental proof that matter is made up of enduring particles at the microlevel. At the same time, the book argues that alchemists created the operational criterion of an “atomic” element as the last point of analysis, thereby contributing a key feature to the development of later chemistry.

Breastfeeding rates in America fell throughout the 1950s and 1960s before beginning to climb again in the 1970s. This work argues that the development of an ideology of natural motherhood preceded breastfeeding's return. Rooted in psychology and animal studies in the 1930s, the ideology of natural motherhood moved beyond the confines of scientific study as a handful of mothers sought out the experiences of “natural” childbirths and breastfeeding in the 1940s. By the 1950s, a back to the breast movement was firmly established within segments of the white, middle-class, and often college educated, population. Despite the widespread acceptance of formula feeding by the medical community throughout the majority of the twentieth century, a small but vocal minority of mothers pushed back against hospital policies and cultural norms when they insisted on breastfeeding their children. In the 1970s, political tensions within the breastfeeding community erupted over the biological essentialism upon which many early breastfeeding advocates had built their arguments. Despite these rifts, natural motherhood continued to hold personal meaning for women across the political spectrum who sought a connection to a natural maternal identity. By the late 1980s, breastfeeding became increasingly associated with the extraction of breast milk from the breast via a breast pump. In the twenty-first century, natural motherhood remains a powerful draw for women who want to feed their infants “naturally,” even while medical and public health messages about breastfeeding can often obscure the movement's maternalist roots.

This book presents a radically new perspective on the study of early modern science. Instead of the triumph of reason and rationality and the celebration of the discoveries and breakthroughs of the period, they examine science in the context of the baroque, analyzing the tensions, paradoxes, and compromises that shaped the New Science of the seventeenth century and enabled its spectacular success. The authors show how scientists during the seventeenth century turned away from the trust in the acquisition of knowledge through the senses towards a growing reliance on the mediation of artificial instruments, such as lenses and mirrors for observation and mechanical and pneumatic devices for experimentation. Likewise, the mathematical techniques and procedures that allowed the success of mathematical natural philosophy became increasingly obscure and artificial, and in place of divine harmonies they revealed an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and constants. In its attempts to enforce order in the face of threatening chaos, blur the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and mobilize passions in the service of objective knowledge, the New Science is a baroque phenomenon.

Before the concept of nature took shape across the long history of European and Islamic natural philosophy and science, for an equally long period beginning in the early second millennium B.C.E. a learned cuneiform world in the ancient Near East engaged in activities manifestly kindred with science in some of the ways it observed and understood phenomena, yet did not seek to ground its understanding in physical nature. This book raises and explores questions about observing and interpreting, theorizing and calculating what we think of as natural phenomena in Assyrian and Babylonian scholarship. Although the object of cuneiform knowledge, as seen in divination, magic, astronomy/astrology, and medicine, was not defined in terms of, or identified with, nature, an axis of knowledge was formed between the knower and an ordered, regular, and intelligible world. Assyro-Babylonian investigation of regularity and irregularity, norms, and anomalies was structured within the epistemic and ontological bounds of that axis. Despite our assumptions as to the attachment of science and scientific knowledge to nature, this book argues that cuneiform knowledge systems that are patently not directed at describing or understanding nature as such can nevertheless be usefully counted as part of the history of science. How to understand cuneiform knowledge and consider its philosophical character, both in relation to the history of science and without recourse to later ideas of nature, is the leitmotif of this book.

A pervasive understanding holds that the foundation of calculus-based mathematical physics was laid by Issac Newton in his epochal treatise Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica of 1687. In this historical understanding, what we now call "classical Newtonian mechanics" was born from Newton's work accomplished in his Principia, and was disseminated and digested throughout Enlightenment Europe as a result of the reception of this book. Before Voltaire challenges this understanding by demonstrating the historical gap separating Newton's work in the Principia from the calculus-based mathematical physics that only later became associated with his name. It also shows the important role played by Continental mathematicians, especially in France, in building from Newton's work, but also that of others such as Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and Nicholas Malebranche, the modern science of analytical mechanics. It further distances this history from the direct life and legacy of Newton by demonstrating the important role that the French Académie Royale des Sciences played in creating the institutional crucible from which this new and innovative science was forged. Treating calculus-based mathematical physics as a contingent historical outcome produced through a wide array of intellectual, cultural, social, and political dynamics, this book frees the history of modern mathematical physics from the Enlightenment mythistory of the so-called "Newtonian Revolution." It does so by narrating a fully contingent cultural history of the birth, contests over, and then establishment of analytical mechanics as a foundational French science in the two decades around 1700.

Although the subject of federally mandated institutional review boards (IRBs) has been extensively debated, we do not know much about what takes place when they convene. The story of how IRBs work today is a story about their past as well as their present, and this book melds firsthand observations of IRB meetings with the history of how rules for the treatment of human subjects were formalized in the United States in the decades after World War II. Drawing on extensive archival sources, it reconstructs the daily lives of scientists, lawyers, administrators, and research subjects working—and “warring”—on the campus of the National Institutes of Health, where they first wrote the rules for the treatment of human subjects. The author argues that the model of group deliberation which gradually crystallized during this period reflected contemporary legal and medical conceptions of what it meant to be human, what political rights human subjects deserved, and which stakeholders were best suited to decide. She then explains how the historical contingencies that shaped rules for the treatment of human subjects in the postwar era guide decision making today—within hospitals, universities, health departments, and other institutions in the United States and across the globe.

This book provides an interdisciplinary exploration of biological individuality, by identifying leading and less familiar perceptions of individuality, what they are good for, and in what contexts. Individuals are things that everybody knows—or thinks they do. Yet even scholars who practice or analyze the biological sciences don't agree on what an individual is and why. One reason is that biological individuality concepts serve different purposes—defining, classifying, or explaining living structure, function, interaction, persistence, or evolution. Practice and theory point to individuals at different levels of organization, from genes to cells to organisms to symbiotic systems. Notions of individuality engage theoretical questions about multilevel natural selection and empirical questions about development, function, and ecology. They ground philosophical questions about the nature of living things and causation. They reflect particular historical and cultural circumstances, often in interaction with theorizing about the nature of society. Each approach has been contested, demonstrating the difficulties of reconciling concepts focusing on structures and those oriented toward processes. Ten scholarly essays and three commentaries by interdisciplinary biologists, historians, and philosophers detail many of the ideas, major figures, and empirical studies both past and present that show why there is no simple answer to the question, "What is an individual, biologically speaking?" There isn't and shouldn't be a single answer. Nature is too messy for that, organisms too quirky in the diverse ways they reproduce, function, and interact, and human ideas about individuality too fraught with philosophical and historical meaning.

Over the course of human history, the sciences in general and biology in particular have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and death camps—all in an attempt to support notions of racial superiority. By investigating the past, including studies of René Descartes and Richard Dawkins, this book hopes to better prepare us to discern ideological abuse of science when it occurs in the future. It brings together fourteen experts to examine the varied ways science has been used and abused for non-scientific purposes from the fifteenth century to the present day. Featuring a chapter on eugenics and an examination of the progress of evolution, the book uses both benign and sinister, ultimately reminding us that ideological extrapolation continues today.

Bitter Roots is a history of drug discovery from plants across different African countries. It reconsiders the history of pharmaceutical patents, biopiracy, and bioprospecting to show that African medicine inspired new phytochemicals and probes the responsibilities of multiple innovators to compensate rural communities through benefit-sharing agreements. It traces the geography of economic , chemical, and botanical exchanges of rosy periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus), pennywort (Centella asiatica ), grains of paradise (Aframomum melegueta), arrow poison plant (Strophanthus hispidus), Ghana quinine (Cryptolepis sanguinolenta), and Hoodia or (Hoodia gordonii ). Scientists at universities and research institutes in Ghana, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Nigeria, and South Africa competed with traditional healers and herbalists. African plant experts also competed with biologists, botanists, and chemists in Canada, England (United Kingdom), France, India, Jamaica, the Philippines, and the United States of America including researchers at the firms Bristol-Meyer Squibb, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, La Roche-Posay, and Unilever. The book maps the distribution of plant specimens during the Early Modern, Atlantic Slave Trade, Pre-colonial, Colonial, and National (Independence) Periods. New plants entered pharmacopeia and materia medica from the late nineteenth century when colonial wars in Africa coincided with the rise of the pharmaceutical industry. During the twentieth century, research into cures for cancer, diabetes, erectile dysfunction, HIV/AIDS, impotence, leprosy, leukemia, malaria, and obesity led researchers to re-examine ethnobotanical evidence in areas with high levels of biodiversity. The book concludes that African scientists direct chemical prospecting and proposes the concept of bioprosperity to express a more equitable sharing of profits.

Blood Relations explores the relationships between mid-century blood transfusion and the development of human genetics. It focuses on Britain, which established its first national transfusion service during the Second World War. By then, blood groups were crucial to transfusion, and were fascinating to scientists interested in heredity and race. Blood Relations follows how the transfusion services made vast quantities of blood group data available for human genetics, during the war and two decades after. The book revisits the history of eugenics in light of the local politics of giving blood, and the power relations between donor, nurse, patient, doctor, and scientist. It reveals how the movement of blood carved out networks that made human populations into objects of surveillance and research. It traces how clerks and scientists transformed documents into genetic data, and analyzes the centrality of paper and notations to genetics. It is an account of how human genetics was constructed through wartime public health, and how it was given meaning through narratives of kin, community, nationalism and internationalism. It is a history of genetics that puts blood, bodies, and bureaucracy at center stage. Today, genetics is still understood as a neutral science that can reliably underpin stories about human identities, ancestry and migrationary history; Blood Relations offers a new historical account of how this understanding began.