ABSTRACTS

Below are the absracts for each panel. For more information on the schedule of the conference, please see our page on conference information.

• Panel 1: "The Role and Influence of Texts in Science"
• Panel 2: "Tradition and Modernity in Health, Science, and Medicine "
• Panel 3: "Locating Health and Science"
• Panel 4: "Science and Technology in the Era of Cold War"
• Panel 5: "Perceptions of Threat"
• Panel 6: "Science and Policy"

PANEL 1: "The Role and Influence of Texts in Science"
Saturday, 10:15 - 11:45am
Moderator: Heather Peterson, History, University of Texas at Austin

• Eighteenth-century Equine Anatomy, Specialism, and a New Farriery
  Michael McKay, History, University of York
  
  Despite studies of the cultural and intellectual history of anatomy, the growing literature on animal experiments and vivisection, and human/animal relations, not to mention an older body of scholarship in comparative anatomy, there is little work on the history of animal anatomy. Seventeenth-century farriers and horsemen looked primarily at the external appearance and parts of the horse to guide their method of care, by the 1790s the London Veterinary College taught anatomy as a major part of their curriculum. This paper will therefore explore eighteenth-century equine anatomy and its significance for the changing nature of equine medicine. First it will describe the emergence of equine anatomy in the late seventeenth century, analysing the implications of Andrew Snape’s foundational Anatomy of an Horse. Second, William Gibson’s work will be shown to have attempted to create a new kind of farrier by linking anatomy and disease in a “scientific” manner. Third, it will argue that the practice of anatomy became common amongst farriers and horse enthusiasts in the eighteenth century. Fourthly, the emergence of foot anatomy will be shown to have defined the farrier as a specialised medical practitioner after 1750.


• Living Dead Guys: A Forgotten Audience of Andreas Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica libri septem
  Valerie Palazzolo, Art History, University of South Florida
  
  Anatomy books, as we understand them today, are intended for a specific audience consisting of students and professionals of anatomy and medicine. Much in this same respect, while contemporary artists may learn the external shapes and contours of the human body, they are not encouraged to seek to learn the internal workings as well. What, then of Renaissance anatomy? The 1543 publication of Andreas Vesalius’s pinnacle text, De humani corpois fabrica libri septem, or, more commonly referred to as the Fabrica, is widely understood as a text which was intended for not only students of anatomy and medicine, but was also very important in the study and practice of working and layman artists, as is made clear through Vesalius’s own writing. However, as a text which was written in response to the ancient writings of Galen, and clearly follows Aristotelian thinking, why should it be, as our anatomy texts today, limited to a specific audience group? In this paper, I explore just these questions. While Vesalius’s text is widely accepted as the most influential work of human anatomy in the history of science, and numerous scholars have placed emphasis upon the importance of the illustrations in relation to an artistic audience, I feel the voluminous text was also intended for a popular humanist audience, a truth which becomes apparent when one examines the witty references exhibited in the illustrations throughout the text. I will examine these intensions through a focus on the three full skeletal figures found in Book One and, also, through supplementary evidence found in other visual elements throughout the source.


• Books, Bodies, and Machines: Anatomical and Print Technologies in Turn-of-the-century Domestic Hygiene Guides
  Aimee Dowl, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, UCLA
  
  Drawing on a variety of developments in science, book production, and other areas of the industrializing economy toward the end of the nineteenth century, domestic hygiene guides informed many American household practices under the banner of improving family and public health. Hygiene authors incorporated new findings in physics, chemistry, and biology, including the investigation of physiology and work in Europe and the United States, into their descriptions of the “human machine,” and book manufacturers enhanced that description for a mass readership with new forms of anatomical illustration. In particular, new methods for producing chromolithographic images made cheap “dissected plate” anatomies possible for the first time on a massive scale, numbering into the many millions. These changes in print and illustration technologies complemented new, “scientific” explanations of the systems of the body and radically changed the look and marketable elements of domestic hygiene guides, which offered users a way to open the layers of the body as if viewing or even performing a human dissection. I explore questions related to the role of anatomy in domestic hygiene guides—e.g., Muller’s Household Medical Advisor—from 1880 to WWI: What social and scientific developments contributed to the importance of anatomy in hygiene guides and domestic economies? How did technological changes in visual anatomical representation affect ways of thinking about the body as a machine? Did new print technologies offer anatomy and domestic hygiene greater epistemological validity? Combining a history of print culture with theories of recent contributors to STEM studies, I assert that these books exemplify Shapin’s assertion that the production and communication of knowledge are not distinct activities and that they show how material, literary, and social technologies united at the “consumption junction” of domestic hygiene guides.


• From Johnny to Chomsky
  Philip Loring, History of Science, Harvard University
  
  The controversial 1955 bestseller Why Johnny Can’t Read warned Americans that their children were slipping behind. Wedded to psychological research that approached reading as a process of word-recognition, textbooks introduced a limited number of new words each school year, and teachers seldom prompted students to “sound out” unfamiliar words from their spelling. This effectively limited students’ reading repertoire to the dull distillations found in the textbooks. As an alternative, Why Johnny Can’t Read advocated “phonics,” an approach informed not by psychology but by linguistics. Phonics focused on the sounds of letters and promised children the ability to decode unfamiliar words and thus read independently sooner. Celebrated in the popular press yet roundly criticized by educators and psychologists, the book nonetheless found a welcome reception among American linguists, who were eager to leverage Cold War concerns into a more prominent role for their own special sort of scientific expertise. This paper examines how a work of popularization like Why Johnny Can’t Read affected debates within linguistics in the late 1950s, at the time when a young linguist named Chomsky began to shake up the profession. Situating Chomsky's early work in the context of the phonics debates allows us to chart intersections between expert and political discourses on proper English, and reframes the significance of the Chomskyan revolution in the history of the Cold War human sciences.

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PANEL 2: "Tradition and Modernity in Health, Science, and Medicine"
Saturday, 11:50am - 1:00pm
Moderator: Sara Sliter-Hays, English, University of Texas at Austin

• Women’s Pathways to Mental Health in India
  Anubha Sood, Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis
  
  In non-Western, medically plural societies, women experiencing mental distress invest greater faith in mystical-spiritual healing traditions than in biomedical psychiatry. In India as well, women predominate in magico-religious healing sites and are largely missing in psychiatric clinics. Psychiatric epidemiological data cite a ratio of one woman for every three men attending public health psychiatric outpatients’ clinics in urban India. Indian state officials view this as ‘under-utilization’ by suffering women, attributing it to the greater stigma attached to women’s mental illness that restricts help-seeking in public health facilities and/ or to the lower importance accorded to women’s health generally. Anthropologists, feminists, and other scholars of cross-cultural mental health attribute these facts, variously, to the empowering aspects of possession-trance states for women in patriarchal settings, to the oppression of biomedical psychiatry that repels women, and/ or to the phenomenological construal of femininity that explains women’s greater affinity for afflictions related to spirit possession. All these explanations fail to speak for the complexity of women’s help-seeking behaviors in urban Indian settings and this paper aims to reason why that is the case. The highly polarized scholarly debates tend to establish superficial dichotomies by romanticizing traditional healing sites as emancipatory to women and psychiatry as essentially oppressive. Modernizing agents such as the public health enterprise construct mystical-spiritual sites as signifiers of women’s backwardness. I argue for a nuanced understanding that factors in the peculiarities of Indian psychiatry and traditional healing practices by adopting a comparative method that investigates both settings.


• Bioprospecting and the Remaking of Chinese Herbs as Pharmaceuticals: The Making of an Ethnobotanical Drug Company
  Andy Pham, Anthropology, UC Berkeley
  
  Bionovo, Inc. has positioned itself as a novel pharmaceutical company in the US to develop drugs derived from Chinese herbs for FDA approval, targeting breast cancer and menopause. While the conversion of herbs into pharmaceuticals is usually undertaken by biomedical scientists and physicians, Bionovo’s cofounders are two former TCM clinicians who have now dedicated themselves to translational science, which in addition to its definition of applying basic lab research to clinical treatment (“from the bench to the bedside”), also serves as a double entendre, as the former acupuncturists/herbalists are now presenting the effects of Chinese herbs and even the concepts of Chinese medicine itself in the language of the biomedical sciences. This re-presentation of TCM raises critical issues. Referring to recent anthropological insights by Volker Scheid, Margaret Lock, Maarten Bode, and William Bowen, this presentation contends that the Bionovo executives, in aligning themselves with the trend towards integrative medicine, aim to synthesize Chinese medicine but are also subject to being synthesized themselves under a subtle, hegemonic homogenization. Their correlation of hot flashes to kidney yin deficiency remains culturally biased, in that this symptom is Euro/American, rather than Asian-centric and primarily implicates the kidneys while understating the influence of other organs in the menopausal process. The company markets its drugs as botanical and natural, marginalizing their Chinese cultural origins. In this form of bioprospecting, Chinese herbs and formulas may undergo a co-optation as standardized, symptomatic pharmaceuticals and become commoditized, with ramifications for herbalists and the women they seek to treat.


• Radiomania: The Uses of Radium in Orthodox and Patent Medicines, 1898–1940
  Rob Holmes, History, University of Texas at Austin
  
  The discovery of radium by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898 was one of the great scientific discoveries of its day. The element seemed to realize the ancient alchemical quest for the transmutation of elements while threatening to overturn the immutable laws of modern physics. Radium also showed promise as a medicine. Early press reports claimed that radium would cure everything from cancer to wife-beating. Medical research showed that even if the most outlandish promises for radium could not be fulfilled, the element was useful in the treatment of some diseases, notably cancer. It did not take long for patent medicine peddlers to get on the radium bandwagon, selling products that purported to be “radiumized waters” that could cure cancer and other diseases. As radium medicine moved into the 1920s and 1930s, the medical establishment was using radium fairly exclusively in the treatment of cancer. Yet even as the orthodox uses of radium narrowed, commercial sales of radium medicine exploded. Their appeals were based less on contemporary reports of what radium could do than on ideas that were decades old. These medicines evoked not only the wild promises of the early days of radium but hearkened back beyond the discovery of radium to the hundreds of years of patent medicine that came before. Old standards like arthritis and constipation, not cancer, were now the diseases targeted by radium patent medicines, and the connection between contemporary radium research and the claims made for radium became more tenuous. I examine this divergence between the uses of radium by the orthodox medical establishment and commercial medicine companies in the early twentieth century.

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PANEL 3: "Locating Health and Science"
Saturday, 2:00 - 3:10pm
Moderator: Rebecca Onion, American Studies, University of Texas at Austin

• Prison Health: Examining Barriers to Care
  Meredith Rountree, Sociology, University of Texas at Austin
  
  Prisoners in the United States have a constitutional right to medical treatment, yet many observers believe this constitutional guarantee has failed to secure adequate health care. In its 2006 report, Confronting Confinement, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America’s Prisons singled out poor prison health care as a national problem. A federal court found it “uncontested” that, despite California’s $1 billion annual budget for prison medical care, on average one California prisoner per week died of medical neglect or malpractice. Litigation over prison health care has exposed dramatic stories that raise important questions about how prison medical staff see themselves, their patients, and their work. This paper presents a theoretical framework for understanding the structural, organizational, and environmental factors affecting these workers’ ability and willingness to conform to medical protocols, legal standards of care, and social norms. It focuses particularly on initial data suggesting that prison medical personnel see themselves as working in a stigmatized practice. It presents initial results from exploratory research into who these workers are; how they have been trained; and the mechanisms, especially professional networks, that influence whether they internalize and support regulatory and policy regimes. Finally, it considers the informal practices and justifications such workers develop where they see strict compliance with rules and standards as unworkable.


• Walter Reed Hospital and the Rise of the American Military Medical Complex
  Jessica Adler, History, Columbia University
  
  Since its 1909 founding, Walter Reed Army Medical Center (WRAMC) has grown from an 80-bed hospital to a 5,500-bed comprehensive health system incorporating various services for both soldiers and veterans. Over the course of the twentieth century, WRAMC has been the site of a wide range of cutting-edge health initiatives that have had a significant impact on both military and civilian health care practices. (It was, for example, the first American hospital to boast an on-staff psychologist and a comprehensive Occupational Therapy program.) I examine the military, political, and social forces underlying the establishment of WRAMC, and argue that the facility was not founded primarily for the benefit of soldiers, but instead as a showpiece of military and medical organization, and a base from which the United States could undertake public health diplomacy as a burgeoning world power. Walter Reed, with its carefully planted maple trees and stately brick buildings, was intended to be more than a hospital; it would, its advocates imagined, serve as a statement of American military dignity and advancement. The establishment of WRAMC furthered the overall institutionalization of the professional Armed Services, which laid the foundations for an extended American military-industrial complex. An investigation of the formative years of WRAMC highlights ideological characteristics of a United States health care model in which only certain citizens – soldiers and veterans included – are entitled to state-sponsored medical care. As the early years of Walter Reed indicate, however, care for “entitled” citizens has not historically been defined mainly by humanitarian ideals. Instead, it has been based on principles of thrift and pragmatism, and a priority to remain internationally competitive both economically, and in the advancement of medical and scientific knowledge.


• Staging Science in Late-19th Century Berlin
  Kristin Becker, Theatre Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz
  
  As the 19th century saw the large-scale emergence of the natural sciences, a critical mass of new knowledge entered the realm of public culture. Knowledge about nature’s phenomena, earth’s history, the evolution of man and the formation of the universe were no longer restricted to a small circle of dedicated insiders but turned into a common good which almost immediately became part of the capitalist flow of goods. Although a professionalization took place within the sciences that created new patterns of exclusion, the overall commodification of scientific knowledge offered access to a broader spectrum of people. This paper will consider aspects of the popularization of the natural sciences around 1900. Attempting a short presentation of a case study, it will examine the interaction of scientific proficiency, technological innovation and popular culture – a hybrid mixture best represented by the Urania institute in Berlin. In 1889, the opening of the Urania introduced two crucial novel modes of imparting the new scientific gospel especially in the fields of Astronomy, Physics and Geology. Other than the usual science museums of the time, the Urania allowed for hands-on-experience and thus originated the concept of the modern Science Center. Moreover, it included the Scientific Theater which would stage “spectacles of nature” as devised by its director, the astronomer and author of popular science literature Max Wilhelm Meyer. This paper addresses questions about how knowledge is produced and negotiated in a specific moment in time and how formerly exclusive knowledge becomes consumable by means of popular culture. It also looks at the formation and transformation of a site of knowledge that is pivotally shaped by discourses of progress, technological innovation and contemporary media techniques.

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PANEL 4: "Science and Technology in the Era of Cold War"
Saturday, 3:15 - 4:25pm
Moderator: Adrian Howkins, History, University of Texas at Austin, Colorado State University

• Re-considering the Chomskyan Revolution: A History of American Linguistics, 1957–1968
  Janet Martin-Nielsen, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto
  
  In 1957, Noam Chomsky revolutionized American linguistics with the introduction of transformational grammar (TG). TG differed radically from earlier schools of linguistics: whereas earlier schools held a behaviourist and empiricist view of language, TG assumed a rationalist and mentalist view. By 1968, TG was the prevailing paradigm in U.S. academic linguistics. I investigate how TG rose so quickly to a dominant position. I argue that TG’s success was due primarily to philosophical, socio-professional, and pedagogical factors. First, TG’s rationalist basis appealed to U.S. linguists who were disenchanted with traditional behaviourist linguistics. Linguists were also attracted to TG’s overtly scientific approach to theory construction and validation. Second, the Cold War research culture at MIT enabled Chomsky to secure funding and attract strong graduate students. Chomsky’s program established a pedagogical cascade which shaped the form and content of the new linguistics departments being founded at universities in the 1960s. Third, TG provided an explicit pedagogical tool (transformations) which facilitated the teaching of linguistics. This tool proved an efficient mechanism for handling the rapid growth in enrolment in university linguistics programs of the 1960s. I conclude that the dominance of Chomsky’s TG was due not to technical superiority, but to philosophical, socio-professional, and pedagogical factors, and that the scientization of linguistics between 1957 and 1968 was a product of the cultural and intellectual spirit of post-WWII U.S. academia. This paper challenges the received view of the rise of Chomskyan linguistics, as presented in Matthews and Newmeyer.


• Operators Are Standing By: Automation and Computer Utilities, 1949–1969
  Andrew Mamo, History, UC Berkeley
  
  Computer operators recognized that the development of time-shared computers from systems of batch processing in the early-1960s marked a significant transformation in the idea of what computers were and how they could be used. While the historiography of computers has been primarily concerned with hardware and applications, this paper examines the relationship between the notion of computation and the practices of working with machines themselves. To that end, this paper explores the tangled relationship of interactive computing initiatives and artificial intelligence in the computer’s formative years of the 1950s and 60s.
  In particular, I will relate the development of the CTSS and Multics operating systems to the research agendas of two key members in the heart of the cold war science patronage system: J. C. R. Licklider, affiliated with MIT, IBM, and ARPA; and Herb Simon, attached to Carnegie Mellon, RAND, and the Ford Foundation. Simon, whose studies of computation drew upon organization theory and business management, saw computers as tools to bring human users out of the loop, while Licklider’s emphasis on the interaction of man and machine charted a different path for computer development.
  The development of time-shared computing required sophisticated mechanisms to share resources among users, and the idea of the operating system that grew out of this brought the organizational motif into the operation of the machine while fundamentally changing the uses of computation.


• False Witness? Feynman, Bohm, and Brazil
  Shawn Mullet, History of Science, Harvard University
  
  When one thinks of Brazil, the physical sciences are not likely to come to mind. For historians of science this general lack of interest in the country as a locus of advancement in the physical sciences has resulted in a lack of archival research that would shed light on the successes and challenges which one of the largest countries in the world has encountered in its efforts to create a self-sustaining physics community within its borders. This lack of archival research has resulted in reliance upon the eyewitness accounts of those American physicists, two in particular, who have spent time in Brazil. By far the most famous of these men was Richard Feynman who spent a total of nearly a year in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1950s. The second was David Bohm who, after losing his job at Princeton due to his leftwing political background, spent three and a half years at the university of São Paulo from 1951-1955. To the extent that historians have discussed Brazil, their views have reflected those first detailed by Feynman and Bohm. This paper explores the extent to which the views of the two men were skewed by their misconception of the state of Brazilian science at the time and what was expected of them during there time south of the equator. In presenting an incomplete if not inaccurate view of Brazilian science, the cases of Feynman and Bohm offer historians of science, especially graduate students, the opportunity question the extent to which personal observations and experiences can be viewed as a legitimate source for exploring a relatively unexplored subject.

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PANEL 5: "Perceptions of Threat"
Sunday, 10:15 - 11:45am
Moderator: Erin Hamilton, Sociology, University of Texas at Austin

• Bodies of Numbers: Enumerating ‘the Prostitute’ in Modern Japan, 1850–1912
  Ann Marie Davis, History, UCLA
  
  The rise of European bio-medical practices in mid- to late-nineteenth century Japan exacerbated representations of “the prostitute” as a major source of venereal disease. Quantitative reports including nosologies and statistical charts, two medical technologies introduced by British forces, represented “the prostitute” as an epidemiological “risk group” that necessitated state surveillance and control. Considering such data as tools of/ for representation and state management, I explore how the states that manipulated them and “the prostitute” whom they defined were co-constitutive devices embedded in changing political and historical economies. I begin with a history of the “modern” prostitute licensing methods in Japan. Despite initial resistance, the Japanese government ultimately adopted and extended the new licensing policies as it aimed to “modernize” and build its own empire. I next introduce data sets that were generated by different groups for different audiences in different contexts. Together they conveyed new meanings, not only for “the prostitute,” but also for the officials, states, and empires that surveilled “her.” While prostitutes were linked with illness as early as the Tokugawa period, British practices of tallying and analyzing quantifiable data contributed to significant changes in their discursive construction in Meiji Japan. Above all, they identified “the prostitute” as a contaminating force that, by infecting soldiers and citizens, obstructed the vitality of the modern nation-state and its empire. As data on diseased prostitutes proliferated, the agents responsible for them—doctors, diplomats, journalists, and hygiene experts—were transformed into oppositional referents: esteemed, educated, and authoritative male guardians of the national body at large.


• A Critical Examination of the Role of ‘Balance’ in U.S. Mass Media Coverage of Climate Change
  Martina Kunovic, Sociology, McGill University
  
  Regardless of potentially devastating consequences, and in spite of a scientific consensus on the anthropogenic contributions of climate change, U.S. media coverage on climate change has diverged significantly from scientific discourse over the past two decades, breeding uncertainty among the public and inhibiting action to mitigate climate change. I examine how the journalistic norm of ‘balanced’ reporting—presenting conflicting viewpoints side by side and attributing roughly equal attention to each—creates an aura of uncertainty regarding climate change in particular, but also scientific issues more generally. Exploring areas of overlap and tension, I argue that journalism’s balancing norm has no corollary in science and, furthermore, that a critical disjuncture exists between the specialized lexicon employed by scientists and the colloquial language used by journalists. The scientific community tends to speak in a cautious language of uncertainty and probability, a propensity that poses a significant challenge to journalists who are trained to report on issues in a clear and crisp way. While ‘balanced’ reporting may seem an appropriate response to dealing with seemingly uncertain findings, in the case of climate change it has perpetuated uncertainty and passivity among the public. That I see the balancing norm as distorting news by obscuring the scientific consensus on climate change should be evident from my discussion, but I aim to identify some limitations in applying the balancing norm to science-related issues and to provide an impetus to revise the approach to climate change reporting.


• Mixed Motives: The Multiple Uses of XDR-TB
  Erica Dwyer, History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
  
  Extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, XDR-TB, is often described as “virtually untreatable” since it is invulnerable to most anti-TB drugs and is almost universally fatal. A 2006 study identified 53 people with XDR-TB at a hospital in rural South Africa. 52 people died, most of them within a month. XDR-TB did not exist in the scientific literature before March 2006. The media discussed the disease as a dangerous pathogen poised to “imperil millions,” and large sums of money were made available by NGOs and governments to fight it. At a time when key grants for the treatment of multi-drug resistant TB were up for renewal, the even more dangerous XDR-TB was able to generate a new wave of excitement. The meaning of the letter X (extreme or extensive) as well as the definition of the associated drug resistance profile were highly contested. The first official definition of XDR-TB published in March 2006 was revised in October for reasons described as both scientific and political. The health experts studying XDR-TB deployed standardization, quality controls, and collaboration to maximize their scientific credibility. Their scientific legitimacy mobilized moral authority, enabling demands for intervention into the lives of the sick and dying based on humanitarian, ethical, and public health arguments. I explore how a sad but commonplace occurrence—the death of a rural South African from HIV and TB—was transformed into an extraordinary and dangerous event, accompanied by language that made claims on governments and demanded action from humanitarian organizations. I argue that XDR-TB was deliberately named and defined to maximize both scientific and moral impact.


• Envisioning the Invisible: The Silent Epidemic of Hepatitis C
  Katrina Boulding, Department of Communications/ Science Studies Program, UCSD
  
  The visible holds a culturally established primacy, an authority that extends to the practices, networks, technologies and knowledges connected to disease. In Western biomedicine, diseases are often conceived of through the visual, classified based on visibility, explained through images, conceptually bound to structural models, and acted upon based on what can be seen. Visibility, however, does not end with the physical. A link exists between physical and social visibility. In other words, social, economic, and political practices that surround medicine and health also play critical roles in the process of envisioning a disease. These forms of visuality include popular adoptions of medical imaging technologies, the presence of disease in the news media, popular discourse and rhetoric, community gathering around a disease, and access to federal funding. For example, people are more likely to take action in response to a disease if that disease has symptoms that are unique and easily classifiable. By the same token, the social visibility of those afflicted by a disease can impact how that disease is understood and accepted by the greater public. But what happens when there is no visual confirmation? How do you envision a disease with no symptoms and no obvious public presence? What does a disease look like that has little or no physical and social visual perceptibility? This paper explores these questions of visibility and perception through the emergence of the Hepatitis C virus in the United States. HCV, though the most common blood-born pathogen, is still considered a ‘silent’ epidemic. It is what I argue to be a ‘remnant’ disease and challenges the ways in which we visualize phenomena.

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