{"title":"Performing national independence through medical diplomacy: tuberculosis control and socialist internationalism in Cold War Vietnam.","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000487","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087424000487","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article explores medical diplomacy as a means of navigating distinct but related nation-building and internationalist projects during the Cold War. It examines how medical professionals from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) utilized their expertise to bolster foreign relations and assert national independence. This article focuses on how three tuberculosis (TB) specialists - Đặng Đức Trạch, Phạm Ngọc Thạch and Phạm Khắc Quảng - adopted, adapted and circulated techniques of TB control, including a modified version of bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine. Amidst these endeavours, these medical-doctors-cum-diplomats navigated various forms of internationalism while soliciting medical assistance. Their roles within the DRV's state apparatus were prominently showcased from the 1950s to the 1970s, particularly at international gatherings such as the conferences of Ministers of Health of the Socialist Countries (MOHOSC). Because of the political complexities inherent in socialist internationalism, these conferences provided a crucial platform for dialogue among socialist nations when other avenues were limited. Consequently, the DRV's medical experts cultivated goodwill and garnered political support, despite encountering mixed results in their TB control initiatives.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"205-220"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Decentring histories of science diplomacy: cases from Asia.","authors":"Gordon Barrett, Aya Homei","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000578","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087424000578","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This special issue brings together a diverse set of cases from Asia with the aim of decentring established historical narratives about science diplomacy. With a critical perspective bringing together the bodies of literature in the fields of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) and critical Asian Studies, we argue that these cases foreground a geopolitical history with multiple forms of sovereignty - often contested ones - and a range of political institutions and actors that enables us to revisit science diplomacy as a means for understanding the relationship between science and international affairs. In doing so, the articles in this issue consciously eschew the normative 'centring' of superpowers or Western imperial powers as the primary actors, focusing instead on the agency and subjectivity of actors within Asia, many of whom were prominent in their respective local contexts. Additionally, we argue that the cases presented here, which examine issues from across science, technology, medicine and the environment, collectively demonstrate the further need for the 'science' in 'science diplomacy' to be interpreted more broadly, incorporating as it does many aspects of human engagement with the material world.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"165-173"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2024-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141076697","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'The very term mensuration sounds engineer-like': measurement and engineering authority in nineteenth-century river management.","authors":"Rachel Dishington","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000948","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000948","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Measurement was vital to nineteenth-century engineering. Focusing on the work of the Stevenson engineering firm in Scotland, this paper explores the processes by which engineers made their measurements credible and explains how measurement, as both a product and a practice, informed engineering decisions and supported claims to engineering authority. By examining attempts made to quantify, measure and map dynamic river spaces, the paper analyses the relationship between engineering experience and judgement and the generation of data that engineers considered to be 'tolerably correct'. While measurement created an abstract and simplified version of the river that accommodated prediction, this abstraction had to be connected to and made meaningful in real river space despite acknowledged limitations to measuring practice. In response, engineers drew on experience gained through the measuring process to support claims to authoritative knowledge. This combination of quantification and experience was then used to support interventions in debates over the proper use and management of rivers. This paper argues that measurement in nineteenth-century engineering served a dual function, producing both data and expertise, which were both significant in underpinning engineering authority and facilitating engineers' intervention in decision making for river management.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"21-41"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139378514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'Visible' compulsions: OCD and the politics of science in British clinical psychology, 1948-1975.","authors":"Eva Surawy Stepney","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000328","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000328","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article historicizes a single stage in how the contemporary obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) category was built. Starting from the position that the two central components which make up OCD are 'obsessions' and 'compulsions', it illustrates how these concepts were taken apart by a small group of clinical psychologists working at the Institute of Psychiatry and the Maudsley psychiatric hospital in south London in the early 1970s, and why compulsions were investigated whilst obsessions were ignored. The decision to distinguish the previously undifferentiated symptoms is attributed to the commitment amongst psychologists at the Maudsley, most notably Stanley Rachman, to an empirical conception of science which emphasized observability. Two aspects of this are discussed. First, compulsions were deemed 'visible' through their correspondence with animal behaviour. Second, the symptom was seen as open to an experimental modification procedure which privileged visible outcomes. Ultimately, the article concludes that the historical division between 'obsessions' and 'compulsions', and the extensive investigation of the latter, has had substantial implications for the development of OCD as a category centred on visible behaviours and treated through behavioural means.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"81-97"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41153450","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Watching birds: observation, photography and the 'ethological eye'.","authors":"Sean Nixon","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000353","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000353","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The article reflects upon the observational practices and methods developed by the early exponents of ethology committed to naturalistic field study and explores how their approaches and techniques influenced a wider field of popular natural-history filmmaking and photography. In doing so, my focus is upon three aspects of ethological field studies: the socio-technical devices used by ethologists to bring birds closer to them, the distinctive observational and representational practices which they forged, and the analogies they used to codify behaviour. This assemblage of elements included hides or screens from which to watch wild birds without disturbing them, optics to extend human vision, pens and paper to sketch and fix patterns of behaviour, watches to record timings, photography to capture action and freeze movement, and illustration and photographs to visualize behaviour. Carried through natural-history networks, the practices, methods and theories of ethologists like Huxley and Tinbergen influenced popular natural-history filmmaking and photography more broadly from the 1940s, driving a behavioural turn in these cultural practices. This popularization of the 'ethological eye' was further facilitated by the convergence of socio-technical devices, forms of observation and dramatization in the work of the early exponents of naturalistic field studies of birds and the popular filmmakers.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10675093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Scientizing the 'environment': Solly Zuckerman and the idea of the School of Environmental Sciences.","authors":"Elliot Honeybun-Arnolda","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000936","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000936","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In 1960 Sir Solly Zuckerman proposed the idea of an interdisciplinary department of 'environmental sciences' (ENV) for the newly established University of East Anglia (UEA). Prior to this point, the concept of 'environmental sciences' was little known: since then, departments and degree courses have rapidly proliferated through universities and colleges around the globe. This paper draws on archival research to explore the conditions and contexts that led to the proposal of a new and interdisciplinary grouping of sciences by Zuckerman. It argues that the activities of Zuckerman and other scientists in Britain during the Second World War and in the post-war period helped to create fertile conditions for a new kind of scientific authority to emerge as a tool of governance and source of policy advice. In particular, the specific challenges of post-war Britain - as addressed through scientific advisers and civil servants - led to the 'environment' becoming both the subject of sustained scientific study and an object of concern.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"99-112"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139040727","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Petty's instruments: the Down Survey, territorial natural history and the birth of statistics.","authors":"Svit Komel","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423001097","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423001097","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>William Petty's work has usually been regarded as an epistemic break in the history of statistical and politico-economic thought. In this paper, I argue that Petty's statistical notions stemmed from the natural-historical techniques he originally implemented to manage the Down Survey. Following Bacon, who viewed the description of trades as a paramount branch of natural history, Petty approached the art of surveying itself as an object of natural-historical analysis. He partitioned the surveying work into individual tasks and implemented a meticulous division of labour, employing hundreds of disbanded soldiers as surveyors and using questionnaires to calibrate the responses of his 'instruments', as he called his specialized workers. By borrowing these methods from natural history to organize surveying work, Petty was able to conceptualize Ireland as a political body defined by tables of aggregate data. I then compare the Down Survey with John Graunt's observations on the bills of mortality to show that both are representative of a particular style of natural history, aimed at describing the natural and political state of a circumscribed territory. I close by considering other manifestations of 'territorial natural history', indicating a continuity between this research tradition and the appearance of statistics in the British Isles.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"43-64"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139472629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The end of an era.","authors":"Peter J Bowler","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423001036","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423001036","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>These volumes conclude a series initiated in 1974, marking almost fifty years of effort by a huge cohort of scholars. This review is thus a valedictory for the whole series as well as an account of what we have learned from the most recent volumes about Darwin's final years (1879-82). The project was begun by Frederick Burckhardt, who shared the editorial role for the early volumes with Sydney Smith and a rolling sequence of assistant editors and advisers who eventually comprised a significant fraction of the leading members of what used to be called the 'Darwin industry'. Smith passed away in 1988 (volume 7 notes his legacy). Burkardt too left this world in 2007 - volume 16, part 1 includes an obituary, but his name has been retained and Cambridge University Press still ask that the series be cited as 'Burkhardt <i>et al.</i>' Duncan Porter took over for volumes 8-15, again with a sequence of fellow editors and assistants, after which James Secord became head of the project through its final years. The dedications of successive volumes record the efforts of individual scholars who have aided the teams and the involvement of the many institutions and foundations that have leant moral and material support over the years. For those of us with Cambridge connections, the University Library will not seem the same without the presence of the team it supported.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"113-117"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139098935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ian Hesketh (ed.), Imagining the Darwinian Revolution Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. Pp. 352. ISBN 978-0-822-94708-0. $55.00 (hardcover). - CORRIGENDUM.","authors":"James A Secord","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423001085","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087423001085","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139465807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sex, science and curated community at the World League for Sexual Reform 1929 conference.","authors":"Laura C Forster","doi":"10.1017/S0007087423000535","DOIUrl":"10.1017/S0007087423000535","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article interrogates the scientific conference as a means by which the organizers of the World League for Sexual Reform's 1929 conference attempted to marshal the 'scientific spirit' in order to present progressive sexual reform as a rational and scientifically informed undertaking. The conference was carefully curated to make the sex reform movement (and the assorted characters that gathered under its banner) look serious, legitimate and, most importantly, scientific. The conference was also an attempt by organizer Norman Haire to exert control over the strategy of sexology, an enterprise that put him at odds with other prominent sexologists of the time. Crucially, Haire understood sexology as inherently intellectually interdisciplinary, but was strategically convinced that the only sound rubric through which to promote and gain acceptance for the movement was through medical science. This central debate, about how best to define the contested concept of sexology, continues among historians today. By examining how the 1929 conference organizers wrestled to define their sex-reforming remit and how they curated the conference to that end, this paper will offer a window onto the mechanisms via which adherents of intellectual communities contend with heterogeneity, how we judge forms of knowledge and, ultimately, what constitutes science.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"469-484"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2023-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71414667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}