{"title":"Performing national independence through medical diplomacy: tuberculosis control and socialist internationalism in Cold War Vietnam.","authors":"Michitake Aso","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000487","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/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":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-21","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":"Value, knowledge and reputation: zoological exchange by Australian museums, 1870-1900.","authors":"Henry Reese, Vanessa Finney, Simon Ville","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424000700","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The burgeoning nineteenth-century public-museum sector built a significant part of its natural-history specimen collections through extensive international trading. The early 2020s has seen an upsurge of scholarly interest in this largely overlooked trade. Exchange was a distinctive aspect of the natural-history trade that reveals much about the diverse practices and motives of the institutional collectors. Economic-geographic benefits included conserving the limited financial resources of museums and exploiting complementarities in the geographic distribution of specimens. Collection management, institutional reputation, social connection and international diplomacy were also part of a complex mix of value making that shaped this important international trade. We analyse the exchange practices of the three largest museums in the Australian colonies in the final three decades of the nineteenth century who exchanged Australia's 'rare and curious' fauna with collectors across the globe. By deploying and analysing extensive, comparative data on a particular form of natural history, zoology, and a particular kind of trade, exchange trading, among three Australian museums, this paper extends and enriches recent scholarship on the mobility of natural-history specimens and how they were traded.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142477435","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":"'Like nets or cobwebs': Kenelm Digby, Isaac Newton and the problem of rarefaction.","authors":"John Henry","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000554","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424000554","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article aims to bring out the problematic nature of condensation and rarefaction for early modern natural philosophers by considering two historically significant attempts to deal with it, first by Sir Kenelm Digby in his <i>Treatise on Body</i> (1644), and subsequently by Isaac Newton, chiefly in manuscript works associated with the <i>Principia</i> (1687). It is argued that Digby tried to sidestep the problem of variation in density and rarity by making it a fundamental starting point for his physics. But he also brought out the difficulties of dealing with condensation and rarefaction within the mechanical philosophy, whether that philosophy was plenist or allowed for void space. The problems became exacerbated after experiments with the air-pump achieved extreme rarefactions. It is argued that these led Newton to first consider a retiform or net-like structure of matter, before adopting the radical innovation of supposing repelling forces operating at a distance between the particles of the rarefied bodies. Eventually, Newton came to believe that extreme rarity was inexplicable 'by any other means than a repulsive Power'.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142366903","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}
Gordon Barrett, Claire Edington, Aya Homei, Kate Sullivan de Estrada, Zuoyue Wang
{"title":"Concluding Conversation: De-centring Science Diplomacy - CORRIGENDUM.","authors":"Gordon Barrett, Claire Edington, Aya Homei, Kate Sullivan de Estrada, Zuoyue Wang","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000712","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424000712","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141238415","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}
Michelle DiMeo, Andrew Gregory, Frank A J L James, Viviane Quirke
{"title":"Horizontal Chemistry.","authors":"Michelle DiMeo, Andrew Gregory, Frank A J L James, Viviane Quirke","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000451","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424000451","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In 1976 Raymond Williams commented, 'Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.' Such implied difficulty has not prevented Bloomsbury Academic, since the 2000s, from publishing around forty series of their well-produced and generously illustrated Cultural Histories, with, according to their website, a further fifty in progress. Each series contains six volumes, each book covering, in theory, the same chronological period (antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the age of empire and the modern age), though there is some variation depending on precise topic. The idea is that one can use these books not only to read 'horizontally' about a subject across time, but also 'vertically' through different subjects in the same period - a idea made easier by the e-texts of the series on Bloomsbury's website.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-11"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141082391","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":"https://doi.org/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":"1-9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-22","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":"'Down pythons' throats we thrust live goats': snakes, zoos and animal welfare in nineteenth-century Britain.","authors":"Helen Cowie","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424000542","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In nineteenth-century Britain, captive snakes in menageries and zoological gardens were routinely fed with live prey - primarily rabbits, pigeons and guinea pigs. From the late 1860s, this practice began to generate opposition on animal welfare grounds, leading to a protracted debate over its necessity, visibility and morality. Focusing on the <i>c.</i>1870-1914 period, when the snake-feeding controversy reached its zenith, this article charts changing attitudes towards the treatment of reptiles in captivity and asks why an apparently niche practice generated so much interest. By looking at the biological arguments put forward for and against live feeding, the article traces the changing nature of humanitarian activism in the late nineteenth century and shows how the shifting character of the live-feeding debate paralleled wider trends in the animal welfare movement. It also highlights the different types of knowledge and expertise involved in the debate, as naturalists, veterinary surgeons, legal professionals, zookeepers and humanitarians offered conflicting perspectives on questions of reptilian dietary requirements and animal sentience.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-20"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141072288","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":"'Who can tell me what potable water means?' The assessment of water quality in debates over hydraulic infrastructure in nineteenth-century Italy.","authors":"Salvatore Valenti","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424000566","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How water is perceived and represented has an impact on the relationships between a given society and its water infrastructure. Historians have identified a shift in the perception of water during the nineteenth century, which was connected to the development of chemistry. From an understanding based in Hippocratic medicine and natural history that treated it as an infinite variety of substances, water eventually became understood as a simple compound consisting of oxygen and hydrogen. This resulted in the abstraction of water from its social and environmental contexts, with consequences for the way water was managed. This article aims to demonstrate that such a view gives a mistaken intellectual coherence to a fragmented and conflicted process, which involved continuities, an adaptation of old frameworks to new social priorities, and fine changes in scientific thinking and practices. This paper examines the scientific and political debates concerning water infrastructure, surveys and analyses on water quality, medical reports and political measures in nineteenth-century Italy. Ultimately, the reduction of 'waters' to 'water' in Italy was more about determining who had the authority to assess water quality in the process of creating and stabilizing new power relations between the public and the private spheres than about the abstraction of water from its social and environmental contexts.</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141069521","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}
Gordon Barrett, Claire Edington, Aya Homei, Kate Sullivan de Edstrada, Zuoyue Wang
{"title":"Concluding conversation: decentring science diplomacy.","authors":"Gordon Barrett, Claire Edington, Aya Homei, Kate Sullivan de Edstrada, Zuoyue Wang","doi":"10.1017/S0007087424000475","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087424000475","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p><b>Gordon Barrett</b> (<b>GB</b>): Research Associate, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK (special issue co-editor).</p>","PeriodicalId":46655,"journal":{"name":"British Journal for the History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"1-13"},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2024-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140912986","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":0.8,"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}