Science in Context最新文献

{"title":"\"Please, come in.\" Being a charlatan, or the question of trustworthy knowledge.","authors":"Irina Podgorny, Daniel Gethmann","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000120","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000120","url":null,"abstract":"With these words from the 1860s, Guido Bennati (1827–1898), an ambulant quack from Pisa, introduced himself at his arrival at the market places in the Italian Piedmont. By calling himself a charlatan, Bennati did not disqualify his art. He called his profession by its real name, and he underscored its value: he was a self-styled practitioner in the lower regions of the medical profession who, in Italy, during the time of the Risorgimento, were still licensed to sell some kinds of external remedies and to perform external operations. They seemed to be making themselves heard everywhere. From England to Italy, from France to Spain and the Americas, markets and newspapers were filled with their advertisements and remedies. “Charlatan,” while a profession, meant something different in other linguistic contexts. Just across the border, in France, the journalist and writer Jean-Baptiste Gouriet (1774-1855) had published a compilation of the most famous charlatans that visited Paris from ancient times to the present day. In so doing, he specified that the term included the jugglers, jokers, jesters, operators, acrobats, crooks, swindlers, soothsayers, card-pullers, fortune-tellers and all the characters who have made themselves famous in the streets and public squares of Paris. Gouriet connected their stories to the history of theatre, entertainment, and illusion, but also to their use of the public space and their itinerant life (Gouriet 1819). Traveling from one marketplace to another, dealing in exotic objects and remedies, organizing shows and exhibitions, performing miraculous healings by appealing to the curative power of words and liniments, charlatans have infested Paris and traversed Europe at least since early modern times. The category included advocates for the elegant dog, the sage donkey, and the talking horses, a conversation that – as Daniel Gethmann shows in his article below – made its way into the scientific debates of the twentieth century. In that sense, tracing the history of charlatans and talking horses can be a means of seeing and understanding the changing frontiers of science. As Nathalie Richard develops in her epilogue, the science of modern charlatans syncretizes elements of a popular culture that far from having “no history” is rather constituted with elements borrowed from the cutting edge of the modernity of its time. As the classic mountebank he was, Bennati arrived in the Italian towns accompanied by a parade of exotically dressed musicians and entertainers (Fucini 1921, translated by and quoted in Gambaccini 2004, 200). Like many other European traveling doctors, Bennati appealed to “drum and trumpet” theater performances, old routines that in the nineteenth century had incorporated the “ethnographic parade,” in the style of Phineas Taylor Barnum’s circus, which originated in the US as traveling medicine shows: the association of a “doctor” with a Native","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39741924","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Useful charlatans: Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti's fasting contest in Paris, 1886.","authors":"Agustí Nieto-Galan","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000168","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000168","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper analyzes the public fasts of two Italian \"hunger artists,\" Giovanni Succi and Stefano Merlatti, in Paris in 1886, and their ability to forego eating for a long period (thirty and fifty days respectively). Some contemporary witnesses described them as clever frauds, but others considered them to be interesting physiological anomalies. Controversies about their fasts entered academic circles, but they also spread throughout the urban public at different levels. First, Succi and Merlatti steered medical debates among physicians on the \"scientific\" explanations of the limits of human resistance to inanition, and acted as ideal mediators for doctors' professional interests. Second, they became useful tools for science popularizers in their attempt to gain authority in drawing the boundaries between \"orthodox\" and \"heterodox\" knowledge. Finally, in the 1880s, Succi and Merlatti's contest, the controversy around the liquids they ingested, and their scientific supervision by medical doctors, all reinforced their own professional status as itinerant fasters in a golden decade for that kind of endeavor. For all those reasons, Succi and Merlatti can be viewed as useful, epistemologically-active charlatans.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39727276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Between learned and popular culture: A world of syncretism and acculturation.","authors":"Nathalie Richard","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000119","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000119","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The world of charlatans is a world of constantly shifting borders and redefinitions, a world of crossed lines and pushed boundaries. Can one even speak of \"the world\" of charlatans in the singular, when the examples we are given to read in this volume reveal such great diversity that they seem to defeat any attempt to define common traits, as Roy Porter (1989) tried to do in his time? Certainly, commercial interests and the lure of a quick and easy profit seem to have motivated some charlatans. Certainly, the universal effects of the nostrum or (psycho)therapeutic procedures were often put forward as a commercial argument. Certainly, many had an itinerant career; but this was not always the case. In fact, these traits are not shared, and the main reason is probably that, aside from a very particular context in early modern Italy, the qualification of charlatan was not claimed by the actors themselves, but was attributed to them by others, be they contemporaries or later historians. These features are therefore only common if we understand them as stigmata1 attributed to charlatans by those who wish to distinguish themselves from them or to draw a line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39741919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SIC volume 33 issue 4 Cover and Back matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s0269889721000181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s0269889721000181","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48502100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"SIC volume 33 issue 4 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1017/s026988972100017x","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/s026988972100017x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45773008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Charlatan epistemology: As illustrated by a study of wonder-working in the late seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.","authors":"Koen Vermeir","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000193","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000193","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article highlights the epistemic concerns that have permeated the historical discourse around charlatanism. In it, I study the term \"charlatan\" as a multivalent actor's category without a stable referent. Instead of defining or identifying \"the charlatan,\" I analyze how the concept of the charlatan was used to make epistemic interventions about what constituted credible knowledge in two interconnected controversies. Focusing on these controversies allows me to thematize how the concept of \"the charlatan\" expanded beyond medical contexts and to bring a history of knowledge perspective to the history of medicine.The title of the article, \"Charlatan Epistemology,\" indicates a historical epistemological approach to charlatanism as well as the existence of a charlatan's embodied epistemology. On the one hand, I historicize the epistemic characteristics of charlatanism, focusing on virtues as well as vices, knowledge as well as ignorance, by addressing the historical and contextual specificities of two case studies and the larger epistemic concerns at play. On the other hand, I show how references to charlatanism implied the existence of specific embodied knowledges, special skills and techniques to manipulate either natural secrets or the human psyche, and I explore the similarities and differences between charlatan epistemology and artisanal epistemology.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39727277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The \"Controversial Cundurango Cure\": Medical professionalization and the global circulation of drugs.","authors":"Elisa Sevilla,&nbsp;Ana Sevilla","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000144","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the medical and political discussions regarding a controversial medicinal bark from Ecuador - cundurango - that was actively sponsored by the Ecuadorian government as a new botanical cure for cancer in the late nineteenth century United States and elsewhere. The article focuses on the commercial and diplomatic interests behind the public discussion and advertising techniques of this drug. It argues that diverse elements - including the struggle for positioning scientific societies and the disapproval of the capacities of Ecuadorian doctors, US abolitionist history, regional and local political struggles - played a role in the quackery accusations against cundurango and its promoters. The development and international trade of this remedy offer interesting insights into the global history of drugs, particularly how medical knowledge was challenged during a period when scientific medicine was struggling for hegemony. It explores how newspapers expanded \"the public interest\" in a possible cancer cure.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39741923","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A democratic program for healing: The Raspail domestic medicine method in 1840s France.","authors":"Hervé Guillemain","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000132","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Raspail's domestic medicine method, popularized in 1840s France, has similarities with the practices of nineteenth century non-academic healers. His mass marketing of camphor as a universal treatment echoes the practices of \"charlatans\" and their circles. But Raspail is also very original in this history of popular care. As a scientist, a popularizer of encyclopedic knowledge and a political activist, he managed to blur traditional distinctions between science and politics and between popular and learned medicine. Raspail was a constant thorn in the side of academic institutions and professional organizations, which were struggling to gain legitimacy. His work took a political turn when he combined, within a single project, his approach to treatment and his call for democratizing medical care. Raspail's method challenged institutional norms by acknowledging the importance of the patient's contribution to the healing process, and recognizing the necessity of thwarting the occasionally deleterious effects of monopolistic medicalization.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39741921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Local versus the Global in the history of relativity: The case of Belgium.","authors":"Sjang L Ten Hagen","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000028","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein's theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows and patterns in the global history of relativity. The attempts of Belgian physicist Théophile de Donder to contribute to relativity physics during the 1910s and 1920s illustrate the role of the war in shaping the transnational networks through which relativity circulated. The local attitudes of conservative Belgian Catholic scientists and philosophers, who denied that relativity was philosophically significant, exemplify a global pattern: while critics of relativity feared to become marginalized by the scientific, political, and cultural revolutions that Einstein and his theory were taken to represent, supporters sympathized with these revolutions.</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0269889721000028","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39068138","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Changing conceptions of mathematics and infinity in Giordano Bruno's vernacular and Latin works.","authors":"Paolo Rossini","doi":"10.1017/S0269889721000041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889721000041","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of Giordano Bruno's conception of mathematics. Specifically, it intends to highlight two aspects of this conception that have been neglected in previous studies. First, Bruno's conception of mathematics changed over time and in parallel with another concept that was central to his thought: the concept of infinity. Specifically, Bruno undertook a reform of mathematics in order to accommodate the concept of the infinitely small or \"minimum,\" which was introduced at a later stage. Second, contrary to what Héléne Védrine claimed, Bruno believed that mathematical objects were mind-dependent. To chart the parallel development of the conceptions of mathematics and infinity, a seven-year time span is considered, from the publication of Bruno's first Italian dialogue (La cena de le ceneri, 1584) to the publication of one of his last Latin works (De minimo, 1591).</p>","PeriodicalId":49562,"journal":{"name":"Science in Context","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1017/S0269889721000041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39068141","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}