History of Science最新文献

{"title":"\"Put a mark on the errors\": Seventeenth-century medicine and science.","authors":"Alice Leonard,&nbsp;Sarah E Parker","doi":"10.1177/00732753221135046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221135046","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Error is a neglected epistemological category in the history of science. This neglect has been driven by the commonsense idea that its elimination is a general good, which often renders it invisible or at least not worth noticing. At the end of the sixteenth century across Europe, medicine increasingly focused on \"popular errors,\" a genre where learned doctors addressed potential patients to disperse false belief about treatments. By the mid-seventeenth century, investigations into popular error informed the working methodology of natural philosophers, rather than just physicians. In 1646, Thomas Browne published <i>Pseudodoxia Epidemica</i>, a large volume on popular error. Despite Browne's formal training as a physician, this work examined only a few medical errors and instead aspired to be an encyclopedia of error. <i>Pseudodoxia Epidemica</i> was highly popular, running to six editions, and was known by the Fellows of the Royal Society. Influenced by Browne, alongside Bacon's theory of the idols, natural philosophic practice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century developed a focus on error that revised traditional attention to the discovery of knowledge. Fellows such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke proposed new ways to secure truth under the far-reaching influence of Bacon's refutations of \"natural human reason\" distorted by false idols, of syllogistic logic, and of \"theories,\" his label for traditional philosophical systems that bias thought toward falsity. In three parts, this article traces the progression in early modern scientific approaches to handling error, and especially medical error - from physicians' efforts to identify and eradicate it through collaborative effort, to the striking tension in Browne's work between seeking to eliminate error while also showing a marked tolerance for it, to the Royal Society's Baconian objective of instrumentalizing error to find truth. Error emerges as its own epistemic category that serves as a driving force toward knowledge production.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 3","pages":"287-307"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pub/pmc/oa_pdf/cc/06/10.1177_00732753221135046.PMC10464649.pdf","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"10212898","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Affective geographies: Family and friendship in the production of scientific knowledge.","authors":"Dena Goodman","doi":"10.1177/00732753211059957","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211059957","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Through case studies of two early nineteenth-century French geologists, this article shows how relations of family and friendship were integral to determining where science took place. Digging up the traces of what I call the \"affective geographies\" of individual scientists that are entangled with their intellectual itineraries, I show how the practice of science is embedded in such affective relations and thus in everyday life.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"236-265"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9628399","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Current debates and emerging trends in the history of science in premodern Islamicate societies.","authors":"Nahyan Fancy,&nbsp;Justin Stearns,&nbsp;Sonja Brentjes,&nbsp;A Tunç Şen,&nbsp;Scott Trigg,&nbsp;Noah Gardiner,&nbsp;Nükhet VarlıkRutgers,&nbsp;Matthew Melvin-Koushki,&nbsp;S Nomanul Haq","doi":"10.1177/00732753231154690","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753231154690","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This roundtable brings together contributions from nine senior, mid-career and junior scholars who work on the history of science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. The contributions reflect upon some of the challenges that have historically constrained the subfield, how they have sought to overcome them, and what they see as some of the more productive and fruitful turns the field has taken and/or should take in the future. A central trend in all contributions is how they seek to confront the combined weight of colonialism, Orientalism, and the teleological history of science that continues to haunt contemporary discussions in both academia and the general public with regards to science in pre-1800 Islamicate societies. Without diminishing the pioneering achievements of the generations of historians who have preceded us, and upon whose work we continue to rely, this combined weight has tended a) to marginalize the study of occult sciences in Islamicate societies; b) to emphasize investigations of content from an etic perspective of how we got to the present, which is primarily seen as how the scientific content is connected to the rise of modern science in Europe; and c) to concomitantly marginalize the study of science in post-1200 Islamicate societies, particularly those with little to no connection to the rise of \"Western\" science. The contributions build upon conversations that took place among participants in December 2019 at a workshop at New York University (NYU), Abu Dhabi Institute in New York City, funded by a grant from NYU Abu Dhabi.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"123-178"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9630978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"The lungs of a ship\": Ventilation, acclimatization, and labor in the maritime environment, 1740-1800.","authors":"Paul E Sampson","doi":"10.1177/00732753211046449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211046449","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the connection between projects for shipboard ventilation and the shifting medical discourse about acclimatization in the British Empire during the eighteenth century. I argue that the design, use, and disuse of a class of shipboard \"ventilators\" proposed by natural philosopher Stephen Hales helps us to trace changing ideas about the ability of European bodies to acclimate, or \"season,\" to tropical environments. These ventilating machines appealed to British administrators because they represented an embodiment of providential and enlightened ideas that validated the expansion of overseas empire. In addition, they promised to increase labor efficiency by reducing the mortality and misery experienced by the sailors and enslaved people during long sea voyages. As skepticism about acclimatization grew in response to stubbornly high mortality rates in the West Indies, Hales' ventilators fell out of favor - a development underscored by their dismissal as a potential solution for the appalling conditions found in the transatlantic slave trade. By examining ventilators' nearly fifty-year career in naval and slave ships, this article will show the role of technology and the shipboard environment in the transition from enlightened optimism about acclimatization toward later attitudes of racial and environmental essentialism.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"214-235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9578535","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shattering crystal with crystal: Galileo's rhetoric, lenses, and the epistemology of metaphor.","authors":"Hannah Marcus,&nbsp;Crystal Hall","doi":"10.1177/00732753211041858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211041858","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The terms that Galileo's contemporaries used for lenses (<i>cristallo/i</i>, <i>lente/i</i>, and <i>vetro/i</i>) have often been treated, and even translated, interchangeably. In this article, we argue that Galileo used references to crystals as lenses to embed epistemological and cosmological arguments in the material object of the telescope. Across Galileo's correspondence and letters, the term crystal had many uses and meanings. As a substance, crystal was a form of raw material, but crystal was also a substance that was central to scholastic cosmology and an explanatory device on which scholastics relied to explain first the appearance of the new star of 1604 and then Galileo's new telescopic discoveries. When Galileo began using the word crystals as a synonym for lenses, he endowed the material of his instrument with cosmological arguments. Galileo's choice of language was deliberate and polemical, serving as a joke at the expense of scholastics and as a linguistic marker of social proximity to Galileo and his intellectual agenda, especially among the members of the Academy of the Lincei. Rhetorically and linguistically, Galileo chose to refer to his lenses as crystals both because of the material from which they were made and because in so doing he signaled the epistemological work that the lenses would perform. Ultimately, the crystal lenses in Galileo's telescope and writings shattered the crystalline spheres, replacing explanatory metaphors with a polemical emphasis on the material and empirical realities of objects.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"179-213"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9572899","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The <i>Revista Ştiinţifică \"Vasile Adamachi\"</i> and its role in forming national and international scientific awareness of Greater Romania, 1910-1933.","authors":"Alexandra Chiriac","doi":"10.1177/00732753211054979","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211054979","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The <i>Revista Ştiinţifică \"Vasile Adamachi\"</i> (1910-1948) had aimed since its first edition to disseminate the newest achievements of science to the interested general public with the explicit intention of building national consciousness and solidarity that would forward Romania's natural powers through science. Even though the editors of the journal had complained constantly that their efforts to promote the national scientific movement were making slow progress, they maintained their openness toward the international state of research by publishing notes and reviews of the main scientific developments worldwide. Caught between those two ideals (that of a Romanian science and of keeping up with the international scientific scene), the journal reflects the struggles, the difficulties, but also the successes of the individual researchers, acting as a two-way communication channel between science producers and consumers. It provides us with a valuable insight into the Self versus Other perception in a time when contact between the Romanian and Western European cultures was beginning to consciously evolve from mere imitation of a dominant power to the incorporation of fragmented foreign categories. It is a perfect example of 'patchwork', in which the native and foreign elements coexisted in a continuous process of redefining and reshaping the newly formed national identity.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 2","pages":"266-284"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9574772","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Local problems, global solutions? Making it rain in Hong Kong c. 1890-1930.","authors":"Fiona Williamson","doi":"10.1177/00732753221105026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221105026","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The late nineteenth to early twentieth century saw a small but dedicated rise in experimental rainmaking. The possibility that humanity might one day be able to control the weather - especially to alleviate drought - was very attractive to governments and private investors. The late nineteenth century was an era of scientific optimism and a number of rainmaking experiments across the world had brought the potential for weather control out of the realms of discourse and literature and further into tangible near-future science. There has been a small but thorough historiographical literature on this subject, focusing largely on American, British, and Australian efforts. This article seeks to build on this by exploring the little-known history of rainmaking in Hong Kong before 1930, centering on a case study of a particular experiment intended to alleviate the disastrous drought of 1928-9. As was the case elsewhere, Hong Kong's rainmaking efforts raised as much skepticism as they did support, with the government, scientists, and the general public in two minds about whether making rain was even possible. As such, this article aims to interrogate the concepts of the sociotechnical imaginary and the history of failure, while also contributing to the wider story of meteorological knowledge-making.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":" ","pages":"732753221105026"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9227449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Techniques of repair, the circulation of knowledge, and environmental transformation: Towards a new history of transportation.","authors":"Dániel Margócsy,&nbsp;Mary Augusta Brazelton","doi":"10.1177/00732753211046450","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753211046450","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>It is the aim of this article to put questions of maintenance and repair in the history of science and technology under scrutiny, with a special focus on technologies and methods of transportation. The history of transportation is a history of trying to avoid shipwrecks and plane crashes. It is also a history of broken masts, worm-eaten hulls, the flat tires of cars, and endless delays at airports. This introductory article assesses the technological, scientific, and cultural implications of repairing and maintaining transportation networks. We argue that infrastructures for maintenance and repair played just as important a role in the history of transportation as the wharves and factories where ships, cars, trains, and airplanes were originally built. We also suggest that maintenance and repair are important sites of knowledge production, and a historical account of these practices provides a new, decentered narrative for the development of modern science and technology.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 1","pages":"3-18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9975890/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9569930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Exploration and mortification: Fragile infrastructures, imperial narratives, and the self-sufficiency of British naval \"discovery\" vessels, 1760-1815.","authors":"Sara Caputo","doi":"10.1177/0073275320970042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275320970042","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Eighteenth-century naval ships were impressive infrastructures, but subjected to extraordinary strain. To assist with their \"voyage repairs,\" the Royal Navy gradually established numerous overseas bases, displaying the power, reach, and ruthless logistical efficiency of the British state. This article, however, is concerned with what happened where no such bases (yet) existed, in parts of the world falling in between areas of direct British administration, control, or influence. The specific restrictions imposed by technology and infrastructures have been studied by historians interested in naval strategy, but they can also help to reframe national narratives of power or observe the transnational interactions surrounding access to knowledge and resources. This paper discusses the material, cultural, and diplomatic constraints that could appear when vessels, and especially \"discovery ships,\" sailed in strange waters or sought technical assistance in allied ports. I argue that the \"mortification\" of some commanders at their vessels' unfitness for service was an important - and often neglected - element on the palette of emotions undergone by voyagers, capturing their strong sense of ultimate material powerlessness. Such frustration even became embedded in imperial cartography, as shown by the case study of Matthew Flinders. This perspective highlights the limits of naval technology, complicating imperialistic \"success stories\" and better reintegrating the navy into the history of maritime travel and transportation, from which it is often singled out.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 1","pages":"40-59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1177/0073275320970042","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9567609","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Contested \"automobility\": Peasants, townsfolks, and infrastructures of road transport in interwar central and western India (c. 1919-39).","authors":"Stefan Tetzlaff","doi":"10.1177/00732753221125055","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00732753221125055","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Infrastructure-making in interwar India was a dynamic, multilayered process involving roads and vehicles in urban and rural sites. One of their strongest playgrounds was Bombay Presidency and the Central Provinces in central and western India. Focusing on this region in the interwar period, this paper analyzes the varied relationship between peasant households and town-centred modernizing agents in the making of road transport infrastructures. The central argument of this paper is about the persistence of bullock carts over motor cars in the region. This persistence was grounded in the specific regional environment, the effects of the 1930s economic depression, and the priorities of social classes. Pinpointing these connections, the paper highlights that \"modernization\" of infrastructure was not a simple, linear process of progressivist change, nor did it mean the survival of apparently \"old\" technologies in the modern era. Instead, the paper pays attention to conflicting social complexities, implications, and meanings of the connection between infrastructure and modernity that modernization assumptions often overlook. Here, the paper shows how technological change occurred as a result of real, material class interests pulling infrastructural technology in different directions. This was where and why arguments of road-motor lobbyists and cart advocates eventually clashed, and Gandhian social workers resisted motor transport in defense of peasant interests.</p>","PeriodicalId":50404,"journal":{"name":"History of Science","volume":"61 1","pages":"77-101"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9576024","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}