The Durham History of Science, Technology, and Medicine research cluster will meet in the History Department at the dates and times specified below. Space may be available for those outside Durham who wish to participate. Contact me to inquire. For more information about the research cluster, see the Durham History Department website.

EVENTS: 2024–25

All events below meet from 3–5pm in Elvet Riverside Room 205 unless otherwise noted.

October 15, 2024 – Hong (Iris) Jiang (Philosophy, Durham; Sichuan University Center for Culture, Science and Technology),
Jane Dye and Birdwatching in China in the First Half of 20th Century

October 22, 2024 – Ron Doel (Florida State University) NB: Meets in TLC113
‘Most Serious Implications for the Future Health and Welfare of the Human Race’: Secret Kennedy Administration Debates over Large-Scale Environmental Experiments

October 23, 2024 – Ron Doel (Florida State University) NB: Meets in PG21
Masterclass on the history of science and visual culture

November 12, 2024: Hansun Hsiung (MLAC, Durham)
Superhuman Powers and Participatory Science in 1970s Japan: The Case of Thoughtography

December 10, 2024: Andy Byford (MLAC, Durham)
Intelligence on the Human-Animal Boundary in the Early 1930s’ Soviet Union

PAST EVENTS

Lectures, 2023–24

April 9, 2024 – Barbara Hof (University of Lausanne)
Unifying Forces: CERN’s Brief Foray into Fusion Science and Its Lasting Impact on International Collaboration

Research on controlled thermonuclear fusion, the process of combining atomic nuclei to release more energy, is currently receiving significant attention because of its potential as a limitless, carbon-free energy source. One of the most well-known projects in this field is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which is under construction in France. Since the 1970s, the United Kingdom and Euratom member countries have also been operating a pioneering reactor, the Joint European Torus (JET), which served as a test bed for ITER. While international collaborations at ITER and JET are oft-cited models of science diplomacy, very little is known about the pioneering years of exchange in fusion science as the basis for scaling up to the ‘global’ dimensions we see them today.

My paper addresses this gap in the early history of fusion science by examining the role of a study group that convened at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) following the declassification of knowledge on fusion processes at the Second Atoms for Peace conference in 1958. Despite its brief activity, the efforts of this study group offer more than just an anecdote about the lesser-known aspects of the history of CERN: the participants collected and shared knowledge, but also established a new network for exchange among fusion scientists in Western Europe. Drawing on archival materials from CERN in Geneva and the National Archives in Kew, and highlighting the key role of British physicists in the study group, my paper shows that the 1958 initiative at CERN formed an important pillar for future international collaboration in the emerging field of fusion science.

May 23 – Emily Webster (Durham, Philosophy)
City of Plague, Ecologies of Power: Land Use Change and Yersinia pestis in Bombay, 1896-1930

This talk will explore the implications of British imperial urban structure and environmental engineering for the propagation and control of the plague epidemic in 1896 Bombay. I will argue that the urban structure facilitated the propagation of the disease, and that the city became the scale at which colonial public health officials targeted interventions for plague control, whether “building out the rat” or clearing the unsanitary environments thought to facilitate the disease. Changes to urban space occurred across ecological scales, affecting both humans and nonhumans. The reorganization of people on the Island promoted distinct changes in population geography, inciting sanitary challenges; meanwhile, at the local level, cleansing and disinfecting practices coupled with slum clearances destroyed the habitats of both human and nonhuman residents. Sanitary measures resulted in the displacement and destruction of habitat for rats, placing fleas and their resident microbe, Yersinia pestis, into closer contact with uninfected humans, and created new habitats that suited rat populations in the form of internment camps. Drawing on Gregg Mitman’s framework, “ecologies of injustice,” along with niche construction theory, I argue that the plague epidemic changed the relationships of humans, rats, fleas, and Yersinia pestis to each other and to the city as a whole. By exploring how the plague pandemic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century became so deadly in the Indian context (12 million of the 15 million global deaths from Yersinia pestis occurred on the subcontinent), I will emphasize how local structural and power dynamics can profoundly influence the severity and longevity of a global disease outbreak – a theme of renewed significance in the era of COVID-19.

October 27 – Hansun Hsuing (Durham, MLAC)
The Housewife, the Gentleman, and the Police Inspector: Facts, Feelings, and Experimental Space in Japanese Thoughtography, 1910–11

This talk examines experiments by Japanese psychologists and physicists ca. 1910–11 concerning the supernormal power of “thoughtography”—the ability to inscribe the mind’s contents onto photosensitized surfaces without the aid of a camera. Broadly speaking, my goal is to untangle how thoughtography’s experimental space shaped divergent personae and norms of behaviour, and through this prompted debates over the relationship between knowledge and affect. More specifically, I analyse how conflicts over “facts” and “feelings” played out between the personae of “gentleman” and “police inspector” in the space of the private, nuclear-familial home governed by the new figure of the “housewife.” In the early twentieth century, the psychological laboratory had yet to establish its authority in Japan. Successful experiment required visiting subjects and navigating the protocols of their homes. Those home protocols were themselves undergoing swift metamorphosis as Japan absorbed models of domesticity from abroad. The strategies through which researchers adapted to the new home, and the strategies by which housewives manipulated homes to their advantage, thus reveal contestations over how researchers were to look, touch and, above all, feel in the presence of others.

November 24 – Jung Lee (Ewha Womans University/Paris IAS)
What’s in the Name?: Refurbishing Modern Botanies in Japanese Colonial Korea (1910–1945)

Rose of Sharon and Japanese cherry are beautiful garden plants cherished in many parts of the world outside of where they are originally from. Both have the names of places in their scientific binomials, too, Hibiscus syriacus and Prunus yedoensis, respectively. Carl Linné (1707–88), the Swedish father of botany, gave the species the epithet syriacus to a rose of Sharon collected from a Syrian garden and claimed Syria as its native land in Species Plantarum (1753). Matsumura Jinzo (1856–1928), a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, named Japanese cherry Prunus yedoensis in an international botanical journal published in Tokyo in 1901, as he believed it was native to Edo, the previous name of Tokyo. According to the Plants of the World Online at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, Linné was wrong, since the rose of Sharon is native to southern China, and Matsumura was right, yet only partially, since it was from a flower shop in Tokyo, making its current binomial Prunus x yedoensis. Still, there are those who disagree with these latest consensus as endless debates seem rules not exceptions to modern attempt to categorize and name nature. But modern taxonomy successfully replaced many old ways of categorizing nature to become the scientific standard. By following Japanese and Korean botanists who competitively created their own modern taxonomies through their interaction in colonial Korea, this talk will claim that the success of modern classification was thanks less to the genius of Linné but more to global builders of modern taxonomy like Matsumura who agreed to make modern taxonomy undebatable in their societies.

Lecture Series – 2021–22

May 24 – Amanda Herbert (Durham)
Labourers and Governors: Spa Medicine and Body Politics c. 1500–1800
Co-sponsored with the Institute for Medical Humanities

This presentation recovers the lives and experiences of women and men who worked inside of medical spa complexes in Britain and the Americas. Spa cities functioned as a ‘curative commons’, offering free healthcare to anyone who needed it, regardless of their gender, race, status, age, or parish of origin. The people who worked in spas, including maintenance and cleaning staff, transportation workers, water dispensers, and body workers, provided essential services within these cities and enabled spas to maintain their identities as sites of public health. Spa workers came under the control or responsibility of local spa governors, and these politicians, physicians, merchants, and land-owners attempted to exert control over spa workers by curtailing their social and cultural lives; by appropriating and redirecting their pay; and by enforcing punitive workplace measures designed to keep workers in positions of vulnerability. In the metropole, spa governors sidestepped or overlook national legislation which would have aided free, white lower-status workers; in the Americas, governors enslaved spa labourers, exerting utter and permanent control over the lives of these women and men, and the lives of their children, in perpetuity. But as we will see, the people who worked at the spa eked out brief but very meaningful moments of autonomy and agency, using the resources at their disposal to push back when governors took actions which they believed were unjust.

May 26, 2022 – Nathan Crowe (UNC Wilmington)
Forgotten Clones: The Birth of Cloning and the Biological Revolution

Long before scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, American embryologist and aspiring cancer researcher Robert Briggs and his laboratory team developed the technique of nuclear transplantation using frogs in 1952. Although the history of cloning is often associated with contemporary ethical controversies, Forgotten Clones revisits the influential work of scientists like Briggs, Thomas King, Marie DiBerardino, and John Gurdon before the possibility of human cloning and its ethical implications first registered as a concern in public consciousness, and when many thought the very idea of cloning was experimentally impossible. By focusing instead on new laboratory techniques and practices and their place in Anglo-American science and society in the mid-twentieth century, I demonstrate how embryos constructed in the lab were only later reconstructed as ethical problems in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of what was then referred to as the Biological Revolution. My work illuminates the importance of the early history of cloning for the biosciences and their institutional, disciplinary, and intellectual contexts, as well as providing new insights into the changing cultural perceptions of the biological sciences after the Second World War.

March 15, 2022 – Yusuf Tayara (Oxford)
Astronomy in the Great Mosque of Damascus: Towards a Social History of Mamluk Astronomy
WHSVC Conservatory, Palace Green Library, 5–6 p.m.

Between the late thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Syria and Egypt’s Mamluk rulers instituted a range of practical reforms within those countries’ religious institutions. Among them was the gradual introduction of the muwaqqit, or timekeeper, in the dominion’s major mosques. In this paper, I focus on the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, one of the oldest continually used religious sites in the history of Islam. As an institution it has housed some of the Islamic world’s most prominent theologians and religious thinkers. The mosque has also produced one of Islam’s greatest technical astronomers, the muwaqqit Ibn al-Shatir (1304–75). I examine how the shifting political and social conditions of Mamluk Damascus came to bear on the astronomical practices of Ibn al-Shatir and his fellow timekeepers. I do so by taking a wider view of the Umayyad Mosque as an institution of technical and religious learning, and as a political symbol of Sunni Islam in a period of high political turmoil. My central contention is that the prevailing mosque hierarchies in the fourteenth century imparted a distinctively practical or folk-astronomical flavour to the writings of technical astronomers in the period. I conclude with some comments on the historiography of astronomy in the Islamic world, highlighting exactly why social histories of science in the Muslim world are generally lacking.

March 8, 2022 – Eamonn Bell (Durham)
Cybernetics, Listening, and Sound-Studio Phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958)

In his Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958), the sociologist of culture Abraham Moles (1920–92) set out to demonstrate the applicability of information theory—a mathematical linchpin of cybernetics—to the arts more generally. Moles drew on classical psychophysics, Gestalt psychology, more modern behavioral psychology, and contemporary psychoacoustic research to advocate a cybernetic model of the perception and creation of art. Moles repeatedly returned to musical examples therein to make his case, leveraging his dual expertise in philosophy and electroacoustics, drawing on formative experiences with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris and Hermann Scherchen at his Gravesano studio. Moles’s interdisciplinary text found many attentive readers across Europe and, following an English translation by the precocious Joel E. Cohen (1966), the Anglophone academic world, but it was valued more as an inspiration for the burgeoning area of “information aesthetics” than as a source of hard scientific evidence. 

Drawing lightly on positions in the history and philosophy of science articulated by Gaston Bachelard (who supervised Moles’s second PhD, in philosophy) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, I suggest a change of emphasis away from its apparent scientific infelicities and toward Moles’s use of sound-studio technique, which is described with reference to the technologies available to Moles in the years leading up to the publication of the Théorie. Moles manipulated and processed sound recordings—filtering, clipping, and reversing them—in his attempts to empirically estimate the relative proportions of semantic and aesthetic information in speech and music. Moles’s text, when understood in tandem with the traces of his practical experiments in the sound studio, appears as an influential and occasionally prescient exposition of the many possible applications of the principles of information theory to the production, perception, and consumption of sound culture that makes ready use of the latest technical innovations in the media environment of its time.

January 18, 2022 – John Shepherd (Durham)
Causes of Crime or Risk Factors?: Predicting Juvenile Criminality in Interwar America

In the early twentieth-century United States, hopes for a new professional science of criminology rested on a variety of potential causes of crime, sought out in the medical, biological and environmental facts of cases. But, as criminologists sifted through more and more information about the personalities, health and backgrounds of criminals, how were general theories of crime to be reconciled with the complexity of individual cases, and what information would be useful for prediction and prevention in practice? This presentation examines interwar criminologists’ attempts to apply psychiatric and statistical methods of prediction to juvenile cases with the aim of identifying future offenders. Through the 1920s psychiatrists argued that behaviours and emotions of childhood were key to diagnosing and treating the foundations of criminality. The Judge Baker Foundation (JBF), first of many new child guidance clinics, was established in 1917 to serve the Boston Juvenile Court. JBF psychiatrists William Healy and Augusta Bronner promised to identify incipient psychoses and maladjustments in Boston’s delinquents and advise on proper sentencing and ‘treatment’. But was this clinical crime prevention effective? By 1934 social scientists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck claimed that JBF psychiatrists had failed and instead offered their own numerical scoring system, utilizing statistical correlates to identify dangerous juveniles based on a selection of related factors. Both the JBF and the Gluecks navigated a huge amount of information drawn from the lives of juveniles with the promise of making accurate predictions to courts, schools, charities and families, all of whom urgently desired knowledge about how to sentence, resource and raise different children. We examine the contestation of predictive authority between the diagnostic expertise of psychiatrists, trained to identify the causes of individual misbehaviour, and the new instruments of statisticians, drawing on tabulated factors to objectively measure risk.

November 4, 2021 - Juan-Andres Leon (Science Museum/Max Planck Institute)
German Astrophysical Research: From Nuclear Sideshow to Controller of the Means of Scientific Production

Much has been written on the fertile interrelationship of mid-twentieth century astrophysics, space exploration, and the Cold War. The national settings for exploring these military-industrial-scientific connections are usually the countries that emerged victorious from World War II. Over the past five years, Luisa Bonolis and Juan-Andres Leon have instead explored how these fields developed in West Germany during the second half of the century, as part of a large project on the history of the country’s peculiar scientific heavyweight, the Max Planck Society.

The starting point of these activities, emerging from the war, reflected the country’s subservient status within the NATO alliance and its scientists’ ambitions to reintegrate to the global community that had been lost during the previous decades. In this context, astrophysics thrived as a way to tap on to global ‘nuclear’ research by working on closely related ‘cosmic’ subjects such as plasma physics and cosmochemistry.

Then, the West German ‘Economic Miracle’ coincided with the launch of Sputnik, so that the country was financially and industrially capable to meet its Space Age ambitions of global leadership. But it also required finding a ‘sweet spot’ regarding their dual-use potential, and circumventing the political fragmentation imposed by a federalized state. It was a renewed embrace of ‘fundamental research’ while outsourcing dual-use aspects, that permitted the creation of large national research infrastructures, albeit, with a need for deep collaboration with the leading space-faring countries and with the nascent multinational organizations such as ESA and ESO.

In the end, however, Germany’s strength in astrophysics did not necessarily derive from building expensive cold-war-related infrastructures; but rather from long-standing research traditions that included technical teams and specialized workshops with remarkable personal and epistemic continuity. These thrived within the global ecosystem just described, so much that by the twenty-first century, instead of owning large infrastructures, many German research groups rather control key ‘means of production’: the higher-value, custom-made made instrumentation and artisanal innovations that are at the heart of even the vastest global collaborations.

October 11, 2021 – Michael Barany (University of Edinburgh)
“Making the Modern Mathematician: Identity, Politics, Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Accidental Rise of a “Young Man’s Game.’”

This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, and will take place as part of the pure maths colloquium.

If mathematics is in principle universal, mathematicians certainly are not. The striking demographic differences between the world of mathematicians and the world at large are a product of the history of where and how mathematicians have been trained, supported, and celebrated. In the twentieth century, a particular image of mathematics as a “young man’s game” came to dominate both popular images of mathematicians and many mathematicians’ own ideas of who can do mathematics and how. I will identify specific historical circumstances and developments that made mathematics appear to be a “young man’s game” in the context of the politics and institutions of an internationalizing discipline. These circumstances converge in the quadrennial International Congresses of Mathematics and the history of the Fields Medal, which has become an accidental symbol of the preemenince of young men in modern mathematics. Recognizing the history, contingency, and politics of this dominant mathematical identity and image can offer a means of understanding and confronting present and future challenges around identity and diversity that continue to matter for mathematics and mathematicians.

LECTURE SERIES – 2020–21

October 30 – John Tresch (Warburg Institute)
“Between Barnum and Bache: Edgar Allan Poe and American Science”

This talk explores the relations between science and its publics in the early 19th century United States. It focuses on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe invented stunning forms of literary sensationalism; yet he had trained at West Point Military Academy and wrote constantly about the sciences. His work reflected two opposed tendencies in science: an explosion of unruly public claims in new periodicals and lecture halls, and elite strategies to control knowledge through centralised institutions. P. T. Barnum’s “American Museum” typified the first; the U.S. Coast Survey, directed by Franklin’s great grandson, Alexander Dallas Bache, exemplified the second. Seen in context, Poe’s works offer incisive, prophetic, and dramatically conflicted commentary on science and the stories it tells.

January 29 – Seb Falk (Cambridge)
“The Light Ages: Planets and Gadgets in (and out of) Medieval Monasteries”

Histories of medieval sciences, especially those written for non-academic audiences, have often focused on big ideas and famous names. The Light Ages is an attempt to write a history of science in the later Middle Ages which focuses on everyday practices of calculation, demonstration, teaching, learning and instrument use. This talk will examine what we can know about the astronomical skills of a poorly recorded monk in fourteenth-century England. We shall discuss what the remarkable life and (perhaps) ordinary achievements of John Westwyk tell us about the place of precise planetary astronomy within monastic life, and within medieval culture more generally.

February 12 – Alex Aylward (Leeds)
“From SSK to ‘Fisher Must Fall’: A Long View of the Controversy over R. A. Fisher’s Eugenics” [Watch on YouTube]

In June 2020, students at Gonville & Caius College Cambridge launched a petition calling for the removal of a stained-glass window commemorating a former student and Fellow, the statistician and geneticist Ronald Aylmer Fisher (1890–1962). The petition, which cited Fisher’s troubling views on race and his lifelong support for eugenics, was a success. The College’s Council voted in favour and within a few weeks, the window had been removed.

Though catalysed by the BLM movement and the recent inquiry into eugenics at University College London, the removal of the Fisher window can be seen as part of a much longer controversy over the relation between Fisher’s eugenical views and his undeniably important scientific contributions. In this talk I revisit the young historians and sociologists whose work in the 1970s and 1980s first drew scholarly attention to Fisher’s eugenics by arguing that it shaped and distorted his scientific work. I contextualise their projects and their findings within the political and historiographical context of their time, exploring also how their work was resisted and criticised by Fisher’s scientific disciples. Reconsidering these 70s/80s debates in light of the recent “Fisher must fall” campaign allows reconsideration of the historical relations between eugenics scholarship and activism.

February 15 – Lara Freidenfelds
“The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America” (Joint meeting with the Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster; note that this meeting is on a week day, and will convene via a different link.)

When a couple plans for a child today, every moment seems precious and unique. Home pregnancy tests promise good news just days after conception, and prospective parents can track the progress of their pregnancy day by day with apps that deliver a stream of embryonic portraits. On-line due date calculators trigger a direct-marketing barrage of baby-name lists and diaper coupons. Ultrasounds as early as eight weeks offer a first photo for the baby book.

Yet, all too often, even the best-strategized childbearing plans go awry. About twenty percent of confirmed pregnancies miscarry, mostly in the first months of gestation. Statistically, early pregnancy losses are a normal part of childbearing for healthy women. Drawing on sources ranging from advice books and corporate marketing plans to diary entries and blog posts, Lara Freidenfelds offers a deep perspective on how this common and natural phenomenon has been experienced. As she shows, historically, miscarriages were generally taken in stride so long as a woman eventually had the children she desired.

This has changed in recent decades, and an early pregnancy loss is often heartbreaking and can be as devastating to couples as losing a child. Freidenfelds traces how innovations in scientific medicine, consumer culture, cultural attitudes toward women and families, and fundamental convictions about human agency have reshaped the childbearing landscape. While the benefits of an increased emphasis on parental affection, careful pregnancy planning, attentive medical care, and specialized baby gear are real, they have also created unrealistic and potentially damaging expectations about a couple's ability to control reproduction and achieve perfect experiences.

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy provides a reassuring perspective on early pregnancy loss and suggests ways for miscarriage to more effectively be acknowledged by women, their families, their healthcare providers, and the maternity care industry.

February 26 – Heather Ellis (Sheffield)
“Ancient and Modern Knowledge: Classical Authors and Scientific Discourse, 1780–1840”

The framework for understanding the relationship between classical authors and scientific discourse in early nineteenth century England is usually one of opposition. Richard Yeo has likened it to the seventeenth century ‘quarrel between the ancients and the moderns’ and emphasises the contrast drawn ‘between classical studies as traditional, and scientific subjects as modern and progressive.’[1] In this talk, I will suggest that this oppositional framework only really holds true for the particular context of Oxford and Cambridge and the debate about what should form part of a liberal education in this period. The ancient universities have been the context most frequently discussed in the historiography, dominated by those working in the fields of history of education and universities. Outside Oxford and Cambridge, the relationship is considerably more nuanced. Drawing on a history of knowledge approach which emphasises not sites of education but rather of knowledge creation, I will focus on the world of learned societies and conversation clubs, in particular, the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society founded in 1781. 

In this context, I will argue that we should understand science as defined not chiefly by content (e.g. studies relating to the natural world), but rather by a particular discourse and method; as William Whewell put it, fields of inquiry in which ‘man’s knowledge assumes that exact and substantial character which leads us to term it science.’[2] When conceived in this way, it is possible to significantly extend our view of the ways in which classical authors were treated. Rather than being defined as chiefly ‘literary works’, many were cited as offering evidence for and commentary on questions of geography, climate, physics, chemistry and biology. Crucially, when classical authors were brought into explicitly ‘literary’ discussions the same ‘scientific’ discourse of hypothesis, argument, evidence and proof remained. As I will show, classical authors were also drawn on in papers across the disciplinary spectrum to both embellish and legitimise scientific discourse.

[1] Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993), 214.

[2] William Whewell, History of Scientific Ideas, vol. 1 (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1858), 5.

April 30 – Richard Bellis (St Andrews)
“Morbid Anatomy in Britain, 1790–1830”

The ‘birth of the clinic’ in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century is a well-known and well explored development in the study of disease, but what happened elsewhere in Europe? In this paper I examine the study of disease in Britain. In the only major examination of such work in this period, Russell Maulitz characterised Britain as a conservative, intellectual backwater in comparison to the continent. However, I argue that there was a distinctive practice of the study of disease in Britain in the early nineteenth century: morbid anatomy. Instead of clinical work, I show that this practice prioritised the description in text and rendering in illustration of the textures of the body changed by disease. Following the example of Matthew Baillie (1761–1823), morbid anatomists made preparations of diseased appearances, formed museum collections, and attempted to produce generalised, anatomical descriptions of their sensory experiences interacting with the diseased cadaver. Rather than being simply conservative, many morbid anatomists were part of the ‘conservative reform movement’ that Carin Berkowitz has identified in Britain in this period. I show that the disinterestedness in Parisian developments that Maulitz identified in Britain in this period was not reactionary, but stemmed from the focus on morbid anatomy as a productive method of inquiry for those studying disease in Britain in the period.

May 13 – Nader El-Bizri (Beirut/Durham) [Note different day]
“Experimentation as a Method of Demonstration and Proof in Alhazen’s Optics”

This lecture examines the methodological rudiments of experimentation and controlled testing in the scientific legacy of the Arab polymath Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham; b. ca. 965 CE in Basra, d. ca. 1041 CE in Cairo). This line of inquiry will be mainly focused on the demonstrations and proofs that Alhazen presents through his experimental procedures in support of his theories of light and vision in the Book of Optics (Kitab al-manazir; De aspectibus; Perspectiva), while showing how this method is underpinned by his broader epistemic approach in studying natural phenomena through the mathematical restructuring of natural philosophy qua physics.

May 20 – Nicholas Everett (Toronto) [Thursday meeting; note different weekday]
“The Art and Science of Medieval Compound Drugs in the Antidotarium Nicolai".

The Antidotarium Nicolai, a collection of recipes for compound drugs written in 12th century Salerno, was an immensely popular and authoritative work in Europe for centuries, an essential part of the medical curriculum and state-mandated for pharmacists and physicians in some regions. Such compound drugs of c.15–60 ingredients, using exotic items like ambergris, pearls or vipers, are an embarrassment to modern science: yet for some recipes modern discoveries in phytochemistry and pharmacology have validated the Antidotarium's claims. This talk shall explore three reasons for the Antidotarium's authority in the history of medicine: a) its relationship to medieval medical theories b) the potential efficacy of some recipes when considered in light of modern scientific studies and c) its mercantile sensibilities.

June 18 – Mary Brazelton (Cambridge)
”Mass Vaccination: Citizens’ Bodies and State Power in Modern China”

This talk will survey immunology and mass vaccination programs in the People’s Republic of China, arguing that the Chinese Communist Party promoted vaccination as a means by which the central state asserted competence and capacities in public health administration. The success of these campaigns therefore helped bolster the legitimacy of the central government at a key moment in its consolidation of power. The PRC subsequently promoted the control of infectious diseases to which vaccination programs had contributed as a major administrative success alongside its much more well-known barefoot doctor and rural health care programmes. This rural health care system became a model broadly championed in communities of global health, but was also connected to regional and global Cold War politics. 

This talk is hosted by the History Department East Asia research cluster and cross-listed with the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine research cluster.​ 

READING GROUPs

The HSTM reading group for 2021–22 focused on the theme of “categories.”

Easter

Henry Cowles, The Scientific Method and Stephen Shapin, The Scientific Life

Michaelmas and Epiphany

November 9: John A. Schuster and Richard R. Yeo, “Introduction,” in The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method

November 16: Richard R. Yeo, “Scientific Method and the Rhetoric of Science in Britain, 1830–1917,” in The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method

November 23: Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science, chapter 1

November 30: Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science, chapter 2

December 7: Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science, chapter 10

January 11: Reviews of and commentaries on The Grammar of Science

The Durham HSTM Reading Group devoted 2020–21 to the issues raised in The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most, by Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell. Vinsel and Russell turn a sharp critical eye toward the pervasive ideology that exalts innovation as an unvarnished good and moots it as the inevitable solution to current social, political, environmental, and technological challenges. Instead, they propose adopting a “maintenance mindset,” which directs our often-diverted attention to the upkeep, repair, and custodianship that is necessary for the smooth functioning of the technologies and infrastructures we so often take for granted. Our discussions addressed these and related themes, according to the following schedule:

October 16
Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “The ‘Industrial Revolution’ in the Home: Household Technology and Social Change in the 20th Century,” Technology and Culture 17, no. 1 (1976): 1–23. (Joint meeting with the Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster)

November 6
The Innovation Delusion, chapters 1 and 2

November 27
The Innovation Delusion, chapters 3 and 4

January 15
The Innovation Delusion, chapters 5 and 6

February 19
The Innovation Delusion, chapters 7 and 8

March 12
The Innovation Delusion, chapter 9

Online Reading Group: Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen; d. ca. 1041 CE), Optics, Books I–III ‘On Direct Vision’

Moderated by: Nader El-Bizri (Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Durham University) and Giles Gasper (Professor, Durham University).

The online reading group focused on the primary text that is translated into English by ابن( A.I. Sabra of Ibn al-Haytham’s Optics, Books I-III ‘On Direct Vision’. Ibn al-Haytham al-Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham; b. Basra in Abbasid Iraq around 965 CE, d. in Cairo in ,الھیثم Fatimid Egypt around 1040 CE) was a remarkable thinker. Not only did he revolutionise optical thought by mathematising its study, his thinking went on to have similar revolutionary effects in medieval Europe. The reception of ‘Alhazen’, as his name was Latinised, in thirteenth-century Europe led to the full understanding of refraction and the behaviour of light. Books I–III are available in English translation which the group will use. A PDF copy of the relevant texts will be circulated via email together with commentary by A. I. Sabra. Weekly readings will be selected from the primary text, Sabra’s commentary is the essential secondary reading. The suggested weekly readings are as follows:
Book I: Vol. I pp. 3–109 (February) On the manner of vision in general
Week 1: Book I, Chapters 1–2
Week 2: Book I, Chapters 3–4
Week 3: Book I, Chapters 5–6
Week 4: Book I, Chapters 6–8

Book II: Vol. I pp. 113–224 (March) On the visible properties, their causes, & the manner of their reception
Week 5: Book II, Chapters 1–2
Week 6: Book II, Chapter 3
Week 7: Book II, Chapter 3
Week 8: Book II, Chapter 4

Book III: Vol. I pp. 227–367 (May) On errors of direct vision and their causes
Week 9: Book III, Chapters 1–2
Week 10: Book III, Chapters 3–6
Week 11: Book III, Chapter 7
Week 12: Book III, Chapter 7