History of Science最新文献

This article uses medical textbooks and advice literature to analyze the persona of the physician in the early German Enlightenment. The article pursues three lines of argument. First, it uses medical textbooks to situate the physician in the context of early modern observational life, focusing in particular on epistemic virtues, techniques, and technologies for conducting and documenting observations. Second, it introduces the concept of epistemic advantage to analyze the ways in which medical advice literature - ranging from ideal accounts of the political physician to satirical portrayals of the Machiavellian physician - mediated strategies for using medical knowledge to shape people's conceptions of disease as well as of the physician as a medical authority. Third, it launches the concept epistemic contestation to capture situations of distrust and dispute, in which the physician's authority was challenged both by patients and by other medical practitioners. Such mediation of epistemic virtues, techniques, technologies, and strategies in medical textbooks and advice literature must be understood in relation to an emerging media landscape that fundamentally affected the conditions for cultivating and performing a medical persona. By adopting this comprehensive approach to medical personhood, the article appeals to readers interested in early modern and Enlightenment medicine as well as those concerned with the broader intersections of medical persona, authority, power, and knowledge.

Between 1935 and 1942, a total of 130 men, aged seventeen to twenty-four, mostly of indigenous Hawaiian heritage, colonized Howland, Baker, and Jarvis Islands for the United States, in rotation, over the course of twenty-six expeditions. As part of the American Equatorial Islands Colonization Project (AEICP), they compiled meteorological data, observed and recorded the natural life of their surroundings, collected specimens for the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, mapped the islands, and built a landing strip on Howland for Amelia Earhart. In doing so, they confirmed U.S. possession of the islands, its imperial and military power in the Pacific, and helped establish aviation routes in the South Seas, all of which assisted American efforts during World War II. At the time, the AEICP colonists did not know the role they were playing in this larger project. While some thought they were recruited as part of the museum's scientific research, others were under the impression that they were stationed on the islands to contribute to commercial air travel. This article will examine the AEICP's scientific framework, how it was deployed as a pretext for larger military and imperial goals, and the ways in which it is an example of the hidden or invisible labor of science that dominated the interwar years, World War II, and the Cold War era. Moreover, it will also expose the underlying scientific racist hierarchy of the AEICP wherein the colonists themselves were classified as "types" and "specimens" to be studied.

This paper examines the intersection of environmental history and the history of science, specifically the impact of forestry science and fire management on land use and community dynamics in rural Portuguese mountains. It further traces the evolution of fire management from an ancestral rural practice to a scientific concern and the subsequent integration of vernacular knowledge with scientific methods. In the early twentieth century, fire was a common tool in rural Portugal for land clearance, pasture management, and soil enrichment. Rooted in local knowledge, these practices were increasingly challenged by the rise of scientific forestry, which viewed fire primarily as a threat to be controlled. By the mid-twentieth century, Portuguese forestry policies had undergone a significant shift toward aggressive fire suppression and large-scale afforestation, reflecting a broader trend of prioritizing timber production and forest protection. Notable shifts occurred in the 1970s, marked, among other factors, by the increase in rural fires, a new socioecological vision for the forest and the introduction of prescribed fire techniques influenced by international models. The paper argues that the establishment of scientific fire management practices represents a merging of expert knowledge with local experience. This move represents a shift from exclusionary policies toward a more nuanced understanding of fire's role in landscape management. An examination of these historical developments demonstrates the intricate interrelationship between science, the environment, policy, and local practices, illustrating the way knowledge systems both shape and are shaped by environmental governance.

The nineteenth century is often remembered as the age in which steamships and steam locomotives connected the globe with a speed and efficiency previously unseen. Although contemporaries frequently equated the use of these rapid-transportation technologies with the progress of civilization, their expansion also had some negative consequences. Among these was the more rapid and widespread diffusion of many diseases along transportation corridors as nonhuman stowaways on ships and trains. Most infamously, cholera extended its reach globally by appropriating and using modern transportation routes in ways that were unintended and disastrous for their human creators. This article goes beyond the technological optimism of the time, and its now widely accepted pitfalls, and expands the scope of Anatolian provincial modernization to incorporate a complex web of interactions between human and nonhuman agents in the context of technological use and nonuse. It argues for a complex cocreation of modern conditions between these agents, rather than seeing these conditions as solely produced by human actions or environmental limits. Among the different human agents, interaction greatly increased between Ottomans and European states and their citizens. As the Ottoman Empire became increasingly integrated into global transportation and economic networks, it also experienced the spread of cholera. In the Anatolian interior, cholera epidemics spread along the railroad. I examine the 1893 cholera epidemic in Eskişehir, an important junction town on the Ottoman Anatolian Railroad, which had just begun operation the previous year. The railroad was widely celebrated for its intended uses: tremendously increasing the speed and transportable volume of cargo and enabling travel for military and nonmilitary purposes. The cholera epidemic, however, was enabled by the unwitting use of the railroad lines as conveyors of sickness and death. Furthermore, human attempts to stop cholera's spread by interrupting train service undermined the technology's intended uses but also demonstrated the availability and potential effectiveness of nonuse as an option.

There existed a tradition of mimetic experimentation in the late nineteenth century, whereby morphologists sought to scale down sublime natural phenomena to tabletop devices in the laboratory. Experimenters constructed analogs of the aurora, attempting to replicate the colors and forms of the phenomenon with discharge tube experiments and electrical displays, which became popular spectacles at London's public galleries. This paper analyses a closely allied but different kind of imitation. Between 1872 and 1884, Professor Karl Selim Lemström (1838-1904) attempted to reproduce the aurora borealis in all of its complexity atop four mountains in northern Finland. Crucially, his "artificial aurora" was to materialize at the same scale as the original phenomenon and in its natural habitat in the polar atmosphere. With his experiment Lemström hoped to uncover the workings of the aurora and the electrical currents that he believed were always present within the atmosphere; his epistemological framework was one of learning by making. This paper sheds light on the broader problem of what it meant to authentically replicate a phenomenon that remained largely enigmatic, and, most importantly, how this replication could be verified. This prompts a discussion as to whether model experiments needed only to appear visually similar to the objects they purported to imitate, were required to preserve their form, or needed to be materially identical in order to the original to be identified as legitimate "reproductions" in the late nineteenth century.

This special section on technology-in-use in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire strives to strengthen the dialogue between historians of the late Ottoman Empire and historians of technology interested in the way technologies were appropriated, domesticated, and used beyond the great centers of technological innovation, with a special emphasis on all kinds of users, including nonhuman ones. The ruling elites of this multiethnic and multireligious land empire strove to instrumentalize new inventions and techniques to improve the empire's geopolitical standing, but in an era marked by interimperial competition, by the rise of nationalism, and by the global expansion of capitalism, the circulation, appropriation, and use of these innovations and techniques proved far beyond their control. From steamships and railways to electricity, the focus is on the ways technologies were appropriated and used in the Ottoman Empire, how they were integrated into the everyday lives of the people, and how they shaped and were shaped by profit-making and political agendas, which reveals the rapid and enormous impact of new technologies on peripheral regions of the world.

Between 1893 and 1908, at least six private consortia and the municipality of Baghdad were denied permission to operate steamships on the Tigris and Euphrates on the grounds that a navigation concession had already been granted to the Privy Purse (hazine-i hassa). The Privy Purse justified its insistence on monopoly with reference to the emerging ideology of development (nafia), though its ideas about the role of steam technology in nafia stood in contrast to those of private investors and other Ottoman bureaucrats. Working from the hazine-i hassa's planning memos and contracts, I show that the private treasury envisioned a primarily agrarian future for Iraq, with steamships serving agricultural aims. As such, it focused on envisioning future steamships rather than managing its existing fleet, while still acquiring dominance over land and transport in the region. However, private companies and officials contested this vision, emphasizing the materiality of existing steamships, their roles in trade, and the potential for commercial competition as a means of resisting British imperial encroachment. After the Committee of Union and Progress came to power in 1908, the Privy Purse was disestablished and its properties reverted to the Finance Ministry, opening a brief window during which steamship companies were encouraged to proliferate. Quickly, however, new comprehensive schemes were proposed, though with railways replacing steamships as the corollary to Iraq's imagined riches. Engaging questions about the futurity of both infrastructure and capital, as well as those posed by the technology-in-use paradigm, this article suggests that the hazine-i hassa is a rich starting point for analysis because the scalar and ontological tensions it embodied highlight how different kinds of futures interact in development planning to affect the present.

Can climate be Chinese, and if so, then how? Drawing on personal writings, popular discourse, and scientific reports, this essay considers the work of early Chinese meteorologists in relation to the revolutionary national politics of the early twentieth century. Historians of China have established that nationalism motivated the pursuit of meteorology and other natural sciences, but I advance the more radical position that there was no clear distinction between the practice of climate science and the political ideology that motivated it. With special attention to the career and legacy of Zhu Kezhen from the Xinhai Revolution through World War II, I test this thesis in two arenas: Chinese meteorologists' production of spatial knowledge, and their production of cultural knowledge. The nation was integral to the questions, methods, and analyses of atmospheric science, which helped to reify the Chinese nation-state.

This article focuses on the earlier encounters and uses of electricity, its technology, and its infrastructure to understand how electricity formed a contested terrain of politics among the city's varying actors, such as state officials, financial investors, and consumers, in late Ottoman Istanbul, roughly between the 1870s and early 1920s. I contend that people used electricity as a political tool in their everyday lives even before they could access it physically. Electricity skepticism during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) increased Istanbul residents' inclination for an electrified future; the longer the sultan's prohibitions lasted, the more they fueled this inclination, causing problems about the use of electricity. In contrast to the previous regime's skepticism about electricity use, the Committee of Union and Progress (1909-18) administrators considered electricity a public service that a larger population could use rather than a source of energy for a small, privileged elite. The first urban-scale power plant was completed in 1914. However, the inability to import technical equipment and raw materials due to political and financial troubles caused by World War I (1914-18) and the Occupation Period (1918-23) hampered electricity production and consumption, causing serious problems in electricity use on public and private scales. Amid the wave of challenges, the city inhabitants witnessed numerous unpleasant encounters with electricity use; some perished in tram accidents, while others became criminals. At a time when much of society viewed electricity as a vital element for progress and economic growth, the prevalence of crowded trams, tram accidents, blackouts, and instances of electricity theft within the Ottoman capital called into question the notion of electricity as a technological promise and public good. Consequently, the initial enthusiasm for electricity's transformative potential waned due to tensions between expectations and daily realities, resulting in a cautious approach toward technological modernity.

What kind of people make good scientists? What personal qualities do scholars say their peers should exhibit? And how do they express these expectations? This article explores these issues by mapping the kinds of virtues discussed by American scientists between 1945 and 2000. Our wide-ranging comparative analysis maps scientific virtue talk across three distinct disciplines - physics, psychology, and history - and across sources that typify those disciplines' scientific ethos - introductory textbooks, book reviews, and codes of ethics. We find that, when inducting students into a discipline, evaluating peers, or codifying their professional standards, postwar American scientists routinely named virtues like carefulness, objectivity, and honesty. They applied such virtues not only directly to scholars' characters, minds, and attitudes (thereby equating virtues with personal qualities), but also to their methods, modes of reasoning, and working habits (in the form of what we call virtue-qualifiers). Strikingly, we find that physicists, psychologists, and historians drew upon largely similar repertoires of virtue. For all of them, scientific work required carefulness, thoroughness, and accuracy. Not all virtues, however, were equally important in all disciplines (notably objectivity), nor did each ethos-forming genre place equal emphasis on the directly personal nature of such virtues. All in all, our research establishes an extended framework for understanding the ways virtues remained present in postwar American scientific discourse writ large.