Endeavour最新文献

In 1918, German archaeologist Robert Koldewey, excavator of Babylon, Iraq, observed that the depiction of the fantastical “dragon of Babylon” on the sixth century BCE Ishtar Gate must reference a real animal whose closest relatives would be dinosaurs like the iguanodon. Though ignored within archaeology, Koldewey’s comments were taken up in German-American popular science writer Willy Ley’s “romantic zoology” (1941), then by Bernard Heuvelmans (1955), founding figure in the fringe field of cryptozoology. Their interpretations would ultimately inspire expeditions by the International Society of Cryptozoologists in Central Africa to find the Mokele-Mbembe, a “living dinosaur,” and migrate into Young Earth Creationist and ancient aliens theories. An analysis of Koldewey’s marginal academic observation serves as a means of considering the process of knowledge formation and canonization and the unpredictable life of scholarly ideas.

Animals, especially mammals, have played a critical role in the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 virus originated in animals, and the virus can jump back and forth between humans and animals. Moreover, animals have been central to the development of the various vaccines against the virus now employed around the world, continuing a long history. The interrelationships between animals and humans in both disease transmission and its prevention call for an interdisciplinary approach to medicine.

Like the rest of Scandinavia, Denmark and Norway have a strong tradition of comprehensive topographical descriptions, often written by local clergymen. Physical-economic descriptions of small areas, most often parishes, emerging in the middle of the eighteenth century soon formed a model that remained strikingly uniform until around 1820, when the topographies changed once again. In the Dual Monarchy of Denmark and Norway, the years between 1760 and 1820 revealed a prolific topographic genre in which natural history and natural resources played important parts. Natural history was essential, being regarded as the condition for the composite peasant economy and offering the opportunity to reveal unknown sources of livelihood or intensify the use of those sources. Natural history was not only an aspect of the locality that should be dealt with in the description of the locality, but it became an entire scheme or method for the whole description, in which knowledge took up the form of inventories as did natural history itself. The topographical descriptions give hints as to the sort of observing, collecting, identifying, sorting, and ordering practices that lay behind the text. The concise and neutral form of these topographies did not give much room for the emotionality otherwise considered in the period as both a precondition for and an effect of dealings with natural history, and only rarely, in small gaps, did the sensual and aesthetic preferences of the authors come through, occasionally revealing their doubts but also their love of nature.

In this article we document the role of Ivan Matveevich Sokolov, anatomy professor at Moscow University, in the mummification of Julia Pastrana, born in Mexico (afterwards an American citizen by marriage), and her son. Sokolov had investigated and described the corpse of this famous “hairy woman” as an example of a congenital anomaly of the genus Homo. Due to the art of Sokolov’s embalming, the mummies of Julia and her son were presented to the scientific world, which made it possible to study similar cases of deformity in the human population. However, the historical role of Sokolov was not limited to his study of a congenital disease. His thorough postmortem examination and description of Pastrana’s and her son’s bodies allowed Sokolov to make an indirect contribution to evolutionary thought. Sokolov’s confirmation that Pastrana belonged to the genus Homo refuted all speculation about her hybrid origins and status as a missing link in the evolution of apes into humans.

Standing apart from Martin Heidegger’s 1929–1930 metaphysical lessons is his description of a photograph taken by Josef Maria Eder, for Sigmund Exner, using the lens of a glow worm’s eye. Since the technical details of the production of such a photography are not readily available, I will reconstruct the experimental setting. Paying attention to the technical details opens up a venue for historical and philosophical reflection based on the creative potential of scientific practices. Through a critical approach, a rather generic experimental meshwork could be turned into a natural-artifactual, living-nonliving hybrid setting in which the concepts of dense technological environment, philosophical toy, and experimental system meet and intertwine thanks to the playfulness that goes through them, a quality rooted in scientific practices. Within this hybrid and playful configuration, the unliving emerges as a paradoxical voice for the living.

In 1866 the Aëronautical Society of Great Britain was founded with George Douglas Campbell, 8th Duke of Argyll (1823–1900) as first president, and patron. The purpose of the society was to further the study of aerial navigation as well as to make aeronautics a respectable science, and today the society--now the Royal Aeronautical Society--serves as a professional body dedicated to aerospace research. There were two fundamental areas of scientific knowledge key to the society in its initial decades: 1) a detailed understanding of the principles of bird flight, and 2) the practical application of that knowledge in the construction of flying machines. Argyll firmly belonged to the former being a well-seasoned ornithologist and theorist of flight, and, with the publication of his best-selling book The Reign of Law (1867), was one of the first to popularise the theoretical principles of bird flight. In this paper, I examine the relationship between bird and mechanical flight through Argyll's ornithological studies, with a focus on the various factors early in Argyll's life that led to his eventual position as president of the Aëronautical Society. By analysing the influence of his family relations, home environment and religious convictions, I show how Argyll’s scientific undertakings existed as part of a wider network of theistic Victorian aristocrats who contributed to the creation and professionalization of scientific disciplines in a way that contrasted markedly with the methods of many of the scientific naturalists.

One common contemporary usage of the term “diagnostic uncertainty” is to refer to cases for which a diagnosis is not, or cannot, be applied to the presenting case. This is a paradoxical usage, as the absence of diagnosis is often as close to a certainty as can be a human judgement. What makes this sociologically interesting is that it represents an “epistemic defence,” or a means of accounting for a failure of medicine’s explanatory system. This system is based on diagnosis, or the classification of individual complaints into recognizable diagnostic categories. Diagnosis is pivotal to medicine’s epistemic setting, for it purports to explain illness via diagnosis, and yet is not always able to do so. This essay reviews this paradoxical use, and juxtaposes it to historical explanations for non-diagnosable illnesses. It demonstrates how representing non-diagnosis as uncertainty protects the epistemic setting by positioning the failure to locate a diagnosis in the individual, rather than in the medical paradigm.