Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte最新文献

This paper was prompted by some striking similarities between both the ritual and the medical use of placenta in Ming China and in premodern Europe. Contrary to most accounts, which focus either on the rise of chemiatric medicine or on the growing interest in “exotic” substances, the seventeenth century in Europe also reveals a revived interest in substances from animals, including materials from human bodies. The paper will analyse the use of words signifying the placenta, and follow the trace of vernacular knowledge about the placenta and its role in birth-giving, and in medieval medical texts on women's medicine. I will then analyse how the placenta is treated in systems of signatures in the age of alchemy and will try to trace the advent of more complicated preparations in the seventeenth century, and how between the eighteenth and the twenty-first century, the placenta meandered between a token of folk medicine (re)productive material and pharmaceutical resource.

Protestant (medical) missionaries were the main proponents of Western medicine in China after the Opium Wars. Several studies have highlighted how they used spectacular surgery as a means of gaining public trust. As well as surgery, they also administered anthelmintic drugs such as santonin as a tool of persuasion and conversion. Many anthelmintic drugs of the European materia medica had a colonial history. My paper analyses how coloniality materialised in medical practice and anthelmintics in China. For the late nineteenth century, I will examine the colonial practices in which the drug santonin was involved. At the time, santonin was the drug of choice for treating roundworm. In the early twentieth century, medical missionaries became involved in parasitological research on parasitic worms such as hookworm and Fasciolopsis buski. For this period, I will explore how new knowledge about anthelmintics emerged in the scattered knowledge space of China, and how it related to colonialism and imperialism.

This study explores materiality and material cultures of human placenta in Ming China (1368–1644), for it perfectly displays Chinese ambiguous attitudes towards the human body parts between living and non-living. For a long time, the Chinese had widely applied human body parts in medical treatments and ritual healings. Numerous evidences in relation to their collection, production, efficacy and application are widely recorded in medical works, in particular those found in materia medica. In the sixteenth century, the Bencao gangmu (Systemic Materia Medica, 1596) illustrates thirty-five “human body drugs.” Of those, the placenta was believed effective for curing illnesses, nourishing the body and prolonging life. The questions to be answered include: how is the placenta perceived in medical and religious discourses? What is its “materiality” and “efficacy” when it becomes a drug? What ethical issues and moral concerns are involved with eating the placenta? Last but not least, how was the placenta ritually buried after childbirth in premodern China? In so doing, this essay aims to provide a better understanding of the placenta situated in both material and cosmological worlds. It helps us rethink the multiple relations of human body part to part, part to whole, and body to body.

Understanding physicians as actors who implemented the early modern ideal of collective empiricism into their practices within the local contexts of everyday life, the paper explores two cases from imperial cities in southern Germany in the 1720s and 1780s in which anatomical studies were contested. By analyzing the strategies and arguments that the two physicians used to justify and continue their anatomical dissections, it focuses on their references to different kinds of (local) community and relates these references to another type of collective: membership in a scientific academy. To examine references to community, it is proposed, offers an opportunity to better understand the spread and practice of the ideal of the study of nature as a collective project and how it was intertwined with concepts and structures of order and society in the Holy Roman Empire.

Im Jahr 1967 feierte die Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) ihr 20-jähriges Bestehen. Die zu diesem Zeitpunkt größte und älteste US-amerikanische Computer-Gesellschaft lud ausgewählte Pioniere des Faches nach Washington D. C. ein, um auf die eigene Geschichte zurückzublicken. Mit Hilfe eines Audiorecorders zeichnete man die Sitzung auf und überlieferte so die Anekdoten und Erinnerungen der anwesenden Pioniere für die Nachwelt.¹ Eine solche Selbsthistorisierung wissenschaftlicher Gesellschaften war und ist nichts Ungewöhnliches. Jubiläen und Jahrestage bieten häufig Anlass, sich mit der eigenen Vergangenheit auseinanderzusetzen, und sie tragen so zur „Ausbildung eines fachkulturellen Gedächtnisses“ bei.²

Ab Mitte der 1970er Jahre startete ein weiteres Projekt, bei dem die Informatik auf ihre Vergangenheit zurückblickte.³ Gut zehn Jahre nach der Jubiläumsfeier der ACM, im Mai 1978, fand in Los Angeles die erste History of Programming Languages Conference (im Folgenden HOPL-Konferenz) statt. Organisiert wurde die Tagung von einer Gruppe InformatikerInnen, und das Programm umfasste die Vorträge ausgewählter Pioniere, die von der Entwicklung besonders bedeutsamer Programmiersprachen berichten sollten. Obwohl die Veranstaltung auf den ersten Blick Parallelen zu dem Jubiläum von 1967 aufweist (die Pioniere des Faches erzählen „ihre“ Geschichte), war ein solcher Zugang genau das, was die OrganisatorInnen mit ihrer Konferenz nicht im Sinn hatten. Dies betonten sie, noch bevor das Vorhaben einen Namen trug: „This [planned history conference] is not supposed to be a group of people just coming together to provide a set of reminiscences.“⁴

Tatsächlich unterschied sich die HOPL-Konferenz wesentlich von anderen Selbsthistorisierungsprojekten – wie etwa der Jubiläumsfeier 1967. Im Folgenden soll gezeigt werden, dass es der Anspruch der OrganisatorInnen war, aus einer möglichst objektiven Perspektive auf die eigene Vergangenheit zu blicken, sie zu erforschen und eine detailreiche, umfassende sowie korrekte Darstellung der Geschichte zu präsentieren; es ging also gerade nicht darum, das eigene Mitwirken an den vergangenen Entwicklungen zu erinnern, wie im Fall der erzählenden Pioniere. Bemerkenswert ist dieses Vorhaben nicht nur durch seine Abgrenzung zu anderen Selbsthistorisierungsprojekten. Der Anspruch der HOPL-OrganisatorInnen, einen Beitrag zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte zu leisten, verortet die Konferenz in den Kontext der sich wandelnden Wissenschaftsgeschichte jener Zeit. Der folgende Text soll daher auch eine neue Perspektive auf die Geschichte der akademischen Wissenschaftsgeschichte eröffnen.

Bei der Vorbereitung der HOPL-Konferenz kam es bald zu Diskussionen, in denen Herausforderungen einer (wissenschafts−)geschichtlichen Arbeit zur Sprache kamen. Die umfassend überlieferte Dokumentation der Veranstaltung⁵ bietet nicht nur Einblicke in die Auseinander

This paper offers a reconstruction of the interpretations of Descartes's ideas of place and motion by Dutch Cartesians (Henricus Regius, Johannes de Raey, Johannes Clauberg, and Christoph Wittich). It does so by focusing on the reading of Descartes's Principia philosophiae (1644) offered, in particular, by the dictated commentaries on it. It is shown how such commentaries bring to the light new potential Aristotelian-Scholastic sources of Descartes, and the different ways Dutch Cartesians brought to the fore, also with the help of such sources, the rationale of the Cartesian text: in doing so, they constituted a philosophical school.

By unravelling the complexities and dynamics of a collaboration between scientists in India and West Germany to establish a cryogenic network, this paper intends to contribute to our understanding of the transnational movement of research technologies during the Cold War. In 1971, a cryogenic laboratory including a helium and a nitrogen liquefier was set up at the physics department of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras as part of the Indo-German partnership at IIT Madras between 1959 and 1974. As a generic research technology with many applications, cryogenics became crucial for a solid state research agenda for semiconductor development. After initial difficulties, Ramaswami Srinivasan at IIT Madras and Gustav Klipping of the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin built a successful collaboration based on mutual trust and on Indian and German scientists travelling and working in each other's laboratories. If the initial motivation of the Indo-German partnership was informed by the logic of Cold War development policy, Klipping and Srinivasan developed their collaboration into a vibrant cryogenic research network around different actors, instruments, and skills moving between India and the Federal Republic of Germany.

Monasteries were famous for their extensive libraries and richly decorated churches. Less well known are their observatories and their mathematical-physical collections with telescopes, air pumps, and friction machines. But how did the way of life in the monastery and scientific practices influence each other? This paper examines the interaction of scientific practices and religious way of life using the example of southern German monasteries in the second half of the eighteenth century. It shows how the monks pragmatically linked monastic life and research practice, thereby forming their own specific scientific culture. This closes an important gap in the understanding of scholarship in the eighteenth century by foregrounding the monasteries as places of knowledge production, which have so far received little attention alongside universities and academies.