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When the Tallamys Met John French: Translating, Printing, and Reading The Art of Distillation. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2022-06-01 Elaine Leong
Centered on the life story of the Tallamy family's copy of John French's The Art of Distillation (London, 1651), this article explores translation, print, and medical reading in early modern England. It traces the adaptation and reuse of textual and practical knowledge across linguistic, geographical, gender, and spatial boundaries and shines light on the scientific labor of translators, technicians
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Of Jinn Theories and Germ Theories Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Hannah-Louise Clark
Focusing on colonial Algeria ca. 1890 to 1940, this article explores what Muslim intellectuals and ordinary people learned about microbes and how they responded to bacteriological medicine. Many Algerians feared invisible spirits (jinn) and sought the healing powers of saints and exorcists. Was it then permitted for Muslims to use French treatments and follow Pasteurian rules of hygiene? Specialists
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The Geopolitics of “Rape Kit” Protocols Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Jaimie Morse
This article contributes to historiographies of forensic medicine by examining late twentieth-century women’s rights activism for new clinical standards on medical forensic exams for sexual assault (commonly known as “rape kits”). I argue that three features of these exams distinguish new standards of care from older practices in forensic medicine: the addition of specialized medical care to evidence-collection
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Powers of Imagination and Legal Regimes against “Obeah” in the Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Kate Ramsey
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, African-derived spiritual practices glossed as “obeah” came to be intensely associated with pathologies of the imagination, first by British Caribbean slaveholders, and then much more widely by others. This article focuses on how early writings about, and legal regimes against, African Caribbean spirit work were shaped by theories of mind-body interaction during
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The Reinvention of an Appropriate Tradition or the Colonial Birth of Vietnamese Medicine Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Laurence Monnais
This chapter examines the impact of colonialism on the “invention” of Vietnamese medicine (VM) in the first half of the twentieth century. It focuses more specifically on the legal framework dealing with VM in the interwar period, when Vietnamese nationalism was on the rise and French colonial authorities were assessing the “successes” and “failures” of the Assistance Médicale Indigène (AMI), the colonial
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Medical Cultures, Therapeutic Properties, and Laws in Global History Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Helen Tilley
This volume ofOsiris takes as its central goal the need to bridge studies of medical cultures, past and present, with studies of the law and legal cultures, encouraging a sustained and historically informed dialogue across all thesefields. It deliberately concentrates most attention on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when medical and legal connections intensified, institutional structures proliferated
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The Pharmaceuticalization and Judicialization of Health Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 João Biehl
A major player in the political economy of pharmaceuticals in the Global South, and boasting a universal health care system, Brazil offers fertile ground for exploring the unanticipated ways people have mobilized for treatment access in contexts of stark inequality. In this article, I place the ever-evolving twin phenomena of the pharmaceuticalization and judicialization of health in a multilayered
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Sexual Assault and the Evidential Body Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Susan L. Burns
This article explores the formation of what Christopher Hamlin has called a “forensic culture” in late nineteenth-century Japan, and its impact on the prosecution of crimes of sexual violence. Before the 1870s, acts of rape often went unpunished or were resolved through private monetary settlements between the victim and her family and the rapist. However, after the formation of the modern Japanese
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Legalities of Healing: Handling Alterities at the Edge of Medicine in France, 1980s-2010s. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2021-01-01 Emilie Cloatre,Nayeli Urquiza-Haas,Michael Ashworth
The practice of healing by anyone other than qualified doctors or pharmacists has been allegedly illegal in France since the nineteenth century. In this judicial order, the state delegated the power to oversee the boundaries of medicine to doctors and pharmacists, allowing them, with support from criminal courts, to determine which therapeutic techniques should remain their exclusive right. In practice
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Digesting Faith Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Bradford Bouley
In seventeenth-century Rome, the consumption of meat was on the rise. By the 1630s, Romans were eating double the amount of meat they had consumed fifty years previously, even accounting for growth in population. At the same time that all this meat was being consumed, the papacy came to fiercely defend another comestible: the wafer eaten in the Eucharist. These two products came to be at the center
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Perceptions of Provenance Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Alissa Aron
During the reign of Louis XIV, influences arising from the Galenic and iatrochemical medical traditions collided with changing notions of Frenchness to shape understandings of the healthfulness and quality of a wine in relation to its provenance. Specific locations were believed to impart particular qualities to the people, plants, animals, and waters that originated there. Thus, wines from a particular
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A Natural History of the Kitchen Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Anita Guerrini
On the evidence of early modern European cookbooks, the wild birds deemed edible around 1600 included cranes, herons, swans, and cormorants. By 1750, none of these were considered palatable. While culinary historians have explored the transition from medieval to modern food marked by François Pierre de La Varenne’s Le cuisinier françois (1651), less attention has been afforded to another major transition
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World War II and the Quest for Time-Insensitive Foods Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Deborah Fitzgerald
When one walks around the local supermarket, one is often struck by the proportion of highly processed foods, or what some refer to as “the middle of the store.” Yet to the military in the 1940s and 1950s, these same foods represented the apogee of scientific progress—the creation of time-insensitive foods suitable for the rigors of military combat. This article explores the social and technical development
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Meat Mimesis Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft
This article examines an emerging form of contemporary food biotechnology, laboratory-grown or “cultured” meat, that often seeks to copy conventional “in vivo” animal flesh by using in vitro techniques. The ultimate goal of cultured meat research is to devise an alternative to the environmentally damaging and ethically undesirable infrastructure that makes “cheap” industrial-scale meat possible. Formal
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Food, Population, and Empire in the Hartlib Circle, 1639–1660 Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Ted McCormick
The idea of population control is often associated with Malthusian views of scarcity and their twentieth-century political and technological legacies. Though sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkers and scientific projectors often described human multiplication in religious—especially biblical and providentialist—terms, they similarly understood population to be constrained by the capacity
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Why Drink Water? Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Joyce E. Chaplin
In 2017, New Zealand’s Whanganui River was designated as having the same rights as a human person. The decision drew upon Maori belief in the animate status of nonhuman beings and depended on the legal power of a Western state. This article examines those two factors in relation to the history of drinking water as an essential part of human diet, focusing on early modern England/Britain. In the early
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On the Virtues of Historical Entomophagy Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 E. C. Spary, Anya Zilberstein
“Why Not Eat Insects?” inquires a short book, really a pamphlet, first published in London in 1885. Working against the common perception of bugs as pests—at best, an absurdly obvious nonfood, and at worst, a toxin—the author, Vincent M. Holt (who provided no autobiographical details that might establish his credentials) aimed at reversing his readers’ general disdain for insects as low and troublesome
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The Introduction of Chemical Dyes into Food in the Nineteenth Century Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Carolyn Cobbold
This article examines the introduction of chemical dyes into food in the nineteenth century in four different countries: the United States, Britain, Germany, and France. From the early 1860s, chemists produced aniline and azo dyes from coal tar on an industrial scale for the burgeoning European textile industry. However, by the end of the century, hundreds of the new dyes were also being added to food
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The Scientific Lives of Chicha Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Stefan Pohl-Valero
From the end of the nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, Colombian chicha (a fermented beverage made from maize) was at one and the same time alcohol and food, a product produced and consumed on a large scale in an urban setting, and an object of intense scientific scrutiny, with multiple meanings and transformations. In this article, I argue that industrial chicha production
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Breakfast at Buck’s Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Steven Shapin
This is a study of some connections between eating-together and knowing-together. Silicon Valley technoscientific innovation typically involves a coming-together of entrepreneurs (having an idea) and venture capitalists (having private capital to turn the idea into commercial reality). Attention is directed here to a well-publicized type of face-to-face meeting that may occur early in relationships
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The Shape of Meat Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Rebecca J. H. Woods
In the mid-nineteenth century, animal flesh was subject to a range of treatments in an effort to preserve meat grown on the fringes of the British Empire (in Australia and New Zealand, South and North America) for consumption in urban centers in Britain. Focusing on the publications of the British Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce and Manufacture, and allied sources such as the Lancet
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Historicizing “Indian Systems of Knowledge” Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Projit Bihari Mukharji
Some recent authors have argued that “Indian Systems of Knowledge,” such as Ayurvedic medicine, cannot be historicized. They argue that Ayurvedic medicine must be understood as a “system” and with reference to its “metaphysical foundations.” Food has often played an important part in these antihistoricist arguments about traditional South Asian medicines. In this article, I first describe and historicize
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The Technopolitics of Food Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Ulrike Thoms
Since the Annales School started to investigate the history of food in the 1960s, institutional diets have been an important field of research. The history of food encountered the general source problem of the history of everyday life of the lower, often illiterate, classes, as they have left hardly any written sources. Even more, food is highly perishable, so that it leaves nothing as a source itself
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Hungry, Thinking with Animals Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2020-08-01 Dana Simmons
Edward L. Thorndike (1874–1949), at the turn of the twentieth century, set up animal hunger as a model system for understanding human motivation and learning. Hungry animals participated in over a hundred years’ worth of experiments designed to characterize human emotions and behavior. Hunger, along with electric shocks, became standard tools for producing psychological effects, such as motivation
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Affected Doctors: Dead Bodies and Affective and Professional Cultures in Early Modern European Anatomy. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Rafael Mandressi
From the end of the thirteenth century, when the practice of human anatomical dissections emerged in Europe, the dead body became part of the cultural economy of knowledge. This had epistemic, technical, and social consequences, in which the affective dimension played a crucial role. The type of manipulations the corpse underwent brought into play affective phenomena of unusual intensity. To a great
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Mother Love and Mental Illness: An Emotional History. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Anne Harrington
Most scholarship on the medicalization of emotions has focused on projects that locate emotions, one way or another, within individual brains and minds. The story of mother love and mental illness, in contrast, is a medicalization story that frames the problem of pathological emotions as a relational issue. Bad mother love was seen as both a pathology (for the mother) and a pathogen (for her vulnerable
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The Feeling Body and Its Diseases: How Cancer Went Psychosomatic in Twentieth-Century German. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Bettina Hitzer,Pilar León-Sanz
This essay examines how psychosomatic medicine, as it emerged between 1920 and 1960, introduced new ideas about the emotional body and the emotional self. Focusing on cancer, a shift can be mapped over the course of the twentieth century. While cancer was regarded at the beginning of the century as the organic disease par excellence, traceable to malignant cells and thus not caused or influenced by
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A Moving Soul: Emotions in Late Medieval Medicine. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Naama Cohen-Hanegbi
Theories of the soul and its faculties, including emotions, are recognized to have evolved significantly from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. While these concepts were widely researched, they have been to a large extent isolated to their theoretical realm with little attention given to their practical application. This essay begins with a question asked by natural philosophers, theologians, and
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Medieval Sciences of Emotions during the Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries: An Intellectual History. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Damien Boquet,Piroska Nagy
The standard narrative of the development of Western thinking about emotions is that the concept of emotions emerged alongside the secularization of European society and thought and was linked to the emergence of psychology as a discipline. This essay argues that a systematic psychology of affectivity emerged far earlier and can be found in Western Christian thought. In the context of the cultural
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An Introduction to History of Science and the Emotions. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Otniel E Dror,Bettina Hitzer,Anja Laukötter,Pilar León-Sanz
This essay introduces our call for an intertwined history-of-emotions/history-of science perspective. We argue that the history of science can greatly extend the history of emotions by proffering science qua science as a new resource for the study of emotions. We present and read science, in its multiple diversities and locations, and in its variegated activities, products, theories, and emotions,
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Cold War “Super-Pleasure”: Insatiability, Self-Stimulation, and the Postwar Brain. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Otniel E Dror
In this contribution, I study the post–World War II discovery of a new “supramaximal” “super-pleasure” in the brain. I argue that the excessiveness of the newly discovered supramaximal super-pleasure challenged existing models of organisms, of the self, and of nature and society, and that it prescribed a rethinking and a repositioning of pleasure. I reconstruct the laboratory enactments and models
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How Films Entered the Classroom: The Sciences and the Emotional Education of Youth through Health Education Films in the United States and Germany, 1910–30. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Anja Laukötter
This essay focuses on health education films in Germany and the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, illustrating how these films developed their potential as a teaching tool capable of shaping the emotions and changing the behavior of audiences. The essay argues that the films’ educational goals were inspired by certain contemporary ideas on the relation between perception
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Tempering Madness: Emil Kraepelin’s Research on Affective Disorders. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Eric J Engstrom
This essay examines some of the research practices and strategies that the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) deployed in his efforts to account for the significance of emotions in psychiatric illnesses. After briefly surveying Kraepelin’s understanding of emotions and providing some historical context for his work in the late nineteenth century, it examines three different approaches that
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Pain as Practice in Paolo Mantegazza’s Science of Emotions. Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2016-01-01 Dolores Martin Moruno
Paolo Mantegazza’s science of emotions represents the dominant style of thinking that was fostered by the late nineteenth-century Italian scientific community, a positivist school that believed that the dissemination of Darwin’s evolutionary ideas would promote social progress in that country. Within this collective thought, Mantegazza was committed not only to studying the physiological experience
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From Technician’s Extravaganza to Logical Fantasy: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Amanda Rees
This article argues that John Wyndham’s postwar novels represent a sustained attempt to analyze and problematize the relationship between knowledge, expertise, and society. Wyndham held vigorous opinions on the critical role that science fiction (SF) could and should play in modernity, even as his novels dissected the ultimate unsustainability of industrial urban democracies. He believed that it was
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Playing Games with Technology: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Will Slocombe
This article investigates the ways in which the history of technology has been modeled in “4X strategy” games, especially in a series called Civilization (which comprises six games and expansions introduced from 1991 to 2016). Although there have been various studies interrogating the ideological biases in strategy games’ modeling of civilization and society, to date there has only been partial exploration
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Ahead of Time: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Colin Milburn
Looking back at his research on tachyons in the 1960s and 1970s, the physicist Gerald Feinberg recalled that he started thinking about particles that go faster than light after reading James Blish’s 1954 science fiction story “Beep.” While the technical conceits of Blish’s tale may have stirred Feinberg’s curiosity, its literary implications were yet more significant. As a story about faster-than-light
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The Speculative Present Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Joanna Radin
I argue for the importance of considering author, director, and producer Michael Crichton (1942–2008) as a critic and student of Cold War cultures of expertise. Though best known for his blockbuster fiction, he shared a sensibility with academics in North America and the United Kingdom who were concerned with scientists’ unchecked authority. These scholars created a new field that would later become
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Parallel Prophecies: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Peter J. Bowler
Science fiction and popular science writing sometimes intersect—authors have written in both genres, and magazines have published their writing side by side. Producing “hard” science fiction depends on getting the known science right and ensuring that predictions seem plausible. There have even been claims that science fiction should be used to make science itself accessible to a wider public. This
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Hylozoic Anticolonialism: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Projit Bihari Mukharji
Imperial ideology identified “science” and “progress” as the prerogative of the “West,” while “religion” and “spirituality” were located in the “East.” Yet, in practice, these neat dichotomies were far more difficult to sustain. Science and religion were braided together by spiritually inquisitive scientists as much in the West as in the East. Various strands of hylozoic thought that undermined the
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Environmental Futures, Now and Then: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Lisa Garforth
Postwar environmental concern has been powerfully shaped by projections of ecological catastrophe. Indeed, it can be said that the global environment as an object of social and political concern came into existence in part through narratives of future crisis. This article explores two successive framings of environmental crisis and the kinds of knowledges that made them up. It examines the announcement
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Thought Transfer and Mind Control between Science and Fiction: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Nikolai Krementsov
This essay makes a detailed analysis of the contents and contexts of a science fiction novel published in Moscow in 1928, and written by gynecologist Fedor Il’in (1873–1959) under the title The Valley of New Life. The analysis illuminates the process of the transformation of the specialized, and often quite arcane, scientific knowledge generated by biomedical research into an influential cultural resource
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Sleeping Science-Fictionally: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Martin Willis
In this article, I examine historical representations of sleep found in both medical and fictional narratives of the second half of the nineteenth century. I draw primarily on medical cases constructed as narratives for specialist medical periodicals, on the one hand, and on utopian fictions (or utopian science fictions, as they might also be called), on the other. I place these narratives in dialogue
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Darwin on the Cutting-Room Floor: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 David A. Kirby
In the mid-twentieth century, film studios sent their screenplays to the Hays Office, Hollywood’s official censorship body, and to the Catholic Church’s Legion of Decency for approval and recommendations for revision. This essay examines how filmmakers crafted stories involving evolutionary biology and how religiously motivated movie censorship groups modified these cinematic narratives in order to
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War and Peace in British Science Fiction Fandom, 1936–1945 Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Charlotte Sleigh, Alice White
Fans of science fiction offer an unusual opportunity to study that rare bird—a “public” view of science in history. Of course science fiction fans are by no means representative of a “general” public, but they are a coherent, interesting, and significant group in their own right. In this article, we follow British fans from their phase of self-organization just before World War II and through their
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Old Woman and the Sea: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Erika Lorraine Milam
A curious sympathy between second-wave feminism and evolutionary theory forged a powerful connection between women and the sea. Speculative nonfiction by Elaine Morgan rewrote humanity’s evolutionary past to be more fluid and more feminist in her Descent of Woman (1972). Later fiction—including Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos (1985) and biologist Joan Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean (1986)—posited alternative
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Looking into the Future: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Iwan Rhys Morus
In an 1898 short story titled “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904,” Mark Twain introduced an electrical instrument called the telectroscope. Machines for transmitting vision at a distance, telectroscopes had been speculated about since the invention of the telephone in 1876. Over the next quarter of a century, numerous inventors were credited with its imminent, but never realized, production. No such
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Presenting Futures Past: Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Amanda Rees, Iwan Rhys Morus
This volume ofOsiris had, as its inspiration, the question of what science fiction could do for the history of science. Or, to put it another way, to what historiographical, intellectual, and pragmatic uses have historians of science put science fiction, and how might these strategies develop in the future? Initial efforts to answer these questions were sketchy, to say the least. Despite the fact that
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Gaming the Apocalypse in the Time of Antibiotic Resistance Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2019-06-01 Lorenzo Servitje
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been an increasing number of articles in the popular press on antibiotic resistance, a great many of which present the phenomenon in the science-fictional language of the “post-antibiotic apocalypse.” In an effort to increase public awareness, the Longitude Prize, funded by the United Kingdom’s National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the
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Feeding Desire: Generative Environments, Meat Markets, and the Management of Sheep Intercourse in Great Britain, 1700–1750 Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Emily Pawley
As a system of profit based on reproduction, growth, and eating, animal husbandry offers an ideal place to examine how capitalism shapes knowledge of bodies. Recent work on the history of breeding demonstrates this, showing how new markets in “blood” helped define new theories of heredity and race. This essay expands on this literature by examining eighteenth-century British efforts to control a different
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Proving Future Profit: Business Plans as Demonstration Devices Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Martin Giraudeau
This essay is a study of the “Project for the establishment of a war and hunting gunpowder manufactory in the United States,” written by Irénée Du Pont de Nemours in 1800, in order to raise funds from potential investors for what was to become the DuPont Corporation. It shows that the “Project” is best understood as a demonstration device akin to those used by natural philosophers at the time. This
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Sugar Machines and the Fragile Infrastructure of Commodities in the Nineteenth Century Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 David Singerman
This essay uses sugar machinery to explore the fragile infrastructure that allowed global commodity traffic to emerge. In the nineteenth century, the cane sugar industry transformed the Caribbean, the Hawaiian Islands, and much of the rest of the tropical world. Observers then and now tied sugar’s revolutionary power to the invention and spread of advanced mechanical technologies. Yet the origins and
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Comstock Capitalism: The Law, the Lode, and the Science Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Paul Lucier
The term “Comstock capitalism” describes new commercial, legal, and scientific conditions emergent in the silver mining industry of the early 1860s in western Nevada. On the Comstock, the first joint-stock mining companies in the American West were incorporated, and stockholders, “the speculative interest,” underwrote exceptional investments in large labor forces, powerful machines, cutting-edge engineering
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Microbiology and the Imperatives of Capital in International Agro-Biodiversity Preservation Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Courtney Fullilove
This essay considers the political economy of transnational scientific research based on global collection of biota for laboratory manipulation, focusing on a program to develop pest-resistant wheat using fungal endophytes common in a range of wild but closely related grasses. This effort extends long-standing efforts to commoditize living substances of increasing scope and complexity, and it is supported
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Organizing the Marketplace Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Lukas Rieppel
This essay engages a classic debate about the way nineteenth-century biology was informed by contemporaneous developments in political economy, and vice versa. However, rather than argue for a convergence between classical liberalism and Darwinian evolution, this essay traces the way that the concept of organization moved between both fields of discourse. Compared to the theory of evolution by natural
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“Safe Driving Depends on the Man at the Wheel”: Psychologists and the Subject of Auto Safety, 1920–55 Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Lee Vinsel
In the first decades of the twentieth century, deaths from automobile accidents quickly mounted, and influential figures, like Herbert Hoover, sought ways to control this icon of industrial capitalism and its users. These early regulatory efforts opened up the new field of automotive safety, a crowded market for ideas full of both buyers and sellers of potential solutions. This essay examines the 1920s
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Smoke Ring: From American Tobacco to Japanese Data Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Sarah Milov
This article explores the political, legal, and social history of the 1981 “Japanese Smokers’ Wives Study.” This large-scale cohort study, led by Takeshi Hirayama, chief epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute in Tokyo, found that the nonsmoking wives of smokers were themselves at greater risk for developing lung cancer. The study was successfully used by American anti-tobacco activists to
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The Microbial Production of Expertise in Meiji Japan Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Victoria Lee
Microbes as an object of knowledge and the scientist as an institution of authority did not exist in Japan before the nineteenth century. This essay considers the formation of these two modern categories by looking at their boundaries in late Meiji Japan (1868–1912). Charting transformations in the landscape of brewing expertise, the processes that brewing technicians used to produce molds as commodities
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Compound Interest Corrected: The Imaginative Mathematics of the Financial Future in Early Modern England Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 William Deringer
What is money in the future worth today? In the seventeenth century, questions about the “present value” of future wealth became matters of practical concern, as businesspeople and governments deployed future-oriented financial technologies like mortgages, bonds, and annuities. Those questions also attracted the attention of mathematicians. This essay examines the excursions two English mathematicians
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Introduction: The Entangled Histories of Science and Capitalism Osiris (IF 0.9) Pub Date : 2018-10-01 Lukas Rieppel, Eugenia Lean, William Deringer
This volume revisits the mutually constitutive relationship between science and capitalism from the seventeenth century to the present day. Adopting a global approach, we reject the notion that either science or capitalism can be understood as stages of modernity that emerged in the West and subsequently engendered a “Great Divergence” with the rest of the world. Instead, both science and capitalism