Abstracts of the History of Science Society 2004 Austin Meeting 18 ...

extended over three generations, and about whom a remarkable body of evidence survives, I hope to trace some of the complex ways
in which issues of work, gender, and power shaped the enterprise of early modern natural history.
Donald Cotter, Mount Holyoke College (wdcotter@mtholyoke.edu)
Saturday, 20-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Hill Country A
A Converted Organic Chemist” and the Invention of American General Chemistry
Although Alexander Smith (1864 – 1922) has been regarded as a minor figure in the history of American chemistry, his 1906 textbook,
“Introduction to General Inorganic Chemistry”, was sufficiently innovative to make it, arguably, the first recognizably modern general
chemistry text in English. Its novelty, and its continuing influence over the dissemination of chemical knowledge in the United States,
arise from its successful synthesis of Ionist physical chemistry, pervasive mathematization, and a distinctly professionalist approach to
collegiate education. After introducing the case for Smith’s significance, this paper traces influential factors in Smith’s intellectual development
and their consequences. Over the course of his first decade at the University of Chicago (1893 – 1903), Smith abandoned the
organic chemistry of his training. Reasons for this remarkable professional transformation can be found in the confluence of many factors,
including his research as a graduate student and as a newly independent professional, his relationship with influential elders (his
Ph.D. advisor, Ludwig Claisen, and his chairman at Chicago, John Ulric Nef), the difficult departmental politics at Chicago, and the sharp
distinction between the epistemological and ontological styles of the organic and physical chemistries of the day. Attention to the ways
in which scientific knowledge is disseminated has revealed much about the practice of science and its growth. Smith’s story is an important
part of that matrix that deserves to be better known.
Hunter Crowther-Heyck, University of Oklahoma (hch@ou.edu)
Thursday, 18-Nov-04, 5:00 - 7:00 PM - Texas Ballroom II
The Program “Is” the Theory: The Search for a New Language for the Behavioral Sciences in Postwar America
One of the great challenges confronting researchers in the biological and social sciences has been the representation of complex, path
dependent systems, from the evolution of species in an ecosystem to the processes of learning and cognition in the human mind. In
the mid-20th century, a number of changes in science, philosophy, and machinery combined to make the rigorous, formal analysis of
such organic phenomena appear to be newly feasible. At the same time, changes in the broader social context made such analyses newly
marketable, especially to military patrons. This paper will discuss three such attempts: the early postwar use of information theory and
game theory by experimental psychologists, such as George Miller, who were interested in understanding language, learning and other
sequential actions; the contemporaneous employment of information theory, game theory, and servomechanism theory by decision theorists
and operations researchers, such as Merrill Flood, who were interested in creating decision rules; and the subsequent embrace of
the computer program by cognitive psychologists, such as Herbert Simon, who saw the program as the only appropriate formalism for
the description of complex, adaptive systems. All of these innovations shared a common origin in the need to develop new formalisms
in which one could describe contingent, sequential actions, and many of them shared an institutional locus: the organized effort by the
National Defense Research Council and the military research agencies to apply mathematics to the problems of modern warfare, especially
gunnery control, logistics, and human-machine interactions.
Scott Curtis, Northwestern University (scurtis@northwestern.edu)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 3:30 - 5:30 PM – Texas Ballroom VII
As Tangible as Tissue: Arnold Gesell, Infant Behavior, and Film Analysis
Arnold Gesell, one of the most influential voices in developmental psychology, based his claims regarding normative child development
on the thousands of feet of motion picture film he took of hundreds of children at the Clinic for Child Development at Yale University
between 1924 and the late 1940s. From these motion picture films, Gesell drew individual frames to illustrate his seminal work, An
Atlas of Infant Behavior (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), which is still a standard text. In a foundational article published
in 1935, he outlines the advantages of cinematography for behavior study, focusing especially on the detail the film record holds
for the researcher: “The cinema records the behavior events in such coherent, authentic, and measurable detail that for the purposes of
study and research the reaction patterns of the infant become as tangible as tissue.” This presentation will outline Gesell’s method of
filming, his method of analysis, and his assumptions about film, quantification, behavior, and the “tangibility” of that behavior. The
paper argues that Gesell’s method was designed, first, to manage the detail of the cinematic image, and second, to extract useful, quantifiable
information from that image. How he did this tells us much about both the state of child psychology at the time and the scientific
use of motion pictures in general.
Lucia Dacome, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL (l.dacome@ucl.ac.uk)
Friday, 19-Nov-04, 1:30 - 3:10 PM - Texas Ballroom VII
Seeing Enlightenments: Anatomical Models and the Visual Regimes of the Body in Eighteenth-Century Italy
Anatomical models in wax promised to provide accurate insights into the inner body. Regarded as potential replacements of the natural
body, they offered a means to overcome traditional shortcomings related to the physical deterioration, bad smells and risks of contamination
that characterized the messy setting of anatomical dissection. Sponsored by pope Benedict XIV and integrated among
Grand Tour attractions, in mid- eighteenth-century Bologna anatomical models were regarded as curiosities as well as teaching
objects, were turned into part of the local heritage, and stimulated a sense of collective pride and identity. As such, models lay at the
centre of a composite world of social interaction, and opened up the way to new forms of authorship related to the expertise of