Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

tion researchers worked both sides of the military/cancer therapy boundary and pitched their studies to
military and civilian agencies including the Department of Defense, the National Cancer Institute and
the Atomic Energy Commission. Indeed, to speak of a boundary is not appropriate given the deeply entwinned
character of the research efforts and the funding sources. Nevertheless, the history of these
events by the victors, medical researchers who announced a cure for leukemia in the late 1970s, has not
only a strong boundary between the two research problems, but medical researchers have effectively
written out all vestiges of the military paternity of leukemia therapy. This presentation will try to recover
some of the contingent and embedded character of military and cancer therapy research.
Lachapelle, Sofie
E-mail Address: Sofie.Lachapelle.1@nd.edu
When Faith Was Not Enough: The Scientific Study of the Afterlife in France, 1880-1910
Scientific spiritists of late nineteenth-century France found both the materialistic conception of death
and the religious faith in the afterlife to be unsatisfying concepts. They hoped to build a new religion in
which the methods of science could provide evidence for religious beliefs. In this paper, I will discuss
some of their ideas on the scientific study of life after death. For Gabriel Delanne, Camille Flammarion,
Gustave Geley, Louis Figuier, and others, death was not the end, but this conviction required scientific
proof. They were not a unified or an organized group what needed to be proven and what constituted a
scientific proof differed for each of them. But whether they believed in the existence of a soul independent
of the human body or in reincarnation, faith was not enough one had to appeal to logic, observations,
experiments, and sometimes morals and ethics to justify this assumption. Scientific spiritists
borrowed metaphors from biology, evolutionary science, and astronomy to bring credibility and authority
to their argument. By importing scientific concepts into the study of the afterlife, they refused to
base their beliefs on faith alone and rejected the uncertainty given by science on life after death. The
bridge they built between faith and reason illustrates a way in which the two need not be regarded as
opposites. The story of their study of the afterlife highlights some of the complexities of the relationship
between science and religion at the time.
Lagueux, Olivier
E-mail Address: lolivier@mac.com
The Mathematization of Monsters: Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's Teratology
If not for the encouragement of his father, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1805-1861) would probably
have become a mathematician. Educated at the École Polytechnique in Paris, where a mathematical
spirit prevailed from abstruse theoretical discussions down to practical engineering applications, he
ended up studying medicine and natural history. While Isidore's early taxonomical and anatomical
papers were somewhat classical, his later morphological works show his natural inclination toward
mathematics. In his 3-volume treatise on organic anomalies (1832-37), one finds not only geometrical
diagrams, but also statistics and equations. As double-monsters were characterized by an axis of symmetry--the
two fused individuals that compose them being placed on each side of that imaginary axis--
Isidore superimposed x and y coordinates to depictions of these anomalous newborns. He went as far as
developing algebraic series to account for the various forms of a given type of monstrosity. While
caloric, motion, or gravitation inspired Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844), his son Isidore
preferred the reassuring coldness of mathematics. As a predictive tool, the younger Geoffroy chose
analytical geometry over outmoded chemical affinities, which indicates the impact mathematicians like
Monge and Lagrange had on French science. While the two Geoffroys shared a strong interest for
teratology, they applied to this new science divergent methods. "Among the works that are common to
the father and the son," wrote the Academician Jean-Baptiste Dumas, "at least according to their topic,