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

sion for three humans beings and turned them into these hills so they could be forever together. During
the lectures, an anthropologist showed that the construction of a South American war bonnet required
astronomical, biological, geological, and several other types of modern scientific knowledge. The
"science textbook" was the making of the war bonnet. This talk describes some contributions of modern
anthropologists that describe oral intellectual systems and specific bodies of scientific knowledge in oral
societies. Thanks to work of modern scholars, historians of science can begin to construct much better
accounts of oral scientific intellectual systems than the previous ones which tended to consider the
predecessors to modern science childish at best. Finally, I compare and contrast science of oral societies
and literate modern science, arguing that historians can learn much about both systems through such
comparisons.
Opitz, Donald
E-mail Address: opit0002@tc.umn.edu
'Behind folding shutters of Whittingehame House': country-house science and domesticity after
the professional turn
A strong theme in the history of Victorian science is the primacy of laboratory-based research in
academic and government institutions by the latter half of the nineteenth century, especially among a
rising professional class. This narrative emphasises the displacement of women and amateurs from the
centre of science where new, professional men of science claim a dominant position. This process, as
historians also recognise, depended on an increasing bureaucratisation of (private) family life and
(public) work and the decline of the aristocracy alongside the rise of the middle and professional classes.
Yet, as I show in this paper, a strong tradition of private research among aristocratic circles persisted
throughout and beyond these developments. Moreover, within the aristocratic tradition, gentlewomen
enjoyed much flexibility to pursue their scientific interests both independently and jointly with others in
their families. With a focus on the case of natural history practice at the Balfour country estate,
Whittingehame, I argue that the country house provides a critical context in which to analyse the impact
of gender in the aristocratic practice of science, with implications that pose a serious challenge to the
received narrative concerning the fate of women’s roles in science after the professional turn.
Osborne, Michael
E-mail Address: osborne@humanitas.ucsb.edu
French Colonial Medicine in the Nineteenth Century
For most of the nineteenth century the challenge of administering the French colonies fell to the
Ministry of the Navy. This responsibility included training physicians and surgeons for what the navy
regarded as a distinctive genre of healing and for medical careers likely to include the demands of
colonial duty, shipboard service, and tending to the health needs of prisoners and thousands of workers
in the naval arsenals. Training for such tasks was accomplished through service in the "great school of
the sea," and by taking special classes at naval medical and post-graduate schools in the French provinces.
Representations of naval and colonial medicine constructed by its practitioners argued that their
craft was an art distinct from the sorts of medicine promoted by the civil faculties of medicine such as
the Paris clinical school. The paper examines and evaluates these arguments for a distinctiveness and
separateness from civilian medicine on three levels; those of ideas of disease, career advancement and
training, and the highly gendered conditions of naval and colonial medical practice.
Otis, Laura
E-mail Address: otis@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
Müller's Lab: The Struggle for Personal Space