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

disease. Zionist claims regarding their development activities based on their surveys ultimately become
the basis for a debate between the British administration and the Zionists about the differential development
of Palestine by the Arabs and Jews. This debate will be outlined in the concluding part of the
paper.
Terrall, Mary
E-mail Address: terrall@history.ucla.edu
Conjecture and Empiricism in Enlightenment Life Science
By the mid-18th century, whenever the question of how to understand the generation of living forms
came up, it brought along related philosophical, theological and methodological freight. The ramifications
of the problem of generation extended across several disciplines, and involved overlapping sets of
medical men, academic anatomists, experimenters, natural historians, readers and philosophers. It was
not a problem that found a ready solution no consensus was reached. Some writers were willing, even
eager, to peer beyond the visible to speculate about fundamental forces and principles others recoiled
with something like repugnance. The interplay between eager speculation and prudent restraint characterized
this discursive terrain, and gave an edge of danger, a whiff of suspicion, to theories of generation
that went beyond the mechanical to give matter self-directing powers. Conjecture as a mode of inquiry
had gained credibility through the "Queries" appended to Newton's Opticks. Furthermore, men of
science like Buffon and Maupertuis justified the forces of organization by analogy to the "penetrating"
force of gravity, referring (at least implicitly) back to Newton's authority once again. Their critics
argued on much the same ground as those who objected to gravity as an unnecessary and perhaps dangerous
occult force. In spite of these resonances, Newtonian language and concepts were transformed
when they moved into the complex discursive terrain of French Enlightenment science.
Thackray,Arnold
E-mail Address:
Theerman, Paul
E-mail Address: paul_theerman@nlm.nih.gov
Psychiatry and Social Progress after World War II: Julius Schreiber and the National Institute
for Social Relations
In the years immediately after World War II, a short-lived organization, the National Institute for
Social Relations, promoted the alleviation of social ills through applied psychiatry. The Institute was the
work of Dr. Julius Schreiber, a psychiatrist who had achieved morale successes in the war effort, first in
at Army camps in California and then at the Pentagon, where he worked with the Menningers. Schreiber
founded his Institute in Washington immediately after the war. He hoped to apply the insights that he
had gained during the war to settle classic American problems of religious and racial prejudice and
social anomie. The Institute made strategic alliances with social progressives and interfaith religious
organizations. It created an active outreach and education program. Ultimately, though, the Institute
could not become self-supporting. After two years, it disbanded, and Schreiber entered private practice,
although he continued as an active speaker on psychiatry and social issues throughout his professional
life. This paper will trace the life of this organization and its activities, and it will place these in the
context of the immediate post-war era. The success of the war effort led many to think that the same
coordinated application of resources, using the latest scientific principles, could attack and overcome the
social ills that had re-emerged after the war. Schreiber's Institute was part of this hopeful era, as well as