2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
recent scholarship and new historiographic orientations in the history of science.
The work of the hygienists will be analyzed within the context of the political
culture of hygienism, a medical imperialism whose goal was to civilize the urban
and rural poor in the dwellings and places or work in the interest of public order
and national security. More broadly, hygienic science was a key feature of the
civilizing mission of the French bourgeoisie both at home and abroad.
Sofie Lachapelle University of Notre Dame
Materializing Authority: The 1922 Psychical Experiments at the Sorbonne
The apparent rejection of the supernatural by scientists conceals a complex
interaction between science and the pseudo-science of the paranormal. I will
discuss one of the most famous of such interactions in French psychical science
centered around Eva C.’s seances at the Sorbonne in 1922. In early twentiethcentury
France, the term psychical science referred to a number of different and
sometimes incoherent research methods, subjects of interest, and grievances
against the structures of scientific authority. Psychical researchers could either
be building a religious science, a popular science, a science of the marvelous, or
imitating what was labeled official science. Whether they were hoping to change
scientific authority in some way or working towards entering under its mantle,
psychical researchers were often engaged in a one-way dialogue with official
science. Although there were respectable French scientists of the period interested
in psychical phenomena, the official science of the Académie des Sciences and
the universities seldom acknowledged the aspirant science. In 1922, however,
at the request of a number of psychical researchers, scientists gathered at the
Sorbonne for a dozen seances to observe and report on the materializations
produced by the medium Eva C. As the negative report of the observers and the
outrage that followed in the psychical research press attracted the attention of
the media, the Sorbonne experiments became part of a few events around which
the scientific and popular presses considered the phenomena and rejected them.
Although these investigations into the reality of materializations are not
representative of the field of French psychical research as a whole, they,
nonetheless, illustrate some of the ways in which psychical researchers contested
official science and hoped to build a different scientific authority.
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Cherilyn␣ M. Lacy Hartwick College
Science Marches Across the Threshold:
From Public Health to Domestic Hygiene in Nineteenth-century France
The French public health movement of the nineteenth century was not
concerned with purifying public spaces alone. Hygienists stressed the