2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

takes as its task historicizing objects—buildings and bodies—as embedded in
multiplicities that constitute precipitibilities and imperceptibilities. It argues
that buildings and bodies are materialized through multiple historical strata,
and further, that the materializations of lay people require as much skill with
objects, practices, and representation as do those of experts.
Janice␣ L. Neri University of California, Irvine
The Visual Rhetoric of Insect Illustration:
Technology & Visuality in the Seventeenth Century
HSS Abstracts
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Seventeenth-century users of microscopes set their sights on the familiar and
mundane world of very small objects—seeds, household items, bits of fabric, and
especially insects. The images produced by these early microscopists present
stunning views of flies, lice, termites, and other insects as they had never been
seen or depicted these magnified views transform small and insignificant creatures
into fascinating, strange, and wholly new beings—exotic animals. Images of insects
such as those found in Hooke’s Micrographia or Leeuwenhoek’s studies are often
cited by historians as examples of the careful and precise observation of nature
characteristic of the advances in seventeenth-century science and technology. In
this paper, however, I argue that such images were the product of reciprocal
relationships between image-makers and observers who made use of older imagemaking
practices that combined fantasy and imagination with precise observation.
It was through the use of these two methods of visual representation—the rhetoric
of the real and the rhetoric of fantasy—that early users of microscopes were able
to make sense of the startling new visions they experienced. The results were
images that present views of insects that are both familiar and exotic.
William Newman Indiana University
The Fire-Analysis Debate Before Boyle and Van Helmont
Since the 1960’s it has been known that Robert Boyle’s famous attack on the
Paracelsian “tria prima” (mercury, sulfur, and salt) owed a significant debt to
the Belgian iatrochemist Joan Baptista Van Helmont. In his Ortus medicinae of
1648, Van Helmont argues (as Boyle would later do) against the much-vaunted
claim of the Paracelsians that analysis by fire provides a fool-proof demonstration
of the tria prima’s pre-existence in compounds. Van Helmont points out that the
Paracelsian position contains an obvious fallacy—the assumption that the
disintegration of a body always reveals pre-existent ingredients rather than mere
artifacts of decomposition. On the strength of this paralogism, the human body
should be composed of worms, and cheese of mites. It has not been realized
widely that Van Helmont himself was the beneficiary of a long and increasingly
bitter scholastic debate about the pre-existence of substances in mixtures. Thomas
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