2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

a direct inference to what otherwise were unwarranted assumptions about the
atom. I will argue that taking seriously Bohr’s comments on method allows us
to make sense of his otherwise mysterious insistence that correspondence had
to be a principle of the quantum theory. I will also suggest an alternative way
to understand his insistence on the necessity of classical language.
Philip␣ M. Teigen National Library of Medicine
Science, Society, and Culture in the Establishment
of the Harvard School of Veterinary Medicine
HSS Abstracts
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During the presidency of Charles W. Eliot (1869-1909), the teaching of science at
Harvard University was transformed. New sciences were added to the curriculum
and old ones revived and reformed. Uneasy at first with the production of scientific
knowledge for its own sake, with its emphasis on explanation, abstraction, and
universality (techne/episteme), Eliot focussed his early reform efforts on educating
practitioners whose knowledge and action could improve Massachusetts’ society,
economy, and culture (phronesis). Chief among them were lawyers, physicians,
agriculturalists, and veterinarians. His establishment in 1882 of a landmark school
for veterinary surgeons provides a case study of how Harvard’s most famous
president saw science serving the needs of post-Civil War Massachusetts. Eliot
established the University’s veterinary school in order to graduate a few qualified
practitioners. He felt they could improve the public health, then afflicted by
slaughterhouse offal in its water supply, diseased meat on its tables, and animalborne
diseases around every corner reduce economic losses to the meat industry,
transportation system, and farmers threatened by epizootic diseases of cattle, horses,
and swine and contribute to moral reform by collaborating with the
Commonwealth’s vibrant anti-cruelty movement. This paper reconstructs the
circumstances of post-Civil War Massachusetts which led Eliot to introduce
veterinary education into the American university.
Mary Terrall University of California, Los Angeles
Vis Viva Revisited
The vis viva controversy is a canonical site for analysis of irreconcilable
philosophical positions in early-modern physics. Viewed retrospectively, in
light of subsequent formulations of the concepts of energy and momentum,
the endless wrangling of the participants reduces to confusion, and not much
else. What more can be said about this controversy, disdainfully characterized
in 1743 by d’Alembert (among others) as “a dispute of words too undignified
to occupy philosophers any longer”? This paper looks at the trajectory of the
dispute from the point of view of the alliances and antipathies connecting and
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