2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
classroom activities based these representations of health could be successful
only in the hands of the finest and luckiest teachers. Even if the instructor
managed to avoid the “false analogies” that had pervaded earlier nature-study
approaches to science teaching, the natural world was far too uncertain to
ensure a consistent lesson, even in a controlled classroom experiment as one
educator explained, rats and rabbits, “like children, show disturbing
discrepancies between behavior and its apparent results.... The wrong one is
too apt to gain, or the right one to cap the climax all too effectively by dying.”
Nevertheless, the history of these strategies for representing health is important,
I conclude, for it helps reveal how twentieth-century Americans acquired a
new language—one with a scientific inflection—for thinking about their bodies
and their world.
Alain Touwaide Independent Scholar
Arabic Science in Byzantium: The Case of Botany
Byzantine manuscripts contain, from the 13th c. A.D. onwards, a kind of text
without precedent: multilingual lexica of plant names, in fact of plants used in
therapeutic as materia medica. Even though some among them were previously
noticed, these lexica have not been explored. On the contrary, they were
neglected as they were considered a minor genre, the sign of a degradation of
the ancient tradition or an incomprehensible kind of works. From a systematic
inventory and an historical study of these lexica, it appears that they aimed to
allow Arabic speaking physicians to read Greek treatises, and conversely, and
that they result from a massive income of Arabic medicine to Byzantium from
the 2nd half of the 13th c. A.D. onwards. Now, Baghdad was taken in 1258 by
the Mongols and, in 1261, Constantinople, previously occupied by the Western
Crusaders, was recuperated by the Byzantines. It seems, thus, that, due deep
militaro-political changes, the geography of science was transformed. In the
specific case of Botany, not only plant names, but also new species were
imported in Byzantium from Baghdad.
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Ljubinka Trgovcevic Historical Institute, Belgrade
Science of Borders:
The Uses of Jovan Cvijic’s Geography at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919-20
The paper discusses the interaction of Yugoslavian scientists and state
politicians during the First World War, when geographical, ethnological, and
geological researches provided justification for the military actions and the
negotiations on the shape and extents of national borders. In 1919-20, the
prominent Serbian geographer Jovan Cvijic, author of the influential La