2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Conevery␣ Bolton Valencius Washington University
Inside, Outside, Valley, Field:
Miasmas and Healthy Places in the Antebellum U.S.
Newcomers to the pre-Civil War Mississippi Valley experienced a range of
places as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy,’ ‘sickly’ or ‘salubrious.’ This paper explores
the variety of sites that antebellum Americans (and new immigrants)
experienced as possessing ‘health.’ Miasmas, I will argue, implicated indoor
spaces as well as external environments in the healthfulness of a place: the
boundary between ‘wild’ and natural environments and bounded, domestic
ones was porous and often permeated. Many different ranges of space,
moreover, could possess ‘health’: both ‘the Mississippi valley’ and a nearby
riverbottom could be meaningfully spoken of as being ‘healthy’ or ‘miasmatic.’
‘Health’ was thus a concept that carried both great specificity and great range:
every environment, in the logic of the early and middle nineteenth century,
possessed influences that wrote themselves into and onto the human form. No
place through which human beings moved was neutral territory.
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Ellen␣ J. Valle University of Turku, Finland
From Sloane to Owen:
Epistolary Episodes in the Construction of Natural History
The epistolary genre was central to the working of the scientific discourse
community and the development of scientific discourse throughout the 17th
and 18th century. New information and ideas often circulated within groups
linked together by correspondence these groups varied considerably in size
and in their degree of compactness vs. diffuseness. The face-to-face discourse
of the Royal Society at the weekly meetings was often based on letters
received or written. Ultimately, these letters might end up published, in the
Philosophical Transactions or elsewhere. Letters were particularly important
in natural history, since this field of study encompassed areas geographically
remote from the center. Letters from the periphery to the center might be
used to convey information about new observations and requests for books
and supplies to accompany a specimen being sent to London or to submit an
official report to the authorities (the Admiralty, for instance). Traveling in
the opposite direction, letters could send directions for exploration or request
particular specimens (a plant for a patron’s garden or a particular fossil bone).
In the 19th century, the epistolary genre is usually considered to be less
important. In natural history and the life sciences more generally, however,
it continued to play a role Darwin’s use of letters, to elicit information about
variation both from professional biologists and from amateurs and ‘fanciers’,
is well known. Likewise Richard Owen embeds letters in his published work