2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

i.e., the system of administrative, fiscal, material, and technological demands
that defined them. By sketching the economy of the silver mines, I intend to
offer a fresh context for a wide range of literary and scientific production. My
paper draws mainly on unpublished archival records from the fiscal and mining
bureaus of Saxony, Hanover, and Prussia.
Olivia Walling University of Minnesota
HSS Abstracts
The Intellectual and Social Life of Nineteenth Century Laboratory Methods,
A Longhorn View
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With the expansion of the cattle industry after the Civil War, the disease “Texas
cattle fever” began appearing in epidemic proportions among cattle native to the
northern United States. In 1866, the New York Metropolitan State Board of Health
began to investigate Texas fever. By the time that the federal government tackled the
problem in the 1880s, agricultural experiment stations in four states were already
researching the disease. All of the investigators involved in this research adhered to
the methodologies associated with the introduction of laboratories that marks a wellknown
watershed in the history of science and medicine. The study of Texas fever
during this time period, however, shows that our assumptions about this “laboratory
revolution” need revision. My paper will use Texas cattle fever as a case study to
explore the introduction of laboratory techniques and tools in the late nineteenth
century. In attempting to isolate the cause of the disease, researchers at the Bureau of
Animal Industry and elsewhere hybridized laboratory techniques with existing natural
history and clinical techniques and, in so doing, they transformed the laboratory into
a productive research tool. In short, the new epistemology was insufficient to produce
a revolution in medicine. Instead, laboratory science emerged triumphant because it
was shaped in the crucible of the social, economic, and political milieu that placed
new demands on scientific research.
Lisa␣ H. Weasel Portland State University
Race and Gender through the Microscope:
A Feminist Perspective on Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line
The relationship between race, gender and the history of science must be
understood as a complex intersection between the social context of science and
its historical practice, as well as the subject matter itself. The case of the HeLa
cell line, the first in vitro human epithelial cancer cell line to be established in
the laboratory, provides an opportunity to examine the ways in which race and
gender have intersected with the history of science at all of these levels. The
cells that make up the HeLa cell line were initially taken from a cervical biopsy
performed in 1951 on an African-American female patient by the name of
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