2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Kunstkammer to demonstrate Russia’s new status as a civilized member of
Western European nations, and identified the sciences as central to this project’s
success. Thus the Ice Palace, and St. Petersburg’s scientific theatricals generally,
make manifest the importance of spectacle for the dissemination of the sciences
during the Enlightenment and can serve as a nexus in which to see clearly the
interlinking of the sciences and absolutist political economy at this time.
Robert␣ S. Westman University of California, San Diego
Kepler’s Early Astrological Problematic
Important dimensions of Michael Maestlin’s (1550-1631) role in framing
Kepler’s adoption of Copernicus’s theory are now widely acknowledged and
reasonably well understood. Also, thanks to recent scholarship, the general outline
of Kepler’s astrological ideas is reasonably well mapped. Rather less attention
has been paid to how Maestlin’s views helped to shape Kepler’s attitude toward
astrological theory and practice and how Kepler reconciled those views with his
evolving cosmographical commitments. In this paper, I will suggest that Kepler’s
astrological, physical, and astronomical convictions were interwoven in
significant ways from his early days as a student at Tübingen.
180
Elizabeth␣ A. Williams Oklahoma State University
The Scientific Discourse of Hysteria in Enlightenment France
If hysteria has been largely discredited as a diagnostic category, nonetheless
as a cultural phenomenon it draws ever more intense scrutiny from historians
of science, medicine, and art as well as professionals in diverse mental health
disciplines. In the historical literature devoted to hysteria, the eighteenth century
has been consistently slighted despite the fact that Enlightenment medicine
supplied crucial ingredients to modern thinking about hysteria, its nature,
treatment, and general cultural significance. This historiographical lacuna, to
which Mark Micale drew attention in 1989, has not been filled since, despite
the appearance of valuable new work on hysteria in later periods. This paper
will examine the status of hysteria in eighteenth-century French nosologies,
especially the Nosologie méthodique of François Boissier de Sauvages, and in
the specialized literature of the “vapors” produced between the 1750s and
1780s by Joseph Raulin, Pierre Pomme, Edme-Pierre Chauvot de Beauchêne,
and others. Three problems will be emphasized: l) the status of hysteria as
somatic or psychodynamic in origin, and the variety of etiologies proposed
within these broad domains of explanation 2) the place of hysteria as a
nosological category in relation to closely-allied conditions such as
hypochondria, melancholia, and, especially, the “vapors” that dominated