2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
medical discussion in the late Enlightenment and 3) the “gendering” of hysteria
in works produced in the 1780s, especially Beauchêne’s De l’influence des
affections de l’âme dans les maladies nerveuses des femmes. The paper will
stress the complexity of the discourse of hysteria in Enlightenment France
while arguing that the late eighteenth century witnessed a general trend away
from somatic explanation and toward holistic, psychosomatic explanations
that depended heavily on emergent conceptions of strictly delimited gender
roles. Thus it will be argued that the gendering of hysteria in the late
Enlightenment emerged from a larger physiological and medical discourse
that purportedly grounded pathological categories in a new understanding of
the physico-moral constitution of the sexes.
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Jack Wilson Washington & Lee University
U.S Patents on Organisms Prior to Diamond v. Chakrabarty
This paper explores the history of the interaction between intellectual property
law and biology in the United States prior to the Chakrabarty decision. As is well
known, in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that patent statutes should be
interpreted so as to include living bacteria within the scope of patent law. Contrary
to popular opinion, however, the Chakrabarty case did not represent the first time
that patent protection had been extended to an economically important living
organism had been patented. Numerous process and product patents had previously
been issued for bacteria, viruses, and vaccines. Some higher plants had been
protected from unauthorized asexual reproduction through the Plant Patent Act of
1930. The scientific and political factors involved in these patents make an
interesting story in their own right and also foreshadow the current debates about
intellectual property rights covering genetically modified organisms and genes.
Alison Winter California Institute of Technology
Snails, Leeches, Mediums, and Conductors:
The Use of Living Things as Instruments in Mid-Nineteenth Century
Europe
The mid nineteenth century saw the proliferation of a number of very different
experimental inventions that, despite their differences, shared one striking
characteristic: the physiology of a living animal was joined to the working of a
mechanical device to create a composite instrumental system. Four examples,
falling within a single decade, are the so-called ‘snail telegraph’, in which snails
were claimed to be able to transmit information between Paris and New York the
‘tempest prognosticator,’ which relied on the responses of leeches to an impending
storm the fashionable practices of ‘table turning’ (the immediate precursor of
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