2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

these films invaluable in a classroom is that they enact that “concrescence”
and, at the same time, raise precisely the philosophical questions that prompt
Whitehead’s philosophical concept.
Paul␣ J. Croce Stetson University
William James on the Healing Arts
HSS Abstracts
Like many nineteenth-century scientists, William James entered the formal
study of nature through medical training. His only academic degree was an
M.D. earned from Harvard in 1869. His work in physiological psychology in
the 1860s through 1890s paralleled the professional developments in medicine
toward laboratory and physiological explanation for disease, most notably the
advent of the germ theory of disease. However, James maintained an
ambivalence about these scientific changes within medicine. This paper will
investigate James’s attraction to the alternatives to regular medicine based on
his family’s practice of the popular folk medicine homeopathy through his
defense of non-conventional healers in the 1890s. This paper will also be an
opportunity to investigate why James went against the mainstream and also
why he was so guarded in his defense of the alternatives. Remaining open to
irregular medicine with its denial that health could be explained by physical
and chemical operations, was a part of his rejection of scientific reductionism.
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Richard␣ D. Cunninghm Pennsylvania State University
Moveable Visual Images and Active Reading Practices
in the Education of Sixteenth-Century English Navigators
In the early modern period texts devoted to the study of natural phenomena
and to mechanical arts began to integrate visual images and text to communicate
their messages. Such texts include da Vinci’s Tratado de Estatica y Mechnica
En Italiano (1493), Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica libri septem
(1543), William Gilbert’s De Magnete (1600), and of course Galileo’s Siderius
Nuncius (1610) and Designe Macchie del Sole (1612). Texts intended to educate
English readers on the art of navigation similarly depended on the use of visual
images to elucidate the lessons they offered. Prime examples of such are
translations into English of Joannes Taisnier’s Opusculum perpetua memoria
dignissim (1562) and Martin Cortes’ Breve compendio de la sphera y de la
arte de navegar (1551). Both texts were translated by Richard Eden: Taisnier’s
as A very necessary and profitable book concerning navigation in 1579, and
Cortes’ as The Arte of Navigation in 1561. While work has been done on the
integration of text and image in early modern Europe, the similar integration
in early modern England is much less studied. At the HSS 2000 conference in
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