2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
Marianne␣ P. Fedunki Stevens Institute for History and Philosophy
of Science and Technology
Malaria and 20th Century Medicine: Fighting Disease with Film, 1940-
2000
This paper examines the role of film in educating scientists, clinicians, and the
general public about the transmission of malaria from 1940 to the present. The
films were produced as both public health propaganda and as scientific/clinical
training films directed at a specialized audience. They include both basic and
applied science as well as material for general Western and indigenous audiences.
I will set these films within their colonial and later post-colonial frames of
discourse and also evaluate the films’ impact on their target audiences, plus the
role of foundation sponsorship in producing and distributing them. Archival
sources for this study include: The Wellcome Trust (London), Imperial War
Museum, Shell Centre (London), British Film Institute, World Health
Organization, and Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. This paper is part of
a larger study of how film served as a way to disseminate “colonialist science,”
particularly in East Africa. There is a large body of anti-malaria films, including
even a contribution by Walt Disney Productions, “The Winged Scourge” (1943)
Mordechai Feingold Virginia Tech
Scientists and Amateurs in Seventeenth-Century England
In her Scientists and Amateurs: A History of the Royal Society (1949), Dorothy
Stimson differentiated the few “true” scientists from a much larger group of
practitioners who satisfied “their curiosity rather than attempting to pursue
scientific learning.” For the latter, she argued, science was “a recreation in
which they delighted, not an activity to which they devoted their whole time
and thought” , though they served an important role as “a welcoming audience
for the new discoveries” and as patrons to scientists. The passage of time has
done little to dispel such an image and my paper intends to probe the nature of
the scientific community during the seventeenth century in an effort to
demonstrate that “amateurism” was a function of social or professional
standing, not an indication of competence.
80
Maurice␣ A. Finocchiaro University of Nevada—Las Vegas
Giordano Bruno, 1600-2000
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in the year 1600, and this year
(2000) several organizations are commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary