2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
in the later 18th century the growing recognition of subjectivity, of the interior
private space of the individual mind or soul, as the inverse side of the objective
public sphere. The relation of self and other, of subject and object, he says,
became problematic at this time. Subjectivity itself emerged as the inverse
side of the public sphere with the appearance of psychological novels such as
Pamela and Werther. It also emerged in the appearance of a new public
psychology, distinct from the philosophy of mind long familiar through figures
such as Locke, Hartley, Leibniz, Wolff, etc. I focus on Karl Philipp Moritz
(1756-93). In his journal, the Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde, Moritz
proposed such a discipline, founded on the public sharing of information. He
invited members of the literate public such as doctors, pastors, teachers,
prosecutors, etc., to share their knowledge of specific cases of aberrant behavior,
providing the empirical evidence needed to construct a new science. Traditional
analysis of the properties of mind formed only one strand of this tapestry.
Contemporary medical thought, particularly the work of Moritz’s friend,
Marcus Herz, was another. It was to be a collaboration by the entire literate
public, including writers (like Moritz himself) who could add their insights
into human personality and motivation. There was another aspect to the project:
the observer of human psychology must also observe himself. Moritz was
aware of the paradox here: the self as knowing subject is also the self as an
object to be known. In an attempt to establish an empirical psychology and
delimit the boundaries between subjective and objective experience Moritz
and his contributors offered their own psyches, their nightmares, hallucinations
and depressions, for public scrutiny. Undertaken in the spirit of Enlightenment,
the enterprise in fact problematized the relationship between subject and object
and helped to construct the issues which would obsess Romantic writers and
the Naturphilosophen.
94
Elizabeth Hanson The Rockefeller University
Women Scientists at the Rockefeller Institute: A Collective Biography
The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research was founded in New York
City in 1901 through the philanthropy of John D. Rockefeller. Modeled on the
Koch and Pasteur Institutes, it was the first research center in the United States
devoted exclusively to studying the underlying causes of disease through
scientific research. Between 1901 and 1946, more than 50 women held research
positions at the Institute in areas including bacteriology, experimental surgery,
chemistry, and biophysics. This paper makes use of archival sources and other
biographical sources to assemble a prosopography of this group. Historian
Lawrence Stone has defined prosopography as “the investigation of the
common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means
of a collective study of their lives.” The technique has been used to understand
the behavior of scientific communities such as the Royal Society of London