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Focusing on Kentucky's immense and world-famous Mammoth Cave, this essay considers contexts from across the nineteenth century in which subterranean darkness was envisaged as a driving force in the transformation of living things. In fact, the cave was the stage for several allied discourses of "dark degeneracy" that conjured images of both generative and destructive mutability, from the generation of animals without eyes to the apparent disintegration of some kinds of human bodies and minds through exposure to the darkness. In elucidating several parallel discourses of dark degeneracy, the essay offers a distinct contribution to several bodies of scholarship by highlighting an important and hitherto neglected manifestation of an intensifying nineteenth-century focus on the how of natural processes and a growing sense of the transformative significance of the apparent cohesion of malleable bodies with their wider environments. At the same time, it evidences the influence of Mammoth Cave in forging and contributing to late nineteenth-century debates about degeneration and shows how dominant sensory hierarchies framed both popular and scientific understandings of life in the deep darkness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The observation that neurological illnesses follow recurrent hits to the head was tempered by the terms that first called the diseases into scientific existence: "punch-drunk," "slugnutty," "slaphappy," "goofy," "punchy," and a host of other colloquialisms accompanying class identities. Thus the discovery of disease and its medicalization ran straight into a countervailing belief about losers—losers in boxing, losers in life, losers in general. To medicalize such individuals was to fly in the face of a culture that made them jokes. Yet a subculture began to emerge around pathological understandings: first in medicine, then in journalism, then in the courts, and finally with patient accounts about illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study deals with some pitfalls and opportunities of contextual explanation in the history of science by examining the case of Isaac Beeckman's invention of corpuscular-mechanical natural philosophy. It makes use of ideas about contextual explanation—its dangers as well as more fruitful avenues of approach—that the author has expressed elsewhere in studies of Descartes's intellectual biography, the historiography of the Scientific Revolution, and the internalism/externalism debate, as well as in articulations and criticisms of post-Kuhnian developments in the history and sociology of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The linkages and interactions of scientific disciplines with industry, politics, and society have long been a staple in the history of science, the history of technology, and science studies. However, it is arguable that the impact of this intertwining on the epistemic and social core of scientific disciplines has not yet been sufficiently explored. Chemistry is an ideal case in point, given that it has emerged as one of the largest scientific disciplines while at the same time becoming one of the world’s most powerful technologies. Specifically, chemistry’s power lies in its ability to gain knowledge of the natural world by transforming it, along with the society in which it is embedded. The four contributions to this Focus section all address chemistry’s border permeability, based on its transformative powers; they focus on the feedback mechanisms that transformed chemistry and thereby altered the very concept of a scientific discipline. So successful has this “nonclassical approach” become that, in the opinion of the contributors to this Focus section, it is now both necessary and advisable to study the history of chemistry’s embeddedness and power in science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science museums come in all shapes and sizes. In order to provide an overview of the present-day landscape of science museums, this survey proposes a typology based on their historical origins. It suggests that, despite their distinct beginnings, museums of various types have converged in their institutional identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earnest effort to clarify his historiographical choices, Frans van Lunteren characterizes his scheme as "analytic rather than historicist" and as providing "a pattern rather than a plot." Clearly he is keener on panoramic painting than on storytelling. Both the panoramic and the narrative genres are suitable for popular audiences: the former provides a static picture, whereas the latter stresses dynamic changes. Despite the limitations of its methodology--which, remarkably, the author points out in his concluding remarks--the essay opens up a broad anthropological perspective that could be further elaborated. Thanks to its focus on ontology, this quick survey of interactions between technology, science, and society clearly assumes the cultural and historical relativity of our concepts of nature and machine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Issue information is provided for the June 2022 issue of the periodical "ISIS: Journal of the History of Science in Society."

The author discusses critical reception for the book "Leviathan and the Air-Pump" by authors Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. It discusses the book's significance to the concept of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), the roots of the book, and the book's impact on the sociology of science as a whole.

The article discusses the published reviews of the book "Leviathan and the Air-Pump" by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, particularly the polarization between sociologists of science and historians and philosophers and the differences in how the book was reviewed following its initial publication in 1985 and how it may be perceived during the early 21st century.

Although "naturalistic fallacy" is a term coined in the twentieth century, scholars have long voiced myriad anxieties over the mechanisms by which their contemporaries have derived moral, social, and political lessons from natural phenomena--often as gambits for advancing their own alternative explanations. The essays in this Focus section explore five episodes in the history of such concerns with naturalistic reasoning in order to shed new light on the persistence of naturalism itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Latin America, the history of disease, medicine, and public health, and global history are deeply intertwined, but the intersection of these three fields has not yet attracted sustained attention from historians. Recent developments in the historiography of disease, medicine, and public health in Latin America suggest, however, that a distinctive, global approach to the topic is beginning to emerge. This essay identifies the distinguishing characteristic of this approach as an attentiveness to transfers of contagions, cures, and medical knowledge from Latin America to the rest of the world and then summarizes a few episodes that demonstrate its promise. While national as well as colonial and neocolonial histories of Latin America have made important contributions to our understanding, works taking the global approach have the potential to contribute more directly to the decentering of the global history of disease, medicine, and public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the participation of Latin America and the Caribbean in the construction and circulation of tropical agricultural science during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. It uses the term "islands of knowledge" to underscore the idea that each producing region across the global tropics, including Latin America and the Caribbean, was instrumental in the creation, adoption, and application of scientific procedures. At the same time, it emphasizes the value of interchange and interconnection between these regions, as well as the many and heterogeneous local areas, for analyzing what it calls "global archipelago agricultural scientific knowledge." This focus challenges the traditional center/periphery hierarchy and opens it to a wider vision of science and practice in agriculture. This essay shows how writing in related areas of research--specifically, commodity histories, biological exchange studies, and knowledge exchange studies--introduces approaches and case studies that are useful for the history of tropical agricultural science. In particular, this work provides analytical frameworks for developing studies of exchanges across the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses the seminal figure of Jawaharlal Nehru to interrogate the nature and representation of science in modern India. The problem posed by Nehruvian science--the conflict between (yet simultaneity of ) science as both universal phenomenon and local effect--lies at the heart of current debates about what science means for the non-West. The problematic of Nehruvian science can be accessed through Nehru's own speeches and writings, but also through the wider project of science with which he identified--critiquing colonialism, forging India's place in the modern world, marrying intellectual endeavor with practical nation building. The essay makes a case for looking at Nehruvian science as a way of structuring the problem of postcolonial science, particularly in relation to understanding the authority of science and its evaluation in terms of its capacity to deliver socioeconomic change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presented as a retrospective speech by the president of the History of Science Society in 2038, this essay imagines a future for the profession of the history of science in the United States. Acknowledging that self-described historians of science do not fully control the subject, it considers the place of the history of science in a future university landscape in which interdisciplinary "studies" have supplanted disciplines as the fundamental organizing structure. It then situates this academic scene within a broader professional landscape in which nonuniversity institutions play an expanded role in bringing the history of science directly to the public. Here the essay focuses on an imagined Science Heritage Center that blends commitments to innovative scholarly research, public history techniques of experiential learning, and updated technologies of virtual reality. It further suggests an unexpected direction for developing a collaborative "citizen history of science." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recently released documentary on life in a protein crystallography laboratory offers an exemplary opportunity to examine how a popular account of scientific training models narrowly defined norms of masculinity and mentorship and simultaneously sets these as the tacit conditions for success in science. Rather than treating this documentary as a good or bad representation of what life in the lab is actually like, this analysis draws attention to how the scientists featured in the film perform for the camera and how the filmmakers splice together the action to animate an engaging story. This essay shows how this popular and widely circulating documentary frames science as a game to be won and stages scientific success on an agonistic playing field. Those who can "make it" are those who are tough enough and those who are willing and able to get entangled in the taunting, jesting, and jostling relationships that appear to be required for mentorship in this lab. The essay argues that this documentary tethers this model of success in science to restrictive norms of masculinity and in so doing promotes a pedagogical culture that fosters competition, rivalry, and ritualized shame. Feminist theories of performativity are engaged to consider the iterative processes through which narrowly circumscribed masculinities and styles of pedagogy are sedimented and naturalized. This essay aims to spur renewed attention to the care historians and anthropologists might take to examine the often hidden tropes that are lurking inside the stories about science that we find so salient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In what ways can the study of science and popular culture in the American context contribute to ongoing debates on popularization and popular science? This essay suggests that, for several reasons, attention to the antebellum era offers the most significant opportunity to realize more sophisticated understandings of science in American popular culture. First, it enables us to take advantage of comparative opportunities, both by benefiting from the advanced state of historiography for Victorian popular science and by engaging with a generation of historiographic innovations by scholars in U.S. history, American studies, literature, and art history. Second, the emergence of popular science in the context of the republican ethos of the antebellum period provides an important vantage point from which to assess the extent to which the general issue of "popular science" and its cognates is historically variable and multiple in terms of the politics of knowledge. Third, the ramifications of the development of popular science for relations between science and the public well into the twentieth century cannot be understood until we gain a more clearly developed sense of the emergent period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay suggests that we should understand the varieties of "popular science" as part of a larger phenomenon: the changing set of processes, practices, and actors that generate and transform public knowledge across time, space, and cultures. With such a reconceptualization we can both de-essentialize and historicize the idea of "popularization," free it from normative notions, and move beyond existing imbalances in scholarship. The history of public knowledge might thus find a central place in many fundamental narratives of the modern world. More specifically, the essay proposes that we pay more attention to forms of knowledge outside the realm of "science," embrace the richness, traffic, and transfer of public knowledge on a transnational scale as well as in comparative perspective, and rethink conventional forms of periodization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay presents an alternative to interpretations of laboratories as institutions for controlled investigation of nature that are either placeless or "set apart." It historicizes the claim by showing how the meaning of "laboratory" has both changed and diversified over the last two centuries. Originally a laboratory could be a site of organic growth or material manufacture, but it can now be a specialized domain for technological development, educational training, or quality testing. The essay then introduces some contingencies of geography and gender by showing how boundaries between laboratories and other spaces--especially domestic kitchens--could be permeable or nonexistent; importantly, some spaces served as experimental laboratories without ever being designated as such. A key corollary, however, is that there were limits to this permeability: not all social spaces could be turned consensually into laboratories, and laboratory users could be intolerant of certain imported technical cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An examination of the use of the word "laboratory" before the nineteenth century yields two striking results. First, "laboratory" referred almost exclusively to a room or house where chemical operations such as distillation, combustion, and dissolution were performed. Second, a "laboratory" was not exclusively a scientific institution but also an artisanal workplace. Drawing on the historical actors' use of "laboratory," the essay first presents (some necessarily scattered) evidence for the actual correspondence between artisanal and scientific laboratories in the eighteenth century. A particularly instructive case is the way the equipment of the laboratory of the Prussian Academy of Sciences was acquired. There was, in this case, a direct transfer of instruments, vessels, and materials from a pharmaceutical to an academic laboratory. The essay then argues that we ought to distinguish between two different experimental traditions in the early modern period: experimental philosophy and the laboratory tradition that meshed studies of nature with technological innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After a productive start in the 1980s, laboratory history is now surprisingly neglected--not lab science, but the lab as social institution. To restart interest, I suggest that we see labs as period specific (early modern, modern, postmodern) and of a piece with each era's dominant social institutions and practices. In the modern era, for example, labs have become powerful and ubiquitous because their operating principles are those of the nation-state and its consumerist political economy. Their educational function is crucial: labs have authority because they are an effective vehicle for educating en masse for life in modern states; they provide general entry to careers in scores of disciplines and a thousand occupations; and they embody prevailing ideals of a meritocracy of competence, transparency (through publication), and a universalistic logic of objectivity. An older microhistory of laboratory practices may thus be reborn as a systematic, macrosocial history of the lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking in particular at the Scientific Revolution, this essay argues that, for all their differences, positivist commentators on science and contextualist historians of science ought to be committed to the view that counterfactual changes in the history of science would have made no significant difference to its historical development. Assumptions about the history of science as an inexorable march toward the truth commit the positivist to the view that, even if things had been different, scientific knowledge would still have ended up where it is. Perhaps surprisingly, the move away from "great man" history and the increasing emphasis among contextualist historians on the broad cultural influences on scientific thought and practice also imply that changes of a restricted or specific nature ought to have no significant effect on general outcomes. Unlike the positivist, however, the contextualist is willing to concede that things might have been different if the entire cultural background had been different. But in such cases the effect of such sweeping changes would be impossible to conceive and so deprive counterfactual history of any useful insights it might be supposed to offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the second half of the nineteenth century, local and regional voluntary societies were among the most widespread, accessible, and familiar public scientific institutions in America. Collectively, they made up an institutional network that converted individuals' private interest in science into a public activity. They played an essential role in the dissemination of scientific information, the growth of a scientifically literate population, and the extension of public support for science in the decades after the Civil War. This essay delineates and maps the spread of these societies throughout the country, as well as the flow of scientific information both among societies and between a society and its regional hinterland. Using the Davenport [Iowa] Academy of Natural Sciences as an example, it demonstrates how local societies were embedded in a national scientific community and mediated between it and local scientific enthusiasts, to the benefit of both. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How are names for new disciplinary fields coined? Here a new (and fun) way to look at the history of such coinages is proposed, focusing on how phonesthemic tints and taints figure in decisions to adopt one type of suffix rather than another. The most common suffixes used in such coinages ("-logy," "-ics," etc.) convey semantic and evaluative content quite unpredictable from literal (root) meanings alone. Pharmaceutical manufacturers have long grasped the point, but historians have paid little attention to how suffixes of one sort or another become productive. A romp through examples from English shows that certain suffixes have become "hard" or "soft" in consequence of the status of their most prominent carrier disciplines. The "-ics" ending came to signify hardness in consequence of the prestige of physics, for example (with "-metrics" as the arteriosclerosis of suffixes), while lower-status (less "hard") disciplines have developed alternate endings (such as "studies"). Some suffixes are eschewed for their perceived ideologic slant (the "-isms," for example). Historians of science need to think more about the pragmatics of language, a task made easier by information technologies and databases that allow searches for words by suffix and first known use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bibliography presents recent books, papers, and articles of interest to historians of science, including such categories as contemporary philosophy of science, sociology and psychology of science and knowledge, and studies of linguistic and visual aspects of science.

Presents a list of articles related to science and society published in several journals. "The Ramesside Star Clocks and the Ancient Egyptian Constellations," by Juan Antonio Belmonte; "Planets, Livers and Omens in Mesopotamia," by Martin Worthington; "Experience as a Source and Ground of Theory in Epicureanism," by James Allen; "Making Time Aristotle's Way," by Jon McGinnis.

Presents a list of articles related to science, society and culture published in several journals. "Expert Knowledge, Democracy and Science," by E. P. Hamm; "The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness," by Donna J. Haraway; "Clearing the Field: New Perspectives on Book History," by Paul Keen; "Inquiry and Performance: Analogies and Identities Between the Arts and the Sciences," by R. P. Crease; "Natural Atheology," by Abigail Lustig.

Presents a list of articles related to the philosophical, sociological, psychological, linguistic and visual aspects of science published in several journals. "On What We Know About Chance," by Frank Arntzenius and Ned Hall; "Scientists' Thoughts on Scientific Models," by Daniela M. Bailer-Jones; "The Progress of Science and Implications for Science Studies and for Science Policy," by Henry H. Bauer.

Examines a conflict regarding language with emphasis on its impact on French Enlightenment science and revolutionary politics. What the conflict involved; How this conflict related to Antoine Laurent Lavoisier's and his colleagues' chemical nomenclature of 1787; Examination of the function of language in chemistry and public instruction.

Examines how prominent engineers and scientists in the United States construed the relationship of science and technology from about 1880 to 1945. Consideration of keywords to express a relationship between science and technology; Professionalization of physics and engineering; Area of discourse deals with the formation of industrial research during the World War I.

Reports on the philosophy and influences of the Royal Academy of Medical, Physical, and Natural Sciences of Havana from 1861 to 1898 on Cuba's colonial status under Spain. Profile of the academy's members; History of the academy's foundation; Relations with the government and community; Scientific matters and national politics.

Presents a list of books on the history of science in society. "The Politics of the Healthy Life: An International Perspective," edited by Esteban Rodríguez-Ocaña; "Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire," edited by H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl; "New Media, 1740-1915," edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree.

The authors of the book "Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life" respond to various articles in the journal concerning reviews of the book and its significance to the sociology of science and history of science.

The article discusses the significance of the book "Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life" by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer and the evolution of reviews of the book from guarded to later enthusiasm for the book. It also discusses the sociological aspect of the book that many reviewers criticized.

Celebrates the forty issues of "ISIS: Journal of the History of Science in Society." Scope of the journal; Process of editing the manuscripts submitted for publication; Challenges weathered by the journal's editorial office.