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Chemist is an outdated Dutch word for ‘chemicus’ or ‘scheikundige’ (literally a person who masters the ‘art of separation’): someone who is knowledgeable on chemistry or who practices chemistry. Until the 19th century, the term chemist was also the name of an occupation in the Netherlands: it was someone who produced and sold chemicals, especially chemical medicines. He positioned himself for at least a century and a half (1670-1820) on the pharmaceutical market as an independent supplier of ‘chimicalia’ and medicines, alongside the apothecary and the druggist.The dissertation maps the fascinating history of the rise, bloom and decline of the chemist occupation in the Netherlands and the centuries-long battle between apothecaries and chemists over (chemical) drug preparation.The Dutch chemists’ occupation never achieved any institutionalization in the form of regulated training courses, a corporate organization, or a qualification structure. This may be one of the reasons that very little is known about Dutch chemists, and that the profession of chemist has fallen between the cracks in the historiography of pharmacy, chemistry, and medicine. This book tries to fill this knowledge gap.The chemists had a common sign: the salamander-in-the-fire, emblem of the chemical preparation of medicines. With this sign, the chemists could distinguish themselves from the apothecaries with their mortar, the druggists with their gaper, and the distillers-brandy-burners with their stills. The origin of the salamander sign from alchemy is described in this book.

Pipe organs have always reflected the artisanal knowledge and skills of their makers. Since the 1990s, replicating historical instruments has opened new ways of studying practices of knowledge and making that revolve around historical organs. In this chapter, we argue that the idea of how a pipe should sound always involves a certain degree of reenactment of the building process. We follow the history of explicating concepts of sound, from one of the most prominent sources for organ builders and reconstructors written by the 18th-century monk Bédos de Celles via an explication of why sound was not centrally discussed in sources before the mid-19th century up to the historically informed pipe making and voicing by Japanese organ builder Munetaka Yokota.

This article discusses children’s novels about Eurasian children who were sent from the Dutch East Indies to the Netherlands for the purpose of character reformation. The corpus shows a remarkable dominance of girl characters, while in actual practice it was mostly Eurasian boys who were sent away for secondary education. I explain this discrepancy between literary text and socio-historical context through the shaping influence of literary genre – that is, of the tomboy story in this particular case. This deflection largely invalidates colonial children’s novels as reliable sources of information about historical educative practices, but it makes them all the more informative regarding the attitudes and values that drove these practices. I conclude by observing that these attitudes and values were anything but homogeneous or coherent, but allowed for a certain bandwidth of variation, which undercuts stark contrasts between colonisers and colonised. Dit artikel bespreekt kinderboeken over Indo-Europese kinderen die vanuit Nederlands-Indie naar Nederland werden gestuurd met het oog op karaktervorming. Opvallend genoeg spelen meisjes het vaakst de hoofdrol in deze romans, terwijl het in werkelijkheid vooral Indo-Europese jongens waren die naar Nederland werden gestuurd voor middelbaar onderwijs. Ik verklaar deze discrepantie tussen literaire tekst en sociaal-historische context vanuit de sturende rol van literaire genre-conventies, in dit specifieke geval, van de zogenaamde ‘bakvis roman’. De dominantie van literaire genres diskwalificeert koloniale kinderliteratuur als een betrouwbare bron over historische opvoedkundige praktijken, maar het maakt ze des te informatiever waar het de houdingen en waarden betreft die ten grondslag lagen aan deze praktijken. Ik concludeer dat deze houdingen en waarden allesbehalve samenhangend of homogeen waren, maar een grote onderlinge variatie vertonen, wat het idee van een scherpe tegenstelling tussen kolonisator en gekoloniseerde ondergraaft.

The Covid-19 pandemic presents a wake-up call to rethink the relationship between science and society. We need to formulate a new social contract between science and society. Different countries may emphasize different aspects in such a new social contract, but I will argue that Covid-19 has demonstrated the urgency for all countries to reconsider the role of science. My plea will be based, mostly, on experiences in The Netherlands, but I will also draw on my work in India.

We leren niet vaak van wat al goed gaat. Toch had een project in Ede precies dat doel. Door video-opnames te maken van standaardwerkwijzen en deze samen te bespreken werd het zorgproces geoptimaliseerd.

In this chapter, we articulate this volume’s key conceptualization of home as a verb. The book’s aspiration is to unlock home, and look at the work it always takes to make home when home intersects with new forms or modes of care because of ageing. We argue that the three modes of ordering the book—moving imaginaries, negotiating institutions and shifting arrangements—allow us to deeply uproot the imaginary of home (and care) as fixed and unmovable. After presenting the different chapters in these three parts of the book, we articulate how this ‘verbing’ of home with care affords room to not only interpret but also design and practise home-care arrangements in new ways.

Over the last decades the popularisation of science has become an important frame for studying the abundant use of magic lantern slides, and Victorian Britain often served as the backdrop of inquiry.¹ Although science popularisation provides a promising alternative for technologically focused ‘pre-cinema’ accounts, the study of magic lantern practices from such a popularisation perspective comes with new challenges. The very notion of ‘popularisation’ tends towards one-directional dissemination practices, whereas historians of science commonly embrace constructivist, contextual or network approaches to study the co-evolution of science and society. This paper proposes a focus on ‘science becoming popular’ in order to...

In this chapter the authors investigate home-making practices for people with dementia in residential care that make use of objects or material environments. Many of these objects or environments have aspects of make-believe. Responding to concerns raised about the growing use of these objects as ‘environmental lies’ or mere ‘façade’ building, the authors discuss what truthful home making could mean. They distinguish two ways of being truthful, connected with two strategies of using objects. In the first strategy, called home-scaping, care tries to closely copy the formerly lived environments of residents. Truth in this case means correspondence with realities as lived outside residential care. The second strategy, home-playing, aims at attuning to residents and to newly emerging truths, here and now, in mutual play. The authors argue that, while both strategies have their value, home-scaping can and must learn from home-playing where it needs to be embedded in ongoing care practices.

In pursuit of responsible research and innovation (RRI), emphasis has been on various forms of inclusion in the governance of science, technology and innovation. Given that much of the ideas on inclusion in fact refer to discursive inclusion, it is surprising that little attention has hitherto been paid to what seems foundational to any discursive space: ontologies (theories of being) and epistemologies (theories of knowing), and notably how these relate to inclusion and exclusion. By means of an action-research case study on responsible innovation on biogasification in rural India, we show that one important mechanism of exclusion exists in a dispossession of epistemological agency and the rendering of ontologies as anomalous, even if this is not directly visible as social exclusion. We argue that RRI should adopt as one of its central values the epistemological empowerment of relevant groups. © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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This chapter is about crafting home and care with objects, habits and bodies in dutch hospices. I focus on how hospice residents engage with what hospices offer to them as more or less specific packages of home and care. I will interpret these engagements as breaching experiments (garfinkel 1967). They bring forth more and less implicit assumptions and normativities of home and care built into hospice architectures, staff movements and residents’ whereabouts. It is these breaches, these gaps, that point to the (productive) work that occurs ‘in between’ categories of home and care, life and death, and the promising instability of these ‘inhabited landscapes’ (nading 2014: 19): to the entanglements that unsettle home and care as static sites of home and belonging on the one hand, and institutionalized care on the other.

There are many histories of the chemical industry but very few systematic studies that portray the changing relations between chemistry and industry. This essay tackles the issue by looking to evolving practices and to changes in semantics in particular. On the practical level, both chemistry and industry changed greatly between about 1750 and 1950, which led to different types of interactions over the course of time. Special attention is paid to the emergence and subsequent history of the concept of the Second Industrial Revolution (ca. 1870-1900). It is arguedand illustrated by several examplesthat historians using that concept have tended to underestimate the role of chemistry in industry before about 1870 and have overestimated its role after that date. The rhetorical repertoires of historical actors had great influence on the ways historians later perceived the period of the Second Industrial Revolution. Moreover, the meanings of the key words that we use to describe historical processes have changed considerably over time. The meanings of the terms chemistry and industry both changed, as did those of terms such as technology, art, science, philosophy, and knowledge. This happened most fundamentally between about 1750 and 1850, a period called a Sattelzeit (transition period) by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck for that very reason. Awareness of those semantic changes is crucial for a better understanding of the changing relationships between chemistry and industry, especially for the period before about 1850.

It is a special moment in the history of STS. With the young discipline transitioning into a not so-young-field-anymore, there is plenty of reason for celebrations: defining groups are celebrating remarkable anniversaries and individual careers are celebrated when founding figures retire. These celebrations are also excellent moments for reflections on pasts, presents and futures of STS and the place of STS in the wider world. In this conversation, Wiebe Bijker, recently subject of his own retirement celebration in Maastricht (Bijker 2017), shares his views on STS. We travel with him from the Netherlands to India, and briefly stop in Edinburgh at SSU where we find the origin of the SCOT abbreviation. On the way, we discuss Dutch activism, teaching, the institutionalization of STS, the emergence of international networks, and different roads STS can take. We end with an optimistic view towards a global future, while emphasizing the importance of the inclusion of history and the classics.

‘Do no harm’ is an enduring principle of medicine, yet people continue to be harmed in the process of being ‘cared for’. Before the 1990s, there was very little understanding that poor quality might be inherent in the structures and processes of the healthcare system.1 Now, as a result of considerable research investment, a great deal is known about, for example, hospital-acquired infection, surgical error, medication error, and the systems and processes that predispose practitioners towards error. Nevertheless, what it means to ‘care’ and how this might carry threats to safety has recently been exemplified by events at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust in the UK. Here, there were consistently higher than average mortality rates and poor standards of care in which patients’ most basic needs were routinely overlooked; personal hygiene, nutrition and hydration were not maintained, and patients were treated without compassion or respect for their dignity.2 3 Describing a pervasive culture of indifference to suffering and tolerance of poor standards of care, the public inquiry explicitly aligned a culture of staff disregard for patients’ dignity with threats to patient safety and drew attention to the value of compassion, kindness and respect for dignity.3 The emphasis the ‘culture’ of healthcare work received as a result of events such as these further stimulated efforts to understand and, where necessary, change healthcare cultures. So although the scope of what is now considered to fall within the remit of ‘safety’ research has expanded to include concepts like culture, still things fall out of view. It has been suggested that the current emphasis of patient safety initiatives on ‘technical errors’ such as surgical mishaps and medication errors means that other harms are overlooked and that ‘emotional distress’ should be considered a legitimate harm on the grounds that it is ‘unwise to …

For a person to enter a Dutch hospice as resident, a clearly articulated deadline is needed: a life expectancy of three months or less. This paper argues that this institutional timeframe of a singular, clocktimed period of more or less linearly approaching death (the end of time), affords life to unfold in hospice as a relatively clockless multitude of temporal orderings enacted by staff and residents (the time of the end). Based on a period of ethnographic fieldwork in hospices and focusgroup interviews with hospice staff, I analyse how temporal orderings manifest and intersect in different ways. The quality of these intersections presence end-of-life normativities in ways that may be instructive when designing and reflecting on end-of-life care.

This essay analyzes the exhibition “Scienza Universale,” which was to be a central part of the 1942 world’s fair in Rome. Although in the end World War II kept the fair from happening, the plans for the exhibit were finished, and they allow for an in-depth analysis of the propagandistic uses of science in fascist Italy. The essay investigates what the regime sought to accomplish with a public display of science, why it chose to stress science’s universal character, and how various stakeholders’ motives played out in the exhibit design. Although fascism is not generally known for either its embrace of science or its internationalism, in this instance both played a major role in the way the state presented itself. “Universal Science,” as depicted in the exhibit, carried messages that were meant to promote a fascist conception of civilization and world order and to stake out Italy’s position vis-a-vis Nazi Germany in particular.

Clowns seem suspect when it comes to respect. The combination of clowning and people with dementia may seem especially suspicious. In this argument, I take potential concerns about clowning in dementia care as an opportunity to explore the meaning of a respectful approach of people with dementia. Our word 'respect' is derived from the Latin respicio, meaning 'looking back' or 'seeing again', as well as 'looking after' or 'having regard' for someone or something. I build upon this double meaning of respicio by examining how simultaneously we look to and after people with dementia. I do so empirically by studying how miMakkus clowns in their practice learn to look with new eyes to people and things around them. I call this clown's view and differentiate it from the predominant way of observing people in dementia care. I argue that respicio comes in two guises, each of which merges specific forms of looking to and looking after the other. By making conventional, solidified ways of seeing the other fluid again, clowns remind us of the value that comes with a veiled way of paying respect to people with dementia.

William James's reputation in the field of emotion research is based on his early psychological writings where he defines emotions as 'feelings of bodily changes'. In his later work, particularly in his study of mystic emotion (1902), James comes up with what looks like a completely different approach. Here his focus is on positive feelings of inspiration and joy, but also on downbeat moods like melancholy and depression. He examines how these feeling states give meaning to an individual's life. Theorists often speculate about a gap between James's early writings and his later work, and assume that the later James turned from an evolutionary-minded natural scientist into a metaphysical philosopher. In my paper, I follow Ratcliffe (2008) in his view that a sharply drawn line between the early and the late work is implausible and that James's later study of mysticism fits nicely with his early psychology. Drawing on James (1902), I show how in his later work, James develops a theory of embodied emotions that anticipates the role ascribed by twentieth century phenomenology to anxiety and other 'bad moods', as possibilities for philosophical reflection and self-understanding.

Incident reporting systems (IRSs) are used in many organisations as tools that promote safety by allowing to collectively learn from incidents. In this paper, we propose a social constructivist approach to learning from incidents, in which the focus is not purely on safety, but on the technology of incident reporting itself. We employ Wiebe Bijker’s work on the Social Construction of Technology to open up the analysis of a specific IRS in use at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center. For this purpose, we carried out 28 interviews with key local actors and collected documents and observation notes. Such social constructivist perspective provides detailed insight into the practices of reporting and the meanings of learning from incidents. Our research shows that various actors within the organisation frame the IRS differently. These framings each have their own implications for the vulnerability of the organisation.

Este artículo sostiene que la documentación proporciona un mejor servicio a la conservación de arte contemporáneo cuando no solo recopila y registra información sobre las obras, sino que también recoge los dilemas a los que los conservadores han tenido que enfrentarse al tomar decisiones sobre sus estrategias de conservación. La razón es que, en las últimas dos décadas, una práctica cada vez más reflexiva ha favorecido una situación en la que están emergiendo nuevos paradigmas éticos que sirven para diferentes tipos de trabajos artísticos y sus diferentes lógicas de perpetuación. El artículo propone tres paradigmas diferentes con sus correspondientes casos paradigmáticos, argumentando que solo un método de deliberación ética “caso-a-caso” (ética casuística) servirá para articular una serie de principios y directrices adecuados a los más recientes paradigmas. Para posibilitar esta deliberación, se hace necesario documentar los dilemas éticos en la conservación. Además, la mayoría de los casos resultarán bastante conflictivos, dado que muchas obras de arte consisten en la unión heterogénea de objetos, ideas y prácticas, con sus propias lógicas diferenciadas de perpetuación, mientras otras se mueven entre distintas lógicas, o pasan de una lógica a otra en el transcurso de sus biografías. Por tanto, la documentación de los dilemas continuará siendo necesaria para facilitar un acercamiento casuístico a la hora de tomar decisiones con responsabilidad y desarrollar un cuerpo de experiencia profesional.

Can STS offer a response to “alternative facts” without falling back into naive positivism? Can STS help to make science accountable to society and make it work—make it function in our democracies and let it produce scientific knowledge? In his valedictory lecture, Wiebe Bijker looks back upon three decades of STS research in general, and upon engaging STS with questions of democratization and development in particular. He starts from the question how to study technological cultures and ends with the question how to construct them. The argument moves from the social construction of technology to constructing socio-technical worlds. Finally, when trying to understand this construction work, the analysis zooms in on the constructing worlds: on the institutions in which this construction work takes place.