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The California Wild Garden opened in Exposition Park in Los Angeles in 1916. Planned by the English horticulturist Theodore Payne (1872–1963), it featured hundreds of Californian plants. Payne claimed scientific expertise as well as practical knowledge. In the next decade, he was also instrumental in the foundation of botanic gardens in Santa Barbara and Santa Ana, which focused on native plants and had both scientific and aesthetic aims. Earlier in his career, he had championed the distribution of millions of non-native eucalyptus trees throughout the state. This essay examines Payne's multiple roles, and the liminal space occupied by horticulturists between gardening and science in progressive-era California.

In Western Europe between 1500 and 1700 the human skeleton became an object: a scientific object, a natural object, an artistic object, an artisanal object, independent of its bodily origins yet retaining a troubling moral status. The act of making a skeleton created a scientific object that also had aesthetic value, with qualities of authenticity, accuracy, and whiteness. Beginning with Vesalius, many anatomists included instructions on how to make a skeleton in their anatomical texts, and many more taught their students how to do this. Skeletons became central to anatomical instruction, both for medicine and for art. By the end of the seventeenth century, skeletons increasingly were found in cabinets and collections, and their aesthetic qualities, particularly their whiteness, became critical. However, the emotional and moral impacts of making skeletons remained unspoken.

On the evidence of early modern European cookbooks, the wild birds deemed edible around 1600 included cranes, herons, swans, and cormorants. By 1750, none of these were considered palatable...

Lawrence Principe’s latest book on the history of chymistry, the early modern science that falls between alchemy and modern chemistry, comes with a pun in the title. The concept of transmutation is...

Sebastien Leclerc’s engraving “L’Academie des sciences et des beaux-arts” of 1698 depicted an ideal academy that joined science and art in a single set of endeavors. Art historian Maxime Pr...

Historians who work with materials in languages other than their own inevitably do quite a bit of translation in the course of their research and writing. Much of this consists of words, ph...

How did the widespread and lasting assumption of an analogy between animal and human bodies affect ideas about the mind-body relationship? In particular, how did seventeenth-century men of science justify their employment of animal brains to talk about human brains and minds? Galenic ideas of the structure of the brain, based on animals, gave way to a multiplicity of ideas about the relationship between the brain and the mind (or soul). The continued reliance on animal models would seem to conflict with a new emphasis on specifically human structures and behaviors. But at the same time anatomists and philosophers also looked anew at animal cognition. The work of Marin Cureau de la Chambre, Niels Stensen, and Thomas Willis reveals some of these new ideas and the tensions that resulted.

Animals, especially mammals, have played a critical role in the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 virus originated in animals, and the virus can jump back and forth between humans and animals. Moreover, animals have been central to the development of the various vaccines against the virus now employed around the world, continuing a long history. The interrelationships between animals and humans in both disease transmission and its prevention call for an interdisciplinary approach to medicine.

I am the first to admit that my career has not followed a conventional path. But in talking to my colleagues, I am not sure that there is a conventional path to an academic career. This retrospective is both a look at how the profession has changed over the forty years since I began graduate school in the late 1970s, and a reflection on my own trajectory within that profession. Historiographical references reflect my own views and are not meant to be comprehensive. I first discovered the history of science as an undergraduate history major at Connecticut College in the early 1970s. The course of physics for non-majors I took with David Fenton was based on Harvard Project Physics, which had been developed in the 1960s by two professors of science education, F. James Rutherford and Fletcher G. Watson, and the historian of science Gerald Holton. We actually wrote term papers for the class; mine was on the theory that Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory.

The Roman physician Galen wrote in his instruction manual On Anatomical Procedures: “As poles to tents and walls to houses, so are bones to living creatures.” In his short treatise On Bones for Beginners he added that bones were the “hardest and driest parts of the living body and, as one might say, the earthiest. . . . All else depends on or is attached to them.” Therefore knowledge of the skeleton must precede any other exploration of the body....

The metaphor of “the ghastly kitchen” of life science research, the places that, said the nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard, stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life,” is well known. In the seventeenth century, the kitchen, and particularly the scullery, was the site of the slaughter, butchery, and dismemberment by carving of a variety of animals. The tools and techniques employed in these activities overlapped considerably with those of animal and human dissection. Dissection often took place in residences and the kitchen was the most likely place for this activity. This challenges historians’ identification of the kitchen as an exclusively female realm. The preparation of food and medicines occurred in tandem with experimental natural philosophy, sharing tools as well as the sensory apparatus of cooking, including tasting and smelling.

To the public, the Coal Oil Point Reserve, north of Santa Barbara, is an example of a natural environment. It became part of the University of California Natural Reserve System in 1970 because of its supposed status as an untouched, nearly pristine environment, and restoration efforts since that time have endeavored to erase any remaining remnants of human disturbance. In fact, Coal Oil Point is a cultural landscape and a novel environment in which the human element has become invisible. Far from being untouched, Coal Oil Point has been a human landscape for thousands of years. Less than a century ago, it was the site of numerous botanic experiments by the pioneering ecologist Frederic E. Clements. Remnants of his plantings still remain, confusing and confounding restoration efforts. This chapter explores the “invisibility” of historic and scientific landscapes. The value of such landscapes lies in their heritage rather than in their pristine nature.

In the face of rapid environmental and cultural change, orthodox concepts in restoration ecology such as historical fidelity are being challenged. Here we re-examine the diverse roles played by historical knowledge in restoration, and argue that these roles remain vitally important. As such, historical knowledge will be critical in shaping restoration ecology in the future. Perhaps the most crucial role in shifting from the present version of restoration ecology (“v1.0”) to a newer formulation (“v2.0”) is the value of historical knowledge in guiding scientific interpretation, recognizing key ecological legacies, and influencing the choices available to practitioners of ecosystem intervention under conditions of open-ended and rapid change.