History of Science

Modern methodologies of economic and aesthetic judgment developed in tandem. Their histories are entwined, born out of the mercantile culture of the late medieval and early renaissance eras. The language of commerce’s intellectual apparatus–the language of economic evaluation and judgment—was first forged in the context of medieval and late Renaissance mercantile practice. Economic and ‘aesthetic’ knowledge were, in mercantile society, two sides of the same coin. The methods and processes of knowledge making that form the foundation for these judgments are inseparable from the body — in the late medieval and early renaissance periods, merchants and other agents of economic judgment believed that the foundations of these judgments were grounded in the body, in its sensations and experiences. Good judgment arose out of a combination of the general and the particular – that is, out of the generalized concepts that the embodied subject generates out of a combination of education and experience. The knowledge necessary to make successful judgments on the marketplace was formed out of both the experiences of the self and intersubjective negotiation and consensus. We have come to know that particular intellectual formation as the practice of connoisseurship. Connoisseurship provided a means of translating aesthetic judgments into action on the market, by pairing those judgments with judgments of value. Questions of price and value lie at the heart of any economic exchange whether the objects of exchange are turnips or paintings. Mercantile approaches to judgment and evaluation paired the aesthetic with the quantitative, and a skilled merchant knew never to lose hold on either. This way of knowing, evaluating, and appraising the world--what one might call mercantile connoisseurship--became the foundation of early modern artistic connoisseurship.Modern practices of artistic connoisseurship developed out of a broader mercantile culture of evaluation and judgment that emerged in late medieval Europe. Art history’s object-centered methodology shares a genealogy with other branches of knowledge founded on evidential paradigms. From medicine to economic analysis to art history, all of these forms of knowledge begin in the same place, in sensory encounters with material objects, and follow the same pathway, forging abstractions from particulars.

Magnificent Distances tells the story of the rise and fall of “capital science,” a period (1862-1920) in which scientists and intellectuals in Washington, D.C. consistently turned to the problems and opportunities of a modernizing capital city to make claims on the authority of science, authority within their disciplines, and, in many cases, the authority of the state. By bringing the scale of state science down to the streets and the everyday lives, concerns, and relationships of people in the city, this dissertation shows how scientists became active political actors within the capital city: architect-engineers controlled municipal improvements, astronomers became lobbyists, naturalists negotiated land development, social scientists pursued uplift through neighborhood reform and institution building, and chemists guarded the District’s public health in their efforts to achieve national regulation. The communities who built the postbellum scientific state in Washington and the scientific culture of the city saw these processes as simultaneously ones of city building, both culturally and physically. The story of capital science bridges the history of science, urban history, and the history of a “long” or “greater” Reconstruction. Magnificent Distances reexamines bureau scientists in this period as modernists whose notions of labor, progress, and civilization remained bound to the racial, gender, and class politics of the city. The liberal exchange and civic politics of many in capital science simultaneously assumed and perpetuated white control over the city, acquiescing to Washington’s disenfranchisement, the most glaringly illiberal fact about the capital city. Yet by situating this story in the city, rather than the halls of government agencies, capital science includes many who were perceived as outside science’s orbit, most notably D.C.’s burgeoning Black intellectual community. It is a story of place, where the cultural meanings—the federal, national, and model city—and relatively compact intellectual geography of the city produced engagement across intellectual communities and competing claims of authority over the capital’s design, political, and cultural futures. Capital science saw an intimate bond among science, capital, and nation. In forging a city in its own image, it would leave an indelible mark.

This dissertation examines the crucial role of biopolitics in shaping and sustaining Chinese socialism through pharmaceuticals. It demonstrates how the peasant-based Chinese Communist Party evolved into a modern industrial regime by developing socialist governmentalities intertwined with biological science, technology, and medicine during the global Cold War. Centering on the rationality of socialist governance, this dissertation presents an alternative narrative to capitalism-centric accounts in the historiographies of modern science and medicine. Instead of attributing intrinsic qualities to socialist science in opposition to capitalist science, it views science as a form of capital, managed diversely across different societies. In the 1950s, the communist state nationalized not only private industry and commerce but also scientific capital to control the vital technology of life——antibiotic drugs. This process involved technology transfers from other socialist countries and the management of Western-trained antibiotic experts. It resulted in a new generation of “ideologically correct scientists” and novel paradigms of knowledge creation and dissemination. It also fundamentally redefined China’s biotech topography. Chinese socialist science profoundly influenced the global biotechnological landscape. By tracing the dissemination of antibiotic technology during the Cold War, this research highlights a lesser-known biotechnology network spanning many regions in the socialist bloc and the developing world. The tension between self-reliance and collaboration within this network provides a framework for contemplating the realities of “really existing socialism.” Furthermore, this dissertation introduces an alternative framework for understanding the pharmaceutical industry’s relationship with society, emphasizing the role of non-profit pharmaceutical factories in a patent-free world. The establishment of socialist big pharma and the domestic supply of biomedical drugs laid the groundwork for the Barefoot Doctor Program initiated in 1968. The interactions between antibiotics and Chinese medicine transformed both medical systems and shaped Chinese perceptions of diseases and health. The experience with antibiotic drugs also had a lasting influence on the Chinese practice of drug evaluation and regulation. I characterize this set of transformations as “Therapeutic Modernity,” emerged in socialist China, following the “Hygienic Modernity” termed by historian Ruth Rogaski in the colonial period.

“Fighting for Capitalism’s Cutting Edge” argues that during the 1980s, amid concerns over waning competitiveness vis à vis Japan, there existed a real and viable alternative to the prevailing economic paradigms—Cold War Keynesianism, Reaganomics, and the emerging so-called neoliberal agenda. Central to this alternative was strategic federal investment in burgeoning sectors of the economy, intended to fortify the United States’ international standing in the impending technology-centric economic era. Although the Democrats were particularly influential in advocating such investments, Republicans also supported positive government investment in the name of competitiveness whenever the president’s approval numbers dwindled and his strategists felt it necessary to respond to business lobbyists advocating industrial policy. Within certain business lobbying organizations like the Council on Competitiveness, the appeal to maintain U.S. competitiveness bridged business and labor interests – and traditional and emergent industrial sectors – over the necessity of positive government investment. The focus on competitiveness during the 1980s catalyzed policy shifts that laid the groundwork for the economic developments of the 1990s and realigned the locus of economic power in the United States towards the “sunrise” champions of the often-invoked “New Economy.”

This dissertation examines mathematician Bernhard Riemann’s (1826-1866) creation of his 1854 habilitation lecture at the University of Göttingen in order to characterize scholarly labor and, by extension, mathematical labor. Riemann’s habilitation lecture lies at the intersection of two prominent transformation narratives: of German universities into “modern research universities” and of mathematics into “modern mathematics.” Riemann’s lecture, “On the Hypotheses Which Underlie Geometry,” is widely regarded as a foundational work in mathematics that later inspired modernist mathematicians. It is also an excellent exemplar of the broader genre of the habilitation lecture, which was a product of decisive university reforms.I provide a new account of scholarly labor in this pivotal moment by locating Riemann in the three academic spaces in which he developed his lecture: the library, the private residence, and the professor’s home. Each chapter focuses on one space; the dissertation as a whole provides an expansive picture of how young scholars conducted research at the University of Göttingen. I show that using each space required a certain kind of labor, which in turn shaped Riemann’s eventual habilitation lecture: organizing knowledge (the library), exercising moderation (Riemann’s residence), and conforming to academic social norms (professors’ homes). In forming his habilitation lecture, Riemann enacted each of these forms of labor with a corresponding epistemic tool: the notion (Begriff), the case (Fall), and generalization. By following Riemann’s creation of his habilitation lecture in these spaces, I provide an account of the function of these tools in academic research. Historians have considered the topics of this dissertation—Riemann’s habilitation lecture, the University of Göttingen, mathematics, Riemann himself—as exemplary in different ways, or even as exceptional. I scrutinize similar claims to exemplarity in Riemann’s habilitation lecture itself, and thereby historicize “particularist” and “generalist” narratives as a product of the nineteenth-century German university. A central difficulty of the habilitation lecture was to properly define the relationship between the general and the particular, not only in one’s research, but also in presenting oneself to the scholarly community.

According to most historians, the idea of extinction was born when the French anatomist Georges Cuvier reconstructed a variety of lost megafauna in Ossemens fossiles (1812). Contrary to this origin myth, this dissertation unearths a longer, more exacting genealogy of this crucial concept, thereby challenging the widely held assumption that awareness of extinction is unique to modern history. Drawing on literary, visual, and material evidence that spans the domains of science, theology, poetry, and art, this dissertation recovers how the natural history of “lost species”—French espèces perdues, German verlorene Arten—already emerged across Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It provides the first book-length study of how the lost world came into being several centuries before Victorian geologists turned dinosaurs into a global fascination. This dissertation unravels the story of how ammonites—creatures from the ancient marine world—came to widely symbolize the extinction of species. It begins in classical antiquity, when travelers and writers saw within many fossils the remains of former creatures. It progresses to Renaissance naturalists who began to debate ammonite shells as “lost species” as well as artisans who found in them proof of man-made extinction. It then moves on to the Royal Society of London, where natural philosophers turned these shells into memories of distant catastrophes, on to Enlightenment savants who turned them into the subject of belles-lettres as well as a science that pinpointed the layer beneath the earth at which they ceased to exist. The story ends with the “age of monsters,” when dinosaurs replaced the old shell-science with extinct beings previously only the stuff of fables. The key intervention of this dissertation is to provide a historical account that conceives extinction as a “problem of knowledge.” Although we now take the reality of extinction for granted, it was a natural fact that proved difficult to observe and almost impossible to verify. Yet the idea itself has been debated for nearly five centuries. By considering the historicity of this knowledge and its contentious circumstances, this dissertation rethinks the history of extinction in both chronology and method.

This dissertation examines the convergence of the struggle for civil rights led by Black Americans and the precipitous rise of government quantification in the twentieth-century United States. Focusing on litigation campaigns waged by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund against employment discrimination and the death penalty, it charts the trajectory of strategies to prove racial discrimination with statistics. It argues that technical standards and social scientific theories shaped legal ideas about fairness, and that the retrenchment of antidiscrimination law was as much a struggle over knowledge as politics, doctrine, or cultural memory. To make these claims, Justice in Numbers traces the “disparate impact” theory of discrimination from its emergence in the 1960s to its codification in the 1970s through the backlash against it in the 1980s. At the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, concerns about racial statistics divided activists and administrators who embraced data to hone litigation as a weapon against structural inequality. Lawyers collaborated with social scientists to mount a constitutional challenge to the death penalty rooted in racial disparities research. Their efforts turned debates on capital punishment into proxy battles over criminal justice expertise amid a rising tide of law-and-order politics. Meanwhile, statistics secured key victories in employment lawsuits. But what social science giveth, it taketh away, as disciplinary dissensus threatened to undermine disparate impact theory. By the Reagan presidency, opponents of civil rights no longer rejected quantification. Rather, they excelled at it, moving law’s benchmark for discrimination even further from the structural and historical concerns that inspired the adoption of statistics in the first place. To tell the crucial story of how quantification shaped legal strategy and colorblind politics, Justice in Numbers uses methods from the history of science and Black studies to analyze milestone cases, providing a new perspective on computing, race, and social power in modern America. Past efforts to mobilize computational modeling and scientific anti-racism in the courtroom have shored up pernicious standards that occlude the historical processes of racism. Scholars confronting the challenges presented by AI and machine learning to civil rights today should take heed of this history, lest it be repeated.

Beginning in the late 1950s the World Health Organization began the momentous task of creating international standards for the classification of mental disorders. By sharpening and standardizing the language of psychiatry, the organization intended to transform psychiatry into a branch of public health amenable to epidemiological representation. In this dissertation I track key developments in the formation of psychiatric epidemiology inside and around the WHO. Focusing primarily on the three decades immediately following the Second World War, I argue that psychiatric epidemiology arose on the back of the postwar welfare state’s reform of the collection of hospital statistics. This reform and the sheer quantity of data it soon provided researchers catalyzed the development of an internationally orientated approach to the classification of mental disorders. It soon drew in biostatisticians with wholly different concerns about the uniform quality of their data. Tracking the implications these developments had for the psychiatric discipline, I argue that it was fundamentally transformed by the WHO’s long-term projects in the epidemiology of mental disorders. In contrast to the emphasis other historians have placed on developments in the United States, I focus on events taking place within the international context of the WHO that drove psychiatry in the postwar era to become increasingly “descriptive” in its outlook.

Saccharin, the oldest artificial sweetener still commonly used today, has been at the center of controversy for most of its commercial life. Since the late nineteenth century, there has been a protracted debate over whether it represents a marvel of modern science or the epitome of its dangers. Is it a damaging and deceptive substitute for sugar or a beneficial replacement that can help enhance health? Efforts to resolve the saccharin debate reveal the complex web of negotiations around its identity between various forms of scientific expertise, political authority, industry interests, and consumers. This dissertation argues a central issue at the core of these debates was whether to categorize saccharin as a food or drug, a previously overlooked tension in its identity. Using a combination of scientific journals, popular magazines and newspapers, advertisements, medical and dietary advice manuals, government documents, and industry- related archival sources, this dissertation shows how efforts to resolve the saccharin debate repeatedly resulted in compromise and ambiguity. The saccharin controversy spans several important episodes in the creation of the federal regulatory system for consumer protection. The first two chapters trace saccharin’s arc from the Progressive era efforts to address the problem of food and drug adulteration through the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 to the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. The third and fourth chapters focus on saccharin in the second half of the twentieth century when its popularity exploded as a dieting product. The climactic moment in saccharin’s history was the FDA’s deeply controversial attempt to ban it in 1977, which was ultimately blocked by Congress after an unprecedented storm of consumer protest. Together these episodes show that debates about saccharin were never just about saccharin, but much broader, fundamental concerns for danger and deception in the marketplace for food and drugs, including the contentious issue of the appropriate role of government and experts in serving as gatekeepers to that market.

“Science at the Nineteenth-Century École des Beaux-Arts” investigates the knowledge and technical skills that artists affiliated with the school of the French Academy used to make realistic drawings and paintings. By examining artists’ treatises, manuals, and memoirs, this dissertation finds concrete links between the history of science and the history of Academic art. Chapter 1 traces artists’ understanding of three optical illusions -- simultaneous contrast, irradiation, and size constancy -- before and after scientists wrote about these phenomena. This chapter shows how artists developed studio techniques to see the illusions rather than be fooled by them. It discusses why, in some cases, artists and scientists recommended exaggerating the illusions on the canvas, while in others, they recommended discounting them. Chapter 2 investigates how the sine law of photometry, which determines the apparent brightness of a point given the angle of incident light, united fine arts draftsmanship and the technical drawing of the École Polytechnique in the early nineteenth century. It explains how the two groups shared a common goal of precisely rendering a three-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface using light and shade. Chapter 3 discusses artists’ knowledge about color at the time Albert Henry Munsell, who invented one of the first widely-accepted scientific color systems, trained in the ateliers of Paris. It argues that several novel features of the Munsell Color System were apparent in artists’ writings. Chapters 4 and 5 describe what comprised the science of “artistic anatomy,” how it developed over the course of the century by incorporating information from a variety of other sciences, and how artistic anatomists ultimately promoted their work as its own discipline that would be useful to anthropologists, physicians, and surgeons. These chapters also document how artists used their anatomical knowledge in practice. Throughout, the dissertation argues that artists learned about the sciences of perception, light, and anatomy to overcome the shortcomings of their materials, since pigments cannot reach the same brightness as lights, and a flat canvas cannot represent the living, moving model. It also suggests several ways in which artists may have influenced contemporary sciences in return.

“The Other Chemists’ War” positions World War II as a transformative moment in the history of chemical weapons, which fundamentally transformed these poisonous technologies in terms of material and meaning, despite its persistent reputation as a case of chemical weapons “non-use.” Taking a wide view of chemical weapons “use,” this dissertation examines research and development programs alongside strategies for maintaining secrecy. Its two case studies are the G-series nerve agents (tabun, sarin, and soman), developed in Nazi Germany between 1936–1944, and the auxinic herbicides, synthesized in the United States and the United Kingdom in the early 1940s and later refashioned into Agent Orange. Each of these novel agents was subject to an imperfect mosaic of information controls, which impacted their military history — that is, their use versus non-use on 20th century battlefields. In the case of the nerve agents, Allied practices of information control elevated Nazi fears of retaliation and contributed to chemical weapons restraint. In the case of the auxinic herbicides, uneven secrecy regimes had the opposite effect. By muddling scientific priority claims, these mutable information controls paved the way for large-scale production of herbicides by any industrial firm, with consequences for the emerging military-industrial complex and defoliation programs of the Cold War era.By highlighting acts of chemical prediction and intuition, this dissertation demonstrates that the “non-use” of poison gas in the European theater rested in part on the contingencies of chemical information flow. In turn, this circumscribed “non-use” shaped the stories that contemporaries told themselves about chemical and other weapons of mass destruction. In the war’s aftermath, journalists, politicians, and military personnel increasingly spoke of poison gas as a weapon of power imbalance, most useful in asymmetric conflicts between industrialized nations and those who lacked the means of retaliation. Policymakers on both sides of the iron curtain also framed chemical weapons “non-use” as an instructive model for the atomic age.

In early modern Europe, the discipline of natural history was in flux. New plants, newanimals, new texts, and new experiences challenged how Europeans understood the natural world. Beastly Encounters: Animals in Early Modern Europe explores how non- European animals provoked a reorientation in how Europeans studied natural history in the early modern period. It begins with the indigenous American animals encountered by early Spanish travelers to the Americas, and how they were understood as one of the many novelties coming from Spain’s new conquests in the region. Then, it looks at how these animals were included in localized natural histories and travel books written not only by Spaniards, but also by other European authors who also had an interest not only in describing the often striking and fantastical creatures of the American continent, but also in trying to fit what were once seen as monsters, outside of the normal order of creation, into European categories that often had no place for them. The dissertation then turns to the issue of classification and the northern European authors of natural histories who tried to systematically include American animals into encyclopedic treatises of natural history that described the world in its entirety. These were often eclectic amalgamations of borrowing from ancient works of natural history, medieval bestiaries, and contemporaneous travel books that stressed empiricism and eyewitness accounts. Finally, the dissertation turns to a new program of systematic anatomies of exotic animals performed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries which stimulated the development and application of experimental and empirical methods in natural history. The dissertation concludes by showing that with this focus on the dissection of animal bodies, natural history and natural philosophy began to merge as the traditional interests of the former combined with the newly developing tools and methods of the latter. Beastly Encounters ultimately argues that the strategies developed in the sixteenth century for dealing with new animals from the American continent were coupled with the strategies developed in scientific societies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to create a new way of reading the book of nature.

This dissertation asks how physiologists and biochemists turned metabolism into a problem of molecular energy transformations over the course of the twentieth century. It examines the work of a transatlantic set of researchers who sought to comprehend how animal cells garner energy from ingested nutrient sources to power vital molecular activities. The analysis focuses especially on how these investigators mobilized metaphors to gain insight into the developing field of energy metabolism (later “bioenergetics”). Each chapter tracks the emergence and rise of a specific metaphor in biological energy studies and assesses its practical research implications. The Introduction brings into view the metaphor of the metabolic “cycle,” arguing that such representations persisted across the century. Chapter 1 explores the ways in which muscle researchers like Otto Meyerhof and A.V. Hill constructed the “muscle machine” as their target in investigations of muscle contraction energetics. Chapter 2 scrutinizes the gendered dynamics of the marital scientific research collaboration between Gerty and Carl Cori, through which they came to conceptualize animal sugar metabolism as a “balance sheet.” Chapter 3 looks critically at the advent of the metabolic “pathway” in the work of the Coris, Meyerhof, Hans A. Krebs, and others, arguing that “pathway” construction efforts became emblematic of an energetic approach to “intermediary metabolism.” Chapter 4 investigates the circumstances behind the articulation of the notion of the “energy-rich” phosphate “bond,” described by Fritz A. Lipmann and Herman M. Kalckar in two review articles published independently in 1941. Chapter 5 offers an account of how the organelles named mitochondria acquired their cellular “power plants” reputation through an examination of the investigative programs of David E. Green and Albert L. Lehninger, both of whom bridged structural and functional concerns in their considerations of oxidative phosphorylation. Finally, the Conclusion documents how biochemists came to envision adenosine triphosphate (ATP), a molecule containing two “energy-rich” phosphate bonds, as the cell’s “universal energy currency.” Ultimately, the dissertation argues that by the late twentieth century, biological energy researchers had thoroughly transformed metabolism into a kind of cyclical energetic “economy,” in which biochemical reactions requiring energy were “paid for” by those that released energy.

“Slow Tampering” chronicles the history of solitary confinement from the medieval inquisitor who first experimented with its potential to the collapse of the nineteenth-century penitentiary movement, which had vested such hopes in solitude as an instrument of reformation. It is the history of a perverse optimism—the conviction, inherited from Christian theology, that souls can change and be changed, by force if necessary—and of a faith in solitude as the catalyst of coerced redemption. The prison cell is the weaponization of the monastic cell, the space of penitential rebirth, whose ambitions have colored the subsequent history of punishment. “Slow Tampering” asks how violence can be an expression of religious conviction and a tool of knowledge-making, and how pious intentions inspire unspeakable cruelty. The dissertation analyzes solitary confinement as a kind of experiment, existing in the tension between projects of reform and the work of punishment. Precisely because the practice is forever reinventing itself, solitary confinement has survived and thrived across millennia, a staying power that can be investigated only with an equally broad historical perspective. The dissertation finds solitary confinement in medieval dungeons and Baroque reformatories, in penitentiaries and plantations, across four continents, a ubiquitous form of violence within carcerality. “Slow Tampering,” in offering such a panorama, argues for attending to continuity rather than rupture in the history of the prison, as well as countering the modernist, secular slants of carceral studies. The project establishes the sophistication and power of premodern carceral regimes, whose ideologies and practices decisively shaped modern penal structures. The dissertation is itself a kind of experiment, grappling with the historiographical challenge of historicizing human experience, particularly so extreme an experience as solitary confinement. The project rests on the epistemic authority of survivors, who possess insights into the nature of solitary confinement unattainable by the historian.

The dissertation examines the roles of the desire for knowledge and amateur intellectuals in thechanging landscape of intellectual life in the twentieth century. It centers on the Geistkreis, an interdisciplinary Kreis [intellectual circle] that convened between 1921 and 1938 in Vienna. The dissertation argues that the Geistkreis should be interpreted as a product of a desire for knowledge—a force that explains the humanistic disciplines' persistence and appeal. The first chapter tells the story of the Geistkreis in Vienna. It argues that the Geistkreis, for many different reasons, did not fit well with the model of the Kreis as it was practiced in interwar Vienna. The chapter analyzes the various features that made the Geistkreis unique. Chapters two, three, and four focus on the Geistkreis’s origin story and explore the relationship between the main protagonists and their teacher, Othmar Spann. These chapters present the Geistkreis as a response to the reigning tradition in the Germanophone intellectual world, the “mandarin” tradition. Chapter five follows the protagonists to the United States, where they found shelter after the annexation of Austria to Germany. This chapter shows how the different members used the Kreis as an idea and a model in their dealings with the American intellectual community. The Geistkreis, I argue, should be understood as a fantasy about intellectual life that does not conform with the overarching trends of professionalization and disciplinarization. These trends are central to the historical and sociological study of science and intellectual life. Therefore, new tools are required to analyze the Geistkreis and the social and cultural phenomenon it stands for. In the dissertation, in two excursuses, I am beginning to develop two of them: the perspective of the desire for knowledge and the analysis of origin stories. Not only the Geistkreis members were nostalgic about it. It moves everyone who is engaged with humanistic knowledge, who sees in its model the pure core of our practices and traditions. This dissertation explores the rise and fall of the form-of-life that made it possible.

“The Lives of the Mind” offers a historical account of the mind-body relationship across the sciences of nineteenth-century Germanophone Europe. It centers on the lives of two figures, the physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–1887) and the physician Josef Breuer (1842–1925), and their major scientific contributions: Fechner’s psychophysics, an “exact science of the relations between body and soul,” and Breuer’s “talking cure,” a method for removing hysterical symptoms and attendant explanatory theory of their psychogenesis. The dissertation approaches the mind-body relation as subject and object of their lives; they pursued this ineffable relationship in adjoined contexts, vocational and personal, rendering it graspable in the idiom of each: scientific concepts in the vocational and everyday experiences in the personal. For Fechner, these were the threshold and taking a walk, and for Breuer, balance and having a conversation. Part I deals with Fechner and psychophysics. Chapter 2 analyzes how the concept of the threshold was the keystone for the new science, leading to its famous logarithmic relation of stimulus and sensation and a new view of God and the universe. Chapter 3 turns to his everyday walks, thickly describing three modes of walking as they stepped through the major conjunctures of psychophysics. Part II centers on Breuer’s encounter with Bertha Pappenheim, the patient later known as Anna O. who coined the “talking cure.” Chapter 4 considers the type of talk—centered on the self—common to duos such as Pappenheim and Breuer, as it grew from and struggled against Viennese conversational culture. Chapter 5 connects the psychical balance reached via the “talking cure” to Breuer’s physiological investigations of the inner ear and the sense of balance, framed by the personal balance between patient and physician. Against the backdrop of the rising Germanophone research university and professionalizing laboratory science, my account meets the unending complexity of both the mind-body relation and the daily demands of the scientific life. In so doing, I show exactly how the life of the mind really worked: in the minute construction and transit of scientific concepts and in the mundane but variegated repetition of daily experiences.

This dissertation is a history of how microbial culture techniques reframed nature’s order in chemical terms. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, scientific workers developed techniques to study diseases and control fermentations, making chemical activities of microorganisms appreciable to human observers. Microbiologists across Western Europe and North America were fascinated by these transformations of matter and the implications they had for problems of agricultural, industrial, medical, and scientific interest. An exchange of cultures, substrates, data, and concepts ushered in novel relations between humans and microorganisms, including, most spectacularly, the use of microorganisms as models of entities and processes believed ubiquitous in living things. In its depiction of a transnational cohort of researchers and the organisms they cultured, the dissertation covers a period beginning in the late nineteenth century, as techniques of “enrichment” and “pure” cultures were adopted by growing numbers of microbiologists. Tracing uses of these techniques through the mid-twentieth century, the dissertation illustrates how chemical knowledge of microbial nutrition and metabolism sparked a proliferation of conceptions of nature’s order.

Chapter 1 looks at members of the “Delft School” of microbiology, who adopted cultures as instruments of chemical analysis and attempted to reform microbial taxonomy along chemical lines. Chapter 2 focuses on the work of Ernst Georg Pringsheim in isolating and maintaining a collection of pure algal cultures used to tease apart biological associations in muddy environs. Chapter 3 follows protozoologists André Lwoff and Marguerite Lwoff as they studied the nutritional needs of blood parasites, theorizing the evolutionary origins of parasitism. Chapter 4 turns to Edward Lawrie Tatum’s efforts to identify “growth factors” that microbes required, which were subsequently repurposed to isolate “biochemical mutants.” A concluding epigraph foregrounds the multiplicity of nature’s chemical orders, while exploring consequences that uses of culture techniques have had for biologists’ conceptions of life.

These case studies show how microbial cultures made chemical orders of nature legible by replacing ecological niches with conditions of human design. Such work helped substantiate ontological categories that remain central to how life is defined and understood, even as biologists have frequently noted limitations of their ordering schemata.

This dissertation is a history of how logic became a mathematical science. Between the mid nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War II, scholars across Europe and North America replaced the venerable prose-based logic of Aristotle with a new and thoroughly mathematical enterprise. I approach this transformation on the level of practices, tracking how writers developed new symbolic systems for representing logic on paper—systems that eventually became not just tools but objects of scientific inquiry. Each new notation entailed a way of interacting with marks on paper, a manner of training students, and a vision for why people might need a science of logic.

I trace the development of writing practices during logic’s mathematical re-making by focusing on five major notations. In each case I show how the most abstract of sciences was rooted in local milieus around its transnational network of practitioners, entangled with their commitments from religious piety to nationalism and anti-Semitism. Chapter 1 explores the theologically-inflected calculus of English schoolmaster and self-taught mathematician George Boole. Chapter 2 considers the sprawling two-dimensional diagrams of German mathematician Gottlob Frege. Chapter 3 turns to American philosopher Charles Peirce and his students at Johns Hopkins University who, rather than sharing one notation, took individual variation as productive terrain to explore. Chapter 4 focuses on the internationalist symbolism of Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano and the ends it served—quite different from his own—in the hands of English philosophers Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and later Susan Stebbing. Chapter 5 follows the concise unpunctuated strings of Polish logician Jan Łukasiewicz and his Warsaw School, showing how a notation shaped a local line of inquiry and became a symbol of national particularity.

Ultimately, students trained in this space of notational possibilities were socialized to accept a pluralism of inscriptive practices, disciplined by the cacophony of existing literature to see any given symbolic system as contingent. As the science of logic became mathematical, the diversity of writing practices through which that transformation took place made it a discipline that not only employed symbolic systems but took them as its fundamental concern.

“STRANGE BEAUTY” uses a material culture approach to untangle the botanical dualities that, from the late-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, produced a constructed image of East Indian rainforests, obscuring the oftentimes violent racialized, gendered, and sexualized work contained therein. The plants written into scientific and aesthetic descriptions of “tropical nature,” I argue, constructed a view of rainforests as extractable, collectible storehouses caught somewhere between fecundity and loss, between beauty and decay. I focus on four plants transformed from curious objects in the field to herbarium specimens in Britain and Europe bound up in debates over evolution and “normalcy” while speaking to the developing ideals and disillusionments of tropical nature. These objects confused reproductive boundaries, embodying the possibilities and perceived environmental dangers while challenging typical labor practices producing a collectible, useful, and containable nature.

Chapter One follows the most miniscule, mundane, of plants: Moss. Paradoxically figured as both “pure” in its seemingly invisible self-reproduction and salacious in its place in pornography, moss functioned as a preservative agent for more “valuable” plants. Simultaneously, botanists interested in moss on its own terms transformed this packing material into an object of microscopic inquiry. Next, I follow an orchid illustrated by a prolific female artist. Explicitly sexualized in their depictions, orchids challenged aesthetic representations, transforming the technical process of botanical illustration while contributing to a false construction of the tropics inevitably leading to affective dissonances among naturalists. Here, theories of color and artistic practice become central to the politics of botanical preservation and display. Chapter Three traces a carnivorous pitcher plant collected by a liminal figure working for the East India Company. The pitcher plant came to crystallize colonial fears of environmental pushback—the phallic, carnivorous plant challenged theories of order while provoking questions about colonial consumption. I end with the largest and rarest plant in the world—the corpse flower. That a flower could actively mimic animal behavior to attract pollinators upended the chain of floral being. Resistant to all forms of collection, preservation, and display, the corpse flower proved to be the ultimate form of tropical nature’s resistance to human intervention and control.

This dissertation explores epistemic, social, and cultural dimensions of the use of audiovisual technologies in infant psychology and psychiatry in the USA and Western Europe from the mid-twentieth century to the present. It argues that the successive introduction of cinematography, video, computational assessment methods, and digital interfaces in research and clinical practice has contributed to a fundamental change in the scientific understanding and medical treatment of young children: The focus in pediatrics, developmental psychology, and infant psychiatry has shifted from the biological and psychological characteristics of the individual infant to the temporal dynamics of infant-caregiver interaction. Observational technologies have played a pivotal role in making these dynamics analyzable for researchers, visible for practitioners, and accessible for therapists. They have made possible the rise of infant mental health as a distinct field of medical expertise and are constitutive of its observational, diagnostic, and therapeutic practices.

Chapter One examines how, in the USA in the post-World-War-II period, psychoanalytic practitioners used ethnographic and documentary film to draw public and professional attention to the emotional life of infants, making infancy a site for observational research and mental health intervention. Chapter Two looks at the revival of cinematographic microanalysis in infant research in the 1960s and 70s, exploring how it contributed to the localization of pathology in infancy on an interactional level. Chapter Three argues that the introduction of video technology into research and clinical practice in the 1970s and 80s enabled infant mental health to consolidate as a field. Chapter Four explores how, in the 1990s and 2000s, digital and computational technologies contributed to the international spread and domestication of the interactive vision of infancy.

The study draws on a rich array of archival and primary source material, including research films and videos, personal manuscripts and correspondences, scientific and medical publications, parenting advice literature, architectural layouts, oral history interviews, and participant observations. Through its focus on the role of audiovisual technologies in infant psychology and psychiatry, it contributes to the history of science and medicine, while also speaking to scholarship in film and media studies and the history of childhood.