Center for the History of Medicine

• 2003 Lecture Series: Reading Race in Medicine
• 2004 Workshop: Medicine in War
• 2007 Workshop: Disease, Experiment, and Mechanism
• 2008 Workshop: Between Anatomy and Therapy: Chymical Analysis and 17th-Century Medicine
• 2009 Workshop: The Representation of Animals in the Early Modern Period
• 2009 Workshop: Accounting for Methods: The Nature and Roles of "Methods Talk" in the Life Sciences

2009 Workshops

The Representation of Animals in the Early Modern Period
Saturday March 7
Goodbody Hall 107

• 9:30 – 10:40
  SACHIKO KUSUKAWA, University of Cambridge
  The Source of Images of Gessner's Historia Animalium in the 16th Century
  Abstract: This paper discusses the sources and functions of images in Conrad Gessner's Historia animalium. The images were frequently copied from manuscripts, prints, and drawings sent by his correspondents or reconstructed from dried specimens, rather than all 'taken from the life'. Gessner had to grapple with the hetereogeneity of his sources in order to establish the credibility and authority of his images.
• 10:50 – 12:00
  KARIN EKHOLM, Indiana University, Bloomington
  Fabricius, Harvey and the Representation of Animal Generation
  Abstract: Fabricius of Aquapendente's two texts on animal generation are exquisitely illustrated: De formatu foetu (1604) includes thirty-three engravings of animal and human fetuses, placentas, and uteruses. De formatione ovi et pulli (1621) is accompanied by the earliest plates of the day-to-day development of chicks. In addition to the published plates, Fabricius left 167 colored and mostly life-size anatomical paintings to the Venetian state library. A third of these plates are devoted to parts of animals. In contrast, Harvey purposely omits illustrations from De generatione animalium (1651) and expresses ambivalence about their value in anatomy. He does, however, make use of his teacher's plates by referring to specific illustrations that correspond to his own verbal accounts. In 1674 portions of Harvey's work were published, accompanied by illustrations provided by the Dutch physician William Langly. I compare these engravings, painting, and verbal accounts, considering what each format reveals and also the respective limitations that led anatomists to provide supplements in different formats.
• Lunch for participants
• 2:00 – 3:10
  SARAH COHEN, SUNY Albany
  Searching the Animal Psyche with Charles Le Brun
  Abstract: The French painter Charles Le Brun, best known today for his dual roles as Director of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture and First Painter to Louis XIV, was also a prolific graphic artist whose drawings far exceeded the constraints of official commissions and pedagogy. One large group of his drawings has fascinated and perplexed viewers from the 1690s through the present day: repeated studies of the heads of animals both domestic and wild, as well as human heads manipulated to look like nonhuman animals. The visual evidence suggests that Le Brun was seeking to establish some kind of connections between different species of animals and between various animals and the humans who physically resemble them; often Le Brun juxtaposed like with like on a single sheet, using lines and grids to formalize visual and structural relations. But what was the purpose of this comparative project? What was Le Brun seeking to establish or record? He was almost certainly inspired by the French translation in 1655/65 of Giovanni Battista della Porta’s De Humana physiognomia (1586), in which the Neapolitan scholar updated and expanded a classical theory of human character founded upon visible correlations between humans and animals. Beginning with Le Brun’s first two interpreters, his contemporaries Henri Testelin and Claude Nivelon, scholars have generally assumed that Le Brun was likewise seeking to define human character (especially negative character) by associating human with animal, but it is not at all clear from the drawings themselves that Le Brun had a clear theory in mind that he was seeking to "prove." Rather, the intensely, even obsessively, worked head studies suggest an effort to learn who or what animals are, and what we can possibly make of the empirical evidence that humans themselves are animals.
• 3:20 – 4:30
  ANITA GUERRINI, Oregon State University, Corvallis
  The Illustrations for the Paris Academy's Histoire des animaux
  Abstract: Soon after the foundation of the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1666, it began a project of dissecting the animals that died at Louis XIV’s menageries at Versailles and Vincennes. The results of this work were published, first as pamphlets beginning in 1667, and then in a lavishly produced elephant folio volume, the Mémoires pour servir à l’ histoire naturelle des animaux which appeared in 1671 and in an augmented edition five years later. The most striking aspect of these volumes was the full-page engravings, produced by such notable Parisian artists and engravers as Abraham Bosse and Sébastien LeClerc. The accounts for the books’ production are among the inventories of Louis’s works of art rather than among the Academy’s accounts, and the illustrations have as much to do with designs for tapestries as they do with anatomical illustration. Was the Histoire des animaux primarily a work of art or, as Claude Perrault strenuously claimed in his preface, a work of natural philosophy, and are these roles necessarily contradictory?
• Tea break
• 5:00 – 6:10
  NICO BERTOLONI MELI, Indiana University, Bloomington
  The Representation of Insects in the 17th Century: A Comparative Approach
  Abstract: Insects posed considerable problems to naturalists and anatomists because of their diminutive size and texture. Not only was their investigation exceedingly challenging, but also the representation of their body parts posed new problems in that readers had to be shown organs they could not easily relate to anything they were familiar with. In this paper I rely on a comparative approach highlighting the choices made in the investigation and especially the representation of insects in a few especially significant cases from Francesco Stelluti to Jan Swammerdam.

Accounting for Methods:
The Nature and Roles of "Methods Talk" in the Life Sciences
Saturday March 28
Goodbody Hall 107

There is a mismatch between what researchers do in the lab and what they state they did when they communicate their findings in their research reports. Scientific papers and articles rarely contain detailed accounts of the nitty-gritty of experimental practice, of the methods applied, of failed trials, serendipity, and surprises. Instead, the prototypical paper presents the experimental results obtained, marshals evidence, and discusses implications. Research processes are communicated - if at all - in highly schematic "methods sections". For several decades, historians, sociologists, and, occasionally, philosophers of science have therefore declared that to understand the nature of scientific research, we need to go beyond the published research reports and investigate scientists' activities at the bench or in the field, study their lab notebooks, examine extant historical instruments, replicate past experiments, and so on.

This workshop re-directs attention to "methods talk" (broadly construed): the accounts of experimental procedures scientists give to their peers. The guiding assumption is that recent developments in the life sciences such as increased attention to ethical standards of conduct, incidents of fraud, areas of extreme specialization, and "big science" projects have made accounts of experimental methods and procedures much more relevant and indeed much more precarious than ever before. The contributions discuss questions including: How do the forms and functions of research reports change over time and across different scientific fields? What constraints do professional conventions, publication guidelines, institutional and organizational factors place on "methods talk", and what are the implications of these constrains for experimental practice? What roles does "methods talk" play in scientific justification in different argumentative contexts?

• 9:30–10:00 JUTTA SCHICKORE (IU Bloomington)
  Welcome and Introduction: Accounting for Methods
• Session 1: The Changing Forms of "Methods Talk"
• 10:00–10:50 EVAN RAGLAND (IU Bloomington)
  Experimental Reports, Controversy, and Genres: A Preliminary Investigation of Experimental Reporting in Dutch Medical Anatomy and Chymistry in the Mid-17th Century
  Abstract: In this talk I will sketch the beginnings of a study of the forms and genres of experimental reporting in and around the Leiden medical school in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Drawing from reports in theses, published treatises, systematic medical works, and society reports, this project will identify the main roles experimental reports played in providing proof or disconfirmation for hypotheses, especially in theoretical controversies. These preliminary studies indicate that replication and event-experiments played a greater and earlier role in these areas and places of experimentation than influential studies of seventeenth-century experimentation suggest.
• 10:50–11:40 HANNAH LANDECKER (UCLA)
  The Medium is the Method: The History of Nutritional Media in Cell and Embryo Culture
  The paper will look at the decades of attempts to create standardized and/or synthetic media for culturing plant and animal cells and mammalian embryos between approximately 1940 and 1970. The creation of media for culturing cells and embryo was on the one hand banal and taxing, in that astronomical numbers of combinations of ingredients could potentially be tested for their different effects on cell growth, survival and differentiation. For this reason, contributions in the field of nutrient media were often disregarded, unpublished, or looked down upon because they were "merely" empirical findings. Often these findings simply became packaged as commercially available solutions, to which many scientists gave no further thought. However, exploring nutrient media was also a profoundly conceptual and philosophical venture, speaking to the difference between in vitro and vivo, the basic conditions of life, the shaping of biology by environment, the definition of a nutrient versus a growth factor, and the definition of "essential"; these recipes contributed as much to the shape of cell and embryo culture as more recognizably experimental or theoretical work.
• 11:40–12:00 Coffee break
• 12:00–12:50
  CHRISTOPHER KELTY (UCLA)
  "This Is Not a Talk": Model Organism Newsletters, Cooperation and Community in Genetics and Developmental Biology
  Abstract: This project explores various forms of "grey literature" in science, especially that which is used to constitute communities, share resources and ideas, or enforce norms. In particular I look at the case of model organism newsletters (such as the Drosophila Information Service or the Maize Genetics Cooperation Newsletter) in order to understand how the dynamics of cooperation are created, enforced and transformed over the course of decades. The project address questions about the role of model organisms in constituting research projects, but it also addresses some of the concerns amid "open science" and the problems of intellectual property, materials transfer agreements, and data replicabilty and re-usability.
• 12:50–14:30 Lunch for participants
• Session 2: 'Methods talk' and scientific justification
• 14:30–15:20
  MELINDA FAGAN (Rice University, Texas)
  'Methods Talk' and Social Epistemology of Experiment
  Abstract: The paper discusses the implications for the discrepancy between 'methods talk' and what is actually done in the labs for scientific justification. The basic idea I'd like to try out is that the issue of justification should be examined within a multi-level framework of social organization of science: different projects/disciplines display different patterns of social epistemic organization, and those influence the ways experimental methods are communicated. One important distinction is between collaborative interactions (combining different techniques and methods into a line of inquiry) and competitive interactions (among groups who share methods and epistemic aims, but are competing rather than directly collaborating on an experimental approach). Both sorts of interaction will tend (I would suggest) to increase the discrepancy, but for quite different reasons. The relation between these interactions and scientific justification is complex and variable across cases.
• 15:20–16:10
  KEN PIMPLE (IU Bloomington)
  Reflections on Methods Talk and Research Ethics
  Abstract: I will consider a variety of ways in which methods talk and methods sections of scientific papers are implicated in research ethics. What does honesty demand of a methods section? What does the collective project of the advancement of science demand of a research paper? How well does methods talk serve the history of science?
• 16:10-16:30 Coffee break
• 16:30–17:20
  CHRIS HAUFE (Virginia Polytechnic Institute)
  On the Plurality of Scientific Practices Abstract: Presentation of a collaborative project currently pursued at Virginia Tech, Columbia, SC, and Exeter, UK. The project examines whether funding agencies put too much emphasis on hypothesis-driven work (as opposed to more "exploratory" research methodologies).
• 17:20–18:00 Concluding Discussion