Whereas eugenics aspired to redeem the human species by forcing it to face the realities of its biological nature, Zionism aspired to redeem the Jewish people by forcing it to face the realities of its biological existence. The Zionists claimed that Jews maintained their ancient distinct “racial” identity, and that their regrouping as a nation in their homeland would have profound eugenic consequences, primarily halting the degeneration they fell prey to because of the conditions imposed on them in the past. Some Zionists believed in a Lamarckian driven eugenics that expected the “normalization” of Jewish life styles to change their constitution. Others believed that transforming conditions would shift selective pressures exerted on the Jewish gene pool.

Many of the epistemological issues that occupied natural philosophers of the seventeenth century were expressed visually in title-page engravings. One of those issues concerned the relative status to be accorded to evidence of the senses, as compared to knowledge gained by faith or reason. In title-page illustrations, the various arguments were often waged by a series of light metaphors: the Light of Reason, the Light of Nature, and the Lights of Sense, Scripture, and Grace. When such illustrations are examined with the authors' theological views in mind, it becomes apparent that in the first half of the seventeenth century, Catholic authors favored the Light of Reason as a source of truth, while Protestant authors favored the Light of Nature. Since by the end of the century it was widely accepted by scientists of all religious persuasions that certain knowledge must be grounded in sense evidence and the direct study of nature, one might argue that in this instance Protestantism was responsible for nurturing an important development of the Scientific Revolution. However, the skewed nature of the sample (the Catholics who used light metaphors were mostly Jesuits; the Protestants who did so mostly alchemists) and the large number of counterexamples available (many Catholic scientists believed in the ascendancy of the senses but failed to engage in metaphorical warfare) mitigate against taking this offshoot of the Merton thesis too seriously.

This paper aims at contributing to the ongoing efforts to get a firmer grasp of the systematic significance of the entanglement of idealism and empiricism in Helmholtz's work. Contrary to existing analyses, however, the focal point of the present exposition is Helmholtz's attempt to articulate a psychological account of objectification. Helmholtz's motive, as well as his solution to the problem of the object are outlined, and interpreted against the background of his scientific practice on the one hand, and that of empiricist and (transcendental) idealist analyses of experience on the other. The specifically psychological angle taken, not only prompts us to consider figures who have hitherto been treated as having only minor import for Helmholtz interpretation (most importantly J.S. Mill and J.G. Fichte), it furthermore sheds new light on some central tenets of the latter's psychological stance that have hitherto remained underappreciated. For one thing, this analysis reveals an explicit voluntarist tendency in Helmholtz's psychological theory. In conclusion, it is argued that the systematic significance of Helmholtz's empirico-transcendentalism with respect to questions of the mind is best understood as an attempt to found his empirical theory of perception in a second order, normative account of epistemic subjectivity.

This paper aims to understand the emergence of comparative anatomy in the eighteenth century in the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences. As early as the 1670s, a program centered on animal anatomy was conceived, which was a first attempt to give some autonomy to studies on animals and to link anatomy with natural history, but it declined after 1690. However, a variety of studies on animals was published in the Mémoires of the Académie during the eighteenth century. We propose a descriptive typology of them in order to explore the status of animals and the significance of anatomy in each type, and to determine, in particular, which elements of Perrault's program were passed on at the Académie throughout the century. We discuss the influence of this legacy on the development of comparative anatomy after 1750, especially in Daubenton's work.

Argument

Throughout his career as a writer, Sigmund Freud maintained an interest in the evolutionary origins of the human mind and its neurotic and psychotic disorders. In common with many writers then and now, he believed that the evolutionary past is conserved in the mind and the brain. Today the “evolutionary Freud” is nearly forgotten. Even among Freudians, he is regarded to be a red herring, relevant only to the extent that he diverts attention from the enduring achievements of the authentic Freud. There are three ways to explain these attitudes. First, the evolutionary Freud's key work is the “Overview of the Transference Neurosis” (1915). But it was published at an inopportune moment, forty years after the author's death, during the so-called “Freud wars.” Second, Freud eventually lost interest in the “Overview” and the prospect of a comprehensive evolutionary theory of psychopathology. The publication of The Ego and the Id (1923), introducing Freud's structural theory of the psyche, marked the point of no return. Finally, Freud's evolutionary theory is simply not credible. It is based on just-so stories and a thoroughly discredited evolutionary mechanism, Lamarckian use-inheritance. Explanations one and two are probably correct but also uninteresting. Explanation number three assumes that there is a fundamental difference between Freud's evolutionary narratives (not credible) and the evolutionary accounts of psychopathology that currently circulate in psychiatry and mainstream journals (credible). The assumption is mistaken but worth investigating.

The historiography of botanical maps has mainly concentrated on their alleged“golden age,” on maps drawn by famous first-generationplant geographers. This article instead describes botanical maps after the ageof discovery, and detects both a quantitative explosion and qualitativemodification in the late nineteenth century. By spotlighting the case of theplant geographer Oscar Drude (1852–1933), I argue that the dynamicsof botanical mappings were closely linked to a specific milieu of knowledgeproduction: the visual culture of Imperial Germany. The scientific upgrading ofmaps was stimulated by a prospering commercial cartographical market as well asa widespread practice of mediating between professionals and amateurs via mapsin the public sphere. In transferring skills and practices from these“popular” fields of knowledge to scientific domains,botanists like Oscar Drude established maps as an indispensable element ofbotanical observation. This wholesale dissemination of botanical maps had thus aformative influence on collective perception – thebotanist's “period eye” – regardingplant distribution.

Einstein's mass-energy relationship was not confirmed experimentally until 1933 when Bainbridge showed that the Cockcroft-Walton experiment afforded a test of it. Earlier, however, it had been used constantly in the analysis of nuclear reactions, as can be seen in those involved in the determination of the mass of the neutron. Chadwick in 1932 was convinced that the neutron mass was about 1.0067 amu (atomic mass units), indicating that the neutron was a proton-electron compound, since that figure was less than the sum of the proton and electron masses. Chadwick's value was challenged in 1933 by Lawrence, who proposed a much lower value of 1.0006 amu, and by Curie and Joliot, who proposed a much higher value of 1.011 amu.Much controversy ensued; eventually, Chadwick and Goldhaber showed in 1934 that the neutron mass was about 1.0080 amu, greater than the sum of the proton and electron masses, proving that the neutron was a new elementary particle (which could decay spontaneously), and providing conclusive experimental support for excluding electrons from the nucleus. These results remained unchanged with further refinements in the last decimal place, the entire pursuit of which provided still further vindication of Einstein's massenergy relationship.

A discussion of the circumstances of the friendship between Einstein and Lorentz using published and unpublished sources provides material for a close analysis of their relationship. In this analysis the concept of distance, both in a physical and a psychological sense, plays a central and clarifying role. It is concluded that for Einstein the distance between him and Lorentz was essential for the relationship to become as rich and intense as it was.

Argument

In 1945 Vannevar Bush proposed a machine that acted as a “supplement” to memory and met the particular information needs of its user. Because this “memex” recorded “trails” of selected documents, it has been seen as a precursor to hypertext. However, this paper considers Bush in relation to earlier concerns about memory and information, via the ideas of Robert Hooke and John Locke. Whereas Bush modeled the memex on the associative processes of natural memory, Hooke and Locke concluded that an external archive had to allow collective reason to overcome the limits of individual memory, including its tendency to freeze and repeat patterns of ideas. Moreover, they envisaged an institutional archive rather than one controlled by the interests and mental associations of an individual. From this early modern perspective, Bush's memex appears as a personal device for managing information that incorporates assumptions inimical to the strategies required for scientific analysis.

This paper argues that Samuel Clarke's account of agent causation (i) provides a philosophical basis for moderate voluntarism, and (ii) both leads to and benefits from the acceptance of partial occasionalism as a model of causation for material beings. Clarke's account of agent causation entails that for an agent to be properly called an agent (i.e. causally efficacious), it is essential that the agent is free to choose whether to act or not. This freedom is compatible with the existence of conceptually necessary connections. Hence, Clarke can harmonize God's freedom of choosing with the existence of eternal and necessary relations among things. Moreover, in Clarke's account, only intelligent entities can be properly understood as efficacious causes. Beings deprived of intelligence are not agents or efficacious causes at all and their effects are thus the result of the immediate action of some intelligent being operating upon them.

The article deals with the interrelation between Galileo and the visual arts. It presents a couple of drawings from the hand of Galileo and confronts them with Viviani's report that Galileo had not only wanted to become an artist in his youth but stayed close to the field of visual arts throughout his lifetime. In the ambiance of these drawings the famous moon watercolors are not in the dark. They represent a very acute and reasonable tool to convince the people who trusted images more than words. The article ends with Panofsky's argument that it was Galileo's anti-Mannerist notion of art that evoked a repulsion of Kepler's ellipses. It tries to show that it was again an aesthetical prejudice that hindered Einstein from accepting Panofsky's theory.

As the deficit model's failure leaves scientists searching for more effective communicative approaches, science communication scholars have begun promoting narrative as a potent persuasive tool. Narratives can help the public make choices by setting out a scientific issue's contexts, establishing the stakes involved, and offering potential solutions. However, employing narrative for persuasion risks embracing the same top-down communication approach underlying deficit model thinking. This essay explores the parallels between movie censorship and the current use of narrative to influence public opinion by examining how the Hays Office and the Catholic Legion of Decency responded to science in movies. I argue that deploying narratives solely as public relations exercises demonstrates the same mistrust of audiences that provided the foundation of movie censorship. But the history of movie censorship reveals the dangers of using narrative to remove the public's agency and to coerce them towards a preferred position rather than fostering their ability to come to their own conclusions.

Argument

In 1980, when the diagnosis of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was introduced into the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), survivor guilt – a symptom long associated with trauma of the Holocaust and other extreme experiences – was included in the list of symptom criteria. But in the revised edition of the manual of 1987 (DSM-IIIR), survivor guilt was demoted to the status of merely an “associated feature” of the condition. Now that survivor guilt has disappeared from the official lexicon of trauma, shame has come to take its place as the emotion that most defines the traumatic state. This paper examines the rationale for the shift from survivor guilt to shame in the context of the American Psychiatric Association's revisions. It argues that the shift can be understood as yet another manifestation of the oscillation between mimetic and antimimetic theories of trauma that, I have argued in my book Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), has structured the understanding of trauma from the start.

Pressures to lower health-care costs remain an important stimulus to eugenic approaches. Prenatal diagnosis followed by abortion of affected fetuses has replaced sterilization as the major eugenic technique. Voluntary acceptance has replaced coercion, but subtle pressures undermine personal autonomy. The failure of the old eugenics to accurately predict who will have affected offspring virtually disappears when prenatal diagnosis is used to predict Mendelian disorders. However, when prenatal diagnosis is used to detect inherited susceptibilities to adult-onset, common, complex disorders, considerable uncertainty is inherent in the prediction. Intolerance and the resurgence of genetic determinism are current pressures for a eugenic approach. The increasing use of carrier screening (to identify those at risk of having affected offspring) and of prenatal diagnosis could itself generate intolerance for those who refuse the procedures. Genetic determinism deflects society from social action that would reduce the burden of disease far more than even the maximum use of eugenics.

In this article I describe the establishment and early development of an institution that is unique to the history of Chinese medicine – the Imperial Pharmacy (惠 民 藥 局). Established in 1076 during the great reforms of the Song dynasty, the Imperial Pharmacy was a remarkable institution that played different political, social, economic, and medical roles over the years of its existence. Initially it was an economic institution designed to curb the power of plutocrats who were manipulating medicinal drug markets in their favor. A few decades later, I claim, the Imperial Pharmacy became a public-health-oriented institution focusing on selling readymade prescriptions in addition to simples. Various records, including local gazetteers and local maps, indicate that the Imperial Pharmacy expanded about a century after it was established to include dozens of branches throughout the empire. The Pharmacy's impact on the practices of physicians during these years is somewhat vague. It seems, however, to have posed an unwelcome addition to the medical scene, since it enabled uninitiated practitioners who relied on the Pharmacy's formulary to fit patients' symptoms to their own prescriptions and dispense medications with relative ease.

“The Case of Ellen West” was published by the Swiss psychiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger, in 1944–1945. The case-history depicts the illness and suicide of a young woman who was his patient twenty years earlier. It came to be considered one of the paradigmatic studies of the newly established discipline of Daseinsanalyse, an attempt to synthesize existential philosophy and therapeutic practice. This paper analyzes the case-study, employing newly uncovered archival material to expose important details regarding the treatment of Ellen West (a pseudonym) and the posthumous writing of her case-history. The richness of the archival sources and the various historiographical characteristics they exhibit raise methodological questions about the potentialities and limitations of historical representation. The new data will thus serve as a platform from which to explore and discuss more generally the problems involved in historical reconstruction – of both subjective experience and clinical knowledge – and the questions of authorship and intertextuality in the genre of the case-history.

This article offers a social history of the “Galois Affair,” which arose in 1831 when the French Academy of Sciences decided to reject a paper presented by an aspiring mathematician, Évariste Galois. In order to historicize the meaning of Galois's work at the time he tried to earn recognition for his research on the algebraic solution of equations, this paper explores two interrelated questions. First, it analyzes scholarly algebraic practices and the way mathematicians were trained in the nineteenth century to reconstruct the scientific meaning of Galois's research. By emphasizing the historically contingent nature of scientific debates, the paper argues that to historicize the work of a mathematician, we must historicize the scientific world as well. The second part of this article goes further to seek a fresh perspective on Galois's short career by analyzing the cultural, social, and institutional dynamics that governed how the mathematical community came to recognize an aspiring mathematician as one of its own.

Argument

Augustus De Morgan was faced with a delicate balancing act in his attempt to interpret mathematics from his position as a professor at the secular University of London. He had learned mathematics at Cambridge, where the subject was intimately connected to Anglican natural theology. In his adult life, his challenge was to understand his subject in such a way that it would remain centrally important, but be suitable to a secular education. De Morgan's attempts to interpret mathematics within his secular world led him to consider the nature of algebra, probability theory, and logic. At times, particularly in logic, this work led him into fierce controversies. Behind the specific twists and turns of his thought, however, De Morgan maintained a remarkably consistent position from which he defended the religious values of his upbringing and education within a secular society.