Perspectives on Science

Stephen Kenny scrutinizes the career of surgeon Rudolph Matas, the so-called "father of vascular surgery." Kenny demonstrates how his life and work must be understood in the context of segregation in the U.S. South and the racialized medicine that was practiced there in the 19th and 20th centuries. He also highlights the ways in which Matas used medical photography to legitimate an ideologically driven racialized research agenda. Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on racial science at: www.chstm.org/video/101

In this episode of Perspectives, we speak with Wendy Gonaver, author of The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880. Wendy Gonaver reveals the history of the Eastern Lunatic Asylum in Williamsburg, Virginia and its superintendent, John M. Galt. Gonaver explains the Asylum's exceptional status as the only psychiatric facility to accept both slaves and free blacks as patients and to employ slaves as attendants. Although Eastern Lunatic Asylum instituted a progressive form of "moral therapy" that reflected Enlightenment values (including doing away with mechanical restraints and corporal punishment), it nevertheless reflected and upheld the institution of slavery and, later, the racially discriminatory society of the antebellum South. Gonaver describes how superintendent John M. Galt believed that "religious fanaticism," as manifested in the abolitionist movement, was more harmful to a person's mental health than any sort of intemperance or "insanity." Despite this fact, Galt was the only psychiatric superintendent in the South to advocate for integrated wards and both black and white attendants. Careful not to romanticize Galt or his work, Gonaver explains how his advocacy of integrated institutions led to him becoming a pioneer in the development of outpatient psychiatric care. However, after Galt's death in 1862, Eastern Lunatic Asylum became segregated like all of the other psychiatric facilities in the South. As a result, psychiatric facilities for black patients in the antebellum South came to mimic the slave plantations that had existed beforehand, leading to abuse and involuntary imprisonment, without even the pretense of adequate or humane care. Wendy Gonaver is the author of The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880. She received her Ph.D. in 2012 from the College of William and Mary. She taught as an adjunct at several universities, and currently works at the Frank Mt. Pleasant Library of Special Collections and Archives at Chapman University. For more resources on this topic, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/116.

In this recording, historian Warwick Anderson discusses his investigations into the development of racial science in the Global South and the fabrication of whiteness as a "strategy of authority." Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, and leader of the Politics, Governance and Ethics Theme with the Charles Perkins Centre. As an historian of science, medicine and public health, Dr. Anderson's work has focused on ideas about race, human difference, and citizenship in the 19th and 20th centuries, particularly in Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and the United States. In this episode of our podcast series on race and science, Anderson discusses the differences between how racial science was practiced in the Global South and how it was practiced in North America and Europe. He notes that theories about race—and thus the practices of racial science—were often more malleable and flexible in the Southern Hemisphere, as opposed to the more rigid racial typologies and hardline eugenics that characterized the United States and Western Europe. In addition, following the work of James Baldwin and Homi Bhabha, Anderson notes how whiteness has been used as a "strategy of authority" for colonial settlers rather than as a robust identity, a fact he illustrates through his research on race in Australia and the Philippines. To listen to other installments in the Consortium's series on racial science, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/101

In this recording and in her book Darwin's Hunch: Science, Race, and the Search for Human Origins, Christa Kuljian examines the history of paleoanthropology in South Africa, interrogating the ways in which ideas about racial hierarchies influenced the founding and development of the field. Her research demonstrates how the social and political context in which paleoanthropology has been practiced in South Africa and elsewhere influenced the development of the science, and how present-day scientists are pushing back against their field's troubling legacy. Christa Kuljian is a writer, author, and Research Associate at WiSER, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa. Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on racial science at: www.chstm.org/video/101

In this episode of Perspectives, we sit down with Audra Wolfe to discuss her book, Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science. In Freedom's Laboratory, Dr. Wolfe examines the relationship between science, politics, and governance in the United States during the Cold War, highlighting the ways in which scientists, policymakers, and administrators defined and thought about concepts such as "scientific freedom" and "Western science." She examines the role of scientists in American cultural diplomacy after World War II, at a time when United States propaganda promoted a vision of science as empirical, objective, and international. This view of science was often contrasted with a representation of Soviet science as politically motivated and nationalistic. Dr. Wolfe adds to our knowledge of how science and propaganda, psychology and diplomacy, interacted with one another and were deployed on both sides during the Cold War. Weaving diplomatic history with the history of science, Wolfe's book demonstrates the powerful and controversial uses and abuses of science during the Cold War. Audra Wolfe is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor, and historian. She is the author of two books on science and the Cold War, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America and Freedom's Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, both available from Johns Hopkins University Press. You can follow her on Twitter as @ColdWarScience and subscribe to her newsletter at Never Just Science dot substack dot com. For more resources on this topic, please visit: https://www.chstm.org/video/112

In this episode of Perspectives, we talk with M. Susan Lindee, author of Rational Fog: Science and Technology in Modern War. In Rational Fog, Susan Lindee explores the way that science, technology and medicine were transformed by the military establishment and defense funding. She discusses the ways in which thousands of scientists, engineers, and physicians justified or made peace with creating technologies of war, or instead rebelled against the use of science for such pursuits. Indeed, as Lindee reminds us, scores of scientific societies have defended science as a uniquely positive endeavor dedicated to the "welfare of mankind," all while many of their members have pursuit chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons research for the purpose of human injury and death. M. Susan Lindee is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Elise Burton discusses the development of genetics, racial science, and race concepts in the Middle East. Dr. Burton sketches the connections between European, North American, and Middle Eastern scientists, and elaborates upon how contemporary issues (such as COVID-19) are influenced by ideas of genetic nationalism. Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on racial science at: www.chstm.org/video/101

This seminar in the Economization of Global Health series focuses on the origins, production and reception of one of the major moments in the economization of global health: the World Bank's World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health (WDR93). Our speakers, both internationally recognized economists, played key roles in this venture: Dean Jamison was the lead author of the report, while Abdo Yazbeck was responsible for much of the technical work. In this seminar, the two discuss their work on the report and reflect on its origins and impact.

Sebastián Gil-Riaño examines how scientific articulations of human diversity have been used to both legitimize and confront notions of race and racism in the modern world. Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on racial science at: www.chstm.org/video/101

Sadiah Qureshi recounts the history of the exhibition of displayed peoples in nineteenth-century Britain, and how these shows contributed to the formation of anthropology. Find this podcast and more in the Consortium's series on racial science at: www.chstm.org/video/101