New Books in the History of Science

In her new book, Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018), Dagmar Herzog examines the relationship between reproductive rights and disability rights in contemporary European history. In a study that appeared in the George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History, Herzog uncovers much that is unexpected. She analyzes Protestant and Catholic theologians that were pro-choice in the 1960s and 1970s; the ways in which some advocates of liberalized abortion access displayed hostility to the disabled; the current backlash against women’s reproductive rights in Europe fueled in part by activists presenting themselves as anti-eugenics and pro-disability; and the impressive advances in disability rights inspired by submerged, contrapuntal strands within psychoanalysis and Christianity alike. An outstanding contribution to the histories of religion, sexuality, and disability rights, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in post-1945 Europe.Michael E. O’Sullivan is Associate Professor of History at Marist College where he teaches courses about Modern Europe. He published Disruptive Power: Catholic Women, Miracles, and Politics in Modern Germany, 1918-1965 with University of Toronto Press in 2018. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While most people in the US are familiar with the ubiquitous Kellogg cereal brand, few know how it relates to US geography, science and technology around the turn of the 20th century. In A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Enterprise (University of California Press, 2017), Nicholas Bauch explores the digestive system as a sociomaterial landscape developed from the Battle Creek Sanitarium, as run by Dr. John Kellogg. Bauch wants to focus less on Kellogg the man, but rather on Kellogg’s ability to enroll actants (a la Latour) in his geographical digestive network. Kellogg’s religious background as a Seventh-Day Adventist, and his scientific and medical training, made purity and cleanliness his central goals at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Responding to the social and personal problems of indigestion and stagnation, Kellogg instituted a regime of tests, procedures and strict dieting (amongst other restrictions) to cure such prevalent ills. Kellogg thought that natural food was too impure a diet, so instead he turned to highly processed foods as developed in his experimental kitchen, which incidentally was how the first cereal flakes were made. Even with such plain and processed dieting, Kellogg found the human digestive system unable to process substances efficiently on its own. This problem led Kellogg to conceptualize an extended digestive system by developing a sewage system. Eventually, Kellogg became reliant upon industrial farming in rural Michigan. New developments in industrial equipment, such as grain-threshing machines, and industrial chemicals, to enrich the soil, provided a relatively clean and efficient food production process to fulfill the sanitarium’s needs. Before his death, Kellogg thus purified the nature/culture binary of food in favor of scientific approach, and engineered a collective digestive system across Battle Creek and nearby areas.While some of Kellogg’s ideas seem antiquarian to today’s standards, Bauch makes a compelling argument for why we can see Kellogg’s paradoxical influence on today’s US food production and consumption. While Kellogg railed against the dominant “natural” cuisine of his day in favor of a new approach to processed foods, the new food movements of today are decidedly critical of processed foods; while Kellogg wanted zero bacteria in the gut, today there are numerous products that are probiotics. What the new food movements gain from Kellogg is not his precise views, but rather his focus on the gut and the potential medicinal properties of food.A Geography of Digestion presents not only a geographical history, but a methodology for exploring sociomaterial processes as landscapes for future researchers to use in other contexts. As such, scholars interested in the relation between science and space, food studies, and materialist approaches to the body will find much use of this recently published work.Chad J. Valasek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Sociology & Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests includes the history of the human sciences, the influence of the behavioral sciences on medical practice and health policy, and political activism around science and the arts. You can follow him on Twitter @chadjvalasek. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Megan Finn's Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters (MIT Press, 2018) is a fascinating examination of how information infrastructures shape the ways that survivors and observers know and learn about disasters. Finn uses three historical case studies – major earthquakes in Northern California in 1868, 1906, and 1989 – to reflect upon the development of private and public information services and how these succeed and fail to inform local and distant audiences about disaster realities. Infrastructure breakdowns make visible the material bases of information systems, from telegraph to newsprint to internet, and how this materiality shapes access relative to social and geographical boundaries. Documenting Aftermath is a very timely book, for as global warming promises more frequent catastrophes, large-scale social media and government information systems increasingly dictate how information moves. More than ever it is necessary to question this arrangement and the oversights, inequalities, and possibilities for abuse of power therein.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Audra J. Wolfe, is a Philadelphia-based writer, editor and historian. Her book Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) examines the post-World War II origins of the relationship between science and politics. Science’s self-concept as politically neutral and dedicated to empirical observation free of bias has often been at odds with its collaboration with the purposes of the Cold War state. Wolfe demonstrates how an understanding of the differences between Western and Marxist science obscured the hidden political objectives. Scientists holding an apolitical view of science became unwitting agents of the U.S. war against the spread of communism led by the Central Intelligence Agency. Multiple scientific and cultural institutions engage in formal and informal cultural diplomacy, espionage, ideological laden science education in underdeveloped nations, and became activists for the human rights of scientists across the globe. Thus, they expanded U.S. influence abroad. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the utopian belief of science as operating in the service of intellectual freedom and internationalism continues even as it depends heavily on government funding for its existence.This episode of New Books in American Studies was produced in cooperation with the Society for U.S. Intellectual History.Lilian Calles Barger, www.lilianbarger.com, is a cultural, intellectual and gender historian. Her recent book is entitled The World Come of Age: An Intellectual History of Liberation Theology, (Oxford University Press, 2018). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his new book, Our Germans: Project Paperclip and the National Security State (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), Brian Crim, Associate Professor of History at the University of Lynchburg, looks at the controversial program to bring German scientist to the United States after World War II. The book draws on recently declassified documents from the Department of Defense, State Department, the FBI and other intelligence agencies to show how these German scientists were incorporated into military and civilian agencies to work on various projects, most importantly rocket technology. Ultimately the book engages with the legacy of Project Paperclip and its place in national memory and how this Cold War program reflects the ambivalence of the American people about the national security state and the military industrial complex. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Suman Seth's new book Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018)provides a new angle on the formation of modern ideas of race through the formation of the British Empire. While scholars have often addressed this phenomenon through the lenses of academic anatomy and natural history, Seth suggests that medical care and theories of pathology were central to how Britons began to see their bodies as fundamentally distinct from other peoples. After the Seven Years War, medical thinkers started contributing to British imperial ambitions by interpreting the distinct disease environments of the empire’s disparate parts. Initially, a “seasoning sickness” was thought unavoidable as colonists entered a new clime, for the body’s complexion had to adapt to the qualities of the new environment. Through numerous iterations and variations, this Hippocratic sense of a porous and variable body was abandoned as illness and vulnerability became ever more tightly tied to inherited somatic traits and behaviors. This figured strongly in debates over abolition and the legitimacy of slavery and provided the precedent for nineteenth-century scientific racism.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of bringing colonial peripheries and non-Western spaces into the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howard Chiang’s new book is a masterful study of the relationship between sexual knowledge and Chinese modernity. After Eunuchs: Science, Medicine, and the Transformation of Sex in Modern China (Columbia University Press, 2018) guides readers through the history of eunuchs in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the techniques of visualization that helped establish the conditions that produced sex as an object of empirical knowledge, the rise of sexology in the 1920s, the discourse of “sex change” in the press from the 1920s to the 1940s, and a famous case of the “first” Chinese transsexual in 1950s Taiwan. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of sexuality in China, and will be of special interest for readers who are interested in bringing Foucault-inspired analyses to the craft of history.Carla Nappi is the Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. You can learn more about her and her work here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Paola Bertucci's Artisanal Enlightenment: Science and the Mechanical Arts in Old Regime France (Yale University Press, 2018) is an innovative new look at the role of artisans in the French Enlightenment. As savants attempted to appropriate leadership of the mechanical arts while deriding artisans as mere laborers, some of these refashioned themselves as artistes, capable of blending craft knowledge with intellectual esprit. Through the little studied and understood Société des Arts, these advertised their service and utility to the state and French economic and imperia expansion. As they fought for official appointments and academic recognition, they help solidify key the Enlightenment concept of technological progress. Through the eyes and experiences of artistes, the Enlightenment appears much less the product of intellectual breakthroughs, and instead, a reflection of the political economic strategies of artisans as they defined their role within the French empire.Lance C. Thurner recently completed a PhD in History at Rutgers University with a dissertation addressing the production of medical knowledge, political subjectivities, and racial and national identities in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Mexico. He is broadly interested in the methods and politics of applying a global perspective to the history of science and medicine and the role of the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The prologue to The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (University of Chicago Press, 2018) begins by provocatively invoking a question American physiologist Walter Cannon first asked in 1926: “Why don’t we die daily?” In the erudite chapters that follow, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers explore how practitioners and theorists working during and after World War I tried to answer that very thorny problem in light of the challenges of wound shock. This functional disorder demanded that doctors, surgeons, and physiologists account for two medical realities: first, that wound shock was a whole-body, multi-systemic response to trauma; and second, that a fairly homogenous group—namely the young, male soldier-patient—responded to wound shock in highly variable and individuals ways. Whereas the historiography of World War I and trauma has largely focused on psychopathological models, Geroulanos and Meyers illuminate how the work of Henry Head, Réné Leriche, Kurt Goldstein and others enacted a wholesale transformation of the concept of the individual, one that would define medico-physiological individuality as an integrated and indivisible body, but one constantly on “the verge of collapse.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision required desegregation of America’s schools, but it also set in motion an agonizing multi-decade debate over race, class, and IQ. In The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence Between Brown and The Bell Curve (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), Michael E. Staub, Professor of English and American Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York, investigates neuropsychological studies published between Brown and the controversial 1994 book The Bell Curve. In doing so, he illuminates how we came to view race and intelligence today.In tracing how research and experiments around such concepts as learned helplessness, deferred gratification, hyperactivity, and emotional intelligence migrated into popular culture and government policy, Staub reveals long-standing and widespread dissatisfaction—not least among middle-class whites—with the metric of IQ. He also documents the devastating consequences—above all for disadvantaged children of color—as efforts to undo discrimination and create enriched learning environments were recurrently repudiated and defunded. By connecting psychology, race, and public policy in a single narrative, Staub charts the paradoxes that have emerged and that continue to structure investigations of racism even into the era of contemporary neuroscientific research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices