New Books in the History of Science

“This is a history of promises.”So begins Nathaniel Comfort‘s gripping and beautifully written new book on the relationships between and entanglements of medical genetic and eugenics in the history of the twentieth century. Based on a rich documentary and oral history archive, The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale University Press, 2012) reframes the histories of early and contemporary human genetics. Rather than treating eugenics as “a contaminant of good, honest biomedicine,” the book shows that early human genetics had many of the same basic goals – human improvement and the relief of suffering – as genetic medicine today. At the same time, contemporary genetic medicine emerges as much less benign than it has often been depicted.All of this is accomplished through a sensitive historical tracing of two major approaches to understanding human heredity through the twentieth century: a Galtonian approach characterized by a concern with quantification, public health, and populations; and a Garrodian approach characterized by an interest in conceptualizing the human as individual, and in synthesizing heredity with other forms of knowledge. As we follow these threads along with Comfort, he introduces us to a bookful of colorful, vibrant characters from the history of medical genetics: the idealistic inventor of a “Gumption Reviver,” the sanitarium-operator who was fond of prescribing yogurt-enemas, and the medical geneticist with a talent for boogie-woogie piano, among others. These figures are embedded in an exceptionally carefully-wrought narrative of the spaces, practices, and events by which medicine became genetic, genetics became molecular, and molecules made the engineering of humanity possible in a new way.In the course of our discussion, we talked about the importance, for Comfort, of paying careful attention to elements of the writer’s craft when composing a historical work. The John McPhee essay on narrative structure that was mentioned in that part of the interview can be found here (A subscription to the New Yorker is required to read the full piece.)The Oral History of Human Genetics Project can be found here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zograscope. Say it with me: zograscope. ZooooOOOOOoooograscope. There are many optical wonders in Maki Fukuoka’s new book The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in 19th-Century Japan  (Stanford University Press, 2012), the zograscope not least among them. The book opens with Fukuoka’s account of stumbling upon a manuscript of... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In The Psychophysical Ear: Musical Experiments, Experimental Sounds, 1840-1910 (MIT Press, 2013), Alexandra Hui explores a fascinating chapter of that history in a period when musical aesthetics and natural science came together in the psychophysical study of sound in nineteenth century Germany. Though we tend to consider the performing arts and sciences as occupying different epistemic and disciplinary realms, Hui argues that the scientific study of sound sensation not only was framed in terms of musical aesthetics, but became increasingly so over time. The book traces a series of arguments by practitioners of the study of sound sensation as they sought to uncover universal rules for understanding the sonic world: How much epistemic weight ought to be placed on the experiences of an individual listener? What sorts of expertise were relevant or necessary for a sound scientist’s experimental practice? Did musical training matter? Was there a proper way to listen to music? The Psychophysical Ear follows sound scientists as they grappled with these and other questions, struggling with the consequences of understanding the act of listening as a practice that was fundamentally grounded in particular historical contexts as phonographic technology and the increasing number of performances of non-Western music in Europe were transforming the sonic world of Europe. Hui’s story often involves the reader’s own sensorium in the story, urging us to imagine or play sequences of musical notes that prove crucial to some of the arguments of the actors in the story. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nicholas Popper‘s new book is a thoughtfully crafted and rich contribution to early modern studies, to the history of history, and to the history of science. Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (University of Chicago Press, 2012) takes readers into the texture of Walter Ralegh’s masterwork and the textual and epistemic practices through which he used the past to understand and offer counsel on the events of the present. Ralegh passed seven of his many years of incarceration in the Tower of London excerpting, rearranging, editing, and recopying passages from his 500+ volume library to produce a book that has been read and interpreted in many different (and sometimes conflicting) ways in the hundreds of years since its initial printing.Popper’s book uses a very focused account of the texture of this single book as a basis from which to offer a wonderfully expansive account of the practices of history in the Renaissance, and the ways that Ralegh’s work and associated practices of historical analysis ultimately transformed European politics, religion, and scholarship. Along the way, there are fascinating accounts of the origins of the modern archival mode of historiography, the differences between causal and narrative accounts of the past, and the many ways that early modern historical practices were inextricable from scriptural exegesis. Popper’s study is both inspired by the methods and insights of the historiography of science, and offers a way to think about the practices of knowledge-production that help identify what we’re talking about when we talk about early modern “science.” Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The story starts on a high-speed train and ends with six men in a crater, with hundreds of years and a number of explosions in between. Sean Cocco‘s rich new book uses Vesuvius as a focal point for exploring the histories of natural history, travel, observation, imaging, astronomy, and many other aspects of the places and identities of early modern history. Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2013) pays special attention to the many resonances of emplacement and locality, and to the agency of the Vesuvian landscape, as it explores the continuities and transformations in the seventeenth and eighteenth century volcanic landscape. Volcanology emerged along with Neapolitan identity while volcanoes became emblematic of the south in the writings of European travelers: rumbling, unpredictable, given to heated eruptions. Cocco’s account shows us the beauty of these transformations as they were embodied in paintings, poems, letters, and other media. Scholars and enthusiasts of the urban and political history of Europe will find much of interest here, as will readers interested in the history of vernacular understandings of nature. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What is alchemy? Who were the alchemists, what did they believe and do and dream, and what did they accomplish?Lawrence M. Principe‘s new book explores these questions and some possible answers to them in a wonderfully written and argued introduction to the history of western alchemy. The Secrets of Alchemy (University of Chicago Press, 2012) traces the genealogy of alchemical practices from their early Greco-Egyptian foundations through early modern chymistry, pausing along the way to reflect on the reinterpretation and refashioning of alchemy from the eighteenth century to the present. Principe’s pages reveal histories of alchemy that are wonderfully rich and diverse, and we meet them in laboratories, recipes, images, dramatic plays, and poems. In the course of our conversation, we talked about aspects of the craft of the alchemist as well as that of the historian, including Principe’s fascinating attempts to recreate alchemical recipes and practices in his own laboratory. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his compelling and fascinating account of how engineers navigated new landscapes of technology and its discontents in 1960s America, Matthew Wisnioski takes us into the personal and professional transformations of a group of thinkers and practitioners who have been both central to the history of science and technology, and conspicuously under-represented in its historiography. Between 1964 and 1974, engineers in America wrestled with the ethical and intellectual implications of an “ideology of technological change.” Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (MIT Press, 2012) takes us into the debates among engineers over their responsibilities for crafting a future in a world where nuclear weapons and chemical pollutants were now facts of life, as citizens were rising in support of environmental and civil rights, and in protest of war and violence. Wisnioski introduces us to the changing resonances of and debates over key concepts in the print culture of engineers in mid-century America, key experiments in the pedagogy and training of engineers at major US institutions, and key efforts to promote creativity in the profession by collaborating with artists, social activists, and others. The book situates all of this within a wonderful introduction to the classic historiography of social studies of technology and engineering, and is illustrated with striking images from the visual culture of engineering in the 1960s. Readers interested in how these issues extend into the more recent history of technology will also find much of interest in Wisnioski’s accounts of Engineers Without Borders and the Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace (ESJP) Network. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

By focusing on food and eating from the dinner table to the laboratory, E. C. Spary‘s new book shows how an increasingly public culture of knowledge shaped the daily lives of literate Parisians in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Spary’s work is at the same time a rich and embodied history of food, diet, and digestion in French Enlightenment science, and an account of how social and epistemological authority were produced amid the emergence of new Enlightenment publics. In Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670-1760 (University of Chicago Press, 2012), controversies over digestion provided a space for the working out of power struggles between political, religious, medical, and culinary thinkers. Faced with a cuisine bursting with new materials and flavors, French society debated various ways of negotiating the opposing poles of indulgence and sobriety, luxury and reform. This is illustrated in several detailed case studies that include coffee and its implication in networks of expertise; cafes as social leveling-grounds, performance spaces, and chemical laboratories; and the production of new liqueurs. Spary’s work urges us to reconsider the way we write commodity histories, and is well worth reading. Enjoy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Audra Wolfe‘s new book, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (John Hopkins University Press, 2013) offers a synthetic account of American science during the Cold War. Wolfe pulls together a rich and disparate literature to provide a thematic, chronological and accessible story about the distinctive ways that Americans wove science and government together for the five decades after WWII. Beyond the familiar story of physics, Wolfe shows not only how science prospered under federal patronage but how the federal government itself came to depend on science as it tried to deal with the problems it faced around the world and at home. The nature of American science, and the promise of american modernity, was put on display in works and institutions as varied modernization theory and the Apollo missions. Wolfe has written a delightful little book offering the historical state of the art for those interested in thinking about the characteristic relationships forged between science and the state during the Cold War and their lasting consequences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine the academic world as a beach.The grains of sand making up the beach are the departments, institutes, and other bodies and related gatherings that make up the officially sanctioned parts of academic institutions and academic life. There is a world between the grains, however – a world of unofficial, accidental, and trans-departmental conversations and inspirations. And it is within that “interstitial academy” that some of the most remarkable work in the history of modern social and humanistic thought has been born.In Working Knowledge: Making the Human Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Harvard University Press, 2012), Joel Isaac takes readers into the interstitial academy of Harvard University in the middle of the twentieth century. Isaac traces a kind of early history of interdisciplinarity in the American academy in the course of an elegantly wrought argument for situating one of the most pivotal texts of the history and philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, within the emergence of what have become known as the human sciences. Twentieth century philosophers and social scientists sought to replace Kant’s transcendental notions with concepts more firmly rooted in the activities of working scientists and mathematicians, creating an epistemology that was deeply rooted in social practices. Maturing in this context and coming of intellectual age largely in the interstitial academy, Kuhn developed a notion of scientific paradigms that were “revealed in its textbooks, lectures, and laboratory exercises,” grounding his philosophy in a fundamental concern with pedagogical practices. At the same time, Isaac’s book is about so much more than Kuhn: it treats the history of American universities, the sociology of Pareto, the development of the case method in legal education, the changing disciplinary relationships between philosophy and psychology, the development of an idea of “social sciences,” among many other themes and stories. It is an exceptionally rich and persuasive story, and well worth reading – be it on the beach or elsewhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices