Browsing by Subject "Science"

In both medicine and theology, the early modern period was one of flux, characterized by Reformation and Revolution. Scholars tend to analyze shifts in natural philosophy and theology separately. This dissertation brings them together to question how early modern Christians understood their own bodies and souls, the diseases to which they were prey, and the physicians and medicine that treated them.

In doing so, it highlights one influential group of thinkers who addressed these questions: late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Lutheran physicians, theologians, and natural philosophers in the so-called Wittenberg Circle. As shown in chapter one, out of inter- and intra-confessional debates in theology, the study of anatomy, and the study of the soul building on the long Aristotelian De anima commentarial tradition, Lutheran thinkers helped create a field of study called anthropologia. Enshrined in the basic curriculum for all students, including physicians, theologians and philosophers, this discipline endeavored to synthesize the fundamental findings of anatomy, philosophy, and theology to explain the nature of human bodies and souls. Building on the intellectual background sketched in chapter one, the second chapter shows how Lutheran physicians attempted to understand bodies and disease in light of this system of thought. To do so, they called on two principal sources of authority: the Bible and medical theory. Following this overview of basic intellectual commitments, the thematic chapters three and four trace evolving notions of (1) the physician as healer of body and of soul, an imitator of Christus Medicus and (2) the spread of learned ideas about body and soul in vernacular literature, and the way patients should understand and cope with their own sicknesses of body and soul.

This dissertation builds on a wide body of academic Latin and popular vernacular sources, from theological and medical treatises to sermons, commentaries, and devotional literature. It highlights the influence of Philip Melanchthon’s commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, and those of his students and friends, as well as the influential writing of the prominent Wittenberg physician Daniel Sennert. In books of prayer, sermons, and biblical commentaries that treat disease and healing, Lutheran pastors and theologians utilized academic medicine and theology to console patients and to popularize pious understandings of body, soul, and medicine. Together these sources reveal a set of beliefs about the relationship of body and soul and their relationship to material and spiritual forces that permeated every level of society.

Designer Science: A History of Intelligent Design in America undertakes the first full-length historical overview of the intelligent design movement (ID), a popular and influential antievolutionary ideology prominent at the turn of the 21st century. To date, on one hand, full length treatments of ID have been primarily polemical, consisting of either critical refutations or hagiographic defenses. The scholarly, non-polemical assessments, on the other hand, have folded ID into a larger story of American creationism and in general do not focus on ID on its own. Rather than making ID a small part of a history of creationism or engaging in polemical conflict, this dissertation treats intelligent design it as its own subject.

In contrast to some critics and scholars who have interpreted intelligent design as a sleeker, deceptive, or “stealth” version of creationism, I find that ID is better understood as an evolution of creationist views into a distinct movement and ideology. The differences are especially stark if creationism is understood as young-Earth creationism, from which ID’s worldview was a significant departure. ID was animated less by the Biblical literalism and geological focus of young-Earth creationism and more by theistic metaphysics, the argument from design, and post-WWII intellectual conservatism. Its minimalist theological principles entailed a jettisoning of many of young-Earth creationism’s most important features, and its resultant lowest-common-denominator approach to antievolution (and reluctance to engage in doctrinal disputes) allowed ID to build a broad but shallow political coalition across antievolutionary movements. It was an expansive “big tent” with influence across the spectrum of antievolutionists and conservative political groups, and so creationists of all kinds were welcome (provided they sidelined doctrinal issues). However, ID and its supporters met their Waterloo in 2005, at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial in Pennsylvania, where ID’s leaders struggled to clearly articulate a scientific vision for the concept and were dealt a disastrous legal defeat. Though ID did not disappear after the Dover trial, it was considerably reduced. Media interest declined, scientists reveled in their victory, and ID’s intellectual leaders responded by doubling down on existing arguments. ID’s general appeal meant that its leaders’ allegations of scientific bias legitimated a narrative of persecution that found great receptivity with its conservative religious supporters. In spite of its public decline, ID’s influence continued to be felt from the cultural margins, and the movement’s transition from an empirical challenge against Darwin to a radical rejection of scientific expertise is an illuminating development in the popular perception of science in the early 21st century. ID had little impact on the way science was practiced in America, but its influence on culture persists.

In order to chart a historical narrative of the movement’s rise, climax, and fall, I have focused primarily on ID’s intellectual history, for it was a movement concerned about the origins and effects of ideas. Supplemental research into the history of American conservatism and populist creationism is incorporated into a fuller picture of ID’s similarities and differences from the antievolutionary movements that came before it, and the latter half of the dissertation focuses on the legal and cultural context of ID in conjunction with its intellectual history. This project aims for a better understanding of what ID was—and what it was not—so as to make sense of its socio-political consequences, which are still being felt in 21st century America.

The commercialization of scientific discoveries into innovation has traditionally been the purview of large corporations operating central R&D laboratories through much of the past century. The past four decades have seen this model being gradually supplanted by a more decentralized system of universities and VC-backed startups that have displaced large corporations as the conductors of scientific research. This dissertation tries to understand how firms create and exploit scientific knowledge in this changing structure of American innovation. The first study examines how scientific knowledge can expand markets for technology and thereby encourage the entry of new science-based firms into invention. The argument is tested in the context of the U.S. patent market and finds that patents citing scientific articles tend to be traded more often, even after controlling for various proxies of patent quality. The second study explores why some American firms started investing in scientific research in the early twentieth century. The chapter relies on a newly assembled panel dataset of innovating firms consisting of their investments in science, patenting, financials and ownership between 1926 and 1940. The empirical patterns reveal that the beginnings of corporate research in America were driven by companies at the technological frontier attempting to take advantage of opportunities for innovation made possible by scientific advances. This investment was especially pronounced for firms based in scientific fields that were underdeveloped in the United States. The final study asks why startups are more likely to bring scientific advances to market. The existing literature has explained the higher innovative propensity of some startups by their superior scientific capabilities. However, it is also possible that the apparent innovativeness of startups may be a result of firm choice, rather than inherent capability gaps with respect to incumbents. Startups may choose novel products that are riskier but offer higher payoffs because they pay a higher entry cost in the form of investments in new factories, sales and distribution channels. I test this entry cost mechanism in the context of the American laser industry which responded to an exogenous influx of Soviet laser science following the end of the Cold War.

This dissertation examines the contributions of apothecary craftsmen and their medicinal retailing practices to emerging cultures of scientific investigation and experimental practice in the Italian port city of Venice between 1565 and 1730. During this important period in Europe’s history, efforts to ground traditional philosophical investigations of nature in a new material culture of empirical and experimental practice elicited significant debate in scholarly communities. Leading the way in advancing the authority of “experience” were Europe’s medical practitioners divided between university-trained physicians and guild-regulated apothecaries and surgeons. In Italy, humanist praise for the practical arts and new techniques of analyzing inherited texts influenced sixteenth-century university physicians to redefine the medical discipline in terms of its practical aims to intervene in nature and achieve useful effects. This led to an important revival in northern Italian universities at Ferrara and Padua of the classical Greek writings on the empirical disciplines of anatomy and pharmacy. In the sixteenth century the university at Padua, under the patronage of the Republic of Venice, was the site of Europe’s first public botanical garden, anatomical theater and clinical demonstrations. The university also hosted important experimental practitioners such as Andreas Vesalius, Galileo Galilei and William Harvey, and remained a leading center of medical investigation attracting an international faculty of students and professors until the eighteenth century. At the same time, the study of Aristotelian natural philosophy in original Greek texts was largely emancipated from the faculty of theology at Padua, nurturing innovative discourses on experimental method by figures such as Giacomo Zabarella and the anatomist Fabricius Aquapendente.

The unique intellectual climate at Padua has thus attracted significant scholarly attention in the history and philosophy of early modern science. However, the university’s important relationships with the thriving world of artisan guilds and their commercial practices in the nearby city of Venice have not received due attention in historical scholarship. To address this issue, this dissertation focuses upon a unique group of guild-trained medical practitioners in Venice – apothecaries – to trace the circulations of materials, skills, and expertise between Padua and the Venetian marketplace. Drawing on the methods of urban history, medical anthropology, literary studies and intellectual history, I conceptualize Venice as an important “contact zone,” or space of dialogue between scholarly and artisanal modes of investigating and representing nature between the latter sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries. In particular, I focus upon emerging apothecary strategies for retailing nature to public audiences through their medicinal creations, printed books, licensing petitions, and their pharmacy shops. Through these practices, apothecaries not only marketed commercial remedies during a period of growing interest in pharmaceutical matters, but also fashioned their own expertise as learned medical practitioners linking both theory and practice; head and hand; natural philosophy and practiced skill. In 1565 Venice’s apothecaries made their first effort to define their trade as a liberal profession in establishing a College of Apothecaries that lasted until 1804. Already by the turn of the eighteenth century, however, Venice’s apothecaries had adopted the moniker as “Public Professors” and engaged in dialogue with leading professors at Padua for plans to institute a new school of “experimental medical chemistry” with the prior of the apothecary college proposed as its first public demonstrator. Looking to a wide variety of statements on the urban pharmacy in Venice in published medical books, pharmacopeias, trade manuals, literary works, civic rituals and archival licensing and regulatory decrees, I trace the evolution of the public apothecary trade in Venice, paying particular attention to the pharmacy’s early modern materialization as a site of cultural and intellectual exchanges between the artisan workshop and the university world inhabited by scholars.

My readings of these sources lead to three important conclusions regarding the significance of apothecary retailing to the scientific culture of early modern Italy. First, the urban terrain of artisan practice in a merchant republic must be placed alongside the traditionally studied princely courts and universities as a fertile ground for dialogue between artisans and scholars in the study of nature. Second, apothecary investments in processing and retailing nature during this period made significant contributions to the material culture of early modern science in both mediating a growing pharmacopeia of exotic materials imported from around the globe, and in fashioning workshop models for the first university chemical laboratories instituted at Padua in the eighteenth century. And third, apothecary marketing strategies expressing their own medical expertise over nature’s materials articulated a fusion of textual learning and manual skill that offered some of the earliest profiles of the experimental practitioner that was eventually adopted in the public discourse of the experimental New Sciences by the latter seventeenth century.

In my dissertation, I attempt to demonstrate how both Romantic and Victorian literature and science came together to produce the idea of “objectivity.” Whereas prior naturalists had tended to embrace an epistemic ideal of what they called “truth to nature”—which involved manipulating observed phenomena to capture their underlying structure—I argue that philosophers of science soon came to recognise that this tendency distorted, instead of elucidated, the objects which they set out to study. In attempting to uncover the abstract form beneath material facts, scientists often ended up merely projecting their subjective beliefs onto nature itself. To prevent this epistemic misunderstanding, I suggest, philosophers began to emphasise the need for what they called “objectivity.” This meant attempting to regulate the unconscious biases of subjects through adopting both particular technologies—notably photographic reproduction—yet also mundane methods of self-regulation, including an emphasis on the need for reproducibility within observation. Through these different forms of epistemic self-restraint, which sought to remove personal belief from science, Romantic and Victorian authors thus attempted to capture the objective structure of nature.

This dissertation examines offers a corrective to the world polity theory of globalization, which posits increasing convergence on a single global cultural frame. In contrast, I suggest that national culture limits the adoption of "world culture" by actors and institutions. Instead of adopting world cultural models wholesale, they are adapted through a process I call translated global diffusion. In order to assess my theory, I follow the creation and development of organizations founded by Australia, Canada, and the United States to foster scientific development within their borders. All three national organizations were initiated around 1915, part of an international wave of state science that prima facie appears to support the world polity thesis.

Through a comparative historical analysis that combines archival material and secondary histories from each case, I demonstrate that concerns tied to national identity mediate the incorporation of models sanctioned as part of a "world cultural canopy" of institutional scripts. More specifically, federal legislatures circumscribe new organizations to fit preexisting ideas of proper government. Secondly, the scientists effectively running state science organizations negotiate often conflicting nationalistic and professional impulses. Finally, the national news media report about science in a selective and nationally filtered way. The result is a kind of particular universality, science layered with national import only fully visible from within the nation-state.

This dissertation makes sense of New Age healing practices and the spiritual currents undergirding the increasingly popular landscape of alternative healthcare. To do so, it argues, we must first determine its material ontology – the conception of materiality that shapes how New Agers understand and interact with the world around them, especially as it pertains to healing the human body using metaphysical tools. As such, it uses archival research, film analysis, and ethnography in the San Francisco Bay Area to uncover the development, not of the New Age religiosity or spirituality per se, but of its material ontology. What emerges is the primacy of musings about virtual matter, things unseen but nevertheless real as they are felt, evoked, and experienced. Things such as quantum phenomena, code, digital content, cosmic energies, chakras, auras, and ancestral DNA resonances. Within these musings lies the close relationship between techno-scientific advancements and metaphysical pursuits, which is why this dissertation is structured around exploring how quantum physics, computing, and cybertechnologies shape the New Age experience. In the New Age material ontology, the microscopic, the digital, and the supernatural can cooperate and be willed to heal, since all belong to a realm of virtuality that interacts with the physical world. This is possible because virtual matter is just matter hidden from the ocular sense, and all matter is subject to human will. Methodologically, this dissertation centralizes the human diversity within the New Age with a focused case study of Iranian-American healers, whose prominent presence in the alternative healthcare landscape demonstrates the importance of including immigrant communities in studies of American religion and culture, the diversity of New Age spirituality, and the prominence of racialized bodies in a movement largely known for being post-racial, universal, and progressive. Iranians also highlight healing in terms of their various subjectivities (national, political, and racial) and existential ailments, adding “homeland” and “lineage” the repertoire of virtual matter as metaphysical limbs of the body. Ultimately, this research contributes to the study of American religions, the anthropology of the body, science and technology studies, and inter-disciplinary conversations about materiality and the human condition.