Whewell’s Gazette
Your weekly digest of all the best of
Internet history of science, technology and medicine
Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell
Volume #22
Monday 17 November 2014
EDITORIAL:
“when you build up false history and false claims for the nation…it is not serving the nation, it is ridiculing the nation – “ – @irfhabib
Recent utterances by politicians have demonstrated the importance of a strong public understanding of the history of the sciences and related disciples (#histSTM). First we had the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a speech, as part of his extreme Hindu nationalist political programme, claiming that all sorts of modern science and medicine were known to the Hindus in Vedic times and are thus not discoveries of the Western World. He was slapped down fast enough by Indian historians and historian of science but his speech will undoubtedly have influenced many less knowledgeable Indians convincing them that the West has stolen their heritage. India did indeed make important contributions to the evolution of science, a fact that is often not adequately acknowledged in Western accounts of STM history but not the rubbish that Modi spouted.
This weekend saw a second outbreak of the falsification of STM history, this time exploration, for religious nationalist propaganda purposes by Turkey’s recently elected President and ex-prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In a speech delivered to South American Muslim leaders Erdoğan claimed that it wasn’t Columbus who discovered America but Muslims who sailed there in 1178. Erdoğan went on to claim, “Columbus mentions a mosque on a hill on the coast of Cuba”. This bizarre claim is not new but is based on an article from 1996 by the historian Youssef Mroueh. In fact the entry from Columbus’ journal merely describes a hill as having the form of a mosque.
Such attempts by politicians to interpret or even rewrite the history of science in the interest of their own religion or nationalist beliefs are nothing new. One only needs to think of the, in the meantime, more than two hundred year long dispute amongst nationalist as to whether Copernicus is German or Polish, a totally meaningless dispute with reference to the times in which he actually lived. One grotesque highpoint of this dispute was an imperial decree issued by the Nazi, unfortunately still in force in Germany, that the name Copernicus is to be spelt Kopernikus!
Nationalism has no place in STM history and all STM historians should feel obligated to fight against any attempts by politicians to rewrite STM history for propaganda purposes.
“Modern science is a conglomeration of different cultures and civilisations. All these contributions were marginalised due to politics.” @irfhabib – h/t@fadesingh
Let us reclaim STM history for the historians
PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:
Conciatore: Galileo and Glass Reprise
Irish Philosophy: John Stewart Bell: The Nature of Reality
John Stewart Bell
Space: Here’s a Thirty-Year History of Getting Closer to Comets
Atomic Heritage Foundation: Remembering Veterans who worked on the Manhattan Project
AIP: The Centennial of Einstein’s 1915 Theory of General Relativity
Huff Post Business: What I Learned from Einstein: The Importance of Culture
Symmetry: The November Revolution
Burton Richter & Sam Ting
Courtesy of: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:
Yovisto: Dr Livingstone, I presume?
Medievalist.net: Recovering the lost details of a medieval map
Yovisto: Louis Antoine de Bougainville and his Voyage Around the World
Bougainville reaching Tahiti
MEDICINE:
The Conversation: How a painful operation inspired the 18th-century equivalent of a horror movie soundtrack
Royal College of Physicians: Not suitable for vegetarians
The Women’s Blog: No. no, no! Victorians didn’t invent the vibrator
Wonders & Marvels: The history of tampons – in ancient Greece?
Four Nations History: Unions and unions: science and medicine in and around Irland, England and Scotland, 1850-1900
The Generous Georgian: Dr Richard Mead: The Foundling Laboratory: inoculation and experimentation
Early Modern Practitioners: Researching Medical Practitioners in Early Modern Ireland
William Petty, c. 1650.
Image Wikipedia Commons
Wellcome Library: Researching medicine in recipe books
Medievalist.net: Healthy Eating in the Middle Ages: the Tacuinum Sanitatis
Yovisto: Dorothea Erxleben – Germany’s First Female Medical Doctor
Dorothea Christiane Erxleben
(1715 – 1762)
Centre for Medical Humanities: Hippocrates Electric: Invoking the ‘Father of Medicine’ in the 21st Century
Slate: 19th-Century Classified Ads for Abortifacients and Contraceptives
CHEMISTRY:
The Recipes Project: Topazes, Emeralds, and Crystal Rubies. The Faking and Making of Precious Stones
Fig. 3 The coloring of stones
The Artery: Science of Art Conservation in U. S. Began With One Man’s Collection of Colors at Harvard
Conciatore: Lake of Flowers
EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:
The Embryo Project: Roy John Britten (1919–2012)
National Museum of Natural History Unearthed: Colored Diamonds from Rio Tinto: The Rough Cut
Yovisto: Robert Morison and the Classification of Plants
The Embryo Project: Francis Maitland Balfour
JSTOR Daily: Animals in the Archive
Geschichte der Geologie: Geologie in Alten Ägypten
Pitt Rivers Museum: A Well-Documented Life: James Arthur Harley (1873-1943)
Nautilus: Cloudy With a Chance of War
Palaeoblog: Died This Day: William Lonsdale
Free Thought Blog: Darwin’s Geological Sense of Humour
The Public Domain Review: Nature Through Microscope and Camera (1909)
Spitalfields Life: A Garden for Thomas Fairchild
TECHNOLOGY:
BBC: Joan Clarke, woman who cracked Enigma cyphers with Alan Turing
The Pianola Institute: The Pleyela, Pleyel-Pleyela and Auto-Pleyela
Psychology Today: Hive Mind: Oh “Hedy” Days of Youth!
BBC: The story of the ‘most complicated’ watch in the world
Unmaking the Bomb: The Visible Atomic Bomb
Science Museum: Cometarium
Cometarium, by W and S Jones, London, a model designed to show the change in motion of a comet as it moves closer and then further away from the Sun according to Newton’s theory of gravity. Front 3/4 view of whole object (without lid) against graduated grey background.
British Library: English and Drama Blog: History at Stake! The Story Behind Vampire Slaying Kits
Internet Society: Brief History of the Internet
META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:
Leaping Robot: Science (and Science History) for the Public
The University of Glasgow Story: Sir William Thompson Baron Kelvin of Largs
The Nation: Apostles of Growth
BBC: Materials book wins Royal Society Winton Prize
Historyonics: Big Data, Small Data and Meaning
The Trickster Prince: Big histories, small minds
Scientific American: Google Scholar Pioneer Reflects on the Academic Search Engine’s Future
AIP: Center for History of Physics: History Center Welcomes New Historian
The Recipe Project: Exploring CPP 10a214: Overlapping Territories
The Dutch in Kerala (knowledge transfer)
American Science: HSS Recap Part 1: Visibility and Invisibility
American Science: HSS Recap Part 2: Humans, Pain, and Philosophy
American Science: SHOT Recap: Innovation, Risk, and Magic
Joanne Bailey Muses on History: The role of nostalgia in forging family life
Medical Heritage Library: Year One of “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library” Is Complete!
Emlio Segrè Visual Archive (History of Physics)
Arms and the Medical Man: What counted as knowledge before the First World War?
Guardian: Bible edges out Darwin as ‘most valuable to humanity’ in survey of influential books
The Physics arXiv Blog: The Extraordinary Growing Impact of the History of Science
University of Cambridge: Sachiko Kusukawa wins Pfizer Prize for “Picturing the Book of Nature”
The Current: A Visionary Accomplishment
W. Patrick McCray
Photo Credit:
Brian W. Robb
The History of Moden Biomedicine: The Recent History of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
Martin Grandjean: [Twitter Studies] Re-writing history in 140 characters
Nautilus: Einstein Among the Daffodils
The Guardian: Jacqueline Stedall obituary
Back Channel: The Man Who Made The UK Say “I’m Sorry For What We Did To Turing”
Method Science in the Making: Issue 1 Boundaries
Literacy of the Present: The Autonomous Science Machine
SHOT: Plenary Lecture: How does one do the History of Technology? David E. Nye (PDF)
ESOTERIC:
Brian Regal: Richard Owen and the sea-serpent (PDF)
Conciatore: Benedetto Vanda
View of Badia Fiesolana – Gaspar Van Wittel called ‘Vanvitelli’ (1652/3-1736)
Heterodoxology: Rosicrucian quadricentennary at the BPH
BOOK REVIEWS:
Guardian: Seven Elements That Have Changed the World by John Browne
Popular Science: About Time – Adam Frank
NEW BOOKS:
D. Lamb: Pathologist of the Mind: Adolf Meyer and the Origins of American Psychiatry
OUP: Classical Philosophy: A history of philosophy without any gaps, Volume 1
Brill: The Making of Copernicus
Princeton University Press: Patrick McCray’s “The Visioneers” win HSS award.
Historiens de la santé: Gender and Class in English Asylums, 1890-1914
teleskopos: Maskelyne: Astronomer Royal – book now available
Historiens de la santé: Art of Vesalius
THEATRE:
FILM:
The Guardian: Alan Turing’s name restored with film about his work, life and identity
Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing with Keira Knightley as Joan Clarke in The Imitation Game. Photograph: Allstar/Black Bear Pictures
EQ View: The Imitation Game – Review
TELEVISION:
TVMOLE: Greenlit: Tomorrow’s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction, BBC2
Medievalist.net: High-Tech Feudalism: Warrior Culture and Science Fiction TV
VIDEOS:
Youtube: Stuff Matters by Mark Miodownik
Youtube: The Quantum Indians
Youtube: Accidental Discoveries That Changed the World – Reactions
RADIO:
PODCASTS:
NPR: Remembering Hedy Lamarr: Actress, Weapons Systems Developer
ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Cambridge University Library: Cambridge Seminars in the History of Cartography 2014-2015
Historiens de la santé: Institut Pasteur Paris: Conference: Les Instituts Pasteur au Maghreb, des origins aux indépendances 27 November 2014
The Renaissance Diary: 2nd CfP: 6th Norwegian Conference on the history of Science Oslo 11-13 February 2015
Race and Ethnicity in the Global South: Warwick Awarded at history of Science Society
Educating Women: CfP: Women’s History in the Digital World 2015
CHoM News: Colloquium on the History of Psychiatry and Medicine
“Making the Suicidal Object: Sympathy and Surveillance in the American Asylum” 20
British Library: Exhibition: Lines in the ice: Seeking the Northwest Passage
Lines in the Ice British Library Exhibition
University of Aveiro Portugal: CfP: Chemical Biography in the 21st Century 9-12 September 2015
Royal Holloway University of London: CfP: 2015 Annual Conference of the Oral History Society
Royal Museums Greenwich: CfP: The Emergence of a Maritime Nation: Britain in the Tudor and Stuart Age, 1485–1714
Advances in the History of Psychology: Nov 24 Talk! BPS History of Psych Disciplines Seminar Series
BSHS: CfP: British Society for the History of Science Annual Conference, 2015
2-5 July 2015, Swansea University
H-Net: CfP: Gendering Science, Prague 4-6 June 2015 Abstracts due 15 December 2014
The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami annual graduate student conference, CfP: “Born-Digital: Reformatting Humanities in the 21st Century” March 20-21, 2015.
Greenwich Maritime Institute: CfP. New Researchers in Maritime History Conference 10-11 April 2015 University of Greenwich
The Royal Institution: Lecture: The history of the Christmas Lectures Wednesday 19 November
Society for the Social History of Medicine: Roy Porter Student Essay Prize Competition
Manchester Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine: CfP: Stories about science: exploring science communication and entertainment media 4-5 June 2015
The Renaissance Diary: CfP: Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World, 1400–1800
LOOKING FOR WORK?
Horniman Museum & Gardens: Jobs
Oxford Brookes University Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Department of History, Philosophy and Religion To mark its 150th Anniversary, Oxford Brookes University is pleased to offer a number of full-time PhD Studentships across a range of subject areas in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, starting in January 2015
Museum for Science and Industry in Manchester: Associate Curator of Science and Technology
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Geologie “im” Alten Ägypten not “in”