Chemical 'canaries': Munitions workers in the First World War.

In the early twentieth century, scientific innovations permanently changed international warfare. As chemicals traveled out of laboratories into factories and military locations, war became waged at home as well as overseas. Large numbers of women were employed in munitions factories during the First World War, but their public memories have been overshadowed by men who died on battlefields abroad; they have also been ignored in traditional histories of chemistry that focus on laboratory-based research.

The past as a work in progress.

Originating as a presidential address during the seventieth birthday celebrations of the British Society for the History of Science, this essay reiterates the society's long-standing commitment to academic autonomy and international cooperation. Drawing examples from my own research into female scientists and doctors during the First World War, I explore how narratives written by historians are related to their own lives, both past and present. In particular, I consider the influences on me of my childhood reading, my experiences as a physics graduate who deliberately left the world of science, and my involvement in programmes to improve the position of women in science.

Pluralism versus Periodization.

In his ingenious bid to restore grand narratives, Frans van Lunteren misleadingly implies that there is a single story to tell about the past. In its favor, his nontrumphalist and metaphorical scheme encourages contextualization and emphasizes objects rather than theories or individuals. Unfortunately, he has selected an arbitrary starting point, and his four emblematic machines—the clock, the balance, the steam engine, the computer—do not bear equivalent relationships to the particular period they are held to represent.

WOMEN, SCIENCE AND SUFFRAGE IN WORLD WAR I.

World War I is often said to have benefited British women by giving them the vote and by enabling them to take on traditionally male roles, including ones in science, engineering and medicine. In reality, conventional hierarchies were rapidly re-established after the Armistice. Concentrating mainly on a small group of well-qualified scientific and medical women, marginalized at the time and also in the secondary literature, I review the attitudes they experienced and the work they undertook during and immediately after the war.

Newton shows the light: a commentary on Newton (1672) 'A letter … containing his new theory about light and colours…'.

Isaac Newton's reputation was initially established by his 1672 paper on the refraction of light through a prism; this is now seen as a ground-breaking account and the foundation of modern optics. In it, he claimed to refute Cartesian ideas of light modification by definitively demonstrating that the refrangibility of a ray is linked to its colour, hence arguing that colour is an intrinsic property of light and does not arise from passing through a medium. Newton's later significance as a world-famous scientific genius and the apparent confirmation of his experimental results have tended to obscure the realities of his reception at the time.

Rulers of the zodiac.

Everybody thinks they know what science is, but pinning down a definite time and place for its origins is more problematic.

Spying for the enlightenment.

According to Enlightenment ideology, knowledge was shared openly in the international Republic of Letters. In reality, the owners of lucrative new technologies were determined to keep their discoveries hidden from industrial spies.

Versions of vesalius.

Andreas Vesalius reformed anatomical knowledge and teaching in the Renaissance by adopting Galenic methods from the classical past. His careful drawings revealed the human body in unprecedented and realistic detail, but the images of himself were more ambiguous.

Of moas and men: Richard Owen's dinosaur dinner.

Victorian scientists boasted about their commitment to progress, cooperation and public education, but paleontology risked being torn apart by personal rivalries.

Joseph Priestley: Docter Phlogiston or Reverend Oxygen?

In propaganda material, people are often presented in black-and-white terms as either a villain or a hero. Although Joseph Priestley is denigrated for believing in the discredited substance phlogiston, he is also celebrated for discovering oxygen.

Minerva/Athene.

Minerva was the goddess of wisdom and war, the Roman equivalent of the Greek Pallas Athene. Like all mythical figures, she was repeatedly reinterpreted to carry different rhetorical messages.

Alessandro Volta and the politics of pictures.

An astute diplomat, Alessandro Volta secured the patronage of Napoleon Bonaparte to promote his rise to fame as an electrical expert. Reciprocally, politicians helped their own causes by presenting him as a national as well as a scientific figurehead.

Mathematical figures.

Renaissance philosophers believed that God had created a harmonious cosmos bonded together mathematically. This intellectual approach was also embraced by some artists, who incorporated complex numerical and geometrical symbolism within their portraits.

Cartesian visions.

Few original portraits exist of René Descartes, yet his theories of vision were central to Enlightenment thought. French philosophers combined his emphasis on sight with the English approach of insisting that ideas are not innate, but must be built up from experience. In particular, Denis Diderot criticised Descartes's views by describing how Nicholas Saunderson--a blind physics professor at Cambridge--relied on touch.

Morphological features of vasa vasorum in pathologically changed human great saphenous vein and its tributaries.

Background: The question whether the primary increase of vasa vasorum (VV) of venous wall (i) plays an initial role in varicogenesis or (ii) is an expression of impairment of the nutritional conditions in superficial veins of lower extremities is not unambiguously solved yet. The aim of the study was to describe the arrangement of the VV within the wall of the human great saphenous vein (GSV) qualitatively, and of its tributaries at different stages of varicosis and in other pathological states like thrombophlebitis or phlebosclerosis.

Material And Methods: 22 patients deserving an aorto-coronary bypass surgery or GSV surgery were subdivided into three groups according to the staging of their varices and other pathology.

Mary Somerville: a scientist and her ship.

Mary Somerville enjoyed posing for busts and portraits, yet just as in her autobiography, she chose how she wished to be seen. A powerful advocate for scientific progress, Somerville gave her name to a ship that carried British products around the world, and portrayed herself as an ideal role model for women and also an exemplar of European civilisation.

Looking for Aristotle.

Although Aristotle was often portrayed during the early modern period, his imagined appearance varied widely. When modern interpreters try to impose definitive meanings on pictures, they run the risk of overlooking symbolic resonances which can be just as significant as direct representation.

Alexander von Humboldt: a revolutionary explorer.

After he returned from his five-year expedition to the New World, Alexander von Humboldt promoted himself as a Romantic explorer. Although this image pervades British perceptions, political movements have fashioned different heroic versions of Humboldt in Germany and South America.

Baron Kelvin of Largs: an economical engineer.

William Thomson--honoured as Baron Kelvin of Largs--was Victorian Britain's most famous physicist, especially celebrated for laying the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. As well as profiting financially from his many engineering projects, Kelvin introduced influential theories about energy and electromagnetism, all strongly coloured by his industrial experiences and the thrifty attitudes of Scottish Christians. Never accepting radioactivity as an additional energy source to the sun, he insisted that the Earth's life span was far too short for evolution to have taken place.