Traces on a Muddy Shore. Science and religion in Colonial and Early Independent Río de la Plata.

This paper is intended as a contribution to the study of science and religion in late modern Catholic societies. I explore the treatment of natural philosophy vis-à-vis religious (Roman Catholic) authority, the teaching of Biblical geology, and the use of natural theology in texts from Río de la Plata in the transition from late colonial to early independent times (1770-1815). After reviewing the assimilation of modern science into scholastic teaching and the articulation of reason and religious authority, the article considers the handling of the early history of the Earth in the theses of scholastic teachers and in the geological memoirs of the naturalist priest from Montevideo Dámaso Larrañaga.

Science, Catholicism and politics in Argentina (1910-1935).

In fin de siècle Argentina a secularist ideology of science was part of the positivist world view espoused by liberals and socialists. Between the years 1910 and 1935, a period in which the Catholic Church experienced a significant cultural expansion, the activities of the Catholic naturalist Ángel Gallardo and the astronomer and priest Fortunato Devoto challenged the so far prevailing idea of science as opposed to religion. This paper explores the connections between the scientific, religious and political aspects of those figures in order to get some insights into the complexity of the relationships between science and secularization in societies with a Catholic majority.

The experiments of Ramón M. Termeyer SJ on the electric eel in the River Plate region (c. 1760) and other early accounts of Electrophorus electricus.

This paper focuses on Ramón M. Termeyer SJ (1737-1814?), a naturalist who experimented with the electric eel in the River Plate region during the 1760s. After going through an enumeration of the chroniclers that since the sixteenth century noticed the benumbing discharge of Electrophorus electricus, the article summarizes the work that immediately preceded Termeyer's and considers as a term of comparison the experiments on the electric eel performed by Bertrand Bajon (fl.

Henry Sigerist and the history of medicine in Latin America: his correspondence with Juan R. Beltran.

During the years of World War II, the American Association for the History of Medicine fostered a Pan-American policy aimed at establishing relationships with Latin American historians of medicine. Juan R. Beltrán, professor of history of medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, also pursued an energetic program of academic diplomacy.