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Germs, infections, and the erratic 'natural laboratory' of Antarctica: from Operation Snuffles to the Killer Kleenex.
Med Hist
January 2025
University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK.
Historians have written copiously about the shift to 'germ theories' of disease around the turn of the twentieth century, but in these accounts an entire continent has been left out: Antarctica. This article begins to rebalance our historiography by bringing cold climates back into the story of environmental medicine and germ theory. It suggests three periods of Antarctic (human) microbial research - heroic sampling, systematic studies, and viral space analogue - and examines underlying ideas about 'purity' and infection, the realities of fieldwork, and the use of models in biomedicine.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Lady and the Plants: Two Notions of Teleology in Agnes Arber's Philosophy of Plants.
J Hist Biol
January 2025
Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany.
Agnes Arber (1879-1960) was a British plant morphologist, historian of botany, and philosopher of biology. Though now largely forgotten, her work offers valuable insights into morphological as well as philosophical issues. This paper focuses on Arber's work on teleology in plants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHistorical and Psychological Authenticity.
Psychoanal Rev
December 2024
6170 A1A South, Unit 212, St. Augustine, FL 32080, E-mail:
In this reflection the author examines the question of authenticity in the culture and in his own experience as a historian and psychoanalyst. His vantage points are death and totalism, the nature of facts, and the spiritual and psychological access to truth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStirring the Pot: Antoine Baumé, Josiah Wedgwood, Pierre-Louis Guinand, and the Development of Optical Glass.
Ambix
November 2024
Independent Researcher, Briarcliff Manor, NY, USA.
The development of defect-free flint glass for use in telescopes and navigational instruments was a key technological challenge facing European chemists, natural philosophers, and artisans that emerged in the 1750s. In 1805, Pierre-Louis Guinand, a Swiss artisan, invented a fireclay stirrer used to stir molten flint glass to create a homogenous mixture relatively free of defects. In this paper, I show it was not Guinand, but French chemist Antoine Baumé, who first came up with the idea of using a fireclay stirrer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe modern synthesis and "Progress" in evolution: a view from the journal literature.
Hist Philos Life Sci
November 2024
Institut supérieur de philosophie, Université catholique de Louvain, Place du Cardinal Mercier 14, 1348, Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium.
The concept of "progress" in evolutionary theory and its relationship to a putative notion of "Progress" in a global, normatively loaded sense of "change for the better" have been the subject of debate since Darwin admonished himself in a marginal note to avoid using the terms 'higher' and 'lower.' While an increase in some kind of complexity in the natural world might seem self-evident, efforts to explicate this trend meet notorious philosophical difficulties. Numerous historians pin the Modern Synthesis as a pivotal moment in this history; Michael Ruse even provocatively hypothesizes that Ernst Mayr and other "architects" of the Synthesis worked actively to eliminate Progress from evolutionary biology's scientific purview.
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