The History of Science, Medicine, and Technology is an ever-expanding discipline. This two-day conference allows Oxford postgraduate students in the field to present their research, covering a broad chronological, geographic, and thematic scope. Panel topics range from early modern ideas to public health, with individual papers covering subjects as diverse as reproductive technology, honeybee diseases and twentieth-century scepticism about science – truly offering new perspectives, as questions fundamental to the history of science and medicine are explored and examined.
All welcome. Admission and lunch are free, but registration is essential. To register please contact belinda.clark@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk by 14:00 31 May.
Programme:
Thursday, 7 June
09:45-10:00
Registration
10:00-10:10
Opening Remarks: Rob Iliffe, Professor of the History of Science, Oxford
10:10-11:20
Session One – Early Modern Natural Philosophy
Natasha Bailey, “The strange force of fascination”: Alexander Ross and natural philosophy
Lucia Bucciarelli, Disseminating scientific knowledge: the role of discipleship in the early modern period
Michelle Pfeffer, Heterodoxy and historical argument: the physician William Coward studies the soul
Chair: Rob Iliffe
11:20-11:40
Tea/Coffee
11:40-12:50
Session Two – Modern Science
Constance Hardesty, Who decides? Public opinion versus the Royal Society in the eighteenth-century lightning rod controversy
Johann Gaebler, Calculus of the mind: George Boole and The Laws of Thought
Patrick Lee, Stellar Atmospheres: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, historical receptions, and ascribing scientific priority
Chair: Michelle Pfeffer
12:50-13:50
Lunch
13:50-15:00
Session Three – Sexuality, Reproduction and Eugenics
Alicja Howard, The sex glands: paradigms of sexuality and gender in the quest for rejuvenation
Nick Logan, Overcorrecting cruel science in post-war America
Angela Yu, Frozen futures: “reproduction without sex” and the single girl
Chair: John Shepherd
15:00-15:20
Tea/Coffee
15:20-16:30
Session Four – Psychology and Criminality
John Shepherd, Tracing the criminal subject: theories of crime and the practice of prevention in Berkeley, California, c.1910-40
Alexandra Ackland-Snow, Surgical, chemical, psychological, behavioural: the concept of “restraint” in the medicalisation of paedophilia in the twentieth century
Henry-James Meiring, Politics and psychoanalysis in Africa: the birth and death of institutional psychoanalysis in South Africa, 1929-50
Chair: Angela Yu
16:30-16:50
Closing Remarks: Sloan Mahone, Associate Professor of the History of Medicine, Oxford
Friday, 8 June
09:50-10:00
Opening Remarks: Erica Charters, Associate Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Oxford Centre for Global History, Oxford
10:00-11:10
Session Five – Health and Colonialism
Rhiannon Bertaud-Gandar, Sharing sanitary intelligence in the Red Sea, ca. 1865-1914
Ho Hee Cho, British-Commonwealth initiatives in international medical cooperation and the Second World War
Frank Vitale IV, Counting Carlisle’s casualties: multiple methods for measuring mortality at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918
Chair: Ethan Friederich
11:10-11:40
Tea/Coffee
11:40-12:30
Session Six – Medicine and Disease Control
Ethan Friederich, Plantations, policy and public health: a history of malaria in Assam 1919-39
Josefine Lochen, The World Health Organization, leprosy and the saga of multidrug therapy
Chair: Frank Vitale IV
12:30-12:45
Closing Remarks: Mark Harrison, Professor of the History of Medicine andDirector of theWellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford
