History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Postgraduate Conference 2018

With panels on:

  • Early modern natural philosophy
  • Modern science
  • Psychology
  • Public health and colonialism
  • Reproduction and eugenics

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 and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford