The Americas in the Advancement of European Science and Medicine, 1500-1830
2009 Annual Seminar
Tuesday, August 4
Session 1: Conceiving the Atlantic World: The Ocean and the Regions
Chair: Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
Carla Lois, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Buenos Aires, “From Mare Tenebrorum to Atlantic Ocean: Creating the modern Atlantic World through Cartographical Writing (1470-1800)”
Anya Zilberstein, Concordia University, “Cold Comfort: The Biogeography of Northern America”
Session 2: Creoles and Science: Political Cartography and Comets
Chair: Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
Lina del Castillo, Iowa State University, “Geographies of Independence: Criollo Representations of Gran Colombia and Their (Re)-presentations in a Changing Atlantic World, 1819-1830”
Marcelo Aranda, Stanford University, “Comets, Colonies, and Bequests: the Instrumentalism of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora”
Wednesday, August 5
Session 3: Scientific Expeditions
Chair: Neil Safier, University of British Columbia
Helen Cowie, University of Warwick, “Sloth Bones and Anteater Tongues: Interpreting American Nature in the Hispanic World (1750-1808)”
Marcelo Figueroa, European University Institute, Florence, “Natural History, Collecting Practices and Colonial Power: the Malaspina Expedition in the River Plate (1789)”
Thursday, August 6
Session 4: Epidemiology I
Chair: Londa Schiebinger, Stanford University
Bertie Mandelblatt, Université de Montréal, “‘On the Excellence of the Vegetable Diet’: Poissonnier-Desperrières’s New Naval Diet and French Colonial Science in the Atlantic World”
Adrián López-Denis, Brown University, “Communities of Immunity in the Iberian Atlantic World”
Session 5: Vernacular Medicine: Native Skills
Chair: Londa Schiebinger, Stanford University
Ryan Kashanipour, University of Arizona “A Medicinal Mélange: The Circulation of Medical Knowledge in Colonial Yucatán”
Kathleen Murphy, California Polytechnic State University, “Useful Hints and Vulgar Errors: Vernacular Knowledge and Natural History in Eighteenth-Century British Plantation Societies”
Teresa Vergara, University of San Marcos, Lima, “Indian Medical Knowledge and the Establishment of the Chair of Medicine and Surgery in the University of San Marcos, Lima 1792-1814”
Friday, August 7
Session 6: Epidemiology II
Chair: Mark Peterson, University of California at
Katherine Arner, Johns Hopkins University, “Making Yellow Fever American: America, Great Britain and the Transatlantic Travails of Yellow Fever, 1793-1810”
Claire Gherini, Johns Hopkins University, “Rationalizing Disease: James Atlantic Struggles with Localism and Custom in Inoculation”
Session 7: Religion and Science
Chair: Mark Peterson, University of California at Berkeley
Sarah Irving, Florida State University, “America, Christian Charity and the Origins of Modern Science”
Christopher Parsons, University of Toronto, “‘I report only what I have learned from my savages’: Ginseng, Missionaries and the French Encounter with the Indigenous Knowledges of North America”
Saturday, August 8
Session 8: Drugs: Trees and Plants, Quina and Snakeroot
Chair: Bernard Bailyn, Harvard University
Matthew Crawford, Kent State University, “European Science as ‘Vain Science’: The Contentious Knowledge Production in the Spanish Atlantic circa 1779”
Melissa Grafe, Lehigh University, “‘An Almost Infallible Remedy’: Seneka Snakeroot, Medical Practice, and the Circulation of Knowledge in World”
Monday, August 10
Session 9: Technology
Chair: Antonio Barrera, Colgate University
Joseph Cullon, Dartmouth College, “‘Geometrically and Arithmetically Performed’: Rationalizing English Ship Design in the Era of Colonization”
Eric Otremba, University of Minnesota, “Inventing Ingenios: Experimental Philosophy and the Secret Sugarmakers of the English Atlantic, 1640-1700”
Session 10: Biogeography: Concepts of the Body and of the Localization of Disease
Chair: Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University
Heather Peterson, University of Texas at Austin, “The Body in New World Contexts: Corporeal Imaginings Spain at the Turn of the Seventeenth Century”
Emily Senior, University of Warwick, “The Diagnostics of Description: Medical Landscape Aesthetics in the British Caribbean”
Tuesday, August 11
Session 11: Bullets and Birds: Theories of Nature’s Mysteries
Chair: Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University
Kelly Wisecup, University of Maryland, “ ‘Invisible Bullets,’ Empirical Medical Knowledge, and Literary Form in Thomas Hariot’s Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588)”
Iris Montero Sobrevilla, University of Cambridge, “Lessons from a Sleeping Beauty: Hummingbird Torpor and Natural Historical Knowledge in the Early Modern Period”
Session 12: Issues and Conclusions