During the early 1870s a young zoologist who worked as a Privatdozent delivering lectures at different Prussian universities invested much of his family wealth and solicited his fellows' contributions to establish a research facility by the sea. The young zoologist happened to be called Anton Dohrn. From the time it opened its doors, the Anton Dohrn Zoological Station – or Naples Zoological Station, as it was originally called – played a crucial role in shaping life sciences as it facilitated research aimed at explaining the mechanics of inheritance. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, zoologists attempted to explain how evolutionary changes occur within a population and become stabilized. In so doing, they looked at developmental processes as well as environmental pressure, coming up with different hypotheses to explain inheritance. In some cases, their research was highly speculative, whereas in other cases they conducted cytological observations to identify the material basis of heredity. Research on evolution and development has been carried out in different places, and zoological stations like the one in Naples have played a major role in this story. However, numerous biological institutions active at the turn of the twentieth century have not received much attention from historians.

Animals played an important role in the formation of psychoanalysis as a theoretical and therapeutic enterprise. They are at the core of texts such as Freud's famous case histories of Little Hans, the Rat Man, or the Wolf Man. The infantile anxiety triggered by animals provided the essential link between the psychology of individual neuroses and the ambivalent status of the “totem” animal in so-called primitive societies in Freud's attempt to construct an anthropological basis for the Oedipus complex in Totem and Taboo. In the following, we attempt to track the status of animals as objects of indirect observation as they appear in Freud's classical texts, and in later revisionist accounts such as Otto Rank's Trauma of Birth and Imre Hermann's work on the clinging instinct. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Freudian conception of patients' animal phobias is substantially revised within Hermann's original psychoanalytic theory of instincts which draws heavily upon ethological observations of primates. Although such a reformulation remains grounded in the idea of “archaic” animal models for human development, it allows to a certain extent to empiricize the speculative elements of Freud's later instinct theory (notably the death instinct) and to come to a more embodied account of psychoanalytic practice.

In the 1940s–50s, one of the most central questions in psychological research related to the nature of neurosis. In the final years of the Second World War and the following decade, neurosis became one of the most prominent psychiatric disorders, afflicting a high proportion of military casualties and veterans. The condition became central to the concerns of several psychological fields, from psychoanalysis to Pavlovian psychology. This paper reconstructs the efforts of Chicago psychiatrist Jules Masserman to study neurosis in the laboratory during the 1940s and 1950s. Masserman used Pavlovian techniques in a bid to subject this central psychoanalytic subject to disciplined scientific experimentation. More generally, his project was an effort to bolster the legitimacy of psychoanalysis as a human science by articulating a convergence of psychoanalytic categories across multiple species. Masserman sought to orchestrate a convergence of psychological knowledge between fields that were often taken to be irreconcilable. A central focus of this paper is the role of moving images in this project, not only as a means of recording experimental data but also as a rhetorical device. The paper argues that for Masserman film played an important role in enabling scientific observers (and then subsequent viewers) to see agency and emotion in the animals they observed.

Animals are “in” – since prehistoric times when humans (or their ancient ancestors) were hunting animals, and when they fabricated the Paleolithic dog as well as the Paleolithic cat. In less general terms, animals are “in” since they received names and were listed, observed, mummified, turned into totems, and, later on, dissected, tortured under laboratory conditions, trained as experimental subjects or “purified” as model organisms. And they are massively “in” again, but now from overtly legal and moral points of view, at least since the last two decades of the twentieth century. This is to say that modern members of the species Homo sapiens have always been connected to animals of the most various kinds – from the human flea (Pulex irritans) and the cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis) to marine mammals, such as dolphins and whales, from horses to parrots, from scallops to worms, and so on.

In recent decades, through the work of Jane Goodall and other ethologists, the practice of giving personal names to nonhuman animals who are the subjects of scientific research has become associated with claims about animal personhood and scientific objectivity. While critics argue that such naming practices predispose the researcher toward anthropomorphism, supporters suggest that it sensitizes the researcher to individual differences and social relations. Both critics and supporters agree that naming tends to be associated with the recognition of individual animal rights. The history of the naming of research animals since the late nineteenth century shows, however, that the practice has served a variety of purposes, most of which have raised few ethical or epistemological concerns. Names have been used to identify research animals who play dual roles as pets, workers, or patients, to enhance their market value, and to facilitate their identification in the field. The multifaceted history of naming suggests both that the use of personal names by Goodall and others is less of a radical break with previous practices than it might first appear to be and that the use of personal names to recognize the individuality, sentience, or rights of nonhuman animals faces inherent limits and contradictions.

This paper aims to understand the emergence of comparative anatomy in the eighteenth century in the Parisian Académie Royale des Sciences. As early as the 1670s, a program centered on animal anatomy was conceived, which was a first attempt to give some autonomy to studies on animals and to link anatomy with natural history, but it declined after 1690. However, a variety of studies on animals was published in the Mémoires of the Académie during the eighteenth century. We propose a descriptive typology of them in order to explore the status of animals and the significance of anatomy in each type, and to determine, in particular, which elements of Perrault's program were passed on at the Académie throughout the century. We discuss the influence of this legacy on the development of comparative anatomy after 1750, especially in Daubenton's work.

For geologists and antiquaries of the late 1850s debates over ancient stone tools were frustrated by a lack of accepted criteria. The artefacts were hard to interpret. It was not self-evident how to judge whether they were ancient or modern, natural or man-made; or indeed whether stone tools could pre-date the use of metal tools at all. Antiquary and papermaker John Evans provided a system that offered to resolve these issues. His criteria and his use of re-enactment, making his own stone implements, gained acceptance among flint experts across fluid disciplinary boundaries and enabled authoritative interpretations of the underdetermined objects. This paper explores how Evans drew on the concerns of his industrial culture to make sense of prehistoric artefacts and support his claim to access the past through his own actions. Situated industrial concerns provided the resources for his flint work: from a patent dispute with astronomer and fellow industrialist Warren de la Rue, through his role in the Victorian arms trade, to the struggle to displace skilled manual labour in his factories. Evans is remembered for pioneering the techniques and classificatory system of modern Palaeolithic archaeology and as one of the founders of the re-enactment science of experimental flint knapping. His work played a significant role in helping reconceive the antiquity of man, yet the system of proof for this grand claim was deeply situated in his industrial culture. This paper explores how the industrial resources of a Victorian papermaker made human history.