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10306 results in History of science: general interest

Page 158 of 516

  • BJH volume 46 issue 3 Cover and Back matter

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 46 / Issue 3 / September 2013
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    15 August 2013, pp. b1-b3
    Print publication:
    September 2013
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  • BJH volume 46 issue 3 Cover and Front matter

  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 46 / Issue 3 / September 2013
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    15 August 2013, pp. f1-f2
    Print publication:
    September 2013
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  • Savage numbers and the evolution of civilization in Victorian prehistory

  • MICHAEL J. BARANY
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 47 / Issue 2 / June 2014
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    09 August 2013, pp. 239-255
    Print publication:
    June 2014

  • This paper identifies ‘savage numbers’ – number-like or number-replacing concepts and practices attributed to peoples viewed as civilizationally inferior – as a crucial and hitherto unrecognized body of evidence in the first two decades of the Victorian science of prehistory. It traces the changing and often ambivalent status of savage numbers in the period after the 1858–1859 ‘time revolution’ in the human sciences by following successive reappropriations of an iconic 1853 story from Francis Galton's African travels. In response to a fundamental lack of physical evidence concerning prehistoric men, savage numbers offered a readily available body of data that helped scholars envisage great extremes of civilizational lowliness in a way that was at once analysable and comparable, and anecdotes like Galton's made those data vivid and compelling. Moreover, they provided a simple and direct means of conceiving of the progressive scale of civilizational development, uniting societies and races past and present, at the heart of Victorian scientific racism.

  • Writing, printing, speaking: Rhesus blood-group genetics and nomenclatures in the mid-twentieth century

  • JENNY BANGHAM
  • Journal:
    The British Journal for the History of Science / Volume 47 / Issue 2 / June 2014
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 August 2013, pp. 335-361
    Print publication:
    June 2014
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  • In the 1940s and 1950s, British and American journals published a flood of papers by doctors, pathologists, geneticists and anthropologists debating the virtues of two competing nomenclatures used to denote the Rhesus blood groups. Accounts of this prolonged and often bitter episode have tended to focus on the main protagonists' personalities and theoretical commitments. Here I take a different approach and use the literature generated by the dispute to recover the practical and epistemic functions of nomenclatures in genetics. Drawing on recent work that views inscriptions as part of the material culture of science, I use the Rhesus controversy to think about the ways in which geneticists visualized and negotiated their objects of research, and how they communicated and collaborated with workers in other settings. Extending recent studies of relations between different media, I consider the material forms of nomenclatures, as they were jotted in notebooks, printed in journals, scribbled on blackboards and spoken out loud. The competing Rhesus nomenclatures had different virtues as they were expressed in different media and made to embody commitments to laboratory practices. In exploring the varied practical and epistemic qualities of nomenclatures I also suggest a new understanding of the Rhesus controversy itself.

Page 158 of 516