A review of Causality in Medicine with Particular Reference to the Viral Causation of Cancers, by Brendan Clarke. Brendan Clarke tackles one of the main and most controversial issues both in general philosophy of science and in the philosophy of medicine, that is causation. His remarkably clear and detailed analysis takes cancer research as a privileged standpoint, focusing on how we are to conceive the modeling of a causal nexus when dealing with the viral etiology of cancer. Reflections in philosophy of science are here substantiated by specific examples, described with great historical and medical precision. Clarke’s doctoral thesis is...

A review of Post-Industrial Engineering: Computer Science and the Organization of White-Collar Work, 1945-1975, by Andrew Mamo. How might historians contextualize the way that the differently constituted groups of society conceive of computers and computing, without falling into the trap of understanding the development of computing machines as the culmination of our search for pure rational thought from Plato to Descartes to Leibnitz to Babbage — as several computing pioneers themselves did? One way might be to simply follow the money, akin to Paul Forman’s work on post-War physics, namely showing that the money for most computing...

A review of The Herschels: A Scientific Family in Training, by Emily Winterburn. William Herschel and his family have long been subjects of interest for historians and popularizers. The Herschels were blessed with uncommon longevity: two event-filled centuries elapsed from the time of William’s birth in 1738 to the death of his youngest grandchild in 1939. The lives of the notable among them (William, his sister Caroline and son John) were rife with exciting tales of adventure, discovery and royal patronage that provided lessons on the value of adaptability, devotion and hard work. They endowed the public record with vast catalogues of...

A review of “A Healthy Child Comes from a Healthy Mother”: Mwanamugimu and Nutritional Science in Uganda, 1935-1973, by Jennifer Tappan. The dissertation examines the science of nutrition, its development and establishment from the 1930s through to the 1970s, through a focus on the research and interventions developed around kwashiorkor among children in the Baganda kingdom of Uganda. In doing so it examines the relations between nutritional research in Uganda and the rise of international medicine, arguing against the dominant narrative of the post-war period as one in which public health was focused solely on narrow technical and...

A review of Shaping Science with the Past: Textbooks, History, and the Disciplining of Genetics, by Jeffrey Skopek. In your high school biology class, did you read about the nineteenth-century monk Gregor Mendel carefully tending his pea experiments? Perhaps you used Punnett Squares to plot out the ratios of inherited dominant and recessive genes over several generations. These uses of history in genetics are neither isolated nor incidental, Jeffrey Skopek contends in his dissertation Shaping Science with the Past: Textbooks, History, and the Disciplining of Genetics. Rather, Skopek argues that various forms of writing involving history...

A review of Plantation Technocrats: A Social History of Knowledge in the Slaveholding Atlantic World, 1830-1865, by Daniel Rood It would be impossible to deny the role of slavery in the development of modern industrial capitalism. Slave colonies provided Europe with sugar and tobacco, with a source of labor, with a place to send its surplus population, and with an investment upon which to build merchant fortunes. But as Dan Rood points out in his ambitious Plantation Technocrats, in all accounts of slavery as an economic system it “prefigures, foreshadows, and props up, but is always prior-to or other-than ‘true’ capitalism” (p. 14),...

A review of Object Lessons: Sensory Science Education, 1830-1870, by Melanie Keene. Historically science popularization was often viewed as a top down model of diffusion from those who knew and did science to those who did not. That approach has become increasingly untenable over the past decade or two, especially when applied to the Victorian era. What has become increasingly clear is that science was practiced by people of different social classes, in many different contexts, and with many different purposes in mind — from natural theology’s study of nature to gain knowledge of the Divine to a political economy inspired study of nature...

A review of Harnessing Non-Modernity: A Case Study of Artificial Life, by Christine Aicardi. Twenty-five years in, and Artificial Life soldiers on, a research field bent toward that receding horizon practitioners like to term “life.” In her ambitious doctoral thesis, Christine Aicardi offers readers a grand tour of a big, noisy, and heterogeneous community of researchers who build and operate robotic and virtual computational systems in order to probe the characteristics of life in digital media. Neither an ethnographic account nor a bird’s-eye view of a dispersed discipline, Aicardi maps the terrain of ALife research. She then zooms...

A review of The Hunter’s Gaze: Charles Darwin and the Role of Dogs and Sport in Nineteenth Century Natural History, by David Allan Feller. In The Hunter’s Gaze: Charles Darwin and the Role of Dogs and Sport in Nineteenth Century Natural History, David Feller analyzes the role of dogs in the formation of Darwin’s scientific career and the formulation of his theories. Feller argues that Darwin acquired all that he needed from the dogs with which he shared his life, from his earliest years in the dog-and-gun culture of the Shropshire gentry, through his supposedly wasted years at university, all the way to the study at Down House and the...

A review of Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: School Meals and Nutrition Policy in the United States, 1900-1946, by Andrew R. Ruis. To paint in broad generalizations, few if any have good things to say about the food served in public schools. Andrew R. Ruis, in Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: School Meals and Nutrition Policy in the United States, 1900-1946, examines why this is the case through his history of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP). This dissertation addresses a major gap in the scholarship on the NSLP. Despite the prominence of educational and nutritional debates at both local and national levels, scholars have given...

A review of Designer Nature: The Papier-mâché Botanical Teaching Models of Dr Auzoux in Nineteenth-Century France, Great Britain and America, by Margaret Olszewski. Margaret Olszewski’s dissertation investigates the career of the French Dr Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux (1797-1880), a pioneer of three-dimensional teaching models. As a medical student, around 1820 Auzoux developed an anatomical model of a life-sized male human. The artificial body was made from a paper paste which could be “dissected” into pieces — the forerunner of today’s classroom models in plastic. This development had important implications for model...

A review of Nature and the Making of a Scientific Community, 1869-1939, by Melinda Baldwin. Melinda Baldwin’s dissertation provides a fascinating history of the early years of the scientific journal Nature, beginning with its creation in 1869 by Sir Norman Lockyer and ending with the retirement of its second editor Sir Richard Arman Gregory in 1939. Challenging our awareness of Nature’s prominent place in the sciences today, Baldwin historicizes the complicated process by which the publication developed its reputation. More than that, Baldwin uses Nature as case study to ask important questions about the changing practice of scientific...

A review of Secret Contagions: Sadness and the Self in Early Modern England, by Erin Sullivan. The history of emotions is a burgeoning field within cultural history. In recent years, a number of key publications have mapped out the beginnings of a theoretical and methodological framework, and academic centers on the subject are mushrooming around the world. Erin Sullivan’s thesis Secret Contagions: Sadness and the Self in Early Modern England is a valuable new addition to this growing field, not in the least because of its innovative approach to the exploration of historical emotions. Readers in the early modern period were extremely...

A review of A Genealogy of the Gift: Blood Donation in London, 1921-1946, by Nicholas Whitfield. Nicholas Whitfield opens his dissertation with the juxtaposition of two images. A 1909 diagram shows the layout of individual positions for blood transfusion in an operating room centered on two adjacent tables for donor and recipient, while a 2006 organizational chart for the ‘Preparation of Blood Components’ includes the act of donation as only one aspect of a complex system connecting donor with the eventual recipient (pp.30-31). Whitfield locates the critical phase of this organizational transformation in the middle of the century, an...

A review of The Living Rock: Natural, Human, and Sacred Histories of the Earth, 1680-1740, by Lydia Barnett. How do you write a history of the Earth from Noah’s Flood to the Apocalypse in an age that rewards piecemeal empirical research? How do you reconcile your overarching theories with the tidbits of evidence that the Bible, figure stones and Platonic myths provide? Lydia Barnett’s The Living Rock offers a refreshing intellectual history of how European scholars tackled these problems in the years around 1700. Her dissertation brings to life the heated debates that theories of the Earth generated across the continent, and reveals...

A review of Architectures of Astronomical Observation: From Sternwarte Kassel (ca. 1560) to the Radcliffe Observatory (1772), by Alistair Marcus Kwan. Given the scientific and symbolic importance of astronomical observatories, it is surprising that they have received relatively little analysis. There are accounts of individual observatories, the astronomers who worked in them and the instruments they used, but much less has been said about observatories as type of building. Still less has the relationship between buildings, instruments and people been given sustained consideration, which seems the more surprising given the ‘spatial turn’...

A review of Mental Defectives, Childhood Psychotics and the Origins of Autism Research at the Maudsley Hospital, 1913-1983, by Bonnie Evans. Bonnie Evans’ excellent dissertation maps out the formation of child psychiatry in the twentieth century while simultaneously exploring the origins and construction of the autistic child in British society. Tracing evolving political standards, upheavals in local and national legislation, changing roles for medical and educational institutions, as well as new trends in psychiatric theory and treatment, Evans’ story captures the ways that the classification and experiences of socially impaired...

A review of Teratology and the Clinic: Monsters, Obstetrics, and the Making of Antenatal Life in Edinburgh, c.1900, by Salim Al-Gailani. Salim Al-Gailani’s dissertation explores the career and impact of the obstetrician William Ballantyne, who in the turn of the twentieth century Edinburgh transformed teratology (study of embryonic and fetal malformations) from a practice of collecting ‘monsters’ and turning them into museum specimens into a clinical discipline of ‘antenatal pathology’. This dissertation is much more than an intellectual biography: through the story of Ballantyne’s disciplinary, technical and literary...

A review of Speaking for Nature: Mary Somerville and the Science of Empire, by Michal Meyer. Mary Somerville (1780-1872) is an intriguing figure in the history of science; unusually for a woman, she managed to gain a reputation for herself as an elite practitioner of science, rather than as just a communicator of men’s intellectual product. That Somerville achieved this status, whereas women in the later decades of the nineteenth century faced great obstacles in sustaining a serious scientific reputation, requires an analysis that delves deep into the historically changing understandings, meanings, connections and representations of...

Dissertation Reviews は、様々な分野で近年審査された、未刊行の博士論文の概要紹介（批評ではありません）を公開するウェブサイトです。 Tom...

Dissertation Reviews는 다양한 학문 분야에서 최근에 완성되었으나 아직 출판되지는 않은 박사 학위 논문들을 추려서 되도록 호의적인 태도로 소개하는 새로운 웹싸이트입니다. 이 싸이트는 톰 물라니 (Tom Mullaney; 스탠포드 대학 역사학과) 교수가 2010 설립한 것으로 각 학분 분야에서의 최근 학문 동향을 소개하는 데 그 목적을 두고 있습니다. 보통 단행본으로 묶여 나온 서적들은 연구가 끝난 뒤 몇 년 후에서야 출판되지만, 이 싸이트는 우리 학문 공동체에서 지금 현재 활발하게 논의되고 있는...

Die neue Website Dissertation Reviews präsentiert unkritisch kürzlich verteidigte und bisher unpublizierte Dissertationen aus verschiedenen Fachrichtungen. Die Plattform, die 2010 vom Tom Mullaney (Assistant Professor für Geschichte, Stanford University) gegründet wurde, soll Forschern einen Einblick in die aktuellsten Entwicklungen in ihren jeweiligen Fächern bieten. Statt Monographien zu rezensieren, die oft erst Jahre nach Abschluss des Projektes erscheinen, widmet sich die Website den tatsächlich aktuellen Entwicklungen innerhalb der akademischen Gemeinschaft. Derzeit liegen Besprechungen zu chinesischer Geschichte, Korea- und...

Dissertation Reviews est un nouveau site web présentant des synopsis amicaux et non critiques de thèses de doctorat soutenues récemment et non publiées, relatives à une grande variété de domaines.

Fondé en 2010 par Tom Mullaney (Professeur adjoint en histoire à l’Université de Stanford), le site a été conçu pour offrir à tous les chercheurs un aperçu de l’état actuel de leur domaine respectif. Au lieu de faire la critique des monographies, dont la publication peut nécessiter des années après l’achèvement d’un projet, le site est consacré à l’analyse de ce qui a lieu en ce moment dans nos communautés...

It is with great pleasure that we announce the forthcoming launch of “Science Studies Dissertation Reviews,” set to go live in Winter 2012. In the tradition of the Dissertation Reviews project, the new site will feature friendly, non-critical overviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations in Science Studies. Approximately 20 dissertations are currently under review, with more to come. If you are interested in reviewing for the new site, or having your dissertation reviewed, please contact the editors at dissertationreviews@gmail.com. Introducing Our New Editor Leon Rocha is Research Fellow in History and Philosophy...

A review of Mad Acts, Mad Speech, and Mad People in Late Imperial Chinese Law and Medicine, by FABIEN SIMONIS. In the spirit of Paul Unschuld and Nathan Sivin, who have both meticulously documented and translated the traditional Chinese medical canon from its first articulation in the Huangdi neijing, Fabien Simonis presents a stunningly comprehensive look at changing conceptions of madness throughout Chinese history. Simonis organizes his dissertation into two main sections. In the first, his focus is on the multiplicity of ways in which Chinese physicians have understood and treated madness, from the Song dynasty to the late Qing. Rather...

A review of Buddhists Discuss Science in Modern China (1895-1949), by ERIK J HAMMERSTROM.  Buddhists Discuss Science in Modern China is an innovative and fascinating exploration of the many ways Chinese Buddhists struggled to come to terms with the ever-increasing influence of science and scientism during the late Qing and Republican periods. The dramatic impact of largely European discourses of modernity on the political and social development of China during these formative decades has already been examined from numerous perspectives—intellectual history, political theory, economic development, etc.—and in the last few years...