ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Glassworkers: women making microscope slides (late 19th c.-late 20th c.)

• In Event: From the Household to the Lab: Tracing Gendered Labour of Collection (18th-20th centuries)

English Abstract

Microscope slides, used and unused, are remnants of scientific practice and are found in innumerable cupboards, archives, attics and basements of scientific spaces. Some are as famous as their makers – like Pacini’s slide containing the cholera vibrio kept in Florence. But most of them are often just considered clutter and pose many conservation challenges that are difficult to address: they are obsolete and standardised things, mass-produced for research and teaching, and they hardly come with first hand documentation.
Rather than focusing on provenance, this paper chooses to look at who produced the collection, and in what professional milieu. This is, I argue, a way to understand the historical and scientific value of microscope slides. Primary investigations indicate that making microscope slides production was probably a women’s work blurring the boundaries of scientific authority and ownership of knowledge-meaning making. Based on cases such as that of Augusta Klumpke (1859-1927) and her collection of histological slides developed with her husband Dejerine for their research in neuroscience, but also that of Eugenia Cooper (1898-1991), a doctor of medicine and histologist at the Manchester Medical School in the 20th century, this paper will examine the development of professional boundaries (Witz 2005; Burri 2008) in the context of collection labour.

Author

• Déborah Sarah Dubald, University of Strasbourg