ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Invisible Actors in Biomedical and Environmental Sciences (I) & (II)

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

The two joint panels aim at providing evidence for the plurality of knowledge and actors who contributed to the making of biomedical and biological science in case studies drawn from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Our panelists center voices and experiences that are often overlooked or ignored–colonized people, patients, women, and animals– at the heart of the construction of scientific knowledge. The two panels focus on these marginalized actors to show how multiple relationships between humans, animals and environment were transformed into authoritative knowledge.
The first panel tackles the question of human and animal experimentation in different contexts, and shows a discrepancy between the lived experiences of humans and animals enrolled in biomedical experiments or trials and expert knowledge. Shiori Nosaka highlights the discrepancy between the robustness of data on vaccination and the difficulties encountered in collecting it in the context of colonial Japan. Lucie Gerber explores how scientists sought to control sheep’s reproductive cycles by tricking their senses, making them into both a source of income and an animal model for neuroscience. Maureen Morlet examines the ways in which medical knowledge of male contraception was debated and eventually contested among doctors and male activists in France in the late 1970-early 1980s.
The second panel addresses the invisible actors within biomedical and environmental sciences. It seeks to highlight silent voices and invisible labors which were overlooked in standard historiography, and emphasizes their role in the construction of scientific knowledge. Mathias Valverde examines the crucial role of mothers in the education, moral behavior, patriarchal norms, and professionalization of the ‘savant’ in eighteenth-century French natural history. Rachel Mundy revisits the discovery of neurogenesis in canaries to connect the songs of canaries ‘sacrificed’ for research to another missing voice, that of a young female researcher in the laboratory. Similarly, Marion Thomas emphasizes the role of emotions in the making of scientific knowledge by examining the relationships between bacteriologists and primates in the context of the Institut Pasteur in Paris and Kindia (Guinea).
These papers are based on research conducted at the Department of History of Life Sciences and Health (DHVS) at the University of Strasbourg. Hosted by the Faculty of Medicine, it especially aims at promoting the research and teaching of history of medicine and the history if life sciences within medical humanities of medical curriculum. Through our panels, we propose new and alternative narratives of medical humanities.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chairs

• Déborah Sarah Dubald, University of Strasbourg

• Tricia Close Koenig, University of Strasbourg

Individual Presentations

• Collecting valuable data in colonies: methodological asymmetries in anti-plague vaccine evaluations between Japan’s mainland and colonies at the beginning of the 20th century - Shiori Nosaka, University of Strasbourg

• “A dose of rhythm:” light, melatonin, and the molecularization of environmental influences in out-of-season breeding of livestock (1930s-1990s) - Lucie Gerber, CNRS, SAGE, France

• Between experiential knowledge and medical knowledge: the collaborative case of male contraception in France, late 1970s-1980s - Maureen Morlet, SAGE

• Mothering naturalists in eighteenth-century France - Mathias Valverde, University of Strasbourg

• Animal invisibility as a clue to emotional conflict in primate experimental science in the early twentieth century - Marion Constance Thomas, University of Strasbourg

• Canaries in the laboratory: silent voices of neuroscience - Rachel Mundy, Rutgers University-Newark

Session Organizers

• Marion Constance Thomas, University of Strasbourg

• Shiori Nosaka, University of Strasbourg