The History of Science, Medicine, and Technology is an ever-expanding discipline. This two-day conference allows Oxford postgraduate students in the field to present their research, covering a broad chronological, geographic, and thematic scope. Panel topics range from early modern ideas to public health, with individual papers covering subjects as diverse as reproductive technology, honeybee diseases and twentieth-century scepticism about science – truly offering new perspectives, as questions fundamental to the history of science and medicine are explored and examined.
Opening Remarks: Rob Iliffe, Professor of the History of Science, Oxford
10:10-11:20
Session One – Early Modern Natural Philosophy
Natasha Bailey, “The strange force of fascination”: Alexander Ross and natural philosophy
Lucia Bucciarelli, Disseminating scientific knowledge: the role of discipleship in the early modern period
Michelle Pfeffer, Heterodoxy and historical argument: the physician William Coward studies the soul
Chair: Rob Iliffe
11:20-11:40
Tea/Coffee
11:40-12:50
Session Two – Modern Science
Constance Hardesty, Who decides? Public opinion versus the Royal Society in the eighteenth-century lightning rod controversy
Johann Gaebler, Calculus of the mind: George Boole and The Laws of Thought
Patrick Lee, Stellar Atmospheres: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, historical receptions, and ascribing scientific priority
Chair: Michelle Pfeffer
12:50-13:50
Lunch
13:50-15:00
Session Three – Sexuality, Reproduction and Eugenics
Alicja Howard, The sex glands: paradigms of sexuality and gender in the quest for rejuvenation
Nick Logan, Overcorrecting cruel science in post-war America
Angela Yu, Frozen futures: “reproduction without sex” and the single girl
Chair: John Shepherd
15:00-15:20
Tea/Coffee
15:20-16:30
Session Four – Psychology and Criminality
John Shepherd, Tracing the criminal subject: theories of crime and the practice of prevention in Berkeley, California, c.1910-40
Alexandra Ackland-Snow, Surgical, chemical, psychological, behavioural: the concept of “restraint” in the medicalisation of paedophilia in the twentieth century
Henry-James Meiring, Politics and psychoanalysis in Africa: the birth and death of institutional psychoanalysis in South Africa, 1929-50
Chair: Angela Yu
16:30-16:50
Closing Remarks: Sloan Mahone, Associate Professor of the History of Medicine, Oxford
Friday, 8 June
09:50-10:00
Opening Remarks: Erica Charters, Associate Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Oxford Centre for Global History, Oxford
10:00-11:10
Session Five – Health and Colonialism
Rhiannon Bertaud-Gandar, Sharing sanitary intelligence in the Red Sea, ca. 1865-1914
Ho Hee Cho, British-Commonwealth initiatives in international medical cooperation and the Second World War
Frank Vitale IV, Counting Carlisle’s casualties: multiple methods for measuring mortality at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879-1918
Chair: Ethan Friederich
11:10-11:40
Tea/Coffee
11:40-12:30
Session Six – Medicine and Disease Control
Ethan Friederich, Plantations, policy and public health: a history of malaria in Assam 1919-39
Josefine Lochen, The World Health Organization, leprosy and the saga of multidrug therapy
Chair: Frank Vitale IV
12:30-12:45
Closing Remarks: Mark Harrison, Professor of the History of Medicine andDirector of theWellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, Oxford
