History 285 Midterm

Equant

(of a crystal or particle) having its different diameters approximately equal, so as to be roughly cubic or spherical in shape.

Ptolemaic System

- first paradigm for normal science; believed the world was unchanging and that it must be moving in "perfect" circular, uniform motion; whenever measurements were taken, they had to be adjusted to fit into the Ptolemaic circles; but, anomalies still existed, so eccentrics used as elaborate explanations for them

Medical system

19th century: physician believed in bleeding and cathartics, in rationalistic framework, without this belief system would not have functioned

ACT UP

AIDS activism group in New York

Actors

Actors include people, institutions, non-humans, material objects and forces.

Decadence

Akeley's science was dedicated to the prevention of decadence, of biological decay

Dichotomy of structure and function

Although Vesalius was primarily an anatomist, he also operated on live animals as a pedagogical device to help his students understand the function of structures within the fabric of the body that they had previously studied in anatomical detail

Kits

Although firms brought out kits to convert the car into a stationary source of power as early as 1912, advertisements for these kits-and others to convert the car into a tractor-did not appear in large numbers until 1917

Microcosm/macrocosm

Anatomy, had to understand the stars/heavens, body was a microcosm of God's mind, uses astrological charts (doctors)

Mo

Chinese reading of the pulse, there were many ways of feeling the pulse and doctors determined illnesses and treatments from it

Robert Moses

Created bridges that didn't allow for buses to pass underneath so that poor people wouldn't come to the beach

Muscleman

With the publication of Andreas Vesalius' On the Fabric of the Human Body (1543), the muscle man became along with the skeleton, an emblem of the new anatomy. Vesalius took his readers through a detailed visual unveiling of the muscles in Book Two. He not only differentiated the muscles in some detailed but used illustrations to convey the subtle ways in which human and animal anatomy could intermingle. His images portrayed the ancient adage, (know thyself), suggesting how strongly the muscle man had come to signify the moral dimensions of human anatomy.

Technologies put to political use

Technology can have social implications. Bridges too low so that buses can't fit and black get to the beach bc white guy doesn't beaches to be crowded

the real Milgram experiments

The Milgram experiments were a series of social science studies carried out by Stanley Milgram at Yale University in the early 1960s. Research subjects were persuaded to believe that they were shocking other subjects as part of an experiment about learning skills and negative reinforcement. In fact, the subjects being "shocked"were pretending to be hurt, and those doing the shocking were the real focus of the research. A surprisingly high percentage of those participating were willing to inflict pain on other people when asked to do so by a white-coated male posing as a scientist. Milgram was interested in how and why so many German citizens participated in genocide, and his work did provide some insights into these questions, though it was later judged harshly as ethically dubious.

Lumpiness

The impact of technical innovation is lumpy, inconsistent, and shaped by the ways we organize people into societies, social groups, professions, classes, races and nationalities. This lumpiness characterizes many industrial enterprises, which produce consumer goods, for example, that benefit some populations, and also environmental problems that injure other populations.

Model T

The inexpensive Model T, to take the most successful example, sat high off the ground (also making repair easier) and had a high horsepower-to-weight ratio and a three-point suspension. The introduction of the Model T in late 1908 also came at a time of growing support for the car among farm leaders.

Natural course (of a disease)

The natural history of disease is the course a disease takes in individual people from its pathological onset ("inception") until its eventual resolution through complete recovery or death. The inception of a disease is not a firmly defined concept.

1980 Conventional Weapons Convention

The purpose of the Convention is to ban or restrict the use of specific types of weapons that are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately. The structure of the CCW - a chapeau Convention and annexed Protocols - was adopted in this manner to ensure future flexibility. The Convention itself contains only general provisions. All prohibitions or restrictions on the use of specific weapons or weapon systems are the object of the Protocols annexed to the Convention.

Prince Henry the Navigator

The system of Portuguese expansion for Henry the navigator contained elements such as vessels and their masters. A shift in focus from Henry to the master and his vessel would bring a further network of sailors, spars, and stores into focus—a network with its own force that, when placed within the system of Portuguese expansion, acted as a single unit. If the vessel and its master did not play the roles defined for them in the network of expansion, then the elements that make them up might, of course, have become individually relevant in Lisbon and been built into Henry's expansion network.

Collective empiricism

The world is big, chaotic, and dynamically changing. To get a grip on things, we humans put things in categories to which we refer with terms like "dog", "pastel color", "malaria", or "revolutionary scientific theory".

Framework of explanation

Therapeutic practices should be considered to exist within a certain context. Patient and physician have to be in same framework, ex: rationalistic framework. Rationalize their course for treatment.

Would ballistics

Wound ballistics is not trauma research. Rather, it is a scientific program focused partly on how to make bullets more effective and more damaging, to maximize injury to people. We might call wound ballistics the opposite of health research, or a form of public health in reverse, the term usually used for biological weapons.

Caravel

a long sailing ship, built, quite light and fine in lines, and drew little water, having a flat bottom and little freeboard

Cathartic

a purgative drug

Generalized principle of symmetry

all knowledge is socially constructed; therefore, the same type of argument that explains how vernacular knowledge is made must be used to explain science

Bleeding

altered the body's internal balance to reach equilibrium

Scientific atlases

atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity—or truth-to-nature or trained judgment—is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity—and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

book written by Khun. Paradigm shift in which a new scientific outlook that addresses anomalies, new normal science is created

Teddy Roosevelt Memorial

central building of the american museum of natural history, lots of taxidermy

Acupuncture body

chinese perspective on how to treat illness.

Normal science

determined by certain paradigms; fluid, changes as anomalies arise and paradigms shift

The Golden Hat

different interpretations and uses of the Golden Hat in the Bronze Age; shows how scientific inventions can serve social, cultural purposes; potential uses: signifies one's power in society, calendar, weather predictor

Anatomy theaters

establishment of Anatomy Theaters as seeing and understanding human dissection became immensely important to science; very narrow, tall auditoriums

De Fabrica

first major anatomy textbook written by Vesalius, cover is of Vesalius dissecting the human hand; textbook served a practical purpose b/c not all people had access to a body to dissect, so it was a more accurate guide than Galen's text to human anatomy; spread knowledge

cun, chi, guan

heavenly, human, and earthly realms associated with areas to feel the pulse. 3 different parts of the inner wrist that connect with different organs

Teddy Bear Patriarchy

his story will be recomposed to tell a tale of the commerce of power and knowledge in white and male supremacist monopoly capitalism, craft of killing that life is constructed, not in the accident of personal, material birth

Scientific self

how the self was not only reflected in the way these atlases were made but also how the atlases became a form of exercise on the self, a kind of demand on what the self should be like and on the deliberate, difficult task of restraining yourself from improving an image

Standardization

importance of standardizing scientific knowledge through mechanical objectivity

Thomas Kuhn

initiated a turning point in STS with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; used Copernican revolution as a model of how scientific revolutions occur; supported Gestalt switch, shifts in paradigms once enough anomalies arise • Kuhn's theory- paradigm anomalies arise paradigm shift new normal science

Regimento

instructions about how to turn the vessel and its instruments into an observatory—how, in other words, to create a stable if heterogeneous association of elements that had the property of converting measurements of the altura into determinations of the latitude

Carl Akeley

killed a lot of gorillas

Cultural competence

knowing the terms and being able to communicate

Credibility tactics

learning terms and looking at past clinical trials

Mustard gas

liquid that's vapour is not only poisonous when breathed, but blisters part of the skin with which it comes into contact even. used in war

Sadeye (cluster bomb, anti-personnel mines)

long, cigar-shaped device the size of a conventional bomb that is dropped from an airplane and opens in midair, releasing hundreds of little round explosive bomblets embedded with steel palls. The bomblets are aerodynamically designed to scatter in the air so that when they reach the ground, they will be evenly distributed over a large area. Many more exposed personnel are likely to be hit and some of the bomblets explode later, when people have come out from under cover to tend to the damage. An anti-personnel is more humane than an ordinary bomb. If you weren't allowed to use cluster bombs, your fighter planes might drop a regular high explosive bomb, inadvertently hitting a school or hospital.

Sleeping metaphors

metaphors that go unnoticed, must awaken to improve our ability to investigate nature. Some biologies are constructed through cultural terms, reflect cultural biases

Lay expertise

normal people can become very educated and enact change

Epistemic virtues (objectivity, truth-to-nature, trained judgment)

objectivity-God's eye view, truth-to-nature(observing and interpreting nature, monitoring), trained judgement-not looking at atlases, developing a sense of anatomy, intuition

Early Modern Period

period in European history from roughly 1550 to 1800

ZP3

polymer of keys, the receptor

Memento mori

remember that you have to die, know thyself: self reflect, understand

Copernican system

response to anomalies and eccentrics in Ptolemaic system; idea that the moon circles the Earth; parts of universe interconnected and they affect one another— "heaven itself is so linked together that in no portion of it can anything be shifted without disrupting the remaining parts and the universe as a whole"; still wanted to preserve perfect uniform motion (despite eccentrics), gives social context to natural findings

Diastole and systole

single pulse is comprised of four parts: the diastole, the rest following diastole and preceding systole, the systole, and the rest following systole preceding diastole. One thus has to separate the durations of the motions from the durations of the rests. The shorter of the rest, the more frequent the pulse

Paradigm

social conventions that everyone agrees on to follow. A model, typical example of something; ex. Ptolemaic, Copernicus; shift as anomalies arise

Closure

some artifacts appear to have fewer problems and become increasingly the dominant form of the technology. This, it should be noted, may not result in all rivals vanishing, and often two very different technologies can exist side by side

Respirators

something to war to protect from inhaling mustard gas

Teleology

study of ends or final causes, as related to the evidence of design or purpose in nature, such design as exhibited in natural objects or phenomena, using the result to describe what happened

Exhibiting a drug

synonymous with administering a drug, fundamental cultural ritual, to exhibit a drug was to act out a sacramental role in a duty of healing

Infrastructure

technological systems that are not salient to us

Inherently political technologies

the adoption of a given technical system unavoidably brings with it conditions for human relationships that have a distinctive political cast

Experimental battlefield

the battlefield became a crucial field laboratory in this period, and that the wounds I consider, the experimental injuries documented in formal texts, are both evidence of nature and evidence of history.

Technological determinism

the idea that technology shapes society, determining and changing different social and political structures

Giant of Karisimbi

the lone silver back male gorilla that dominates the diorama depicting the site of Akeley's own grave, killed in 1921

Heterogeneous engineers

the stability and form of artifacts should be seen as a function of the interaction of heterogeneous elements as these are shaped and assimilated into a network

Network

the stability and form of artifacts should be seen as a function of the interaction of heterogeneous elements as these are shaped and assimilated into a network

Technological stability

the stability and form of artifacts should be seen as a function of the interaction of heterogeneous elements as these are shaped and assimilated into a network

Epistemology

the theory of science of the method or grounds of knowledge, the study of how we know, the philosophical examination of obstacles to knowledge

Know Thyself

to know yourself you have to know the body

Haptic styles

touch, feeling; experts for certain practices of feeling; anatomy shaped how and what fingers felt, influencing how doctors felt their patients and how people experienced their own bodies; pulse-taking was a key art in European and Chinese medicine (ex. feeling the Mo, you experience the body in different ways)

Pulse

touching the body became essential to knowing the body. Across many cultures, feeling the pulse was a way of determining what was wrong with someone

Slippery/rough

types of pulses that determine different things, the slippery mo comes and goes in slippery flow, rolling rapidly, continuously forward. The rough mo is thin and slow, its movement is difficult and disperse and sometimes it pauses before arriving

Collateral data

unavoidable in modern, high technology war. Just as battles have produced "unintended" destroyed villages or dead civilians, so too they generate information that is not the direct purpose of the battle

Experimental violence

violence was central to twentieth-century technical knowledge systems. The relevance of medicine, engineering and science to the state's monopoly on violence shaped these forms of systematic human inquiry over the last century in many ways that we are only now beginning to notice and explore.

On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543)

written by Copernicus. The book, first printed in 1543, offered an alternative model of the universe to Ptolemy's geocentric system, which had been widely accepted since ancient times.

Andreas Vesalius

wrote De corporis humani fabrica; reformer of knowledge, performed some of the first dissections (on humans) and questioned previously used techniques; when dissecting, if he didn't actually see something in the body that the professor said was in the anatomy textbook, he would question the professor

Galen

wrote On the Function of Parts, On Anatomical Procedures; ex. of function of parts: studied function of the hand and function of the lap (different parts of human body serve different functions/purposes); dissected apes, made analogies to humans

Scientific Revolution

There was no such thing as the scientific revolution. It was, moreover, construed as a conceptual revolution, a fundamental reordering of our ways of thinking about the natural. In this respect, a story about the Scientific Revolution might be adequately told through an account of radical changes in the fundamental categories of thought. Historians now reject even the notion that there was any single coherent cultural entity called "science" in the seventeenth century to undergo revolutionary change.

working objects

These atlases define the 'working objects' of science and, through attentive historical analysis, one can see in them the developing 'epistemic virtues' guiding scientific thought. Daston and Galison argue that the ways in which scientists visually conceived and presented the objects of their researches reflects their implicit epistemological commitments.

Tomato harvester

Took jobs away from many people and had social implications

Doctor-Patient relationship

Used to be more personal, doctor knew your family and your history

Therapeutic Revolution

Using drugs to solve problems instead of bleeding and trying to reach equilibrium. The increasingly aggressive empiricism of the early nineteenth century pointed toward the need for evaluating every aspect of clinical practice; nothing was to be accepted on faith and only those therapeutic modalities which proved themselves in controlled clinical trials were to remain in the physician's arsenal

Interpretive flexibility

Different social groups associate different meanings with artifacts leading to interpretative flexibility appearing over the artifact. The same artifact can mean different things to different social groups of users. For young men riding the bicycle for sporting purposes the high- wheeler meant the "macho machine" as opposed to the meaning given to it by women and elderly men who wanted to use the bike for transport. For this latter group, as already mentioned, the high- wheeler was the "unsafe machine" (because of its habit of throwing people over the handle bars). Such meanings can get embedded in new artifacts, and developmental paths can be traced which reinforce this meaning (e.g., placing even larger wheels on bicycles to enable them to go even faster). Interpretative flexibility, however, does not continue forever.

Egg and sperm

Egg is always described in terms of being passive and acted upon while sperm is active and takes control, gender biases and cultural values in science

Devil wagon

Farmers joined small-town residents, suburbanites, and even irate city dwellers in many parts of the country in hurling such epithets as "red devil" and "devil wagon" at the dangerous, speeding car-names that soon symbolized the rising clamor of rural protest

Duck-Rabbit

Gestalt switch, making sense of lines, happens in a moment. Based on whole, making sense of things. Kuhn- paradigm shift to Copernicus

Henry Beecher

Henry Beecher carried out a study of shock and of pain in severe wounding that drew on such field methods. Beecher was an important figure in the history of biomedicine. In the course of a long, productive career he theorized the placebo effect, wrote several papers that shaped the development of the Institutional Review Board system, and was lead author of a key report on brain death that facilitated the development of transplant surgery. Beecher's ideas and views of medicine were arguably shaped by his early work studying shock in real time, with human beings who were on the brink of death.

(Historical) context

In a historical context we can say it was a scientific revolution but in the time there was no context

The Hand

It is important to touch the body, the hand is central to this, how our bodies come together to function. served as a symbol of Aristotle's practices of understanding human's anatomy

Volta

It was the invention of this circle, called the volta by the Portuguese, that marks the decisive third step. Ships were no longer forced to stay close to the coast. Cape Bojador, the classic point of no return, was no longer the obstacle it had previously been. The masters could sail beyond it and expect to be able to return. The volta can thus be seen as a geographical expression of a struggle between heterogeneous bits and pieces assembled by the Portuguese system Simplifying the Complexity builders and their adversaries, that is, the winds, the currents, and the capes. It traces on a map the solution available to the Portuguese.

snowflake

Not long before, Johann Kepler had celebrated the beauty and perfect symmetry of snowflakes in a short treatise. Since then, those who have described and drawn snowflakes, from Robert Hooke to the nineteenth-century English meteorologist James Glaisher, have seen them as absolutely perfect forms, marvelous expressions of invariable mathematical relations. Everything that appeared asymmetrical or irregular, whenever noted, was labeled as an "exception" or declared inessential. There was a sort of blindness or annoyance towards the irregularities of nature.

SCOT

Social Construction of Technology; the idea that manufacturers, inventors, and users all interact to impact design and use of technology; relates to the interpretive flexibility of technologies, meaning that users can shape or change how technologies are used to fit their own needs, eventually leads to closure, where a technology becomes less flexible and settles into a distinct use

Solar energy

Solar energy is desirable not only for its economic and environmental benefits, but also for the salutary institutions it is likely to permit in other areas of public life

Equilibrium

Synonymous with health