“Medical Arithmetic in Late 18th Spain: Gender, Paper Tools, and Social Ideals”

Elena Serrano (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

This paper reveals the paper tools and paper systems used for tracking and tracing children at the Madrid Foundling House after 1799, when an aristocratic female association was charged with its administration. A medieval institution that stood at the heart of the city, the House received around one thousand children each year, most of whom died in its care. The Junta de damas de honor y mérito (Ladies of Honor and Merit 3 Committee) set up new hygienic measures, doubled the medical and caring personnel, and re-arranged the life in the House. Above all, the Junta ordered the heavy traffic of children by setting up a new paper system, a notebook for registering both the entrances and exits of children. Elena Serrano explores the impact of the Junta’s newly-introduced paper tool, showing that it changed ways of looking at foundlings and with it, their chances to survive. Additionally, while the notebook served to legitimate that a female body governed a contested institution, it also documented more accurate mortality rates, which lent credence to the women managers. As scholars have shown, numbers detach knowledge, the local and the personal, making it appear independent of the producer and the concrete circumstances on which it is produced. The orderly new books represented the authority and governing capacity of the Junta in this way, as a material representation of the ideal social order in which upper-class learned women played a key public role in the reform of society.

“Papering Over the Female Body: Clelia D. Mosher, the Posture Sciences, and the Schematograph”

Beth Linker (University of Pennsylvania)

This paper examines the work of Dr. Clelia D. Mosher (1863-1940), who, as professor and director of women’s physical education at Stanford University, became a forerunner in measuring human posture through a graphic inscription device known as the “schematograph,” an apparatus that she invented in 1915 with the help of mechanical engineer, Everett P. Lesley. The device was essentially a camera obscura outfitted with translucent drafting paper which the examiner used to hand-draw an outline of an examinee’s human form. At a time of heightened enthusiasm in the clinic for other visualization technologies, such as film, camera photography, and x-rays, Mosher insisted that the act of drawing, tracing, and physical manipulating paper was essential to the advancement of the posture sciences. While the schematograph began as a distinctly gendered tool, the device would go on to be used during the interwar years in all-male institutions of higher education, elementary schools, and in the military. In these settings, scientists employed Mosher’s paper method to create a universal classificatory system of posture grading, a schema that served as physical evidence for an epidemic of slouching in America.

“The Phrenological Interface: Gender, Paper Platforms, and Knowledge Negotiations”

Carla Bittel (Loyola Marymount University)

This paper examines gender, phrenology, and consumerism in early nineteenth-century America to uncover the role of paper in measuring, documenting, evaluating, and even negotiating the meaning of cranial characteristics, especially in relation to gender. It argues that phrenology’s paper tools, especially the phrenological chart, functioned as an “interface” for analysts and clients. As we will see, phrenological charts were interactive platforms that often blurred the boundary between producers and users of knowledge. While much has been written about phrenology, less attention has been paid to its gender dimensions. A popular, but contested science of the mind, phrenology was based on evaluations and measurements of nodules on the head; it articulated a relationship between the brain and skull, the mental and the physical, the interior and exterior. In antebellum America, phrenology articulated rigid dualistic notions of gender, and yet there was some variability, especially when it came to middle-class clients. As we will see, phrenology’s gender dualism and malleability were expressed on and through paper. Charts served as both individual character analyses and records of the phrenological encounter; charts also made phrenology an accessible, transportable, marketable science, available to both men and women. Ultimately, this study shows the vital intersection of gender and materiality in phrenological practice, and demonstrates the role of paper as a social and epistemological mediator.