“Seeing Ice Over Time: Ice Atlases and the Cartography of Dynamism”

Alexis Rider (University of Pennsylvania, HSS Dept.)

This paper explores how evolving ways of doing science in the Arctic—both practically and epistemologically—transformed the region from an “empty” space, reserved solely for explorers, to a dynamic region whose changeability—both spatially and temporally—are crucial to understanding the natural history of the earth as a whole. While this transformation took place over the long twentieth century and relied on an increased capacity to look above, below, and into ice, this paper focuses on one example of the changing perception of the Arctic: Charles Swithinbank’s Ice Atlas (1960).

How can one map an ice pack, a surface that grows and shrinks annually, and varies in thickness each year? Essentially, how can one map a surface that is dynamic and inconsistent both in area and in depth? Swithinbank turned to the ship logs of every vessel that had visited the region since 1900, from the days of sail to the era of ice breaker, arguing that records of navigability could be translated into ice conditions. The result is an atlas that captures changeability over time in a static object, thus revealing the importance, in the mid-twentieth century, of understanding the dynamism of the ice pack as a system. It is only when the vitality and fragility of the region was understood that the crucial role of the poles in the global system—and as metaphor and metonym for climate change—took hold.

“Senses, Intellect, and Exceptional Children at the turn of the 20th century European and Russian Human and Medical Sciences”

Kai Mishuris (University of Michigan)

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, “the child” emerges as an object of scientific and medical exploration as part of the broader attempts to understand human origins, the working of memory and the unconscious. The notions of the child and reason were traditional antithetical. The late nineteenth century observers of childhood saw children as fundamentally irrational and spontaneous being, driven by bodily senses rather than reason. Given the raw spontaneity of the child's mind, what did the students of childhood mean when they wrote about child's intellectual capacities and talents? Examining European and Russian corpus of medical, psychological, and educational treatises, the paper will examine the role of the senses in the understandings of talent and exceptional ability in children. It will pay special attention to the interplay between the notions of intuition, talent, and the unconscious in the construction of the prodigious mind.

“’What is this Feeling?’ Locating Peripheral Sensation in China and Germany (1931-1955)”

Lan Li (Columbia University)

Touch proved difficult to capture at the periphery of the body. Simultaneously an action and reaction, at once a moment and a memory, physiologists inscribed lines on skin to define distinct areas sensitive to pressure and temperature, only to find their embodied experience impossible to articulate. By joining approaches in postcolonial STS and critical cartography, this paper investigates the ways in which historical actors adapted a range of scales—national, transnational, regional, and personal—to elaborate on cultures of epistemology and historical ontology. In particular, this paper compares two historical attempts to locate, map, and fix sensation. The first case centers on a medical reformer named Cheng Dan’an in Shanghai who famously published a series of photographs of inscribed meridian paths on a nude model in 1931. The second case study centers on German neurologist Otfrid Foerster’s production of dermatome maps also inscribed on nude human models in 1933. I argue that the inscription of a line—a graphic line that lacked form, texture, and tangible quality—captured a kind of ontology that straddled accuracy and approximation. These lines took on many different meanings when they were curved, straightened, thinned, thickened, broken, colored or shaded. A close study of body maps allows us to understand a range of medical practice and medical theory that remains multiple and contingent. How did physiologists represent sensations in the body that shift over time and differ among individuals? What were the ways in which these forms of dynamic representations serve to articulate scientific knowledge?