The emergence of new scientific disciplines in Portuguese medicine: Marck Athias's histophysiology research school, Lisbon (1897-1946)

This paper discusses the emergence of new medical experimental specialties at the Medical School of Surgery (Escola Médico-Cirúrgica) and the Faculty of Medicine of Lisbon University (Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de Lisboa) between 1897 and 1946, as a result of the activities of Marck Athias's (1875-1946) histophysiology research school. In 1897, Marck Athias, a Portuguese physician who had graduated from the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, founded a research school in Lisbon along the lines of Michael Foster's physiology research school in England and Franz Hofmeister's physiological chemistry school in Germany. His research programme was highly innovative in Portugal. Not only did it bring together many disciples and co-workers, but it branched out and created new medical specialties within Portuguese medical science. These new disciplinary areas grew out of the study of the histology of the nervous system but eventually expanded into normal and pathological histophysiology, physiological chemistry and experimental endocrinology. The esprit de corps that existed between research school members ensured the school's success and influence in various fields social and political as well as scientific. Athias's school was strongly influenced by positivist ideals and promoted a teaching and research style that sought inspiration in Humboldt's university model, thus helping to bring about a change in the dominant scientific ethos and to modernize scientific research in Portugal during the first half of the twentieth century.     

A Mere Shadow of an Institution: the Unhappy Story of the Portuguese Geological Survey (PGS) in the Period Between the Two World Wars

In the period between the two World Wars, the Portuguese Geological Survey (Serviços Geológicos de Portugal: PGS) was legally dependent on the General Directorate of Mines and Geological Survey (Direcção Geral de Minas e Serviços Geológicos: GDMGS). Portugal was then living through troubled times, and the PGS struggled with financial problems and a lack of technical personnel. This situation did not allow the PGS to work properly as a scientific institution, and achieve its main function: the making and publication of geological maps and research papers.     

The Eclipse,the Astronomer and his Audience: Frederico Oom and the Total Solar Eclipse of 28 May 1900 in Portugal

This study offers a detailed analysis of an episode of the popularization of astronomy which took place in Portugal, a peripheral country of Europe, and occurring in the early twentieth century. The episode was driven by the 28 May 1900 total solar eclipse which was seen on the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and Spain). Instead of focusing on one of the ends of the popularization process, we analyze the circulation of knowledge among scientists and the public, contrast the aims of the various expeditions, professional and amateur, which took place on Portuguese soil, analyze their repercussions in the Portuguese astronomical landscape, and the different ways used by the Portuguese political elite and astronomical community to successfully appropriate this astronomical event to serve their varied agendas, political, social and scientific. In this episode of public enthusiasm for science, a central figure emerged in the network of the official commission, professional and amateur communities and the ‘general public’: Frederico Tomás Oom (1864–1930), an astronomer of the Lisbon Astronomical Observatory. This paper aims to illustrate the different layers of the circulation process, and at proving that the popularization of science was not a unidirectional process from scientists to lay people nor did it serve only a particular agenda, be it political, social or scientific.     

Organisation des laboratoires de chimie à Paris sous le ministère Duruy (1863–1869): Cas des laboratoires de Fremy et de Wurtz1 Cette étude a fait l'objet d'une communication à l'ESF workshop on chemical laboratories à Lisbonne (Portugal), 25–27 novembre 1996.

As soon as he was appointed Minister of Public Instruction in 1863, Victor Duruy embarked on a major reform of French education. One of his most important initiatives was the creation of a new secondary curriculum (l'enseignement spécial) designed to prepare for careers in industry, trade, and agriculture. Edme Fremy, professor at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle, took the opportunity of proposing a course of instruction in practical chemistry that would be offered at the Muséum for young men intending to work in industry. Duruy approved the proposal, and funds were immediately made available. In contrast, Charles-Adolphe Wurtz, who led an internationally recognized research laboratory in organic chemistry in the Paris Faculty of Medicine, had difficulty in securing either administrative recognition or financial support. This article draws on the correspondence that Fremy and Wurtz exchanged with Duruy and senior officials in the Ministry between 1863 and 1869 to bring out the significance of the divergent ministerial responses to the two laboratories.     

Hugo de Vries and the rediscovery of Mendel's laws

Hugo de Vries claimed that he had discovered Mendel's laws before he found Mendel's paper. De Vries's first ratios, published in 1897, for the second generation of hybrids (F₂) were 2/3:1/3 and 80%:20%. By 1900, both of these ratios had become 3:1. These changing ratios suggest that as late as 1897 de Vries had not discovered the laws, although he asserted, from 1900 on, that he had found the laws in 1896. An Appendix details de Vries's Mendelian experiments as described in the original edition (1903) of volume two of Die Mutationstheorie, but omitted entirely from the English translation (1910).     

Horticulture in Portugal 1850–1900: The role of science and public utility in shaping knowledge

In this paper, we address the emergence of horticultural practice, agents, spaces and institutions in the two urban settings of Lisbon and Porto, in Portugal, during the second half of the nineteenth century. We do so by following the networking activities of two players: the self-made horticulturist and entrepreneur José Marques Loureiro, who created, in Porto, a commercial horticultural establishment and founded the Journal of Practical Horticulture; and the agronomist Francisco Simões Margiochi, head of the gardens and green grounds department of the municipality, who created the first course on gardening and horticulture, and founded the Royal Horticultural Society, both in Lisbon. Their joint activities were aimed at establishing horticulture as an applied science and to cater simultaneously to an extended audience of citizens. They enable us to enrich the narratives on the emergence and development of horticulture in Europe by calling attention to the participation in circulatory extended networks of actors who are often absent from these accounts. Additionally, they allow a comparative assessment of the outcome of their actions at the national level, and to understand their results in terms consonant with recent historiographical trends on the co-construction of centres and peripheries.

Abbreviations: AML – Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa (Municipal Archive of Lisbon).; ANTT – Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (National Archives at Torre do Tombo).; AHCPL – Arquivo Histórico da Casa Pia de Lisboa (Historical Archive of the Casa Pia of Lisbon).; JHP – Jornal de Horticultura Practica (Journal of Practical Horticulture). Online at: http://www.fc.up.pt/fa/?p=nav&;f=html.fbib-Periodico-oa&;item=378; BSNHP - Boletim da Sociedade Nacional de Horticultura de Portugal (Bulletin of the National Society of Horticulture of Portugal).     

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

In response to the Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755, and the subsequent seismic activity in Europe, Kant wrote several articles on earthquakes and volcanic phenomena. Full translations of the most important parts of these articles are presented, and summaries for the remainder. Kant developed a carefully worked out theory to account for seismic activity, based on his reading of the scientific literature, the reports received in Königsberg of the Lisbon earthquake and associated events, and his general theory of the origin of the Earth's crust, as presented in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte of 1755. Following Lémery, Kant supposed that volcanic action was due to the subterranean combination of sulphur and iron, and he rejected the suggestion that earthquakes might be due to the gravitational pull of heavenly bodies. Kant's theory was naturalistic, but his account was not wholly divorced from physicotheological considerations.     

A bibliographical study of the introduction of Lavoisier's Traité élémentaire de chimie into Great Britain and America

As the most famous woman scientist of the twentieth century, there has been no shortage of books and articles on the life and career of Marie Curie (1867–1934). Her role as a director of a laboratory-based research school in the new scientific field of radioactivity, a field which embraced both chemistry and physics, however, has never been examined. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the question of research schools, and Morrell, Ravetz, Geison, and Klosterman, amongst others, have written on this subject. Using, in part, the methodology of Morrell, this paper investigates the role of Marie Curie as a school director in the Paris Faculty in the years 1907–14, examining the work and characteristics of her school and assessing her effectiveness as a director.     

The letter,the dictionary and the laboratory: translating chemistry and mineralogy in eighteenth-century France

SUMMARY

Eighteenth-century scientific translation was not just a linguistic or intellectual affair. It included numerous material aspects requiring a social organization to marshal the indispensable human and non-human actors. Paratexts and actors' correspondences provide a good observatory to get information about aspects such as shipments and routes, processes of translation and language acquisition (dictionaries, grammars and other helpful materials, such as translated works in both languages), texts acquisition and dissemination (including author's additions and corrections, oral presentations in academic meetings and announcements of forthcoming translations).

The nature of scientific translation changed in France during the second half of the eighteenth century. Beside solitary translators, it also happened to become a collective enterprise, dedicated to providing abridgements (Collection académique, 1755–79) or enriching the learned journals with full translations of the most recent foreign texts (Guyton de Morveau's ‘Bureau de traduction de Dijon’, devoted to chemistry and mineralogy, 1781–90). That new trend clearly had a decisive influence on the nature of the scientific press itself. A way to set up science as a social activity in the provincial capital of Dijon, translation required a local and international network for acquiring the linguistic and scientific expertise, along with the original texts, as quickly as possible. Laboratory results and mineralogical observations were used to compare material facts (colour, odour, shape of crystals, etc.) with those described in the original text. By providing a double kind of validation – with both the experiments and the translations – the laboratory thus happened to play a major role in translation.     

Putting the Indices into practice: censoring science in early modern Portugal

ABSTRACT

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Inquisition was the institution most invested in the censorship of printed books in the Portuguese empire. Besides publishing the Indices of Forbidden Books, the Holy Office was also responsible for overseeing their implementation and ensuring their efficacy in preventing the importation, reading, and circulation of banned books. Overall, the sixteenth-century Indices condemned 785 authors and 1081 titles, including 52 authors and 85 titles of medicine, natural history, natural philosophy, astronomy, chronology, cosmography, astrology, and divinatory arts. By looking at the largest collection of early modern scientific books in Portugal, I will argue that a closer inspection of marginalia and ownership, and the establishment of a typology of expurgations is essential for the comprehension of the actual practices and the mechanisms of censorship. By examining the material evidence of censorship, in order to reconstruct expurgation practices, this paper reveals the processes and effectiveness of ecclesiastical control in the Portuguese Inquisition and highlights the differences between what inquisitors wrote in the Indices and what others put into practice.     

Lavoisier and his Last Printed Work: The Mémoires de physique et de chimie (1805)

On the basis of a significant number of unpublished documents, here published for the first time, the article reconstructs the historical and scientific origins of Lavoisier's Mémoires de physique et de chimie. Because of the paucity of primary sources available so far, this work has previously received little attention and its 'publication' is commonly attributed to Madame Lavoisier's effort to revive the memory of her husband. In contrast with this image, this article suggests that Madame Lavoisier had only a subsidiary role and that Armand Séguin's contribution to both the editing and the scientific organization of the Mémoires needs a historical reassessment. Lavoisier's collaboration with Séguin, dating from 1792, resulted in a work the aim of which was far more ambitious than that of collecting already published memoirs. Furthermore, it is argued that the contents of the first volume of the Mémoires indicate an important evolution in Lavoisier's chemical theory.     

Concentration and nature of iodide secreted by the perfused salivary glands of the golden hamster

Résumé L'analyse de la salive extraité par ponction de la glande sous-maxillaire duCricetus auratus montre que cette glande concentre l'iodide inorganique et que la salive qu'elle sécrète, contient un facteur capable de «lier» cette substance. Ce facteur manque par contre à la glande sublinguale et l'iodide n'y est pas concentré.Il est donc suggéré que le facteur contenu dans la salive de la glande sous-maxillaire et qui est responsable de l'iodide «lié», joue un rôle dans le mécanisme de concentration de l'iodide par les glandes.

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This communication is the unpublished part of a thesis presented to the Faculty of Medicine of the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School, for the M.D. degree.     

The Prussian Mining Official Alexander von Humboldt

From summer 1792 until spring 1797, Alexander von Humboldt was a mining official in the Franconian parts of Prussia. He visited mines, inspected smelting works, calculated budgets, wrote official reports, founded a mining school, performed technological experiments, and invented a miners’ lamp and respirator. At the same time he also participated in the Republic of Letters, corresponded with savants in all Europe, and was a member of the Leopoldine Carolinian Academy and the Berlin Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde. He collected minerals, made geognostic observations, performed chemical and physiological experiments, read the newest scientific journals, and prepared and published texts on mineralogy, geognosy, chemistry, botany and physiology. Humboldt did his scientific investigations alongside his administrative and technical work. This raises the question of whether there were fruitful interactions between Humboldt's technical-administrative work and (parts of) his natural inquiry. I argue that the mining official Humboldt was a late eighteenth-century figure of hybrid savant-technician. Mines and smelting works provided numerous opportunities for studies of nature. Humboldt systematically used inspection tours for mineralogical and geognostic observations. He transformed mines into chemical laboratories, and he transferred knowledge and material items from his natural inquiries in mines to academic institutions. The main objective of this paper is to illuminate the persona of savant-technician (or scientific-technological expert) along with Humboldt's mixed technological and scientific work during his term as mining official.     

Book Reviews

José María Albareda (1902–1966) was an applied chemist and a prominent member of the Roman Catholic organization, Opus Dei, who played a crucial role in organizing the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the new scientific institution created by the Franco regime in 1939. The paper analyses first the formative years in Albareda's scientific biography and the political and social context in which he became an Opus Dei fellow. Then it discusses the CSIC's innovative features compared with the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios (JAE), the institution in charge of scientific research and science policy in Spain from 1907 up to the Civil War (1936–1939). Next it goes into Albareda's ideas about science and science policy. Finally, it shows how they shaped the organization of the CSIC, of which Albareda was the General Secretary from 1939 to his untimely death in 1966.     

Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800

SUMMARY

As the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I investigate the narrative strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist François le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] (1790) allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind.     

Influence of heparin and serotonin on basophil leucocytes of rabbit blood

Résumé Chez le lapin, l'injection intraveineuse d'héparine a été suivie d'une diminution significative du nombre des basophiles du sang au cours de 6 h. La sérotonine a produit pendant ce temps une augmentation du nombre total des leucocytes, et au bout de 24 h, une augmentation spécifique du nombre des basophiles.Les basophiles n'ont pas changé de nombre après l'injection de protamine ou de réserpine.

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This work was supported by grants from the Danish Rheumatism Association, and Eli Lilly and Co., Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A., to Dr.Asboe-Hansen.

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Author on leave from the Histology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Cairo University (Egypt).     

The introduction of the differential notation to Great Britain

In the history of chemistry, the Danish chemist Julius Thomsen (1826–1909) is best known for his contributions to thermochemistry. Throughout his life, he was a pronounced atomist and a tireless advocate of neo-Proutian views as to the constitution of matter. On many occasions, especially in his later years, he engaged in speculations concerning the unity of matter and the complexity of atoms. In this engagement, Thomsen was alone in Danish chemistry, but his works were representative of a large number of 19th-century chemists, particularly in England and Germany. Thomsen's ideas as to the constitution of matter, the periodic system and the noble gases, may be seen as typical of this vigorous trend in fin de siècle chemistry.     

Neuronal and extraneuronal localization of noradrenaline in the rat heart after perfusion at high concentration

Résumé Avec la méthode à la fluorescence deFalck etHillarp on montre que lors d'une perfusion selonIversen avec haute concentration de noradrenaline il se produit une accumulation d'amine aussi bien intra- qu'extraneuronale. Les varicosités des nerfs sont agrandies et tordues.

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This work was supported by grants from the Swedish Medical Research Council (project No. B67-12X-712-02A) and by the Faculty of Medicine, University of Lund, Sweden.     

The human AB0 blood group substances

Résumé Cet article rend compte des essais d'isolation des substances spécifiques des groupes sanguins de l'homme. Elles sont déterminées comme étant des complexes mucoïdes ou polysaccharides-aminoacides et l'on traite de quelquesunes de leurs propriétés physiques, chimiques et immunochimiques. En isolant ces substances qui forment des complexes moléculaires homogènes, on estime pouvoir obtenir, si l'on opère sur le sang d'individus de génotype connu, un matériel permettant de déterminer l'influence des gènesA, B etO sur les caractères physiques des produits de gènes très voisins. Les résultats des recherches entreprises dans ces directions constitueront une précieuse contribution à nos connaissances sur la chimie des substances génétiques humaines.

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Based on lectures given in Basle and Zürich in November 1946.