A reminder about our Wellcome lecture and workshop next week follows 
below. If you would like to join us for dinner at a local restaurant at 
7pm after the drinks reception then please email me.

All my best for 2012,

Francis.


University of Cambridge
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

** Seventh Cambridge Wellcome Lecture in the History of Medicine **

On Thursday 19 January 2012 at 4.30pm

Staffan Müller-Wille (University of Exeter)

will speak on

Revisiting the Mendelian revolution

Abstract:
Much research into heredity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries took place in such applied contexts as seed production, 
breeding yeast and cereals for large-scale beer making, mass-manufacture 
of vaccines, efforts to further public health, administration of 
psychiatric hospitals and eugenic programmes. In these areas increasing 
division of labour and more bureaucratic control promoted a culture of 
expertise and scientificity. We need to understand this if we want to 
explain the effect on the life sciences of the so-called rediscovery of 
Mendel's laws in 1900. Mendelism was not taken up as a theory, but as a 
set of important methods for realizing scientific values such as 
analyticity, exactitude, calculability and predictability. Breeders and 
eugenicists, in particular, shared a combinatorial approach that 
promised the transparent and reliable production of effects from one 
generation to the next. Synthetic chemistry, not physics, provided the 
model science. Framed in this way, the origin of genetics appears as 
much less of a revolutionary break. The concepts and procedures of early 
Mendelians fitted rather well into a world that had already been 
thoroughly shaped by medical and agro-industrial concerns with the 
production of stable varieties.

The lecture, which doubles as the first Departmental seminar of Lent 
Term, will start at 4.30pm in Seminar Room 2, Department of History and 
Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane, Cambridge. There will be tea 
from 4pm in Seminar Room 1, and a drinks reception there after the 
lecture at 6pm.


At a workshop to be held the same day at 11.30am in Seminar Room 1, Dr 
Müller-Wille will introduce a discussion of 'Heredity, race and disease'

Workshop abstract:
The concept of heredity, when it entered biology in the early nineteenth 
century, did not refer to the age-old observation that 'like engenders 
like'. It was rather geared towards a much more specific phenomenon, 
namely /heritable variation/. When early modern authors wrote about 
heredity, they focused on hereditary diseases and regarded transmission 
of such diseases as a curiosity. It simply struck them as odd that a 
disease – that is, something quintessentially accidental – should be 
transmitted regularly. In the eighteenth century, natural philosophers 
then linked this medical discourse with the discussion of human racial 
diversity, resulting in a conflation of the normal and pathological, the 
natural and the accidental. The regular transmission of heritable traits 
in general, whether normal or deviant, now came to be seen as pointing 
back to historical events and processes that had given rise to a 
diversity of traits in the first place. This was of great significance 
for the life and human sciences, including anthropology and medicine: it 
opened a space for a truly historical approach, as epitomized by Charles 
Darwin's theory of evolution.


Supported by the Wellcome Trust.

All welcome!

Further details of our events are at: 
http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/medicine/events.html