SCHEDULE/CALENDRIER 2012-2013

UNIVERSITY OF BURGUNDY- CENTRE INTERLANGUES TEXTE/IMAGE/LANGAGE
SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATION – SEMINARS 2012-2013

Seminars will take place on Fridays – precise location and time to be confirmed

OCTOBER 26^th 2012 : MEDICAL ILLUSTRATIONS  

Journée d’étude en anglais – the papers will be given in English

Tim Huisman (Museum Boerhaave, Leiden) “The Eye and The Hand: Anatomist-artist co-operations on two Dutch anatomical atlases (1685-1742)”

Tim Huisman is curator of prints, drawings and paintings and early medicine at the Museum Boerhaave, the Dutch national museum of science and medicine in Leiden. Trained as an art historian but working for more than ten years in the history of medicine and science, his field of interest lies at the crossroads of these two disciplines. In 2009 he published The Finger of God. Anatomical Practice in 17^th Century Leiden, Leiden (Primavera press).

Anatomical atlases – as a rule prestigious illustrated books of large size – are generally considered prime examples of the best of the artistic and scientific worlds combined, with Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1542) as an archetype.

Huisman’s presentation will focus on the genesis of two equally grandiose Dutch post-Vesalian projects of atlases illustrating the whole of human anatomy: Govard Bidloo and Gerard de Lairesse’s Anatomia humani corporis (1685) and B.S. Albinus and Jan Wandelaar’s Tabulae sceleti et musculorum (1742). What were the motivations for the Amsterdam surgeon Bidloo and the Leiden professor Albinus to embark on such a difficult, ambitious and financially risky undertaking as an anatomical atlas? How did they team up with their respective artists De Lairesse and Wandelaar? What did they expect from them? Special attention will be paid in this presentation to the actual working process of these anatomist-artist teams. How was the handiwork of the anatomist transferred to a two dimensional representation by the artist? Finally Huisman will consider the scientific, artistic and general cultural contexts surrounding both projects. How did these influence the coming into being of these two anatomical atlases?

Josep Simon (Université Paris Ouest) “Seizing the Cultures of ‘Medical Physics’ in the Nineteenth Century”

Josep Simon is ‘Marie Curie’ postdoctoral fellow at the Institut de Recherches Philosophiques, Université Paris Ouest, with the project "The Rise and Fall of Textbook Science: Technoscientific and Pedagogical Expertise in the Making of Physics in Europe (1802-1902)" (FP7-PEOPLE-2009-IEF-254889-EuroTextbookScience). His work combines approaches from history of science, history of medicine, book history, history of education and visual studies. He is the author of Communicating Physics: The Production, Circulation and Appropriation of Ganot´s Textbooks in France and England (1851-1887) (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011).

Medicine and physics have a long history of reciprocal interactions, but it was in the nineteenth century when ‘medical physics’ was established as an academic discipline. The disciplinary narrative of ‘medical physics’ portrays the field as a succession of innovative efforts around instrumental design and experimental practices, which embraces areas such as 18^th-19^th-century medical electricity, 19^th-century experimental physiology, and 20^th-century nuclear medicine. The making of ‘medical physics’ as a discipline is often seen as a mere succession of technological milestones marking notable applications of physics in medicine (electrical therapies, X-rays, radiotherapy, nuclear medicine, technologies of diagnostic imaging, etc.) and associated techniques of medical imaging. As a history of invention, this historiographical narrative is embedded on an implicit centre-periphery and traditionally Eurocentric model, which focuses on French, British and German case studies (and for the 20^th century, increasingly USA histories) and on a driving technological determinism.

In this presentation I will review the current contributions to the history of medical physics focused around the role of medical imaging and will propose new ways of writing such history, stressing the importance of medical visualization but overcoming the simplicity and linearity of the standard narrative in this field, based on the succession of  technological milestones.

Alfons Zarzoso (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona/Medical History Museum of Catalonia) “Representing Delivery and Creating Obstetrics in Nineteenth-Century Spain through Medical Textbooks”

Alfons Zarzoso is curator of the Medical History Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona and associate lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His research focuses on the material culture of medicine and the visual representations of science and medicine in contemporary Spain, and their role in the definition and delimitation of medical specialties such as anatomy, obstetrics and plastic surgery. He is the author of three books and a number of papers in international journals. His work has received awards by the Spanish Society for the History of Medicine and has been supported by institutions such as the Wellcome Trust and the Bakken Museum.

Childbirth was mainly in the hands of midwifes in 18^th-century Spain. The arrival of the Bourbon authorities early in that century was accompanied with the coming of a number of French surgeons. Court medicine acted as a means of introducing male obstetrical surgery among the Madrid aristocracy. Since then the female hegemony on this matter was challenged by authorities and male-midwife surgeons emerged and consolidated their position from mid 18^th century to mid 19^th century. Such a process has been studied by Spanish historians of medicine. However, ideas about how man-midwifery did learn to “see” the contents of the womb and to “handle” childbirth are not fully apparent yet. Medical textbooks, mannequins and anatomical models played a crucial role in that course of visualizing the invisible female internal organs and imagining and touching the unknown female body. Throughout that century Spanish translations of French obstetrical treatises written in the 17^th- and 18^th centuries seemed to establish the rule. Regulation of licensing midwifes and the creation of the Barcelona and Madrid Royal Colleges of Surgeons (1760, 1787) resulted in the publication of several books devoted to midwife and man-midwife surgeons by Spanish physicians and surgeons. Interestingly, the particular Spanish context shows two periods marked with an extraordinary influence of French obstetrical knowledge. After the Napoleonic war, Spain was already a growing market for the distribution of Spanish translations of French obstetrical treatises. That trend was progressively changed by mid 19^th century when regulation on this matter strengthened and Spanish publishers and medical authors fought to share that market. In this presentation, however, I would like to exam the engravings of those 18^th-century Spanish medical textbooks and to put them into a broader range of visual skills such as those exhibited in the anatomical museums of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons in order to show how the female body was built and was represented in the multimedia intersection of the written word, the engraving and the model.

Elisa Campos (Lisbon) Perception of Lipoproteins and Atherosclerosis through their visual representation

Elisa Campos has been a collaborator of the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (FCT/UNL) since 2003. She has a Ph.D.  in biochemistry from the University of Lisbon and a Ph. D in History and Philosophy of Sciences, from the Universidade Nova of Lisbon. She teaches biochemistry and her area of research concerns the metabolism of lipoproteins.

This presentation aims to follow the perception of lipoproteins and of atherosclerosis stages through their visual representation. Following cholesterol trajectory from friend (beginning XXth century) to foe (1950s on)

I will try to interpret the content of the images which were authored by researchers themselves and whose work resulted in different perspectives on cholesterol. Scientists use images in specific ways to communicate what they have learned. Thus I will include descriptive figures (I looked and this is what I saw), explanatory figures (I looked and this is what I thought); a particular chart with Fredrickson’s classification of hyperlipoproteinemias may mean: ‘Think of it this way’. 

Some figures on methodology show a fundamental aspect of science – the manipulation of Nature – in order to understand its workings (this is how I think it works). Finally, some illustrations give concrete expression to purely abstract concepts or ‘thought experiments’. Visual representations add an element of persuasion to the oral or written communication and they can therefore be used to transport representations of distant phenomena to a single site where they can be manipulated, compared and combined. This means that the concept of geography of scientific knowledge put forward by Livingstone also encompasses visual knowledge. Besides circulation and diffusion of visual representations, phenomena such as visual hybridization and appropriation also occur, in this way contributing to the making and reformulation of scientific knowledge, as I will demonstrate with some of the visual representations of lipoproteins. At the end, I will show a work of art on lipoproteins and I would like to discuss with the audience their interpretation.

JANUARY 25TH 2013: ILLUSTRATIONS ANATOMIQUES

Séminaire en français – the papers will be in French

Hélène Cazes (Université de Victoria, Colombie Britannique, Canada) “Les petites lettres de l’anatomie”

Eduquée en France jusqu’à sa venue au Canada en 1995, Hélène Cazes enseigne la littérature française et les « Humanités » à l’Université de Victoria depuis 2001. Seiziémiste par formation et par nature, elle s¹intéresse à l’humanisme, plus particulièrement aux écritures et destins de savants, d’antiquaires, médecins, poètes. Heureuse récipiendaire d¹une subvention de recherche du CRSH intitulée « Enfin Vésale vint », elle travaille sur le statut iconique  des ‘planches anatomiques’ de Vésale. Ses dernières publications portent sur la bibliographie (deux numéros spéciaux de revue, Variétés Bibliographiques (Renaissance et Réforme) et Variations Bibiographiques (@nalyses) et sur l’amitié (chez Brill, novembre 2010, un recueil collectif sur l’humaniste Bonaventura Vulcanius et ses réseaux, Bonaventura Vulcanius, Works and Networks ainsi qu’un catalogue d’exposition (Leyde): Facebook in the 16th century (Bibliothèque Universitaire de Leyde).  Pour plus de renseignements, voir www.helenecazes.info

Beaux et grands livres, souvent in folio, les traités d'anatomie de la "révolution scientifique" soignent leurs illustrations tant pour des raisons tant scientifiques qu'esthétiques  Le traité icônique de Vésale sur la Fabrique du Corps Humain est, dès sa parution en 1543, loué et copié pour ces mêmes raisons, rappelées dans les préfaces des imitateurs et plagiaires. Or la beauté majestueuse du grand format et des gravures pleine page entre en dialogue avec un système de lettrines et, au sein des illustrations, de "petites lettres" (litteraculae) d'appel de légendes. L'usage de ces ornements typographiques et pratiques d'indexation n'est pas nouveau en 1543, mais il entre alors, dans l'univers du De Fabrica, dans un système complexe et cohérent de dédoublement de la lecture et de ses usages.

Etienne Lepicard (Jérusalem) « Entre mémoire et métaphore, le corps humain comme maison »

Après des études de médecine en France et une thèse remarquée sur les questions d’éthique médicale dans les sources juives (Bible et Talmud), Étienne Lepicard a émigré en Israël où il vit depuis. Explorant depuis une vingtaine d’année les liens entre médecine et nazisme (le livre issue de son PhD sur la première réception de l’Homme, cet inconnu d’Alexis Carrel est attendu aux Belles Lettres dans la collection Médecine et sciences humaines), il aime à se replonger dans les sources juives en y appliquant le questionnement des théories littéraires de la réception des œuvres. Il a ainsi récemment publié un article sur les représentations de l’embryon dans la littérature rabbinique ancienne (Hist. Phil. Life Sci., 2010) ainsi qu’un autre sur la représentation du corps humain comme une maison dans une encyclopédie hébraïque du tout début du 18ème siècle (Medical History, 2008). Pour plus d’informations, cf.

http://yadvashem.academia.edu/EtienneLepicard.

David Ruderman a écrit que « Ma’asseh Tuviyah/La Geste de Tuviyah » a sans doute été « le manuel de science et de médecine écrit en hébreu le plus influent de la période moderne ». Sans cesse réédité depuis sa première publication à Venise en 1708 jusqu’à nos jours, sa première édition comporte en outre des illustrations qui n’ont pas leurs pareilles dans la littérature médicale hébraïque. L’une des particularités les plus remarquables de cet ouvrage est sans nul doute le dialogue qu’il instaure entre les découvertes de la révolution scientifique et les sources juives, entre le monde de l’oralité traditionnelle et celui de la diffusion du livre. En ce sens l’illustration du corps humain (re)présentée comme une maison à l’orée de la section médicale du livre sur la pathologie est exemplaire, puisqu’il joint l’illustration anatomique, le système de « petites lettres » référéntielles et les « arts de la mémoire » chers à France Yates.

MARCH 22^ND 2013: ENGINEERING DESIGNS 

Séminaire en anglais – the papers will be given in English

Frances Robertson (Glasgow) Delineating a rational profession: engineers and draughtsmen as “visual technicians”

Frances Robertson is a lecturer at Glasgow School of Art: her research interests include visual communications with relation to practices of drawing and representation, printing, and the history of technology and science, in dialogue with elite, fine art visual discourses. Future work will consider further aspects of the art worlds of the technicians, jobbing designers and draughtsmen working in the visual economies of the nineteenth century.

I start within the public culture of 'industrial enlightenment' around 1800 described by Jacob (1997) or Mokyr (2002; 2009), in which representations alongside exhibitions and lectures created a 'meaning for machines' that merged the 'mechanical and the philosophical' within a 'broad agenda of improvement' (Stewart 1998: 291). But, this was not a jolly consensus; engineers were trying to build professional status as investigators in the rational mechanical science of construction and manufacture, aiming to fend off, variously, natural philosophers, other technical professions, and, increasingly, lower aspiring ranks within their own field. From the late eighteenth century through to around 1830 engineers, draughtsmen, and other groups entered into a competitive frenzy to invent mechanical drawing aids. These instruments were displayed in useful arts publications, both as objects described in words and pictures, but also through the traces of their use. 'Machine drawing' created distinctive marks that formed an aesthetic of technical representation in print.

Such images mirrored developments in technical representations in the workplace, but had deep differences. To those who see technical drawing as emanating from the 'mind's eye' of the engineer (Ferguson 1977;Baynes 1992), illustrations are frequently, and misleadingly, characterised as peripheral or non-serious productions. But in fact many different types of mechanical engineers worked as visual technicians, and were concerned with technologies of representation on paper, using and inventing drawing machines to manage the literature of professional presentation.
When we start to examine how and where drawing aids, from rulers to ruling machines, were used, and how they worked, we can see that the full range of devices engineers were concerned with did not articulate at all clearly with the substantial feats of material production and construction we associate with the 'heroes of invention' (MacLeod 2007) which are supposedly the engineer's unique field of operations. Furthermore, many devices were fiddly, temperamental, and as difficult to build as to operate. So, why did they bother to invent all this paraphernalia? Through considering the interaction between procedures for making and using drawing equipment, I argue that these toy-like devices contributed just as much as bridges or gargantuan steam powered machines did to the self-fashioning of engineers and engineering.

Mark Niemeyer (Dijon) “Displaced Representation and Nationalistic Appropriation: Illustrating the Atlantic Cable of 1858”

Mark Niemeyer is professor of American literature and American history at the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon.  His research focuses on nineteenth-century writings of the antebellum period and is frequently concerned with questions related to cultural nationalism and national identity.   He has published numerous articles on authors including Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and is co-editor of several editions of works by Herman Melville, including the Folio Classique edition of Mardi (2011), the Norton Critical edition of The Confidence-Man (2005), the « Pléiade » edition of Mardi (1997) and Moby-Dick (2006) and the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Moby-Dick (1988) and Carel (1991).  He is co-editor of Literature on the Move: Comparing Diasporic Ethnicities in Europe and the Americas (2002) and co-author of an American and British history textbook, Repères de civilization : Grande-Bretagne, Etats-Unis (2003).  He has also published illustrated works of general interest including Water: The Essence of Life (2008) and Wonders of the World: World of Man (2010).

This paper will attempt to characterize and analyze some of the contemporary illustrations in the popular press (as well as in commemorative books published especially for the occasion) of one of the great technological feats of the nineteenth century, the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable in the summer of 1858.  The Atlantic Cable, linking Great Britain and the United States, put the two countries, for the very first time, in almost instantaneous communicational contact.  The enthusiasm surrounding the event was enormous, and it was widely celebrated in the popular press and other publications, which often included illustrations.  One problem, however, was that the cable itself was hardly an interesting visual subject.  Thus, various “displacement strategies” were used to find more captivating aspects of the endeavor to illustrate.  Many of these solutions simply involved focusing on the “machinery” used to manufacture and lay the cable or on the men who helped make the project a success, but some of the illustrations also suggest, more or less overtly, a nationalistic aspect of the project, linking it with America’s rising power and need to assert itself on the world stage.

MAY 24^TH 2013 : UNIVERSAL IMAGES?  

Séminaire en anglais – the papers will be given in English

Basak Aray (Paris) “Universal language and scientific images in the logical empiricist tradition”

Otto Neurath (1881-1945) was an economist and one of the leading members of the Vienna Circle. He used visualisation of social statistics for mass education in the Museum of Society and Economy. This talk deals with his methods of visual education, especially the graphic language ISOTYPE  (International System of Typographic Picture Education). This technique for visualising social statistics is the result of Neurath's efforts for popularization through an egalitarian medium considering the special conditions of adult education, like low level of literacy and mixed public. From a pedagogical perspective, Isotype aims to be an emancipatory intellectual tool allowing the introduction of the lower classes in the knowledge of social facts. Parallelling Neurath's physicalism in philosophy of language, it starts from common elements of communication and proceeds by the elimination, where possible, of specific local elements in order to serve intercultural communication on the basis of democratically accessible empirical facts. In this it shares a universalist tendency in the interlinguistics of his time found in numerous attempts for an international auxiliary language. In addition to the history and principles of Isotype, some connections of Neurath's work on Isotype with Basic English and Interglossa will be shown here.

Phil MacGregor (Bournemouth) “Aesthetics and news values in online imagery of space.”

This paper will discuss the selection criteria, presentation, and aesthetic qualities of a range of images used in the space/science sections of news websites. It investigates any particular departures in form and selection criteria compared to other news genres as collated by previous studies of ‘news values’, and debates whether the online medium is a factor in permitting innovation in the sense that it has widened the scope of scientific representation compared to classic media. A view may be sustained that imagery is leading the selection process for online representation, for example in shots arriving from space telescopes, space stations and unmanned probes into the solar system. Websites of the Guardian (space section), the official blog of MSNBC Cosmiclog, and the science section of Le Figaro in France are the sources studied. Some consideration will be given to the capacity of this imagery in space to reflect the astrophysical sciences, which connect to the enduring mysteries of the origin and fate of the universe, and life.

JUNE 7^TH 2013 : LES SCIENCES ET LEURS VULGARISATIONS PAR L’IMAGE

Séminaire en français – the papers will be in French

Norbert Verdier (Université de Paris-Sud) Graver des figures de géométrie au XIXe siècle: procédés, acteurs et enjeux éditoriaux

Norbert Verdier est maître de conférences histoire des sciences et des techniques (IUT de Cachan & GHDSO: université Paris-Sud). Il est l’auteur de Galois : le mathématicien maudit (2011).

Daniel Raichvarg (Dijon) Les illustrations dans les livres scientifiques pour enfants au 19e 

siècle comme objets communicationnels.

Daniel Raichvarg est professeur à l’université de Bourgogne à Dijon. La vulgarisation scientifique est son objet de recherche de prédilection. Chercheur, historien des sciences, Daniel Raichvarg a notamment publié un livre sur l’histoire de la vulgarisation La science pour tous ? chez Gallimard. Historien et théoricien de la vulgarisation, D. Raichvarg est aussi un praticien acharné de la culture scientifique : à l’université de Bourgogne il a ainsi coordonné la Mission culture scientifique destinée à faire dialoguer l’université et le grand public, de façon parfois inattendue.

Les livres scientifiques pour les jeunes constituent un genre littéraire clairement identifié au XIXe siècle. Ils sont, bien évidemment, riches en illustrations. Ces illustrations peuvent être prises en charge par de nombreuses problématiques : leurs conditions de production, leurs auteurs, leurs fonctions dans les livres, leur mode de réception ou leurs usages. Elles assurent une circulation culturelle des savoirs. Elles entrent dans la catégorie de ce que l’on peut appeler des « objets communicationnels. »

The programme of seminars is to be continued over the next few years. Please address queries and proposals to Marie-Odile Bernez, marie-odile.bernez@u-bourgogne.fr.