Showing papers by "Warwick Anderson published in 1992"
TL;DR: Weston Chamberlain's laboratory investigations thus challenged the long-held medical theories of inevitable white degeneration in the tropics.
Abstract: When Andrew Balfour spoke to the London Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 1914, his subject was "Tropical Problems in the New World," and he had some recent information from the Philippines that would surprise some of his audience and please others. Balfour announced that Weston Chamberlain, working at the Manila Bureau of Science, had recently reported on his investigations of the "physiological activity of Americans in these islands and the influence of tropical residence on the blood." It seemed probable that the tropical climate itself exercised no harmful influence on the new colonizers: "By far the larger part of the morbidity and mortality in the Philippines is due to nostalgia, isolation, tedium, venereal disease, alcoholic excess, and especially to infections with various parasites." Chamberlain's laboratory investigations thus challenged the long-held medical theories of inevitable white degeneration in the tropics.'
60 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In an age when the colonial powers were intervening in the world's human order, acclimatization provided a way for scientists to intervene in its natural order and theories proposing an active adaptation to a new climate, and thus the feasibility of transforming foreign organisms, were soon to emerge.
Abstract: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY WAS A CENTURY OF ACCLIMATIZATION. AS NEVER before, Europeans mobilized the natural world to their economic and cultural advantage. Plants and animals from even the most distant, sultry colonies were forced to endure the northern winters. In an age when the colonial powers were intervening in the world's human order, acclimatization provided a way for scientists to intervene in its natural order: just as the leaders of Europe altered the political geography of the globe, so too did acclimatizers alter its biogeography. During this period a pervasive discourse on the migration of animals and plants between climatic zones emerged in complicity with European politics of appropriation and command. The vocabulary of acclimatization is itself a creature of the lateeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The French polemicist G. T. F. Raynal, ever an admirer of the exotic, first used the word acclimater in 1776 in his Histoire philosophique et politique des etablissements et du commerce des Europeens dans les deux Indes. But not until 1801 did Sebastien Mercier, a playwright much given to scientific speculation, coin the term accimatement. The words acclimatation and acclimation, both passive constructions similar to acclimatement, seem to have entered the English language only around 1820. The development of these terms during this period is just one indication of a vigorous interest in the study of climatic influences on the newly described species-on organisms once considered stable. It was in this context that theories proposing an active adaptation to a new climate, and thus the feasibility of transforming foreign organisms, were soon to emerge. Indeed, by the 1830s French natural scientists were discussing acclimatisation-an activity far more deliberate and systematic than Mercier's detached observation of accirnatement.
54 citations
TL;DR: This paper describes the efforts of clinical scientists and computer experts to introduce computer diagnosis into the wards of a major Australian teaching hospital during the 1960s and 1970s, and appeals to a scientific method that physicians were prepared to use rhetorically to bolster their diagnoses.
Abstract: This paper describes the efforts of clinical scientists and computer experts to introduce computer diagnosis into the wards of a major Australian teaching hospital during the 1960s and 1970s. A logical-empiricist procedure construed as a `scientific' model of medical diagnosis — and thus challenging traditional physicians' claims of `craft knowledge' — had the potential to define a new social and institutional role for clinical research. In this account, the `craft' and `scientific' representations of diagnosis are treated symmetrically, as discursive resources used in a hospital context to legitimate the divergent competences of two competing occupational subgroups. Neither `skill' nor `science' is privileged as an explanatory framework. Attributions of skill — as of rationality — may serve distinct social goals and institutional interests. In order to secure a place for this diagnostic technology clinical scientists appealed to a scientific method that physicians were prepared to use rhetorically to bol...
28 citations