Gregg Mitman

When nature is the zoo : Vision and power in the art and science of natural history

La camera est un instrument necessaire a la creation et la restauration de la nature, afin de saisir ses emotions, ses qualites et son individualite au travers des observations

Ebola in a Stew of Fear

Like the Ebola virus itself, the fear surrounding it has an ecology that must be understood if the current epidemic is to be brought under control. The local populations fears reflect, in part, the scars and painful memories of past medical encounters in West Africa.

Hay Fever Holiday: Health, Leisure, and Place in Gilded-Age America

By the 1880s hay fever (also called June Cold, Rose Cold, hay asthma, hay cold, or autumnal catarrh) had become the pride of Americas leisure class. In mid-August each year, thousands of sufferers fled to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, to the Adirondacks in upper New York State, to the shores of the Great Lakes, or to the Colorado plateau, hoping to escape the dreaded seasonal symptoms of watery eyes, flowing nose, sneezing fits, and attacks of asthma, which many regarded as the price of urban wealth and education. Through a focus on the White Mountains as Americas most fashionable hay fever resort in the late nineteenth century, this essay explores the embodied local geography of hay fever as a disease. The sufferers found in the White Mountains physical relief, but also a place whose history affirmed their social identity and shaped their relationship to the natural environment. And, they, in turn, became active agents in shaping the geography of place: in the very material relationships of daily life, in the social contours of the region, and in the symbolic space that nature inhabited. In the consumption of nature for health and pleasure, this article suggests, lies an important, yet relatively unexplored, source for understanding changing perceptions of environment and place and the impact of health on the local and regional transformation of the North American landscape.

From the population to society: the cooperative metaphors of W. C. Allee and A. E. Emerson.

ConclusionJohn Greene has dismissed the evolutionary ethics of Simpson as a case in which science was “only a tool, a weapon, in defense of positions that were essentially religious and philosophical.”57 This position adopts an amorphous view of science, in which a scientific theory can be construed to support practically any rhetorical position. The relationship between theory and rhetoric, however, is more complex; it is interactive, with the theory and the rhetoric influencing and supporting one another. It is no coincidence that Allee, Emerson, and Simpson all arrived at a biological basis of democracy and a naturalistic ethics during a period when the future of world politics and mans own morality were in question. Allees commitment to world peace certainly antedated his theory of sociality, just as Simpsons commitment to democracy undoubtedly preceded his evolutionary views.By adopting a particular theory, however, the biologist necessarily imposes constraints on the corresponding rhetoric. Allee and Emerson could not, for example, have stressed the importance of the individual in democracy, given the orientation and framework of their biological research. There were differences among the social philosophies of Allee, Emerson, and Simpson; these differences depended, in part, on the specific evolutionary metaphors to which they subscribed. Allees ideas with respect to cooperation were distinct from Emersons, and both men differed strongly from Simpson on the role of the individual in evolution. The Chicago school was united by a conceptual framework that emphasized the population as the unit of selection, and the importance of cooperation in nature. But cooperation could play many roles: as a unifying principle for a theory of sociality, as an integrating mechanism in physiological functionalism, and as a biological source of hope for a society in the grips of a world war.

Where Ecology, Nature, and Politics Meet: Reclaiming The Death of Nature

The Death of Nature offered a promising bridge between the history of ecological thought, a subject of the history of science, and the history of environmental change, the purview of environmental history. Such bridging was an ambitious goal, hindered, as this essay argues, by the histories and politics of academic disciplines and their publics. Directions in both the history of science and environmental history, as well as the current political climate in the United States, make today an opportune moment once again to explore productive places of exchange that The Death of Nature invited us to consider twenty‐five years ago.

Defining the Organism in the Welfare State: The Politics of Individuality in American Culture, 1890–1950

To speak of the “transfer of metaphors between biology and the social sciences” implies a sense of movement from one space into another. Implicit is an understanding of dichotomy, of boundaries to be transgressed. Framing the problem in this way legitimates the disciplinary boundaries central to the professional identity of the biological and social sciences and to their professional authority within the public sphere. For example, one might detail the preponderance of anthropomorphic terms such as “spite” and “slavery” in sociobiology, citing how such transgressions erode the disciplinary authority of the social sciences and breach the nature/nurture divide. Instead of reifying these boundaries, can we bring them into question? Can we alter these disciplinary topographies, shattering the linear movement of words from one space to another, and situate the metaphors within a general field of meaning? Once we begin to explore science as culture, the dichotomy erected between the biological and the social begins to break down. In the subject matter of this essay, biology is a human science.1

Evolution as Gospel: William Patten, the Language of Democracy, and the Great War

W | ORLD WAR I OPENED UP many opportunities for scientists in America. With the establishment of the National Research Council in 1916 and the mobilization of science for war, chemists, physicists, biologists, and social scientists found their roles in the science-government sector transformed.1 Yet, while a new niche was created for the scientist as professional expert within the government and military establishments, and fields such as psychology, physics, chemistry, and medicine profited from this relationship, the practical services that the evolutionary biologist could offer in the war effort remained marginal at best. Unlike the fields of agriculture or genetics, evolutionary biology seemed to contribute little in the way of material rewards. Within the domain of social ethics and morality, however, a number of biologists felt that evolutionary theory had much to offer. Indeed, the war helped highlight the image of the biologist as social expert-as someone who could defend the principles of democracy, not through expertise in the technology of war, but on the basis of evolutionary philosophy. Although many biologists in the first two decades of the twentieth century rejected the importance of natural selection as an evolutionary agent, the war and the later antievolution campaign of the fundamentalist movement helped foster support for alternative interpretations of evolution that played down the image of nature red in tooth and claw. Vernon Kelloggs Headquarters Nights, first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1917, made explicit the association of Darwinian theory, especially the depiction of nature as struggle, with German war ideology during World War I. Kelloggs anti-Darwinian and anti-German rhetoric influenced a number of biologists who sought to counteract the negative connotations of Darwinian theory. Emphasizing the creative process of evolution, biologists such as Edwin Grant Conklin and William Patten saw specialization,

Dominance, leadership, and aggression: animal behavior studies during the Second World War

During the decade surrounding the Second World War, an extensive literature on the biological and psychological basis of aggression surfaced in America, a literature that in general emphasized the significance of learning and environment in the origins of aggressive behavior. Focusing on the animal behavior research of Warder Clyde Allee and John Paul Scott, this paper examines the complex interplay among conceptual, institutional, and societal forces that created and shaped a discourse on the subjects of aggression, dominance, and leadership within the context of World War II. The distinctions made between sexual and social dominance during this period, distinctions accentuated by the threat of totalitarianism abroad, and the varying ways that interpretations of behavior could be negotiated attests to the multiplicity of interactions that influence the development of scientific research.

Essay Review: Exploring the Borders of Environmental History and the History of Ecology

In 1980, when Raymond Williams’s essay “Ideas of Nature” was published, the field of environmental history was just coming into being, and instead of interrogating the many ways in which humans have constructed nature, American environmental historians were confidently adding a historical dimension to the political reform movement that had inspired their discipline – environmentalism. Like environmental activists, environmental historians relied on the science of ecology to guide their narratives of how human culture was altering nature. William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983), for example, juxtaposed explorers’ and colonists’ accounts of the landscape with recent ecologists’ literature, which Cronon intended to act as a transparent picture of what the New England landscape, sans human interference, was meant to look like. For Cronon and his fellow chroniclers of human impact on the environment, ecological theories held a status not unlike that which Williams noted had long been enjoyed by nature: ecology was seen as describing the essential constitution of the world, as a sort of transcendent principle, which could be counted upon to measure the degree of human folly in interfering with nature’s essence.

Natural history and the clinic: the regional ecology of allergy in America

Abstract This paper challenges the presumed triumph of laboratory life in the history of twentieth-century biomedical research through an exploration of the relationships between laboratory, clinic, and field in the regional understanding and treatment of allergy in America. In the early establishment of allergy clinics, many physicians opted to work closely with botanists knowledgeable about the local flora in the region to develop pollen extracts in desensitization treatments, rather than rely upon pharmaceutical companies that had adopted a principle of standardized vaccines beholden to bacteriology that gave no thought to the particularities of place where their products were to be sold. Natural historical sciences like plant ecology and systematics furnished important knowledge, resources, and practices in establishing a medical marketplace for allergy in America. And botanists similarly profited from biomedicine and allergic bodies in extending their network of knowledge about the plant world.