Critical Perspectives on the Historiography of "Western Science"

Beyond Relay-Race and Precursorism: Challenges in Situating Islamic Medicine in the Historiography of Western Science

by Nahyan Fancy, University of Exeter

The category of "Western science" and its standard narrative creates myriad problems for both understanding the development of medicine in Islamic societies themselves, and its relationship to Renaissance and early modern Latin medicine. It is of course true that the works of Hippocrates, Galen and Aristotle were fundamental building blocks for the medical theoretical tradition in Islamic societies. It is also true that the Arabic translations and engagements with these works were translated into Latin and played an important role in the development of medical theory and practice in Latin European societies. The problem of course is that the standard narrative of Western science makes a number of assumptions that restrict investigations and the teaching of medicine in Islamic societies within the larger rubric of relaying Greek thought to the Latin West and/or mildly anticipating some later Renaissance development. It also presumes that there was no movement of texts after 1200 from Arabic into Latin, and so also confines the teaching of medicine in Islamic societies to this pre-1200 period, often misrepresented as a "Golden Age" after which a decline follows. Using the example of developments in pulse theory, I shall try to see if we can find a way past these constraints. 
 

Provincializing (Western) Model Organisms through the East Asian Fish

Lijing Jiang, Johns Hopkins University

A model organism has been understood as consisting of standardized colonies of biological species that are supposed to represent other species including humans in the laboratory and are supposed to work at any laboratory in the same manner. In the twentieth century, during which such a conception consolidated, prevalent model organisms portrayed by scholars were usually used as genetic tools in service of fundamental or biomedical research. Some key assumptions of the model organism, such as its laboratory universalism, genetic essentialness, and bifurcating roles in fundamental and biomedical research, may have partially resulted from a limited scope of historical inquiries regarding the topic restricted to the relative few examples in the Western World. What can we learn if we take experimental organisms emerged elsewhere seriously and try to understand how they have functioned and evolved with alternative contexts? What can a comparative study between model organisms East and West teach us about previously hidden features of the Western models?

In this chapter, I critically examine the narratives, technologies, phenomena of interest, and goals in the development of the zebrafish model at George Streisinger’s Laboratory at University of Oregon from the late 1960s to the early 1980s by comparing them with relevant observations I gained while researching about how medaka (the Japanese rice fish) and goldfish functioned as experimental organisms in Japan and China. These juxtapositions reveal some previously hidden precedence, inspiration, and resource from East Asia for the foundation of Streisinger’s zebrafish research and expose some of the very local features of late-century Western model organisms that have been often taken as universal. Further, I suggest that deeper understanding of history of modern science in non-Western world, in addition to all other merits, is essential for scholars to fully and critically understand the resources, styles, and limitations of modern science within the Western world.

Beyond the Golden Age: Non-Western Science in the Persianate World (1500-1750) after the Supposed Death of Science in Islam
 
Younes Mahdavi and Peter Barker, University of Oklahoma
 
Abstract: In the first section we will explain the Decline Thesis in detail. Next we will describe the education of the Islamic scholars who are today counted as scientists and the patterns of their careers. Even the most advanced education in technical subjects like astronomy and medicine was conducted as one-to-one, teacher to student training. Since the teachers, especially in the case of astronomy, moved frequently because their main careers were in political administration or diplomacy, both education and research were distributed geographically, and seldom concentrated into what we would today call research centers. The situation was only slightly different in the case of medicine, because hospitals served as centers of teaching and research. But even so, training was provided and certified one-on-one, and students frequently travelled to many different teachers in the course of their educations. The third section of the paper describes how original research was publicized. The primary vehicle was a book genre called a commentary, which in the West has come to denote a derivative work that departs little, if at all, from the text it is commenting on. In the Islamic world, however, commentaries played the same role as research journals today, communicating new results and creating a dialogue between earlier and later research. Important works created not just chains but ever expanding cascades of commentaries, glosses and supercommentaries. In the fourth and fifth sections we apply these ideas to medicine and astronomy showing how these categories reveal vigorous research traditions in Safavid Persia and Mughal India, into the mid-1700s, and decisively refute the Decline Thesis.

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"Separating the West and Non-West in Discourses of Scientific Deficiency"
Suzanne Moon, University of Oklahoma
and
"Surrounding the Adoption of 'Western Science': A Historiographical Reflection on Choe Han-Gi and His Kihak in South Korea"
Jaehwan Hyun, Pusan National University, Busan
 

Paul Keyser, Independent Scholar
"Neither Triumph Nor Telos"
and
Abigail Nieves Delgado, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Juliana Gutiérrez Valderrama, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia
"Othering knowledge: The use of the prefix 'ethno' in science"

Michael Gordin, Princeton University
"Genghis Khan with a Nuclear Reactor: Three Centuries of 'Western Science' in Russia"
Roy Wagner, ETH Zürich
"Indian Mathematics Can’t Win"

 
Elise Burton, University of Toronto
James Poskett, University of Warwick
Suman Seth, Cornell University

"When Racial Science Became ‘Western’"

 
Claire Fanger, Rice University

"The changing shapes of science: Magic, meta-knowledge, and reality in medieval Christian thought"