FAS Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the history of attempts to ameliorate fatigue and other workplace afflictions in the US in the first half of the twentieth century. Bringing together labor history, business history, and the history of science, this dissertation traces how three communities of researchers attempted to apply the emerging sciences of (I) physiology, (II) time and motion, and (III) mind to measure and resolve the intractable problem of industrial fatigue and related workplace maladies. The third group of researchers, championing a mental approach, succeeded in demonstrating, at least to the business community, that the science of studying workers’ minds, rather than their physiology or time and motion, was the key to resolving the labor problem. I argue how, in this process, these scientific approaches invented to wrangle the condition of fatigue sometimes amplified it, transforming fatigue study from a reform-minded initiative to protect workers’ health to a tool for capital to better command its workforce. By using science to pathologize the mental roots of fatigue, researchers promised industry a method for ensuring peaceful workplaces free from discontent and transformed industrial life. As workers variously resisted, sabotaged, and acquiesced to these new initiatives to scientifically collect data about their behaviors, minds, and bodies, they left behind a history of how workers experienced and responded to technological transformations at work.

This dissertation presents a reinterpretation of the historical development of modern neuroscience during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Contrary to the existing historiography, I argue that an interdisciplinary approach to unravelling the mind/brain relationship did not develop first at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the aegis of F.O. Schmitt and the Neurosciences Research Program in the 1950s. Rather, modern neuroscience was the product of a relatively small group of historical actors operating at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) between 1928 and 1965. Under the leadership of its founder, the neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, the MNI became a unique site for medical research into the human brain, and achieved an unprecedented level of disciplinary integration. Chapter One examines the origins of Penfield’s vision for an interdisciplinary neurological institute; the structure of the MNI was rooted not only in the broader agenda of his Rockefeller Foundation patrons for interdisciplinary medicine, but also in Penfield’s scientific biography, which included considerable experience in laboratories and clinics in Europe as well as the United States. Penfield sought to create a new kind of neurological clinic that could employ the insights of the emerging science of histology and cytology – the microscopic study of tissues and cells – to advance the professional standing of neurosurgery. Penfield ultimately established a clinic in Montreal, a city that he felt would allow him access to the scientific and medical cultures of Europe and North America. Surgery for epilepsy became the signature operation of the new clinic. Chapter Two traces the development of neuropsychology at the MNI. Penfield recruited a series of young psychologists to address post-operative intelligence and memory deficits. The nearly two-decade collaboration between the MNI’s surgeons and the psychologists D.O. Hebb, Molly Harrower and Brenda Milner led to the emergence of cognitive neuroscience as a new field of inquiry. Chapter Three details the contributions of Penfield’s closest collaborator, Herbert Jasper, whose pioneering work with the electroencephalograph (EEG) not only reinvigorated the study of the functional anatomy of the human brain, but also acted as a crystallization point for global efforts to create an Interdisciplinary Brain Research Organization (IBRO). The IBRO became the acknowledge origin of neuroscience outside of the United States. Jasper’s brand of neuroscience displayed a notably different style from that emerging at MIT. An examination of how the MNI and MIT groups addressed the issue of memory illustrates these different styles; while the MIT group searched fruitlessly for a ‘memory molecule’ akin to DNA, the MNI group engaged in more profitable studies of the functional anatomy of memory. Chapter Four examines the troubled relationship between the MNI and the field of psychiatry as a case study in failed interdisciplinarity. Penfield was initially optimistic about incorporating psychiatry into the interdisciplinary community at Montreal; however, the psychiatrist selected to run Montreal’s new training facility for psychiatrists, the Allan Memorial Institute (AMI), was uninterested in collaborating, except on the issue of psychosurgery. The issue of psychosurgery led to a breakdown of communication between MNI and AMI, leading Cameron to disassociate himself from the Montreal neuroscience community. This disassociation afforded him the opportunity to engage in ethically questionable experiments in ‘psychic driving’ that were later revealed to be funded by the American CIA. In the Conclusion, I reflect upon the reasons for the decline of the MNI, and the ascendance of MIT’s molecular approach to neuroscience. Drawing on the insights of Mark Granovetter, I argue that the MNI’s brand of neuroscience was a product of its strong assemblies of historical actors, which were enriched by its ‘weak ties’ to other scientific cultures.

I argue in my dissertation that Robert John Thornton's (1768?-1837) Temple of Flora (folio 1799-1807, quarto 1812), also entitled "The Universal Empire of Love," represents personified botanical flowers of the British Empire in a colonial microcosm where anthropomorphic plants are allegorized as Europe's others. This book was a collectible item with plates issued in a series of subscriptions, which were always bound in different combinations so that no two copies were ever the same--a book that depicts a metamorphic view of nature through a series of alterations made to the individual plates, which reflects the diversity of exotic and familiar territories in the world and the mysteries within it. Thornton chose plants, flower symbolism, and landscape backgrounds "with scenery appropriated to their subject," to encapsulate the universe as a series of botanical scenes of exotic and familiar territories of Britain's past and present, and this botanical world includes four continents of the world symbolically represented as women through the relationship between image and text, the diversity of people and naturalia within these territories, and the passage of historical and chronological time. TheTemple of Flora is a textual space that involves strategies of possessing and knowing nature through the collection and conquest of plants that represent the colonial inhabitants of the British Empire ensconced in their territories and collected by wealthy Britons as a miniature colonial and exotic world bound between two covers.

This dissertation examines the material culture of quantum theoretical work from 1911 to 1927. It argues that the writing practices and the editorial rules Niels Bohr used in his own work and enforced at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen shaped the culture of theoretical physics and quantum theory itself. Each chapter uses oral histories, archived drafts, photographs, and personal and professional correspondence to reconstruct the writing practices of quantum physicists -- dictation, drawing, revising, and reading. Examining the contributions made in writing and editing work foregrounds different historical actors and scientific sites than those privileged within previous histories of quantum theory. It reveals the importance of Margrethe Bohr, Niels Bohr’s wife and amanuensis, and of his secretary Betty Schultz, to the creation of quantum theory. It also emphasizes that domestic spaces including the Bohr family home and summer vacation cottage were significant sites where scientific theories were disciplined. Chapter 2 addresses Bohr’s practice of using dialogue with a non-scientist to produce first drafts. These dictation/dialogue practices co-evolved with Bohr’s ideals for scientific communication and underscored the value Bohr placed on communicating to non-experts. Bohr’s dictation practices are particularly visible in how he defined the responsibilities of authors and readers in the creation of the meaning of a text. Chapter 3 reconstructs Bohr’s revision practices and the revision and editorial practices he enforced at his institute, especially those surrounding the 1913 article “On the Constitution of Atoms.” It uses theoretical tools from literary theorists, scholarly editors, and historians of science to argue for a new, cinematic way of reading scientific writing, which privileges neither the published version nor the original moment of discovery, situating the meaning of a work in the process not the final product. By examining the reception of Bohr’s theories, Chapter 4 reveals the importance of informal networks in the spread of quantum theory. Bohr’s use of interleaved pages to record feedback on published work suggests a writing process that does not stop at publication. The completed work, instead of remaining a fixed text, immediately becomes basis of a new draft.