OHST Special Lectures - Winter-Spring 2008
Co-sponsored by Department of Anthropology, the Science, Technology, and Society Center, and the Department of Anthropology and History of Social Medicine (UCSF).

Laura Cházaro
Cinvestav-IPN, Mexico City

Trade in Medical Instruments and Colonialist Policies between Mexico and Europe in the 19th Century

In an effort to delve into the material dimension of science, this talk focuses on the medical sciences in 19th-century Mexico. My archival research shows that in the mid-1800s Mexico carried on a vigorous commerce that involved shipping or transferring medical instruments from Europe, especially France. Though it is now common to question G. Bachelard’s concept of instruments as merely ‘reified theories’, it is not clear whether the space in which they may come to be placed determines the knowledge they produce. This talk proposes to respond to such questions as: How does the knowledge encapsulated in such artifacts travel from one place to another?; and, having been designed for universal use, how is it that they come to calibrate bodies and national issues? This study of commerce in medical instruments between America and Europe may thus contribute to refining the ahistorical thesis of the ‘free exchange’ of scientific goods, and this dimension of the case leads us to re-examine the official history of science by raising such issues as: why every theory requires material expression, and whether Mexican scientists imported instruments because they lacked the ability to produce such technologies.

12:00 PM
Thursday, April 17
221 Kroeber Hall (Gifford Room)

Office for History of Science and Technology, 543 Stephens Hall #2350
University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2350
tel: (510) 642-4581, e-mail: ohst@berkeley.edu