To date, studies of the relationship between technology and its consumers have used the constructs of traditional paradigms of production and consumption as the foundation for analysis. These studies have served to reinforce traditional concepts of gender and hierarchy in the nursing–technology dichotomy. To propose a new and more relevant framework for analysing the technology–nursing relationship, the analysis of gender within the methodology of the social history of technology will be used. Healthcare will be viewed as a technologic network, and (...) within that network multiple knowledge domains reside and interact. These domains, in turn, are socially constructed and historically contingent. This paper operationalizes this argument by examining the domain of the early nurse practitioner movement of the 1960s as part of a gendered technologic system. The findings of this study illuminate the agency of nurses in the shaping of traditionally male knowledge domains and as a crucial factor for understanding the evolution of not only the particularities of the nurse–technology relationship, but also the generalities of the gendered ways of knowing within the healthcare–technology relationship. Perhaps most importantly, different sets of questions can be formulated to analyse the history of the nurse practitioner movement from a technologic perspective that will provide new standpoints for the nursing‐technology dichotomy in the millennium. (shrink)

Microstudies and big picture accounts are often counterposed. This paper investigates the supposed dichotomy between the two historiographical approaches. In particular it investigates how the discussions are reflected in the historiography of molecular biology and the special questions posed by the disciplinary context. Taking inspiration from the microhistory tradition as exemplified by the works of Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques Revel, and David Sabean among others, the paper highlights the heuristic value of microstudies to reconstruct the multiple contexts that link apparently small (...) events with broader structures. In a parallel fashion, the paper argues for using microstudies to open up the history of molecular biology to other fields of study and thus moving beyond the confines of the disciplinary framework. Such an approach does not dismiss the search for big pictures. Yet rather than opposing big pictures to microstudies, it sees microstudies as a valid way to gain new and broad vistas. (shrink)

Sandra Harding is working on the reconstruction of scientific objectivity. Lorraine Daston argues that objectivity is a concept that has historically evolved. Her account of the development of "aperspectival objectivity" provides an opportunity to see Harding's "strong objectivity" project as a stage in this evolution, to locate it in the history of migration of ideals from moral philosophy to natural science, and to support Harding's desire to retain something of the ontological significance of objectivity.

Nowhere is current controversy over biological explanations for human behaviour more striking than in debates over violence. New theories are being formulated, and biological markers are being identified in new ways. The terms of discourse and debate are being changed. Violence may be represented as a pathological biological syndrome, or as natural, especially for men. Why the growing interest now in biological explanations of violence? Is the biology of violence suggestive of a new brand of biological determinism? This latter, broader (...) question poses a challenge to the argument that current biological theories of behaviour are different and better than faulty, often racist and eugenicist, theories which have gone before. New theories do not reduce to linear cause-and-effect explanations, and there are no `genes for crime'. Nevertheless, there is a question of geneticism, `the doctrine of the primacy of the genetic make-up in determining every aspect of the human mind, constitution and social behaviour...' (Medawar, 1984: 255). (shrink)

During the last decades, medical historiography has undergone considerable changes. This review attempts an outline of the developments since 1945. The first section sketches the institutional background of the discipline focusing on the characteristic features which emerged in different national traditions. The following sections—essentially restricted to the German speaking context—describe the development of the fields in research and teaching, ranging from the history of ideas to the social history of medicine, from philogical and editorial work to the philosophy and sociology (...) of medical knowledge. (shrink)

The increased popularity of the label "cultural" within science studies, especially in relation to "cultural studies, " invites consideration of how it is and can be used in historical work. A lot more seems now to be invested in the notion of "cultural history. " This article examines some recent historiography of science as a means of considering what counts as cultural history in that domain and attempts to coordinate it with the sociologically informed studies of the past ten orfifteen (...) years. The label "sociocultural" seems a more useful term by which to capture recent developments. (shrink)

Medical anatomy is one of the key sites of the scientific production, reproduction and maintenance of sex and gender. Our Human Anatomies Project explores the construction, reconstruction and maintenance of difference in genital anatomies, focusing especially on the clitoris. This article focuses on representations of human genitalia in the form of cyberanatomies - video, CD-ROM and internetbased renderings of human bodies. In cyberspace as elsewhere, the biomedical expert remains the proper and dominant mediator between humans and their own bodies, despite (...) the democratization of knowledges supposedly possible through the Internet. Special attention is given to the specific sites of production and distribution of these different cyberanatomies. Through our review of the globalization of cyberanatomies, we have come to witness the very sedimentation of sex/gender/sexuality in new arenas of representations of human bodies. Western biomedical imperialism and globalization of a standardized (American) body are taken up as core theoretical concerns. (shrink)