University:
Boston University
Course:
CAS HI 546 | Places of Memory: Historic Preservation Theory and Practice
Academic year:

2023
Views:

261

Pages:

14
Author:

ke1ra3p2uaper

“Methods Discourse”  Methods-related statements and criteria that past experimenters themselves proposed.  E.g.: An experimental finding should be reproducible   I use present-day concepts and distinctions (e.g. “replication”) but I also pay attention to past actors’ terms (e.g. “imitation”) I pay particular attention to the ways in which and where past scientists discuss methodological issues and whether they offer justifications for methodological views. Snake venom research, ca. 1660-1860  Research questions:  Nature and composition of venom?  Effects on the (human) body?  Antidotes?  Research techniques:  Animal experimentation, post mortem dissection  Chemical investigations of venom Sample episodes  The Tuscan naturalist Francesco Redi (1626-97) and his critic, the French apothecary and chemist Moyse Charas (1619-98)  The Tuscan naturalist and physician Felice Fontana (1730-1805)  Their views on comparative trials, repetition, replication (“imitation”), and variation (“diversification”) Francesco Redi (1626-97) The “yellow liquor” causes the fatal consequences of snake bites  Deadly when inserted into wounds, innocent when taken by mouth  Redi’s critic Charas: the viper’s rage is deadly  Redi the experimentalist Redi demanded that experimenters see for themselves, and he stated that he could not trust the phenomena “if they are not confirmed by iterated and reiterated experience.”  Let’s look beyond his general commitment to experimentalism and examine what exactly this commitment involved.  Many, many experiments     Old fables were refuted “by experiments made many many times.” Redi had “observed [. . .] very often” that the yellow liquor spurted into the wound when the viper struck. The effects of bile and of the yellow fluid were tested on a number of different animals (as well as on the viper catcher). Redi demonstrated the effects of venom taken from dead vipers in more than a hundred experiments Comparisons Redi punctured the thighs of ten pigeons with broom straws sharpened like arrows and dipped in the yellow liquor collected from many dead vipers. The poisoned straws were left in the wounds. All pigeons died after two or three hours.  He also wounded four other pigeons with straws that had not been dipped in the fluid, and these birds survived.   “The first experimenter to use experimental controls”? Charas objected… … (following van Helmont) that it was not the yellow liquor but the rage of the viper that was the cause of death.  Charas thus compared animals bitten by angry vipers and animals bitten by contented and relaxed vipers and demonstrated that only angry vipers caused death.  What’s innovative about these experiments?  The practice of repetition or the practice of comparison? Some well known comparative trials Galen’s treatise On Theriac to Piso (ca. 200) contains the description of trials with “poisonous beasts,” which are placed among wild cocks that had received theriac, and “those who have not drunk theriac die immediately, but those who have drunk it are strong and stay alive after being bitten.”  The 14th-century scholar Bernard Gordon advised that the experimenter “take two pheasants, cut off their crests, apply a poison to the wounds (or administer it orally) and wait until they begin to stagger. Then put theriac on the crest wound and in the drink of one of them: if this one lives and the other dies, the theriac is good.”  Redi did not comment on comparisons, but he did discuss repetitions   Marco Aurelio Severino, “most versed in knowledge of the viper and greatly experienced,” had been convinced by “only two experiments” that the yellow liquor was not lethal when it was put into wounds. “…often times it happens that […] genuine causes, for some unknown or unseen hindrance, cannot produce their effects…” Charas on Redi  Redi “hath contented himself with having made some of the yellow liquor to be swallowed by one only Man, one only Duck, one only Kid, thence to know and to assure himself of its innocence when swallow’d, without making a greater number of Experiments.” “Many many” experiments A large number of experiments (i.e. investigating a topic from many angles)  Many repetitions of a particular trial  “More than enough” trials for the purpose 