The work of Lorraine Daston's research group for 1995-1997 addresses two major topics: the varieties of scientific experience, and the history of scientific objectivity. Both projects aim to historicize, by means of specific examples taken from several periods and scientific disciplines, categories of analysis long taken for granted by historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science. These projects take as their departure point the idea that experience and objectivity themselves have histories, which can be reconstructed on the basis of key examples.
Lorraine Daston (responsible), in co-operation with Doris Kaufmann, Ursula Klein, H. Otto Sibum, Skúli Sigurdsson and Friedrich Steinle
Both the natural and human sciences have been extremely fertile in developing new forms of experience: e.g. clinical observations, laboratory experiments, legal indices, statistical tables, anatomical dissection, field work in natural history and anthropology, introspection, instrumental probes, ideal types, and computer simulations. Some of these forms of experience are as old as Hippocrates; others have emerged within living memory. Each has its characteristic objects of study, canons of evidence and proof, and conventions of literary presentation. Until very recently, they have all been lumped together under the rubric "empiricism" by philosophers, and mostly ignored by historians. The project "The Varieties of Scientific Experience," begun this past fall in Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, has three goals: (1) to construct a refined taxonomy of the forms of scientific experience across a varied sample of disciplines and periods; (2) to trace the history of each of these forms, with special attention to the conditions under which they emerge or disappear; and (3) to investigate the relationships between different forms of experience and corresponding standards of evidence, proof, and description within the sample.
Although the central focus for the sample is on the natural sciences since the seventeenth century, it was considered essential for several reasons to include some examples both from the human sciences and from earlier periods. First, some forms, like clinical observation, have a history that stretches back to antiquity. Second, the current classifications of knowledge that divide the natural from the human sciences diverge sharply from earlier classifications. For example, in the medieval university curriculum, music theory was a close neighbor of astronomy, and astronomy and physics were remote from one another. Third, there are historical affinities and genealogies among forms of experience that cut across even contemporary classifications. It is, for example, difficult to understand seventeenth-century notions of what constituted a scientific fact without a careful study of the legal doctrines of evidence from the early modern period. Throughout the project, we have emphasized the importance of comparisons - between disciplines, periods, and intellectual and cultural contexts.
The study of forms of scientific experience throws light on two other fundamental issues in the history of science: how certain kinds of objects (and not others) come to qualify as objects of scientific inquiry; and what can and cannot be communicated in the presentation of scientific experience to a community dispersed in time and space. In the first case, there is an intimate connection between what can become a scientific object and what are considered to be legitimate forms of scientific experience. For example, the controversy in psychology at the turn of this century over the legitimacy of introspection as a form of scientific experience - it was empirical but not public knowledge - threatened to eliminate the will and consciousness itself as objects of scientific inquiry. In the second case, the conditions placed upon communications intended for audiences scattered across the globe (or even across centuries) are very different from those for an audience addressed face to face, as in the classroom. Certain crucial aspects of scientific experience, for example the elements of bodily skill required to get a capricious experiment to work, may become invisible because they cannot be communicated in words, though they might be learned by example.
In the early phases of the project, we have concentrated upon limiting cases of scientific experience; i.e. on cases that stretch some aspect of our current conceptions of the empirical almost to the breaking point. These limiting cases unsettle the self-evidence of currently accepted forms of scientific experience by providing concrete alternatives to the choices of what to investigate and how. They also throw into relief the otherwise hidden criteria by which certain forms of experience and description are judged to be legitimate. If, for example, the late eighteenth-century Seelenforscher attempted to develop an empirical science of dreams, but psychologists of the early twentieth century rejected the possibility of a science even of waking consciousness, we may suspect a crucial shift in these criteria. Similarly, if mid-eighteenth-century physicists discard reports of luminescent phenomena that their seventeenth-century predecessors deemed key to understanding the nature of light, we may suspect a change in criteria of evidence, significance, and even of facticity. We have also attempted to pay heed to hybrid kinds of scientific experience, which usually emerge in contexts of application: for example, the standardization of scientific units and procedures through the creation of an electrification network, the extraordinary pressures on psychiatry to classify and cure war-time mental disorders, or the "paper tools" of tables and formulas manipulated by organic chemists suspended between the laboratory and the factory.
With Katharine Park, (see "Activities of the Visiting Scholars and Research Fellows") Lorraine Daston completed a book manuscript this fall on Wonders and the Order of Nature, which traces the responses of European naturalists from the high Middle Ages through the Enlightenment to marvels and anomalies. Wonders as things and events - a two-headed calf, the appearance of three suns in the sky, stones figured with faces and landscapes, rains of blood or frogs, a single tree bearing two kinds of fruit - mark the boundaries between the possible and the impossible in nature. Hence, a history of wonders is also a history of the order of nature, of what kind of phenomenon can count as natural. The order of nature defined by Aristotelian habits, what nature does "always, or most of the time," locates wonders in the realm of the preternatural (praeter naturam), which lies outside the ordinary course of nature but is not miraculous (supra naturam). In contrast, the order of nature defined by natural laws at the turn of the eighteenth century eliminated the intermediate realm of the preternatural, and with it, most of the scientific study of wonders. The history of wonders is also a history of the opposition and conflation of art and nature. Particularly in the early modern period, the wonders of art and nature, displayed side-by-side in the Wunderkammern, helped to dissolve the ancient opposition between the works of man and the works of nature. When Francis Bacon and René Descartes sought examples of how art and nature merged in the reformed natural philosophy, they turned to the wonders of such "cabinets of curiosities," to monsters and automata. Finally, the history of wonders is a history of the cognitive emotions of wonder and curiosity, which selected certain objects for study, prescribed that they be studied in a certain way, and set standards of the evidence of things and testimony accordingly. Within the context of a history of scientific experience, wonders represent a limiting case with respect to ontological possibility, epistemological credibility, and collective psychological sensibility.
This study focuses on the relationship between psychiatric discourse, its social context, and cultural representation. The investigation starts in the 1850's, when psychiatry as a scientific system broke with its intermediate position between philosophy and medicine. Emphasizing the physiological basis of psychic phenomena and defining illness as diseases of the brain, psychiatry made a "paradigmatic shift" to become a science, a change accompanied by a process of professionalization which saw the establishment of psychiatry as a special medical field at universities and the establishment of psychiatric hospitals as accepted places of residence for and observation of those labelled insane. In addition, psychiatrists appeared to offer society both a scientific explanation and a treatment of the psychic disorders observed by contemporaries. The disorders came to be interpreted as the result of the disruption of traditional ways of life during a period of rapid industralization and correspondingly dramatic socio-economic change.
The study shows the centrality of psychiatric thinking, specifically of explaining social problems within a medical framework, to broadening not only scientific psychiatry's theoretical impact on the emerging fields of criminal anthropology, criminal justice, and the European eugenic movement, but also to expanding the accepted sites for analyzing psychiatric experience. The realm of the possible was expanded from observation in patients' homes and clinical observation to field work in asylums, prisons, schools, the streets (in case of the homeless), and ultimately on the battlefields of the First World War.
The theoretical shift in the definition of hysteria in the 1880's from a disease of the female reproductive organs to one of the nervous system, meaning that men could be diagnosed with hysteria and its sub-conditions, led to increasing divisions within the psychiatric scientific community, the emergence of psychoanalysis, and a social, political and programmatic reorientation of gender relationships. The experience of the Great War was central to the development of new psychiatric approaches: not only did heretofore unknown psychic disorders, traumas and brain injuries appear, but different forms of observation, explanation and applications in psychiatric practice and theory also produced competing facticities.
The multiple meanings of hysteria in psychiatric discourse and its relationship to other diseases (such as schizophrenia) were also reflected in its cultural representation. The narrative forms of naturalism and decadence, which adopted and interacted with psychiatric diagnoses and case studies, link the psychiatric discourse with the crisis of the middle classes in the face of modernity and new gender identities. Older layers of the psychiatric discourse remained, however, in the language of suffering and in the collective memory of society, and mingled with the new forms of experience codified and created by scientific psychiatry.
Two perspectives inform this inquiry into the forms of scientific experience in organic chemistry from 1815 - 1870. First, what part of the body of knowledge in nineteenth-century organic chemistry was considered empirical and what part was not? How did nineteenth-century chemists transform the epistemological status of some of their statements from an explanatory or "theoretical" to a factual one? One example is the slow transformation of the general "theory of proportions," which was controversial in the 1810's and 1820's, into an "empirical law" by the mid-nineteenth century. Another example is the transformation of the "theory of substitution" in the 1830's into "substitution" as a description of certain laboratory techniques by the 1850's. A third example comes from the formula notation in general as well as from the specific formulas of particular substances. Formulas were first considered topics of research, and interpreted as theoretical, but were subsequently transformed into facts and material paper tools.
The second perspective concerns the mediation of experience by different kinds of socio-material tools, ranging from physical material tools and material paper tools to reified concepts and quasi - a priori categories. The history of a classical laboratory science like chemistry provides a broad variety of examples of how laboratory tools interacted with paper tools as well as with reified concepts in the production and transformation of experimental knowledge. Not only were new laboratory tools and craft skills developed in nineteenth-century organic chemistry, but also a new kind of paper tool: chemical formulas. Closely connected to the transformation of the "theory of proportions" into a "law" was the resolution of the theoretical debate as to whether all chemical compounds could be represented by formulas. The original theoretical import of formulas was black-boxed when they were used as paper tools to recreate the order of "reactions" (this is an outstanding example of a completely reified chemical concept) out of the overwhelming complexity of organic experiments. Within a few decades after their introduction, a paper world of chemical formulas had been established, interacting with both the physical world of the chemical laboratory and the world of propositional chemical knowledge represented in texts.
Historians of science have increasingly begun to explore experiment as a particular form of human work with its own values. These narratives are predominantly based on textual representations of the past, such as scientists' notebooks, letters and papers. Only quite recently have they begun to emphasize the importance of studying instruments, or generally speaking, the material culture of these endeavors. However, conventional historiography is still unclear about how to give these silent representations of the past a proper voice. Reworking experiments by performing them with replicas of historical objects was developed as a way of enriching our knowledge of historical laboratory events. Furthermore, it draws our attention to hitherto unrecognized anthropological dimensions of experimental practice, and at the same time opens ways to link the experimenters' gestural knowledge to their cultural context. The use of the term "gestural knowledge" should emphasize that those crucial elements usually called skills are part of a local working knowledge intimately tied to the historical actors' bodily performance of work.
These neglected dimensions of experimentation and its historical meaning for the development of nineteenth-century physics are studied through the genesis and development of the experimental determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat, i.e. the history of a scientific fact. In the early nineteenth century, the existence of a constant relationship between mechanical work and heat, such as James Joule determined with his paddle wheel experiment, made possible the calibration of natural forces and thus became at once the central building block of Victorian energy physics and the major standard for the establishment of nineteenth-century metrology. This ongoing historical comparison of these worlds of experimental physics - especially their specific practices of replication - at different sites in Europe ( Manchester, Cambridge, Berlin) and the United States (Baltimore) indicates that researchers' experimental performances vary according to the gestural knowledge that originated in these places. Furthermore, it seems reasonable to argue that there are complex and neglected relations between experimental thermodynamics, electrodynamics, economics, engineering and the changing cultures of practical skill and organized work. This map of the historical geography of nineteenth-century laboratory work, focusing on the acquisition and communication of gestural knowledge, thus promises a deeper historical understanding of the formation of the exact sciences in the nineteenth century. Finally, this research leads to a new interpretation of the emergence of modern practical physics in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the birth of a modern physical standard.
When Johann Wilhelm Ritter performed some of his experiments on electricity at the beginning of the nineteenth century, electric circuits were so few and far between that Ritter had to use his own body as a circuit element. At the end of the nineteenth century, the electron was discovered in the Cavendish laboratory, while electrons were already being hurled in growing numbers along the emerging power networks of Western industrialized nations and the global telegraphic networks of an earlier vintage. A century later, the entanglement of electrons, electric circuits, and electric power networks has become total and global. The fabric of society has become electric: household appliances, cardiac pacemakers, communication systems, computers, radio and television, videos, electric trams, and elevators, are just a few examples.
A milestone in the historical study of electrification was the publication of Thomas P. Hughes' Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (1983). Hughes' study made it clear that the categories of applied vs. pure science fail to do justice to the complex interaction between science and technology. Many of the problems solved by engineers, scientists, and technicians are fundamental and not applied; their novelty precludes the application of already existing theory. Conversely, no "pure" theory could adequately deal with the complexity of material and organizational culture. Examples of fundamental problems abound in the history of electrification: protection of transmission lines against lightning, stability of electric power transmission networks, design of nuclear power reactors, and the regulation of the flow of rivers are only a few of the possible illustrations.
The historian of Icelandic electrification need not be concerned with invention or discovery; the technology was imported in standardized form. Rather, one must pay close attention to the possession of the skills necessary to operate the technology. In this instance it is possible to draw upon recent studies on the role of experimental skills in the history of science and technology. Moreover, one of the results of post-Networks historiography has been the analysis of the construction of various electric standards (e.g., the ohm at the Cavendish laboratory in the 1870's). Standards are essential to the operation of large technological systems, in everything from microchips to the screws and bolts that hold them together. The relevance of these discoveries to the language used by system builders and electrifiers is illustrated strikingly by a book published in the early 1930's by the Association of German Engineers, Internationale Sprachnormung in der Technik, besonders in der Electrotechnik (die nationale Sprachnormung und ihre Verallgemeinerung) by Dr. Eugen Wüster. The calibration of culture and language also occurred in Iceland, but with a peculiar twist, for an integral part of the emerging national identity was the maintenance of a native tongue unsullied by foreign influence. Thus the vocabulary for describing electric power technologies and other large technological systems in Iceland had to be re-gauged to fit Icelandic cultural norms (e.g., "rafmagn" is electricity).
The last example suggests that the history of electrification is also cultural and symbolic. Electricity continues to be a potent symbol of material and political progress, as witnessed by Lenin's faith in electrification, the role electric power technology played in New Deal projects in the 1930's, and the project now underway in China to harness the power of the Yangtze River (Three Gorges Dam). The challenge for the historian of electrification is to resist the siren calls of these symbols and to recognize that the example of hydropower - so central to the Icelandic post-war experience - points to the ambiguity of not only whither progress, but also at what cost. Irrespective of the example chosen, be it uprooting Chinese peasants or endangering the fragile ecosystems of the arctic, the history of electrification is not only one of technological achievement, but also a story filled with ambiguity and sorrow over worlds lost.
The project works toward a detailed understanding of the variety of possible interrelationships between experimental activity and concept formation within different contexts. The question is particularly prominent in periods where there are no well-established conceptual frameworks available to direct investigative activity, be it experimental or theoretical. The early work of Faraday and Ampère on electromagnetism provides a rich source of historical material for such questions. These two scientists worked on the same new field and at times faced similar problems, yet their experimental procedures and manner of concept formation differ dramatically. Their contrasting views on new electromagnetic phenomena provide a striking example of the variety of scientific experience possible, even in cases where the main points of the immediate laboratory results are agreed upon. One major goal of the project is to examine how that variety is embedded in different experimental practices, theoretical traditions, sociological situations of the actors, and conventions of communication. One central aspect of the study is the detailed reconstruction of the laboratory practice and its context, based on intense work with archival material of various types.
Lorraine Daston (responsible) in collaboration with Wolfgang Küttler and Annette Vogt
When did objectivity begin? With the first gropings towards a philosophy of nature in the fragments of the pre-Socratics? With the strivings of ancient historians like Thucydides and Tacitus to render an impartial account of the past? With the meditations of Descartes on the possibility of certain knowledge? With the cult of facts established by seventeenth-century scientific societies such as the Accademia del Cimento, the Royal Society of London, and the Paris Académie des Sciences? With the attempts of Enlightenment savants to replicate each other's experiments on electricity, pneumatics, or animal magnetism? With scientific illustrations made by camera obscura or by photography? With the emergence of techniques and instruments of precision measurement in the nineteenth century? With the invention of statistical techniques of data reduction and inference?
Each of these historical moments, which arc from the sixth century B.C. to the 1940's, reflects a facet of our current notion of objectivity. Truth, certainty, impartiality, facticity, publicity, authenticity, impersonality - these concepts all cluster tightly around objectivity as we know it, as do the practices of photography and statistical data analysis. But a mere inventory of the components and close neighbors of objectivity will tell us little about the meaning of the whole, and still less about its history. Both meaning and history depend not only on the components and associations but also on their interrelationships: how did these elements come to cohere together? The corresponding historical question is not how and when did each element emerge, but rather, how and when did these components and associations crystallize into a whole?
This project seeks to answer this question by studying both the concrete practices (photography, statistical data analysis, etc.) and the reflective ideals (publicity, impersonality, etc.) of objectivity in their historical context. Although seventeenth- and eighteenth-century case studies provide instructive antecedents and contrasts, the focus of the study lies in the period 1820-1950, when the very word "objectivity" and its cognates reappeared in major European languages, and when objectivity replaced truth as the primary goal of the sciences. This transformation of ideals and practices stretched across many disciplines in the natural sciences, from anatomy to geology, and also encompassed the human sciences, such as history and sociology. Hence, although the project emphasizes the specific cultural and intellectual contexts which made this transformation possible, it aims ultimately at a global account of a global phenomenon that affected many diverse disciplinary and national traditions.
At present, the project consists of three complementary studies, each concentrating on a different aspect of the history of objectivity: techniques of visualization in the natural sciences; the careers of women scientists and mathematicians at Berlin university and within the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft during the first decades of higher education for women in Prussia; and the role of history within the social sciences at the turn of the twentieth century, emphasizing the work of Max Weber. Each of these studies emphasizes a different moment of scientific objectivity. New ways of making images, particularly photography and global mapping, at once symbolized and constituted new forms of scientific objectivity in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. These images were attempted solutions of epistemological and moral problems at the heart of objectivity. The career possibilities for women scientists in early twentieth-century Berlin shed light on another aspect of the practices of objectivity: to what extent were contemporary ideals of science blind to personal traits? Although objectivity may have originated in the natural sciences, social scientists confronted with the challenge of political relevance on the one hand and the threat of political ideology on the other provided some of the most acute and far-reaching reflections on the possibility and limits of objectivity.
Lorraine Daston (in collaboration with Peter Galison, Harvard University)
The photograph and the global map: these images were at the core of two new and distinct forms of scientific objectivity which emerged in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, which might be called mechanical objectivity and communitarian objectivity. Mechanical objectivity countered the subjectivity of projection onto nature, including judgment and aesthetic idealization. It was nominalist in its metaphysics, mechanical in its methods, and self-restrained in its morals. Scientific images produced in the service of this brand of objectivity were neither types nor ideals nor averages - all time-honored modes of scientific illustration - but rather representations of concrete individuals. Wherever possible, image-making and observation were mechanized, through photographs, self-registering instruments, and statistical data reduction. In a moral vein, scientists upholding the ideals of mechanical objectivity exhorted themselves and their colleagues to refrain from intervention in and interpretation of phenomena. The unretouched photograph became both the emblem and the substance of mechanical objectivity.
Communitarian objectivity, in contrast, countered the subjectivity of idiosyncracy and parochialism, not only of individuals but also of local research groups. Proponents of mechanical objectivity worried that human intervention might distort natural phenomena; proponents of communitarian objectivity fretted about how anthropocentric scales of time and space might fail to register certain phenomena altogether - the path of a storm system, the shape of an isotherm, the distribution of a species. Communitarian objectivity preferred composites of many observations to representations of individuals, and standardized to mechanical techniques. Whereas mechanical objectivity called for self-restraint in judgment and interpretation in the name of authenticity, communitarian objectivity demanded the equally severe curtailment of individual and local autonomy in choice of instruments, methods, and even research topics in the name of solidarity. Its most characteristic visual technique was the global map - of the whole earth or the entire dome of the heavens - composed like a mosaic by a network of far-flung observers, each contributing a fragment.
This study traces the emergence and development of both forms of objectivity through atlases of scientific objects, from nebulae to fossils, and through the records of the scientific collaborative projects, such as the Internationales Grademessung Projekt and the Carte du Ciel, launched in the mid-nineteenth century. Close attention to the choice of practices, such as choice of instrument or mode of illustration, described and debated in these sources reveals how both forms of objectivity fused methods, morals, and metaphysics into new ways of investigating and understanding nature.
This project deals with the development of conceptual devices for appreciating the subject matter of history as a scientific discipline at the turn of the last century, and draws on more general insights into the structure of the conceptual and scientific revolutions. A keen awareness of the historicity of nature and society was always of paramount importance for making further progress in understanding the controversial topic of the relationship between history and the sciences. History not only plays a central role in the humanities and social sciences, but also influences the emergence and development of scientific world views over time. Periods of protracted change or upheaval in particular make a greater impact on a culture's view of nature and history, its portrayal of the relations between society, history, and nature, and the degrees of pluralism preferred in the field of sciences and philosophy.
Starting from an investigation of the structure of historical thought of Max Weber, who preferred a comprehensive approach to the subject of historical knowledge, this study analyzes changes in the historical disciplines and in the treatment of the historical dimension of the social sciences in Germany from 1900 through the 1920's. Such comprehensive studies have been performed for the Enlightenment, and for the period of the gulf between the sciences and history during nineteenth-century historicism, but there are as yet no comprehensive studies for the period after the turn of the last century. There are studies of the paradigmatic changes in cultural and social understanding during this latter period, as well as of the impact of developments in physics after the turn of the century, but an analysis of reciprocal influences between the cultural and scientific developments, with particular emphasis on the role of history, is missing.
The subject of the present study will be the changing conception of history in the historical and social sciences during the early decades of the twentieth century. This change in understanding was strongly influenced by methodological controversies, which were in turn affected by neo-Kantian and positivistic modes of thought. Marxist views also played a role, although this is not the primary focus of the present study. Particular attention will be paid to "basic types" of inquiries into history: the treatment of structure, process, development (including the problem of progress), events, actions, alternatives, lawfulness, objectivity, and freedom. The varying methodological and theoretical approaches will be exemplified by source studies of the most prominent figures in these debates and by examination of how history was actually written (particularly of civil society and the rise of capitalism since the sixteenth century) in the journals and monographs of the time.
In a second stage of this study, source texts of the humanities and social sciences (and later of the natural sciences) which deal with more general aspects of philosophy and the philosophy of science will be used to investigate the relationship between changes in the understanding of history and the establishment of the modern fundamentals of the exact sciences.
This comprehensive survey of women who graduated from the Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin from 1898 - 1945 and of the women scientists who worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG) seeks preliminary answers to questions concerning the development of the study of women in Germany and the involvement of women in German science in the early decades of the twentieth century. These women have all but disappeared from the histories of their disciplines, and intensive archival work was required to reconstruct their professional and private lives. In addition to establishing the identities and biographies of this surprisingly large group of women researchers, the study aims to discover:
(1) Whether the women gravitated to certain institutions and specialties within science and mathematics, and if so, why?
(2) What ideals and practices of early twentieth-century scientific research, particularly those of objectivity, helped or hindered the recruitment and the participation of women?
(3) What role did changing cultural views of femininity during this period in Germany play in the careers of these women scientists?
Archival research in 1995 focused on the following:
1. A study of the relevant documents of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG) and the Max-Planck-Archiv, particularly of the KWG's annual reports, leading to the paper "Female Scientists in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft."
2. A study of the documents pertaining to several institutes within the KWG, especially documents of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Hirnforschung, carried out at the Archives of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW) (Spring 1995).
3. Biographical research on women scientists who worked in the KWG.
4. Dissertations by women on topics in mathematics and the natural sciences in the Humanities Faculty of the University of Berlin between 1898 and 1945, meaning all the women who defended a dissertation at the university between 1898/1899 and 1936 in the Humanities Faculty and between 1936 and 1945 in the newly founded Faculty for Mathematics and Science, plus all documents about postdoctoral projects by women at the university between 1919 and 1945.
Preliminary results of this archival work contain several surprises relating to both the employment of women scientists at the KWG and the topical distribution of dissertations written by women during this period.
KWG: To date, records of more than 110 women scientists working for the KWG during this period have been uncovered. It has become clear that women scientists headed at least 9 and possibly as many as 11 departments at Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut (KWI). We now know that Lise Meitner was not alone.
Dissertations: Of the 346 dissertations studied to date, 162 dealt with topics in the humanities and social sciences, whereas 184 covered topics in mathematics and the natural sciences, and 105 of these were in chemistry. Some of these dissertations were based on research done at the laboratories of the KWIs: there were at least 13 chemistry dissertations at four different KWIs, but only 6 biology dissertations at 3 KWIs. Chemistry's special role is emphasized by the fact that there were 5 - 6 different institutes in the KWI dealing with chemistry fields, and 54 of the 112 women scientists in the KWG worked in these 5 - 6 institutes. In contrast, there were 15 institutes in the KWIs in the biological sciences, but these institutes employed only 46 women scientists, and awarded 22 women fellowships.
The next steps will involve reconstructing the scientific careers of the 9 - 11 department heads at the KWIs, who have been largely omitted from the official history of the KWG. In expanding from the level of biography to prosopography, the sociological background of the women doctoral candidates remains to be reconstructed, as does the intellectual affinities governing their choice of discipline (and supervisor), and the culture of gender relations at the foremost Berlin scientific institutions during this period. Among the ultimate aims of the study is an attempt to make precise judgements of the ethical dimension of creeds of scientific objectivity in Germany during this period: when and why did the gender of the scientist matter?