News and Notes

We are delighted to announce the launch of the new Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Seven institutions have joined with the dozen members of the Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science to form the new Consortium. We are very excited by the greatly expanded opportunities and resources that these new partnerships will provide for promoting public and academic understanding of the history of science, technology and medicine.

The Consortium comprises the following members:

New acquisitions Daniel Bohn, MD, and Ralph Bohn, MD papers, circa 1905-1919 The Legacy Center, Drexel University .8 linear feet Papers of Daniel Bohn, M.D. (d. 1963, Hahnemann Medical College, 1894), who practiced in Altoona, PA, and his son Ralph W. Bohn, MD (Hahnemann Medical College, 1924), a psychiatrist practicing in New York (Gowanda State Homeopathic Hospital).

Congratulations to Carin Berkowitz (2009-2010 Dissertation Writing Fellow), who has been elected to the History of Science Society governing Council for 2015-17.

by Abe Gibson

Susan Hanket Brandt (2011-2012 Research Fellow) successfully defended her dissertation, “Gifted Women and Skilled Practitioners: Gender and Healing Authority in the Delaware Valley, 1740-1830,” and graduated from Temple University in August 2014 with a Ph.D. in History. Her article “‘Getting into a Little Business’: Margaret Hill Morris and Women’s Medical Entrepreneurship during the American Revolution” will be published in a forthcoming special issue of Early American Studies entitled Ligaments: Everyday Connections of Colonial Economies.

The American Philosophical Society has recently made newly processed resources available to researchers, including the following:

• "The World Turned Topsyturvy": Thomas Paine in Print and Ink
• James Van Gundia Neel Papers
• Colonization in the Foulke Papers
• Of Hatches and Haste: ​​A Conservation Adventure
• The Papers of Frank Siebert (1913-1998)
• Read more about these collections here.

The Chemical Heritage Foundation has added a number of new items to its collections. In the fall of 2013 CHF made one of the largest and most important acquisitions in its thirty-year history: a collection of early alchemy manuscripts. Of the nine manuscripts in the collection, seven date to the fifteenth century, some as early as the 1430s. Among them is Petrus Bonus’s Pretiosa margarita novella (The Precious New Pearl), ca. 1450–1480—one of only six known complete copies of that work in existence.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania recently made the following acquisitions: Dr. Robert Howland Chase papers, 1826-1926 (Collection 3733) Summary An expert in psychology, Massachusetts native Dr. Robert Howland Chase worked at a number of facilities in Pennsylvania, including the State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown and the Friends' Hospital in Frankford, Philadelphia. Description Dr. Robert Howland Chase was a psychologist during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was born in Massachusetts but educated at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania. Dr.

Philadelphia has proven an auspicious base for our consortium with its wealth of archival resources and a large community of engaged scholars. With this strong foundation, we have already:

Abraham Gibson (2014-2015 Postdoctoral Fellow) has had two book chapters accepted for publication: "Beasts of Burden: Feral Burros and the American West," in The Historical Animal, edited by Susan Nance (Syracuse University Press, 2015), and "Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology" (co-written with Michael Ruse) in A Companion to the History of American Science, edited by Mark Largent (Wiley, 2015).