UMD Theses and Dissertations
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Item Doctor's Domain: Innovation and Regulation in the U.S. Medical Device Industry, 1950-2000(2024) Bowrey, Brice; Sicilia, David; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines the role of physicians in shaping the development and regulation of medical technologies in the United States during the second half of the twentieth century. I argue that physicians became the dominant actors in the medical technology sector by using their preexisting professional prestige to assert the primacy of clinical knowledge and promote a culture of tinkering in private sector research and development. In contrast, the nascent profession of biomedical engineering could not effectively compete for status and influence. By analyzing the professional conflicts between physicians, biomedical engineers, and other stakeholders in the regulatory system for medical devices that emerged during and after Congress enacted the Medical Device Amendments of 1976, this dissertation explores the role of perceived expertise and scientific legitimacy in shaping regulatory policy, business organization, and other social structures that facilitate technological innovation.Item A BAROMETER OF SCIENTIFIC CULTURE: THE DEBATED ROLE OF AMERICAN SCIENCE AT THE 1850’S SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION(2023) Buser, Allison; Woods, Colleen; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)During the initial decade of the Smithsonian Institution’s existence, its first secretary, Joseph Henry, sought to establish an institution for the advancement of science that defied popular understandings of scientific work in the United States. From the end of the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, American science was infused with republican ideology and was widely expected to prioritize practical results that would directly benefit society at large. At the Smithsonian, Henry sought to establish a boundary between professional, theoretical science, conducted and distributed more selectively among experts, and wider public influence and demand for utilitarian scientific work. Examination of discourse in popular publications reveals that Henry’s plan created an ongoing public debate in the 1850s regarding the Smithsonian’s legitimate scientific mission. This included criticism of the Smithsonian publications program’s inaccessibility and lack of utility to the public as well as many alternative proposals for how the institution might be of better scientific use to Americans. Such expectations that Smithsonian research and resources would serve the general American population were also expressed throughout the correspondence of the Smithsonian Meteorology Project—the Institution’s first major scientific research initiative. Although Henry sought to create a boundary between theInstitution’s work and the public, the utilitarian demands of many of the project’s volunteer observers ensured that the practical goals of the public remained intertwined with Henry’s own goals to promote theoretical science in the development of the Smithsonian. The influential work of this extended scientific community was often made possible through the contributions of additional members of households. Close reading of the meteorological project correspondence reveals an extensive, although often officially unacknowledged, contribution from women and other individuals whose labor was often more fixed to the household. While the public volunteers of the project shaped the trajectory of the Smithsonian, the devalued labor of peripheral contributors to the Institution’s large-scale data work set important precedent for professional scientific frameworks at the end of the century. Overall, the relationship between the early Smithsonian and the public in the 1850s demonstrates that the process of establishing borders defining a professional/amateur dichotomy in American science was uneven. The Institution contended with republican expectations of the scientific public and its projects continued to rely upon contributors without formal or elite credentials who in turn demanded accessible and practical research and shaped scientific institutions. Despite Joseph Henry's contribution to the professionalization and specialization of science, the boundaries of science and who could participate in scientific research remained fluid through the mid-nineteenth century.Item CODE ME A GOOD REASON: JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM AND A RHETORIC OF ETHICAL AI(2021) Yang, Misti Hewatt; Pfister, Damien S; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Joseph Weizenbaum was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor often credited with creating the first chatbot, or automated computer conversationalist, in 1966. He named it ELIZA. Ten years later, however, he wrote Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, a book questioning the ethics of natural language processing, AI, and instrumental reason. This dissertation presents Weizenbaum as an early 20th century rhetorical theorist of computation. With an understanding of rhetoric as the material means for generating good reasons for living together, I articulate how Weizenbaum’s rhetorical interventions around the early development of computational culture can inform the ethics of engineering broadly and the development of AI specifically. The first chapter provides an overview of my historical and theoretical framework. The second chapter starts with Weizenbaum’s childhood and ends with the release of ELIZA. The third chapter chronicles his growing disillusionment with computers in society in the context of the Vietnam War. The final two chapters are dedicated to the book and reactions from a prominent figure in the history of AI, John McCarthy. Informed by Weizenbaum, I recuperate rhetoric as a practice of reason composed of technē that requires phronêsis in order to be realized in its full ethical potential. I argue that recognizing the practice of rhetoric inherent in engineering and ethics can better equip engineers and the public to manage scientific and technological uncertainty with the care necessary for a humane future.Item Mosquito Beaters and Rockets: Cape Canaveral's People and Technology from Orange Groves to Apollo(2021) Kirschenmann, Rachael; Zeller, Thomas; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Kennedy Space Center on Cape Canaveral holds a unique place in American memory as the launch site for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), but the space center was not constructed out of a wilderness. This thesis looks at the communities that called North Merritt Island home prior to the arrival of NASA in the early 1960s, in particular the citrus workers and growers who were displaced via eminent domain to make room for the space center. It examines the technology-in-use as employed by citrus workers alongside the technology of the Apollo Program, and considers the implications on the broader community in Brevard County.Item AMBIGUOUS BODIES: GENDER NON-CONFORMITY AND BODILY TRANSFORMATION IN EARLY MODERN ITALIAN ART(2020) Berkowitz, Sara K.; Colantuono, Anthony; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines images of ambiguously gendered human bodies in early modern Italian art (1600-1750). Specifically, it explores how artists rendered bodies that underwent a physical change, transforming from conforming men and women into ambiguous or gender-fluid entities. However, the alterations to these figures’ forms did not relegate them to the period’s third category of gender, the hermaphrodite. Rather, they entered into liminal spaces between the defined boundaries of male and female. Focusing on Italy and its interactions with other European centers, including England and Spain, I explore the ways in which artists constructed a new visual language for the portrayal of ambiguously gendered bodies by turning to a variety of novel sources. In particular, I examine artists’ use of medical knowledge from treatises on congenital diseases, anatomical illustrations, and surgical manuals. In combination with artists’ use of classicizing myths and religious doctrines, these medical sources enabled artists to render figures as recognizable derivations from the natural order, while still retaining attributes of their humanity. Three case studies demonstrate how these issues manifested on the painted surface: Jusepe de Ribera’s portrait of Magdalena Ventura and Her Husband (1631); Jacopo Amigoni’s Musical Portrait Group: The Singer Farinelli and Friends (1750–1752); and Giovanni Andrea Coppola’s altarpiece Martyrdom of Saint Agatha (1650). The subjects of these paintings—hirsutes (figures whose hair covers the entire body or face), castrati (male singers who were castrated before reaching puberty so that their voices would remain at a prepubescent height and pitch), and Saint Agatha (an early Christian virgin martyr whose breasts were amputated) demonstrate how slippages between conforming male and female bodies existed across early modern life and belief. Drawing from the fields of Art History, Social History, Gender Studies, History of Medicine, and Literature, this dissertation elucidates the early modern preoccupation with understanding bodily difference—a preoccupation, I argue, of equal importance for artists, philosophers, and medico-philosophers as studying and representing the ideal Renaissance body. This project, therefore, presents an opportunity to reconsider the parallels between early modern definitions of non-conforming bodies and issues surrounding gender identity in contemporary society.Item Objects of Memory: Paul Gauguin and Still-Life Painting, 1880-1901(2017) Shields, Caroline D.; Hargrove, June; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Memory plays a profound role in the aesthetic philosophy and still-life painting of French Symbolist artist Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). Throughout Gauguin’s career, memory and imagination served him as an artistic tool, a personal resource, and a metaphor for the freedom of artistic expression. These themes recur in his writing, and this dissertation locates their visual expression in Gauguin’s still-life painting, wherein he gave tangible form to his theories through reflection upon and manipulation of objects. In chronologically-arranged case studies, I examine three types of memory: visual memory, nostalgia, and the ephemeral nature of autobiographical memory, situating each within nineteenth-century and present-day science. In so doing, I perform a type of interdisciplinary methodology called “cognitive historicism” that is new to art history. Art historians have long noted the exceptional qualities of several of Gauguin’s still lifes, but have not to date identified what in particular sets the genre apart. My research has located and articulated the achievement of Gauguin’s still life as a body of work in which he repeatedly grappled with memory, its processes, and its meaning. A concentrated analysis of period beliefs about memory and the ways memory appears in Gauguin’s visual art and writing reveals the depth and significance of the relationship between aesthetic Symbolism and the nineteenth-century interest in individual, autobiographical memory. In turn, this study contributes to a larger historical inquiry into the meaning of memory to the late-nineteenth-century mind. As Gauguin was explicitly attuned to the scientific developments of his time, he functions as a lens through which to consider the art and science of memory. While I ground my investigation in theories proposed during Gauguin’s lifetime, I situate historical intellectual developments in the context of recent science. This project thereby constitutes an exploration of interdisciplinary methodologies that bridge science and the humanities in a way that privileges the artwork and its historical circumstances. It demonstrates the rich but previously untapped potential of this method that uses frameworks and vocabulary derived from cognitive science to inform art historical inquiry, which promises to provide new directions for the discipline.Item INVESTIGATING THE POSTWAR DECLINE OF RACE IN SCIENCE(2016) Fobia, Aleia Clark; Kestnbaum, Meyer; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Race as a biological category has a long and troubling history as a central ordering concept in the life and human sciences. The mid-twentieth century has been marked as the point where biological concepts of race began to disappear from science. However, biological definitions of race continue to penetrate scientific understandings and uses of racial concepts. Using the theoretical frameworks of critical race theory and science and technology studies and an in-depth case study of the discipline of immunology, this dissertation explores the appearance of a mid-century decline of concepts of biological race in science. I argue that biological concepts of race did not disappear in the middle of the twentieth century but were reconfigured into genetic language. In this dissertation I offer a periodization of biological concepts of race. Focusing on continuities and the effects of contingent events, I compare how biological concepts of race articulate with racisms in each period. The discipline of immunology serves as a case study that demonstrates how biological concepts of race did not decline in the postwar era, but were translated into the language of genetics and populations. I argue that the appearance of a decline was due to events both internal and external to the science of immunology. By framing the mid-twentieth century disappearance of race in science as the triumph of an antiracist racial project of science, it allows us to more clearly see the more recent resurgence of race in science as a recycling of older themes and tactics from the racist science projects of the past.Item Empiricism and Exchange: Dutch-Japanese Relations Through Material Culture, 1600-1750(2015) Jamrisko, Kristi; Wheelock, Arthur K; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This thesis will focus on unique modes of material culture exchange to shed light on the early relationship between the Dutch Republic and Japan in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. I will demonstrate that while exoticism and “otherness” animated this cross-cultural interaction, important commonalities between the two countries also merit examination. The rich and diverse material culture bequeathed by the Dutch-Japanese relationship, particularly when viewed in the context of “micro-exchanges” such as gift-giving and (anti-) religious ritual, offers an excellent means for exploring these similarities. Three case studies – the Japonsche rok (Japanese robe), Rembert Dodoens’s Cruydt-Boeck (Herbal), and bas-relief plaques of Christ and the Virgin Mary, which in Japan were transformed into fumi-e (踏み絵, “trampling images”) – will illuminate one of these commonalities: the simultaneous rise of empiricism in both the Dutch Republic and Japan.