Quinine (Cinchona) and the incurable malaria: India c. 1900-1930s

The early decades of this century witnessed significant developments in the approaches to control of malaria in British India. These included both large-scale preventive measures and curative treatment methods (often referred to as "cinchona" or "quinine" policy). This paper identifies a number of factors that constrained the colonial government's capacity to control malaria through effective cinchona policy. The ideal of achieving "self-sufficiency" and having an efficient form of treatment and distribution within the reach of the masses in India (as originally intended in late 1850s) was far from being achieved. Both government's policy and medical profession seemed to have contributed equally to this failure.     

The reception of Mendelism in the United States, 1900-1930

Scholars have differed on the question of why Mendel's work was neglected between 1865 and 1900, and the (by contrast) relatively rapid acceptance of Mendelism in many countries after 1900. This paper focuses on two factors that have not been well explored in the debate. The first is that Mendelism fit perfectly into the atomistic philosophy associated with mechanistic materialism in western science, and thus was strongly promoted by a younger group of biologists around 1900 to raise the prestige of biology to the rigorous level of the physical sciences. The second factor was that Mendelian theory, with its experimental and predictive qualities, fit well into the new demands for industrialization of agriculture both to feed a growing urban population and to provide an arena for capital expansion. This paper proposes that the early promotion of Mendelian research, by both private and public funds, owed as much to economic and social as to biological causes.     

Animal cognition: 1900-2000

During the 20th century there has been considerable progress in the study of animal cognition, based on essential ideas that were developed earlier. These essential ideas include the metaphors of the animal, the questions, the sources of hypotheses, and the types of explanations. The progress cannot be generally characterized as continuous improvement, cyclic changes, or discrete steps, but the quality of the empirical results has increased substantially since the first experiments in the field. Improvements in research methods have been primarily responsible for this progress. These have included improvements in animal husbandry, stimulus control, apparatus design, the measurement of behavior, experimental procedures, and data analysis. In the last third of the century the computer has led to major improvements in all stages of the research process in animal cognition. Although they have greatly improved the quality of the empirical results, they have not led to a general theory of animal cognition. In the near future the available research methods are likely to lead to further progress in the developments of quantitative theories of animal cognition.