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[NOTE: Notice the presentation by Mary Morgan and Marcel Boumans.--RBE] 
 
WELLCOME SYMPOSIUM FOR THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE 
with 
THE SCIENCE MUSEUM 
 
MODELS IN THE SCIENCES, TECHNOLOGY AND MEDICINE: 
DISPLAYING THE THIRD DIMENSION 
 
Friday & Saturday 13-14 November 1998 
 
Models in three dimensions have been critically involved in the practices 
of many disciplines, and although largely ignored by recent scholarship on 
the problems of representation, they offer exciting opportunities for 
historical inquiry. The meeting will bring a variety of historians 
together to explore what we can learn from each other about the practices 
of modelling and the cultures of models, and more ambitiously, to discuss 
what histories of modelling we should tell. 
 
The scattered work of various scholars is already making clear that 
three-dimensional modelling has played important roles in perhaps every 
discipline. The models we have in view range from the anatomical waxes of 
 
the Italian Enlightenment to the human embryos that were reconstructed 
from serial sections since the 1880s; from the ball-and-stick molecules 
that were introduced into mid-nineteenth-century chemistry to the 
macromolecular models of electron densities that were produced by X-ray 
diffraction analysis in the mid-twentieth; from the plaster casts studied 
by archaeologists, anthropologists and palaeontologists to the models of 
mathematical surfaces that filled the cabinets of mathematical institutes 
by the end of the nineteenth century; from the inventions that were 
displayed in the collections of eighteenth-century rulers to the wind 
tunnels of more recent engineers. Modelling was a commercial enterprise, 
and models a substantial proportion of the scientific, medical and 
technological exhibits at world's fairs. Crucially, modelling was held to 
be an unusually powerful  means of communication: from models that 
produced the structure of the human body for medical students to the 
dioramas that displayed natural history to  the museum-going public, 
three-dimensional representations were designed to  achieve a vividness 
that no flat picture could match. For these reasons too, modelling was in 
many disciplines a key research practice; its proponents argued 
vehemently that models were actually more important publications than 
those that appeared in print. But the meanings of models were not fixed, 
especially when, as often happened to anatomical waxes in peep-shows and 
panopticons, they ended up in the "wrong" hands, being viewed in "wrong" 
ways. 
 
Historians and sociologists of science and medicine have shown that much 
of scientists' work can be analysed as processes of representation. Often 
the point has been to show how a three-dimensional world could be 
mastered on paper; scientists are reckoned to work most effectively by 
reducing three dimensions to two. Actual three-dimensional 
representations would, it has widely been assumed, be too expensive and 
immobile for routine use, though it is usually conceded that they might 
be valuable for teaching or communicating with lay audiences. We would 
like to challenge this view by focusing on cases like those we have just 
mentioned in which three-dimensional models actually have been key to the 
practice of the sciences, medicine and technology. 
 
We do not propose to discuss models as theoretical constructs or abstract 
representations. Nor do we wish to fetishize an isolated class of 
objects, but rather to encourage speakers to explore the place of models 
in scientific, medical and technological practice by analysing their 
production, manipulation and display. As Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar 
have argued, representations can be made to represent only within the 
activities in which they are produced and used. Whilst models have often 
been rather robust bearers of meaning, "representational transparency" 
has always required hard work and has by no means always been achieved. 
We would like speakers to pay attention to the ways in which models were 
problematic or controversial, and especially to the fraught 
interrelations between practices of representation in two dimensions and 
in three. Framing the analysis like this should also allow us to reflect 
self-critically on the ways in which it may, or conversely may not, be 
useful to focus on the specific virtues and problems of 
three-dimensionality. 
 
 
FRIDAY: in the Auditorium of the Wellcome Building, 183 Euston Road,  
London NW1 
 
09.30 - 10.00 Registration 
 
10.00 - 10.10 Dr Nick Hopwood (Wellcome Institute) and 
Dr Soraya de Chadarevian (University of Cambridge) 
Introduction 
 
10.10 -10.50 Dr Malcolm Baker (Victoria and Albert Museum) 
The Three-Dimensional Model in Eighteenth-Century Design Procedures: The 
representation and viewing of process 
 
10.50 -11.30 Dr Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge) 
Fish and Ships: Enlightenment models and practical reason 
 
11.30 - 11.50 Coffee 
 
11.50 - 12.30 Professor Renato Mazzolini (University of Trento) 
Felice Fontana and His Models of the Human Body 
 
12.30 - 13.10 Dr Nick Hopwood (Wellcome Institute) 
Publishing in Wax: Modellers and anatomists in turn-of-the-century 
embryology 
 
13.10 - 14.10 Lunch 
 
14.10 - 14.50 Dr Thomas Schnalke (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) 
Casting Reality, Capturing the Individual: The production and meaning of 
medical moulages 
 
14.50 - 15.30 Professor Christoph Meinel (University of Regensburg) 
Molecular Modelling and Chemical Synthesis, 1865-1875 
 
15.30 - 15.50 Tea 
 
15.50 - 16.30 Professor Herbert Mehrtens (Technical University, 
Braunschweig) 
What is "Anschauung" about? The role of models in mathematics before 
World War I 
 
16.30 -  17.10 Professor Deanna Petherbridge (Royal College of Art) 
Translations: Representation and dimensionality 
 
17.10 - 18.00 General Discussion 
 
 
SATURDAY: in the Fellows Room at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road,  
London SW7 
09.30 - 10.00 Registration 
 
10.00 - 10.40 Dr Christopher Evans  (Cambridge Archaeological Unit) 
Model Excavations: Text/context and graphic literacy 
 
10.40  - 11.20 Professor Lynn Nyhart  (University of Wisconsin) 
When is a Model Not a Model? Science, art and authenticity in natural 
history displays 
 
11.20 - 11.40 Coffee 
 
11.40 - 12.20 Dr Eric Francoeur (Ecole des Mines, Paris) 
Powerful Tinker-Toys: Space-filling molecular models and the  
experimental articulation of structural constraints 
 
12.20 - 13.00 Dr Soraya de Chadarevian (University of Cambridge) 
Models and the Making of Molecular Biology 
 
13.00 - 14.00 Lunch 
 
14.00 - 15.00 Tour of models in the Science Museum Collections 
Led by Dr Alan Morton and Alex Hayward (Science Museum) 
 
15.00 - 15.20 Tea 
 
15.20 - 16.00 Dr Mary Morgan (LSE) and Dr Marcel Boumans (University of 
Amsterdam) 
The Secrets Hidden by Two-Dimensionality: Modelling the economy as a 
hydraulic system 
 
16.00 - 16.40 Dr Ghislaine Lawrence (Science Museum) 
Making the Bed: 1960s engineering design research for the King's Fund 
hospital bed 
 
16.40 - 17.10 Commentaries: 
Professor Ludmilla Jordanova (University of East Anglia) and 
Dr Dominique Pestre (Centre Alexandre Koyre, Paris) 
 
17.10 - 18.00 General Discussion 
 
18.00 Reception - All Welcome 
 
 
R E G I S T R A T I O N 
 
Registration Fee: 
Friday and Saturday, 13-14 November 1998 
includes VAT and covers 
coffee, tea and buffet lunch on both days A328.00 / A320.00 
[students/Friends] 
and Reception on Saturday 
TWO DAYS 
 
OR: 
Friday 13 November only A314.00 / A310.00  
[students/Friends] 
 
Saturday 14 November only A314.00 / A310.00  
[students/Friends] 
 
Forms from Frieda Houser at the Wellcome Institute: 0171-611 8619/Fax: 8862 
PLEASE NOTE: The closing date is 6 NOVEMBER 1998 
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