No.156 Seminar ： The A-bomb and Turning Points in the History of Science –
- Yuriko Tanaka (The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research/Graduate School of Letters)
- 2018/11/20 4:30pm
- The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research (Research Administration Building 1F)
- Japanese(This seminar is open for students and researchers at Kyoto Univ.)
Summary
In this presentation I would like to talk of a workshop, which I held with my three fellow historians last year, entitled “The A-bomb and Medical History,” and introduce our standpoints to see the year 1945 as a turning point in the history of science. The realization of the invention of atomic bomb and its actual use in war entailed historical consequences in our contemporary world, of which we would not be able to explain simply with normal logics or factors internal to scientific activities. Two significant situations could be examined here in regard to the history of science. Firstly, there took shape a new “clinical” setting where whole unknown diagnoses and pathologies should be innovated. Japanese and American medical doctors/researchers who worked in the bombed area, were all forced to search for unprecedented practices coping with unexampled circumstances. Medical records and information gathered there would tell us how new system of medical treatment gradually got shaped, deeply in connection with the complexity of social demands or political limitations surrounding them (on this point I fully rely on my friends’ achievements). Then secondly, it occurred there that the atom, which had been in doubt until the mid-nineteenth century, got an abrupt and radical transition in its form of existence. Its visible explosion as well as its subtle and progressive effect on living bodies, effectively overpassed what the human scientific and philosophical pursuits had argued over the first half of the twentieth century. This “overpassing” should cause various points of confusion in the practices of scientific research and philosophical reasoning. On this occasion, I would like to examine some possible cases of this confusion along three analytical contexts; “scientific – technological,” “theoretical – real,” “known – unknown” (this is my work-in-progress).