It wasn’t until the turn of the last century that scientists began to examine seriously the idea that chemical secretions regulated the body’s physiology. Although in the 1890s the British physiologist Edward Schafer interpreted the results of gonadectomy (the removal of either the testis or the ovary) in terms of nervous function, over the next […]

The gonads, people have long known, affect the body and psyche in myriad ways. For centuries, farmers have known that castration affects both the phy­sique and behavior of farm animals. And although human castration was offi­cially banned by the Vatican, in Europe the specialized singing voices of the castrati were heard in more than a […]

—- ЛЗ In Which Testosterone Taints the Fountain of Youth In A 1945 HOMAGE TO MEDICAL SCIENCE, THE FIFTY-FOUR-YEAR — OLD bacteriologist and popular science writer Paul de Kruif published a book enti­tled The Male Hormone, in which he revealed to the world a deeply personal fact: he was taking testosterone. Beginning in his late […]

Can we ever know whether there is a gender difference in the corpus callo — sum?107 Well, it depends a bit on what we mean by knowing. The corpus callo- figure p. 7A (top): The ‘‘science half’’ of the woven knowledge connections; p. 7B (bottom): The ‘‘culture half’’ of the woven knowledge connections. (Source: Alyce […]

Like all scholarship, Allen and her colleagues’ study is necessarily embedded in the context of an ongoing conversation about the broader subject matter it explores—in this case, the corpus callosum. They must rely heavily on preexisting work to establish the validity of their own. Allen and her col­leagues note, for example, that even though the […]

To the outsider coming to the dispute for the first time, the flurry of numbers and measures is bewildering. In displaying and analyzing their measurements, scientists call on two distinct intellectual traditions, both often labeled with the word statistics.66 The first tradition—the amassing of numbers in large quantity to assess or measure a social problem—has […]

With all the subdivisions agreed upon, finally, students of the corpus callosum are in business. Now they can make dozens of measurements. From the undi­vided CC come dimensions of the total surface area, length, width, and any of these divided by brain volume or weight. From the subdivided CC come named or numbered parts: the […]

Can scientists succeed in making measurements of the CC on which they all agree? Can they use their CC data to find differences between men and women or concur that there are none to be found? It would appear not. Here I look at thirty-four scientific papers, written between 1982 and 1997.“ The authors use […]

Scientists don’t measure, divide, probe, dispute, and ogle the corpus callosum per se, but rather a slice taken at its center (figure 5.2). This is a two­dimensional representation of a mid-saggital section of the corpus callosum.43 This being a bit of a mouthful, let’s just call it CC. (From here on, I’ll refer to the […]

figure g. і: A three-dimensional rendering of the entire corpus callosum cleanly dissected from the rest of the brain. (Source: Alyce Santoro, for the author) first tame it—turn it into a tractable, observable, discrete laboratory object. This challenge itself is nothing new. Pasteur had to bring his microbes into the laboratory before he could study […]