La cultura médica instrumental: los viajes políticos de los esfigmógrafos entre Europa y América
Generally explained by the association between precision and instrument, the instrumental dominion of medicine in actual days is assumed as a natural and necessary destiny. Placed in the practices of Mexican physicians of the XIX century, I discuss this naturalized image of medical instruments. Taking as a case the Sphygmograph, device recorder of the cardiac pulse, I interrogate the reasons of the massive import of instruments from the European markets. I have found that the political search for affirming normality and civilization of the Mexican population encircle an epistemological dimension; the instruments are revealed as appliances of knowledge and objects of consumption, in this case, of the colonial market, which hierarchies determined how in this side of America medical doctors were creating knowledge and instruments importing Europe’s instruments.
Introduction: Instruments in the History of Science
IN THE 1943 VOLUME of Isis there appeared a two-page article entitled "Traduttore-Traditore: A Propos de Copernic et de Galilee," written by Alexandre Koyre. Besides the normal problem of accuracy in translating scientific texts from another era, Koyre argued that there is the additional danger of "involuntarily substituting our conceptions and our habits of thought for those, entirely different, of the author." Among the examples he cited was a passage at the beginning of the third day of Galileo's Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences, translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, in which Galileo's comperio was rendered in English as "I have discovered by experiment." Koyre argued that the word "experiment" was simply added by the translator who, "obviously committed to empiricist epistemology, could not imagine that one could demonstrate or discover something other than by experiment." It was no wonder, according to Koyre, that the legend of Galileo the empiricist and experimenter was so firmly established in America, for even the best American historians cited the translation by Crew and de Salvio.' Koyre set out to change all that. In his Etudes galileennes of 1939 he drew a different portrait of Galileo, a Platonist, who found things in his head and used instruments only by way of illustration. In the same year that his little article appeared in Isis, there appeared in The Philosophical Review his article "Galileo and the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century," in which he made the following statement:
Fluid to liquid membrane energy exchanger for simultaneous liquid desiccant regeneration and desalination applications–Theoretical and experimental analyses
Abstract In this paper, a thermal model developed for assessing the performance of the fluid to liquid membrane energy exchanger based liquid desiccant regenerator is presented. The model was validated with the experimental data and found accurate. Using the experimental inlet conditions reported in the literature for the structured packing chamber, the performance of the fluid to liquid membrane energy exchanger based liquid desiccant regenerator was theoretically predicted choosing water and air as working fluids and Lithium Chloride as a liquid desiccant. Further, studied the influence of inlet parameters such as working fluid and desiccant inlet temperature’s, hot liquid desiccant to cold working fluid ratio and desiccant concentration on vapour absorption rate. From this analysis, it is observed that membrane based liquid desiccant regenerator using water as a working fluid is best suitable for converting the weak desiccant into strong desiccant and for generating the pure water simultaneously (co-generation process). An experimental investigation was carried out for assessing the energy exchange process across the membrane based liquid desiccant regenerator using water as a working fluid. From the experimental analysis, it was found that desiccant temperature has a significant impact on the energy exchange process. The pressure drop across the membrane based liquid desiccant regenerator was also measured at different desiccant flow rates and concentration.