The historiography of botanical maps has mainly concentrated on their alleged“golden age,” on maps drawn by famous first-generationplant geographers. This article instead describes botanical maps after the ageof discovery, and detects both a quantitative explosion and qualitativemodification in the late nineteenth century. By spotlighting the case of theplant geographer Oscar Drude (1852–1933), I argue that the dynamicsof botanical mappings were closely linked to a specific milieu of knowledgeproduction: the visual culture of Imperial Germany. The scientific upgrading ofmaps was stimulated by a prospering commercial cartographical market as well asa widespread practice of mediating between professionals and amateurs via mapsin the public sphere. In transferring skills and practices from these“popular” fields of knowledge to scientific domains,botanists like Oscar Drude established maps as an indispensable element ofbotanical observation. This wholesale dissemination of botanical maps had thus aformative influence on collective perception – thebotanist's “period eye” – regardingplant distribution.

Up until the French Revolution, European mathematics was an “aristocratic” activity, the intellectual pastime of a small circle of men who were convinced they were collaborating on a universal undertaking free of all space-time constraints, as they believed they were ideally in dialogue with the Greek founders and with mathematicians of all languages and eras. The nineteenth century saw its transformation into a “democratic” but also “patriotic” activity: the dominant tendency, as shown by recent research to analyze this transformation, seems to be the national one, albeit accompanied by numerous analogies from the point of view of the processes of national evolution, possibly staggered in time. Nevertheless, the very homogeneity of the individual national processes leads us to view mathematics in the context of the national-universal tension that the spread of liberal democracy was subjected to over the past two centuries. In order to analyze national-universal tension in mathematics, viewed as an intellectual undertaking and a profession of the new bourgeois society, it is necessary to investigate whether the network of international communication survived the political, social, and cultural upheavals of the French Revolution and the European wars waged in the early nineteenth century, whether national passions have transformed this network, and if so, in what way. Luigi Cremona's international correspondence indicates that relationships among individuals have been restructured by the force of national membership, but that the universal nature of mathematics has actually been boosted by a vision shared by mathematicians from all countries concerning the role of their discipline in democratic and liberal society as the basis of scientific culture and technological innovation, as well as a basic component of public education.

This paper studies the evolution of mathematics teaching in France and Germany from 1900 to about 1980. These two countries were leading in the processes of international modernization. We investigate the similarities and differences during the various periods, which showed to constitute significant time units and this in a remarkably parallel manner for the two countries. We argue that the processes of reform concerning the teaching of this major school subject are not understandable from within mathematics education or even within the school system. Rather, the evolution of the processes of reform prove to be intimately tied to changing conceptions of modernity according to respective social and cultural values and to changing epistemological conceptions of mathematics. It is particularly novel that we show the key impact of the changing social status of primary schooling for these modernization processes.

A number of issues related to vaccines and vaccinations in society are discussed in this paper. Our purpose is to merge an analysis of some recent changes in the vaccine market with social science research on the relationship between citizens and authorities. The article has two empirical parts. The first shows how the vaccine market, which for many years has had immense financial problems, nowadays seems to becoming economically vitalized, mostly due to the production of new and profitable vaccines. However prosperous the future may appear, certain reactions from the public regarding vaccination initiatives offer insight into inherent problems of vaccine policies in many Western countries. In the second part of the article, these problems are exemplified with the recent controversy over the MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine. We conclude that in spite of the improving profit-margins, the vaccine market remains vulnerable and insecure. Vaccines are permeated by society, even more so than pharmaceutics that are used to cure or alleviate illnesses. Radical changes in financial conditions with promises of a more profitable market will not, we argue, solve other even more fundamental problems.