ABSTRACT After a productive start in the 1980s, laboratory history is now surprisingly neglected—not lab science, but the lab as social institution. To restart interest, I suggest that we see labs as period specific (early modern, modern, postmodern) and of a piece with each era's dominant social institutions and practices. In the modern era, for example, labs have become powerful and ubiquitous because their operating principles are those of the nation-state and its consumerist political economy. Their educational function is crucial: (...) labs have authority because they are an effective vehicle for educating en masse for life in modern states; they provide general entry to careers in scores of disciplines and a thousand occupations; and they embody prevailing ideals of a meritocracy of competence, transparency (through publication), and a universalistic logic of objectivity. An older microhistory of laboratory practices may thus be reborn as a systematic, macrosocial history of the lab. (shrink)

A curious appendage to the Oxford Museum of Natural History has an interesting history. Although, in its original form, its architecture may have suggested a chapel, it was built as a chemical laboratory in the 1850s. Was its Gothic style an idle fancy, or was it intended to contribute to some grand design? The choice of architectural style may suggest a purely aesthetic interpretation. Alternatively the high roof and ventilation of the laboratory points to a purely utilitarian purpose. Yet neither (...) of these views can be accepted as more than a partial explanation. Overriding these is the dominant religious context of a university imbued with the values of the mid‐Victorian Church of England. It would be a mistake to discount the university politics of the time. There is often a strong ideological basis to architecture. Oxford's classical curriculum was challenged by the claims of science and, among the sciences, chemistry suffered from particularly strong prejudices. Indeed its image represented a gross caricature. Yet, if chemistry was to be fully accepted, as an essentially experimental science, its pursuit demanded special facilities. The paper provides a study of the gradual acceptance of an experimental science in one particular social context. (shrink)

During the 1870s animal morphologists and embryologists at Cambridge University came to dominate British zoology, quickly establishing an international reputation. Earlier accounts of the Cambridge school have portrayed this success as short-lived, and attributed the school's failure to a more general movement within the life sciences away from museum-based description, towards laboratory-based experiment. More recent work has shown that the shift in the life sciences to experimental work was locally contingent and highly varied, often drawing on and incorporating aspects of (...) museum work. Thus in order to understand the more general changes, studies of particular sites are needed. Here I examine the organisation of teaching at Cambridge, both in terms of the spaces in which it was taught and the ways in which teaching and examining were organised, to bring out the complexities of the 'revolt from morphology' and to show in more detail the institutional aspects that intertwined with intellectual change. Francis Maitland Balfour, as head of the Cambridge school, was able to make use of family connections and his own personal wealth to promote morphology. His successor lacked these resources, and one competition within the natural sciences at Cambridge intensified, morphology was unable to compete properly. (shrink)