A frequently recounted episode in early modern medicine concerns the physician Helvetius's introduction of ipecacuanha to French medical practice after curing Louis XIV's son of dysentery using this medicinal drug. To this day, the Helvetius story remains riven with contradictions, obscurity, and confusion, even down to the nature of the drug involved. This article, challenging histories of “information” as homogeneous and neutral, explores how Helvetius's reputation as a physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur was crafted through print and correspondence. Rather than seeking (...) to establish a definitive account of “what actually happened,” it addresses the ways in which different media shaped and mediated the politics of knowledge surrounding Helvetius and his drug. Considerations of intellectual and commercial property inflected medical knowledge in different ways, producing distinct strategies of publicity. While Helvetius capitalized on courtly connections to promote himself and his drug, rivals eyed the Republic of Letters as an alternate route for establishing natural knowledge-claims. Yet the arch-newsmonger of the Republic of Letters, Leibniz, elected to preserve the connection between Helvetius and ipecacuanha in print. I argue that Leibniz's actions stemmed from a view of the public domain that downplayed discovery and emphasized disclosure of medical secrets in the public interest. (shrink)

Much has been said about the need for improving the current definitions of scientific authorship, but an aspect that is often overlooked is how to formulate and communicate these definitions to ensure that they are comprehensible and useful for researchers, notably researchers active in international research consortia. In light of a rapid increase in international collaborations within natural sciences, this article uses authorship of this branch of sciences as an example and provides suggestions to improve the comprehensibility of the definitions (...) of authorship in natural sciences. It assesses whether the definition of authorship provided by the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity can deal with current issues and problems of scientific authorship. Notably, problems that are experienced in project groups with researchers coming from multiple countries. Using theories developed by Jürgen Habermas and Robert Merton, a normative framework is developed to articulate ethical authorship in natural sciences. Accordingly, enriching the current definition of authorship with normative elements and using discipline-specific metaphors to communicate them are introduced as possible ways of improving the comprehensibility of the definition of authorship in international environments. Finally, this article provides a proposal to be considered in the future revisions of the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity. (shrink)

This article suggests that institutional workshops of assay were significant experimental sites in early modern London. Master assayers at Goldsmiths’ Hall on Foster Lane, in the heart of the city, and at the Royal Mint, in the Tower, made trials to determine the precious-metal content of bullion, plate and coinage. The results of their metallurgical experiments directly impacted upon the reputations and livelihoods of London's goldsmiths and merchants, and the fineness of coin and bullion. Engaged in the separation and transformation (...) of matter, assayers and the affairs of their workshops were also a curiosity for those interested in the secrets of nature. Making use of a wide-ranging body of sources, including institutional court minutes, artisanal petitions, mercantile guidebooks, recipe books and natural-philosophical treatises, this article uncovers a complex culture of metropolitan expertise. We first examine the workshop spaces in which assayers undertook their professional activities, and their secretive corporate cultures. We turn next to the manuscript culture through which assayers codified and communicated knowledge, ‘secrets’ and techniques to broader urban audiences. Finally, we assess exchanges and tensions between assayers and the wider community of Londoners engaged in scientific knowledge production and dissemination. (shrink)

This paper aims to assess the credibility of the legitimation thesis; the claim that the development of experimental science involved a legitimation of certain aspects of artisanal practice or craft knowledge. My goal will be to provide a critique of this idea by examining Francis Bacon’s notion of ‘mechanical history’ and the influence it exerted on attempts by later generations of scholars to appropriate the knowledge of craft traditions. Specifically, I aim to show how such projects were often premised upon (...) socio-epistemological ideals that served to reinforce, rather than relinquish boundaries between artisans and natural philosophers. It will be my claim that a closer examination of the presuppositions underlying attempts by early modern natural philosophers to appropriate craft knowledge reveals, not a desire to legitimize aspects of artisanal practice, but rather strategies aimed at demonstrating the inferiority of the local ways of knowing upon which it was based. (shrink)

What is authorship? How are answers to that question related to ideas aboutthe understanding, interpretation, or appreciation of literary works? In what follows I provide a selective survey of the voluminous literature on thesedivisive questions, offer criticisms of some influential theories, and present an alternative.

In 1622, Francis Bacon published his Historia naturalis et experimentalis. Many of the features of Bacon's natural and experimental histories were entirely new. This paper studies this literary form as a new epistemic genre. In particular, it analyzes its origin and evolution in Bacon's work, focusing on how its basic template and features were influenced by his specific epistemic requirements. It shows that Bacon devised these features in the process of developing a Historia mechanica, or a history of the mechanical (...) arts, drawing on the particular case of the technical recipe. Since antiquity, the recipe had been the dominant epistemic genre for recording and communicating technical knowledge. However, this paper suggests that the recipe format did not meet Francis Bacon's epistemic needs. In particular, the format was incompatible with the goal of keeping experimentation and its reporting open-ended and flexible. More generally, the acknowledgment of the provisional, historical character of knowledge was a tenet of what Bacon called an “initiative” method of knowledge transmission, or a method of “probation.” According to this approach, knowledge “ought to be delivered and intimated, if it were possible, in the same method wherein it was invented” and discovered. Only the display of its tentative features would encourage and stimulate others to improve and advance it. The format of the new genre of natural and experimental histories grew out of Bacon's dissatisfaction with the way in which recipes hid the imperfection of the process of knowledge production. (shrink)

Edgar Zilsel's famous thesis, which argues that modern experimental science was born from the union of artisans and intellectuals in the 16th century, received little support when Zilsel proposed it in the 1940s. In recent years, however, with the turn toward social and cultural history of science, the “Zilsel Thesis” has undergone something of a revival as historians rethink the relevance of artisanal knowledge for the history of early modern science. This essay looks at the Zilsel Thesis in a global (...) setting – specifically a colonial Iberian setting – and argues for its relevance in framing natural history, medicine, and the impact of science on everyday life. Using the examples of corn, quina, and cochineal, this essay argues that the agronomic, chemical, and entomological knowledge accumulated over generations of practice by indigenous practitioners was in fact artisanal knowledge that was passed on to European intellectuals in “global trading zones” to become part of the Western scientific patrimony. (shrink)

The ability to dominate or exercise will in social encounters is often assumed in social theory to define power, but there is another form of power that is often confused with it and rarely analyzed as distinct: logistics or the ability to mobilize the natural world for political effect. I develop this claim through a case study of seventeenthcentury France, where the power of impersonal rule, exercised through logistics, was fundamental to state formation. Logistical activity circumvented patrimonial networks, disempowering the (...) nobility and supporting a new regime of impersonal rule: the modern, territorial state. (shrink)

This introductory article provides an overview of the historiography of scientific secrecy from J.D. Bernal and Robert Merton to this day. It reviews how historians and sociologists of science have explored the role of secrets in commercial and government-sponsored scientific research through the ages. Whether focusing on the medieval, early modern or modern periods, much of this historiography has conceptualized scientific secrets as valuable intellectual property that helps entrepreneurs and autocratic governments gain economic or military advantage over competitors. Following Georg (...) Simmel and Max Weber, this article offers an alternative interpretation of secrecy as a tool to organize and to hierarchically order society. In this view, the knowledge content of secrecy is less important than its social-psychological effects. The authors argue that, in many instances, entrepreneurial researchers and governments use scientific secrets as an effective tool to manipulate the beliefs of their competitors and the larger public, and not necessarily to protect the knowledge that they hold. (shrink)

For several decades, historians have realized the limitations of analysing the historical past of science as a mere succession of theories. One of the most stimulating messages that the reinvention of the discipline has launched is that although there are obvious intellectual elements that promote the development and progress of science, there are also social, economic, and institutional aspects to consider. The history of science is no longer just a history of scientific ideas and theories, but also a history of (...) institutions, communities, spaces, objects, and practices as well as a history of the complex interaction among all these dimensions. Accompanying this new panorama is a broad consensus among scholars to accept that major social changes have inexorably some impact on scientific practice and vice versa. This premise, now widespread, is especially relevant to the history of early modern science and the question of its roots because it has allowed the introduction of new agents and spaces previously excluded from the domain of scientific development. In other words, this enriched perspective has multiplied both the processes of knowledge construction and the arenas in which these processes were undertaken. More specifically, historical research is no longer limited to spaces traditionally linked to the construction of science; it now embraces less orthodox ones. Within this broadened field of inquiry, practical knowledge and the objects of material culture have come to occupy a central place. This special issue explores how the new directions in which the history of science has expanded have a direct impact on the study of Iberian science in the Atlantic world. (shrink)

ArgumentSpace projects represent, after World War II, the archetype of large-scale organization of scientific practices that are flexible, temporary, and oriented towards specific goals. A new form of activity, the project, emerged through the management of technical means, allocation of skills, and coordination of various players. Project management emerged as the synthesis of a set of social practices designed to subordinate as well as synchronize the initiatives of researchers, engineers, and technicians who had temporarily joined forces. This article presents the (...) genesis and deployment of the Franco-Soviet space program ARCAD 3 whose purpose was to study the magnetosphere with a satellite. This study is situated at the junction of three historiographical dimensions: scientific writings, links between action and graphic forms, and Big Science. The diagrams, organization charts and schedules produced by the French space agency throughout the entire project form the documentary substrata of this analysis. These graphic management tools define the role of each player, designate fields of competence, and specify the temporality of actions. A self-monitoring system as well as surveillance instrument, diagrams, organization charts and schedules are linked to form a certain vision of authority along the lines of the “neoliberal governmentality” defined by Michel Foucault. By defining in advance and in writing all the possible (or impossible) relationships, the chronological order of activities as well as the actions to be performed, graphic project management tools contribute to the transfer of coercive panoptic mechanisms towards a minimal organization of relationships between individuals. (shrink)

In 2017 a clock from the collection of the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon in Dresden was dismantled. This clock had been made around 1767 by Johann Gottfried Köhler (1745–1800), who was then in...

ArgumentThis article argues that during the seventeenth century chemistry achieved intellectual and institutional recognition, starting its transition from a practical art – subordinated to medicine – into an independent discipline. This process was by no means a smooth one, as it took place amidst polemics and conflicts lasting more than a century. It began when Andreas Libavius endeavored to turn chemistry into a teaching discipline, imposing method and order. Chemistry underwent harsh criticism from Descartes and the Cartesians, who reduced natural (...) phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, leaving little room for chemistry as an independent discipline. Boyle rejected the chemical principles and promoted the fusion of chemistry with corpuscularianism. He did not reduce chemical phenomena to the mechanical affections of matter, but strived to promote chemistry as part of natural philosophy. Lemery gave strong impulse to the recognition of chemistry as a discipline in its own right by fostering a compromise of chemistry and mechanism. Lemery adopted the chemical principles, but did not see them as the ultimate ingredients of bodies. In order to promote chemistry, he distanced it from alchemy and pursued the reform of chemical terminology. (shrink)