This essay follows recent work in environmental history to explore the history of recycling in physical sciences in Britain and North America since the seventeenth century. The term ‘recycling’ is here used broadly to refer to a variety of practices that extended the life of material resources for doing science in the early modern period. These included practices associated with maintenance, repair, exchange and the adaptation or reuse of material culture. The essay argues that such practices were common in early (...) modern science, and informed experimental spaces and techniques and the ideas that they generated. The essay considers some of the varied motivations that led to such practices, and concludes by examining the endurance of recycling in science since the end of the eighteenth century, particularly in recent efforts to create sustainable scientific research practices. (shrink)

This paper sketches how late seventeenth-century Dutch anatomists used printed publications to advertise their anatomical preparations, inventions and instructional technologies to an international clientele. It focuses on anatomists Frederik Ruysch and Lodewijk de Bils , inventors of two separate anatomical preparation methods for preserving cadavers and body parts in a lifelike state for decades or centuries. Ruysch's and de Bils's publications functioned as an ‘advertisement’ for their preparations. These printed volumes informed potential customers that anatomical preparations were aesthetically pleasing and (...) scientifically important but did not divulge the trade secrets of the method of production. Thanks to this strategy of non-disclosure and advertisement, de Bils and Ruysch could create a well-working monopoly market of anatomical preparations. The ‘advertising’ rhetorics of anatomical publications highlight the potential dangers of equating the growth of print culture with the development of an open system of knowledge exchange. (shrink)

The Kunstkammer of the Electors of Saxony, founded in Dresden around 1560, housed one of the richest collections of tools and scientific instruments in its day. A close analysis of the optical objects in the collection in the decades around 1600 is undertaken here—in particular, their arrangement by a mathematically trained curator, Lucas Brunn, and their use in an ‘experiment’ by a distinguished visitor, Johannes Kepler. It is argued that the selection, display and use of optical objects within this collection (...) reflect a specific, playful image of optics promoted at the Saxon court.Keywords: Court collections; Optics; Instruments; Perspective; Wonder. (shrink)

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century anatomy depended upon a variety of visual displays. Drawings in books, particularly expensive, beautiful and elaborately illustrated books that have been the objects of historians' fascination, were understood to function alongside chalk drawings done in classrooms, casual and formalized experience with animal and human corpses, text describing or contextualizing the images, and preserved specimens. This article argues that British anatomists of the late Enlightenment discovered and taught an intelligible, orderly Nature through comprehensive systems of display. (...) These systems trained vision, and, taken as a whole, they can be used to understand a visual culture of science. Displays helped anatomists, artists and natural philosophers learn to see both the tiniest and the rarest of parts and an overall general plan of anatomy and relationship of parts. Each type of display was materially different from the others and each served to perfect human vision for a group of natural philosophers who valued sensory experience – primarily that of vision, but also that of touch – as the basis of learning. Together, these displays allowed the anatomist to see, in all of its dimensions, human nature, frozen in the ordered and unstressed state of fresh death, a comprehensible guide to life and its functions. A pedagogical context of use defined and bound such displays together as complementary parts of a unified project. A system of display stood in for Nature and at the same time represented her ordering by anatomists. (shrink)