The appearance and proliferation of physics laboratories in the academic institutions of Britain between 1865 and 1885 is an established feature of Victorian science. However, neither of the two existing modern accounts of this development have adequately documented the predominant function of these early physics laboratories as centres for theteachingof physics, characteristically stressing instead the exceptional cases of the research laboratories at Glasgow and Cambridge. Hence these accounts have attempted to explain, somewhat misleadingly, the genesis of these laboratories purely by (...) reference to the stimuli of professionalizedresearchprogrammes, instead of considering the contemporary growth in demand for the professional laboratory teaching of physics. In failing to consider such physics laboratories in terms of the political economy of British education, these accounts have also faileda fortiorito correlate this development with the contemporaneous extension of laboratory teaching methods to other scientific disciplines, a movement dubbed as a laboratory ‘revolution’ by later nineteenth-century commentators. (shrink)

In his comprehensive survey of the work of William Herschel, published in the Annuaire du Bureau des Longitudes for 1842, Dominique Arago argued that the life of the great astronomer ‘had the rare privilege of forming an epoch in an extended branch of astronomy’. Arago also noted, however, that Herschel's ideas were often taken as ‘the conceptions of a madman’, even if they were subsequently accepted. This fact, commented Arago, ‘seems to me one that deserves to appear in the history (...) of science’. From the time Herschel published his first paper in the Philosophical transactions in 1781, he was subjected to the suggestion of lunacy. His patron and friend William Watson, told him that after his claims for the extraordinary power of his telescopes, ‘your prognosis that some would think you fit for Bedlam has been verified’. On learning of Herschel's supremely accurate new micrometer, the astronomer Alexander Aubert exclaimed to Herschel that ‘we would go to Bedlam together’: Aubert wrote to Herschel in January 1782 that he should ‘mind not a few jealous barking puppies: a little time will clear up the matter, and if it lays in my power you would not be sent to Bedlam alone, for I incline much to be of the party’. (shrink)

French science of the period between 1793 and 1830 is now a major focus of study. The large body of work produced since the nineteenth century, particularly in the field of institutional history, has provided the background for important attempts in the last ten or fifteen years to apply tools of sociological analysis to this field of enquiry. Particularly important have been theories of professionalization and institutionalization. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the consequences of the use (...) of such models in relation to this specific historical context. In particular, I shall suggest that such questions as the importance of institutions in the conduct of science, and the extent to which science became a profession or remained a vocation, may be better understood once the world of French science has been situated in a wider political and intellectual context. An article, however, can do no more than suggest new perspectives, and must leave to more extended treatments the work of amplification and correction. Briefly, however, this paper will argue for a view of science at this period as locked in a conflict between the ambiguous demands of the political world on the one hand, and on the other pressures on individuals and groups within the vocation of science to conform to an ideology which viewed science as completelynon-political. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn Germany during the 1870s and 1880s a number of important scientific innovations in chemistry and biology emerged that were linked to advances in the new technology of synthetic dyestuffs. In particular, the rapid development of classical organic chemistry was a consequence of programs in which chemists devised new theories and experimental strategies that were applicable to the processes and products of the burgeoning dye factories. Thereafter, the novel products became the means to examine and measure biological systems. This (...) took place as a result of two trends. The first was a move toward diversification in the dye industry – made possible by the extensive range of products – which in turn was stimulated by economic and political conditions. The second was the increasing availability of techniques, substances, and processes used in industry. This made possible a concrete program of introducing the qualitative and quantitative methods of chemistry into the domain of laboratory experimentation on biological materials, thereby realizing the abstract desire to transform cell biology into an exact science.Moreover, the conceptualization of biological systems that emerged from this endeavor leaned heavily on a theory of dye chemistry that indicated which particular arrangements of atoms performed specific functions. This biological modeling used the imagery of chemical structural formulae to transform chemical nuclei and their side chains into adequate representations of protoplasmic structure. (shrink)

What sort of activities took place in the academic laboratories developed for teaching the natural sciences in Britain between the 1860s and 1880s? What kind of social and instrumental regimes were implemented to make them meaningful and efficient venues of experimental instruction? As humanly constructed sites of experiment how were the metropolitan institutional contexts of these laboratories engineered to make them legitimate places to study ‘Nature’? Previous studies have documented chemists' effective use of regimented quantitative analysis in their laboratory teaching (...) from the 1820s, but less is known about how Victorian academics made other sorts of laboratories unproblematic pedagogical spaces. This paper will examine the literary, disciplinary and instrumental technologies of microscopy deployed by T. H. Huxley at his South Kensington laboratory during the early 1870s to render his biology teaching legitimate, meaningful and efficient. As such it is a response to Pickstone's recent call for a broader account of microscopy teaching in late nineteenth-century academic life science, and one localized answer to Bennett's enquiries as to what the appearance of a microscope in laboratories and other domestic settings betokened to historical actors, and how such tokens changed over time. (shrink)

In a paper which examined the ‘simultaneous emergence of evolutionary theories in biology and sociology in the nineteenth century’, J. C. Greene said of Comte that ‘it was not from biology that his inspiration [the inspiration of his evolutionary view] was drawn; his writings and letters in the formative period sing the praises of Bichat and Gall but not of Lamarck. His intellectual debt in social theory lay in a different direction—to Condorcet'sSketch of an historical picture of the progress of (...) the human mind, to the historical writings of Hume and Robertson, and to the ideas of Saint-Simon’. This statement from a paper published almost twenty years ago as an exploratory reconnaissance of virgin territory is representative of the kind of confused judgements which still surround a discussion of the inter-relations between social, biological and medical thought in the century 1750 to 1850. It makes some valid points which a critical examination should not be allowed to overwhelm, the most significant being that Comte is unequivocally identified with the Enlightenment tradition represented here by Condorcet, Robertson and Hume. But since it is a very condensed statement about a complex set of relationships, it invites interpretations which the author did not necessarily intend. (shrink)

This essay assesses the value of social constructivist theories of science to the history of medicine. It highlights particularly the ways in which feminist theorists have turned their attention to gender as a category of analysis in scientific thinking, producing an approach to modern science that asks how it became identified with "male" objectivity, reason, and mind, set in opposition to "female" subjectivity, feeling, and nature.In the history of medicine this new work has allowed a group of scholars to better (...) explain not only how women were marginalized in the profession but also the manner in which politics, male anxiety about shifts in power relations between the sexes, social and political upheaval, professional concerns, and changes in the family all had an impact on the production of knowledge regarding the female body, including the "discovery," definition, and treatment of a wide range of female ailments, from anorexia nervosa to fibroid tumors.Building on the work in the history of medicine already accomplished, the essay offers a critical rereading of the writings of Elizabeth Blackwell, a pioneer nineteenth-century woman physician and leader of the woman's medical movement. It contends that Blackwell, who lived through a revolutionary change in medical thinking brought on by discoveries in immunology and bacteriology, remained critical of "objectivity" as the "best" form of knowing and suspicious of the laboratory medicine that promoted it so enthusiastically. Moreover, her critiques of radical objectivity and scientific reductionism deserve to be recognized as foreshadowing the maternalist strain of thinking among contemporary feminist philosophers and thinkers such as Sara Ruddick and others. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is the emergence of the research laboratory as an organizational entity within the company structure of industrial firms. The thesis defended is that, after some groundwork by British and French firms, the managements of several of the larger German dye companies set up their own research organizations between the years 1877 and 1883. The analysis of the emergence of the industrial research laboratory in the dyestuffs industry presented here makes clear that both the older study (...) on the subject by John J. Beer and a later paper by Georg Mseyer-Thurow contain some serious defects. Beer, like so many other authors of the 1950s who studied the ‘marriage’ between science and industry during the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’, incorrectly correlates the engagement of university-educated chemists with the rise of industrial research. The appointment of academic chemists by BASF and Hoechst at the end of the 1860s, for instance, was described as ‘the…acquisition of a research staff’. This reveals a misunderstanding of the roles of chemists within the nineteenth-century chemical industry. University-trained personnel were, in fact, working in industry as early as the start of the nineteenth century. However, they were employed as managers, works chemists and analysts, and only exceptionally in research. (shrink)