Natural Histories,Analyses and Experimentation: Three Afterwords

Pickstone John V. , “Working knowledges before and after circa 1800: Practices and disciplines in the history of science, technology and medicine”, Isis, xcviii (2007), 489–516.

Klein Ursula , “Technoscience avant la lettre”, Perspectives in science, xiii (2005), 226–66.

Kim Mi Gyung , Affinity, that elusive dream: A genealogy of the chemical revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2003).

Bowker Geoffrey C. Star Susan Leigh , Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences (Cambridge, MA, 1999).

See Hess Volker Mendelsohn J. Andrew , “Case and series: Medical knowledge and paper technology”, History of science, xlviii (2010), 287–314. This useful recent paper takes a welcome long view of the paper technologies of case records, stressing constraints and continuity. In so doing, it may somewhat underplay the variety of projects represented in this medium — E.g. from the early modern arts of bibliography and indexing, to the enlightenment project connecting patterns of disease with environmental difference and changes — Examples respectively of what Erwin Ackerknecht called “library medicine” and “bedside medicine”. The nineteenth century saw two major developments: ‘hospital medicine’ records, incorporating anatomo-pathological analysis, and the ‘laboratory medicine’ variant, incorporating records of physiological variables such as temperature. The former (Paris tradition) were extensively ‘museological’ and comparative between diseases; the latter investigations generally worked with smaller numbers of patients and focused on norms, as nicely described for America by John Harley Warner in his The therapeutic perspective (Princeton, 1997). How such traditions articulated with each other and with changing institutional imperatives seems to me the key problem in long historical readings of case records, as Löwy here explores for cancer. And for this, it seems to me, we need analysis of changing structures of work and knowledge.

Keating Peter Cambrosio Alberto , “Cancer clinical trials: The emergence and development of a new style of practice”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, lccci (2007), 197–223.

Loewy Ilana , “The experimental body”, in Cooter Roger Pickstone John (eds), Companion to medicine in the twentieth century (London2000), 435–50.

Collingwood R. G. , An autobiography (Oxford, 1939).

Rheinberger Hans-Jörg , Towards a history of epistemic things (Stanford, 1997).

See The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), special number on “Getting the big picture”.

Christie J. R. R. C. , review of J. V. Pickstone, Ways of knowing, in The British journal for the history of science, xxxviii (2005), 350–1.

For example the recent CUP volumes, including Modern biomedical and earth sciences (2009) which I edited with Peter Bowler.

For example Golinski Jan , Making natural knowledge: Constructivism and the history of science (Cambridge, 1998); Bowler Peter J. Morus Iwan Rhys , Making modern science: A historical survey (Chicago, 2005); Fara Patricia , Science: A four thousand year history (Oxford, 2009).

See the Introduction to the Focus section “Between and beyond ‘history of science’ and ‘history of medicine’”, ed. by Pickstone John V. Worboys Michael in Isis, cii (2011), 97–101.

Pickstone John V. , “Sketching together the modern histories of science, technology and medicine”, Ibid., 123–33.

See the issue on “Technoscience” edited by Klein Ursula , Perspectives in science, xiii (2005).

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref 1).

See Coleman William R. , Georges Cuvier, zoologist: A study in evolutionary theory (Cambridge, MA, 1964).

A useful recent review of collecting sciences could be extended by closer examination of the interplays between natural history and analysis: Kohler Robert E. , “Finders, keepers: Collecting sciences and collecting practice”, History of science, xlv (2007), 1–27. Rather like the later essay by Hess and Mendelsohn, as noted above, Kohler follows the history of a particular practice (collecting) over time, rather than as (sometimes) a constituent of more complex but definable practice-sets.

See my essay review of Objectivity in The British journal for the history of science, xl (2009), 595–600.

Note that the paper by Rheinberger tends to assume that synthesis is a normal correlate of analysis — But this is true only in fully manipulable systems, such as he tends to deal with. To be sure, whenever one analyses one may think of how the parts fit together, or one might be able to suggest models of how they do so (mathematical synthesis), but putting the parts together substantively, directly as bricks as it were, or indirectly as by the procedures of synthetic organic chemistry, is a very different matter. Further, if you synthesise to confirm analysis, then analysis remains the overall gaol. Synthesis, in WoK talk, means un-de-constructing as an end.

Hamlin review of Ways of knowing in Journal of the American Medical Association, cclxxxvi (2001), 2878–9.

Though see Barry Barnes Klein (ed.), Perspectives in science, xiii (2005).

These include the works, already noted, by Kohler Hess Mendelsohn , the discussions of Objectivity, and the recently published collection edited by Daston Lorraine Lunbeck Elizabeth , Histories of scientific observation (Chicago, 2011).

For example, Emma Spary's review in International studies in the philosophy of science, xvii/2 (2003).

Pickstone John V. , “How might we map the cultural fields of science? Politics and organisms in restoration France”, History of science, xxxvii (1999), 347–64.

See Pickstone John V. , “Bureaucracy, liberalism and the body on post-revolutionary France: Bichat's physiology and the Paris school of medicine”, History of science, xix (1981), 115–42.

Dean Mitchell , Critical and effective histories: Foucault's methods and historical sociology (London, 1994), 93–4.

A recent example of the WoK approach focuses on the (analytical) sciences and technologies of sequencing, thus revealing crucial continuities which cut across disciplinary histories. García-Sancho Miguel , Biology, computing and the history of molecular sequencing (1945–2000) (Basingstoke, forthcoming).