Museological Science? The Place of the Analytical/Comparative in Nineteenth-Century Science,Technology and Medicine

Pickstone John V. , “Ways of knowing: Towards a historical sociology of science, technology and medicine”, The British journal for the history of science, xxvi (1993), 433–58.

I explore some of these questions of persistence and interaction, for medicine, in “The biographical and the analytical: Towards a historical model of science and practice in modern medicine”, in Löwy I. (eds), Medicine and change: Historical and sociological studies of medical innovation (Paris and London, 1993), 23–47.

Ackerknecht E. , Medicine at the Paris Hospital 1794–1848 (Baltimore, 1967).

Jewson N. D. , “The disappearance of the sick man from medical cosmology”, Sociology, x (1976), 225–44; see also, his “Medical knowledge and the patronage system in eighteenth century England”, Sociology, viii (1974), 369–85.

All four types are outlined in Pickstone , “Ways of knowing” (ref. 1).

Harwood J. , Styles of scientific thought: The German genetics community 1900–1933 (Chicago, 1993).

This suggestion emerged in the Peak District, in discussion with Morrell Jack .

My thanks to Simon Schaffer for discussion on this question. 9. For a recent survey of the institutional changes see Dhombres N. Dhombres J. , Naissance d'un nouveau pouvoir: Sciences et savants en France (1793–1824) (Paris, 1989).

For a recent survey of the institutional changes see Dhombres N. Dhombres J. , Naissance d'un nouveau pouvoir: Sciences et savants en France (1793–1824) (Paris, 1989).

See the collection Quels musées pour quels fins aujourd'hui (Paris, 1983), and especially the essay by Poulot Dominic , “Les finalités des musées du XVI au XIX siècle”; and the useful anthology edited by François Dagonet , Le Musée sans fin (Paris, 1984). Also Vidler Anthony , “Architecture in the museum: Didactic narratives from Boullée to Lenoir”, in his The writing on the walls: Architectural theory in the late Enlightenment (Princeton, 1987), 165–73.

Ackerknecht , Paris Hospital (ref. 3); Foucault M. , The birth of the clinic (London, 1973).

Shinn T. , “Science, Tocqueville, and the state: The organisation of knowledge in modern France”, Social research, lix (1992), 533–66, summarizes some of the results of his L'École Polytechnique, 1794–1914: Savoir scientifique et pouvoir social (Paris, 1980).

See Ministère de l'Education Nationale, Cent-cinquante ans de haul enseignement technique au Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Paris, 1970).

The best single account probably remains the detailed guide-book by Deleuze J. P. F. , Histoire et description du Museum Royal d'Histoire Naturelle (2 vols, Paris, 1823).

See ref. 10.

Pujoulx J. B. , Promenade au Jardin des Plantes à la ménagerie et dans les galleries (2 vols, Paris, 1804).

On the transformation of life sciences the key secondary texts are Daudin Henri , De Linné à Jussieu: Méthodes de la classification et idée de série en botanique et en zoologie (1740–1790) (Paris, 1926); idem, Cuvier et Lamarck: Les classes zoologiques et l'idée de série animale (1790–1830) (Paris, 1926); and Foucault M. , The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences (London, 1970). On early nineteenth-century anatomies, see Russell E. S. , Form and function: A contribution to the history of animal morphology (London, 1916). On mineralogy and geology, in comparison with life-sciences, see the excellent article by Albury W. R. and Oldroyd D. R. , “From Renaissance mineral studies to historical geology in the light of Michel Foucault's The order of things”, The British journal for the history of science, x (1977), 187–215.

See the article in this issue by Forgan Sophie , “The architecture of display: Museums, universities and objects in nineteenth-century Britain”; Desmond A. and Moore J. , Darwin (London, 1992); Desmond A. , The politics of evolution: Morphology, medicine and reform in radical London (Chicago and London, 1969).

Jacyna L. S. , A tale of three cities: The correspondence of Allen Thomson and William Sharpey, 1836–1870 (Medical history supplement, 1989).

For example, Kremer R. L. , “Building institutes for physiology in Prussia, 1836–1846: Contexts, interests and rhetoric”, in Cunningham A. and Williams P. (eds), The laboratory revolution in medicine (Cambridge, 1992), 72–109, esp. p. 84; Jacyna L. S. , “John Goodsir and the making of cellular reality”, Journal of the history of biology, xvi (1983), 75–99, and “The romantic programme and the reception of cell theory in Britain”, ibid., xvii (1984), 13–48.

Pickstone , “Biographical and analytical” (ref. 2).

Desmond , Politics (ref. 18); Maulitz R. C. , Morbid appearances: The anatomy of pathology in the early nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1987).

On Betancourt see Perez J. F. and Tascon I. G. (eds), The description of the Royal Museum machines (Madrid, 1991).

Lanz J. M. and de Betancourt A. , Essai sur la composition des machines (Paris, 1808).

See the entry on Watt in Dictionary of scientific biography. I owe this suggestion and a reminder about Willis, to Simon Schaffer.

Hilken T. N. , Engineering at Cambridge University 1783–1965 (Cambridge, 1967).

Anderson R. G. W. , “What is technology?: Education through museums in the mid-nineteenth century”, The British journal for the history of science, xxv (1992), 169–84.

Crosland M. P. , Historical studies in the language of chemistry, 2nd edn (New York, 1978); Kim M. G. , “The layers of chemical language, I: Constitution of bodies v. structure of matter”, History of science, xxx (1992), 69–96. But I would emphasize the differences between savant and analytical classifications.

Golinski Jan , Science as public culture: Chemistry and enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 1992) provides useful material on the analytical involvements and the worksites of chemists.

Morrell J. B. , “The chemist breeders: The research schools of Liebig and Thomas Thomson”, Ambix, xix (1972), 1–46; Turner R. S. , “Justus Liebig versus Prussian chemistry: Reflections on early institute building in Germany”, Historical studies in the physical sciences, xxi (1982), 19–35.

Crosland M. , The Society of Arcueil: A view of French science at the time of Napoleon I (London, 1967) includes material on chemistry at the Museum of Natural History.

Here one should note the crucial role of military and civilian state projects in supplying employment and laboratories to Berthollet and especially Gay-Lussac. It was in Gay-Lussac's gunpowder laboratory that Liebig received his most important training. See Crosland M. , Arcueil (ref. 31), and his Gay-Lussac, scientist and bourgeois (Cambridge, 1978).

Turner , “Liebig” (ref. 30).

See Forgan , op. cit. (ref. 18) for Britain. Jungnickel C. and McCormmach R. , Intellectual mastery of nature: Theoretical physics from Ohm to Einstein, i: The torch of mathematics, 1800–1870 (Chicago, 1986), chs 1–3, provide much information about collections of instruments by or for professors of physics in early nineteenth-century Germany. Their own intellectual focus precludes much analysis of these collections or their connections with other kinds of collections. I hope that the notion of analytical STM will facilitate such comparative historiography.

Smith C. and Wise N. M. , Energy and empire: A biographical study of Lord Kelvin (Cambridge, 1989).

Ibid., and see the very useful article by Grattan-Guinness I. , “Work for the workers: Advances in engineering mechanics and instruction in France, 1820–1830”, Annals of science, xli (1984), 1–33.

Gooday G. , “Precision measurement and the genesis of physics teaching laboratories in Victorian Britain”, The British journal for the history of science, xxiii (1990), 25–51.

For further suggestions on the modelling of mathematics, see the essays by L. J. Daston on probablity, by J. V. Grabiner on analysis, and by I. Grattan-Guinness on French mathematical physics in Janhke H. N. and Otte M. (eds), Epistemological and social problems of the sciences in the early nineteenth century (Dordrecht, 1991).

E.g. Sutton G. , “The physical and chemical path to vitalism: Bichat's ‘Physiological researches on life and death’ (1800)”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, lviii (1984), 53–71; Tuchman A. M. , “Hermann von Helmholtz and the German medical community”, to appear in Cahan D. (ed.), The borders of science: Essays on Hermann von Helmholtz (Berkeley, 1994).

On Humboldtian sciences, see Cannon S. F. , Science in culture: The early Victorian period (New York, 1978); Nicolson M. , “Alexander von Humboldt, Humboldtian science, and the origins of the study of vegetation”, History of science, xxv (1987), 167–94.

On the centrality of stratigraphy to the new geology, see Laudan R. , “The history of geology, 1780–1840”, in Olby R. C. (eds), Companion to the history of modern science (London, 1990), 314–25; Secord J. A. , Controversy in Victorian geology: The Cumbrian–Silurian dispute (Princeton, 1986), esp. p. 25.

Crosland , Arceuil (ref. 31).

Jungnickel and McCormmach , Mastery, i (ref. 34), ch. 3.

Desmond and Moore , Darwin (ref. 18).

See Lecuyer B.-P. , “The statistician's role in society: The institutional establishment of statistics in France”, Minerva, xxv (1987), 35–55; Bourguet M.-N. , Déchiffrer la France: La Statistique Départmentale à l'Époque Napoléonienne (Paris, 1988); and the essays by Daston L. J. Bourguet M.-N. Lecuyer B.-P. and Metz K. H. in Kruger L. Daston L. J. , and Heidelberger M. (eds), Theprobablistic revolution, i: Ideas in history (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).

See Pickstone J. V. , “Dearth, dirt and fever epidemics: Rewriting the history of British public health, 1760–1850”, in Ranger T. and Slack P. (eds), Epidemics and ideas: Essays on the historical perception of pestilence (Cambridge, 1992), 125–48; Hamlin C. , “Predisposing causes and public health in early nineteenth-century medical thought”, Social history of medicine, v (1992), 43–70.

Ackerknecht , Paris hospital (ref. 3). My interpretation here differs from the account of Pinel in the thesis by Albury, who regarded Pinel as reaching a combinatorial form of nosography, comparable to the mature form of Lavoisierian chemistry. But the case relied on Pinel's understanding of the ‘compound diseases’. Pinel's basic account of diseases seems to me ‘distributive’, as, by Albury's account, it did to François Dagognet. Albury W. R. , “The logic of Condillac and the structure of French chemical and biological theory, 1780–1801”, Ph.D. thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 1972.

Burckhardt R. W. Jr , The spirit of system: Lamarck and evolutionary biology (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

Again the most useful work is by Albury (ref. 47), but my interpretation is different. He stresses the combinatorial aspects of Vicq d'Azyr, Pinel and Bichat; I see them on the eighteenth-century side of the main divide. That is also Albury's position in a later article on Bichat's physiology, “Experiment and explanation in the physiology of Bichat and Magendie”, Studies in the history of biology, i (1977), 47–131. For another reading of Bichat see Lesch John E. , Science and medicine in France: The emergence of experimental physiology 1790–1855 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984).

There is a good, succinct account of Lavoisier's chemistry in Brock William H. , The Fontana history of chemistry (London, 1992). The relationship of this chemistry to Condillac's method of analysis is beautifully dissected in Albury's thesis (ref. 47), 51. See ref. 49 and Pickstone John V. , “Bureaucracy, liberalism and the body in post-revolutionary France: Bichat's physiology and the Paris School of Medicine”, History of science, xix (1981), 115–42.

Temkin O. , “The role of surgery in the rise of modern medical thought”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, xxv (1951), 248–59, and Gelfand Toby , Professionalising modern medicine: Paris surgeons and medical science in the 18th century (Westport, Conn., 1980).

Smith and Wise , Energy and empire (ref. 35); Cardwell Donald , James Joule: A biography (Manchester, 1989); idem, From Watt to Claudius: The rise of thermodynamics in the Industrial Age (London, 1971).

See ref. 12; Gillispie C. C. , Lazare Carnot, savant (Princeton, 1971); idem, Science and polity in France at the end of the Old Regime (Princeton, 1980); Geison G. L. (ed.), Professions and the French State, 1700–1900 (Philadelphia, 1984).

Bourguet M.-N. , Voyage, statistique, histoire naturelle: L'inventaire du monde au dix-huitième siècle . Rapport de synthèse présenté à diriger des recherches, Université de Paris I, Panthéon, Sorbonne, 1993, dactyl.

I thank Drouin J.-M. for discussion on De Candolle.

Albury , op. cit. (ref. 47); Gross M. , “The lessened locus of feelings: A transformation in French physiology in the early nineteenth century”, Journal of the history of biology, xii (1979), 231–71.

Lesch , op. cit. (ref. 49).

See the articles on the Brongniarts in the Dictionary of scientific biography.

Ibid.; Pickstone J. V. , “The origins of general physiology in France with special emphasis on the work of R. J. H. Dutrochet”, Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1974.

Metzger H. , La Génèse de la science des cristaux (Paris, 1918); Russell , Form and function (ref. 17); Appel T. A. , The Cuvier–Geoffroy debate: French biology in the decades before Darwin (Oxford and New York, 1987).

Pickstone , op. cit. (ref. 60) and “Vital actions and organic physics: Henri Dutrochet and French physiology during the 1820s”, Bulletin of the history of medicine, i (1976), 191–212; Schiller J. Schiller T. , Henri Dutrochet: Le matérialisme mécaniste et la physiologie générale (Paris, 1975).

See ref. 56.

See Dictionary of scientific biography and ref. 61.

Albury , op. cit. (ref. 47).

Ibid.

Foucault , Order (ref. 17); Lenoir T. , “Generational factors in the origin of ‘Romantische Naturphilosophie’”, Journal of the history of biology, ii (1980), 57–100.

Pickstone , “Bureaucracy, liberalism” (ref. 51) and “Vital actions” (ref. 62) on absorption; Haines B. , “The inter-relations between social, biological and medical thought, 1750–1850: Saint-Simon and Comte”, The British journal for the history of science, xxi (1978), 19–35, and Clarke E. and Jacyna L. S. , Nineteenth century origins of neuroscientific concepts (Berkeley, 1987) on Purkinje, etc.

For the notion of field here, see Bourdieu P. , The field of cultural production (Cambridge, 1993); for discussion of the relations between politics and life-sciences, see my forthcoming article in History of science.

Coleman W. , Georges Cuvier, zoologist: A study in the history of evolution theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).

Daudin , Classification (ref. 17).

Bud R. and Roberts G. K. , Science versus practice: Chemistry in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1984).

See the review by Keller A. , “Has science created technology?”, Minerva, xxii (1984), 160–82.

Krohn W. and Shafer W. , “The origins and structure of agricultural chemistry”, in Lemaine G. (eds), Perspectives on the emergence of scientific disciplines (The Hague and Paris, 1976).

Bernard C. , An introduction to the study of experimental medicine (Dover edn, New York, 1957); Figlio Karl , “The historiography of scientific medicine: An invitation to the human sciences”, Comparative studies in science and society, xix (1977), 262–86.

Thomason B. , “The new botany in Britain, 1870–1914”, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, UMIST, 1987; Gooday G. , “Nature in the laboratory: Domestication and discipline with the microscope in Victorian life sciences”, The British journal for the history of science, xxiv (1991), 307–41.

T. Lenoir on Ludwig in Coleman W. and Holmes F. L. (eds), The investigative enterprise: Experimental physiology in nineteenth century medicine (Berkeley, 1988), 139–78.

Forgan , “Architecture” (ref. 18).

For example Walter Morley Fletcher, who became the first secretary of the Medical Research Council. See Austoker J. and Bryder L. , Historical perspectives on the role of the Medical Research Council (London, 1989).

Wilson David , Rutherford: Simple genius (London, 1983). This may be a good example of opposition between ‘high’ experimentalism and nascent techno-science.

Since I wrote this paper, I have come across two very relevant books which I have not been able to use but which readers may wish to refer to: Hooper-Greenhill Eileen , Museums and the shaping of knowledge (London, 1992), and Stemerding Dirk , Plants, animals and formulae: Natural history in the light of Latour's Science in Action and Foucault's The Order of Things (School of Philosophy and Social Sciences, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, 1991).