Jan Golinski

Utility and audience in eighteenth-century chemistry: case studies of William Cullen and Joseph Priestley.

Historians of science are less inclined now than they were a few years ago to regard chemistry as having sprung full-grown from the mind of Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. Many of the contours of pre-Lavoisierian chemistry have recently been mapped, its Newtonian and Stahlian theoretical traditions have been delineated, and the degree of coherence enforced on the subject by its didactic role has been argued. In addition, the social prominence and cohesion achieved by chemists in various national contexts, such as France, Scotland and Germany, have been investigated. Karl Hufbauer (arguing specifically from the case of Germany) and Christoph Meinel have proposed that the cultural climate of the European Enlightenment provided the language and the social settings in which chemistry could be detached from its previous role as a service-art for medicine, and presented as a science with diverse practical applications.

Is it time to forget science?: reflections on singular science and its history

The name history of science reflects a set of assumptions about what science is. Among them is the claim that science is a singular thing, a potentially unified group of disciplines that share a common identity. Long promoted by scientists and philosophers on the basis of a supposedly universal scientific method, this claim now looks very embattled. I trace its development from the early nineteenth century and the growth of the positivist movement to its various manifestations in the twentieth century. Recently, some historians have called for the term science to be relinquished, and for adoption of a more relaxed pluralism. Yet the complex legacy of the notion of singular science cannot be so easily abandoned.

‘Exquisite Atmography’: theories of the world and experiences of the weather in a diary of 1703

This paper describes and analyses a hitherto unknown document of considerable historical significance : a narrative diary of the weather for every day of the year 1703. Available evidence enables us to assign the authorship of the document, with a high degree of probability, to an Oxford graduate residing in rural Worcestershire. The text presents plentiful natural philosophical speculations about the causes of meteorological phenomena, drawing both upon the ideas of leading scientific thinkers and upon vernecular lore concerning the weather. Furthermore, the diarist composed a remarkably personal document, in a richly descriptive style, cataloguing his physiological and emotional reactions to prevailing weather conditions. The document thus represents an empathic and discursive style of meteorology, an alternative to the contemporary efforts to establish objective weather records that have previously been recognized by historians

Humphry Davy: The Experimental Self

This essay examines the career of Humphry Davy against a background of the development of disciplinary structures in science and the exploration of individual subjectivity in the Romantic period. I show how Davy constructed a charismatic persona for himself as a scientific lecturer and researcher with his deployment of spectacular and powerful chemical instrumentation. Doing so, he both exploited and consolidated new institutional and disciplinary formations. I also show how Davy’s career called for continuous self-fashioning in a changing social milieu, how demands for more thoroughgoing institutional reform sidelined him, and how he was subjected to ridicule in a context of unstable gender-relations. Davy’s case suggests that the establishment of disciplinary institutions had a complex relationship to formations of personal identity, and that the career of a charismatic individual in such institutions could be a precarious one.

Thomas Kuhn and Interdisciplinary Conversation: Why Historians and Philosophers of Science Stopped Talking to One Another

This paper looks back to Thomas S. Kuhn’s seminal work of 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as a landmark in the relations between history and philosophy of science. I propose that Kuhn’s book, though read both by historians and by philosophers, contributed to the process by which they have developed largely separate concerns in recent decades. Kuhn was a committed participant in interdisciplinary discourse, and yet his book was read in fundamentally different ways in the two disciplinary communities. To understand how this happened, I propose that we need to modify Kuhn’s own categories of historical analysis to recognize the bearing on disciplinary communities of factors that he discounted as “external.” I argue that philosophers and historians approached Kuhn’s work with preoccupations shaped by the cultural and political context of Cold War debates about science, though that context yielded very different orientations in the two communities.

Richard Kirwan and the Royal Irish Academy: Provincial Metropolitanism and the Crisis of the 1790s

The Irish chemist Richard Kirwan (1733–1812) is remembered among historians for his resourceful defense of the phlogiston theory of combustion, but his pursuit of the sciences of the environment has been little studied. This paper considers his work in Ireland in the 1790s, especially on mineralogy and meteorology, and situates it against the backdrop of elite projects for national improvement and armed insurrection against British rule. Kirwan is viewed as having the outlook of a metropolitan intellectual, which he struggled to reconcile with the circumstances of Irish provinciality and an emergent – sometimes militant – nationalism.

Humphry Davy and ‘The Lever of Experiment’

How do people become convinced by experiments? Why should anyone draw any conclusions from them? And why should they draw particular conclusions? These questions have emerged as central ones in recent work in the history and sociology of science. Their prominence in contemporary discussion of scientific practice marks the degree to which we have departd from a naive philosophical view of the nature of science. From that point of view, experiments are taken to represent nature just as it is and they simply communicate natural facts. Not to be convinced by them would be to violate the basic methodological rules of the scientific enterprise.

The Personality of Henry Cavendish: A Great Scientist with Extraordinary Peculiarities

ISSN: 0002-6980 (Print) 1745-8234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yamb20 The Personality of Henry Cavendish: A Great Scientist with Extraordinary Peculiarities Jan Golinski To cite this article: Jan Golinski (2017) The Personality of Henry Cavendish: A Great Scientist with Extraordinary Peculiarities, Ambix, 64:3, 287-288, DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2017.1385899 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2017.1385899

The Cradle of Chemistry: The Early Years of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh

ISSN: 0002-6980 (Print) 1745-8234 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yamb20 The Cradle of Chemistry: The Early Years of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh Jan Golinski To cite this article: Jan Golinski (2016) The Cradle of Chemistry: The Early Years of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh, Ambix, 63:2, 189-190, DOI: 10.1080/00026980.2016.1227168 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00026980.2016.1227168

Paul A. Elliott, Enlightenment, Modernity and Science: Geographies of Scientific Culture and Improvement in Georgian England (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), pp. xii + 363, £54.50, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-84885-366-9.

Convertite did not retrain sex workers, women hesitated to join them, for they required severing relationships with men they loved, and there was no replacement of earning potential. McGough’s book is also about the treatment of disease. Guaiacum, known as Holy Wood in Italy, was ground into sawdust and soaked in water, then boiled and reduced. The foam was then dried and used as a medicine. However, while the disease was considered curable, university-trained physicians viewed it as a moral failing and attached great stigma to it, a deterrent to patients needing treatment. Moreover, they blamed their patients if treatment failed, or suspected witchcraft if natural remedies proved ineffective. Popular healers were more accessible, and self-treatment was even more attractive because it assured anonymity. The most unique aspect of McGough’s work involves her comparisons of early modern Venice with Africa in the twenty-first century. People in both settings were guided by religious authorities as well as practitioners of witchcraft. Guilt-ridden, they sought to hide their afflictions because of the stigma, allowing the disease to thrive. Furthermore, stigma got in the way of mapping out a course of planned prevention. For Africa there is still time to overcome such obstacles, and McGough’s fascinating study of sexual contagion and treatment in Venice is an instructive means of understanding how societal attitudes can shape the course of disease.There has been quite a lot of research on the scientific culture of the English provinces in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the time may be right for a summing-up. In the last couple of decades, the pioneering work of Roy Porter, Margaret Jacob, and Larry Stewart has inspired several local studies. A fair amount has now been learned about institutions in such commercial centres as Manchester and Birmingham, about the work of itinerant lecturers in towns like Bath and Norwich, about the scientific contents of periodicals and newspapers, and about the trade in scientific instruments. Paul A. Elliott’s book goes some way toward the goal of organising all of this information, though it falls short of a comprehensive synthesis. Each of Elliott’s chapters is focused on a different site of scientific activity in the period, including the home, the school, the garden, the county town, and the Masonic lodge. He acknowledges what has been written on the historical geography of Enlightenment science by Charles Withers, David Livingstone, Vladimir Jankovic´, and Miles Ogborn. He also alludes to the ‘spatial turn’ in the sociology of scientific knowledge, but without engaging substantially with theoretical issues. Instead, he covers fairly concrete practices, like domestic architecture, the layout of gardens, and urban planning. The focus on a series of locations is a good device to organise his summaries of historians’ work and to integrate the results of his own archival studies. He provides ample references to the scholarly literature and to selected primary sources, which will add to the book’s value. Elliott succeeds in showing how his chosen sites were connected to wider networks through which printed materials, instruments, and specimens were circulated. Discussing the household as a place of scientific activity, he mentions books that taught botany, meteorology, and chemistry to women and children. He shows how natural history collections in private houses evolved into public museums in Lichfield and Darlington.He tells of itinerant lecturers who brought their shows into middle-class homes, and of the learned societies in towns like Spalding, Derby, and Birmingham that began as domestic gatherings. The chapter on Dissenting academies notes how influential were the works of such writers as Joseph Priestley, Isaac Watts, and Philip Doddridge, whose pedagogical ideas were shaped by their experience in those institutions; and in two chapters on botanical gardens, Elliott links European-wide debates about classification and nomenclature to the horticultural practices adopted in particular English towns. At several points, Elliott uses his own archival research to add detail to the overall picture. His previous book on Derby informs the chapter on Erasmus Darwin’s botanical gardens, and that on the significance of county towns. Another chapter presents a casestudy of Nottingham, describing the importance of learned societies, visiting lecturers, and local Dissenting clergy in sustaining the scientific culture of that town. The final chapter sketches the career of Abraham Bennet, a Derbyshire clergyman, electrician, and meteorologist.Elliott shows that Bennet’s scientific work was nurtured by connections to the aristocratic Cavendish and Russell families, and to experimenters in Birmingham, Manchester, and London. At the same time, it was specifically rooted in the climatic and geological peculiarities of the Peak District, and in the concerns of the local lead-mining industry. The book is enriched by nearly fifty illustrations, including maps and plans, though one wishes for more originality in the choice of a cover image. (The over-familiar Joseph Wright, again!) Strong as it is on specific information, it is weaker on the level of interpretation. The passages in which Elliott summarises the perspectives of other historians are hampered by a wooden prose style and a tendency to avoid taking sides on contentious issues; for example the role of freemasonry in Enlightenment scientific institutions. This limits the book’s analytical bite. There are also too many sentences that cry out for the attention of a rigorous copyeditor, which it seems the publisher did not provide.Nonetheless, the book will be valued for its coverage of recent scholarship, its original contributions to the field, and its stimulus to further thought about the geography of science in Enlightenment England.