Historians Of Science

"Technology...has become the prime source of material change and so determines the pattern of the total social fabric."

"The past contains many answers, but until we ask the right questions their meaning eludes us."

"...After the more prosperous era of the mid-1990s through around 2008, we seem to have forgotten the truly dreadful market of the 1970s, the awful job market of most of the 1980s, some of the occasional downturns of the 1990s, and the fact that even the best of times has never offered the number of tenure-track jobs equal to the number of Ph.D.’s."

"...All historians are nonfiction writers, whether we know it or not."

"...You will be offered a period in your life in which to learn and think, and see where it takes you. That is a rare and valuable thing. We have begun to assess the Ph.D. as if it were an M.B.A. It isn’t."

"We need some citizens committed to exploring and producing knowledge, as well as consuming it, and the outcomes cannot be measured solely in economic terms (nor is the Ph.D. the only path to that end, but it is certainly an important one)."

"A friend who did a lot of consulting work when tenure-track jobs were not readily forthcoming once told me that having a Ph.D. means two things: You know a lot about a little, and you know better than most people how to look things up—particularly at a time when there is so much cheap, unreliable, useless information out there."

"My great-grandmother would talk about her uncles who served in the Maine Regiment during the Civil War, my great-grandfather’s work helping to build the Canadian railroad and Halifax harbour, the first time she used a flush toilet, talked on the phone (she still had a party line), road in automobile, and so forth. It made me appreciate how much technology transformed the world within a century."

"... and Hugh Hodge, Philadelphia's leading teachers of in the 1840s and 1850s were vociferous in rejecting the suggestion that might be contagious, indeed often spread by the obstetrician himself ... The intensity of their response suggests that something more than mere intellectual difference was involved; one of the roots of their hostility to a contagionist point of view lay in the threat it implied for the physician's status, especially in relation to female patients."

"Just as s and s assumed that their research illuminated the glory of God in His works, so did most nineteenth-century American physicians assume that there could be no conflict between their findings and the truths of morality. The human organism was a thing both material and divine, and offenses both physical and moral were necessarily punished with disease. Drinking, overeating, sexual excess, all carried with them inevitable retribution, not because the Lord deigned to intercede directly in human affairs, but because He had created man's body so that infringing on God's moral law meant disobeying the laws of . Moralism thus drew upon the prestige of science, while medicine was pleased that its findings supported the dictates of morality."

"In an account that both travels over explored territory and covers new ground, Charles Rosenberg provides a vivid and complex history of a key institution. Rosenberg divides The Care of Strangers into two periods: the pre-Civil War era, before the advent of modern medicine, and from the war to the 1920s, by which time the had assumed modern form. The underlying theme of the book is that hospitals are a product of the interaction of and physicians. Hospitals were dominated by reformers as long as medical science was weak. But with its rise and the subsequent power of physicians, reformers and their social welfare goals faded."

"Far into the nineteenth century, Washington remained a small, rather provincial city. Life was seasonal. Oppressed by heat and malaria during the summer, the capital did not awake to its foreshortened and unnaturally frenetic life until fall and the convening of Congress."

"Medicine has always had its s, but until recently it was a history written by and for practitioners. Until the early nineteenth century, in fact, history and practice could hardly be distinguished. Galen and Hippocrates could be and were used to bolster arguments about the nature of fever or the logic of a particular therapeutic choice. A learned physician read Latin and , not simply to mystify the laity but to work with those master texts that still figured meaningfully in his intellectual life. By the late nineteenth century, of course, the writings of and were no longer alive in the thought and practice of even educated practitioners. History had become quite clearly history — something in the past. This is not to suggest that interest in the medicine of previous eras disappeared. It remained was to become gradually — if even today incompletely — an academic field. But the history of medicine was still populated almost entirely by scholars trained in medical schools, the great majority of whom made their living as physicians."

"Even the most optimistic advocate of innovation in medicine cannot ignore ever-increasing , costs associated in some measure with that we so much admire. And, as we are equally well aware, access to clinical services is far from universal or equitable. As I write this introduction, more than forty million Americans lack and medical expenses remain a major cause of bankruptcy. Still another paradox complicates the relationship between society and medicine. Though expectations of therapeutic efficacy have never been more euphoric and patients appear to trust their own physicians, respect for the medical profession has declined ... The is trusted even less."

"Physicians and since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush have criticized the peculiar tensions of American life. The speculative pathologies which explain precisely how these tensions injured the mind and body have changed in form since the days of Rush, but the ambivalent attitudes which they express toward American life have not. Yet neither Benjamin Rush nor his successors later in the century—, , and , among others—were willing, warn as they might of the psychic perils of American life, to exchange its liberties for the placid tyranny of the Russian or Turkish empires (or, most Americans felt, their Protestantism for the formalistic reassurances of Catholicism)."

"was the classic epidemic disease of the nineteenth century, as had been of the . When cholera first appeared in the United States in 1832, and smallpox, the great epidemic diseases of the previous two centuries, were no longer truly national problems. Yellow fever had disappeared from the , and had deprived smallpox of much of it menace. Cholera, on the other hand, appeared in almost every part of the country in the course of the century. ... Before 1817, there had probably never been a cholera epidemic outside the ; during the nineteenth century, it spread through almost the entire world ..."

"There are many reasons to revisit the history of research on (TMV), beginning with the fact that it was the first virus to be identified and so marks the start of the field of . However, not every original example of a new biological category becomes a well-studied object in its own right ... As virology took off in the early twentieth century, TMV did become one of the best-studied viruses and remained at the forefront of the field. It was used to elucidate basic knowledge about the nature of viruses and served as a in as well as agriculture, where it had emerged. The fact that the first recognized virus came from plants—although es were rapidly identified—meant that virology was, from the outset, highly comparative ... Literature on the origins of often privileges and the contributions of the ... Yet early work with TMV inspired Max Delbrück and other early molecular biologists to take up the study of bacteriophages. Moreover, TMV itself became a prominent model system for understanding the molecular nature of heredity and the relationship between proteins and nucleic acids ... Notably, some of the main scientists involved in elucidating the double-helical structure of DNA were also studying TMV, which became a tool for cracking the ."

"put to work in , having induced in an inbred mouse strain (Strong A) that was particularly susceptible to the implantation of tumors ... He and K. G. Scott found that these leukemic mice concentrated more radiophosphorus in their s and s than did healthy mice after both groups received tracer doses. ... This finding stoked hopes that radioisotopes would be selectively absorbed and localized in cancer patients, where they could serve to irradiate tumors."

"s used s to reveal the sequence of chemical reactions in . s followed the assimilation and turnover of key s and tagged molecules such as to track the movement and activity of s. s labeled s with radioisotopes to follow the replication and expression of s. Physicians utilized radioisotopes such as and to diagnose and detect s. Ecologists profited as well, using to trace through the living and nonliving parts of aquatic and terrestrial landscapes, giving concrete meaning to the notion of an ecosystem."

"By 1950 the nature of the virus was no longer a mystery. Viruses were known to be s, genetic units, parasites that depend on their hosts for and . But a funny thing happened on the road to this knowledge. The viruses that most shaped this emerging portrait were not the most dangerous s, but those examples, however innocuous to humans, that made good laboratory subjects. Researchers constructed general knowledge about viruses based on a few that, by reason of historical precedence or biological robustness, were intensively studied as representatives of the rest."

"Laboratory instructions and recipes are sometimes edited into books with a wide circulation. Even in the late twentieth century, publications of this nature remained influential. For example, s from a 1980 summer course on at provided the basis for a bestselling laboratory manual by , and . Not only did the Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual become a standard reference for s (commonly called the ‘bible’), but also its recipes and clear instructions made gene cloning and technologies accessible to non-specialists. Consequently, this laboratory manual contributed to the rapid spread of genetic-engineering techniques throughout the , as well as in industry. As is often the case with how-to books, however, finding a way to update methods in this rapidly changing field posed a challenge, and various molecular-biology reference books had different ways of dealing with knowledge obsolescence. This paper explores the origins of this manual, its publication history, its reception and its rivals – as well as the more recent migration of such laboratory manuals to the Internet."

"The 1940s and 1950s were marked by intense debates over the origin of drug resistance in microbes. ... Antibiotic resistance became a key issue among those disputing physiological (usually termed ‘’) vs. genetic ( and ) explanations of variation in . Postwar developments connected with the gave this debate a new political valence. Proponents of the weighed in with support for the genetic theory. However, certain features of drug resistance seemed inexplicable by mutation and selection, particularly the phenomenon of ‘multiple resistance’—the emergence of resistance in a single strain against several unrelated antibiotics. In the late 1950s, and his collaborators solved this puzzle by determining that resistance could be conferred by rather than . These could carry resistance to many antibiotics and seemed able to promote their own dissemination in bacterial populations. In the end, the vindication of the genetic view of drug resistance was accompanied by a recasting of the ‘gene’ to include extrachromosomal hereditary units carried on viruses and s."

"In Life Atomic, Angela Creager weaves an engaging tale of the history of s. Much of her material came from government documents from the Manhattan Project that were declassified during the . ... Creager introduces the concepts and vocabulary of radioisotopes at a level that any reader can appreciate."

"... one of the virtues of Creager's admirable book is that the attentive, even if scientifically uninformed, reader will learn a great deal, not only about these subjects but more generally about the character of during the last two-thirds of the twentieth-century. By tracking the history of from the applied realm of through its acceptance as —a widely and conventionally accepted laboratory tool—Creager traces more general trends in the development of , genetics, and . ... The power of Creager's method lies in how it underlines the dynamic set of relationships between ideas and experimental practice, between the laboratory and its sources of support."

"Like ’’’’, is part of the biologist's . The best-known model systems—standardized organisms such as the and the —are investigated by an entire community of biologists. Model systems become prototypes within which key biological questions are defined and resolved, useful precisely because they have already been so well studied. was a model system in these respects, studied and discussed by a large contingent of s, s, and other agricultural and medical researchers ..."

"Harrison is no nostalgic reactionary. He acknowledges modernity’s gifts. But he warns against monochrome narratives of progress. One of his most provocative claims is that science, too, relies on “ implicita.” …As a scholar of new religious movements, I find Harrison’s thesis electrifying. He doesn’t mention my field, but I’ll extend his argument: many new religions are a renaissance of “fides implicita.” Converts don’t join because they’ve dissected theological treatises (although some may read them later). They join because they trust a guru, a prophet, a community. Just like early Christians and Muslims. The intellectual scaffolding may come later—or not at all. So, is “fides implicita” obsolete? Has secular science vanquished religion? Harrison—and I—say: not so fast. Belief, in its ancient form as trust, is alive and well. It’s just wearing new clothes."

"From the late nineteenth century, economics gradually became a more technocratic, tool-based, science, using mathematics and statistics embedded in various kinds of analytical techniques. ... By the late twentieth century, economics had become heavily dependent on a set of reasoning tools that economists now call 's': small mathematical, statistical, graphical, diagrammatic, and even physical objects that can be manipulated in various different ways. Today, in the twenty-first century, if we go to an economics seminar, or read a learned scientific paper in that field, we find that economists write down some equations or maybe draw a diagram, and use those to develop solutions to their theoretical conundrums or to answer questions about the economic world."

"The joint work with from that research group, ' ..., is now seen as creating a new strand. The extant philosophy of science thought about s in relation to theory: models were ways of capturing the essence of a theory. What we were doing in that little research group – and what we did in the volume Models as Mediators – was to say, if you look at the way science is practised, you see that scientists treat models as autonomous objects on which they develop arguments. They manipulate them, argue with them, extend them. Models are not in a simple relationship between theory and the world, rather they are at angles to both, so you can use them to interrogate both sides. Models as Mediators is 20 years old, and you can definitely see now that the project as a whole changed the conversation in the philosophy of science about models. I don’t mean that everybody was convinced by it, but it created a big enough presence so that, even if you didn’t agree with it, you had to take it into account. This work was part of a wider move that has been happening toward ‘the philosophy of science in practice’."

"John F. Fulton was one of the leading figures internationally in and history of medicine between the early 1930s and 1960. Working at the laboratory of physiology at Yale University, he was a pioneer in the study of the functional localisation of the cerebral cortex in primates. His 1938 treatise Physiology of the nervous system was a milestone in the development of neurophysiology. Fulton created a working environment at the laboratory where training was provided to important scientists who later directed centres in their home countries. He stood out as speaker, editor, communicator, and member of several committees, and established many links with foreign figures, including the Spanish physicians , Jaume Pi-Sunyer, , , and Francisco Guerra. Fulton was a student of and Harvey Cushing and showed a special interest for the world of Santiago Ramón y Cajal. A great bibliophile, he dedicated the last years of his short but intense life to the history of medicine, publishing studies on Michael Servetus."

"I was mystified one morning in an outpatient department by the numerous and vague complaints of an Italian boy—who, incidentally, neglected to mention his chief trouble—and in order to temporize he was told to return with a "24-hour specimen". The next morning he arrived in a Ford car with sundry members of his family and six jugs containing 20 litres of pale, clear ! I need scarcely remark that this was my first experience with ."

"Born of pioneering stock, with three generations of physicians behind him, it is not surprising that should turn the full force of his tremendous energies to charting a little known field — the human brain. After attending Yale College and , he went to the where, under the influence of , Osler and , he made himself eminent as a and as a leader in the reform of . Cushing was one of the earliest in the United States to use s; the first to take routinely during surgical operations and in general practice. The use of the in brain operations was first developed by him."

"A bitter debate in the early twentieth century between "biometricians" and "Mendelians" about how best to study seemed to end in a victory for genetics, defined by a focus on discrete nuggets of hereditary causation for which in 1909 coined the term "." The new genetics emphasized , , and s. Despite geneticists' intense engagement with eugenics and medicine, Homo sapiens was not their preferred organism. It was too resistant to laboratory manipulation and had too long a generation time in comparison to , s, and viruses."

"I have chosen to place ... and ... side by side ... Both men were incredibly industrious., Osler's output running to 1,195 books and papers, as indicated in Maude Abbott's bibliography, ... while Choulant published sixty separate books (see Appendix IV); his journal contributions have never been counted or collected."

"Margaret W. Rossiter, a historian whose trilogy, “Women Scientists in America,” documented in sharp detail the ways women were excised from the annals of science — and who coined the term “,” named for the 19th-century suffragist , to describe the age-old practice of attributing scientific achievements of women to their male colleagues — died on Aug. 3 in ... Among the scientists Dr. Rossiter wrote about was , who with the German chemist developed the theory of . He won the for that discovery; she did not. The “Matilda effect” was but one of the many career blows that were queasily familiar to female scientists. So was the “harem effect,” a term Dr. Rossiter coined to describe male scientists’ habit of surrounding themselves with, as she put it, a “bevy of competent female subordinates who would not be as threatening as an equal number of bright young men.” (And who would presumably stay put, because their opportunities were so limited.)"

"The systematic study of social numbers in the spirit of natural philosophy was pioneered during the 1660s, and was known for about a century and a half as political arithmetic. Its purpose, when not confined to the calculation of insurance or rates, was the promotion of sound, well-informed state policy. ... , who invented the phrase "political arithmetic" and is thought by many to have had a hand in the composition of 's work, was in full accord with his friend as to the purpose of these studies. Political arithmetic was, in his view, the application of Baconian principles to the art of government."

"Although by all accounts the period 1940–72 was a golden age for science in America, it has generally been considered a very dark age for women in the professions. ... How could this have been? Were not women an integral part of American science by 1940? Why, then, in a period of record growth in almost every aspect of American science that one could count—money spent, persons trained, jobs created, articles published, even s won—were women so invisible?"

"I can still recall my astonishment when I discovered in 1972 some women's entries in the old directories, and when I read biographies of several scientists in the then-new '. Here were people who had been present at many of the familiar places and events, but were totally unknown even to those well versed in the history of American science. I felt like a modern Alice who had fallen down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of the history of science that was familiar in some respects but distorted and alien in many others. Learning more about these women and bringing their stories into closer connection with the rest of history of this period became a compelling and absorbing intellectual task. The initial stumbling block was locating material, since most of the women scientists bordered, for a variety of reasons, on the "invisible.""

"The of would have been a very different story had advances and applications in chemistry matched progress in . As it was, there wre no "green revolutions," and chemical knowledge played a minor role until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Margaret W. Rossiter's interesting monograph on the influence of shows that the indifference of s to the blandishments of science was as much a consequence of the meager fare offered by the scientists as of any ingrained anti-intellectualism on the part of cultivators."

"We live in historic times. This is especially trued for American women in science and engineering. Opportunities have greatly expanded since the early 1970s because of a variety of factors, starting with but extending beyond —new expectations, new energy, a growing economy, new technical industries and opportunities, battles won and programs instituted. The women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired many women scientists and their supporters to new levels of activism, and legislators passed and President Richard M. Nixon signed significant legislation that greatly affected traditional patterns in academia."

"Although ' seems to work as a memorable , it can mislead. The book is not about implicit trust, but reluctance and hesitation. Numbers that appear sufficiently routine may pass under the radar, but when conflicting interests are at stake, they are readily challenged. They often require . This typically involves putting aside deep meanings and convictions in favor of compromise and convention. The title came to me in reaction to my editor's suggestion of "Truth in Numbers," which I rejected at once."

"Beginning in 1892, when he took up statistics as his scientific vocation, Karl Pearson devoted himself relentlessly to a project of almost universal quantification. This work, the invention of a , defined one of the landmark transitions in the history of the sciences, or indeed of public rationality."

"Our scientific culture, and much of our public life, is based on trust in numbers. They are commonly accepted as the means to achieving objectivity in analysis, certainty in conclusions, and truth. Numbers tell us about the health of our society (as in the rates of occurrence of unwanted behavior), and they provide a demarcation between what is accepted as safe and what is believed to be dangerous. In Trust in Numbers, Theodore Porter ... unpacks this assumption and uses history to show how such a trust may sometimes be based less on the solidity of the numbers themselves than on the needs of expert and client communities. ... Porter is to be congratulated for showing how intimate can be the mixture of , real and pseudo-quantification, awareness and self-deception, and vision and fantasy, in the invocation of trust in numbers. His historical insights can provide the materials we need for a debate on quality in quantities, a debate which is long overdue."

"Of importance for the is that , in both his cycle books, had concentrated his energies on the statistical evidence of the economic interactions involved in the business cycle and the of these relationships rather than on the relation between the economic cycle and the exogenous causal factor. Moore's concern with evidence end statistical explanation compared to that of Jevons, and the matching change in contemporaries' responses, are both indicative of the development of the econometric approach by the early years of the twentieth century. Yet, it was some years before Moore's broad econometric approach to the explanation of economic cycles, involving a large number relationships linking different parts of the economy, was taken up by who produced the first macro econometric models in the late 1930s."

"Science is our century’s art."

"Doctrinaire formula-worship, that is our real enemy."

"...It would be of value to have a comprehensive study of the relationship between philosophy and the physical sciences in the period after about 1970. My guess is that the impact of professional philosophers upon physics in this period has been minimal, but I am not sure."

"I have a certain weakness for alternative ideas, not because I think they are valid but because they tell us something about science and the psychological state of scientists."

"Science started having significant applications more than a hundred and fifty years ago (e.g., in the rising chemical and electrical industries) and those applications were based on theories that have been abandoned (e.g., on an ether-based electromagnetic theory)."

"I was not brought up in a religious milieu but was (like most Danes) born into the Lutheran-Protestant church. Religion did not play much of a role and when I was in my early twenties I left the church; not because I became an atheist but just because of lack of interest and a certain dislike of organized religion as practiced in my country. My interest in religion is of relatively new date and mostly a result of my studies in history of science which showed how important Christian religion has been for the development of science (and at some stage also Islam). Especially after I turned toward history of cosmology I began thinking about religion in connection with, for example, the perennial question of the origin of the universe. Although I do not believe in traditional religious dogmas I have sympathy and respect for religious thought whereas I have no sympathy for hard-core atheism and materialism. Somehow, it seems to me, there must be something above and beyond the physical universe, a mystical spirit or divine principle. If this principle is called God, I believe in God. But this god has no interest at all in human beings. In a sense, my kind of religiosity is somewhat the same as the one Einstein expressed on various occasions."

"I read a great many books without finding one that satisfied my needs and so I decided to write one myself. (About his book An Introduction to the Historiography of Science, 1987.)"