Abstract
The Making of Modern Science: Science, Technology, Medicine and Modernity, 1789–1914 is a striking text, which engages, as its title suggests, with the cultural prowess of science between two key historical events: the French Revolution and the commencement of the First World War. Successfully blending together social, cultural, medical, institutional and national histories into a concise but informative synthesis, Knight details how the term ‘scientist’ came into being; reveals how science became professionalised and accrued profound cultural significance; and explores how science transformed into a force which helped to shape and define modernity. The book's aims are ambitious, but impressive. The scope of The Making of Modern Science encompasses the entirety of the ‘long nineteenth century’ in American, colonial and European-wide contexts. Despite this lengthy period, little is left out. Astronomy, physics, chemistry, electricity, medicine and biology are all given due attention, while themes pertaining to science's historical relationship with religion, industry, society and industrialisation are explored throughout. Yet the author is well placed to fulfil the book's weighty ambitions. David Knight is a prestigious and prolific historian of science who has won numerous awards for his articles, books, edited collections and teaching at Durham University. He has also served as president of the History of Science Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (now known as the British Science Association), and for the British Society for the History of Science. Not only is his academic standing impeccable, but Knight's accessible writing style ensures that The Making of Modern Science is an appropriate text for both professional and general readers.
Knight's overarching argument is that during the nineteenth century, the term ‘scientist’ essentially came into being, a phrase which encompassed a set of individuals previously working separately in disparate fields such as chemistry, natural philosophy and natural history. During this period, science matured, becoming more than just a vocation or hobby. New jobs were created, university chairs established, and a firm intellectual presence in industry was developed. An interest in scientific discovery is revealed by Knight to have become increasingly embraced not only by the ‘great scientists’ whose names are well-remembered today, but also by populations existing throughout the entirety of European class structures. Hence, the development of scientific education, societies and publications emblematised science's new-found purpose as a source of public knowledge, a vector of social mobility, and a vehicle of modernity. Not all the results of this can be considered mainstream. Both phrenology and mesmerism, for instance, are presented as cultural phenomena of the nineteenth-century which presented obstacles to what academic viewpoints preferred science to be. Yet Knight's analysis of them convincingly reveals the momentous social presence of professional intellectual approaches to comprehending the relationship between man and his world.
The Making of Modern Science is an excellent example of modes of analysis that are current in the history of science. It is non-Whiggish, in that Knight refuses to limit himself to grandiose descriptions of the great scientific figures. Hence, the author's discussion of Darwinism reminds the reader that Charles Darwin was not the first to imagine the idea that the development of biological life could be conceptualised in terms of gradual evolution. This approach allows for much discussion of ‘history from below’, whereby science has not simply evolved in terms of a progressive series of improvements to knowledge and dramatic breakthroughs. Instead science is presented as having developed historically by the means of a far more complex, and patient, system of knowledge accumulation and rejection. Furthermore, The Making of Modern Science does not venture too far down the often more abstract approach of philosophy of science, adopting at all times a practical approach which explains how scientists actually behaved, and how their ideas operated in health contexts; assisted in relieving the problems of nineteenth-century industrial cities; and contributed to the technologisation of every-day life.
Despite being thematic, The Making of Modern Science is broadly chronological. The opening chapters of Knight's book take the reader to the close of the eighteenth century, a period of revolutions, political uncertainty and societal transformation.
We read of the invention of the battery, the development of new technical languages, the application of Humphrey Davy's safety lamp which gradually transformed mining practice, and the mapping of scientific techniques onto industrial and agricultural landscapes. The intertwining of medical concerns with scientific theory is demonstrated to have had an increasingly profound impact upon the activities of professional groups throughout the nineteenth century. This entailed the popularity of holistic models of the body giving way to new analytical models, which investigated phenomena such as the nerves and organs. Contemporaneously, scientific medicine is shown to have joined the battle against devastating, life-threatening epidemics including cholera and typhoid. As the century progressed, medical scientists are shown to have elucidated the existence of germs, and engaged in contemporary anxieties surrounding poisoning and urban problems of sewage.
The middling sections of The Making of Modern Science address an optimistic era of colonialism and technological advancement. As European nations expanded their territory into new areas of the world, developments in anthropology are shown to have reflected Imperial agendas. Scientists observed, classified and passed judgement upon the new races they encountered in unfamiliar territories, often striving to produce scientific models which dismissed African races as racially and evolutionally backward. New technologies impacted upon the Imperial experience by providing new ways to transport produce in colonised countries such as trains and steam-powered boats. Furthermore, in a period of emergent nationalism, advancement in science was utilised to express national prestige and prowess.
Yet against this backdrop of scientific and technological advancement anxieties existed about the challenges science presented to religion. Knight shows how Darwinism, for instance, challenged traditional notions of the relationship with the animal kingdom. At worst, science encouraged and confirmed agnosticism, while certain non-mainstream strands of the field investigated contentious areas such as parapsychology. Tensions between religious and scientific communities are shown to have not been clear-cut, yet they played a central part in popular attitudes towards modern science throughout the period in question.
The continuing wariness of the public towards the rise of science is tantalisingly hinted at towards the close of The Making of Modern Science. Knight hints at science losing its innocence during the First World War, a catastrophic event when scientific understanding was used to transform gases such as chlorine into deadly weapons on the battlefield and the technological potential of science was harnessed to develop aggressive military machinery including tanks and jet planes.
Overall, David Knight's The Making of Modern Science raises questions of relevance to scientists today, allowing the reader to consider the modern-day workings of the relationship between science and public policy, education, and society. It provides a reflexive account of how science can contribute to notions of national identity, while revealing the powerful socio-cultural impact of particular scientific paradigms at any given point. By revealing how science accumulated cultural leadership, Knight encourages the reader to ask to what extent this pre-dominance is justified, and to re-consider the nature of opposition to this cultural hegemony. The Making of Modern Science also provides the reader with a historical insight into public perceptions of the workings of science. It identifies historical moments when scientific endeavours have been most successful in convincing the public of its utility, and when this has proven more problematic, as exemplified in on-going discussions surrounding vivisectionism and science's challenge to religious faith.
The Making of Modern Science will long retain a place as a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate courses dealing with the historiography of scientific ideas, and will also appeal to a public audience. The book is light in style, while at the same time academically rigorous and intellectually engaging. Furthermore, its structure is accessible, being neatly split into chapters on themes which analyse science's relationship with health concerns, languages, laboratories, national identity, cultural leadership and the body and mind.
For those who might be less familiar with research undertaken in the vibrant field of history of science, The Making of Modern Science provides a thorough and reliable introduction to scientific historiography, successfully drawing upon an impressively extensive set of topics and themes, and presenting them in a remarkably concise manner. Knight's work is academically flawless, while simultaneously being perhaps the most accessible overview of the workings of science during the nineteenth-century penned in recent years. For the specialist reader, it acts as a useful reference book, while it proves ideal for others who might be seeking an introduction to this engaging area of historical analysis.
University College, Dublin I
The Ashgate series ‘Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities’ aims at ‘reflecting the ‘state of the art’ in the application of advanced ICT [Information and Communication Technology] methods within and across arts and humanities disciplines’ (xiii). Text Editing, Print and the Digital World is the second of the eight volumes in the series. This collection of essays, edited by Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, addresses scholarly editing in theory and practice and is ‘intended as an appraisal of the current state of digital editing, considering from a number of perspectives its benefits and drawbacks in the development of complex editions’ (1). The eleven essays presented here by renowned scholars in the field are drawn from presentations at seminars within the ICT Methods Network at King's College London during 2006.
The volume is structured in two parts: ‘In Theory’ (six chapters) and ‘In Practice’ (five chapters). Especially in the first part, the reader encounters a collection of thought-provoking essays, reflecting the state-of-the-art discussion of textuality, textual criticism, markup theory and scholarly editing, the discourses between print and digital medium in this context, and the ‘new’ understanding of the roles that editor and reader might have in the ‘Digital World’. The authors implicitly agree on the need for a rethinking of textuality in the age of electronic texts but also make clear that it is necessary to ‘get beyond our computer-driven simulation of bookishness’ (22) — a state that has been diagnosed and criticised for a while.
The arguments in the debate of ‘In Theory’ are many. And they are intriguingly well-coordinated. For instance, in The Compleat Edition, Mats Dahlström picks up the thread that Kathryn Sutherland (Being Critical: Paper-based Editing and the Digital Environment) has spun earlier. Dahlström, on the one hand, outlines the idea of the scholarly edition as a ‘scientific tool’ (33) whose purpose is ‘… to enable the user-as-editor, as it were, to follow the same paths or to tread different paths than those trodden by the editor ’ (34). For him, it is the digital medium only (when it is fully exploited) that enables this new quality: ‘Digital scholarship editing offers the chance to organize paratexts and transmitted material in much more dynamic and complex manners than it is possible within the printed edition’ (40). An argument that Sutherland, on the other hand, employs for just the opposite: ‘a print edition, even one that is complexly structured, can be used with relative ease by a range of different level readers, and for different purposes. Currently, most electronic editions have not grappled with this; they assume a sophisticated editor-user ’ (25). While Sutherland regards the stability of printed texts as an advantage and requirement for textual scholarship, others like Dahlström regard this stability as stasis and the major drawback of printed texts.
It is not the purpose of this review to verify the different positions expressed in the volume, let alone to decide between them. But it is exactly this intriguing coherence and succession of sometimes controversial discussions around the main theme of digital scholarly editing that makes the volume worth reading as a whole: Dahlström's ‘media translations’ (32) correspond with Dino Buzzetti's (Digital Editions and Text Processing) ‘rendering a text’ (46), while textual mobility […] and a dynamic model of textual instability’ (57) of the latter can be regarded as the theoretical foundation of Elena Pierazzo's considerations for writing as ‘a process that occurs in time as well as space’ (Digital Genetic Editions: The Encoding of Time in Manuscript Transcription, 169) and so on. This congruency of arguments leads occasionally and naturally to some redundancy.
For instance, Buzzetti and Paul Eggert (The Book, the E-text and the ‘Work-site’) not only agree in their definitions of texts being instable and not self-identical but also in their criticism of the OHCO (ordered hierarchy of content objects) model. But they argue from different viewpoints: Buzzetti's philosophical, if not mathematical considerations, which lead to a proposal for a ‘extension of the basic string representation from a one-dimensional to a many-dimensional case’ (61) is complemented by Eggert's view as a practitioner of scholarly editing. And Dahlström, Gabriel Bodard and Juan Garcés (Open Source Critical Editions: A Rationale), and Edward Vanhoutte (Every Reader his own Bibliographer — An Absurdity) all try to define a typology for (digital) scholarly editions and the roles that editors and readers (users) play in the various types of editions, but they come up with different suggestions and these are worth comparing. Part II of the volume illustrates some of the theoretical and methodologically driven discourse of Part I. Although an anthology like this can naturally do this only on an exemplary basis, the selection of chapters here appears a bit arbitrary in comparison with the well-coordinated first part of the volume: Espen S. Ore's Norwegian perspective (‘… they hid their books underground’), the case-studies by Linda Bree and James McLaverty (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift and the Future of the Scholarly Edition), James Mussell and Suzanne Paylor (Editions and Archives: Textual Editing and the Nineteenth-century Serials Edition), and Charlotte Roueché (Digitizing Inscribed Texts) as well as Pierazzo's more general and fundamental considerations of encoding time in manuscripts. But even if not systematically put together, all five contributions of ‘In Practice’ give interesting insights into the workshop of digital scholarship. They prove that the development of new methodology has not yet come to an end and that such development must be regarded as an interplay between established theories and practices of scholarly work: digital scholarship is based on the foundations of the presence and future of the humanities and at the same time facilitates new paths in scholarship: the ‘Digital World’ becomes an enabler for the further development of our understanding of textual editing.
Instead of including abstracts for the individual chapters, the volume is preceded by an introduction where the editors provide a sound and critical summary of each chapter that embeds them into the mission of the volume and the overall debate. The volume is rounded up with a compiled bibliography and an index — both very useful references especially to follow-up the more theoretical discourses.
Although a lot has been published recently on the theory and practice of digital scholarly editing, the volume makes a significant contribution to this discussion. The chapters date back to presentations given five years ago, but their arguments and the problems they address are still up-to-date. And furthermore, they have already had a proven impact on recent research, as can be seen in the development of a new model for genetic encoding within the framework of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) for which Elena Pierazzo's chapter has provided the theoretical foundation.
With Text Editing, Print and the Digital World, Sutherland and Deegan have presented a very well edited volume. Overall, it gives an intriguing insight into the workshop of digital scholarly editing and provides the reader with a sound overview of its ongoing discussions. The volume is, however, published not digitally but as a printed book. Although making the case for digital scholarship, it is aware of the reality of the acceptance of digital publications. Roueché points out that there was ‘a widespread sense among our peers that [electronic publications] are not ‘real’ publications’: only a book is that’ (164) — a dilemma which cannot be solved by this volume alone.