Vestiges of the history of popular science [Essay Review]

Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation and Other Evolutionary Writings, ed. James A. Secord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1994. Pp. xlviii, vi, 390, viii, 254. US$ 19.95 PB. The title of Robert Chambers' anonymous evolutionary work, Vestiges of the natural history of creation, has long been familiar to even the most casual readers of the history of evolutionary theorising. From as early as 1861—when Charles Darwin first appended his 'historical sketch of the recent progress of opinion on the origin of species' to the third edition of his own more famous work on the subject—down to the present time, no history of what Loren Eiseley called 'evolution and the men who discovered it' has been complete without a discussion of this book. Yet as Eiseley's rather unfortunate phrase makes particularly clear, such histories of evolution are historiographically problematic. Indeed, it has become increasingly common over recent years to question altogether the value of 'evolution' as an object of historical study for any period before the middle of the nineteenth century, when the word began to acquire its familiar modern sense (viz., the origin of animal and plant species by a process of development from other forms). The great danger of evolution historiography is that it can unwittingly lead to teleological, present-centred history—more subtly so, perhaps, than in Eiseley's case, but nonetheless carrying the implication that Darwin's theory of natural selection (if not the modern evolutionary synthesis) was always out there, waiting to be 'discovered'

Beyond the "common context" : the production and reading of the Bridgewater Treatises

The Bridgewater Treatises were among the most widely circulated books of science in early nineteenth-century Britain, yet little is known of their contemporary readership. Drawing on the new history of the book, this essay examines the .. "communication circuit" in which the series was produced and read, exploring some of the processes that shaped the meanings the books possessed for their original readers. In so doing, it seeks to go beyond the standard interpretation of the Bridgewater Treatises as contributing to a "common context" for debate among the social and cultural elite. Instead, the essay demonstrates the wide circulation of the series among many classes of readers and shows that consideration of the distinctive meanings with which the books were invested by readers in divergent cultural groups serves to elucidate the contested meaning of science in the period. It is argued that by thus taking seriously the agency of all those involved in the communication circuit, including readers as well as authors and publishers, this approach supersedes the increasingly unworkable analytical category of "popular science.

Introduction [BJHS special section: book history and the sciences]

The expanding interest in book history over recent years has heralded the coming together of an interdisciplinary research community drawing scholars from a variety of literary, historical and cultural studies. Moreover, with a growing body of literature, the field is becoming increasingly visible on a wider scale, not least through the existence of the Society for the History of Authorship, Readership and Publishing (SHARP), with its newly founded journal Book History. Within the history of science, however, there remains not a little scepticism concerning the practical value of such an approach. It is often dismissed as an intellectual fad or as an enterprise which is illuminating but ultimately peripheral, rather than being valued as an approach which can offer major new insights within the field. This is no doubt in part because much of the most innovative work in history of science over recent years has been carried out by historians anxious to get away from an earlier overemphasis on printed sources. Eager to correct a profoundly unsocial history of ideas, usually rooted in texts, historians have looked increasingly to both the practices and the material culture of science. In such a context, a renewed focus on the history of books sometimes seems like a retrograde step, especially given the common misidentification of ‘books’ with ‘texts’. On the contrary, however, it is just such a twin emphasis on practices and material culture which also characterizes the new book history. Indeed, to the question ‘what is book history for?’ we might answer that its object is to reintroduce social actors, engaged in a variety of practices with respect to material objects, into a history in which books have too often been understood merely as disembodied texts, the meaning of which is defined by singular, uniquely creative authors, and is transparent to readers

A view from the industrial age

Like the constructivist approach to the history of science, the new history of reading has shifted attention from disembodied ideas to the underlying material culture and the localized practices by which it is apprehended. By focusing on the complex embodied processes by which readers make sense of printed objects, historians of reading have provided new insights into the manner in which meaning is both made and contested. In this brief account I argue that these insights are particularly relevant to historians of science, first, because practices of reading, like those of experiment and fieldwork, are constitutive of scientific knowledge, and, second, because attention to the history of reading provides important evidence of the multifaceted and uneven contest for meaning that occurs when science is mobilized in popular culture. The essay concludes by considering some of the surprisingly abundant sources of available evidence from which a history of scientific reading might be constructed for the modern era

Influenza and memory T cells : how to awake the force

Annual influenza vaccination is an effective way to prevent human influenza. Current vaccines are mainly focused on eliciting a strain-matched humoral immune response, requiring yearly updates, and do not provide protection for all vaccinated individuals. The past few years, the importance of cellular immunity, and especially memory T cells, in long-lived protection against influenza virus has become clear. To overcome the shortcomings of current influenza vaccines, eliciting both humoral and cellular immunity is imperative. Today, several new vaccines such as infection-permissive and recombinant T cell inducing vaccines, are being developed and show promising results. These vaccines will allow us to stay several steps ahead of the constantly evolving influenza virus

Accessing the content of nineteenth-century periodicals: the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project

Nineteenth-century periodicals significantly outnumber books from that era, and present historians with an immensely valuable set of sources, but their use is constrained by the difficulty of identifying relevant material. For many periodicals, contents pages and volume indexes have been the only guide, and the few subject indexes that exist usually provide only an indication of the subjects mentioned in the article titles. By contrast, the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project (SciPer) indexed the science content of general-interest periodicals by skim-reading the entire text. The project’s approach to indexing is described and the relative merits of indexing and digitization in aiding researchers to locate relevant material are discussed. The article concludes that, notwithstanding the more sophisticated search interfaces of more recent retrodigitization projects, human indexing still has an important role to play in providing access to the content of historic periodicals and in mapping their data structure

Not thinking about science and religion

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] Willem B. Drees, Religion, Science and Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). xvi + 314 pp., ISBN: 0-521-64562-X. It is often an illuminating, if sobering, experience to see one’s work through the eyes of another discipline. Theologian Willem Drees gives historians researching the interactions of science and religion just such an experience. The thrust of Drees’s project is to argue for the application of a form of ontological naturalism to religion (or, more specifically, to Christianity) and to consider what remains of religion when this has been done. In developing this project, however, he devotes interesting chapters to modern discussions of science and religion, and to ‘histories of relationships between science and religion’. His assessment raises questions that historians would do well to consider

Encyclopaedic visions: scientific dictionaries and enlightenment culture [Review Symposium]

In the preface to this impressive book, Richard Yeo quotes David Brewster’s words to the co-editor of his eighteen-volume Edinburgh Encyclopaedia as a warning to himself to make his task manageable. In so doing, he restricts his primary purpose to revealing and analysing “the assumptions behind the encyclopaedic project” and to considering “how these influenced coverage and format”. What he explicitly eschews — with eyes no doubt to Robert Darnton’s publishing history of the Encyclopédie — is the task of giving a “publishing history or a study of readership”. Yeo nevertheless expresses a hope that his study will be a useful contribution to the “significant intersection between history of science and the history of the book” (p. xvi). That hope is well founded, and he makes the case repeatedly for the importance of taking seriously the practices of authorship, readership, and publishing. Yet there are significant respects in which his primary purpose would have been more fully accomplished had he paid more attention to these issues

A note on the archives of the British Society for the History of Science, 1947-97

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] It is perhaps ironic that a society of historians such as the British Society for the History of Science should have been in existence for some thirty-six years before any attempt was made to create a formal archive of its history. Such an oversight is doubtless attributable to the undue modesty of those involved in the earlier history of the Society, possibly tinged with a distrust of what historians can do with archival records, but it is none the less regrettable that there are not more early records of our Society's activities. The official Council Minutes from 1947 onwards, however, are more detailed than one might expect, and a very useful source of information