What Is History of Science, Medicine and Technology?
And why study it?
Imagine holding in your hands the manuscripts of Isaac Newton or Charles Darwin, the laboratory instruments and notebooks of Louis Pasteur or Marie Curie, and deciphering science in the making – what peculiar combinations of conceptual, cultural and technical resources allowed them to be able to think thoughts that hadn’t been thought before? Or to bring under experimental control phenomena that had baffled generations or that had never even been suspected?
Or imagine building a replica of the paddle-wheel apparatus James Joule used in to determine the mechanical equivalent of heat and recreating his experiment in order to reveal the role of particular skills in a great discovery – in this case the role of the exquisite temperature-measuring skills of a nineteenth-century Manchester brewer in the making of a fundamental law of nature, the law of conservation of energy.
Or imagine decoding the bizarre, quasi-religious-mythological-sexual symbolism of alchemical treatises, and finding that it actually does describe workable chemical processes, thus illuminating unexpected origins of the science of chemistry.
Or, finally, imagine having been able to interview J. Robert Oppenheimer about what it was like to work on the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, in order to study the increasingly collective and large-scale character of science in the twentieth century. These are a few of the things historians do, when they study the past of science, technology and medicine.
Beyond such detective work is also the heavy intellectual and creative work of figuring out how to select, interpret, and synthesize vast amounts of information from myriad sources – archives, books, scientific journals, newspapers, museum artefacts, literary works, government documents, institutional records, once-private correspondence, art objects, economic statistics – into a coherent picture of the interrelations of society and culture with science, technology and medicine and their development over time. Here, historians draw on the tools of anthropology, sociology, philosophy, and other disciplines, and influence those disciplines in turn. And here, historians are at the heart of a wider, relatively new interdisciplinary effort, often called social studies of science, or science and technology studies. Altogether, the history and social study of science, technology and medicine is a vibrant and fast-growing area, with new degree programmes and departments being set up over the past 10 or 15 years at major universities in the UK, the USA, and Europe.
But why the effort? What good is it all? First, there is the fun, the challenge to your intellect and imagination, and the almost limitless intellectual horizons you have in doing history. But history is also massively relevant to understanding today’s world and perhaps even helping to shape it. It is a cliché, a true cliché, that the modern world is a preeminently scientific and technological one. Billions are spent on R&D. Biomedicine stamps our most intimate experiences of health and illness, birth and life and death, even as we ask increasingly how we can afford to pay for it and whether it adequately addresses our human needs.
Fast-developing automation and information technologies continue to change the nature of everyday work and its wider economic and social relations even as you read these lines.
Yet how many of us know much about how this world came to be? Know that there were roads not taken and what exactly these were? The lesson of history is always that things have been otherwise in different times and places and thus could now be otherwise as well. In this sense, knowing the past does not distract from or constrain the present, but rather opens up its possibilities. Studying history opens possibilities and horizons, gives you knowledge and critical perspective and analytical tools, whether you intend to continue studying in the sciences or engineering or medicine, or whether you imagine going on into education, the media, business, government, museum work, or, of course, academic history itself.
Public interest in both history and in understanding science has rarely been as high as it is today. If our era is profoundly technological and scientific and future-oriented, so too it is captivated by the past, both recent and distant – in books, films and television, fiction.
Science journalism has been a major growth area in the media and often has a historical component. Prize-winning books on the making of the atomic bomb or the solution to the problem of longitude, historical novels based on great scientific figures like Kepler, command wide audiences today. Likewise, it is a time when scientists and medics face increasing demand that they be publicly accountable for the vast social resources expended on research. Public debate swirls over the purpose and goals of science. In one famous recent case of government investigation into ‘misconduct’ in research, notebooks from the laboratory of an eminent scientist were confiscated for analysis by the United States Secret Service acting on behalf of Congress. In such a climate, there is more need than ever for serious historical and social inquiry into the nature and workings of science.
This is no easy task, but a good taste of the craft can be acquired even through an introductory degree programme. For those whose appetites are whetted, there are abundant opportunities for research: some could involve that foreign language that you happen to have but rarely get to use outside of your private life; others might involve oral history; there is much work to be done on the role of Western science and technology in the colonial and postcolonial world; on science, medicine and technology in Islamic and Asian civilizations, in both modern and pre-modern times; and generally on the twentieth century.
What sorts of question do historians of science, medicine and technology ask? What research problems do they tackle? Most familiar among these, perhaps, is the impact of science and technology on society. Less familiar, but often more challenging, is the other way round: the impact of society on science, technology and medicine, the ways it shapes them. What factors, for example, account for why in Paris around 1800 the Western medical tradition, having stood and worked perfectly well for over 2000 years, since about 800 BC, gave rise, within a matter of a few years, to an entirely new conception of the body and way of practicing medicine and producing medical knowledge? Other medical historians have attempted to account for the fact that those older medical practices – bloodletting, for example – seem utterly misguided to us yet made perfect sense to minds that were as good as ours.
Today’s economic and political globalization trends have prompted a renewal among historians in the big picture of world history. History of science, technology and medicine can provide unusually illuminating ways into this. For instance, one eminent medievalist has argued famously that much of the characteristic social and economic structure of feudalism derived from something so seemingly trivial as the invention of the stirrup.
The methods and institutions and ethos of science that arose in the West at the time of the ‘scientific revolution’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have proved to be the most exportable and portable and universally adoptable product of civilization hitherto. Thus historians ask what is special about those methods and institutions, and why the scientific and industrial revolutions took place in the West and what the relation was between them. Other, perhaps more basic aspects of science are usually held to originate in antiquity, but debate flourishes on the relative roles of ancient Greece and Mesopotamia, debate which thereby also forces questions about the very definition of science. Closer to the present, other historians ask what factors caused science and medicine after World War II to take a quantum leap in scale and interconnection with government and business, becoming massive enterprises of research and development, requiring large bureaucratic organization, and absorbing immense amounts of society’s resources.
These are all questions that historians of science, medicine and technology are actively exploring – perhaps you have a contribution to make?
