Making History • HIST 1105 • Week 13.1

Science and Medicine

  • Background: Sarah Maza, Thinking About History (2017), ch. 3: “The History of What?”, 83–108
  • Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (1996), Introduction, 1–14
  • Charles E. Rosenberg, “Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History,” in Rosenberg and Janet Golden, eds., Framing Disease (1992), xiii–xxvi
  • Optional: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), 1–22

Kuhn is cited by the pages of the second edition (1970). Rosenberg’s introduction is numbered in roman numerals. Johns is quoted from The Nature of the Book (1998), ch. 1.

Section one · science

From great men to knowledge made by many people

1913–36 · the old story

Early histories credited a few chosen spirits and the occasional genius

Garrison, An Introduction to the History of Medicine (1913)

“It is no exaggeration to say that science owes most to the shining individualism of a few chosen spirits.” (p. 36)

Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (1936), in Maza’s words

“Ideas, in this sort of approach, are like a set of building blocks with which thinkers play and from which the occasional genius constructs something dazzling” (Maza, pp. 86–87)

Discuss

Who disappears from a history that credits “a few chosen spirits”?

An oil painting at night: a man in a dark furred robe sits on an observation platform and looks up at the stars with one hand raised, beside a large diagram of concentric circles around a central sun, with a Gothic cathedral and books and instruments around him
Jan Matejko, Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God, 1872 Painted more than three centuries after Copernicus died, it shows him alone at night beside his sun-centered diagram, hands raised as if in conversation with God.
(Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)
An oil painting of a dim stone room: a bearded man in a dark red robe stands alone at right, facing three seated churchmen in black and white habits at a table, with a crucifix on the wall behind them
Cristiano Banti, Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition, 1857 Painted more than two centuries after the 1633 trial, it makes Galileo a lone martyr for truth, standing before three churchmen.
(Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)
An oil painting of an elderly man in a billowing red cloak seated on a cloud, holding a key up to a kite string in a storm, while winged children tend electrical apparatus at the left and help with the kite at the right
Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, c. 1816 Painted more than sixty years after the 1752 kite experiment, it gives Franklin a billowing cloak, a key at the end of the string, and cherubs to tend his apparatus.
(Philadelphia Museum of Art, via Google Art Project and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)
A sepia drawing of a large library in which nearly fifty men in early nineteenth-century dress stand and sit in groups around a central table, with a globe at the left and a round mirror on the back wall
Sir John Gilbert, Men of Science Living in 1807–8 A Victorian artist imagines nearly fifty British scientists and inventors in one library. Every one of them is a man.
(National Portrait Gallery, London, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)

1931–49 · the old story

Science was told as the making of the modern world

An engraved title page: a sailing ship heads out to open sea between two tall columns under a cloudy sky, with Latin lettering above and a printer's cartouche below
Bacon's Great Instauration, 1620 · public domain

The Scientific Revolution “outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes” Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (1949), quoted in Shapin, p. 1

The “Whig interpretation of history,” named in 1931, judges the past as the road to the present.

Historians told science that way “through the Cold War” (Maza, p. 92).

Internal and external · 1930s

Historians split on whether science changed by its own ideas or by its society

Inside: ideas and methods

One school read Galileo’s science as a change in thought: mathematics, more than experiment, remade physics.

Outside: economics, religion, politics

Another tied Newton’s Principia to the needs of shipping, mining and war, and English science to Puritan values.

Internalist and externalist

Later historians named the sides. Internalists explain scientific change from inside science, by ideas, methods and evidence; externalists by the economics, religion and politics outside it. The old story of great geniuses was largely internalist.

Kuhn · 1962 · the turn

Kuhn: historians now judged old science by its own time

“Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older science to our present vantage, they attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time.”

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 3
Paradigms, not accumulation

Kuhn called a shared model of “problems and solutions” a paradigm. When misfit results pile up, a crisis brings a new paradigm, “incommensurable” with the old: the two can’t be judged by the same standards (Maza, p. 93, on Copernicus).

Discuss

If paradigms can’t be judged by the same standards, in what sense is later science better science?

1970s · science and the occult

Newton’s gravitation was rooted in alchemy

An oil portrait of a man in his forties with long gray hair, in a dark brown gown, his hand resting on a ledge, looking directly out
Kneller, 1689 · public domain

His work toward gravitation was “rooted in the great scientist’s avid and extensive research into the ‘dark arts’ of alchemy.” Maza, Thinking About History, p. 99

The line between science and “occult” pursuits hardened only in the eighteenth century (p. 99).

1979 · the laboratory

Social scientists followed a laboratory as it made facts

Tall concrete laboratory blocks with wooden shutters step down a paved courtyard toward the ocean under a deep blue sky, with small trees in the foreground
Salk Institute · Highsmith · public domain

“There is as much society inside the scientist’s laboratory, and internal to the development of scientific knowledge, as there is outside.” Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 10

Laboratory Life (1979) followed scientists at a Salk Institute laboratory in California, as an anthropologist would follow a village.

They saw facts take shape through arguing, writing and persuading. The first subtitle was The Social Construction of Scientific Facts.

1979 · print

One argument held that print made the Scientific Revolution possible

A hand-colored engraving of a great brass quadrant on a wall, with Tycho Brahe painted inside its arc pointing upward, his observatory's floors and assistants behind, and men reading the instrument and recording at a table below
Tycho Brahe at his great quadrant, 1598 · public domain

“The ‘Scientific Revolution’ was thus inconceivable without a preceding printing revolution.” Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (1998), p. 11, summarizing the argument

Print gave texts “fixity”: the same words, repeatable anywhere (Johns, p. 10).

Its hero was Tycho Brahe, who set printed rival models of the universe side by side and saw where they disagreed (pp. 10–11).

After Kuhn · 1970s–80s · constructivism

Constructivists treated scientific knowledge as something people make

“the belief that scientific knowledge is a human creation, made with available material and cultural resources, rather than simply the revelation of a natural order that is pre-given and independent of human action.”

A definition of constructivism, quoted in Maza, p. 95
Compare · Week 10.1

The linguistic turn read sources as “texts,” not transparent windows onto the past. Constructivists treated scientific knowledge the same way: as made, not simply found.

Discuss

If a belief has a social cause, has anyone yet said whether it is true?

An engraving of a tall wooden machine on a stand: a brass cylinder with a toothed piston rod and a crank, connected to a large glass globe sealed at the top with a stopcock
Robert Boyle’s air pump, plate 1 of New Experiments Physico-Mechanical, 1660 “The cyclotron of its age,” in one scholar’s phrase (quoted in Maza, p. 96): the costliest, most advanced machine of its day. Few machines existed, so most people learned the results from Boyle’s book or from the chosen witnesses who saw them.
(Library of Congress. Public domain.)

1985 · politics

The air-pump dispute was also a dispute about political order

“solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order.”

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), quoted in Maza, p. 97
England, 1660

After two decades of civil war, Boyle’s experimenters stood for freedom used responsibly. Hobbes, author of Leviathan, a defense of absolute rule, trusted only mathematical proof in science and a single authority in the state (pp. 96–97).

Shapin · 1994 · trust

Shapin argued that experimental science flourished in England because gentlemen did it

“Experimental science flourished in seventeenth-century England, Shapin argues, because it was conducted by a group of elite practitioners—’gentlemen,’ members of the landed upper class—who both trusted one another and had moral authority in the society at large.”

Maza, Thinking About History, p. 98, on Shapin, A Social History of Truth (1994)
Discuss

Whom do you trust on science today, and what makes them trustworthy: credentials, numbers or someone like you?

An engraved frontispiece: under an arch, a winged Fame crowns a bust of King Charles II on a pedestal, with a seated gentleman on each side, and books, globes, instruments and a telescope behind them
Frontispiece to Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society, 1667 Bacon, right, and the Society’s first president, left, flank its patron, the king. Gentlemen and a king vouched for the new science; Sprat’s triumphant history, written seven years on, defended it.
(Wenceslaus Hollar after John Evelyn. Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0.)
A black and white photograph of a room of women at desks covered in photographic plates and ledgers, some with magnifiers, one standing at the center
The women “computers” of the Harvard College Observatory, about 1891 By the nineteenth century, one historian shows, trust came from “expertise backed by numbers rather than genteel status” (Maza, p. 98). These women produced the numbers, for far less pay than men.
(Harvard College Observatory. Public domain.)

Shapin · 1996

Shapin opens by denying that the Scientific Revolution happened

“There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it. Some time ago, when the academic world offered more certainty and more comforts, historians announced the real existence of a coherent, cataclysmic, and climactic event that fundamentally and irrevocably changed what people knew about the natural world … It was the moment at which the world was made modern, it was a Good Thing”

Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 1

Shapin · 1996 · what is argued

Historians still argue about what the Scientific Revolution was

One event, or many practices?

Many historians doubt any “singular and discrete event,” and any single “science” or “scientific method” to revolutionize (pp. 3–4).

A break, or continuity?

The continuity of seventeenth-century natural philosophy with its medieval past “is now routinely asserted” (p. 4).

Ideas, or practices?

Older accounts treated ideas as if they “floated freely in conceptual space.” Newer ones ask what people did to make an observation or run an experiment (p. 4).

Inside, or outside?

Whether science’s causes were intellectual or social was long argued. Shapin calls the split “a rather silly demarcation” (p. 9).

Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, pp. 3–4, 9

Shapin · 1996 · who took part

Shapin asks who was left out of the Scientific Revolution

“The half of the European population that was female was in a position to participate in scientific culture scarcely at all, as was that overwhelming majority—of men and women—who were illiterate or otherwise disqualified from entering the venues of formal learning.”

Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 8
Revolution for whom?

If only a few took part, “in what sense, if at all,” was it the moment “modernity was made, for ‘us’”? (pp. 4–5).

Shapin · 1996 · ancestors

Shapin still tells the story, as one about our ancestors

“Yet there is absolutely no reason we should not want to know how we got from there to here, who the ancestors were, and what the lineage is that connects us to the past.”

Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 7

Such stories, he warns, are “not likely to be sensitive accounts of how it was in the past”: Galileo, Descartes and Boyle were hardly typical of their countrymen (p. 7).

Discuss

Is it wrong to judge the past as the road to the present if the road really did lead here?

1998 · print and trust

Printed books had to earn trust, a later historian argued

An oil portrait of a man in a long curled wig and black clerical gown with white bands, seated in a leather chair, one hand on his chest and the other on a book
The astronomer John Flamsteed, 1712 · public domain

“In such a world, questions of credit took the place of assumptions of fixity.” Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (1998), p. 31

Early print was full of piracy and error, so readers had to decide which books to believe (p. 31). Even Tycho could not get his star catalogue printed (p. 18).

In 1712 Newton and Halley printed an astronomer’s star catalogue against his “vehement opposition” (p. 55).

Print and trust

One view put authority in the printed page; another put it in readers

Print fixed texts, so scholars could compare, correct and build on them. The Renaissance and Reformation were “rendered permanent” by permanent texts (as Johns summarizes it, p. 11).

Readers make print trustworthy (1998)

Fixity “exists only inasmuch as it is recognized and acted upon by people” (p. 19). Printed texts were trusted “only as a result of hard work” (p. 36).

From gentlemen to books

The later view builds on Shapin’s trust: not only whom to believe, but which printed books (p. 31). The two authors argued it out in the American Historical Review in 2002.

A hand-colored engraving of a flowering branch with orange and yellow blossoms and feathery leaves, with a caterpillar, a cocoon and a large gray moth
Maria Sibylla Merian, the peacock flower, from Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (“The Transformation of Surinam’s Insects”), 1705 Merian drew Surinam’s insects from life, and recorded enslaved and Indigenous women using these seeds to end pregnancies. A later historian found science “in the workshops of artisans and artists” (Maza, p. 101).
(Biodiversity Heritage Library. Public domain.)

2007 · objectivity

Scientific objectivity itself has a history

An engraving of a standing human skeleton with the chest wall opened and some muscles shown, arms held out, in front of a large rhinoceros, with trees and a stone wall behind
A plate from Albinus's anatomy atlas, 1747, drawn under his direction · KU Leuven · CC0

“The objectivity of the experimental matter of fact … was an artifact of certain forms of discourse and certain modes of social solidarity.” Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), quoted in Maza, p. 97

Objectivity (2007) traced scientific atlases and found self-restraint as an ideal of science taking shape only in the nineteenth century.

Earlier atlases trusted the expert’s eye to show the typical body.

2007 · circulation

Science was made through circulation between places, not spread from Europe

Two massive pale yellow stone structures of an astronomical observatory: a triangular wall with arched openings and a stepped edge rising at left, and a curved stone arc rising at right, under a clear blue sky
Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, built by Jai Singh II in the 1720s and 1730s: an illustration only · Eichmann · CC BY 4.0

“the reframing of historians’ ‘where’ … from the single location to transnational and global expanses, all of which have entailed challenges to Eurocentrism.” Maza, Thinking About History, p. 116

Older accounts had Western science radiating from Europe. Relocating Modern Science (2007) argued that South Asia and Europe made it together.

Maza · 2017 · who did science

Science was practiced by many more people than the old story allowed

“Science, in short, was not just produced by savants in learned societies but practiced by all sorts of people with very concrete needs and agendas—performing at court, impressing wealthy friends, firing an intricate piece of pottery, or, in the case of wives and family members, providing unacknowledged assistance of every sort.”

Maza, Thinking About History, p. 101
Discuss

Shapin says women and the illiterate took part in scientific culture “scarcely at all”; Maza says “all sorts of people” practiced science. Who is right, and what is each counting as science?

Section two · medicine

From heroic doctors to the frames around disease

Doctors’ histories · to 1930

The history of disease was long written by doctors and moral writers

“Although it has been a traditional concern of physicians, antiquarians, and moralists, the study of disease is still comparatively novel for social scientists.”

Rosenberg, "Framing Disease," p. xxiii
The physicians’ version

Antiquarians were collectors of old things and texts. Doctors wrote most early histories of medicine: great men from Hippocrates to Pasteur beating back ignorance.

An oil painting of a doctor in a dark coat seated in a study, scratching the bare arm of a small boy with a lancet while a woman in a white bonnet holds the boy steady
Ernest Board, Dr Jenner Performing His First Vaccination, on James Phipps, a Boy of 8, May 14, 1796, about 1910 The physicians’ version as a painting, made more than a century after the event: a calm doctor, a trusting boy, a woman holding him steady.
(Wellcome Collection. CC BY 4.0; frame cropped.)
An oil painting of a bearded man in a dark suit standing at a laboratory bench by a window, holding up a glass jar to study it, with bottles and instruments around him
Albert Edelfelt, Louis Pasteur, 1885 Pasteur studies a glass jar at his laboratory window, a lone man of science at work. Germ theory made it seem only a matter of time before the microbe behind every disease was found (Rosenberg, p. xvii), and popular books made the germ hunters adventure heroes.
(Musée d’Orsay, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.)
An oil painting of a dark surgical amphitheater: a white-haired surgeon with a bloody scalpel turns from an operation on a patient's exposed thigh, assistants bent over the body, a woman in black recoiling at left, students watching from the tiers
Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875 A surgeon lectures mid-operation in Philadelphia. The surgeon is lit like a hero, the patient is a pair of legs, and the woman at left, probably a relative, cannot watch.
(Philadelphia Museum of Art and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Public domain.)

1930s–40s · society

Medicine’s history began to be written as part of society’s history

“Every aspect of medicine’s history is necessarily ‘social,’ whether acted out in laboratory, library, or at the bedside.”

Rosenberg, "Framing Disease," p. xiv

One doctor-historian wrote about disease, health insurance and workers’ illness, not only doctors.

1961 · madness

The freeing of the mad came to be seen as a new kind of control

An oil painting of an asylum courtyard: a doctor in a dark coat and hat stands among women patients, one of them barefoot in a white dress, as an attendant removes her chains, while other women crouch against the wall
The hero version: Pinel unchaining patients, Paris, 1795, painted 1876 · public domain

Critics came to see diagnoses “as tools of social control, as labels for deviance” Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” p. xvi

Madness and Civilization (1961) argued that the asylum replaced chains with constant watching.

Deviance: behavior a society treats as abnormal.

Discuss

Was unchaining the mad an act of kindness or a quieter kind of control?

Rosenberg · 1962 · cholera

Rosenberg used cholera to understand American society

A wood engraving of a squalid London courtyard: ragged children play in garbage and a dead cat, women draw water beside an open drain, and crowds lean from the windows of crumbling houses
Punch blames a London slum, 'A Court for King Cholera,' 1852 · Wellcome · CC BY 4.0

Once cholera was known to spread “through the water supply, policy choices were reframed not only in practical engineering terms but in political and moral ones.” Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” p. xx

The Cholera Years (1962) followed the epidemics of 1832, 1849 and 1866. Americans first read cholera as punishment for sin, later as a problem of filth and water.

A disease showed what a society believed.

1970s · ecology

Historians made smallpox part of the conquest of the Americas

A pen drawing in panels: a healer kneels beside a person covered in spots lying on a mat, and in the other panels more spotted figures lie wrapped in blankets
A Nahua healer tends smallpox sufferers, 1520, in the Florentine Codex, 1577 · public domain

Historians took up “an ecological vision of history in which disease plays a key role, for example, in the Spanish conquest of Central and South America.” Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” p. xv

The Columbian Exchange (1972) traced the plants, animals and germs that crossed the Atlantic after 1492. Plagues and Peoples (1976) went worldwide.

1976 · did medicine work?

Historians asked whether doctors deserved credit for longer lives

An oil painting of a dim cottage room: a bearded doctor sits leaning forward, chin in hand, watching a sick child asleep across two chairs, while the parents wait in the shadows behind
Luke Fildes, The Doctor, 1891: the physician can only watch · public domain

“How much credit should go to specific medical interventions … and how much to changed economic and social circumstances?” Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” p. xv

The Modern Rise of Population (1976) argued that better food, more than medicine, cut tuberculosis deaths. The claim drew controversy (n. 7).

The policy question follows: spend on cures, or on prevention (p. xv)?

1970s–80s · construction

Historians argued that societies help decide what counts as a disease

Social construction “has forcefully reminded us that medical thought and practice are rarely free of cultural constraint, even in matters seemingly technical.”

Rosenberg, "Framing Disease," p. xiv
Discuss

Does saying a disease is framed by society make it any less real to the person who has it?

1970s–80s · blame

Ideas about disease have carried a society’s views of race, gender and class

“It is difficult indeed to think of any significant area of social debate and tension—ideas of race, gender, class, and industrialization—in which hypothetical disease etiologies have not served to project and rationalize widely held values and attitudes.”

Rosenberg, "Framing Disease," p. xxii
Theories of cause

An etiology is a theory of what causes a disease. Such theories often carried, and justified, blame. The debate “has hardly ceased,” he wrote, citing AIDS (p. xxii).

A black and white photograph: a white doctor in a white shirt draws blood from the arm of a man in a dark jacket at the left edge, while a Black woman in a headscarf and a Black man in a hat and checked shirt look on
A doctor draws blood for the Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis, Alabama (undated) From 1932 to 1972 the U.S. Public Health Service left about four hundred Black men with syphilis untreated, even after penicillin. A 1981 book, Bad Blood, told it as a history of racism in medicine.
(National Archives. Public domain.)
An oil painting of a lecture room: an older doctor in black addresses a crowd of men in dark suits while a young woman in a white blouse, her back arched and eyes closed, faints into an assistant's arms
André Brouillet, Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (“A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière”), 1887 A neurologist demonstrates hysteria on a patient before an audience of men. The Female Malady (1985) asked why madness was so often seen as a woman’s illness.
(Université Paris Cité. Public domain.)

1985 · patients

Historians called for medical history from the patient’s side

A hand-colored caricature of a crowded room: a doctor vaccinates a frightened woman from a bucket while patients around her sprout small cows from their arms, noses and mouths
James Gillray, The Cow-Pock, 1802: vaccination as some patients feared it · public domain

Rosenberg names, as one trend, “the emphasis among professional historians on social history and the experience of ordinary men and women.” Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” p. xv

A 1985 essay asked for medical history from below, from the patient’s view, as workers’ history had been written from below.

1990 · childbirth

A midwife’s diary let a historian rebuild her medical practice

A hand-colored etching of a figure split down the middle: the left half a man in a blue coat beside shelves of forceps and drugs, the right half a woman in a striped dress and apron beside a fireplace
Cruikshank's Man-Mid-Wife, 1793, mocks men taking over childbirth · Wellcome · CC BY 4.0

“Pregnancy and childbirth, for example, like epidemic disease have in recent years become an accepted part of the standard historical canon.” Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” p. xv

A Midwife’s Tale (1990) used a Maine midwife’s diary of more than eight hundred births, 1785–1812.

Women’s healing, missing from doctors’ histories, became evidence.

Rosenberg · 1992 · the field

Rosenberg mapped why historians turned to disease

Ordinary people

Social history: patients, childbirth, epidemics.

Public health

Did medicine or living conditions lengthen lives? Demographers counted.

Ecology

Disease in the conquest of the Americas.

Social control

Diagnoses as labels for deviance; the most influential.

What all of them missed

How a disease gets defined, and what the definition does to lives, policy and care (Rosenberg, pp. xv–xvi).

Rosenberg · 1992 · reframing disease

Rosenberg treated disease as six things at once

A biological event

It happens in bodies, and in animals, whatever anyone calls it.

A vocabulary

A generation’s “verbal constructs,” shaped by medicine’s ideas and institutions.

A reason for policy

An occasion for public policy, and a potential justification of it.

A part of who you are

An aspect of a person’s social role and identity.

A sanction for values

A way a culture backs up what it values.

A relationship

A structuring element in how doctors and patients deal with each other.

Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” p. xiii

Rosenberg · 1992 · frame

Rosenberg: a disease exists socially once it is named

“In some ways disease does not exist until we have agreed that it does, by perceiving, naming, and responding to it.”

Rosenberg, "Framing Disease," p. xiii
Discuss

Cholera killed before anyone agreed what it was. In what sense did the disease “not exist”?

1993 · empire

Historians showed colonial medicine entering Indian homes

A sepia photograph of an Indian family of men, women and children seated on mats and chairs in front of a row of temporary huts made of cloth and matting, with trees behind
A well-off Bombay family forced into a plague camp, 1896–97 · Wellcome · CC BY 4.0

Rosenberg noted “a recent growth of interest in ‘imperial’ medicine” Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” p. xxv n. 9

Colonizing the Body (1993) showed that against plague in 1896–97, officials searched homes and moved families into camps.

It argues that Indian resistance made officials back down.

Two fields · one course

Both fields moved from triumph to the people, interests and politics behind knowledge

Science

Great men and the birth of the modern world. Then inside and outside causes and Kuhn’s paradigms; then laboratory facts, political order and trust; then women, print that earned credit, objectivity’s history and circulation.

Medicine

Doctors’ histories of great men and germ hunters. Then society, the asylum and cholera; then disease in conquest, doubts about medicine’s credit, patients, race, gender and empire, and disease as a frame.

Compare · the semester

The path of history itself: Ranke’s nations, then history from below, gender and the linguistic turn.

The take home

The history of knowledge shows its makers, and we are among them

“What we select inevitably represents our interests, even if we aim all the while to ‘tell it like it really was.’ That is to say, there is inevitably something of ‘us’ in the stories we tell about the past.”

Shapin, The Scientific Revolution, p. 10

Science and medicine have histories because people made them, trusted them and named things with them. What we take as settled now will have a history too.

Next · 13.2 · environmental history

Next time, nature itself helps make history

A century from now, what will historians say we got wrong about science or medicine, and how will they know?