What is History of Science, Medicine & 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 enabled them 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 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 interviewing Richard 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 artifacts, 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 have influenced those disciplines in turn. Historians of science are currently 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 what is the good of all this research? 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. Studying history opens possibilities and horizons; it gives you knowledge and critical perspective and analytical tools.
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, and 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, or 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, master's 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 questions 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, and the ways it shapes them. What factors, for example, account for why in Paris around 1800 the Western medical tradition, having 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, institutions and ethos of science that arose in the West with the scientific revolution of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries have proved to be the most exportable, portable and universally adoptable product of civilisation hitherto. Thus historians ask what is special about those methods and institutions, and why the scientific and industrial revolutions took place in the West. What is the relationship between the scientific and industrial revolutions? Science is commonly believed to have originated in antiquity, but debate flourishes on the relative roles of the ancient Greeks, Mesopotamians and Romans - debate that calls into question the very definition of science.
Closer to the present, historians have asked what factors caused science, technology and medicine to take a quantum leap in scale during and after World War II. To what extent was this leap caused by the interaction of science, government, business and the military? More generally, how and why has science grown over the past two hundred years to become a massive enterprise requiring enormous bureaucratic organisation, and absorbing immense amounts of society's resources. These are all questions that historians of science, technology and medicine are actively exploring - perhaps you have a contribution to make?
Author: Dr Andrew Mendelsohn, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial College
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