French hygienists wanted to make public health a scientific discipline, by which they meant using observation, experimentation, and quantification to study public health problems. Placing problems in historical context also figured prominently in their method. In their methodological approach hygienists were greatly influenced by the empirical tradition of the Enlightenment, eighteenth-century developments in social statistics, and the recent numerical method articulated and practiced by clinician Pierre Louis. Charles Londe expressed the critical spirit hygienists hoped to bring to bear on the study of hygiene: “There is only one way to remove hygiene from every systematic influence: that is to circumscribe it [hygiene] within the rigorous limits of facts and to leave to the facts their natural relationships.” Emphasizing a quantitative approach, Villermé expressed a similar idea in his classic study of varying mortality rates in the French departments: “I am going to attempt to bring it [the whole question of the causes of differing mortality] to light by masses of incontestable facts, which for the first time will establish it [the answer] by measurement.”

Although a critical approach was not new to scientists, hygienists believed their method constituted a radical break with the way public health problems had traditionally been investigated. As they saw it, traditional Hippocratic hygiene had been scientific, or based on observation. But commentators during the centuries had abandoned the observational method that had characterized classical hygiene. Hygiene had become a sterile list of rules and theories transmitted uncritically from one generation to another.

Investigation was central to the practice of public hygiene in Paris. Acting individually, as health council members, or as appointed members on a municipal commission, hygienists investigated problems referred to them by the municipal government or undertook such studies on their own initiative. Investigations varied in depth and scope, ranging from routine investigations of industrial establishments to studies of national problems such as working-class conditions. Several research methods predominated. Many hygienists employed historical research in archives and official collections, as well as interviews, questionnaires, on-site observations, and statistical data. Some public health problems required experimentation as well. Once the data were gathered, the investigation completed, a report prepared, and a conclusion reached, the investigator(s) proposed one or more solutions, which were sent to the official in charge – usually the prefect of police – who then determined what action to take.

Considering themselves scientific investigators, Parisian hygienists used the city as their laboratory, since it was “well equipped” with many problems and useful tools for investigation. For historical research there were the records of the prefecture of police and the municipal council to be surveyed. Manuscript records of the Paris health council dating from 1802 were available at the Prefecture of Police, and hospitals and the Prefecture of Police both collected statistical data that hygienists routinely used. The most important statistical resource was, however, the Recherches statistiques sur la ville de Paris.

INTRODUCTION

the ideas, the organization, and the technology associated with the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution were introduced into Sweden in three steps. First, Cartesian philosophy (with Copernican cosmology) was imported in the course of a prolonged academic row in the second half of the seventeenth century; second, institutions of the continental and British academy type were created in the first half of the eighteenth century, while at the same time Newtonianism and experimental physics made their entry; third, in the decades around the mid-eighteenth century, science reached maturity with Swedish scientists achieving international eminence in a number of fields – especially in natural history, mineralogy and chemistry. Carl Linnaeus (von Linne) and his colleagues made the eighteenth century a golden age for Swedish science (and a favourite topic for latter-day historians of science). Around 1780, however, the position as one of the most active scientific nations in Europe was lost, and toward the end of the century Swedish science had been reduced to relative obscurity.

In the following, the technical or philosophical aspects of Swedish science will be touched upon but lightly; the development will be discussed primarily from the institutional point of view. The seventeenth century will therefore be dealt with briefly, while the organization of the forces of Swedish science, which occurred in part as a response to the disintegration of the forces of the Swedish military, will be given a fuller treatment.

‘historians write about scientific revolutions as automatically as of political, economic or social revolutions’ – these are the words with which Roy Porter began his stimulating deliberation on the Scientific Revolution. He is right, of course. Thanks to the intensive work of historians of science over the recent decades, the concept of Scientific Revolution has become deeply embedded in the consciousness of current historiography.

Nevertheless, we shall be going back to the concept of Scientific Revolution again and again. Certainly partly because this concept in itself, although it has now been the subject of tens of monographs and thousands of articles, is still relatively new. However, also because the concept of revolution itself is very flexible and may adopt the most various forms, depending on the field in which the revolutionary changes are taking place.

Let us attempt to present a small parallel between the classical political revolution and the Scientific Revolution. Let us consider two examples, two types of political revolution which are among the best known: the French Revolution of the end of the eighteenth century (and let us ignore the exceedingly strict opinions voiced by the British Prime Minister on the occasion of its 200th anniversary), and the Russian Great October Revolution of 1917. It seems to me that both satisfy the prerequisites already developed with regard to Classical ancient drama and observed, for instance, by Shakespeare, Moliere, or even Havel. These amount to the principle of three unities: the unity of place, time and action.

modern science proclaims itself objective, rational and international: the periodic table of the elements hangs upon the chemistry laboratory wall in Berkeley, Berlin and Beijing, the writ of Boyle's Law runs all around the globe. Science is said to be a universal language or culture, transcending national boundaries and nationalistic rivalries. To a fair degree this is true. A profusion of poetries, philosophies, aesthetics and theologies litters the continents, but there is only one scientific enterprise in the commonly accepted sense. When an Indian scientist changes places with an Italian, or an Argentinian with an Austrian, no conceptual problems are posed. Nobel Prizes symbolize the unity of science today.

This quality of universality is much prized and celebrated. It is therefore hardly surprising that historical accounts have sought to demonstrate that the pursuit of natural knowledge in earlier centuries was equally independent of, and superior to, subjective, personal, local and other essentially contingent factors. Science (we are often told) owed its progress to a commitment to strict scientific method (whether that be induction, deduction, experimentalism, or whatever) and, above all perhaps, to genius, the Odyssey of the brilliant Mind, lost in thought, confronting the external realities of Nature.

The early-nineteenth-century public health movement that ultimately spread to many areas of Western Europe and the United States had its origins in eighteenth-century France. The French were the leaders in public health theory and reform up to the 1830s, when the French public health movement reached its culmination. During the 1820s and 1830s there was considerable cross-fertilization of ideas between public health advocates in Britain and France, and British public health leaders such as Edwin Chadwick, Southwood Smith, and William Farr were influenced by French developments. The beginnings of the British public health movement dated from 1837–8, and by the 1840s, the British were enjoying some legislative and administrative success. By the 1850s, the French acknowledged British superiority in practical public health matters, such as sewerage and water supply, and leadership passed from the French to the British. Although Chadwick was familiar with the works of the French hygienists, frequently citing them in his 1842 Sanitary Report, by 1854 Ambroise Tardieu, one of the leading French hygienists and legal medicine specialists, included in his Dictionnaire d'hygiène publique the British parliamentary inquiries of the late 1830s and 1840s into public health conditions as some of the most important public health works the French hygienist should consult. Although the French were the early leaders in public health, the French and British movements developed simultaneously for a while and hence invite comparison.

Although some public health concerns such as epidemics, vaccination, and child labor attracted the attention of the national government, public health administration was principally a municipal and departmental affair. The creation of advisory health councils (conseils de salubrité) at the municipal and departmental levels to assist prefects and mayors in regulating public health was characteristic of the period. The idea of a permanent advisory commission on public health dated from the Revolution, and the first French health council, the Paris health council, which became the model for all French councils, was founded in 1802 by the prefect of police of Paris, Dubois. By the 1830s, when the French public health movement was at the height of its activity, the health council idea had spread to other cities and departments, and Nantes, Lyon, Marseilles, Lille, Strasbourg, Bordeaux, Rouen, Troyes, and Toulouse had their own advisory councils.

THE PARISIAN PUBLIC HEALTH ADMINISTRATION: THE PREFECTURE OF POLICE AND THE PARIS HEALTH COUNCIL

The Parisian public health administration consisted of the prefecture of police, the institution in charge of public health for the city, and the Paris health council, the advisory body to the prefect of police and the one institution devoted solely to the preservation of the public health in Paris. Paris and the department of the Seine were governed by two magistrates, the prefect of the Seine and the prefect of police, each appointed by the Minister of the Interior.

Sanitary reform included much more than improving water and sewer systems. The salubrity of private dwellings and public establishments, such as hospitals and prisons, was critical to the healthfulness of Paris. Personal cleanliness and the purity of food and drink were also areas of major hygienic concern. The scope of early-nineteenth-century public health interests was so broad that hygienists also considered social welfare concerns part of their domain. Indeed, many of these problems were intimately related to public health. In their dual concern over morals and health, hygienists investigated prostitution, which they considered the primary cause of venereal disease. Because of the high infant mortality rate, they also took an interest in the wet-nursing business and the foundling question. Many of these problems had earlier been handled by charitable institutions and would in the second half of the century fall into the domain of social welfare or public assistance, but in the early nineteenth century they were public health problems.

THE SALUBRITY OF PRIVATE DWELLINGS

Claude Lachaise, physician and author of the principal medical topography of Paris, presented a report to the Royal Academy of Medicine in 1840 that described the influence of crowded living conditions on urban mortality. Lachaise noted that although there had been many public health reforms in Paris since 1815, improvements in private dwellings were negligible. Construction had not kept pace with the population increase, and new dwellings were small and badly built. Many Parisians lived in substandard, unsanitary dwellings.

Hygienists writing in the 1850s considered the science of public hygiene mature. In the decades after 1848 public hygiene came of age both as a scientific discipline and in terms of practical results. According to Adolphe Trébuchet, the Paris health council and the society of the Annales d'hygiène publique et de médecine légale established the science of public hygiene on a firm basis and made possible its propagation both in France and abroad. In terms of practical results, reforms that were advocated in the first half of the century were effected in some cities with the urban transformations of the Second Empire. Paris and Lyon, where water supplies and sewerage systems were enlarged and improved, are obvious examples. After 1850 some of the problems that had preoccupied early-nineteenth-century hygienists were solved by industrial improvements and chemical discoveries. But new ones appeared, such as health concerns related to railway hygiene. Subsequent to the public health law of 1848, health councils proliferated throughout the nation. And in 1854, the editors of the, Annales d'hygiène publique commenced the second series of the journal, with a commitment to continue to publicize all aspects of public health and legal medicine, as they had done in the first series (1829–54).

The work of the leading hygienists, such as Jean-Baptiste Monfalcon and A. P. Isidore de Polinière, Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, Alphonse Chevallier, Michel Lévy, and Louis-René Villermé, continued to be widely cited and in most cases remained the definitive studies on the subjects they had treated.

The public health movement developed within the context of Restoration initiatives, policies, and institutions that reflected and built upon traditional public health concerns – epidemic prevention and control – as well as the public health idea inherited from the Enlightenment and Revolutionary eras. Hygienists believed that the scope of public health was all-encompassing; nothing was unrelated to the preservation of health. The Restoration government, however, took a more focused view, concentrating on a few specific problems and working through a limited number of institutions. Public health institutions and policies emanating from the Restoration government included the Royal Academy of Medicine, which advised the government on public health matters and helped shape national public health policy; the sanitary administration, created by the 1822 sanitary law, whose purpose was to prevent the importation of contagious epidemic diseases; and national health care policies and programs including officiers de santé and the médecins des épidémies, and the national vaccination program with its depositories (dépôts de vaccine) and committees.

THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF MEDICINE AND PUBLIC HEALTH

The Royal Academy of Medicine continued the policies and programs of the Royal Society of Medicine, advising the government on major public health questions. The Royal Society of Medicine was founded in 1776 as a governmental commission to deal with the problems of epidemics and epizootics, and during the late 1770s and 1780s it acted as a national clearinghouse, receiving information from its provincial correspondents and intendants and dispatching members to give assistance to areas invaded by epidemics.

Historia von D. Johann Fausten (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1587) tells the sad story of a Wittenberg alumnus. Faust, an astrologer, a doctor of theology and medicine, who studied night and day, despaired finally of the knowledge in books. He sold his soul to Satan for twenty-four years of real power, in order to fulfil academic male fantasies. But, like a good German, Faust continued working for eight years after the pact. With Mephistopheles he journeyed through the celestial spheres, and from these observations produced the best calendars and prognostications. Through satanic arts, he was able to dominate nature, emblematized by food, peasants and women. He travelled much, and demonstrated his abilities for many audiences, including the imperial court. His fame spread. (In later editions of his Historia, other universities will woo him from Wittenberg.) By magic he feted his colleagues on free food, as if a job search committee were in permanent session. He slept with a new woman every night. But he perished wretchedly, and went to hell.

Faust's Historia is a German testament to a male intellectual crisis of the early modern era: desire for more power and knowledge over heaven and earth than were contained in the traditional philosophy's books. That is the motif for my analysis of the Scientific Revolution, which has this structure: instruments and experimentalism; mathematics and heliocentrism; mechanica mundi et harmonia mundi.