General

There have been few general surveys of the history of science, technology and medicine in colonial India and a dearth of interpretative essays. Standard histories of science, technology and medicine written from the perspective of Europe and North America give little coverage to India. At most there might be some initial acknowledgement of the mathematics, medicine, chemistry and astronomy of ancient India, but Joseph Needham’s work on China (unparalleled in range and quality for India) is more often cited by authors in search of non-European comparisons. Of the specifically Indian works, D. M. Bose, S. N. Sen and B. V. Subbarayappa (eds.), A Concise History of Science in India (New Delhi, 1971), provides a convenient overview of a longer period than that covered by this book, but the chapter by Subbarayappa Western Science in India up to the End of the Nineteenth Century AD’(pp. 484-567) is a useful summary across several scientific fields. Unfortunately, no attempt is made to cover the twentieth century or to discuss medicine and technology.

There has been a tendency to partition the study of India’s science, technology and medicine, like much else in the region’s history, along conventional lines into ancient (Hindu), medieval (Muslim) and modern (colonial) periods. Of works that do link the pre-colonial and colonial periods of Indian scientific history, particularly useful are Ahsan Jan Qaisar, The Indian Response to European Technology and Culture (AD 1498–1707) (Delhi, 1982); and two articles by S. N. Sen, ‘Scientific Works in Sanskrit, Translated into Foreign Languages and Vice Versa in the 18th and 19th Century AD’, IJHS, 7, 1972, pp. 44–70, and ‘The Character of the Introduction of Western Science in India during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, IJHS, 1, 1966, pp. 112–22.

The English East India Company was as old as modern science itself. Founded in 1600, the Company shared its early years with the Scientific Revolution, and by 1662, when the Royal Society of London was founded, was already a flourishing concern with trading bases at Surat, Madras and Masulipatam. The sciences prominent in early colonial India – botany, geology, to a lesser extent zoology – were still at a formative stage when the Company embarked on its career of territorial expansionism in the mid-eighteenth century. The first volume of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle appeared in 1749, as Anglo-French rivalry in the Carnatic was reaching its peak; Linnaeus’s Species plantarum, which established the binomial system of nomenclature, was published in 1753, four years before the battle of Plassey opened the floodgates to British ascendancy in Bengal. By the time the Geological Society of London, model for a new generation of metropolitan scientific societies, was founded in 1807, British power had been extended over vast tracts of northern and peninsular India and was poised for the final defeat of the Marathas. The publication in 1830 of the first volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, one of the foundational texts of modern geology, came three years before the Company lost its vestigial trading rights; and Darwin’s Origin of Species was published in November 1859, twelve months after the East India Company had finally been declared extinct.

Although there was no clear ideological or professional break between the science of the Company period and the science that followed under the Crown after 1858, there was a steady move away from the earlier modes of exploratory and observational science, in which the Company had taken an erratic interest, to a more confident alliance between science and the state. In the late nineteenth century the colonial regime employed science as both a means of self-legitimation and an aid to more effective government. While exploiting the authority and utility of Victorian science, the state remained none the less committed to a largely instrumentalist view of science: science existed to serve the empire, not to constitute an alternative source of authority or to dictate imperial priorities. However, from the 1890s through to the First World War there was unprecedented Indian interest in, and engagement with, Western science. With the growth of an Indian scientific community, India participated in international science in ways that belied any narrow definition of colonial science. The combination of these two elements – imperial science and an emergent Indian scientific community – did much to advance science in India in the critical decades of the 1890s–1900s to a position of intellectual and political prominence but also to fuel its inner tensions and contradictions.

SCIENCE AND THE SERVICES

Science played little part in the education and training of Indian Civil Service officers and, though a recreational interest in natural history often developed in the course of a career in India, there was always a suspicion of the professional scientist and a greater regard for the practical exercise of administrative authority. The ICS valued first-hand experience in the districts above the cosmopolitanism and intellectualism of science and regarded a close acquaintance with the villages and peoples of rural India and a grounding in the vernacular languages as a superior basis for knowing and ruling India.

Medicine occupied a central place in Western scientific thought and activity in nineteenth-century India. There were many reasons for this. Firstly, the Colonial Medical Service was one of the principal scientific agencies in India during the Company period and for several decades thereafter. Company surgeons and their successors under the Crown provided a large share of the botanists, geologists, zoologists, meteorologists, foresters and other specialists. Secondly, partly because of their wide-ranging scientific brief, medical personnel had a vital role in the European investigation of the Indian environment (including its topography, climate and diseases), and hence in understanding how nature fashioned the human condition in India. Thirdly, to a degree unparalleled in other scientific fields and matched by few aspects of technological change, medicine represented direct intervention in, and interaction with, the social, cultural and material lives of the Indian people. This dual engagement — with the environment and with culture — helped fashion not only the distinctive character and preoccupations of India’s colonial medicine, but also the manner of its Indian reception and assimilation. Although medical and sanitary intervention was initially driven by the scientific interests of the colonial state, over the course of the century medicine began to serve other agendas and to inform a wider cultural and political dialogue.

From the perspective of medical history, the demise of the East India Company in 1858 was not in itself particularly momentous, and it is more appropriate to see the nineteenth century as a whole. Some developments can usefully be traced through to the 1910s and 1920s, but this chapter is mainly concerned with the period up to the mid-1890s, when, in the wake of Robert Koch’s identification of the cholera bacillus and Ronald Ross’s discovery of the mode of malaria transmission and the outbreak of bubonic plague in India, there was a shift away from the environmental paradigm that had dominated nineteenth-century medical thought and the emergence of new scientific ideas, institutions and practices.

It is time for another look at the Scientific Revolution and Newton. The immediate occasion for further discussion of this perennial issue is Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs's 1994 essay in Isis and Richard S. Westfall's reply, both appearing in this volume. These two giants in the modern-day history of science, both now sadly deceased, disagreed about the meaningfulness of the concept of “the” Scientific Revolution – the “big one” that happened between Copernicus and Newton. Dobbs was conspicuously critical of the generalizations of historians who emphasized the notion of the Scientific Revolution at the expense of the particularity and uniqueness of the individuals crushed beneath the weight of this venerable, grand theory. She didn't buy into the concept except with reservations. It was too anachronistic, she claimed, following Cohen. It was also too metaphorical and, therefore, problematic, to talk – along with Whiggish historians such as Butterfield and a host of others – about a revolution that portrays “a change that is sudden, radical, and complete.” Worst of all, exponents of the Scientific Revolution, distorted the highly individualized genius of Newton and appropriated him into their theory as either the heroic “First Mover” of the great change or as the heroic “Final Cause” of the Scientific Revolution.

In his typically gallant manner, Richard S. Westfall politely disagreed and firmly continued to align himself with the “Final Cause” school of the mid to late twentieth century, a position he outlined in his first major book and which he maintained until his death.

Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs argues that Newton's De gravitatione was composed in the year 1684 or early 1684/5. Most scholars (myself included) have fixed its date of composition no later than 1673. Nevertheless, Dobbs's claim is persuasive if not decisive. I shall assume her dating in reassessing the theological outlook that underlies the structure of Newton's Principia. My concern is how Newton's religious and natural philosophical beliefs interrelate within the intellectual context of their making. If Dobbs is right, De gravitatione is part of a creative process (begun in the mid-1680s) that includes the composition of the Principia This is a significant point. Seen from this perspective, De gravitatione expresses the theological world view that animates the Principia itself. To elaborate this theme, I consider “Tempus et locus,” a manuscript which can be dated to the early 1690s. This important manuscript, I argued, is part of Newton's revisions for the first edition of the Principia (1687), begun directly after that treatise was published. In both De gravitatione and “Tempus et locus” he considers the infinity of spatial extension. In De gravitatione he articulates its geometrical structure in relation to the being and activity of God. Once these connections are evident, the preface to the first edition of the Principia (1687) – which outlines relations between mathematics and nature – throws significant light on the structure of Newton's masterwork.

In his youth the German chemist Johann Rudolph Glauber (1603/4–70) passed through Basel, where he met a philosophically minded man who showed him his own dead child preserved in the water from a nearby spring. Although this child had died some time before, its corpse remained untouched by putrefaction. Glauber never saw the source in Switzerland from which this water came, but he happened upon a similar spring in Vienna-Neustadt. The water in this spring transmuted everything placed in it into stone, preventing all things from rotting. Moreover it cured Glauber of a long and difficult fever. Glauber stayed the whole winter observing this spring and found that it prevented the swamps from freezing, kept the grass green around its edge, and supported numerous turtles and other amphibious animals during the cold winter.

Later, after many years of reading and experimenting, Glauber claimed to have discovered the makeup of the salt that gave this spring it powers. He called it sal mirabile, for the wonders it could work, and claimed that he produced it from common salt and sulfuric acid. He first announced his discovery in 1658, publishing a book about the nature of salts in general. In it he praised the manifold virtues of salt: it was the nutriment of all things, a symbol of eternity, the crucial ingredient in alchemical transmutation and in aurum potabile (potable gold), the cause of spontaneous generation, and the principle of all life. All salts, including common cooking salt, partook in the wondrous qualities of the elemental salt, but the sal mirabile was truly miraculous.

I find myself in an ambiguous pose that I need to explain before I continue. I did more than count Betty Jo Dobbs as my friend. Rightly or wrongly, I regarded myself as her earliest admirer in the discipline – after her graduate professors, to be sure. We got into correspondence, first about Newton's handwriting, and then about his alchemical papers, while she was still a graduate student, and as a consequence I read her dissertation chapter by chapter as she completed each one. I wrote enthusiastically to Northwestern in support of her first appointment, and I continued to write whenever she needed a reference. I feel her loss both personally and professionally. For all that, I am going to devote this chapter, written in her memory, to taking issue with the last piece she published, her History of Science Society Lecture, “Newton as Final Cause and First Mover.” Anyone who knew Professor Dobbs understood that you did not take a high tone with her. Neither do I here, even when there is no possibility of a retort. You also understood that she took the intellectual life seriously and thought that important issues required thorough discussion. I can do no better service to her memory than to take the issues she raised seriously and, in a low voice, to contribute what I can to their elucidation. The issues concern the Scientific Revolution, and I intend to make that topic, rather than details of Dobbs's essay, my focus.