Historical accounts of the practice of smallpox inoculation in the late eighteenth century invariably make a distinction between the widespread general inoculations carried out within small rural parishes and the partial inoculations in urban centres such as London, Manchester, Newcastle and Leeds. This distinction, moreover, is generally reinforced by concluding that the rural inoculation programmes were ‘highly effective’ or ‘successful’ in contrast with the urban inoculation schemes, which are often seen as ‘marginally effective’ or indeed ‘failing’. Success or failure tends to be judged by the impact which inoculation had upon reducing mortality from smallpox, but as a result of this demographic focus the motives behind the implementation of urban inoculation have been overlooked. My paper readjusts this balance by looking more closely at motives and by judging success in relation to aims. To achieve this I have taken a new approach towards the history of smallpox inoculation as a whole, and portray the basic idea of giving a person smallpox in order to confer subsequent immunity as being modified in the hands of different people throughout the course of the century. Hence it is possible to trace the development of inoculation from a folk practice carried out within the home with the aim of protecting individuals, to large-scale general inoculations of an entire community, which aimed to eradicate the disease altogether.

In order to pass the BA examination, it was, also, necessary to get up Paley's Evidences of Christianity, and his Moral Philosophy. This was done in a thorough manner, and I am convinced that I could have written out the whole of the Evidences with perfect correctness, but not of course in the clear language of Paley. The logic of this book and, as I may add, of his Natural Theology gave me as much delight as did Euclid. The careful study of these works, without attempting to learn any part by rote, was the only part of the Academical Course which, as I then felt and as I still believe, was of the least use to me in the education of my mind.

Charles Darwin

Autobiography

One of the books Charles Darwin read at Cambridge University was William Paley's Natural Theology (1802). Many scholars have assumed that this was a set text at the university in the early nineteenth century. However, a study of the examination papers of the university, and contemporary memoirs, autobiographies and correspondence, reveals no evidence that this was so, though it did appear in some of the college examinations. This contrasts with other books by Paley which did appear for many years in both university and college examinations. This paper uses the misapprehension about Paley's text as a starting point to investigate the role of natural theology in a Cambridge education in the first three decades of the nineteenth century.

Dugald Stewart (1753–1828) lectured in astronomy and political economy, held the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh University from 1775 to 1785, then the chair of moral philosophy from 1785 to 1810, and wrote extensively on metaphysics, political economy, ethics, philology, aesthetics, psychology and the history of philosophy and the experimental sciences. He is commonly regarded as the last voice of the Scottish Enlightenment, the articulate disciple of Thomas Reid, father of Scottish common sense philosophy. Recently some historians have begun to rediscover elements of the contribution Stewart made to early nineteenth-century British intellectual culture, and his Collected Works have been republished with a new introduction by Knud Haakonssen.

The role and status of writing in scientific practice have become central concerns in the history and philosophy of science. Investigations into the rhetoric of scientific texts, the ‘language games’ of calculation, experimentation and proof, and the uses of textbooks, reports and specialized journals in the formation of scientific communities have all brought a growing awareness of what the American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49) heralded as ‘The Power of Words’. In discussing several works of this author, who perhaps more than any of his ‘literary’ contemporaries grappled with the growing dominance of science and technology in his time, this paper shows the potential ambiguity and polyvalence of the rhetoric of science. Poe's writings exploit this increasingly powerful language in a variety of ways: through logical proofs, satires, hoaxes, and the analysis of mysteries, codes and poetry, notably his own. Poe's unorthodox use of scientific rhetoric highlights the importance of historically specific modes of discourse for the consolidation of truth.

As has become evident from historical studies, science does not proceed in the coherent and predictable way that basic science texts would have us believe. I will argue that an excellent counter-example is an episode from the historical development of quantum mechanics in which the incompatibility of the particle and the wave representations of the electron and light were destined to be encompassed by two mathematically equivalent, but conceptually quite different theories.

I shall argue that the appearance of two such different, yet equivalent, quantum theories was not surprising at all and I claim even predictable. As Einstein himself wrote in 1909: ‘It is my opinion that the next phase in the development of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be interpreted as a kind of fusion of the wave and the [particle] theory.’ Certainly, the interpretative content of Werner Heisenberg's and Erwin Schrödinger's theories could not have been more different. By mid-1926, the theoretical foundations had been laid for a scientific and emotional battleground between the particle and the wave. I suggest that an important element in the debate was not the incompatibility itself but actually coming to terms with ambiguity in science. For, in the end, ambiguous and vague interpretations of the same phenomena became part of science, where science was supposed to give a clear and unambiguous description of nature.

No one will deny the extraordinary interest and importance of this method which showed for the first time and in such minute detail the effects of the passage of ionizing radiations through a gas ... I am personally of the opinion that the researches of Mr Wilson in this field represent one of the most striking and important of the advances in atomic physics made in the last twenty years ... It may be argued that this new method of Mr Wilson's has in the main only confirmed the deductions of the properties of the radiations made by other more indirect methods. While this is of course in some respects true, I would emphasize the importance to science of the gain in confidence of the accuracy of these deductions that followed from the publication of his beautiful photographs. Ernest Rutherford, 1927

Rutherford refers here to the photography of particle tracks made visible as lines of condensation in the supersaturated water vapour of a cloud chamber. C. T. R. Wilson first saw and photographed tracks in March 1911. The cloud chamber had existed since 1895 when Wilson, pursuing his meteorological interests, developed the instrument to determine the process of droplet formation in clouds. Galison and Assmus have examined this early phase of the cloud chamber's existence, rightly concluding that, with the production of tracks and their photographic record, the instrument was radically transformed into a crucial tool of the particle physicist. This transformation was not immediate, however, and a genealogy of the apparatus cannot fully explain how this novel means to apprehend the existence and behaviour of hitherto invisible particles subsequently functioned within and contributed to the project of particle physics. My own focus is on the period immediately following Wilson's first publication of ray-track photographs. The central questions to be addressed are provided by Rutherford's comments above. In precisely what way did Wilson's work increase the confidence of scientists? How was his method more direct than others?

The belief in the existence of eternal mathematical truth has been part of this science throughout history. Bourbaki, however, introduced an interesting, and rather innovative twist to it, beginning in the mid-1930s. This group of mathematicians advanced the view that mathematics is a science dealing with structures, and that it attains its results through a systematic application of the modern axiomatic method. Like many other mathematicians, past and contemporary, Bourbaki understood the historical development of mathematics as a series of necessary stages inexorably leading to its current state — meaning by this, the specific perspective that Bourbaki had adopted and were promoting. But unlike anyone else, Bourbaki actively put forward the view that their conception of mathematics was not only illuminating and useful for dealing with the current concerns of mathematics, but that this was in fact the ultimate stage in the evolution of mathematics, bound to remain unchanged by any future development of this science. In this way, they were extending in an unprecedented way the domain of validity of the belief in the eternal character of mathematical truths, from the body to the images of mathematical knowledge.

Bourbaki were fond of presenting their insistence on the centrality of the modern axiomatic method as a way to ensure the eternal character of mathematical truth as an offshoot of Hilbert's mathematical heritage. A detailed examination of Hilbert's actual conception of the axiomatic method, however, brings to the fore interesting differences between it and Bourbaki's conception, thus underscoring the historically conditioned character of certain, fundamental mathematical beliefs.

The group of mathematicians known as Bourbaki persuasively proclaimed the isolation of its field of research — pure mathematics — from society and science. It may therefore seem paradoxical that links with larger French cultural movements, especially structuralism and potential literature, are easy to establish. Rather than arguing that the latter were a consequence of the former, which they were not, I show that all of these cultural movements, including the Bourbakist endeavor, emerged together, each strengthening the public appeal of the others through constant, albeit often superficial, interaction. This codependency is partly responsible for their success and moreover accounts for their simultaneous fall from favor, which, however, can clearly be seen as also stemming from different internal problems. To understand this dynamics, I argue that Bourbaki's role can best be captured by using the notion of cultural connector, which I introduce here.

To highlight speculative trends specific to the mathematical tradition that developed in China, the paper analyzes an excerpt of a third-century commentary on a mathematical classic, which arguably contains a proof. The paper shows that the following three tasks cannot be dissociated one from the other: (1) to discuss how the ancient text should be read; (2) to describe the practice of mathematical proof to which this text bears witness; (3) to bring to light connections between philosophy and mathematics that it demonstrates were established in China. To this end the paper defines its use of the word “proof” and outlines a program for an international history of mathematical proof. It describes the sense in which the text conveys a proof and shows how it simultaneously fulfills algorithmic ends, bringing to light a formal pattern that appears to be fundamental both for mathematics and for other domains of reality. The interest in transformations that mathematical writings demonstrate in China at that time seems to have been influenced by philosophical developments based on The Book of Changes (Yi-jing), which the excerpt quotes. This quotation within a mathematical context makes it possible to suggest an interpretation for a rather difficult philosophical statement.

This paper makes use of the 1860 clash between T. H. Huxley and Richard Owen to examine the role of social context in scientific advance in the biological sciences. It shows how the social context of nineteenth-century England first favored the Coleridge-Owenite interpretation of the biological world and then, at mid-century and subsequently, allowed the Darwin-Huxley interpretation to win through. It emphasizes the complexity of the clash. Professional, personal, and generational agendas as well as scientific theory and fundamental philosophical intuition were at stake. The history, ultimately, provides a useful instance of Schutz ‘s and Scheler ‘s concept of societal factors controlling and selecting between flows of idealfactoren. Although Huxley is conventionally regarded as the victor I conclude by suggesting that the issue is not yet closed and that profound philosophical issues remain unresolved.

European ethology and North American comparative psychology have been the two most prominent approaches to the study of animal behavior through most of the twentieth century. In this paper I analyze sets of popular articles by ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and psychologist Frank Beach, in an effort to understand the contrasting rhetorical styles of the two. Among the numerous ways in which Tinbergen and Beach differed were with respect to expressing the joy of research, the kind of scientific approach adopted, their treatment of animals, their sense of history, and the types of illustrations they chose. In general, Tinbergen‘s articles placed him closer to nature and Beach‘s more in the tradition of dispassionate scientific inquiry. These differences in rhetoric may have been one factor in the greater success of ethology after World War II.

I think you would be amused if you were here now to see my lectures – in my elementary one I have got a front row entirely consisting of young women (some of them not so young neither, as someone says in Jeames' Diary) and they take notes in the most painstaking and praiseworthy fashion, but the most extraordinary thing is that I have got one at my advanced lecture. I am afraid she does not understand a word and my theory is that she is attending my lectures on the supposition that they are Divinity and she has not yet found out her mistake.

Professor J. J. Thomson to Mrs H. F. Reid, 4 November 1886

When Joseph John Thomson used this light-hearted description to brighten up a letter to a family friend, women had been attending physics lectures at the Cavendish Laboratory for four years. Though the picture was designed to amuse the recipient, a married woman, joviality thinly disguised unease. Thomson's previously homogeneous audience had been physically split into two opposing sections with young, male students at the back and older, female students along the front row. Intellectual divisions were also apparent; the women took notes in a different, non-male way, and without the sharpness of a masculine mind they could not understand the content. The message was plain – the women had made a mistake. Their infiltration had been unsuccessful and they did not fit in.

Much ink has been spilt in consideration of the once pervasive reliance on military metaphors to depict the relationships between science and religion in the nineteenth century. This has resulted in historically sensitive treatments of secularization; and the realization that the relationship between science and religion was not a bloody war between intellectual nation states, but a protracted divorce of former partners. Moreover, historians of science have been encouraged to throw off the yoke of the internalism–externalism debate, and to explore the cultural boundaries that impinged upon practitioners of a natural knowledge of the world. Within the historiography of nineteenth-century science, this has resulted in many new perspectives on science and natural knowledge in relation to cultural control and authority.

According to articles and books published at the end of the nineteenth century, the introduction of photography to astronomy was one of the most notable events in the discipline in a period chock full of important inventions and amazing discoveries. Edward Holden, director of the Lick Observatory in California, between 1887 and 1898, was rapturous about the promise of photography: it would simplify astronomical observation, increase the reliability of data and produce permanent records of the heavens untainted by distraction, ill discipline or bias. This would happen, he argued, because of the mechanical virtues of the camera:

It does not tire, as the eye does, and refuse to pay attention for more than a small fraction of a section, but it will faithfully record every ray of light that falls upon it even for hours and finally it will produce its automatic register [ctdot ] [that] can be measured, if necessary, again and again. The permanence of the records is of the greatest importance, and so far as we know it is complete [ctdot ] We can hand down to our successors a picture of the sky, locked in a box.