THE background to Halley's visit to Cambridge in August 1684 was a chance conversation of the previous January. By his own account, Halley had been contemplating celestial mechanics. From Kepler's third law, he had concluded that the centripetal force toward the sun must decrease in proportion to the square of the distance of the planets from the sun. Halley wrote his account in the summer of 1686 after he had read two successive versions of what became Book I of the Principia. Since Newton coined the word “centripetal” after January 1684, Halley could not have framed his conclusion using that word, and he probably did not use the concept, either. The context of his statement implied that he arrived at the inverse-square relation by substituting Kepler's third law into Huygens's recently published formula for centrifugal force. He was not the only one who made the substitution. After Hooke raised the cry of plagiary in 1686, Newton recalled a conversation with Sir Christopher Wren in 1677 in which they had considered the problem “of Determining the Hevenly motions upon philosophicall principles.” He had realized that Wren had also arrived at the inverse-square law. When, at Newton's request, Halley asked Wren about the conversation, Wren told him that for many years he “had had his thoughts upon making out the Planets motions by a composition of a Descent towards the sun, & an imprest motion …,” but he had not been able to solve the problem.

CRISES racked the institution to which Newton moved in the spring of 1696. Indeed, the Mint was an institution within an institution within an institution, all three of which faced crises. The recoinage engaged every pinch of energy at the Mint. The Treasury, of which the Mint was a relatively minor department, devoted equal energy to devising temporary expedients and new machinery to cope with overwhelming financial needs. The English state and the revolutionary settlement it embodied balanced precariously on the outcome of the Treasury's efforts. In proclaiming William of Orange as its king in 1689, England had perforce embraced his foreign policy of resistance to French expansion. Although the ensuing war was known as King William's war, England would have found it impossible to stand aloof in any case, for the France of Louis XIV threatened its security only less than the security of William's native Netherlands. On a scale that exceeded previous wars, with a large English army in permanent operation on the Continent in addition to the naval operations England preferred, the war placed financial demands far beyond any precedent on the state. In 1696, it was not clear that the demands would be met. If they were not, if national bankruptcy ensued, the revolutionary settlement would undoubtedly collapse before a second Stuart restoration. In the larger crises of the government and its finances Newton was not involved beyond his concern as an Englishman committed to the revolution.

With these trenchant words, Susan Cannon has recently placed a bomb under the whole state of scholarship of eighteenth-century science. What lies behind these devastating criticisms?

The last generation has wrought a revolution in the history of science. As it was written thirty years ago, history of science, with honourable exceptions, essentially celebrated the biography of humble genius and the triumphal progress of discoveries along the royal road of truth. The history of science was the spaniel of science itself.

If one poses, for a science such as theoretical physics or organic chemistry, the problem of its relations with the political and economic structure of society, doesn't one pose a problem which is too complicated? Isn't the threshold of possible explanation placed too high? If, on the other hand, one takes a knowledge [savoir] such as psychiatry, won't the question be much easier to resolve, since psychiatry has a low epistemological profile, and since psychiatric practice is tied to a whole series of institutions, immediate economic exigencies and urgent political pressures for social regulation? Cannot the interrelation of effects of knowledge and power be more securely grasped in the case of a science as ‘doubtful’ as psychiatry? It is this same question that I wanted to pose, in The Birth of the Clinic apropos of medicine: it certainly has a much stronger scientific structure than psychiatry, but it is also very deeply involved in the social structures.

Introduction

The eighteenth century was a period of particular importance for chemistry since it witnessed a transformation usually described as “the chemical revolution”. At the end of the seventeenth century writers of chemistry books continued to think it necessary to apologize for their study, since it was still confused with alchemy, and to explain that: “Chymistry is a true and real Art, and (when handled by prudent Artists) produceth true and real effects”. Yet by the beginning of the nineteenth century chemistry was seen by many people as the outstanding example of a successful science, and one which was recruiting the best brains. As the astronomer Delambre remarked in 1808: “the revolution recently brought about in chemistry could not happen without turning many experimentalists a little out of their ordinary course, when they saw in a neighbouring science a road opened that promised more numerous discoveries”. As the ‘chemical revolution’ occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century, it is appropriate for this chapter to focus on the period after 1750, while giving some consideration to the wider period with the influence of Issaac Newton (d. 1727) and culminating in the reception and development of the work of Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794).

Introduction

Representations of nature in scientific culture have been widely used to comment upon the social order. Such social uses have not, however, greatly interested historians of science. They routinely consider their business to be the study of the generation and evaluation of scientific knowledge. Social uses of scientific knowledge are conceived to occur in another context from the contexts of production and evaluation of science. How science may be socially used can, therefore, be of little material concern either to the scientists who produce the knowledge, or a fortiori to the historians who study the scientists. Thus, the significance accorded to studies of the social uses of science rests upon an historiographical demarcation between contexts of social use and contexts more routinely treated by historians of science. And, as is often the case, the demarcation expresses an evaluation - in this instance a negative assessment of the historical significance of studies of social uses of science. These evaluations and the attendant demarcations are faulty. It will therefore be necessary to state as clearly as possible, even at the risk of some oversimplification, what these largely implicit historiographical assumptions are.

These include the notion that individuals in an esoteric sub-culture generate scientific knowledge by contemplating nature and ‘rationally’ assessing their findings. The context wherein science is produced and judged is argued (or, more commonly, assumed) to be separable from other contexts.

‘We’, wrote a late-eighteenth-century English author, ‘are doing the drudgery by which the Golden Age is to profit’, and, he added, ‘Perhaps some other power may be discovered, as forcible and as manageable as the evaporation from boiling water - another gunpowder that may supersede the present - and other applications of mechanical powers which may make our present wonders sink into vulgar performances’. These forecasts were remarkable, for the first evidently predicts, accurately enough, the wealth and good fortune of nineteenth-century England, while the second foreshadows the characteristic achievements of the twentieth century. And, moreover, they set the eighteenth century in a context; not a golden age, as the writer admitted, for he designated his own time a ‘silver age’, but when compared with the troubled if brilliant seventeenth century a time of consolidation and reasonable, measured progress.

The background

The widespread changes associated with the ‘industrial revolution’ in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century became apparent William Jackson, The Four Ages (1798), 60, 92. after 1815. Babbage, Dupin, Ure and others toured the industrial areas and reported on the new industries from both the social and the engineering and scientific points of view. Strangely, the economists such as Ricardo and Nassau Senior seem to have been uninterested in the latter, and thus contributed to a culture gap that persisted a long time. From that period onward we can distinguish three separate academic disciplines: the history of technology, economic history and the history of science.

Introduction

Ours is not the first generation to be preoccupied with modernity, nor the first to search for clues as to when ‘our’ kind of medicine began. Conventional wisdom generally locates that origin in the Revolutionary Paris of the 1790s. Thus, R. H. Shryock's chapter on early-nineteenth-century French medicine is entitled ‘The emergence of modern medicine, 1800-1850’, and the ‘clinic’ described by Michel Foucault does not simply concern the activities of Bichat and Laennec, but also the ‘conditions of possibility of medical experience in modern times’. This French hospital medicine coincided with political and social upheaval and with ‘the end of the Enlightenment’, a fact which deepens the apparent chasm separating our medicine from that of the Enlightenment and before.

If our own medicine derives in some important sense from the hospitals of Revolutionary France, the medical forms, patterns, and practices of the Enlightenment can be viewed in two antithetical ways: as having created the possibility of modernity; or, by way of reaction, the ultimate victim of it. The latter has been the more common historical attitude. Thus Shryock, while applauding eighteenth-century advances in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and the social sciences, discovered a variety of social and intellectual reasons why medicine lagged behind.

Introduction

In most historical accounts of mathematics and mechanics, the eighteenth century is recognized as a separate period. But that recognition seems conditioned less by the characteristics of eighteenthcentury mathematical science itself, than by the fact that the eighteenth century straddles two exciting periods in the development of mathematics and mechanics: the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. The seventeenth century saw the creation of algebraical symbolism by Viète and Descartes, of analytical geometry by Descartes and Fermat, the beginning of a mathematical theory of chance through Pascal, Fermat and Huygens, the foundation of classical mechanics by Galileo, Huygens and Newton, and the invention of the calculus by Newton and Leibniz. And the nineteenth century witnessed the foundation of rigorous analysis through Cauchy and Weierstrass, the creation of complex function theory by Cauchy, Riemann and Weierstrass, the emergence of new schools in geometry, projective geometry and non-Euclidean geometry in the work of Poncelet, von Staudt and others, new extensions of mathematical physics in relation to the theory of heat and electricity, the creation of modern algebra through Galois, Dedekind and Kronecker, and the beginnings of set theory and foundational studies of mathematics in the works of Cantor.

Available historical accounts create distinct pictures of both these periods, with persons and achievements clearly placed in the foreground - images well structured in the common memory of the community of mathematical scientists. The eighteenth century does not enjoy such clarity.

During the eighteenth century natural philosophy - or fisica, physique, physica, Naturlehre - broke loose from the place in the organization of knowledge that it had occupied since antiquity. The scientific revolutionaries of the seventeenth century, however much they altered the principles and doctrines of physics, had left it with the purpose, method and coverage assigned to it by Aristotle. Eighteenth-century ferments decomposed and recombined it, drove off old parts, fixed new ones, and restructured its bonds with the body of knowledge.

We do not find an answering ferment among historians of eighteenth-century physics. That is not because they are few or idle. Perhaps as many as one historian of science in ten works on eighteenthcentury physics. Almost 10 per cent of the articles published during the past twenty years in the leading general journals - Isis and Revue d'histoire des sciences - concern the subject. About one half of these articles relate to experimental physics and the making of instruments. These figures are representative. Over the past fifty years the moderate but sustained investigation of eighteenth-century experimental physics has produced over 300 books and papers that are noticed in the Isis lists or in the bibliographies in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography.

This literature contains much information of great value. But it offers little in the way of helpful generalization or periodization.

The globe as subject

With few exceptions, historians of science have paid little attention to a major branch of natural philosophy in the eighteenth century: the science of the system of the earth and its products. Distinguished general surveys, such as those of Dampier, Singer, Hall, Gillispie and Taton, have no connected analysis of the sciences of the terraqueous globe. The volume Natural Philosophy through the Eighteenth Century barely mentions the physical environment. Most historians of science are still writing (sometimes Whiggish) ‘tunnel histories’, tracing the progress of modern scientific disciplines, rather than exploring the cognitive landscapes of the past. And much scholarship in this field remains stubbornly biographical rather than problem-oriented.

Why has there been this neglect of the sciences of the physical environment, of the earth as such? It is partly a reflection of the focusing down of science itself, where formerly dominant all-embracing frameworks, like the Great Chain of Being, have splintered into specialties like palaeobotany and seismology. It is partly also a response to persuasive philosophies of science. Ever since the influential classifications of natural knowledge by Comte, J. S. Mill and Jevons, leading philosophers have argued that the ideal science is one of universal categories, amenable to abstraction and quantification. Thus physics rather than the ‘extensive’ environmental sciences becomes their model.