This article examines the practice of post-mortem examination in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815). The professional medical logbooks kept by ship’s surgeons as part of their mandated practice reveal that they turned to pathological anatomy to diagnose their patients – a technique typically associated with French anatomy during this period. I show that these post-mortem dissections blended medicine and surgery together by correlating clinical signs and symptoms of disease with pathological manifestations of disease in the bodies after death. This article also considers the medical culture that existed on these ships that enabled this research, specifically how captains, officers and crew responded to, and interpreted, such medical enquiry on board. By resituating the naval ship as a site of medical experimentation and enquiry, I explore how naval surgeons participated in medical research within the Royal Navy and used the ship space to engage in pathological anatomy before their British civilian counterparts flocked to French hospitals after the wars.

During the forty-thousand-mile voyage of HMS Beagle (1831–6) Charles Darwin compiled an extensive corpus of manuscript materials, containing a highly specialized chromatic vocabulary. Darwin’s dedicated use of binomial colour terms, such as ‘aurora red’, ‘orpiment orange’ and ‘gamboge yellow’, was the result of his regular consultation of a work popular among British naturalists: Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours (1821) by Patrick Syme. A copy of this compact colour manual was among Darwin’s ‘most useful’ possessions on the Beagle. Now held in Cambridge University Library (DAR LIB T.620), Darwin’s copy of Syme’s book evidences both the difficulties of capturing accurate colour in exploratory natural history and the mechanisms by which this was attempted. Mining the Beagle archive for representations of coloured phenomena, this article reveals for the first time the extent of Darwin’s reliance on Werner’s Nomenclature for collecting and communicating chromatic data, across distance and against the fugitive, subjective and shifting nature of natural hues.

Between 1814 and 1826 four members of the family of Jane Talbot and her cousin William Henry Fox Talbot had an active and varied interest in the study of mosses, which included the collecting, drawing and naming of specimens. This article explores the textures of their developing practice of learning natural history, and considers their activities within the framework of the circulation of knowledge, their reading and skill development, and the networks that supported them. Their social status and connections provided access to the expertise of numerous British botanists, including Lewis Weston Dillwyn, William Jackson Hooker, and James Dalton, placing the family as a locus of knowledge (re)production and transmission. This work illustrates the pedagogical practices of an elite group as they engaged with botany in a domestic setting, and makes suggestions as to their motivations and stimulations, as well as the conditions that maintained or diminished their interest. At a time when mosses were little-studied even by professed botanists, it demonstrates how a family group including many young women filled their leisure pursuits with these small plants, and reveals how an extended family with no previous expertise in formal botany could be actors in early nineteenth-century knowledge exchange.

In the latter half of the eighteenth century, British civil engineers strove to enhance their status and assert the identity of their developing profession. Alongside associational and visual cultures, one means of achieving a sense of community was through the formation of a shared literary culture. As a profession notorious for what Torrens described as ‘papyrophobia’, it is perhaps surprising that many engineers, in this period, read widely and wrote extensively. John Smeaton (1724–92), for example, valued good authorship and experimented widely with literary form. James Brindley (1716–72), his contemporary, wrote sparingly, but nevertheless generated a literary strategy in support of his projects. Other engineers, such as John Phillips (fl. 1785–1813), made use of their engineering background and of engineering literature to create alternative careers. By exploring how mid- to late eighteenth-century engineers wrote, in order to persuade and to educate others as well as to publicize, record and defend their professional decisions, this paper will show how their reputations were dependent on literary constructions as much as on physical ones.

Prognosis is an important aspect of any scientific culture. Speculation and imagination about future knowledge, social organization and technology pervade the practice of science and lend it aim and direction (or at least the appearance of direction). This article is about the development of prognosis in the fiction and popular-scientific writing of Jane Webb Loudon (1800–58), a writer familiar within the history of science for her publications in botany and gardening, if not for her romantic novel The Mummy!, one of the earliest examples of the genre later known as science fiction. I argue that Webb Loudon viewed scientific activity as declining and flourishing throughout human history, and that she anticipated the science of her time would ‘resuscitate’ knowledge and even political structures of past eras (like ancient Egypt). Following the work of Jim Endersby and other historians of science who have worked to reintegrate the role of fiction in our understanding of science culture, I argue that Webb Loudon’s efforts to promote and diffuse her understanding of science and its relation to the future (and past) ought be viewed as informing the cultural meaning of science in the nineteenth century.

In this paper, I argue that Johann Christoph Sturm’s eclectic scientific method reveals an unexpected indebtedness to Francis Bacon’s thought. Sturm’s reception of Bacon is particularly surprising given that the German academic context in the second half of the seventeenth century was still largely Aristotelian. Sturm is indebted to Bacon in the following respects: (1) the critique of the current state of knowledge, (2) eclecticism, (3) a fluid transition from natural history to natural philosophy, (4) the conception of science as hypothetical and dynamic and (5) experimental philosophy and the use of instruments. Given that Sturm mentions Francis Bacon in important places in his work, these respects should not easily be dismissed as commonplace. Bacon is one of Sturm’s salient sources and they are both deeply concerned with a thoroughgoing reform of existing scientific practices.