At the beginning of this book I set out to answer the question of what nineteenth-century physics is. I proposed to deal with this complex question through a case study of the communication of physics in nineteenth-century France and England, focused on the production, circulation and appropriation of Ganot's and Atkinson's textbooks. Ganot's physique was born in the margins of the French scientific and educational elite and it has occupied a marginal position in the current historiography of physics. However, as we have seen, this is not historically accurate, for Ganot's physique and Atkinson's physics were granted a canonical status in nineteenth-century French and British culture.

The study of Ganot's textbook physics tells us that nineteenth-century physics was more medical, chemical and pedagogical than considered by the standard historiography of nineteenth-century physics. It defines physics as a subject based on experimental and instrument design, in which theory and conceptual unification played a secondary role. It shows that the making of physics as a discipline was a business driven by the interaction of research and pedagogy, and the tension between pedagogical practices, practices of book production and reading practices. And it stresses the key role that persistent communication across different cultural, social and national contexts had in the making of physics.

The medical and chemical character of nineteenth-century physics is clear in taking into account the major educational reforms which shaped the development of a workforce in the making of physics as a discipline.