This book offers the first in-depth study of the masculine self-fashioning of scientific practitioners in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, it explores the complex and dynamic shifts in the public image of the British ‘man of science’ and questions the status of the natural scientist as a modern masculine hero. Until now, science has been examined by cultural historians primarily for evidence about the ways in which scientific discourses have shaped prevailing notions about women and supported the growth of oppressive patriarchal structures. This volume, by contrast, offers the first in-depth study of the importance of ideals of masculinity in the construction of the male scientist and British scientific culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the eighteenth-century identification of the natural philosopher with the reclusive scholar, to early nineteenth-century attempts to reinvent the scientist as a fashionable gentleman, to his subsequent reimagining as the epitome of Victorian moral earnestness and meritocracy, Heather Ellis analyzes the complex and changing public image of the British ‘man of science’.

Increasingly, critics accused practitioners of hiding hubris behind their purported humanity and questioned whether an increasingly professional scientific community could retain its grip on the meaning of compassion. This volume presents a set of responses to this criticism and others, showing the extent to which the lived-experience of scientific practice became a justification in and of itself for the expression of social, political and cultural authority. Bare knowledge, as it was presented, came with an enormous social valuation. These sources show how that authority changed and grew over time.

William Whewell, the famous master of Trinity College in Cambridge, was a central figure in nineteenth-century British scientific culture and one of the last great polymaths. His influential work ranged from history and philosophy of science, education, architecture, mineralogy, and political economy to mathematics, engineering, natural theology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy. Among his many gifts to science was his role as cofounder and president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and his wordsmithing; he coined the terms scientist, physicist, linguistics, and electrode. While he was himself an opponent of evolution through natural selection, Whewell’s most famous works, including his Bridgewater Treatise (1833) and Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), played a formative role in Charles Darwin’s creation of the theory of evolution. William Whewell: Victorian Polymath reexamines the whole of Whewell’s oeuvre, as well as the wide range and internal unity of his many polymathic endeavors, placing him within the early Victorian intellectual landscape and highlighting his exchanges with other important figures of the period, such as John Herschel, Charles Lyell, and Robert Peel. Bringing together a group of eminent and emergent scholars, the volume explores all major aspects of Whewell’s reform project and its legacy, both in the sciences and the humanities, in the Victorian era and beyond.

Virtues have become a valuable and relevant resource for understanding modern science and technology. Scientific practice requires not only following prescribed rules but also cultivating judgment, building mental habits, and developing proper emotional responses. The rich philosophical traditions around virtue can provide key insights into scientific research, including understanding how daily practice shapes scientists themselves and how ethical dilemmas created by modern scientific research and technology should be navigated. Science, Technology, and Virtues gathers both new and eminent scholars to show how concepts of virtue can help us better understand, construct, and use the products of modern science and technology. Contributors draw from examples across philosophy, history, sociology, political science, and engineering to explore how virtue theory can help orient science and technology towards the pursuit of the good life. Split into four major sections, this volume covers virtues in science, technology, epistemology, and research ethics, with individual chapters discussing applications of virtues to scientific practice, the influence of virtue ethics on socially responsible research, and the concept of "failing well" within the scientific community. Rather than offer easy solutions, the essays in this volume instead illustrate how virtue concepts can provide a productive and illuminating perspective on two phenomena at the core of modern life. Fresh and thought-provoking, Science, Technology, and Virtues presents a pluralistic set of scholarship to show how virtue concepts can enrich our understanding of scientific research, guide the design and use of new technologies, and shape how we envision future scientists, engineers, consumers, and citizens.

Debating Contemporary Approaches to the History of Science explores the main themes, problems and challenges currently at the top of the discipline's methodological agenda. In its chapters, established and emerging scholars introduce and discuss new approaches to the history of science and revisit older perspectives which remain crucial. Each chapter is followed by a critical commentary from another scholar in the field and the author's response. The volume looks at such topics as the importance of the 'global', 'digital', 'environmental', and 'posthumanist' turns for the history of science, and the possibilities for the field of moving beyond a focus on ideas and texts towards active engagement with materials and practices. It also addresses important issues about the relationship between history of science, on the one hand, and philosophy of science, history of knowledge and ignorance studies, on the other. With its innovative format, this volume provides an up-to-date, authoritative overview of the field, and also explores how and why the history of science is practiced. It is essential reading for students and scholars eager to keep a finger on the pulse of what is happening in the history of science today, and to contribute to where it might go next.

The astronomer’s observing chair as both image and object, and the story it tells about a particular kind of science and a particular view of history. The astronomer’s chair is a leitmotif in the history of astronomy, appearing in hundreds of drawings, prints, and photographs from a variety of sources. Nineteenth-century stargazers in particular seemed eager to display their observing chairs—task-specific, often mechanically adjustable observatory furniture designed for use in conjunction with telescopes. But what message did they mean to send with these images? In The Astronomer’s Chair, Omar W. Nasim considers these specialized chairs as both image and object, offering an original framework for linking visual and material cultures. Observing chairs, Nasim ingeniously argues, showcased and embodied forms of scientific labor, personae, and bodily practice that appealed to bourgeois sensibilities. Viewing image and object as connected parts of moral, epistemic, and visual economies of empire, Nasim shows that nineteenth-century science was represented in terms of comfort and energy, and that “manly” postures of Western astronomers at work in specialized chairs were contrasted pointedly with images of “effete” and cross-legged “Oriental” astronomers. Extending his historical analysis into the twentieth century, Nasim reexamines what he argues to be a famous descendant of the astronomer’s chair: Freud’s psychoanalytic couch, which directed observations not outward toward the stars but inward toward the stratified universe of the psyche. But whether in conjunction with the mind or the heavens, the observing chair was a point of entry designed for specialists that also portrayed widely held assumptions about who merited epistemic access to these realms in the first place. With more than 100 illustrations, many in color; flexibound.

This open access book considers science and empire, and the stories we tell ourselves about them. Using British Nobel laureate Ronald Ross (1857-1932) and his colleagues as access points to a wider professional culture, Empire Under the Microscope explores the cultural history of parasitology and its relationships with the literary and historical imagination between 1885 and 1935. Emilie Taylor-Pirie examines a wealth of archival material including medical lectures, scientific publications, popular biography, and personal and professional correspondence, alongside novels, poems, newspaper articles, and political speeches, to excavate the shared vocabularies of literature and medicine. She demonstrates how forms such as poetry and biography; genres such as imperial romance and detective fiction; and modes such as adventure and the Gothic, together informed how tropical diseases, their parasites, and their vectors, were understood in relation to race, gender, and nation. From Ancient Greece, to King Arthur’s Knights, to the detective work of Sherlock Holmes, parasitologists manipulated literary and historical forms of knowledge in their professional self-fashioning to create a modern mythology that has a visible legacy in relationships between science and society today.

Developed out of a 2015 conference of the History of Education Society, UK, this book explores the interconnections between the histories of science, technologies and material culture, and the history of education. The contributions express a shared concern over the extent to which the history of science and technology and the history of education are too frequently written about separately from each other despite being intimately connected. This state of affairs, they suggest, is linked to broader divisions in the history of knowledge, which has, for many years, been carved up into sections reflective of the academic subject divisions that structure modern universities and higher education in the West. Most noticeably this has occurred with the history of science, but more recently the history of humanities has been divided as well. The contributions to this volume demonstrate the diversity and originality of research currently being conducted into the connections between the history of science and the history of education. The importance of objects in teaching and their value as pedagogical tools emerges as a particularly significant area of research located at the intersection between the two fields of enquiry. Indeed, it is the materiality of education, a focus on the use of objects, pedagogical practices and particular spaces, which seems to offer some of the most promising avenues for exploring further the relationship between the histories of science and education. This book was originally published as a special issue of the History of Education.

Claiming Indigenous Plant Knowledge: From Botanical Exchanges to Resource Extraction in the Indian Ocean World examines the collection and documentation of the natural world’s development over the course of the nineteenth century into a vast network of scientists who attempted to categorize and understand nature, particularly in the botanically rich Indian Ocean. But the process of collecting plants and exchanging knowledge about the natural world went far beyond the labor of botanists and naturalists. Naturalists depended on many groups for regional knowledge and local information about the uses, names, and value of plants. Publications and archival materials included local and indigenous knowledge of nature, but as exploration led to colonial expansion and botany became a professional science, local and indigenous knowledge moved to the periphery of botanical writing. Local knowledge never stopped being important, but the act of discovery and the claiming (perhaps even colonization) of botanical knowledge became the limited sphere of professional botanists. Indigenous peoples involved in the early days of collecting never stopped their activities, but professionals failed to acknowledge their labor and expertise. By the end of the century, colonial administrations used botanic information collected by professionals to convert colonies into natural resource extraction zones. This shift disrupted indigenous lifeways in the Indian Ocean World and led to environmental issues facing the region today.

This book investigates the historical construction of scholarly personae by integrating a spectrum of recent perspectives from the history and cultural studies of knowledge and institutions. Focusing on gender and embodiment, the contributors analyse the situated performance of scholarly identity and its social and intellectual contexts and consequences. Disciplinary cultures, scholarly practices, personal habits, and a range of social, economic, and political circumstances shape the people and formations of modern scholarship. Featuring a foreword by Ludmilla Jordanova, Gender, Embodiment, and the History of the Scholarly Persona: Incarnations and Contestations is of interest to historians, sociologists, media and culture scholars, and all those with a stake in the personal dimensions of scholarship. An international group of scholars present original examinations of travel, globalisation, exchange, training, evaluation, self-representation, institution-building, norm-setting, virtue-defining, myth-making, and other gendered and embodied modes and mechanisms of scholarly persona-work. These accounts nuance and challenge existing understandings of the relationship between knowledge and identity.