The metaphor of “the ghastly kitchen” of life science research, the places that, said the nineteenth-century physiologist Claude Bernard, stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life,” is well known. In the seventeenth century, the kitchen, and particularly the scullery, was the site of the slaughter, butchery, and dismemberment by carving of a variety of animals. The tools and techniques employed in these activities overlapped considerably with those of animal and human dissection. Dissection often took place in residences and the (...) kitchen was the most likely place for this activity. This challenges historians’ identification of the kitchen as an exclusively female realm. The preparation of food and medicines occurred in tandem with experimental natural philosophy, sharing tools as well as the sensory apparatus of cooking, including tasting and smelling. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In 1730, shortly before his death, the Paris anatomist Joseph‐Guichard Duverney wrote his will, leaving his anatomical specimens to the Académie des Sciences, of which he was a member. But the will was disputed by Pierre Chirac, supervisor of the Jardin du Roi where Duverney, as professor of anatomy, had performed most of the dissections that produced the specimens. The ensuing debate between Chirac and René‐Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, arguing for the Académie, reveals the tensions surrounding both the concept (...) of intellectual property in this period and the collective enterprise in natural philosophy. The differing roles and audiences of the Académie and the Jardin were central to this debate. In addition, this essay explores the origins and significance of the anatomical specimens themselves and their changing role in instruction and display, as well as the transition from the cabinet of curiosities to the natural history museum. (shrink)

Summary This essay explores the place of natural philosophy among the patronage projects of Louis XIV, focusing on the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (or Histoire des animaux) of the 1670s, one of a number of works of natural philosophy to issue from Louis XIV's printing house. Questions particular to the Histoire des animaux include the interaction between text and image, the credibility and authority of images of exotic animals, and the relationship between comparative anatomy and natural (...) history, and between human and animal anatomy. At the same time that the Histoire des animaux contributed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert's management of patronage and of Louis's image, it was a work of natural philosophy, representing the collaborative efforts of the new Paris Academy of Sciences. It examined natural history and comparative anatomy in new ways, and its illustrations broke new ground in their depiction of animals in a natural setting. However, the lavishly formatted books were presentation volumes and did not gain wide circulation until their republication in 1733. Sources consulted include Colbert's manuscript memoires on the royal printers and engravers. (shrink)

Defining experiment was particularly vexed in the realm of anatomical dissection and vivisection. Was dissection merely descriptive, or something more? Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood and Aselli's discovery of the so-called lacteal veins shaped much anatomical research between the late 1620s and the 1650s. While the techniques of dissection and vivisection gained wide use, there was much debate on the validity of the circulation in particular, and its relationship to the lacteal veins. Critics, particularly the French anatomist (...) Jean Riolan, but also the natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi, focused on the lack of causation in Harvey's method and the lack of medical use and not on his use of vivisection. Jean Pecquet's discovery of the thoracic duct in 1651 changed the terms of the debate by definitively connecting the circulation with the lacteals. Riolan's critiques of Pecquet in the 1650s show profoundly differing notions of the purpose of dissection. While Gassendi eventually accepted Harvey's concept of the circulation, Riolan never did. (shrink)

Historians who work with materials in languages other than their own inevitably do quite a bit of translation in the course of their research and writing. Much of this consists of words, phrases, or sentences, and much remains unpublished. This essay looks at the author’s experiences with this sort of translation as well as with more formal published translation, with a focus on early modern French and Latin.

Both The Ferment of Knowledge and Geoffrey Cantor’s essay review defined the “eighteenth-century problem” in terms of the lack of a totalizing vision. Forty years on, the problem has shifted to the appropriation of eighteenth-century science by both the political left and the right. As historians grapple with the legacies of slavery and colonialism, an emerging theme is material culture and its “entanglements.” The subject of this essay, collections and collecting, is central to this new historiography. Collections included antiq­uities, natural (...) history, anatomy, and ethnographic objects. My focus will be on human skeletal collections. Historians who have considered skeletal collec­tions have focused mainly on the later eighteenth century and on developing concepts of race and geological time. But their significance is much broader. Collecting entailed entanglements both of cultures and of genres. Such collections could be medical, geological, aesthetic, taxonomic, or all or none of these. Case studies of collections of human bones, skeletons, and skulls reveal a different eighteenth century from that which the historians of 1980 envisaged, and bring questions of value and values to the centre of our reading of history. (shrink)

I am the first to admit that my career has not followed a conventional path. But in talking to my colleagues, I am not sure that there is a conventional path to an academic career. This retrospective is both a look at how the profession has changed over the forty years since I began graduate school in the late 1970s, and a reflection on my own trajectory within that profession. Historiographical references reflect my own views and are not meant to (...) be comprehensive. I first discovered the history of science as an undergraduate history major at Connecticut College in the early 1970s. The course of physics for non-majors I took with David Fenton was based on Harvard Project Physics, which had been developed in the 1960s by two professors of science education, F. James Rutherford and Fletcher G. Watson, and the historian of science Gerald Holton. We actually wrote term papers for the class; mine was on the theory that Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory. (shrink)

(2010). The representation of animals in the early modern period. Annals of Science: Vol. 67, The Representation of Animals in the Early Modern Period, pp. 299-301. doi: 10.1080/00033790.2010.488139.

Evan Ragland’s Making Physicians looks at medical education at the University of Leiden from its founding in 1575 until 1639. It forms a prequel to a second volume, Experimental Medicine, that cove...

The aim of this special issue is to address issues surrounding the use of live animals in experimental procedures in the pre-modern era, with a special emphasis on the technical, anatomical, and philosophical sides. Such use raises philosophical, scientific, and ethical questions about the nature of life, the reliability of the knowledge acquired, and animal suffering.