Over the past twenty-five years, history of science has expanded into history of knowledge. Plurality has been the main message. Commonality, by contrast, is the main finding of the present study. It examines the knowledge practices of the full range of participants in cases of public inquiry—trials, tests, inspections—involving human bodies in contexts of criminal law, police, public health, marriage and family, claims to community aid, and regulation of trades. The cases come from the archives of three agencies of inquiry (...) and evaluation—a government, a university faculty, and a guild—in a variety of polities in the Holy Roman Empire between about 1500 and 1650. Participants of widely differing education, occupation, and experience—learned, artisanal, and domestic, as well as specialized versions of these—are found to have shared practices of observation, description, explanation, and argument. This finding opens the prospect of a history of shared empirical rationality, in contrast to the hegemony of difference, dialogue or transfer, and “expertise,” in how we understand knowing in modern as well as premodern Europe. (shrink)

This essay draws a new picture of the science of bacteria in its 'golden age', circa 1880-1900: the organization of its knowledge and practice, its germ theory of disease, the difference between its two major research traditions, and, above all, its place in life science in this period that bristled with theories and debates over inheritance, variation, selection, evolution and that witnessed the transition from natural history to laboratory biology. Pasteur and Koch's science acquired this biological dimension not despite being (...) outside academic biology, nor despite the limitations of its applied, medical matrix, but rather because of that framework. The very practices of vaccine development constituted, at the same time, a new biological model of bacterial species and variation, which aligned them with other living things. Finally, the new picture reveals unsuspected continuity to later microbiology and molecular biology. In illuminating the self-perceptions of these sciences in relation to the past, it situates and opens a critical perspecive on writings by bacteriologists such as Ludwik Fleck, François Jacob and René Dubos, which have widely informed how we understand science. (shrink)

What was classification as it first took modern form in the eighteenth century, how did it work, and how did it relate to earlier describing and ordering? We offer new answers to these questions by considering an example less well known than that of botany or zoology, namely medicine, and by reconstructing practice on paper. The first and best-known disease classification is the “nosology” of the Montpellier physician François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix. Its several editions, we show, were less (...) products than process: published tools for building a classification system. The disorder of a hitherto unstudied notebook that Boissier de Sauvages kept throughout this process provided a way of breaking with the topical order of earlier physicians’ humanistic commonplace books of disease observation while sustaining the paper practices those earlier physicians—and Sauvages himself as a student—had used to order disease. This suggests a different picture of historical change than that of a scholarly world of ordered words giving way to a scientific one of ordered things. Classification, in the case of Sauvages’ nosology, arose through an incomplete break with, and intensified practice of, a past way of ordering the described world. The humanist paper practice that had made observationes, differently applied, now made species. Classification into genera and species by similarity and difference, which Sauvages’ nosology shared with botany, was an algorithm of paper and ink practice—in its operation more machine-like than humanist textual practice yet in its effects more creative and re-creative of categories and questions of relationship. Thus a new empiricism of generalizations arose out of the older, Renaissance empiricism of particulars. (shrink)