Ed. Note: Readers of this column are aware that recent articles have been devoted to ways in which survey and introductory courses in American and European history can be broadened to include social history and the history of science. The editor welcomes additional papers that focus on how art, music, literature, economics, and other, often neglected, areas can be incorporated into survey and Advanced Placement courses. Papers that discuss special projects, techniques, or teaching methods (e.g., computer use, working with documents) are also welcome. Please send manuscripts or letters of interest to Professor Robert Blackey, Chair, Department of History, California State University, San Bernardino, 5500 University Parkway, San Bernardino, CA 92407-2397.
An enterprising publisher recently is sued several volumes containing course syllabi used by prominent American historians in universities across the United States. They make interesting and, on the whole, encouraging reading. The political, economic, and social history of the United States is treated with great skill.
Consequently, a serious student could not take any of the survey courses described in these volumes without learning a great deal about the origins of the various wars and reform movements that have punctuated American history, about race relations and foreign relations, about the rise of big business and the history of the labor movement. The assorted “isms” of intellectual history, although rarely spotlighted, usually occupy a few sessions: Puritanism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, socialism, and liberalism among others.
But one dish is notably absent from this banquet: the history of science. To judge by these survey courses in American history, it would seem that science was and is a very minor part of American culture, occupying a position some what inferior to that of history itself.
Our students of course must know otherwise. Science buildings dominate academic campuses; science is touted and condemned on the nightly news; foreigners fear, admire, and emulate American scientific and technological achievements; the newsstands hawk scores of more or less reputable science magazines; advertisers use science to flog their products; and politicians and industrialists debate science policy. Even those unconscious of the past find in the present overwhelming evidence testifying to the importance of science to our economy, politics, and culture. Alert students will naturally wonder about when, how, and why science came to occupy this position; our history courses give them few clues.
The disparity between the role of science in our lives and its role in our history courses demands some explanation. It would be easy to say that general historians lack the technical sophistication to understand the history of science or that historians of science lack the literary skill to attract readers from the humanities. Yet neither of these arguments carries much force. Few historians have managed to evade all contact with science during their educations, and many have strong scientific credentials.
… students deserve to he acquainted with some of the questions defined and explored by historians of science, technology, and medicine from recent years.
More important, much history of science is written for the non-scientist. There is nothing forbiddingly technical in Charles E. Rosenberg’s sparkling essays on the interplay of science and American values in the nineteenth century or in Daniel J. Kevles’s magnificent book on the development of the discipline of physics in America.
Just as in any special branch of history, the history of science offers a spectrum of approaches and styles. General historians may find little use for a close analysis of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s fruit fly experiments or Robert A. Millikan’s cosmic ray research, but they will benefit from studies that set the lives and works of such scientists within the broader context of American society, institutions, and culture. Most historians of science are today far closer to general historians in their values and interests than they are to scientists; it makes little sense to array historians of science opposite humanists along C. P. Snow’s two culture divide.
If mutual antipathies between science and the humanities do not explain general historians’ peculiar neglect of the history of science, what does? Here, as historians are wont to do, it is useful to look to the past. A generation or two ago, when the history of science was just beginning to coalesce as an academic discipline, scientists and non-scientists alike held firmly to a few simple generalizations about the nature of science and its role in history. Science was seen as a logic machine that worked according to its own laws. It was objective and impersonal; it stood above and beyond the realm of human action.
Indeed, science was believed to be progressive in ways that other human enterprises were not because it transcended the foibles and stupidities of individual actors. It needed only freedom and money to prosper, and of these freedom was most important. Religious dogma and totalitarian ideology were its enemies. Science was the powerful engine of progress; it pulled in its train technology, medicine, and the other arts that shared science’s progressive character. Francis Bacon’s aphorism was little doubted: “Human knowledge and human power meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced.”
Leaving aside the interesting question of why near unanimity existed on these issues, it is worth noting that these beliefs made pedagogy simple. By invoking a few simple bromides, general historians could relieve themselves of their duty to integrate science into the story of civilization. Those teaching American history could explain America’s rise to scientific leadership in the twentieth century by referring to the money and freedom the United States afforded its scientists. The integration of science into American culture could be described as a kind of warfare in which science won inevitable victories over theology and ignorance. The lengthening of life spans could be described as a logical consequence of the development of scientific medicine; the quickening pace of technological change could be explained as a natural consequence of the infusion of science into industry. Science, according to this view, transformed America during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the nature of science and the way in which it accomplished these results seemed so mechanical and so obvious as to be historically uninteresting. Historians ignored the history of science a generation ago because so much of it seemed so dull. In truth, it was dull.
During the past thirty years, however, all of the simple and seemingly self evident verities cited above have been called in question by historians and philosophers of science and by historians of technology and medicine. Science no longer appears as impersonal and objective as it once seemed. If scientists achieve progress, Thomas Kuhn tells us, it is not because they obey special and inflexible rules but rather because they work within social structures that are unusually efficient in defining and solving problems. Others, more extreme, assert that scientific progress is illusory and that science is simply a tool used by interest groups to maintain and extend their political and social power.
Just as the progressive nature of scientific knowledge has been challenged, so too have old assumptions about the relations between science and technology, medicine, and religious belief. To day, few specialists in the history of technology would accord science a central role in the development of technology prior to about 1870 or argue for a simple uni-directional model of the relationship between science and technological change in the decades since. Scientific knowledge is one among many resources that inventors or engineers may draw upon, but the precise contribution that science makes to technology varies from case to case. Engineers often work outside the realm within which scientific theory has useful guidance to offer. Where once simple answers sufficed, historians of technology now struggle to find ways to express the complexity of the issue with which they deal.
Much the same could be said of recent scholarship on the relations between science and medicine. Where there was once consensus there is controversy. How and why medical doctors began to identify their profession with the basic sciences is now hotly debated; some deny that scientific medicine had a major impact on mortality rates; some even question whether the basic sciences have made significant contributions to therapeutics.
As for the warfare between science and religion, those patient enough to search will find many shades of opinion in the secondary literature. By and large historians of science seem far more interested in understanding the role of religious values in nurturing the scientific enterprise than in developing or supporting the old warfare thesis. Careful studies of the relations between science and religious belief, pioneered by Robert K. Merton, have shown that scientists, as often as not, have shared the values and religious assumptions of their times and that science and religion have often reinforced one another and drawn strength from common sources. What was once a picture so simple as to be dull has very rapidly become so complex as to be bewildering. Faced with so much uncertainty about such basic issues, it is understandable why historians teaching survey courses might wish to skirt the history of science. The risks of crossing such terrain are great, and there are always fields in political or social history which, complex as they may be, are more safely and easily traversed by both teacher and student.
A little reflection, however, is sufficient to show how wrong this response is. We do not typically organize our courses around the material that is easiest for ourselves and our students; nor do we typically eschew that which can not be expressed by a few simple maxims. The controversy, the counter-intuitive findings, and the uncertainties of the history of science should be seen as opportunities and not headaches by those teaching survey courses. Unsettling as it may be—or better, because it is unsettling—students deserve to be acquainted with some of the questions defined and explored by historians of science, technology, and medicine from recent years. At the very least, they should be led to examine those old verities which, despite recent scholarship, are still uncritically accepted by most young men and women entering college: that science is an impersonal and objective force that is independent of the politics, values, and beliefs of its practitioners and patrons; that basic science undergirds technology and always has; that scientific medicine had an integral role in the demographic revolution of the past two centuries; and that science and religion have historically been implacable adversaries. Liberally educated men and women should not only know that science has an important place in our society, but that we are only beginning to understand why that is so and how it came to be.
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There are as many ways to integrate these issues into survey courses in American history as there are teachers of such courses. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that most teachers of American history already deal with such topics as industrialization, the secularization of thought and society, and the growth of the professions. It takes little effort to imagine how one might move from these topics to a consideration of the issues outlined above. It is, for instance, quite natural to discuss technological change in connection with the growth of industry.
On the other hand, challenge students to name a science-based invention developed prior to 1870. Unless one adopts an exceedingly loose definition of science, the list will be very short. A question like this breeds discussion of the separability of knowing and doing. It suggests that links between the enterprises of science and technology are historically contingent. And it prepares students to ask how and why the relations between science and technology changed during the past century or so- queries that are best treated by following the development of a specific industry or technology. It is equally natural to weave a discussion of the relationship between science and religious belief into a treatment of the secularization of American culture or a discussion of the role of science in medicine into a treatment of the professions.
However one chooses to integrate the history of science into the history of the American people, there are certain books and articles that should make the task easier for both instructors and students. On the history of science as a field of scholarship, readers will do well to read Thomas S. Kuhn’s lucid essays, “The History of Science” and “The Relations between History and the History of Science,” in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). Kuhn’s well known The Structure OJ Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970) was enormously influential in shaking traditional beliefs about science. Barry Barnes develops a more radical view of the nature of scientific knowledge in Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
The best introduction to the history of science in America is Daniel J. Kevles’s The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Knopf, 1978). Constructed around the question of how an avowedly elitist enterprise grew and prospered in a democratic culture, Kevles’s work is unsurpassed for its breadth and literary style. For the period prior to the Civil War, readers should begin with John C. Greene’s American Science in the Age of Jefferson (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1984).
Liberally educated men and women should not only know that science has an important place in our society, but that we are only beginning to understand why that is so and how it came to be.
Among recent biographies, two are especially notable for the skill with which scientific lives are used to illuminate larger issues in the development of science in America: Robert H. Kargon, The Rise of Robert Millikan: Portrait of a Life in American Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) and Garland Al len, Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man and His Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
The development of the electrical industry affords perhaps the best case through which to study historical relations between science and technology, both because of the rich secondary literature and because of the importance of electric power in American economic development. Several recent books are of special value here: George Wise, Willis R. Whitney, General Electric, and the Origins of Industrial Research (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Leonard Reich, The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876–1926 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). David F. Noble’s America By Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf, 1977), although marred by errors of fact and exaggerations in interpretation, raises exciting and challenging questions about both the relations between science and technology and the influence of corporations upon the development of American science.
E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) shares many of the virtues and flaws of Noble’s book. His Marxist analysis, however, will provoke readers to re-examine their assumptions about the foundations of scientific medicine. Competing interpretations are available in John Ettling’s The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) and Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982). Thom as McKeown’s The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage, or Nemesis? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979) assesses the role of therapeutics in the modern decline of mortality rates. Al though based upon analysis of the English experience, McKeown’s argument should _also find application in the discussion of American demographic patterns. On the relation between basic science and therapeutics, see Gerald L. Geison’s provocative essay “Divided We Stand: Physiologists and Clinicians in the American Context,” in The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, I979).
Questions about the relations between science and religious belief in America arise in the study of Puritan New England and reappear in various forms up to the present. Among the better recent works on this subject are: Theodore Dwight Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science: The Baconian Ideal and Antebellum American Religious Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977); Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science (Berkeley: Univers1ty of California Press, 1986). As the title suggests, Robert K. Merton’s classic Science and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (1938; reprint ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1970) is about England, but his thesis—that proponents of experimental science and Puritanism held common values—is well worth study in relation to the scientific and religious traditions of America.
Readers seeking more information about the issues discussed in this article or for a fuller bibliography should consult Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter, eds., Historical Writing on American Science, Osiris 2nd ser. 1 (1985); especially valuable are the essays on science and medicine by John Harley Warner, on science and religion by Ronald L. Numbers, and on science and technology by George Wise.
John W. Servos, a member of the Committee on Education of the History of Science Society, has taught the history of science at Princeton University and, more recently, at Amherst College. His essays have appeared in Isis, Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, Osiris, and other journals.
