The painstaking examination of past science appealed to a number of people throughout the nineteenth century. There were physicians and chemists who, at the end of their career, sought to describe how the method of their own science had evolved. There were mathematicians and astronomers who, having been trained in classics, sought to transcend the ennui of a provincial school or government office by scrutinizing the work of significant predecessors. There were philologists who recognized that the languages of European colonies – notably Sanskrit and Arabic – held a key to a significant literature about ancient and medieval writings on nature.
Nineteenth-century discoveries about knowledge in the remote past are remarkable. The astronomical innovations of medieval Islam, both observational and theoretical, were discussed in the research of Louis-Amélie Sédillot (1808–1875). Euclid’s geometry, studied for nearly two millennia as the primary model for clear thinking, received a canonical expression at the hands of Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1854–1928). The notion of medieval Europe as a scientific wasteland came into question through Pierre Duhem’s (1861–1916) elaboration of the writings of philosophers at the University of Paris. The deciphering of planetary tables on Babylonian clay tablets by Joseph Epping (1835–1894) established the first reliable chronicle of antiquity.
Learned periodicals arose to circulate findings among the committed band of historians of science. By the last third of the nineteenth century, courses of instruction provided a showcase for the esoteric speciality. As academic philosophy spun out into hundreds of camps and factions, history of science found a practical use in the burgeoning field of epistemology – the philosophical discussion about how we know things. And as the rise of mass education stimulated an interest in teaching methodology, history of science emerged as the most reasonable way to teach physics, chemistry, and natural history. The so-called genetic presentation of scientific disciplines like chemistry and physics, according to which students received an appreciation of old ideas in chronological order, dominated much of science instruction up to the middle of the twentieth century.
The discipline of history of science
Nineteenth-century writings about history of science are grounded in the notion that modern science is a gift of Western Europe. Writers believed that scientific method and practice distinguished the people of the West from the civilizations that the West had conquered. Art, music, and literature were matters of taste; Japanese painting and poetry, for example, could be held only to differ from European painting and poetry. Science, however, was a matter of truth. All peoples, furthermore, could acquire it. A convenient justification for imperialist domination of the world came in the form of instruction in the canons of Western reason. Historians of science were among the firmest apologists for the superiority of European intellect.
The philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) looms as a major figure behind much writing in history of science. In Comte’s view, humanity had passed through various stages. Science, using experiment and mathematics to verify theories, would usher in a new age of prosperity and harmony. Comte established a hierarchy for the sciences, with astronomy at the apex and physiology near the bottom. Over time, he believed, all inquiries into nature would become more like mathematical physics. He also outlined how humanity had progressed from a religious worldview to a scientific one. This positivist orientation, where qualitative and prejudicial notions fell by the wayside, animated the beginnings of sociology, the quantitative science of human affairs. To bring the new golden age into being, Comte revived the French Revolution faith in Reason and established a church of positivism. Fundamental to the new doctrine was a critical examination of the evolution of science, demonstrating its grand unity and progress. To tell this story, the curators of the Collège de France (the elite institute for research and popular teaching in Paris) appointed Comte’s disciple Pierre Laffitte (1823–1903) to a chair of history of science.
Laffitte accomplished little in the course of his long tenure as the world’s most visible historian of science; he was entirely overshadowed by Paul Tannery (1843–1904), an administrator in the French state tobacco monopoly who had occasionally taught at the Collège de France. Tannery had published a large corpus on the history of the exact sciences, from classical antiquity through medieval Islam to the Renaissance and on into the nineteenth century. He established a European-wide network of colleagues who shared his passion. Developing a model that would have appealed to Comte, Tannery stated that science originated in Hellenic Greece, passed through Islamic stewardship to medieval Europe, and then blossomed in the seventeenth century. It was quite entirely an affair of the West.
In 1900, on the occasion of scholarly celebrations surrounding the grand Paris Exhibition, Tannery convened the world’s first international congress devoted to history of science. He assembled colleagues from Europe and put together an impressive programme. The congress resulted in a permanent commission to plan for future gatherings, establish an international society, and publish a periodical. The organizing epistolary activity (his correspondence was published in many volumes by his widow) contributed to Tannery’s dossier as Laffitte’s successor at the Collège de France. But politics intervened to deny him the academic position that he merited. Third Republic secularists passed over Tannery, a practising Catholic, in favour of a philosophically inclined disciple of Comte’s. When Tannery died of pancreatic cancer in 1904, the newborn discipline lost its most vocal advocate.
Tannery’s attempt to form a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of a number of initiatives for promoting Western civilization. Intellectuals sought organizations and causes that, in spanning the nation states of Europe, could project a common front against barbarism. They proudly pointed to the institution of the Nobel prizes, the creation of the world court in The Hague, and the convening of international congresses in fields of study from mathematics to history. The initiatives depended, however, on funding from national sources. The projection of scholarly and scientific excellence, based not on international assemblies but on national institutions, became a card in the game of diplomacy. Nations tallied up their Nobel laureates, art museums, libraries, and grand research laboratories. During the early decades of the twentieth century, and especially as a result of European wars and political squabbles, the discipline of history of science followed distinct trajectories in various national sectors.
Germany, the land of the research doctorate, contributed dozens of university courses and a number of periodicals. The key figure there was Karl Sudhoff (1853–1938), a medical doctor who in 1905 became director of a privately funded institute for the history of medicine and science at the University of Leipzig. Sudhoff’s successor in 1925 was the Paris-born and Swiss-educated Henry Sigerist (1891–1957), who in 1932 became director of the new Institute for the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Great Britain found an energetic patron in the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, the Canadian-born and American-acculturated Sir William Osler (1849–1919). Osler cultivated Charles Singer (1876–1960), who in the 1920s obtained a chair of history of science at the University of London. France continued the philosophically inclined course of Comte with Emile Meyerson (1859–1933) and Gaston Milhaud (1858–1918), which culminated in the Platonism of the Russian-born Alexandre Koyré (1892–1964). And in 1928, Italian-born Aldo Mieli (1879–1950) instituted the International Academy of the History of Science and located it in lodgings in Paris provided by Henri Berr’s (1863–1954) Centre International de Synthèse.
All these efforts produced mixed results. Scholarship in Germany was generally compromised by war and political savagery; Sudhoff, in his eighties, willingly embraced Adolf Hitler’s National Socialism. Willy Hartner (1905–1981), one of the brightest lights in Germany, studied at Harvard and became a rare opponent of Hitler in Germany. Singer and his wife Dorothea Waley Cohen (1882–1964) generated scholarly surveys and collections, but they produced few students; Osler’s querulous disciplinary successor at Oxford, biologist Robert T. Gunther (1869–1940), found a passion in scientific instruments. Mieli fled Vichy France for Argentina, just as he had fled fascist Italy for Paris; he died there in obscurity, a victim of Perón’s wrath. Koyré left Paris for Egypt and