Notwithstanding his unceasing propaganda in favour of medical reform (he was a consultant for the establishment of socialized medicine in the Province of Saskatchewan in Canada), Sigerist promoted significant scholarship at Johns Hopkins. He found two singular disciplinary fellow travellers in émigrés Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990) and George Sarton (1884–1956).
In the 1920s, Austrian-born Neugebauer was the brilliant student of mathematician Richard Courant at the University of Göttingen. Neugebauer elected to focus his scholarly interest on history of mathematics, rapidly becoming the most accomplished interpreter of mathematical antiquity, from the Babylonian clay tablets to Ptolemy’s astronomy. He earned his living, however, as the paid editor of a major journal of mathematical abstracts. Fascism drove him to a position at the University of Copenhagen, and in 1939 to a chair in the history of mathematics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Neugebauer’s unparalleled scientific authority and his access to scholarly resources led to a school of disciples based on mastery of languages, primary and secondary literature, and above all the technical details of the exact sciences.
If Neugebauer was wary of generalizing and popularizing, Sarton revelled in the broad sweep. Born and educated in Belgium, Sarton used his inheritance to create, in 1913, what has become the leading scholarly periodical in history of science, Isis. Following the German invasion of Belgium in 1914, he fled to London with his British wife and infant daughter. There he lived on the brink of starvation until in 1915 he sought his fortune in the United States as a promoter of Tannery’s vision of history of science. He found willing listeners in university administrators and capitalists who were interested in appropriating European culture. In 1918 Sarton obtained a salary from the Carnegie Institution of Washington for maintenance at Harvard University’s Widener Library as a special researcher. The arrangement continued over the next thirty years, during which time Sarton gradually acquired professorial privileges, edited Isis, and produced a grand outline of the history of science up to the Renaissance. He envisioned history of science as the privileged intersection of the natural sciences and the humanities. In his view, history of science was the true record of human achievement.
Sartonian generalizing and Neugebauerist specialization often find expression today in writings about science past. It might be said, indeed, that Sarton’s vision lived on for nearly a half century after his death, in 1956, through the enterprise in chronicling the history of science in China conceived and directed by Joseph Needham (1900–1995) at Cambridge. At mid century, however, the emphasis on encyclopaedic chronicle, ponderous biography, and antiquarian curiosity began to recede in favour of methodology. Whereas Sarton and Neugebauer did not often justify the particular focus for their energies (beyond, say, noting something about every science writer in the twelfth century or transcribing and interpreting all known coffin lids with astronomical cyphers), the middle third of the twentieth century demanded relevance. That is, the new generation of scholars found themselves called to consider the end of their vocation. What did Renaissance astronomers or Puritan experimentalists have to do with human suffering and political change? Did the power and prestige of social institutions determine the shape of ideas about nature? How could specialist, scholarly apparatus illuminate the deep structure of human thought?
Physicians in classical antiquity knew that art is long and exhausting, while life is short and demanding. One must gradually build up an intellectual arsenal to attack significant problems. Practical results can certainly be obtained by ingenuous debutants, but even here method and knowledge are everything. Three scholars – Thomas S. Kuhn (1922–1996), Derek J. de Solla Price (1922–1983), and Robert K. Merton (b. 1910) – mixed appropriate quantities of innocence and experience to transform our vision of history of science. They did so by interpreting the prosaic side of scientific endeavour.
In the twentieth century, Thomas Kuhn is widely recognized as the most influential commentator on the meaning of science. Derek Price is seen as the guiding spirit behind the quantitative measurement of scientific development. Robert Merton identified the normative criteria for scientific activity and the institutional constraints that guide the life of scientists. Their achievements are the more remarkable because their careers encompassed much else. In an age of specialization, they were polymaths – people able to innovate in diverse ways.
Across the decades spanning the middle of the century, the three interpreters of science share a common modus operandi. Most apparently, each is a brilliant stylist. At a time when academic writing discouraged use of first person singular, their intensely personal sentences leap off the page. Kuhn, Price, and Merton each formulated a seminal theoretical overview that was based on a close reading of critical episodes in science. Kuhn examined Copernican astronomy, energy conservation, and quantum physics; Price scrutinized medieval astrolabes, Chinese horology, and measuring and calculating devices from classical antiquity; Merton placed the early years of the Royal Society of London under a microscope and then examined the career of elite American scientists. Each sought general truths by extrapolating from definitive studies of carefully selected examples.
The men who transformed history of science avoided encyclopaedic studies of the kind pursued by Sarton, Neugebauer, and Needham. Common concern with the social dimensions of scientific enterprise led to books about science in society at large – Merton’s early treatment of science in seventeenth-century England; Kuhn’s analysis of the Copernican revolution; Price’s lectures about measuring scientific growth. But their appeal to learned precedent (a distinguishing characteristic of the scholarly life) was based on the advice of personal informants, rather than on systematic bibliographic travail. Lack of scholarly apparatus notwithstanding, each man expressed intense interest in organizing documentation for the next generation of scholars. Kuhn animated the international effort to assemble interviews and private correspondence known as the Sources for the History of Quantum Physics, a project more than any other that has alerted the scientific and scholarly world to the importance of preserving the record of recent science. Price was the most vigorous academic promoter of the quantitative measurement marketed by Philadelphia’s Institute for Scientific Information and now used extensively by countless agencies and analysts. Merton collaborated intensively with Paul Lazarsfeld (1901–1976) at the Institute for Applied Sociology in Columbia University, where he assembled sociological documentation on a wide range of phenomena.
They were products of elite universities and all enjoyed the privileges of accumulated honours, but they lent their voices to new institutions and assemblies. Kuhn was entirely Harvard educated, obtaining a doctorate in theoretical solid-state physics under John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (1899–1980); he sat in uneasy harmony between history and philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley (where an inheritance allowed him to reduce his teaching obligations) until in 1964 he moved to a programme at Princeton tailored to his measure. He helped Charles C. Gillispie (b.1918) steer the signal achievement of American scholarship, the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Price obtained a doctorate in experimental physics from the University of London in 1946. A second doctorate in history of science came from Cambridge in 1954, following which he joined the singular company of scholars in history of science at Yale. He energetically supported new societies and new periodicals. Merton went from Temple University to Harvard, where he obtained a doctorate in sociology. He participated in launching the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
The three found their earliest and strongest voice in the seminal article, rather than the weighty tome, but all mastered general presentations as well as specialized analysis. Following a number of monographs (among which was his brilliant doctoral dissertation), in early middle age Merton produced collections on the sociology of science and social structure. After the profound but general study of Copernicus and the appearance of the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Kuhn issued a searching, technical analysis of the birth of quantum physics. Price published meticulous studies of clocks and calculators as well as collections of essays on measuring science.
Masters in the realm of ideas, from