The most striking advances in the knowledge of human anatomy and physiology that the world had ever known—or was to know until the seventeenth century A.D.—took place in Hellenistic Alexandria. The city was founded in 331 B.C. by Alexander the Great. After the tatter's death in 323 B.C. and the subsequent dissolution of his empire, it became the capital of one of his generals, Ptolemy, son of Lagus, who established the Ptolemaic dynasty there. The first Ptolemy, subsequently named Soter (the Saviour), and his son Ptolemy Philadelphus (who succeeded him in 285 B.C.), became immensely enriched by their exploitation of Egypt and raised the city to a position of great wealth and magnificence. Anxious to enhance both their own reputation and the prestige of the kingdom, they sought to rival the cultural and scientific achievements not only of other Hellenistic rulers but even of Athens herself. Their patronage of the arts and sciences, coupled with their establishment of the Museum (an institute for literary studies and scientific research as well as a temple of the Muses), together with the Library, made the city the centre of Hellenistic culture. Philosophers, mathematicians, astronomers, artists, poets and physicians were all encouraged to come and work there.

Science in the twentieth century has relied on enormous financial investment for its survival. Once departed from an amateur pursuit, industry, charity and government have ploughed huge resources into it, supplying the professional occupation of science with a complex of institutional facilities – full-time posts, research laboratories, students and journals. Financial support, however, has always been a limited resource and has gone most generously to those areas of research which appear particularly novel, innovative or promising, that is to the ‘leading edges’. To secure the funds necessary to maintain their life-style, then, scientists have had to make their activities scientifically and economically attractive to the funding bodies. Historians and sociologists of twentieth-century science have tended to follow these priorities and have concentrated on the leading edges. We have studied at length the acquisition of new knowledge through research, the creation of the institutional complex and the furtherance of science through innovation, specialty and discipline formation, part and parcel of which is the gathering of the necessary funds. The competition for funds has been investigated in analyses of controversy between competing groups within a research area, which has provided important models for the social and conceptual development of science. This emphasis, however, may have missed a great deal of what happens in science.

In his classic textbook, The History of Biology, Erik Nordenskiöld suggested that there had existed, throughout the nineteenth century, not one but two distinct forms of plant geography. He designated one of these traditions of inquiry ‘floristic’ plant geography, tracing its origins back to the work of Carl Linnaeus on species and their distributions. The second form Nordenskiöld termed ‘morphological’, by which he meant that its practitioners concentrated upon the study of vegetation rather than flora. He located the origins of this tradition of inquiry within the botanical work of Alexander von Humboldt.

The years immediately after the final downfall of Napoleon Bonaparte could easily have been years of anti-climax in French science. In 1815, after two decades of undoubted greatness, the time, I feel, was ripe for decline. And decline might well have occurred if the traditions and the style of science as practised in France in the period of Napoleon's rule had been carried on unchanged by the disciples of the two great men who had dominated work in the physical sciences for so many years. These men, of course, were the chemist Claude Louis Berthollet and the mathematician and physicist Pierre Simon Laplace.

I think you would be amused if you were here now to see my lectures – in my elementary one I have got a front row entirely consisting of young women (some of them not so young neither, as someone says in Jeames' Diary) and they take notes in the most painstaking and praiseworthy fashion, but the most extraordinary thing is that I have got one at my advanced lecture. I am afraid she does not understand a word and my theory is that she is attending my lectures on the supposition that they are Divinity and she has not yet found out her mistake.

Professor J. J. Thomson to Mrs H. F. Reid, 4 November 1886

When Joseph John Thomson used this light-hearted description to brighten up a letter to a family friend, women had been attending physics lectures at the Cavendish Laboratory for four years. Though the picture was designed to amuse the recipient, a married woman, joviality thinly disguised unease. Thomson's previously homogeneous audience had been physically split into two opposing sections with young, male students at the back and older, female students along the front row. Intellectual divisions were also apparent; the women took notes in a different, non-male way, and without the sharpness of a masculine mind they could not understand the content. The message was plain – the women had made a mistake. Their infiltration had been unsuccessful and they did not fit in.

One hundred and twenty-eight years ago in the historic city of Oxford a relatively brief impromptu verbal exchange at a scientific convention occurred. It is still vividly remembered in and out of academia. This so-called ‘debate’ between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and the young scientist, Thomas Henry Huxley, a simple and concrete episode, has continued to symbolize dramatically the complex and abstract phenomenon of the conflict between science and religion in the late nineteenth century. while that symbol may be somewhat inaccurate, or its relevance may have shifted from a century ago, it still is a powerful image, one which continues to be an important part of the religious, scientific and rhetorical history of the late Victorian era. Moore recently wrote: ‘No battle of the nineteenth century, save Waterloo, is better known.’ It is, as Altholz put it, ‘one of those historical events the substance and significance of which are clear, but whose specifics are decidedly fuzzy around the edges.’ It is the purpose of this paper to present a full and balanced view of the specific ingredients, permitting a better insight into the event's symbolism and significance.

When did modern science arise? This is a question which has received divergent answers. Some would say that it started in the High Middle Ages (1277), or that it began with th ‘via moderna’ of the fourteenth century. More widespread is the idea that the Italian Renaissance was also the re-birth of the sciences. In general, Copernicus is then singled out as the great revolutionary, and the ‘scientific revolution’ is said to have taken place during the period from Copernicus to Newton. Others would hold that the scientific revolution started in the seventeenth century and that it covered the period from Galileo to Newton. Sometimes a second scientific revolution is said to have occurred in the first quarter of the twentieth century (Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, etc.), a revolution which should be considered as great as the first one.

This article considers the role of overseas academic travel in the development of the modern research university, with particular reference to the University of Cambridge from the 1880s to the 1950s. The Cambridge academic community, relatively sedentary at the beginning of this period, became progressively more mobile and globalized through the early twentieth century, facilitated by regular research sabbaticals. The culture of research travel diffused at varying rates, and with differing consequences, across the arts and humanities and the field, laboratory and theoretical sciences, reshaping disciplinary identities and practices in the process. The nature of research travel also changed as the genteel scholarly excursion was replaced by the purposeful, output-orientated expedition.

This paper examines the development of British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s. In a 1951 report for the World Health Organization Bowlby contended that the mother is the child's psychic organizer, as observational studies of children worldwide showed that absence of mother love had disastrous consequences for children's emotional health. By the end of the decade Bowlby had moved from observational studies of children in hospitals to animal research in order to support his thesis that mother love is a biological need. I examine the development of Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s, a central period in the evolution of his views and in debates about the social implications of his work. I argue that Bowlby's view that mother love was a biological need for children influenced discussions about the desirability of mothers working outside the home during the early Cold War. By claiming that the future of a child's mind is determined by her mother's heart, Bowlby's argument exerted an unusually strong emotional demand on mothers and had powerful implications for the moral valuation of maternal care and love.

In 1858, August Kekulé and Archibald Scott Couper independently published similar ideas regarding the tetravalence and self-linking ability of carbon atoms; three years later, the Russian chemist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov read a paper at the German Naturforscherversammlung in Speyer, which restated, clarified, and enlarged upon the ideas of Kekulé and Couper. In 1958, the centenary of the structure theory was celebrated in Chicago, London, Heidelberg, and Ghent; the celebrations in Moscow, Frunze, and Kazan took place three years later. For over a century chemists and chemical historians have disputed the origins of structure theory. Sometimes this activity has been confined to occasional sniping, but at other times determined battles have been fought. The polemic has never been characterized by cool and dispassionate discourse. Western historians have in general been unwilling or unable to master the extensive Russian literature on the question; the arguments of Soviet historians have often been clothed in Marxist rhetoric or otherwise influenced by political considerations.

The Royal Society in the eighteenth century cuts a poor figure in comparison with its robust parent of the seventeenth century. Contemporary satirists and modern historians alike have found little to recommend the weak and well-padded institution. After Newton's death in 1727, it was no longer the centre for natural philosophy, and even during his tenure as President the Society did not escape censure. Fascination with monstrous curiosities and antiquarian puzzles replaced serious scientific work, according to various detractors. Recently scholars have begun to re-evaluate this caricature and point to the myriad ways in which the Society cultivated natural philosophy and natural history during the eighteenth century. This essay focuses on one of the Society's frequently overlooked strengths: its extensive correspondence.

This essay revisits the drafting of the first UNESCO Statement on Race (1950) in order to reorient historical understandings of mid-twentieth-century anti-racism and science. Historians of science have primarily interpreted the UNESCO statements as an oppositional project led by anti-racist scientists from the North Atlantic and concerned with dismantling racial typologies, replacing them with population-based conceptions of human variation. Instead of focusing on what anti-racist scientists opposed, this article highlights the futures they imagined and the applied social-science projects that anti-racist science drew from and facilitated. The scientific experts who participated in drafting the first UNESCO Statement on Race played important roles in late colonial, post-colonial and international projects designed to modernize, assimilate and improve so-called backward communities – typically indigenous or Afro-descendent groups in the global South. Such connections between anti-racist science and the developmental imaginaries of the late colonial period indicate that the transition from fixed racial typologies to sociocultural and psychological conceptualizations of human diversity legitimated the flourishing of modernization discourses in the Cold War era. In this transition to an economic-development paradigm, ‘race’ did not vanish so much as fragment into a series of finely tuned and ostensibly anti-racist conceptions that offered a moral incentive for scientific elites to intervene in the ways of life of those deemed primitive.

This paper reconstructs the historical geographies of a family holiday and field trip in 1952 to Glen Roy, Scotland, site of the famous Parallel Roads. The puzzle of the Parallel Roads' origin has generated a hefty literature over the years, much of it written by eminent scientists, but is here considered through an episode in the scientific history of Glen Roy that did not make the published record. The primary source is the Murray family's expedition logbook: a private and personal document that records the various aspects of life and work in the field. This is supplemented by the family's oral history. Drawing on concepts from science studies and geography, the paper tries to ‘get behind the science’ itself to explore the underlying motives and actions that make it happen. These are intrinsically geographical, because they shape, and are shaped by, the relationships between people, ideas and places. Two themes are central to the account of these other historical geographies of this trip to Glen Roy. The first of these is the coming together of a distinctly local community of knowledge in the Badenoch Field Club in the early 1950s. The second, revealed by the logbook's emphasis on storytelling, travelling and residing, is the way in which the presence of the family in the field changes the ways in which the site of scientific investigation is experienced and understood.

Generally, the mass media in Britain, as elsewhere, treat the history of science as arcane knowledge. A few iconic tales do none the less come to permeate public consciousness. How do these come to be selected from the myriad of possible narratives?

One of the most enduring and well known of stories is the discovery of penicillin, which stretched from Alexander Fleming's observation in 1928 to the award of the Nobel prize to Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain in 1945 and the subsequent dominance of American companies in its manufacture. During the 1980s, when it appeared scandalous that monoclonal antibodies discovered in Cambridge, England, had not been patented by the British government, the parallel was often made with penicillin. An alternative use was made of the story when, in July 1995, a columnist in London's Evening Standard criticized massive expenditure on medical research and claimed that most drugs were discovered by accident. He sustained his thesis by merely putting in pointed parentheses the one word, ‘penicillin’. The same year, partisans found space in the correspondence columns of the New Scientist to return enthusiastically to the debate over the proper disposition of credit between Fleming and Florey. The BBC's Money Programme broadcast a piece on how best to support inventors today in October 1996; it included film of the Science Museum's coverage of Fleming.

The story of penicillin seems therefore bound, time and time again, to great issues in British culture: pride over technological prowess, resentment over the loss of opportunity, jealousy of American success, the National Health Service and the emergence of the modern pharmaceutical industry. The appeal of the story and meaning of its associations are matched by reverence for its material relics. In high profile auctions, the sale of samples prepared by Fleming raises thousands of pounds and is previewed in the newspages and on the radio. The original plate on which Fleming observed penicillin with its sterile ring surrounding the healing penicillin is one of the most familiar of historic relics (Figure 1).

There can be little doubt that 1973 will remain notable as a year in which knowledge of Galileo's mechanics increased dramatically. Professor Stillman Drake's publication, in May, of some of Galileo's early work on the law of free fall was followed in the autumn by the publication of a number of important manuscripts clearly indicating Galileo's use of precise measurement. From a discussion of these manuscripts and Thomas Settle's performance of Galileo's inclined plane experiment, Drake implies that a clear view of Galileo's use of experiment is now emerging. Added emphasis was given to Drake's thesis that doubts concerning Galileo's use of experiment were largely unfounded, by James MacLachlan's realization of a Galilean experiment which was previously described as ‘imaginary’ by Koyré. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that, while it cannot be doubted that Galileo used experiment and precise measurement, his attitude to observation may well have been far more complex than Drake has supposed. My point of departure is James MacLachlan's remark that continuing disagreement over Galileo's use of experiment should lead to further examination of Galileo's experimental claims. I shall indicate that more than one view of Galileo's use of experiment may prove capable of explaining our present knowledge—a corollary of this being that alternative explanations may be proposed for the manuscripts recently published by Drake.

In the spring of 1937, the University of Chicago Press mailed hundreds of subscription forms for its latest enterprise – a projected series of twenty short monographs by various philosophers and scientists. Together the monographs were to form the first section of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Included in each mailing was an introductory prospectus which began:

Recent years have witnessed a striking growth of interest in the scientific enterprise as a whole and especially in the unity of science. The concern throughout the world for the logic of science, the history of science, and the sociology of science reveals a comprehensive international movement interested in considering science as a whole in terms of the scientific temper itself. A science of science is appearing. The extreme specialization within science demands as its corrective an interest in the scientific edifice in its entirety. This is especially necessary if science is to satisfy its inherent urge for the systematization of its results and methods and if science is to perform adequately its educational role in the modern world. Science is gradually rousing itself for the performance of its total task.

In this paper I analyse some resources for the history of manipulative skill and the acquisition of knowledge. I focus on a decade in the life of the ‘ingenious’ Robert Hooke, whose social identity epitomized the mechanically minded individual existing on the interface between gentleman natural philosophers, instrument makers and skilled craftsmen in late seventeenth-century London. The argument here is not concerned with the notion that Hooke had a unique talent for working with material objects, and indeed my purpose is to rethink the ways in which we account for such virtuosity. In this vein, I do not adopt solely a realist or constructivist attitude to skill but seek to show how, in a purposeful way, Hooke drew from the resources of techniques and information made available to him by his social interaction with labourers, servants, craftsmen, gentlemen and noblemen. In Hooke's local culture, intelligence flowed between the sites where these individuals worked and socialized. I examine the practical, social and situational links between the worlds of the coffee house, the workshop and the rooms of the Royal Society at Arundel House (between 1667 and 1674) and Gresham College. From this perspective, there were no rigid boundaries between the domains of natural philosophy, banausic culture and construction work on which Hooke was engaged, and I argue that we should examine his world in term of a series of networks of capital exchange comprised of finance, social power and mechanical expertise.

In the past thirty or forty years scientists, historians, and others have written many histories of the wonder drug, penicillin. However, almost all of these works fail to develop an important part of the history of penicillin: the attempt to synthesize the drug during the Second World War. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore this largely unexamined episode in the history of science, and to answer some relevant questions. For example, why was there a need for synthetic penicillin? What organizational plans had to be made in order to accommodate this massive endeavor? What was the effect of the search for a synthesis on the natural production of this drug? And finally, did chemists ever devise a successful synthesis? Before attempting to answer these and other questions, a brief introduction to 1) the discovery and development of penicillin as a therapeutic agent, and 2) the general organization of wartime medical research in the United States and Great Britain, is necessary.

The response to physics and chemistry which characterized mid-nineteenth century physiology took two major directions. One, found most prominently among the German physiologists, developed explanatory models which had as their fundamental assumption the ultimate reducibility of all biological phenomena to the laws of physics and chemistry. The other, characteristic of the French school of physiology, recognized that physics and chemistry provided potent analytical tools for the exploration of physiological activities, but assumed in the construction of explanatory models that the organism involved special levels of organization and that there must, in consequence, be special biological laws.

The roots of this argument about concept formation in physiology are explored in the works of Theodor Schwann, Johannes Müller, François Magendie and Claude Bernard among others.

After 1700, astrology lost the respect it once commanded in medical circles. But the belief that the heavens influenced bodily health persisted – even in learned medicine – until well into the nineteenth century. The continuing vitality of these ideas owed much to the new empirical and mechanical outlook of their proponents. Taking their cue from the work of Robert Boyle and Richard Mead, a number of British practitioners amassed statistical evidence which purported to prove the influence of the Moon upon fevers and other diseases. Such ideas flourished in the colonies and in the medical services of the armed forces, but their exponents were not marginal men. Some, like James Lind, were widely respected and drew support for their views from such influential figures as Erasmus Darwin.