How did the discourse of progress first emerge? What role did the scientific texts of the Ancien Régime play in this process? How did the Enlightenment read some of these medical, anatomical or philosophical texts? These are some of the questions addressed in this collective volume, edited by Frédéric Charbonneau. Through its nine splendid contributions (which can be found summarised at the end, alongside a very useful thematic index), the book traces the way in which some key figures of the so-called Scientific Revolution – specifically those related to the anatomical and medical sciences – were transformed into icons of scientific progress. From Andrea Vesalius to the Montpellier doctor Théophile du Bordeu, from Descartes to Newton, and from Cyrano de Bergerac to the Comte of Buffon, the book explores the collective elaboration of the discourse of progress and the coming about of scientific hagiography as part of that process. Along these lines, the book should not only be of interest to the historian of medicine or science, but also to the general historian, the philosopher of history, and to all those concerned with the practicalities required to give the living conditions of certain individuals the fictional character of a universal history of glory.
Whilst the first chapter is consecrated to the re-editing of Vesalius’ work, De Fabrica, Chapter 2 explores the interpretation and reception of Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood. In the case of Chapter 3, Frédéric Tingley examines the case of one of the most famous disciples of Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, whose logic of discovery was mainly based on the idea of serendipity. In Chapters 4 and 5, Josiane Boulad-Ayoud and Joël Castonguay-Bélanger deal with the different ways in which both René Descartes and Isaac Newton were portrayed during the Enlightenment. In his own chapter, Frédéric Charbonneau explains how the term ‘progress’ came to be applied to the sciences in the mid-eighteenth century. In the examples provided by contemporary dictionaries, he argues, the word suffered a sort of re-signification and acquired a particular historical meaning, rather than being limited to the technical improvement of a specific science or art. Like other contributors, Charbonneau also makes use of academic obituaries to explain how these texts constructed a certain notion of individual and collective progress. After all, what seems to be at stake here is not simply the anticipation of what we will later refer to by the expression of ‘ideology of progress’, but rather the constitution of a historical expression in which the singularity of events – those of a given life, for example – seems to serve a more general purpose: that of science.
There is, however, a very thin line between the historical reconstruction of the narrative of progress employed in the hagiography of some modern figures and the twenty-first century appreciation of those very same authors. Catrione Seth, for example, who explores the mechanisms of self-fashioning used by Tronchin, a doctor à la mode, seems also to be interested in defending the place of this doctor in the pantheon of history – especially when she attempts to show the essential role that Tronchin played in the transformation of eighteenth-century medicine: from a science of observation to a science of intervention. The same kind of misunderstanding regarding the ‘contribution’ of another figure comes up in the chapter on Buffon. In this case, Swann Paradis, gathering information from different obituaries, comes to the conclusion that the intendant (Director) of the Jardin du roi ‘could also equally be listed as a (neglected) icon of progress in Natural History, at least in what has to do with his contribution to the disenchantment of animal descriptions’ (194). This is a very different point of view to those expressed in some other chapters. For Alexandre Wenger, for example, the question is not so much the discussion of Théophile de Bordeu’s real contributions, but rather of how he was turned into an icon of modern science while he was still alive only to be side-lined and then abandoned in the historical discourse of scientific progress.
All in all, this is more than a book on eighteenth-century ideas of progress. By focusing on new sources, like obituaries and eulogies, the book also explores the coming into existence of a new historical narrative that goes far beyond the realm of science and medicine. Wenger is right again when he claims that, after some degree of detachment from the biographical genre (undoubtedly motivated by the interest in collective stories – of peoples, of classes, of mentalities), there has been a certain historiographical retour to personal narratives. The tensions between the singularity of personal events and the universality of biographical reports, between real and fictional lives, come into being in this splendid book as part of a more general reflection on the uses of history and the many different ways in which the eighteenth century invented the figure of the martyr of science as part of a new discourse of progress.
