Joris Vandendriessche. Medical Societies and Scientific Culture in Nineteenth-Century Belgium. (Social Histories of Medicine.) xii + 317 pp., notes, bibl., index. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. £80 (cloth); ISBN 9781526133205. E-book available.

Isis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 410-411
Author(s):  
Raf Vanderstraeten
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Medical Societies

Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment

PMLA ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 117 (3) ◽  
pp. 465-478 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Logical Consequence ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Experimental Knowledge ◽  
Useful Knowledge ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Failed Attempt ◽  
Dorian Gray

This essay challenges two established critical assumptions about late Victorian literary decadence: first, that decadence represented a sterile and ultimately failed attempt to defy social and cultural norms and, second, that the movement was antithetical to the scientific culture of the nineteenth century. Decadence is instead shown to be the logical consequence of a scientific spirit that, by the end of the century, increasingly ignored the demands of utilitarianism and fixated on the pursuit of experimental knowledge for its own sake, regardless of the consequences. Thus, the “failures” of the subject that so frequently mark the end of accounts of decadence such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Collins's Heart and Science, and Machen's The Great God Pan represent the triumph of a historically specific experimental ethos that valued the transcendence of conventional epistemology over the discovery of useful knowledge.

scholarly journals Scientists to the streets. Science, politics and the public moving towards new osmoses

2002 ◽  
Vol 01 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuri Castelfranchi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Standard Model ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Semipermeable Membrane ◽  
Public Communication ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Standard Model

What may be defined as the "standard model" of the public communication of science began to develop in the second half of the nineteenth century, gained a clear structure (especially in an Anglo-Saxon context) in the first three decades of the twentieth century and dominated until the nineties. Roughly speaking, the model tends to describe science as a compact social (and epistemic) corpus, largely separated from the rest of society by a type of semipermeable membrane. That is, information and actions can flow freely from science to the rest of society (through the application of technologies and the spread of scientific culture, for instance), but much more limitedly in the opposite direction (through science politics or the influence of sociocultural events on science itself).

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Alison E. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
History Of

Straddling comparative literary and cultural studies and the history of science, this chapter insists on the importance of translation to the scientific culture of early- to mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It emphasises the centrality of women to the translation of Humboldt’s work for a British readership and explores more generally the reception of his work by the British critical press.

Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore

2015 ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Amy M. King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Victorian Period

Victorian natural science is not something separate from culture and social life, but integral to Victorian literary culture broadly defined. This is particularly important to the Victorian period because it was during the nineteenth century that the professionalization of science occurred; at the same time a vibrant popular science existed. Natural history is part of a broader landscape of scientific culture in the nineteenth century beyond the poles of the ‘scientific naturalists’ such as Charles Darwin and the Anglican ‘gentlemen of science’. A particular nineteenth-century version of natural theology persisted at least until mid-century and even as late as the 1870s, manifesting especially in popular natural histories. One specific genre was the seashore natural history, in which there is a blend of empirical observation and theology, especially in the work of Philip Henry Gosse.

Mathematicians and the Nation in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century as Reflected in the Luigi Cremona Correspondence

2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Millán Gasca
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Bourgeois Society ◽  
Dominant Tendency ◽  
The Individual ◽  
National Membership ◽  
The French Revolution

ArgumentUp until the French Revolution, European mathematics was an “aristocratic” activity, the intellectual pastime of a small circle of men who were convinced they were collaborating on a universal undertaking free of all space-time constraints, as they believed they were ideally in dialogue with the Greek founders and with mathematicians of all languages and eras. The nineteenth century saw its transformation into a “democratic” but also “patriotic” activity: the dominant tendency, as shown by recent research to analyze this transformation, seems to be the national one, albeit accompanied by numerous analogies from the point of view of the processes of national evolution, possibly staggered in time. Nevertheless, the very homogeneity of the individual national processes leads us to view mathematics in the context of the national-universal tension that the spread of liberal democracy was subjected to over the past two centuries. In order to analyze national-universal tension in mathematics, viewed as an intellectual undertaking and a profession of the new bourgeois society, it is necessary to investigate whether the network of international communication survived the political, social, and cultural upheavals of the French Revolution and the European wars waged in the early nineteenth century, whether national passions have transformed this network, and if so, in what way. Luigi Cremona's international correspondence indicates that relationships among individuals have been restructured by the force of national membership, but that the universal nature of mathematics has actually been boosted by a vision shared by mathematicians from all countries concerning the role of their discipline in democratic and liberal society as the basis of scientific culture and technological innovation, as well as a basic component of public education.

scholarly journals Cornish science, mine experiments and Robert Were Fox's Penjerrick letters

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward J. Gillin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Magnetic Survey ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Natural Philosopher ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
A Site ◽  
Century Science ◽  
Magnetic Phenomena

In 2019 a collection of letters from the nineteenth-century natural philosopher Robert Were Fox was discovered in his home at Penjerrick in Cornwall. Fox came to the attention of scientific audiences for experimentally establishing that temperature increases with depth beneath the Earth's surface, and later secured fame for his magnetic dipping needle, developed to measure terrestrial magnetic phenomena. The newly uncovered Penjerrick letters constitute a valuable archival discovery with important historical ramifications for our understanding of Fox's work and its place within nineteenth-century science. As well as highlighting the central role of networking in promoting provincial science, the letters reveal the prominence of the Cornish mine as a site of experiment within British scientific culture. These venues presented Fox with unique spaces in which to scrutinize nature, but such philosophical investigations were unverifiable within a laboratory and appeared susceptible to inaccuracies arising from the working conditions of this uncontrollable environment. Nevertheless, the Cornish mine was crucial to the development of Fox's dipping needle, which became the premier device for making magnetic observations at sea in the 1840s. In this article, I demonstrate the epistemologically problematic nature of the mine as an experimental space that was to take on a central role in the worldwide magnetic survey that historians have described as the ‘Magnetic Crusade’.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document