Lab History: Reflections

ISIS

Volumn 99, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 761-768

  Kohler, Robert E ^a  

^a Logan Hall ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61849146840     PISSN: 00211753     EISSN: 15456994     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/595769     Document Type: Review

References (53)

1. Sophie Forgan, "The Architecture of Science and the Idea of a University," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 1989, 20:405-434;
2. Thomas F. Gieryn, "Three Truth-Spots," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 2002, 58:113-132;
3. Gieryn, "Two Faces on Science: Building Identities for Molecular Biology and Biotechnology," in The Architecture of Science, ed. Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 423-455;
4. Galison and Caroline A. Jones, "Factory, Laboratory, Studio: Dispersing Sites of Production," ibid., pp. 497-540;
5. Simon Schaffer, "Physics Laboratories and the Victorian Coundy House," in Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge, ed. Crosbie Smith, and Jon Agar (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 149-180;
6. Graeme Gooday, "The Premisses of Premisses: Spatial Issues in the Historical Consduction of Laboratory Credibility," ibid., pp. 216-245;
7. Myles Jackson, "Illuminating the Opacity of Achromatic Lens Production: Joseph Fraunhofer's Use of Monastic Architecture and Space as a Laboratory," in Architecture of Science, ed. Galison and Thompson, pp. 141-163;
8. and Robert E. Kohler, "Labscapes: Naturalizing the Laboratory," History of Science, 2002, 40:473-501.
9. John L. Heilbron, ed., Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2003).
10. Karin Knorr Cetina, "Laboratory Studies: The Culdiral Approach, to the Study of Science," in Handbook of Science and Technology Studies, ed. Sheila Jasanoff et al. (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1995), pp. 140-166;
11. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (1979; new ed., Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1986);
12. Latour, "Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World," in Science Observed, ed. Knorr Cetina and Michael Mulkay (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1983), pp. 141-170;
13. Owen Hannaway, "Laboratory Design and the Aim of Science: Andreas Libavius versus Tycho Brahe," Isis, 1986, 77:585-610;
14. Steven Shapin, "The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England," ibid., 1988, 79:373-404;
15. Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988);
16. Knorr Cetina, "The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory: On the Relations between Experiment and Laboratory in Science," in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 113-138;
17. and Frank A. J. L. James, ed., The Development of the Laboratory: Essays on the Place of Experiment in Industrial Civilisation (London: Macmillan; New York: American Institute of Physics, 1989), esp. "Introduction," pp. 1-7.
18. David Cahan, "The Institutional Revolution in German Physics, 1865-1914," Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences, 1985, 15(2):1-66;
19. R. Steven Turner, "Justus Liebig versus Prussian Chemistry: Reflections on Early Institute-Building in Germany," ibid., 1982, 75(1):129-162;
20. Graeme Gooday, "Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories in Victorian Britain," British Journal for the History of Science, 1990, 25:25-51;
21. Romuladas Sviedrys, "The Rise of Physics Laboratories in Britain," Hist. Stud. Phys. Sci., 1976, 7:405-436;
22. and Richard L. Kremer, "Building Institutes for Physiology in Prussia, 1836-1846: Contexts, Interests, and Rhetoric," in The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 72-109.
23. David Callan, "Institutions and Communities," in From Natural Philosophy to the Sciences: Writing the History of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. Cahan (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 291-328, esp. pp. 291-293. Cahan also finds that many historians of science declare institutions to be a personal interest, but few work on them.
24. Schaffer, "Physics Laboratories and the Victorian Country House" (cit. n. 1); Kohler, "Labscapes" (cit. n. 1);
25. John L. Heilbron, "Science in the Church," Science in Context, 1989, 5:9-28;
26. Jackson, "Illuminating the Opacity of Achromatic Lens Production" (cit. n. 1); and Brian Gee, "Amusement Chests and Portable Laboratories: Practical Alternatives to the Regular Laboratory," in Development of the Laboratory, ed. James (cit. n. 3), pp. 37-59.
27. Peter Galison, "Buildings and the Subject in Science," in Architecture of Science, ed. Galison and Thompson (cit. n. 1), pp. 1-25, on p. 1.
28. Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, "De-centering the 'Big Picture': The Origins of Modern Science and the Modern Origins of Science," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1993, 26:407-432.
29. Ibid.
30. On early modern labs see esp. Pamela H. Smith, "Laboratories," in The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park, and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 290-305;
31. Ursula Klein, "The Laboratory Challenge: Some Revisions of the Standard View of Early Modern Experimentation," in this Focus section; and Klein, "Apothecary Shops, Laboratories, and Chemical Manufacture in Eighteenth-Century Germany," in The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation, ed. Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (Amsterdam.: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007), pp. 247-276.
32. See also Larry Stewart, "Experimental Places and the Knowledge Economy," Hist. Sci., 2007, 45:155-178.
33. Paul Forman, "The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology," History and Technology, 2007, 25:1-152.
34. Gieryn, "Three Truth-Spots" (cit. n. 1);
35. Shapin, "House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England" (cit. n. 3);
36. and Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1994).
37. Robert E. Kohler, "Place and Practice in Field Biology," Hist. Sci., 2002, 40:189-210; and Gieryn, "Three Truth-Spots."
38. Know Cetina, "The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory" (cit. n. 3); Graeme Gooday, "'Nature' in the Laboratory: Domestication and Discipline with the Microscope in Victorian Life Science," Brit. J. Hist. Sci., 1991, 24:307-341;
39. and H. Otto Sibum, "What Kind of Science Is Experimental Physics?" Science, 2004, 506:60-61.
40. Latour, "Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World" (cit. n. 3);
41. and Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), Chs. 2, 6.
42. E.g., Turner, "Justus Liebig versus Prussian Chemistry" (cit. n. 4);
43. Gooday, "Precision Measurement and the Genesis of Physics Teaching Laboratories" (cit. n. 4);
44. and Forgan, "Architecture of Science and the Idea of a University" (cit. n. 1).
45. Shapin, "House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England" (cit. n. 3), esp. pp. 374-376;
46. and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton Univ. Press, 1985).
47. For similar analyses of early modern courtly and mercantile elites and natural knowledge (diough not lab knowledge) see Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press, 1993);
48. and Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2007).
49. Steve Sturdy and Roger Cooter, "Science, Scientific Management, and the Transformation of Medicine in Britain, c. 1870-1950," Hist. Sci., 1998, 56:421-466.
50. See also Thomas Schlich, "Surgery, Science, and Modernity: Operating Rooms and Laboratories as Spaces of Control," ibid., 2007, 45:231-256. Schlich follows Foucault too slavishly, in my opinion, but he is right that the conventions of lab and operating room mirror those of capitalist political economy.
51. Is there such a thing as a working-class lab? It seems inconceivable - yet we were surprised by pubs, so would do well to keep an open mind. See Anne Secord, "Science in the Pub: Artisan Botanists in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire," Hist. Sci., 1994, 52:269-315.
52. No one has analyzed industrial science in quite this way, but there is suggestive material in Leonard S. Reich, The Making of American Industrial Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876-1926 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985);
53. and Monte A. Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830-1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1967).