Bacteriology as a Cultural System: Analysis and Its Discontents

A cultural system in two senses, bacteriology is underrepresented in the history and philosophy of science (significantly, however, it was the home science of the great prophet of underdetermination, Ludwik Fleck).1 Pasteur and Koch garner attention, but more as founders than practitioners.2 A quarter century ago, in 1987, Olga Amsterdamska called attention to the peculiarity of the enterprise, a biomedical praxis tied only loosely to natural history, to biology, or even to science.3 In this paper I shall examine the bacteriology presented in American textbooks between 1935 and 1950 in the terms of John Pickstone's Ways of knowing: A new history of science, technology, and medicine (2000), and supporting work (2007, 2009).4 In the book, Pickstone identified world-reading (natural philosophy), natural history, analysis, and experimental synthesis as distinct modes of knowing, which had arisen in a broadly sequential relation. Later writings would extend the concept to complementary ways of working and make clearer the concurrence of multiple ways of working and knowing in particular times and domains - there was no teleology here, nor were the ways of knowing/working mutually exclusive.From a Pickstonian standpoint, bacteriology is exemplary in two respects. First, there, the categories of natural philosophy, natural history, analysis, and rationalized synthetic craft are almost always conflated though in changing ways. Second, any working-knowing divide dissolves. There is an enormous emphasis on the pragmatic and operational: theories may underwrite practice, but practice is more important.Bacteriology may fit Pickstone, but does Pickstonizing bring anything to it? Some years ago as a reviewer, I suggested that Ways of knowing had a Kuhn-like potential to inform our understanding of science (and technology and medicine). I thought it might link Kuhn to the emerging literature on technoscientific practice and enrich our characterization of large scale units of activity (i.e., paradigms). That enrichment in turn, might help to clarify their dynamics. Kuhn had seen the overturning of paradigms primarily in epistemic terms. Accumulated anomalies brought revolution. He had not gone far into distinguishing multiple ways of knowing and doing, or to exploring factors that might give a technoscientific enterprise extended and trans-epistemic viability. Pickstone's analytic, by contrast, is applicable not only to diachronic changes within a technoscientific enterprise, but also to synchronic differences within and among the enterprises in a particular time and place: it offers, in short, a complement not only to Kuhn, but to J. ? Merz, whose classic History of European thought in the nineteenth century was equally about ways of knowing. By offering a richer set of categories for appreciating what sorts of work 'working knowledges' might do, Pickstone's approach eased burdens of epistemic accountability without sacrificing the benefits of a systematic comparative framework.REPRESENTATIONS OF BACTERIOLOGYBy the 1930s, a third generation of bacteriologists practised a discipline distinct - in terms of institutional organization, textbook traditions, modes of training, and career possibilities - from botany and zoology; equally from the other main biomedical laboratory science, pathology; and from the applied, and significantly colonial, enterprises of genetics, parasitology and veterinary medicine. They had, as we shall see, subverted an incipient biochemistry, which challenged the sanctity of the bacterial species concept. They had spawned as a parallel endeavour, immunology, and its chief practical arm, serology: the relation of immunology to bacteriology would be ambiguous and often contested - serological specificity was a means of defining bacterial specificity, and yet many serologists leaned dangerously toward general physiology and physical chemistry. Any picture of a community of happy equals, with each bacteriologist investigating the wee beasties of his (or rarely her) chosen domain is misleading. …