Multimedia: Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge
Authors: David Armstrong
Journal: BMJ (1999)

Eds Christopher Lawrence, Steven Shapin


University of Chicago Press, £15.25, pp 352 




ISBN 0 226 47014 8

———————

Rating: ★★

In the 18th century the pursuit of natural history involved collecting and classifying objects found in the natural world—with the major exception of humans. It was only when natural history was replaced by biology at the start of the 19th century (except for the vestigial natural history table still to be found in many primary schools) that humans moved centre stage. But just as humans had been overlooked in the 18th century as an object of study, so scientists in the 19th and most of the 20th century overlooked another important object of study: themselves. This omission has begun to be rectified by the increasing numbers of empirical studies that take science and its practitioners as their object. There are now studies of how scientists think and studies of what they actually do, so it is only a small step to examine their bodies—what they looked like, how they expressed themselves, what moods they had, what illnesses they suffered, etc.

This book presents this new line of research by examining the relation between the traditional disembodied scientific idea (surely we are more interested in Darwin’s theory of evolution than his eczema?) and its “embodiment” in the everyday lives of scientists. In effect, the book claims to be a sort of cultural history of ideas which explores their embodied forms. As such it makes good reading: great thinkers of the past seemed bedevilled by all sorts of ailments and bodily afflictions, and these bring out a more human, if prosaic, side to people whose reputations have been based on the force of their ideas rather than their bouts of melancholia or backache.

But beyond this prurient interest in the bodily processes and failings of the famous, what conclusions can be drawn about the relation between ideas and their “embodiment”? The book prepares the reader by suggesting it does not even try to offer a coherent and systematic response to the question. The individual chapters range from personal medical histories to common stereotypes of the connection between ideas and embodiment. For example, the supposed link between Newton’s mental problems and his work has helped inform a subsequent belief that genius and madness are closely linked. The idea of stereotypes is taken further in Lawrence’s chapter on the images of the surgeon and the physician—one stocky and down to earth, the other lean and bespectacled—although these arguably present less a case for the individual embodiment of ideas and more a caricature of the connection between thought and body, between practice and physique.

The new questions surrounding the scientist’s persona seem to be part of a more general postmodern twist that causes scientists or practitioners to become reflexive, to gaze into the mirror of themselves. For example, having explored patients’ illnesses for the past few centuries, the medical profession has now begun to investigate the “sick doctor” in surveys of illness and studies of professional failing. It is this historical phenomenon, of which this book is simply a symptom, that needs further study.