Review of Allen G. Debus' "Man and Nature in the Renaissance"

These days "magic" seems quite separate from the pursuit of science; Paracelsian iatrochemistry sounds about as scientific as the use of an ouija board. But to divorce these two different kinds practices - the art of magic, the power to conjure, to discern the occult "mathematical secrets of the universe" on the one hand and what we would consider rigorous, empirical observation on the other - is quite ahistorical and misunderstands the spirit of science in the Renaissance. Allen Debus, professor for many years at the University of Chicago and historian of early modern science, drives this point home repeatedly in each of the general area discussed in this book.

The topics covered are ones that you would expect to be found in a book that summarizes the history of major scientific developments from approximately 1400 to 1650 - the study of nature (especially flora and fauna), the increased understanding of human physiology, cosmology, and a brief precis explaining the development of the scientific method generally speaking. 

Many of the Renaissance humanists, most notably Paracelsus, wholly rejected the scholasticism and Aristotelianism of previous generations and wished to infuse science and the study of nature with a renewed appreciation for mysticism and alchemy. While a religious understanding of the universe was utterly central to Paracelsian science, he simultaneously emphasized observation, which had been critically ignored by Aristotle and his studious promulgators. (His interest in chemistry, especially iatrochemistry, speaks to his interest in observation.) Aristotle's appreciation of science had been vitiated of all divine wisdom and knowledge by his paganism; Paracelsus wished to correct for this by suffusing science with neo-Platonic, Hermetic, and alchemical texts. He thought that the mathematical formalism of science resembled scholasticism, and he avoided it like the plague. 

Empiricism and observation critically improved a number of scientific areas, not just alchemical medicine. In the fifteenth century, crude medieval woodcuts of plants based on Pliny's centuries-old descriptions dominated the scholarship of botany. The drawings of Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner and Italian botanist Aldrovandi were much more accurate than previous ones, and therefore could greatly benefit both botanists and physicians alike.

In the area of medicine, matters had similarly stagnated. The practices of Galen predominated for a millennium after Galen's death because of their wide use and various translations. Debus discusses the historical developments contributed by those from Vesalius to William Harvey, the first person to accurately characterize blood flow in the human body.

This book is a wonderful introduction for two reasons: it covers the wide range of what were considered the sciences in the few centuries Debus is most concerned with without overwhelming the non-specialist reader, and he continually stresses the continuity between what we would today consider “magic” and empirical, rational, deductive reasoning, or what we would be more likely today to associate with science. He does this effectively in every chapter, and as someone who has a longstanding interest in the history of medieval and Renaissance science, it is refreshing to see an author who isn’t trying to retrospectively make modern science out of something supposedly written by Hermes Trismegistus. He lets the two stand side by side in whatever tension they might have, and deals with them as they are, not as he wants them to be.

Review of James Gleick's "The Information"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure, as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Glancing over many of the other lower ratings of this book, I’ve found that most people have already hit upon the major points of why I found it such an unsatisfying reading experience, and there were quite a few of them. To begin with, the actual title and the informational content of the book don’t really seem to jibe. There’s too much biographical information here, and of too many people, for the entire book to cohere in any meaningful way. The connection that one chapter has to the next is tenuous at best. For example, Gleick starts out talking about the ways in which African drummers drum in order to retain the information in a message over long distances (an fascinating way to the begin talking about information as a broad subject), but then almost inexplicably jumps directly into a short history of early English dictionary-making in the next chapter, and follows that with a history of the work Charles Babbage and Ada Byron Lovelace did together, including the Difference Machine and the Analytical Machine. Connecting them is only the thinnest of threads – the work of Claude Shannon and the birth of information theory - which isn’t even substantively developed until halfway through the book. Because of this, the whole endeavor ends up being a mile wide and an inch deep.

Is it just me, or does most non-technical science- or technology-oriented writing “The Information” read this way? The narrative net seems like it needs to be cast so far and wide that even those readers who might be put to sleep reading about something like information theory (why are these people reading this book in the first place?) will be able to maintain their interest. It can mostly be avoided when the subject is narrowed to the life and/or ideas of one person, as in Gleick’s previous book on Isaac Newton, though I found that book a little unsatisfying for a different reason: I thought it was much too short.

To give off the sense that this book wasn’t fun to read would be unfair. If you’re broadly interested in the history of science, this provides as a good introduction to a number of topics: in addition to the ones already mentioned, Gleick discusses telegraphy, the birth of statistical mechanics in physics and the concept of entropy, and the rise and difficulties of quantum computing. It’s just that the star of the show, the history of how “information” has been treated as such, suffers tremendously.

I picked it up because 1) it was on the discount shelf at Barnes&Noble for a reasonable price (and if you can get it for six dollars, I would still say it’s worth investing in), and 2) I felt that my knowledge of information theory would be insufficient for a book that demanded a readership with more expertise. For those interested in something like the history of computing, this would be a wonderful place to start. Anyone expecting something more tightly focused on the likes of Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner, their colleagues, and the development of fields like information theory and cybernetics will walk away wishing for something much more focused.

Review of William R. Newman's "Promethean Ambitions: Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Living in a time of Dolly the sheep and bioluminescent rabbits, it’s easy to lose sight of the ever-blurrier distinction between nature and “art” (understood in the sense of anything “artificial”). Most of us are familiar with an example that Newman himself mentions – that of Hawthorne’s story “The Birth-Mark,” which tells the story of a man who tries to eliminate a small mark on his otherwise remarkably beautiful wife’s face. The moral is so universal as to be predictable: his effort to perfect the already perfect is to have hubris that cannot go unpunished, it is to fail to accept in a Niebuhrian sense our own limitedness and the sin of human nature. But one of the goals of Newman’s book is to show that this conversation is much older than the nineteenth century. It goes back at least to the myth of Icarus and Arachne.

I’ve had a longstanding interest in the history of science, but this was admittedly a bit of a blind purchase from the University of Chicago Press. The subtitle, “Alchemy and the Quest to Perfect Nature,” hinted at perhaps a bit of room for the reader of general interest, but I had no such luck. The topic is fascinating in itself, and I walked away from the book feeling that I’d learned a lot about the history of the art-nature debate in its various instantiations throughout history. 

The preface offers a nice, general introduction to the history of alchemy. (It should be noted that Newman’s use of the word “alchemy” is extremely general. Scientists locked away in a laboratory trying to transmute lead or aluminum into gold should be banished from your mind. Instead, think about any kind of transformation produced by a human being, including the visual arts and, in much more recent history, the production of human life through means other than coitus, i.e., in vitro fertilization or other methods.) In fact, Newman’s thesis is that “alchemy provided a uniquely powerful focus for discussing the boundary between art and nature” and that this whole discussion “can only be understood if the reader is willing to engage with the presuppositions of premodern philosophers, theologians, alchemists, and artists about the structure and nature of the world around them” (p. 8). 

He’s not kidding, either. The heart of this book is a truly exhaustive attempt to chart the history of this idea, many of whose contributors will not be recognizable, even to readers of the history of science. Some of more popular: Ibn Khaldun, Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas play gigantic roles. But most are unfamiliar: Jean de Meun, Petrus Bonus, Thomas Erastus, Bernard Palissy, and Zosimos of Panopolis are just a few of the dozens. There are so many of these minor people, whose ideas loom large in the book, that they are often picked up, left behind, only to be picked up in another chapter, leaving the readers to flip back and forth in order to intellectually orient themselves. 

I’ll spare you the various transmutations and permutations of these complex arguments (they do get very complex), but Newman seems to have two important takeaways. One is that our view of alchemy as synonymous with witchcraft or other black arts is naïve and undeveloped, and that it needs to be expanded to include all of the arts in the sense described above. The second and more important one is that this intellectual conversation has a long, subtle, and storied past in the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and the natural sciences. This should without a doubt be read by someone with a narrow, serious interest in this subspecialty (if this is the case, you’re probably already familiar with Newman’s name, since he’s one of the better-known scholars in the field). The book doesn’t have even a bit of appeal to a slightly more popular audience that it might have had that would have made it much more enjoyable, at least for this non-specialist.

Review of Keith Thomson's "Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

When we think about the modern biological sciences, one name invariably pops into mind: Charles Darwin. Keith Thomson’s book, “Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature,” looks at the approximately two centuries of science that predate Darwin, partially in an attempt to see what influenced him, but mostly because it’s a fascinating history in and of itself. Thomson is almost wholly concerned with an age in which all natural science (then still often called “natural philosophy”) was almost always natural theology – that is, an understanding that the study of science and nature would draw one close to understanding the mind of God. William Paley, the eighteenth-century English naturalist whose book “Natural Theology” had a tremendous influence on Darwin’s early career, thought that the ways of God are shown to man through a rigorous and critical study of the natural world.

We get a quick, breathless account of big scientific developments from Copernicus to Newton, and see that the more we learn about God, the less ground natural theologians have to stand on. Thomson rhetorically asks, “Once Pandora’s Box was opened and a new, lesser, role ascribed to God, who could predict where matters would end?” (p. 44). 

The rest of the book is taken up with discussing the contributions of several scientists, many of them not nearly as recognized as they should be, including Thomas Burnet, John Ray, Robert Plot, and Martin Lister. Paley and Ray especially built an argument from design, but there was one glaring problem: it’s clear there are many things in nature that are not perfect, and that don’t look like they were designed. The human eye – commonly adduced by modern-day creationists as an example of “irreducible complexity” – has a blind spot that lacks photoreceptors and therefore would make us more susceptible to attacks from predators if we still lived out in the open. The sacroiliac region at the base of the spine is mechanically imperfect to bear our weight, which often results in back pain as we age. Someone convinced that the human body is a perfectly designed machine can’t explain the appendix, a vestigial organ for which there is no observable purpose. 

What Thomson seems to be saying is that natural theology had a historical tendency to reverse engineer science to fit its own theological ends. Therefore, what we see here is not so much science as we would understand the term today, but the use of science as a kind of anthropocentric cherry-picking to shore up preformulated beliefs, namely the creation accounts (there are two of them) in Genesis. Ironically, these culminate in a the work of Steno, a Dutch geologist and anatomist who was blithely unconcerned with how much his own work – the work of a Catholic bishop, mind you – confirmed or denied the accounts in Genesis.

There’s tons of other fascinating stuff in here that I won’t get into about interpretations of the fossil record (apparently people used to think that fossils just grew in place in the ground and that their resemblance to animals was purely coincidental), geology, paleontology, and what everyone thought about the Great Flood. It could also serve as a reference work if you’re interested enough in the history of natural science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It’s pretty much rekindled my long-dormant interest in the history of science.

Review of Fritz Stern's "Einstein's German World"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

The French political philosopher Raymond Aron once remarked to Fritz Stern that the twentieth century could have been Germany’s century.” This remark, which Stern mentions in the introduction to his book, creates a opening in which Stern examines reemerging themes like material strength, nationalism, militarism, and German culture all through the eyes of many of Einstein’s scientific coevals. In fact, from the biographical sketches that Stern produces here, he offers the uncontroversial opinion that Germany’s decline into moral nihilism under Nazi rule and the varying effects that had on the professional classes within Germany were some of the forces that prevented Germany from realizing its fullest potential. For this reason, the book is more than a little underwhelming.

The first half of the book contains a series of miniature Plutarch-like biographies of the immunologist Paul Ehrlich, physicist Max Planck, and the chemist Fritz Haber (the only major convert to Christian Stern mentions). Despite the title, some were much close to Einstein than others, but of the four, Einstein was the only one who never embraced militarism and who encouraged Zionism. 

Later in the book, Stern offers a couple of essays which discuss Zionism and some of its earlier discussants, including Walther Rathenau and Chaim Weizmann, whose early faith in the movement would later develop into disappointment. Two more essays – “Travails of the New Germany” and “Lost Homelands” – explore broader themes in contemporary Germany historiography; these explore the tragic psychic cost of German reunification. There’s also a wonderfully polemical essay titled “The Goldhagen Controversy,” which argues against Daniel Goldhagen’s supposed thesis set forth in “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” that there was something in the German people themselves that drove them to orchestrate the Holocaust. (I use the word “supposed” here because I haven’t read his book and wouldn’t want to criticize it without doing so.) 

I have previously read and reviewed Stern’s “The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology,” and thought it to be one of the better books that I read in 2012. While I’ve taught science and math, I read precious little of it for pleasure, but was immediately interested when I was Stern’s name. I don’t know what it is about this book, but he never seems as fascinated by his subjects here. He admits that he’s never had a formal background in science, even though most of his subjects are professional scientists. While it is always a historian’s task to remain as objective as possible, Stern seemed cold and sometimes even uninterested toward his subjects – and quite frankly, he rarely says anything about them that hasn’t been said before. If you’re really interested in science in early twentieth-century Germany from a biographical side, this might have something of interest to offer. Otherwise, this is going to be a lot of general history with which you’re probably already familiar.

Review of Roy Porter's "Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Lunatics"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Roy Porter is mostly known for his books on the history of medicine and the development of medical practice in Europe. “Madmen” is Porter’s attempt at outlining the changes in the care of “lunatics” (as the subtitle puts it), mostly during Georgian England. The book traces the different approaches to various mental illnesses from the time of humoralism up until the birth of what can be recognized as modern-day psychiatry in the early nineteenth century.

Porter begins by challenging Foucault’s concept of the Great Confinement, in which unreasonable members of society were institutionalized in large numbers. According to Foucault, before the Great Confinement folly had “a liberty and truth of its own, engaging in a dialogue with reason” but afterwards became disqualified, abominated, and reduced to pure negation (unreason). Foucault also maintains that it was it mostly the poor who were institutionalized by the rising middle classes. Porter challenges this as historically inaccurate at least in England; instead, the progress was slow and gradual. Also, “it is a key contention for Foucault that the Great Confinement was driven by the powerful to police the poor … but it would be a mistake to underestimate the numbers of bourgeois, gentry, and nobility who were also being confined” (p. 21).

Porter gives an historical account of the four-fold humoralism (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) as a way of explaining how rational, mortal men could attain balance with the cosmos; aetiologies of sickness were also explained as an imbalance between the humors well into the eighteenth century. Even though there was a medical tendency to somatize mental illness, elements in the culture (including Richard Burton, author of “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” and himself a renowned melancholic) portrayed it as a kind of psychomachia – literally, a battle between the rational and irrational parts of the soul. In later Georgian England, insanity became something to be pitied, aided by Locke’s conception of madness as a false association of ideas, instead of “the overthrow of noble reason by base passions”

While confinement of the insane did exist before around 1800, it was in private institutions, and sometimes in churches. It wasn’t until after this date that the state began to demand confinement for lunatics in subsidized asylums. Before this, going back even to the Restoration, many madhouses were actually private residences – indeed, that’s even how the word “madhouse” came about – in an age before licensing and regulation. These enterprises could be greatly lucrative for the people running them, since the owners could mandate that the lunatics stay there indefinitely while they collected the money from the lunatics’ family members. The Act for Regulating Private Madhouses of 1774 went some way toward protecting the mentally fit from being wrongly confined, but they would have to wait until the 1840s for legislation that attempted to supervise the living conditions and quality of care of the patients.

During the first part of the nineteenth century, there grew to be a body of treatments which we can increasingly recognize as psychiatric. “In particular, currents in metaphysics and medicine were proposing fresh paradigms of mind and body, behavior and self, and thereby opening a new field eventually to be denominated the psychiatric. For this, the catalyst proved to be the associated emergence of bricks-and-mortar institutions for lunatics; for the presence of the first time of concentrations of patients isolated in madhouses, encouraged close ‘scientific’ surveillance of delusions and delinquencies, stirring the clinical ‘psychology’ of the disturbed. This hitherto unparalleled scrutiny of lunatics under controlled conditions, particularly while interacting with keepers, formed the matrix for practical (experimental) discipline of managing madness” (p. 178). 

Much of the book, especially the second half, was bogged down in doctors and case studies of individual patients, which really subtracted from the bigger picture that Porter is trying to illustrate here. This usually isn’t a problem for me, but it was the equivalent of zooming too close in a photograph and losing focus. Had it not been for these minutiae, it story could have been much more effective. However, because of my interest in the topic, I still want to read Porter’s “The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: The Medical History of Humanity.” 

Review of Robert Darnton's "Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Most people are probably passingly familiar with Franz Anton Mesmer, the eighteenth-century German-born physician and originator of what we now know as “mesmerism,” but the background that Robert Darnton (formerly of Princeton University, but now heads the Harvard University Library) brings to the this book puts mesmerism into not just medical and physical, but also political perspective.

Pre-Revolutionary France was peopled with scientists trying to create new cosmologies to explain the mysterious universe around them. “Science had captivated Mesmer’s contemporaries by revealing to them that they were surrounded by wonderful, invisible forces: Newton’s gravity, made intelligible by Voltaire; Franklin’s electricity, popularized by a fad for lightning rods and by demonstrations in the fashionable lyceums and museums of Paris and other miraculous gases of the Charlieres and Montgolfieres that astonished Europe by lifting man into the air for the first time in 1783” (p. 10). It was a time of both experimentation and empiricism – and lots of quackery. Mesmer himself proposed that a superfine fluid pervaded the entire universe, but especially the body. “Individuals could control and reinforce the fluid’s action by ‘mesmerizing’ or massaging the body’s ‘poles’ and thereby overcoming the obstacle, inducing a ‘crisis,’ often in the form of convulsions, and restoring health or the ‘harmony’ of man with nature” (p. 4). 

There were, however, institutionalized consensus positions on scientific issues, and the literary and medical journals and professional societies who held them would openly call out Mesmer on his unsubstantiated claims. Mesmer was unconcerned, though. As he said, “It is to the public that I appeal.” The accreditation and approval of official societies meant nothing to him, and he didn’t bother seeking it; rather, he wanted to bring his science to the people and let it speak for itself, and accept it on their own accord.

However, mesmerists didn’t think that mesmerism’s power stopped and started with the body. Instead, they suggested that the health of the body was related to many other things, including mental health, morality, and even the possibility for political change. Darnton details some of the more important people of Mesmer’s inner group, and the splitting into factions that eventually occurred. One of the factions, led by a man named Bergasse, “developed the social and political aspects of his theory – his own ideas about ‘universal morality, about the principles of legislation, about education, habits, the arts, etc.,’” (p. 78). “Carra [another one of the breakaways from Mesmer’s official doctrine] and his friends, especially Bergasse, dealt with the cosmological side of mesmerism by extracting a political theory from the obscure, strictly apolitical pontifications of Mesmer. ‘Political theory’ may be too dignified a term for their distortions of his ideas, but they themselves considered their theories consistent and reasonable, and the police viewed them as a thread to the state” (p. 107). 

What was it in mesmerism that appealed to the radical mentality before the Revolution? The mesmerists began to think that the professional, academic journals and societies had formed a kind of anti-democratic coterie whose job it was to marginalize legitimate scientists with valid ideas. In other words, some mesmerists began to see science as something other than what could be described, for lack of a better term, as an “elitist” enterprise. Science had no One Right Answer, and the ridiculing poorly known scientists for their ideas was no better than what Louis XVI was doing; science and political theory – namely, democracy – had collided. 

Obscure as it sounded, the ideas of Carra and Bergasse took Mesmer to his logical conclusions: unjust legislation, just like a bad moral disposition, “disrupted one’s atmosphere and hence one’s health, just as physical causes could produce moral effects, even on a broad scale” (p. 108). By construing Mesmer so liberally (and so inaccurately), Carra, Bergasse and others were able to cast a single net around both the world of science, ethics, and revolutionary politics. “By injecting a Rousseauist bias into a mesmerist analysis of the physical and psychological relations among men, Bergasse saw a way to revolutionize France. He would reverse the historical trend of physico-moral causality, reforming institutions by physically regenerating Frenchmen. Improved bodies would improve morals, and better morals would eventually produce political effects” (p. 124). 

I just happened to read this soon after finishing George L. Mosse’s “Confronting the Nation: Western and Jewish Nationalism,” which has a few chapters that discuss fascism and its relation to nationalism. In one of those chapters, he pinpoints the French Revolution as the historical event that allows movements like fascism to eventually develop, especially with the mass mobilization of politics. Although Darnton never explicitly suggests this, his book seems to be solid evidence of Mosse’s thesis. Mesmer choosing to ignore scientific consensus and saying “I wish only to convince the public,” his conspiratorial view well-known scientists trying to crush and demolish him, and the collusion of science and politics (especially more race-related “science” as we get into the nineteenth century) all have strong lines of continuity with what we will later call fascism. For anyone interested in how science, ideology and politics can become so easily and terribly entangled, I found this to be a wonderful case study. 

But it’s just as good for those interested in the more pedestrian history or sociology of science. Darnton’s background in eighteenth-century European (especially French) history was essential for building the picture that he does, and for building the conclusions that he convincingly reaches. For those interested in something along the same lines but a bit more popular, Darnton’s “The Great Cat Massacre,” which I have also reviewed on this site, is a wonderful and equally insightful collection of essays on early modern French cultural and literary themes.