40 - Science

Summary

The term ‘scientist’ is a Victorian one, coined by William Whewell in 1833. From there it is easy to imagine Victorian science as advancing steadily, shedding spiritualism, natural theology, mesmerism and phrenology towards what we might recognise as science today. Yet, as with many such convenient historical myths, we find nothing of the sort, with some scientists at the end of the century denouncing state funding for research, defending the study of supernatural phenomena and, in the pages of the late nineteenth-century popular science magazine Science-Gossip, having a lively discussion as to why the term ‘scientist’ should be abandoned as a barbarism. Although those who practised science might have claimed their results captured timeless truths about the natural world, what were considered truths and the methods with which they were derived and disseminated were drawn from the changing world around them. Equipment, methods, bodies of knowledge, research programmes, networks of expertise and mechanisms for the communication of results all rooted the production of objective scientific knowledge in historically contingent social practices. Not only does science have a history, but for those Victorians practising science there were a variety of subjects to study and ways in which to study them.