TY - JOUR
AU1 - Gooday,, Graeme
AB - As members of a largely neophile technocratic culture, we have become accustomed to histories that focus their explanatory tales on the innovations of modern industrial society. Useful gadgets such as the mass-produced thermometer, stethoscope, and the X-ray machine are easily adduced as central agents in past transformations of healthcare. The less-discussed corollary is that each successive “improvement” in such technologies has generated large- scale discarding of older models, most headed in their manufactured obsolescence for the scrap-yard or (occasionally) the museum. Simon Werrett contends, however, that we should take a different view of how Big Business has taken over so much of our modern knowledge- making. Indeed he suggests that our familiarity with this pattern of throwaway cultures in science and medicine has led us to overlook how, in the longer term view, the recurrent pattern of commodified purchase, upgrading and discarding has been rather recent and actually quite anomalous. Werrett’s punning book title reveals his twin thematic concerns with material culture and environmental sustainability. Rather than acquiescing in modernist myth-making, he points us instead to an older scientific culture of thrifty recycling and repurposing of materials. Where some might see the rise of a “green” culture of preserving the globe’s resources, he sees in fact a return to an older economy of circulating materials that were used again in new creative ways until they were completely worn out. He thus points us to the early modern world of science that was mostly undertaken in the home, and thus in a world of familial-domestic patterns far removed from the corporate culture of off-the-shelf test-tubes and reagents. This volume, then, is an engaging and original study about how we can re-learn what we have lost (in several senses) from older societies’ handling of material culture. In linguistic terms, one of this book’s many intriguing insights is that our vocabulary of “waste” to be discarded has drifted a long way from the thriftier worldview of Samuel Johnson’s generation. For him, “rubbish” signified building debris used to fill ditches or foundations; “trash” once meant splinters of wood used to make compost or start fires; “garbage” was offal used for animal food, and “junk” signified old nautical ropes and cables. All these terms signalled pre-used material still in circulation for new purposes. Only the very humble category of “refuse,” Werrett emphasizes, signified the detritus which civilized society refused to re-use and thus judge as worthless, hence to be discarded (p. 28). In general, all things in the early modern world were presumed susceptible of re-use; hence rather than specialization of objects to tasks, a ubiquitous multifarious utility was the norm. To understand the key word in Werrett’s title, we need to appreciate that thrift per se was not a uniquely Victorian virtue invented by Samuel Smiles. In fact, for many centuries the value of thrift in running the household “oeconomy” was directly connected to thriving: by avoiding profligacy and gratuitous waste, one might hope to secure the habits and resources needed for lives and careers to flourish (p. 21). The flip-side, of course, was that in harsher times of famine, disease, pestilence and war, the prospects of survival were greatly enhanced by thrifty habits that furnished resilience in attempts to deal with unpredictable restrictions in resources. The lessons of this overarching picture – familiar to our grandparents perhaps, but alien to those born in post-World War II world – are explored by Werrett in eight thematically organized chapters. These culminate in an insightful discussion of how in the nineteenth century the natural sciences could drop thrift as a driving value as they came to be the beneficiaries of more generously-funded laboratories, all the while nevertheless assimilating at least some lessons from a thriftier earlier period. So what does Werrett’s fresh take on material culture tell us about how the natural sciences were conducted in a pre-commodity world? First, research often began in the home, where kitchen resources and tools in particular were the starting point of experimentation: specialist investigative apparatus imported from the instrument-maker were exceptions rather than common-place. And the domestic cellar is often where Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle arranged for the conduct of their experiments, not in specialist artificial outhouses. Even items of clothing could be fundamental in pursuing systematic investigations. For example, in 1759 Robert Symmers’s two-fluid theory of electricity came from his studies of how silk-stockings could be made to emit sparks. While such research was soon published in the prestigious Philosophy Transactions of the Royal Society, Werrett wryly notes that some of the Society’s Fellows baulked at the indelicacy of the personal item being thus discussed. Yet, importantly, none questioned the use of regular household goods in staking claims to profound discoveries (p. 64). When more elaborate apparatus was used in early modern science, Werrett tells us that great store was set on robust regimes of maintenance and repair. This itself inspired research into the materials that were most likely to be conducive to a thrifty practice by being unlikely to break in use, and or being easy to repair. Thus the Dutch chemist Herman Boerhaave elucidated for readers of his Elements of Chemistry in 1735 how to deploy the distinctive properties of wooden vessels for keeping salts, compared the value of iron and clay vessels for heating, and of glass as the ideal medium for preserving within its immutable transparency (p. 86). Such was the value attached to worthy working equipment of this sort, that bequests of second-hand equipment and public auctions came to be standard forms for equipping the domestic laboratory, in preference to shopping for new equipment. In his conclusion, Werrett observes that the return of concern for sustainability in the twenty-first century scientific sensibility might render the rise of unthrifty “Big Science” in the previous century only a brief hiatus in a more parsimonious longue durée (p.198). But can we really believe that company share-holders and directors will allow the profitability of mass-produced laboratory equipment to be sacrificed in returning to a greener more recycled science that thrived hundreds of years ago? In the era of the Large Hadron Collider and missions to Mars, we might be waiting a very long time for a broader voluntary return to epistemologically valuable thrift. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Simon Werrett. Thrifty Science: Making the Most of Materials in the History of Experiment
JF - Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
DO - 10.1093/jhmas/jrz047
DA - 2020-01-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/simon-werrett-thrifty-science-making-the-most-of-materials-in-the-wSEFpK6X7c
SP - 112
VL - 75
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -