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Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 By: Jan Golinski Published by Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760-1820 By: Jan Golinski Published by Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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Description:
Science as Public Culture joins a growing number of recent studies examining science as a practical activity in specific social settings. Jan Golinski considers the development of chemistry in Britain from 1760 to 1820, and relates it to the rise and subsequent eclipse of forms of civic life characteristic of the European Enlightenment. Within this framework the careers of prominent chemists like William Cullen, Joseph Black, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Beddoes, and Humphry Davy are interpreted in a new light. The major discoveries of the time, including nitrous oxide (laughing gas) and the electrical decomposition of water, are set against the background of alternative ways of constructing science as a public enterprise. The book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship between scientific activity and processes of social and political change in a period of great transformations in chemistry and in the conditions of public life.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Science as public culture
2. "The study of a gentleman": Chemistry as a public science in the
Scottish Enlightenment
Chemistry as an academic
discipline
Gentlemanly science in the
public realm
The social construction
of the Scottish program
3. Joseph Priestley and the English Enlightenment
The uses of chemistry in
Enlightenment England
Making connections: Priestley's
career
The experimenter and the
writer
4. Airs and their uses
Priestley's chemistry in
public education
The birth of pneumatic medicine
The analysis of air
5. The coming of the Chemical Revolution
Lavoisier's theory and its
reception in Britain
The instruments of persuasion
Demonstration, authority,
and community
6. "Dr. Beddoes's Breath": Nitrous oxide and the culmination of Enlightenment
medical chemistry
The Pneumatic Institution
Enthusiastic respirations:
The nitrous oxide incident
The end of Enlightenment
science?
7. Humphry Davy: The public face of genius
Davy's career: The creation
of a public audience
The voltaic pile: The making
of an instrument
Chlorine and "the lever
of experiment"
8. Analysis, education, and the chemical community
Specialist careers in the
London chemical community
The identity of the discipline
and the reception of Dalton's atomic theory
Mineralogy and the development
of chemical analysis
Conclusion: Discipline-formation and public science
Bibliography