In Ways of Knowing, John V. Pickstone provides a new and accessible framework for understanding science, technology, and medicine (STM) in the West from the Renaissance to the present. Pickstone's approach has four key features. First, he synthesizes the long-term histories and philosophies of disciplines that are normally studied separately. Second, he dissects STM into specific ways of knowing—natural history, analysis, and experimentalism—with separate but interlinked elements. Third, he explores these ways of knowing as forms of work related to our various technologies for making, mending, and destroying. And finally, he relates scientific and technical knowledges to popular understandings and to politics. Covering an incredibly wide range of subjects, from minerals and machines to patients and pharmaceuticals, and from experimental physics to genetic engineering, Pickstone's Ways of Knowing challenges the reader to reexamine traditional conceptualizations of the history, philosophy, and social studies of science, technology, and medicine.
In the mid-1920s a physiologist, a glass chemist, and a zoo embarked on a project which promised to turn buildings into medical instruments. The advanced chemistry of "Vita" Glass mobilised theories of light and medicine, health practices and glassmaking technology to compress an entire epoch’s hopes for a healthy life into a glass sheet – yet it did so invisibly. To communicate its advantage, Pilkington Bros. spared no expense as they launched the most costly and sophisticated marketing campaign in their history. Engineering need for "Vita" Glass employed leading-edge market research, evocative photography and vanguard techniques of advertising psychology, accompanied by the claim: "Let in the Health Rays of Daylight Permanently through "Vita" Glass Windows." This is the story of how, despite the best efforts of two glass companies, the leading marketing firm of the day, and the opinions of leading medical minds, "Vita" Glass failed. However, it epitomised an age of lightness and airiness, sleeping porches, flat roofs and ribbon windows. Moreover, through its remarkable print advertising, it strove to shape the ideal relationship between our buildings and our bodies.
The great biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed "awkward" data because it didn't support the case he was making. Joseph Lister's famously clean hospital wards were actually notoriously dirty. And Einstein's theory of general relativity was only "confirmed" in 1919 because an eminent British scientist massaged his figures. Drawing on the latest scholarship, John Waller shows that many of our greatest heroes of science were less than honest about their experimental data, and not above using friends in high places to help get their ideas accepted. He reveals how sheer effrontery and self-promotion propelled certain scientists to the fore, obscuring the vital contributions of others and the intrinsic merit of the ideas they overturned. Einstein's Luck is an enthralling and entertaining book, which resurrects the complex personalities, bitter rivalries, and intense human dramas that enliven and illuminate the history of science. Book jacket.
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