A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America , and: Doctor Franklin’s Medicine , and: Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (review)

Abstract

A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America. By James Delbourgo. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. 367. Cloth, $29.95.)Doctor Franklin's Medicine. By Stanley Finger. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 379. Cloth, $39.95.)Science and Empire in Atlantic World. Edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew. (New York: Routledge, 2008. Pp. xiv, 365. Cloth, $95.00; Paper, $31.95.)Reviewed by Carla MulfordIn recent decades, scholarship on scientific revolution and Enlightenment studies more generally has taken turn away from intellectual history (largely story of training and writings of elite groups) toward cultural studies, social history, and history of technology and its circulation. Rather than focusing primarily on findings of Royal Society, scholars have excavated stories of numerous lesser-known scientists, engineers, and quacks involved in experimental, technological, and human sciences, and they have articulated range of stories that have usefully called into question imperial narratives of Enlightenment. Rather than speaking of one Enlightenment that moved from center to peripheries, these scholars have shown extent to which so-called enlightened sciences were embraced everywhere by everyday people for everyday ends. Examining interplay between technology and human behavior and between culture and state formation, scholars such as Roy Porter, Margaret Jacob, Stephen Shapin, Simon Schaffer, and Michael Brian Schiffer have shown that while ideology of enlightenment was in part province of well-to-do intellectuals who pontificated on matters of natural philosophy, epistemology, teleology, and ontology, it was also integrally evidenced in responses of everyday people to wonders being elucidated by experimental science practiced and reported on in their midst.The three books under review participate in this newer conversation about impact of experimental science for general population, revealing how local forms of scientific and technological knowhow assisted in creating public cultures of scientific enlightenment that eventually found (or challenged) marketplace of knowledge-sharing and disciplinary boundary-making among intelligentsia in England and Europe. In metropolitan centers during seventeenth century, debates continued between experimental scientists and traditional philosophers like Cambridge divine and philosopher Henry More (1614-1687), who disliked challenge to then-current epistemes being launched by experimental scientists and their slibber sauce experiments. To charges More laid against experimental science, William Petty (whose tracts garnered him admiration of young Benjamin Franklin) responded that the sweetness of experimental knowledge was far preferable to Vaporous garlick 8c onions of phantasmaticall seeming philosophy.1The debates about importance of experimental method continued through seventeenth century, but empirical method eventually held sway for large swath of population interested in improving on existing practices, whether in agriculture, astronomy, navigation, physiology, or iatrochemistry. At time that Franklin praised Sir Francis Bacon as a prodigious genius, one justly esteem'd father of modern experimental philosophy (quoted in Finger, Doctor Franklin's Medicine, 10), Bacon's methods had been embraced - and challenged, even as they were embraced - by collectors and natural philosophers in different hemispheres. Indeed, as Neil Saner points out in his essay, Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu's South American Odyssey (in Delbourgo and Dew's collection Science and Empire), Bacon's wellknown maxims were being turned on their head: Whereas Bacon had proposed that m situ description was to be followed by metropolitan ordering and interpretation of natural data, Joseph de Jussieu insisted that only those with lived experience in field ought to be credited as scientists. …