Roy Porter (ed.), The Cambridge history of science. Vol. 4: Eighteenth-century science, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. xxx, 912, £65.00, $95.00 (hardback 0-521-57243-6).

Abstract

Although best known for his prolific writing on the history of medicine, the late Roy Porter's reputation among general historians and a generation of Cambridge graduates was first and foremost as the author of the outstanding Penguin paperback, English society in the eighteenth century (1982). He was therefore the obvious authority to edit the fourth of eight volumes synthesizing our knowledge of the history of science. The Cambridge history of science has been planned since 1993 as a complement to Cambridge University Press's fourteen volume Cambridge modern history. It is intended to be an up-to-date account of science “from the earliest literate societies in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the beginning of the 21st century that even nonspecialist readers will find engaging” (p. xxx). In Eighteenth-century science, Porter masterminds thirty-five contributors in a sweeping survey of the longue duree (curiously a temporal category not used by any of the contributors) between Newton's Principia (1687) and the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. Although Porter did not live to see the volume through the press, he contributed a vintage twenty-page introduction that seamlessly links the authors' papers together. He observes that while Enlightenment sciences lacked the drama of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century or the Darwinian revolution of the nineteenth, the century was anything but dull. During it natural philosophy became part of Western culture and “public knowledge”, and natural philosophy itself underwent what Porter terms “balkanization” as the unified nature of tradition broke up into specialist disciplines. It is unfortunate that Porter chose not to contribute a chapter. As it is, Thomas H Broman's essay on the medical sciences (pp. 463–84) is confined to a treatment of medical theory as articulated by university-trained physicians. It is a fine chapter, but its account of a world without surgeons, apothecaries, patients and the medical market place is hardly representative of the scholarship of the last twenty years. (Indeed, readers interested in eighteenth-century medicine would be better directed to Porter's rumbustious chapter in his Greatest benefit to mankind, 1997.) The bulky but sturdily-bound volume is organized into five sections. Eight preliminary essays on science and society cover the Enlightenment, universities, institutions, science and government, popular science (an entertaining and perceptive essay by Mary Fissell and Roger Cooter), the image of the man of science, women, and how historians have deployed prosopography. Part 2 has a dozen essays on scientific disciplines; besides the obvious sciences collateral to medicine, these include treatments of the classification of natural knowledge and of the marginalization of sciences such as animal magnetism, physiognomy, astrology, alchemy and Hutchinsonianism under the twin pressures of Enlightenment reason and social attitudes. A shorter section of five essays follows on special themes such as instrument making, printing and the book, scientific illustration, and the significant subject of scientific voyages during the century. The book then looks at non-Western traditions in Islam, India, China (over brief, and strangely achieved without a single reference to the work of Joseph Needham) and Spanish America. Each of these, but particularly the last by Jorge Canizares Esguerra, pays particular attention to medicine. Science in the Ottoman empire, Africa and Australasia are not covered except by default in scattered references by several authors to exploration during the century. A final section of five excellent essays surveys some of the ramifications and imports of the century's events and concerns in religion, literature, the philosophy of mind, commerce and Empire, and technological change. The latter two chapters, by Larry Stewart and Ian Inkster, are the only ones that deal explicitly with industrialization. Porter admits to having had difficulties in commissioning non-British or American contributors, but given the global reach of the volume Anglo-American bias is minimized and the treatment of French and German sources is excellent. The comprehensive indexing required in such an encyclopaedic survey seems reliable and helpful, though it is puzzling why some, but not all, footnotes are indexed. While the volume does not offer a comprehensive survey and analysis of the medical sciences in the eighteenth century (the lack of a chapter on pharmaceutical developments is a serious omission), historians of medicine will undoubtedly find this a useful reference book for help in contextualizing their teaching and research. It achieves Porter's intention of providing a stable platform upon which scholarship on the nineteenth-century can be built. At the same time it shows how the eighteenth century was much more than the consolidation of the revolutionary changes that had taken place in the century before.