Science

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The word ‘scientist’ was first used in the 1830s, signalling a shift away from the integrated and comprehensive idea of ‘natural philosophy’ in which emerging disciplines such as astronomy, chemistry, geology, botany, biology, and electromagnetism were part of a more general ‘enquiry into the phenomena and powers of nature’, to use Richard Yeo’s phrase.1 Rather than being seen in a modern way as a number of rarefied and discrete fields that could be understood only by the specialist, natural philosophy was regarded as working alongside other forms of knowledge, including literature. Erasmus Darwin used verse to present scientific ideas to the public (extract 10.3), while in his poem ‘Religious Musings’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented ‘Philosophers and Bards’ as united in their endeavours (ll. 227–30). In the 1790s, when Coleridge wrote this poem, science was seen as fundamentally interlinked with ethical, religious, political, and literary debates. The anxiety expressed in a text like Frankenstein, written two decades later, was that science was beginning to cut itself free of its responsibilities to these wider concerns.KeywordsLiving BodyMaterialist PositionAggregate MassVital PropertyMercuric OxideThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.