Reviewed by: Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge Jennifer Tucker (bio) Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, edited by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin; pp. 350. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998, $55.00, $19.00 paper, £43.95, £15.25 paper. In recent years, historians have focused increasingly on how scientific knowledge and practices are shaped in meaningful patterns of interaction in the world. Perhaps in part because cultural studies of science have insisted upon the embodied dimension of scientific practices, the body has been among the most prominent issues taken up in detailed work by cultural studies scholars. Cultural studies of science have been attentive to bodily skills as constitutive of scientific knowing, and as impositions upon who or what is to be known. In this ambitious and creative volume of historical essays, the contributors have recovered a hitherto neglected range of bodily repertoires that people once used to speak about the processes by which genuine knowledge was to be attained. They also argue that the stories told about the nature of the authentic knower are central to defining and validating officially sanctioned knowledge. One of the volume’s major strengths is its shift of focus from how science has measured the body, to how the bodies of scientific intellectuals themselves were differentially marked. A central claim of earlier social studies of science was that scientists are like everyone else, and therefore to be studied with the same tools that social scientists use to understand the cultures made by people working in other occupations. Science Incarnate implicitly revises this assumption: while maintaining that science is a “special object of inquiry” because “no present-day body of culture competes in any significant way for the mantle of Truth” (13), its contributors argue that the “sameness” of scientists is a late-twentieth-century concept. The editors, Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin, explain: “Across a range of different cultures, questions about the status and worth of knowledge have been partly dealt with by the bodily presentations of those who produced and reported upon this knowledge” (10). Far from being seen to resemble everyone else, natural philosophers and scientists historically were regarded as having different bodily and moral constitutions from other people. Most of the essays are organized around the bodily self-presentations and representations of heroic individual male scientists. Rob Iliffe shows that to understand Isaac Newton’s important place in eighteenth-century English society, it is necessary to consider the social formation of his philosophical identity as an abstemious genius. Janet Browne demonstrates that Charles Darwin’s gastrointestinal afflictions affected his social relations, and examines portrait photographs of Darwin to see how his feebleness meshed with his celebrity status. By contrast, Simon Schaffer, Christopher Lawrence, and Andrew Warwick emphasize the centrality of bodily practices to the collective identity and self-definition of experimental philosophers, scientists, and doctors. Schaffer argues, for example, that the Restoration order was secured in part through the attribution of power to the bodies of natural philosophers charged with managing the supernatural capacity [End Page 497] of humans in royal spectacles. A few contributors reflect on how ideologies of womanhood and manhood in specific historical and cultural settings worked to define what it meant to be a scientific knower. Warwick goes farthest in examining the gender/knowledge relation among men of science, investigating the role that Victorian Cambridge played in socializing male adolescent mathematics students as athletic scholars, and revealing how a normative form of masculinity and heterosexuality was cultivated within a competitive, homosocial system of training. Departing from the preponderance of essays in the volume on male scientific intellects, Alison Winter argues that the early-Victorian mathematical genius, Ada Byron Lovelace, adapted Victorian conventions portraying elite women as sickly to stake her special claim to mathematical originality. Since it does the main work of engaging with other scholars, the Introduction by Lawrence and Shapin is crucial for understanding the conceptual framework of the project. The Introduction is divided into five sections: why the body of science is a funny but important topic; the embodiment of knowledge as an academic topic; embodiment of knowledge as a historians’ topic; how the body signals knowledge...
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Sep 1, 2005
Kathleen T Heinrich 
Open Access