Instruments and the Imagination (review)

In The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, (1984), Robert Darnton took a lead from anthropologists and contended that historians can most easily enter an unfamiliar culture by seeking out those episodes that, on the face of it, seem most inexplicable. Darnton’s point has been taken to heart by the authors of Instruments and the Imagination. However, as they note (p. 72), historians of science have usually ignored what they do not “get”: ideas, books, organizations, or instruments that do not make sense by the lights of modern science have, at least until the last fifteen years or so, traditionally been ignored. One of the most interesting strategies of Hankins and Silverman is to examine some instruments that either appear baffling, or would not be classed as scientific by the canons of late-twentieth-century science.

In concentrating on instruments, the authors make another move that would have been unusual even fifteen years ago. Until relatively recently the proper study of the history of science was generally taken to be the study of the history of theories and concepts; instruments and apparatus were usually relegated to the sidelines. The marginal position of instruments in historical accounts began to change in the late 1970s, for perhaps two main reasons. First, some historians, philosophers, and others interested in modern science, especially the sociology of scientific knowledge, turned to the study of the actual working practices and day-to-day activities of scientists, rather than what those scientists imply or claim they do in scientific papers and monographs. The turn to practice, with its natural focus on instruments, was then picked up by others with concerns far from the sociology of scientific knowledge. Second, instruments also became a center of attention in another, very different, sphere, that of science policy. This growing interest was fueled by the steeply rising cost of certain classes of instruments. For example, at the time of the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider in 1993, its final price tag was reckoned to be on the order of $10 billion. Such contemporary instruments, and the often heated debates swirling around them, appear to have helped focus attention on the history of instruments in general.

Much of the literature on instruments, however, is still composed of studies of single instruments set within a narrow context. Instruments and the Imagination is far more ambitious. Ranging in its coverage of time periods between the seventeenth century and the early twentieth century, it centers on a set of case studies (five of them on specific instruments, and two on a broad class of instruments) of instruments that derived from the natural magic tradition, but that also became subjects for debate by experimental philosophers. Each instrument or group of instruments, then, belonged to two traditions—a point that naturally raises the central question of what is to count as a scientific instrument. This issue, in turn, leads to questions about the proper ways to study nature, as well as what should count as natural science. In addressing these questions, the authors have much to say about the association between instruments and language, the way their chosen instruments replicated or investigated the phenomena of sight and sound, the role of instruments in mediating between sense and reason, and what is to count as correct method. The authors also stress instruments as demonstrators, that is, as vehicles for the display of objects and phenomena—a choice that gives them “more of a carnival character than the instruments that we commonly think of as ‘scientific’” (p. 12).

There is a brief discussion of the history of the sphygmograph in a chapter on recording devices and the universal language of instruments, but none of the instruments or classes of instruments examined in depth relate directly to medical practice. Nevertheless, there is much here to interest historians of medicine. For example, a significant chunk of the book deals with the imitation of human functions by various devices in the...