The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections (1740–1870) (review)

In The Microscope and the Eye: A History of Reflections (1740–1870), Jutta Schickore presents a series of essays revolving around the complex problem of instrument-aided observation. The essays are linked together by the historical thread of the developing microscope, as the author traces the idea of an “optimistic” view of scientific knowledge—that scientific knowledge is attainable by using an instrument. The book is not a history of the microscope, however, but rather an examination of the early period of microscopial investigations that serves as a case study for her placing the technological, theoretical, and methodological developments in historical perspective, and characterizing the different periods by how the microscopists valued their observations. The result is a re-evaluation of the importance of early scientific studies that depended on the microscope. By emphasizing the solving of “second-order” considerations (questions about the tools rather than the object investigated), Schickore places what has traditionally been considered the beginning of an era—Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus’s studies on the retina—instead as the “culmination of a long-standing project” (193). These “second-order” analyses are where the “reflections” in the title become significant—there was a back-and-forth relationship between the observer, the instrument being employed, and the object being studied.

The introductory essay presents three main questions to consider: What were the main procedural problems that microscopists addressed? Did the microscopists assume that the problems could be solved, and if so, how? What conclusions did the microscopists draw concerning the epistemic merits of the microscope? To answer these questions the author describes the contextual changes brought about by the microscope, and to which the microscope was also subject. What is most interesting in this book is the way that Schickore sets out to answer these questions.

With the first chapter, “The Versatile Tool of Improvement,” the reader sees how the author will approach the questions posed in the introduction. It deals with the possibilities of the microscope perfecting knowledge by letting the observer see the underlying structure of the natural world. Without the microscope you would never understand the insect eye or the internal structure of the nerves or retina, and yet the microscope itself was subject to scrutiny by the scientific community. To counter the traditional historical evaluation of eighteenth-century microscopy as a rather unproductive period, the author considers the “practitioners’ perceptions of the microscope’s merits and their methodological and epistemological concerns” (15). In this early period, “The microscope served as a tool to discover metaphysical truths, truths about God’s creation and man’s place in the world, and because it did so, the extension of the human gaze into the secret recesses of nature was legitimate” (25). The study of the British tradition in the first few chapters establishes the social context for microscope investigations, the study of test objects, and analysis of the microscope by its users. As the story continues, Schickore shows that optics, tissue preparation, chemistry, and physics all came together in the study of the retina in the 1830s and 1840s. The convergence of physiology, chemistry, and physics culminated in the codification of the techniques of microscopy. Chapters six through nine take the story away from Britain to German lands and consider the studies of Johannes Müller and later sensory physiologists studying the retina.

In the process of expanding the view of microscopists and their research by looking at the self-conscious examination of instruments as part of the scientific process, a more complex and multi-layered image of nineteenth-century biological discoveries based on the microscope emerges. The author’s final chapter, “The Advance of Reflexive Concerns,” brings all the strands of the previous chapters together. She shows how her examination of the second-order analysis by the microscopists allows a richer understanding of the development of microscopial science. By seeing the discordant results in the micro-anatomists...