Transforming Traditions in American Biology, 1880-1915 (review)

TITLES THAT MAY INTEREST YOU As a service to our readers whose specific interests span the full spectrum of the fields of biology and medicine, we are providing the titles of and relevant information about some of the books sent to us by the publishers that will not receive full review treatment. Whenever possible we will add a short description of each book. The Unheeded Cry: Animal Consciousness, Animal Pain, and Science. By Bernard E. Rollin. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990. Pp. 308. $14.95. This book is not anti-science. The author hopes that it will be viewed "as a constructive critique of questionable philosophical assumptions which underlie much current scientific activity, whose abandonment can only enhance the intellectual and moral validity of scientific efforts to understand the world." The issue of animal consciousness, especially of pain, forms the central theme of the book. The author hopes "to show that denial of subjective states in animals is not an essential feature of a scientific stance, but rather a contingent, historical aberration which can be changed—and indeed must be changed—to make science both coherent and morally responsible." The author traces the development of changing attitudes towards animals and shows how growing social concern about the way in which we treat them is forcing some scientists to re-evaluate their ideology or moral thinking about animals. Transforming Traditions in American Biology, 1880—1915. By Jane Maienschein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991. Pp. 366. $48.00. The author, a professor of philosophy and zoology, has written several books dealing with aspects of the history of biology in the United States. This book is a collective biography of four pioneers in biology: Edmund Beecher Wilson, Edwin Grant Conklin, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and Ross Granville Harrison, all graduates of Johns Hopkins University. Although they were from similar backgrounds and shared experiences, their divergent research careers led to the revolutionary transformation of biology in America, leading away from the nineteenth-century traditions of morphology and physiology to the experimental developments in cytology, genetics and embryology (both evolutionary and experimental). "This is a story of individuals, and institutions, of scientific commitments, and 156 Book Reviews the way scientists do their work, and of how all these come together in the process of transforming traditions." This book "is more morphological, concentrating on the form and the patterns of change in the traditions and lines of research within them, rather than physiological and focused on the functioning or larger role of the traditions." This is a fascinating work with a rare depth of understanding ofboth scientific theory and practice. The Absent Body. By Drew Leder. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990. Pp. 218. $34.95; $14.95 (paper). The author probes the inner, visceral body that is absent from conscious experience. He reveals "those ways in which our bodies are absent in daily life, whether forgotten, alien, uncontrollable, or obscured," and studies "the ways in which bodily phenomena manifest structures of concealment and alienation." He presents "a highly original critique of Cartesian dualism, arguing that it is based upon, but misinterprets, our everyday experience." "The notion of lived body here employed refers to the embodied person witnessed from the third-person and first-person perspective alike, articulated by science as well as the life-world gaze, including intellectual cognition along with visceral and sensorimotor capacities." This philosophical treatise explores the relationship between medical and phenomenological themes concerning the body and embodiment. It is an important addition to the growing literature on embodiment. The New Medicine and the Old Ethics. By Albert R. Jonsen. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990. Pp. 171. $18.95. Despite the remarkable record of scientific discovery, clinical triumph, and personal sacrifice, the history of medicine also contains evidence of obscurantism , dogmatism, and greed. The author addresses "the conflict between altruism and self-interest, which he believes is built into the structure of medical care and woven into the very fabric of physicians' lives." He states that his book inclines to Aristotle rather than Descartes and Spinoza. He points out that "medicine has moved from being an institution in which the physician is the dominant actor, the patient-physician relation the dominant scenario...