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

Wishing to understand how the microscope gained universal trustworthiness and reliability and became “a widely accepted and commonly used tool of biomedical research” (p. 2), Jutta Schickore argues in this ambitious and often difficult book that we must look beyond traditional histories of technology and culture and pay serious attention to what she terms “second order concerns.” To this end she analyzes the arguments concerning the structure and function of the eye, and the means and methods of scientific research, advanced by physicians and natural historians who struggled with microscopical observations that were difficult to interpret and who came to realize that similar instruments could produce quite dissimilar results. Much of this work occurred before, and in significant ways laid the foundations for, the technological developments that are usually said to have ushered in the era of scientific or modern microscopy in the years around 1830.

While this book is written primarily for historians and philosophers of science, there is much here to interest historians of technology. An example is Schickore’s account of the low-powered microscopes used by astronomers, surveyors, and meteorologists, and the ways in which this simple “second order” device came to play “an essential and largely undisputed role” in the “improvement and validation of measuring operations” and become a “tool for instrument making” (p. 68). Another is her account of the growing appreciation of defining power as distinct from brute magnification. Here she discusses the cabbage butterflies, cheese mites, and other such objects that microscopists used to evaluate the optics of particular instruments and communicate the results to one another, and that also served as “second order” tools that challenged instrument makers to produce microscopes with better performance characteristics.