Écriture et mémoire: Les carnets medico-biologiques de Vallisneri a É. Wolff (review)

This collection of talks presented in Milan in 2005 at the Eleventh Congress of the SHESVI (European Society for History and Epistemology of Life Sciences) harvests new ideas about making and communicating science. The modest volume of 226 pages is a brilliant and subtle critical introduction to the status of scientific writing in connection with the very heart of research in the laboratory. Those who reject the many current prejudices haunting this topic should read it. It includes a series of case studies dealing with the making of unpublished notebooks and their function in transforming data from both observations and experiments into convincing public communications.

Inspired by the pioneering works of Holmes, Shapin, and Schaffer and early works on Abraham Trembley and Lazzaro Spallanzani in the 1980s, Maria Teresa Monti, in an illuminating introduction, explores some central problems dealing with the nature and function of scientific notebooks and provides a very thoughtful frame for the contributions to follow. She challenges the traditional understanding—that a notebook’s pure, early writing is transformed into persuasive rhetoric in a published scientific book—and sets forth the promising concept that consistent rhetoric is used throughout the process from early notebook to published monograph. She contends that research is a complex of three strongly interactive elements: pragmatic operation, rational thinking, and writing. She shows that the laboratory notebook is not only useful as a witness to what was previously considered a virginal space for discovery, free of any external corruption, but that it is also frequently directly composed with the aim of convincing oneself and other scientists.

Differences between laboratory notebooks and more rhetorical monographs are obvious. But the analysis of returns from the writing to the pragmatic laboratory activity discloses a new understanding of laboratory events. Historians must now study how and why the practice of convincing themselves and others leads scientists to change projects, interpretations, and pragmatic operations. If concepts and action, the native couple of science, are functionally linked to the writing of private notebooks, it is urgent to submit these early texts to extensive studies. Laboratory notebooks may be data collections or quotations of exceptions or abnormalities that are very useful for the future elaboration of published writings. They are nevertheless also the written space where conceptual and practical maturation about the meaning of science takes place. Writing and rewriting may lead to deep rethinking about what was done and what remains to be done. In this perspective, writing is one of the reasons to carry out new experiments. For the scholars, this indicates that writing, with its own textual logic, is a primary scientific operation.

Even as it addresses the fundamentals of the practice of science, this series is based on rich historical narration. It includes famous scientists as well as unknown “amateurs,” showing that besides the former, many laypersons very accurately mastered the internal rules of research, taking part in the development of a larger experimental culture.

Dario Generali’s very fine presentation shows how Antonio Vallisneri’s “quaderni,” written in Padua between 1694 and 1701, are where this major naturalist, writing about his readings, observations, and experiments, conceived a new influential naturalist culture. Among other very stimulating contributions, Maria Ferrucci presents Spallanzani’s 1761 notebooks about infusions and reveals how the concepts and the vocabulary of the great Italian physiologist arise in his early laboratory writings as well as in more elaborated published monographs. Addressing the organization, meaning, and rhetoric of Horace-Benedict de Saussure’s 1765 cahier, Marc J. Ratcliff develops one of the best examples of how very specialized research led to a general theory of animal reproduction. Three different but connected trends—cognitive activity, experimental creativity, and writing as a textual space—increase acceptance or rejection of the hypothetical phenomena. Marco Bresadola’s accurate reading of Luigi Galvani (1727–1798)’s famous paper books reveals major unpublished steps that...