Unreliable Observers, Flawed Instruments, 'Disciplined Viewings': Handling Specimens in Early Modern Microscopy

In the preface to Micrographia (1665) Robert Hooke expressed his allegiance to the Baconian ideals of scientific objectivity in affirming that a trustworthy description of a microscopical object requires two essential elements: 'a sincere Hand, and a faithful Eye, to examine, and to record, the things themselves as they appear'. The real shape of things, the most often quoted point on the agenda of experimental philosophy, was a concept constructed on the distinction between natural objects and artifacts. In the case of microscopy, the distinction must be seen through the more subtle difference between specimens and objects. By and large, seventeenth-century microscopical observations can be read through this dissimilarity between the natural object that preceded and articulated the inquiry and the artificial specimen that confirmed the type to which the object belonged. The incongruity of the two terms generated in the period a peculiar need to perpetually bring the object back to an initial stage of examination, whereby the experiment was constantly stating its own discursive authority in an attempt to do away with the shortcomings of a yet-imperfect instrument.