Kagaku to hyoushou: "Byougenkin" no rekishi 科学と表象:「病原菌」の歴史 [Science and Representation: A History of "Bacteria"] by Yuriko Tanaka 田中祐理子 (review)

Yuriko Tanaka's Science and Representation: A History of "Bacteria" consists of four case studies, each of which is devoted to a specific person: Girolamo Fracastoro, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, Louis Pasteur, and Robert Koch. This structure might strike some readers, particularly those who are familiar with the history of science, as rather an old-fashioned approach. Glancing at its table of contents, I wondered whether the book intended to explore the history of its given discipline by focusing on selected prominent (male) scientists whose contributions are deemed decisive from a present-day perspective. Such old-fashioned historiography often starts by identifying the "fathers" of the discipline and then chooses some later figures to be those who finally gave it its "modern contours." In the history of microbiology, Fracastoro and Leeuwenhoek tend to play the former role, and Pasteur and Koch the latter. Though this type of progressive and positivistic narrative once flourished in the history of science, it has been subjected to severe criticism in the past few decades. Soon after I started reading her book, however, I was reassured that the author was well aware of that criticism.

Tanaka begins the book with a historiographical reflection, stating that she is taking up the four aforementioned figures precisely because they have been represented as the key scholars in the old literature on the history of microbiology (35). While she focuses on them too, her aim is by no means to rehearse the now obsolete narrative. Instead, she hopes to explore the gaps and tensions between the old and new historical scholarship on their work. For this purpose, she emphasizes that these four figures held perspectives and made claims that cannot be easily incorporated into the standard history of microbiology. In other words, her premise is that the history of a given discipline is too often constructed by distortedly representing the reality of past figures. In the case of microbiology, Fracastoro and Leeuwenhoek in particular fell victim to such distortion. The standard history of the discipline suggests that they saw what they could have never seen, in order to incorporate them as the discipline's early figures, while the demand for this incorporation emerged only after Pasteur and Koch created the discipline in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

This book has, therefore, two parallel agendas. On the one hand, it presents case studies of the four prominent scholars; on the other, it intends to reflect on the historiography of microbiology through its consideration of how the four came to be grouped together and represented as the discipline's founders. The significance of running these agendas in parallel could have been maximized if the author were to manage to intertwine the two and provide a fresh perspective on each. I will return to this point at the end of this review.

In the subsequent four chapters, Tanaka discusses the four scientists. Chapter 1 is devoted to Fracastoro. She begins her examination by describing the process of how Fracastoro was rediscovered from almost total oblivion and came to be credited as a precursor of modern microbiology. Historians of medicine in the first half of the twentieth century praised him for his correct recognition of the mechanism of disease propagation (e.g., Garrison 1929). Fracastoro, they claimed, had already believed in the existence of microorganisms that carried diseases from one body to another. Tanaka points out that their understanding was conditional not only on the later emergence of the discipline of microbiology but also on a specific scientific discovery that they themselves witnessed: the identification of Treponema as the cause of syphilis. The excitement of this discovery prompted historians to search for the originator of the idea that invisibly small animals caused diseases. In this process, they found Fracastoro (note that he composed a poem entitled "Syphilis") and attributed to him various insights that he could never in fact have attained in the...