No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (review)

In these days, when all too often publishers bring out barely revised books with new titles to trick us into thinking we are buying a new book, it is a pleasure to find a truly new and expanded edition of an old standby whose title remains unchanged. When No Other Gods appeared more than two decades ago (1976), its essays provided handy teaching materials for the increasing number of courses in the history of medicine.

The fifteen essays of this edition are divided into two almost equal parts. The first group, on science, society, and social thought, focus on the dissemination of scientific ideas and the ways in which those ideas may act as social variables. Here we find essays on heredity, sexuality, and gender roles, as well as some more-detailed studies. These latter include an oft-cited essay on George M. Beard, the progenitor of the important late-nineteenth-century disorder of neurasthenia; one on the role of pietism in the origins of the American public health movement in the 1840s; and one that focuses on the medical scientist as hero in Sinclair Lewis’s widely read 1925 novel, Arrowsmith.

In the eight essays in the second group, Rosenberg’s focus is on the relationship of medical and scientific ideas to social structures and the world of public policy. Here there are essays on the scientist’s role in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century agricultural experiment stations; on the influence of the Adams Act of 1906, which specified that appropriated funds be used for agricultural research; and on the interplay of social as well as scientific factors in the rise of American genetics.

The revised and expanded edition of this collection has a new introduction and three essays not included in the earlier edition. Of particular note is Rosenberg’s oft-cited “Toward an Ecology of Knowledge: On Discipline, Context, and History,” which first appeared in a slightly different version in 1979. Here he discusses the role of knowledge in particular disciplines as well as in society more generally. He employs the ecological metaphor effectively in describing the rich texture and the complexity of the intellectual work of particular disciplines such as science or medicine, as well as the context in which the scientist or physician carries out the work of practice or of creating new knowledge. In this same essay Rosenberg also uses the metaphor of ethnography, and in the new introduction he notes that one explanation for the antiheroic tenor of much recent history of medicine and science may be related to the much wider use of an ethnographic orientation. Just as no man is a hero to his valet, “few scientists are noble and disinterested seekers after truth in their ethnographer’s account” (p. xi).

In the preface to the 1976 edition, Rosenberg wrote that “the relationship among science, society, and social thought has been a marginal topic for historical inquiry” (p. ix). Two decades and more later, no one would be able to say the same—because Rosenberg and a host of others who have come later, many deeply influenced by his work, have greatly enriched and expanded the field of medical history. Thus it is most welcome that these essays are once again readily available in a good paperback edition.