Reine und angewandte Chemie Die Entstehung einer neuen Wissenschaftskonzeption in der Chemie der Aufklärung

In its attempt to achieve acknowledgement and support as a true science and academic discipline eighteenth-century chemistry experienced that the traditional distinction between theory and practice, respectively between science and art, was an incriminating heritage and did not longer conform to the way chemists saw themselves. In order to substitute the former, socially judging classification into theoretical science and practical art, J. G. Wallerius from Uppsala coined the term pure and applied chemistry in 1751. The idea behind this new conception was that it ought to be chemistry's research aim and not the kind of work, be it manual or intellectual, which was to decide about its branches and their dignity. The change in orientation which took place during the eighteenth century, and which is symbolized by the new dichotomy “pure and applied”, led towards a revaluation of the utilitarian aspects of chemistry. Its historical roots reach back to a long and fruitful cooperation of, and interaction between chemistry and economy, which was reinforced by the Stahlian tradition in Germany and Scandinavia. Subsequently, it was its strong economic bias that helped chemistry to become institutionalized and accepted as an academic discipline distinct from the medico-pharmaceutical profession. The analysis of this change of attitudes, behaviour and institutional pattern suggests that, at least during the period of institutionalization of this particular discipline, social structures and the intrinsic scientific contents are so tightly interrelated, that any division into “internal”, cognitive developments (facts, theory and subject-matter) and “external” conditions (social context and stategies of institutionalization) would be artificial, since they both constitute the scientific community as a context of argumentation and action.     

Die Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin ‐ Bestand und Wandel einer gelehrten Gesellschaft Ein Überblick

The article deals with the foundation and development of the society Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freunde zu Berlin in the 18th and 19th centuries, its position as a privat society for natural history in Berlin, and its relation to Freemasonry. The paper shows the change of meaning of these society, especially after the foundation of the Berlin university in 1810.     

Geschlecht und Gesellschaft: Die ersten Ärztinnen und sozialpolitische Vorurteile

The objective mode of scientific inquiry has increasingly been called into question especially within feminist theory. I have tried to introduce two methodological approaches in examing a small area of medical opinion-making in the medical press at a period in which the question of women doctors was being discussed, but very few women doctors were actually practicing in Germany. Methodologically feminist history sees gender as a structural component used to ascribe sexual division of labour and to form concepts of “masculinity” and “femininity” in a society. It does not define “women's history” as a separate sphere additive to other traditional areas of historical writing including history of science. The second methodological approach is that of deconstruction: “objective” statements in medicine and the biological sciences are part of social and cultural preconceptions. I have examined the pattern of unreflected scientific statements about women's claims to want to become doctors. The pattern is one of preventive prejudice: representative doctors wrote about women in physiological and biological terms of being “weak” and “unfit”. This was an effective strategy for maintaining a status quo of dequalification. The historical examination of women entering the professions has not so much to do with their own capacities, but rather with socially conceived forms of argumentation indirectly applied: preventive statements in medicine about biological function, the “weaker” sex, intellectual denigration, physiological determinism. Some of the statements I found are amusing, but the humour becomes bitter when the consequences enter our social consciousness.     

Die Idee einer historischen Entwicklung der Krankheiten des Menschengeschlechts und ihre Bedeutung für die empirische Medizin des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts

In early 19th-century German medicine many doctors had a strong interest in historical pathology. They investigated the historical records of fevers and epidemics in detail, trying to find out how the changing influence of the epidemic constitution worked and hoping that history would help them to define specific disease entities. The underlying theory of this endeavour was that diseases undergo a historical development similar to the evolution of plants and animals. This paper tries to show that historical pathology was, in its time, a legitimate attempt to solve the most urgent problems of empirical medicine.     

Die Centrosophia des Athanasius Kircher SJ: Geometrisches Paradigma und geozentrisches Interesse

The main subject of the paper is to give an example of what could be called, in the history of philosophy and science, reinforcement of traditional topics or paradigms of explanation in order to give explanatory support to or to coooborate the defence of old or the solution of new problems. In the 17th century nearly all positions in the natural science are dependent from theological and philosophical (metaphysical) presuppositions, especially all positions which belong to types of the scientia universalis (Yves de Paris, S. Izquierdo, A. Kircher). To defend the finiteness of the world and the geocentric position of the earth, the Jesuit A. Kircher (1602–1680) returns to an old topic of cosmological speculation, to the geometria speculativa, in order to demonstrate the absolute perfect and finite structure of the world as an analogon of the absolute perfect and finite structure of the cercle or, better, the sphere (globe). He shows this in his Iter exstaticum (Rome 1656) and in his Mundus subterraneus (Amsterdam 1665). The paper discusses only a central part of the Mundus subterraneus titled ‘Centrosophia’: here we find all typical arguments for the phenomenon of reinforcement of old topics and paradigms. God is the center or the non-dimensional point (punctum) of the cosmic sphere (which is the sphere of all being) and he is in consequence the principle of all geometrical (ontological) parts of this figure. Kircher transmits the evidence of the perfect geometric relation between center and circumference modo analogico to the relation God (creator) and world. Together with this well known and often used analogy he develops a new theory: the theory of the dignity of the subterranean parts of the earth and the earth as earth, as the unic and ideologically exclusive place in all reality that gives mankind the fundament to develop its own implications. The high estimation of the earth sets free an unprejudiced view of what the subterranean area really is: Kircher thinks here in organologic categories — the subterranean world is an analogon of the world as such and this world is a great animal. Kircher develops in the limits of his traditional geocentric position an new non-traditional theory of the inner side of the world.