Experiments are major components of modern science and play important roles in the generation of scientific knowledge. This project will seek to expand and refine our understanding of the long-term transformations, contextual influence, and epistemic and epistemological dimensions of experimentation by studying significant direct connections between key experimenters in physiology and chemistry of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In its focus on several clear threads of historical connection, this project has multiple aims and rewards: to study a neglected major seventeenth-century research program; highlight the crucial role that experiments on living entities played in the seventeenth century; trace a vital tradition stretching to the nineteenth century; and develop a comparative approach in which the various periods mutually illuminate features of change and continuity in practices, ideas, attitudes, and materials involved in the production of experimental knowledge.
While current literature focuses largely on the socio-cultural context of experimental science, we still lack more detailed studies of the production of knowledge in experiments. The important connection of nineteenth-century physiology to the seventeenth century has not been explored. The present project would build on the growing awareness of Dutch experimentation by addressing under-researched figures such as Regnier de Graaf (1641-1673), Franciscus dele Boe Sylvius (1614-1672), and Florentius Schuyl (1619-1669). In the nineteenth century, leading scientists Francois Magendie (1783-1855) and Claude Bernard (1813-1878) revived and re-envisioned the work of the seventeenth-century researchers in their own experiments and attitudes toward the laboratory investigation of life.
The intellectual merit of this project is found both in the historical recovery of key themes and figures, the vital analysis of organic experimentation, and the novel historiographical approach. Taking the experiments on the pancreas and the body as a chemical apparatus as a focus, this project will provide a mix of detailed comparison of anatomical practices, philosophical veins, bodily sensation, standards of chemical analysis, and broadly experimental approaches, all within the cultural contexts of their times. In building an analysis of multiple perspectives on scientific and historical entities, this project will refine a novel approach to the history of science that takes a robust view of experiments and experimental practices and objects as historical subjects, but remains sensitive to local context and culture.
The broader impacts of such a study are manifold. Such a project will illuminate changing relations between concepts of nature, art, and the body, and how these concepts relate to experimentation, as well as expand our historical understanding of the ethics and experiences of animal experimentation, and add to the study of technology, instrumentation, and the historical transmission of texts and images. As a scientific, cultural, and social phenomenon, physiological experimentation in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries also necessitates interrelations with other fields o studies: studies of the body in gender studies, the notion of life and the soul in philosophy and theology, the transmission of knowledge in materials in the history of the book, social governance and statecraft, and the history of practices and material culture all meet in the heart of the experimental enterprise.
