the history of science as unending steeplechase: a dialogue

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The History of Science as Unending Steeplechase: ADialogue

Alexandre Métraux

Science in Context / Volume 26 / Issue 04 / December 2013, pp 649 - 664DOI: 10.1017/S0269889713000331, Published online: 30 October 2013

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0269889713000331

How to cite this article:Alexandre Métraux (2013). The History of Science as Unending Steeplechase: A Dialogue.Science in Context, 26, pp 649-664 doi:10.1017/S0269889713000331

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Science in Context 26(4), 649–664 (2013). Copyright C© Cambridge University Pressdoi:10.1017/S0269889713000331

The History of Science as Unending Steeplechase:A Dialogue

Alexandre Metraux

Universite de Lorraine, Campus NancyE-mail: [email protected]

Preliminary remark: The following conversation began as a series of written email exchanges.Due to technical reasons, this exchange had to be interrupted at some point. Rather thanrewriting the text that had obtained from scratch, I continued the conversation, turning thereal “other” of the dialogue into an imagined one. Heartfelt thanks to Oren Harman, the guesteditor of this topical issue, for continuing support and for having taken the risk of designingthis unusual topical issue of Science in Context with me. AM.

Q: A question, which seems to be of more than casual interest, relates to the significanceof the fact, manifested in the contributions to the present issue of Science in Context, thathistory is written by historians for different reasons – some complementary perhaps,but not all – and to different ends. What does this mean for history as a discipline, as aprocess, and as a product? Is history (the writing of history) one thing, or many things?And if many, what does this entail for memory more generally, and for our relation, ashumans, to our past?

If history, including the history of science, is more than one thing, how are we toteach it? How are we to speak of its provenance, and its raison d’etre? More fundamentally,somewhat less internally: how does this realization impact upon our collective andpersonal relationships to the past when it comes to knowledge and science?

AM: The question, “How are we to teach it?” − meaning: how are we going to teachthe history of science? − is no longer of concern to me, since I quit academic teachingmore than twenty years ago.

More troublesome to me is the word “collective” used in connection with“relationships to the past when it comes to knowledge and science.” Let me brieflyrefer to one example. In La pensee sauvage, Claude Levy-Strauss (1962) reflects on aprehistoric period during which plants were domesticated. He argues that grass wasturned into cereal. But no traces of the practices of our nameless forebears survive.What we consume day after day, if we are lucky enough, refers back, materiallyand historically, to that presumably tortuous process of plant domestication. I doubtthat many of us, collectively, are aware of the expertise accumulated in prehistorictimes that was transmitted from generation to generation. One might argue now

650 Alexandre Metraux

that, given the significance of plant domestication for humanity today, some lieu dememoire1 should remind us of this achievement. But if collective memory needs tobe reminded of great or not so great past events, of heroes and presumably famousscholars, conflicts over what is more or less significant will never end, then this compelsus to raise various questions: Is it the task of political authorities (legislators, judges,and so on) to decide what ought to be remembered, and how we should rememberthe past? Recent events in French law-making illustrate the controversial character ofpolitically motivated prescriptions which prevent professional scholars, school teachers,and historically minded lay persons from proposing in public research hypotheses whichdo not accord with the law (cf. Journal officiel 2001a and 2001b as well as 2005).2

The need for remembering is, indeed, so variegated and heterogeneous that it seemspreferable not to tame it by law enforcement measures or any such socio-politicalmove.

The notion of a collective relationship to the past causes me some trouble, for itneeds to be divided into partial collective relationships to the past: the relationship ofchildren to the past, of professional groups to the past, and so on. Marc Ferro examinedhow history was taught to children in different countries. His monograph focused onthe ways teachers shape historical knowledge through politically or otherwise biasedreconstructions. One may as well read this excellent contribution as an analysis of howhistory is taught to children rather than to grown ups studying in a department of history(cf. Ferro 1984 and 2004).3 To put it differently, speaking of a “collective relationshipto the past” is meaningless as long as one doesn’t specify which ensemble of individualsis concerned . . .

Q: . . . and what about teaching the history of the sciences?

AM: My experience as an academic teacher was highly limited. I purposely gave upteaching the history of one science − psychology − after ten years, due to an obviouslack of interest on the part of the students for the history of that discipline. The historyof psychology was not a compulsory course. They thought that attending a courseon the history of the discipline of their choice would offer them some orientationin a field divided into several sub-fields (from neuropsychology to social psychology,and from clinical psychology to industrial psychology, and so on). So their overallaim was to situate themselves within the present state of the discipline. My aim, incontradistinction, was to create a critical distance between the present state of the disciplineand its past. The students remained rooted in one regime – that of being engaged

1 Realm or space of memory.2 For extensive verbatim hearings of historians organized by members of the French parliament during thepreparatory legislative work see http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/13/cr-miqm/07-08/index.asp (last accessedMay 18, 2013).3 Some reliable insights into the development of historical consciousness in children are to be found in Kolbland Straub 200l, as well as in Kolbl 2009.

The History of Science as Unending Steeplechase: A Dialogue 651

in reproducing scientific knowledge in order to enable themselves to participate inproducing scientific knowledge − whereas I was interpreting the mechanisms, means,tools, social and material prerequisites of the production of scientific knowledge fromthe standpoint of a different regime. My guess is that they took my accounts to be justmore or less funny stories about something that had vanished in earlier decades.

Q: So you quit the history of psychology. What came next?

AM: I couldn’t get along in the history of psychology for yet another reason.Psychology combined with other disciplines − physiology, neurology, psychiatry,etc. The study of its history necessitates excursions into the history of these closelyneighboring disciplines. Under such conditions, why not look for interesting topicsthat cut straight through current academic demarcations? One topic I chose was nerves:anything and everything relating to nerves or neural substance in the eighteenth,nineteenth, and early twentieth century. Helmholtz’s sensory physiology was among myfavorites.

Q: What did you consider to be important in the domain of the historiography of thesciences?

AM: One issue I could not avoid because it bothered me again and again was that ofthe status of narrative accounts. Are such accounts explanations in disguise? What arenarratives likely to convey? Do they necessitate the occasional fiction when gaps in thearchival records are unavoidable?

I read a lot of contributions on the challenges that historiography confronts −contributions of book length by Paul Ricoeur (1983–1985), Jorn Rusen (1983–1989),Peter Novick (1988), Arthur Danto (1999a; 1999b), or Aviezer Tucker (2004), andcontributions of essay length, e. g. by Paul Roth (1989) or Eelco Runia (2006) – to referto a modest sample of authors. This was all in all beneficial food for thought. Ultimately,however, such meta-historical, meta-historgriographical, philosophical reflections andthe ensuing theoretical proposals were not of much help. Indeed, meta-historiographyled me to think about who or what is the “primary custodian” of memory, to referto a splendid expression of Yoseph Yerushalmi (1989, xxxiii). Which form to choosefor a narrative? How many quotes from primary sources does a narrative bear withoutbecoming dry or boring? In short, the issue of skill revealed itself to be more challengingthan meta-historiographical problems.

Q: Was there nonetheless a particular historiographer who you found to be exemplary?

AM: I indulge in naming only one – the Russian (formerly Soviet) historian AaronGurevich, whom I had the chance and the honor to translate (cf. Gurjewitsch[Gurevich] 1993). He had a delicate sense for medieval culture in all its complexity. Iwas most impressed by his analyses of knowledge transfers from the sphere of friars tothe sphere of the flock by way of exempla, that is to say, in Gurevich’s words, by way ofexamples, as “short entertaining stories, anecdotes from contemporary life or borrowed


from ancient literature” built into sermons. The exempla illustrate the collision betweenthe earthly world and the transcendent world of the (Christian) god:

The collision of the two worlds, immensely magnetic to the medieval audience, brings tolight the contrasts and contradictions of the mind that created these stories and found inthem its own nourishment. It is the consciousness of the clergy that immediately revealsitself in the ‘examples’, but it is oriented to the widest audience. (Gurevich 1987a, 355)

Q: Gurevich was not a member of Soviet/Russian school of history of science, was he?

AM: No. But what he had to say was also relevant for historians of the sciences. Notbecause he dealt with topics of the history of science in the narrow sense of the term,but rather because of the manner in which he studied knowledge transfers in medievalEurope and the social tensions caused by competing bits of knowledge. Gurevich drewfrom the semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin (cf. Gurevich 1987a, 354), and more particularlyfrom the dialogical approach of Bakhtin and his co-workers. Had Gurevich not hadanything to offer to the historians of the sciences, I presume that he would not havebeen invited by the editors of Science in Context to contribute to an issue dealing, amongother things, with Pierre Duhem and medieval philosophy and science (cf. Gurevich1987a and 1987b).

Bakhtin’s dialogical approach appealed to me for two reasons. First, it takes vocal,and especially linguistic expressions (from a shrill scream to books, from road signsto speeches, from one-line ads to a treatise on magnets, etc.) as the starting pointof analysis. Thus, problems regarding truth, pure knowledge, inference, hypotheses,validity, refutation, and other such logical and epistemological matters, are deemed tobecome secondary in comparison to problems of operations involving signs, hence ofoperations of handling signs – of working on, with, and for signs.

The second reason is that the dialogical approach, according to its name, allows one,as Gurevich put it, to grasp the inner aspects of past acts: “It would be very helpful forhistorians to study historical sources so as to discover in them the sign systems that wereemployed in different societies.” And he added that the historian “does not fuse hismind with their mind [sc. the mind of the agents], but begins a sort of dialogue withthem, affording them to express the possibility to express their own mode of vision”(Gurevich 1987a, 353).

Q: Which means that the dialogical approach does not restrict itself to one’s ownencounter with sources of any kind. . ..

AM: Yes. When we read some text dating from, let’s say, 1550, we also may happento read the author’s opinion (response) to, let’s say, Lucretius’s De rerum natura or tocomments by Galen on some work authored by Hippocrates, or even to a text which initself reflects its author’s response to comments by Galen on some work by Hippocrates.We might thus read “through” several palimpsests.


Q: Does this semiotic approach yield historiographically justifiable results? Given thefact that you apprehend traces of the past within your own semiotic system, which,however, may also be that of many other contemporaries, but most probably not thatof people who lived many decades or centuries ago, you might unknowingly distortthat which you intend to grasp as content of the traces you analyze. . ..

AM: To begin with, I don’t conjure some ultimate certainty concerning the objectivetruth of our interpretations of the past (I know, both terms, “objective” and “truth”are problematic, but let’s ignore that for the moment). However, absence of ultimatecertainty is quite different from obtaining relative certainty that narratives do indeedoffer reconstructions of historical processes and thereby show how things happened.4

Q: This still squares with a modernist approach to facts, to non-fictional narratives, tomethodically guided empiricism, doesn’t it?

AM: Recently I read a thin book advertising on its title page new thoughts on an olddiscipline. The author contrasts mainstream historians who “strive for ‘real historicalknowledge’, for objectivity, for the evidentially-based synoptic account and for truth-at-the-end-of-enquiry” with historians who don’t believe in narrative closure, or, theother way round, who believe in “interminable openness” which allows for “new,disrespectful, contentious, radical readings and rereadings, writings and rewritings ofthe past” (Jenkins 2003, 3). This reminded me, though the wording differs, of theentry on history in one of the huge monuments of positivist scholarship, PierreLarousse’s universal dictionary. In that entry, right in the opening, one reads that“history changes its aspect in each generation. . . . Each epoch studies it from aviewpoint of its proper concern. The material aspect of history, that is to say thefactual knowledge, changes likewise over time because of the uncertainty inherent tothe givens of human testimonies” (Larousse 1866–1877, 300).5 Do you perceive anypropensity towards closure, any striving for the ultimate version of but one, of themaster narrative? I don’t. The new thoughts look like new words for old thoughts. . .

Coming back to an earlier question concerning the collective relationship to thepast, in that entry on history, Larousse’s dictionary emphasized that the (French)“historical movement” of the seventeenth century was shaped by Bossuet, that ofthe eighteenth century by Herder, Vico, and Condorcet,6 and that of the nineteenthcentury by “many remarkable minds” (which remained unnamed) (ibid.). Condorcet’swork doesn’t inform either professional or lay approaches to history any more, whichillustrates the fact that Larousse had observed that even the history of science had had

4 See David Carr’s (2010) remarks on Leopold von Ranke’s famous idea that historians show how the pasthappened.5 “L’histoire change d’aspect a chaque generation. [. . .] Chaque epoque l’etudie au point de vue qui la preoccupe.L’objet materiel de l’histoire, c’est-a-dire la connaissance des faits, change aussi selon les temps, a cause del’incertitude inherente aux donnees du temoignage humain.”6 For the relevance of the history of the sciences for historical consciousness, cf. also Ziche 2012.


a deeper effect upon both the study of, and the public interest in, political, social, andeconomic history. . .

Q: But the spirit in which mainstream historians are writing history seems to bedifferent from that for which the author. . ..

AM: . . .. you mean Jenkins?

Q: . . .. yes, well, mainstream historiography seems to be different from that which hepleads for, meaning that they are often dogmatic. . ...

AM: . . .. pardon me, non-mainstream historians are often dogmatic as well. But let’sturn to something else.

Q: How do you organize a narrative? How do you structure it?

AM: It depends on the wealth of material (primary and secondary sources) and on thetopic. If I have to write a brief story about a single, well-documented event, I resort toother means than if I have a complex story to tell which is not too well documented,but which extends over a considerable stretch of time.

Q: Such as?

AM: Such as the strange chapter in the annals of ornithology concerning swifts’ andswallows’ hibernation under the surface of water. I’ll come back to this topic a bit later.The crucial point of a narrative is to adequately frame the scene − a place with peopleand other living and non-living beings (e. g. Siamese twins in jars or armies of insects indrawers), instruments, or places more or less filled only with writings and drawings. . .

Q: Laboratories and lecture halls and libraries?

AM: Yes, of course, but also observatories, hospitals, museums, zoos, planetariums,botanical gardens, mobile labs, sites for observers in exotic places recording on demandwhat they see, ships, submarines, airplanes, psychotherapeutic settings, conferencerooms, pubs . . .

Q: Pubs?

AM: Yes, of course. Anne Secord published some years ago a splendidly illumining essayon the history of Lancashire artisans engaged in scientific botany who would meet inpubs; her essay is also an account of working-class people dealing with matters of sciencenot just in well circumscribed spaces, but also in everyday situations characterized bysocial tension (cf. Secord 1994). And recall Robert Hooke’s frequent visits to coffeeplaces and taverns where he met likeminded polymaths with whom he dined ordrank chocolate and discussed matters of physics or natural history or architecture orinstrument making (cf. Hooke 1935, e.g. 102, 197, 284, etc.).7

7 See also Shapin 2010.


Let me refer, as well, to Angelo Mosso, the Italian physiologist, who played thelead part in a particular scene. He measured the blood flow on the brain’s surfaceof subjects whose head had been injured − these patients had successfully undergonemedical treatment following a head injury, but their skull showed a relatively large open“window” through which Mosso could apply the sphygmograph specially designedby him. So this was a scene with clearly demarcated boundaries, with identifiableinstruments and other equally well identifiable equipment, with easily recognizablemechanical inscriptions documenting the variations of blood pressure in the subject’sbrain.8 In contradistinction, there exist scenes with hardly graspable boundaries,stretching over centuries, with no easily definable actors or agents.

Q: Such as?

AM: Such as that already mentioned chapter in the history of ornithology. A firmbelief among natural philosophers of the seventeenth century had it that swallows andswifts would not migrate, like geese or ravens, but instead would endure the cold seasonsomewhere under the surface of the sea. By mere chance I stumbled over a reviewof a monograph on this topic (among other similar topics) in the French Journal desscavans. I dare say that the editors of that journal wouldn’t have published such a reviewif the monograph’s content hadn’t been considered to be trustworthy and dealt within scholarly ways. But the bibliographical information given in the Journal des scavanswas misspelled. This was a dead end – I didn’t find the source. Some years later Istumbled, again by chance (I was looking for something else), on a very similar reviewin the Transactions of the Royal Society. And there, the bibliographic information was notmisspelled, as it turned out. I found the book − its author was the German physicianJohann Pechlin (cf. Pechlin 1676). This made it possible to draft a narrative that focusedon a piece of traditional knowledge, on a belief firmly entrenched in natural historyand transmitted from generation to generation over several centuries. The same belief,though adumbrated by some doubt, was still held in the entry “hirondelle” (swallow)of Jacques Valmont de Bomare’s dictionary of natural history, in spite of the fact thatthe location of the birds’ wintery sleep had moved from the sea to ponds and muds(cf. Bomare 1764).

Pechlin, the physician, plus the authors quoted by him, plus the people mentionedin the sources he consulted − e.g. fishermen discovering living swallows among thedead fish-bodies in their nets and witnessing the birds’ awakening in heated rooms −are no doubt agents of the story to be told. But there is no direct link between theseagents, and we can’t possibly reconstruct the paths along which this taken-for-grantedpiece of ornithological knowledge circulated from somewhere to northern Europe andfrom there to Paris and London and again back to France. One could nearly say thatinterwoven beliefs were the agents of this story. However, I am not even faintly able

8 Cf. Metraux 2013.


to ascribe some disposition or causal efficacy of agents (or agencies) to disembodiedbeliefs, however stubborn they seem to persist as socially acceptable convictions.

Why this (perhaps too long) comment? Because it refers to a narrative that shows thatwords were literally taken to be twins, and equally credible twins, of direct observations.To read texts dealing with birds was like doing some real bird watching. The text neededto be credible if the words standing for one’s potential eye- or ear- or hand-witnessobservation were to be accepted as trustworthy testimonies. And what did Pechlindo? He looked for anatomo-physiological mechanisms in the bodies of swallows andswifts that would entirely concord with, i.e. epistemically confirm the validity of, thewords “through” which he had been watching fishermen discovering living swallowsand swifts in winter. Since Pechlin seems to have been convinced that the anatomicalfindings supported the hypothesis that swallows and swifts could hibernate accordingto “observations by reading,” it nicely followed that the corresponding words were astrustworthy as one’s eyes.

Which is to say that the hardly visible scene is still a scene for a narrative, andthe narrative suggests that the epistemic attitude towards words and observation inthe seventeenth century differed vastly from that of later times as well as from thatof many other scholars of that period. And then things start to become thrilling.You notice the co-existence of more or less archaic and recent, innovative modes ofworking (intellectual or mental work, manual work, linguistic and somehow artistic,at least iconic work, etc.) at the same time and in the same places. Today, a similar co-existence of modes of working is likely to be observed when you look at the differencebetween techno-scientific entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and traditionally trainedphilologists studying early medical treatises, on the other.9

Q: Who would represent, in that period, a mode of working radically different fromthat of Pechlin?

AM: Probably Antony van Leeuwenhoek who sought to make his microscopicobservations credible by having them confirmed by honest eyewitnesses from hisneighborhood. Leeuwenhoek observed nature and then spoke or wrote about her,contrary to Pechlin who first read “into” nature and then examined her by directinspection.

Q: If you insist on scenes as frames of narratives, aren’t you sooner or later forced tofind out what the actors were thinking and feeling, what beliefs they shared, whichkind of moral conduct they would adopt?

AM: It would probably be of some help if we were able to know from the inside ofthe actors what happened, let’s say, when a model of the human ear was presentedto the fellows of the Academy of Science at Vienna. We might then tell what they

9 More on the topic of the scene in the historiography of the sciences is provided by Clark’s arguments on voice,scene, agents, plot, and end (see Clark 1995).


thought apart from what they said; we would be able to ascertain who argued tacticallyand who argued candidly. We could perhaps add some details to the narrative of whathappened on that one day at the Viennese Academy of Science. Measured against this(hypothetical) ideal, the achievable narrative is riddled with gaps and silences.

Q: There are silences and gaps everywhere in history, that’s nothing unusual . . .

AM: Yes! I don’t mention such gaps and silences as handicaps met only by historiansof the sciences. The job of writing any history is one of facing silences and gapsanyhow. When you visit archives, look around first in order to see what is missing. Ilike the metaphor of shadows living in archives. And shadows of all sorts are living,or stubbornly surviving, in historical records anyway. In spite of inevitable gaps andsilences, it’s still better to have a rich, dense record at one’s disposal. It permits thehistorian to write narratives that give a voice to the actors. . ..

Q: Are you then nearly compelled to take an ethnographer’s stance?

AM: No, not quite. When Bronislaw Malinowski presented in 1922 the outcome ofhis field-work done in New Guinea, he formulated three “lines of approach” − hiswords (Malinowski 1922, 24) −, which he then summed up in an oft quoted andno less often rejected injunction, according to which the ethnographer needed “tograsp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world”(ibid., 25). No doubt, historians of science are also, in a sense, dealing with personswho are natives − natives of other epochs, natives of other societies, natives with otherbeliefs and convictions. But most of the historian’s natives are dead, except those whocan be interviewed as eye-witnesses or bystanders. Thus, Malinowski’s urge to fullyunderstand, up to the point of identifying with, the vision of the native’s world, isdoomed to fail when actors of the past are at stake, and I wonder whether it could beapplied at all even by participant observers in labs or in hospital wards or in big scienceorganizations such as CERN in Geneva. The crucial question is whether one can dowithout following an injunction as demanding as that of Malinowski.

Q: Why?

AM: As an historian of the sciences, I do not study the everyday lives of researchers orscholars or professors in their encompassing totality. Not each and every action of theactors in the domain under scrutiny is relevant. The ethnographer of a Malinowskianinspiration, however, should pay attention to virtually all everyday actions of his orher subjects. Hence, the narrator of laboratory life in chemistry in mid-nineteenthcentury London can afford to not know whether August Hoffmann preferred wineto ale or ham to fish, whether he shared some strong religious beliefs with his wife,whether his wife was religious to begin with, or even whether he was married atall. Nor is it necessary to know what the religious creeds of Hoffmann’s aids were.Here’s a curious coincidence, which supports the rejection of Malinowski’s injunction:The diaries of one of Hoffmann’s aids, Herbert McLeod, were made available as a


document concerning the religious practices of a young man around 1860. This samedocument, however, is replete with entries relating to laboratory life − entries whichindicate what Hoffmann asked his aids to do, what kind of experiments the latterperformed as half-amateur, half-professional chemist in their spare time, how theybehaved in the lab, how they kept contact with manufacturers of dyestuffs, and so on.This information turns out to be obviously relevant to a narrative of early dyestuffchemistry at a particular place and at a given period of time; it also turns out to beuseful in spite of the overall intention by which the diaries were kept, and, arguably so,in spite of the fact that I don’t need to grasp the actors’ vision of the world to beginwith in order to come up with a narratively dense account of some chemists’ practicesat the forefront of organic chemistry (cf. Metraux 2003).

Q: Do you, accordingly, adopt tacitly an injunction negating that of Malinowski tofellow ethnographers?

AM: No, of course not. And why should I? Aren’t the cases with which historians ofthe sciences deal most variegated, and, indeed, requiring a large array of methods, ofreading guidelines, and of forms of writing narratives? If I’m deeply committed to thereconstruction of the life history of a scholar (let’s assume for a while that the scholaris willing to submit to extensive interviews), I’m not going to ban from the outseteverything that it not bound to his or her research practices. To put it differently: whyshould I look merely at what’s going on behind the doors of the institution where ascholar was working, and not also pay some attention to what an ethnographer wouldbe wanting to know? But I wouldn’t adopt this approach (ask as much as possible abouteverything in one’s life history from birth to the point of time of the last interviewsession, or death) as a guideline or a self-imposed injunction; a dialogical attitude asmentioned earlier in this conversation is sufficient.

What counts, after all, is not the actor’s vision of the worlds, the representations inher head, but an ensemble, a chain, a sequence of acts and actions – worldly, spatio-temporally determined events which are enacted, performed, carried out, realized forreaching goals. I do not deny that actors’ or agents’ intentions are part and parcelof the events to be described and examined by historians. But in order to describeand examine such events in context, one doesn’t need to know the whole networkof interwoven beliefs and convictions, creeds and opinions of the agents. Except inrare cases such as that of George Price whose theoretical work on altruism was moststrongly interlinked with his moral convictions and, above all, with his moral conduct(cf. Harman 2010).

Q: Would you mind giving an example or two?

AM: We finally reach the part I consider to be central to my way of doing historicalresearch.

Alexandre Yersin, a collaborator of Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux, was sentfor a mission to Berlin. His task was to take a course offered by two of Robert


Koch’s assistants, a course for doctors who wanted to acquire practical knowledge inelementary microbiology, as one would say today. This was not the grand tour ofAmerican students who would spend some months in the German Empire and visitone or more universities. Rather, it was a small tour, a limited expedition intendedto gather inside information – in one word: soft medical espionage. Yersin was noteven a go-between between the Pasteurians in Paris and their Kochian opponents inBerlin. So he took the course in Koch’s “fabric” as if he were just one among severaldoctors eager to become experts on a promising front of microbiological diagnosticsand, perhaps, therapy. Yersin was present from the first to the last lesson. He recordedwhat either of Koch’s assistants taught him and his fellow “students,” i.e. how to cut apotato in two halves without spoiling the surface (cleanliness is a must when you track apathogenic agent according to Koch’s approach), how to grow microbiologically fertilecultures, how to stain pathogenic agents, and so on.

The scene, or space, if you prefer, is nicely defined by the rather large room wherethe course was given. You do not have to know who the single actors were, norwhat kind of mental representations they had in their minds regarding male fashion,political parties, public transportation facilities in Berlin (as compared to, let’s say, thosein Paris). And the guiding intentions of what was happening in that one large room(the scene, the space) are to be inferred from Yersin’s description of the single acts to beperformed in order to reach this or that microbiologically relevant goal or sub-goal. Ifone then looks into the publications on laboratory practices of the Kochian type, onenotices that there existed a correspondence between the authors of these publications,the experts’ instructions (in the present case, the authors were the expert teachers), thesingle acts or manipulations to be learned, and the knowledge recorded on paper ormemorized by the “students.”

Q: Now I see what you meant earlier. You don’t need to know what beliefs were inthe heads of the persons involved at that time and in that place. You simply assume thatthe expert teachers were teaching microbiological expertise, and that they intendedto be good teachers, that Yersin and other “students” wanted to learn something, andthat, in the end, there was a body of standard practices of the Kochian type . . .

AM: . . . that’s it. Yersin’s report opened the door for the narrative to be told. But thekey subject matter of that narrative was what I called a “script,” something anybodycould learn (like a film script, or the script of a sketch), and something which didnot depend upon the particular dispositions, whether motor or mental, of the agentsinvolved (cf. Metraux 1991). That’s not all that is to say. I hope you do agree that Yersinand the other persons attending the course in that one large room in Berlin were notdreaming that they would cut potatoes in order to grow microbiological cultures andthat they were not imagining in their dreams that they would handle pathogenic agentsor bodies which looked like pathogenic agents. They were not dreaming, nor fancyinganything. What they did in terms of manual work was quite real – as real, in the literalsense of the word, as the tables and the chairs and the gas flames and the bottles, and


as real as the explosions which happened to occur from time to time in Hoffmann’slaboratory at the Royal College of Chemistry in London. Whatever they expectedto happen, whatever they were daydreaming from time to time while waiting for thenext step to be taken, their work adapted itself, and constantly, as I would maintain,to the things around them. They were cutting potatoes and not cabbage, they usedknives instead of scissors, the vessels for microbiological cultures were made of glass,not of clay, they worked in daylight, not close to the dim light of candles, and soon. Yersin’s report refers to these real things, and I assume his report was faithful towhat he had experienced during the lessons at Koch’s institute, that he didn’t want tofool Roux, and that the information written down was so much to the point that the“script” could be enacted somewhere else by other persons without loss of the realthings referred to in the report. Finally, when one writes a narrative of this episode inthe history of bacteriology, pathology, microscopy, phytology, something past is madepresent, perhaps not all too well, perhaps not all-encompassing enough, perhaps indull language, perhaps even unknowingly indulging in some mistakes. But rather thanask what historiography can not achieve in general and especially in the history of thesciences because of an insuperable lack of ultimate evidence, I prefer to go along withsome provisional interpretations of events taken to be real. Such interpretations, afterall, can always be improved by future historians. What Koch’s assistants had been doingwhen giving that course, what they had conveyed to their “students,” depended on thematerial properties of the objects they were manipulating. This is trivial, a truism − andyet a triviality that ought not to be taken figuratively. Whatever recent historiographersmay have voiced about impossible ultimate interpretations, about the lack of objectivity,when I write on Yersin, I’m writing on acts of manual work, and these acts wouldmost certainly have failed if they hadn’t corresponded to, i.e. hadn’t materiallyadapted to, the objective properties of potatoes, pathogenic agents, jars, water, air, andgerms.

Q: You emphasize the importance of the notion of scene for unfolding narratives.

AM: Yes, when you work on the basis of this notion, you may modify the temporaland the spatial parameters (cf. also Ophir and Shapin 1991). You may have a one-actor-one-day-one-room scene, you may as well vary the size and the duration of scenes.Rather than reconstructing narrative scenes in Paris from the point of view of nativeactors, I can glimpse, just barely glimpse, some bits of what the scene looked like fora scholarly trained Arabic observer traveling to Paris from Cairo in the late 1820s andearly 1830s (cf. Rifa’a at-Tahtawı 1988). But I would be utterly unable, due to thelack of required linguistic skills, to write a narrative on Rifa’a at-Tahtawı’s perceptionof institutions of learning in Paris.

Q: What else?

AM: The actors’ impact upon social groups or even upon societies, the self-perception,motivations, economic status, etc., in one word, the variables which define academic


workers acting in, and on, scenes to be narrated, also change.10 One of the recenttransformations of the world of learning and of research has to do with the shifttowards an economical optimization of science administration. Paul Forman grievesover the loss of the regulative ideal of disinterested inquiry and deplores the overtakingof research by shortsighted economic interests. Forman’s diagnosis draws a slightly tooapologetic picture of the lost paradise of pure science (cf. Forman 2010). If you lookclosely into the past of research, you’ll see that pure science, though responding toa more or less sincere vocational ethos, was rarely transparently pure. The modern,not the postmodern era promoted research on poisonous gas for use in battlefields,the modern, not the postmodern era saw the birth of eugenics, research on nutrition,national statistics, and so on, clearly never disinterested endeavors, not to speak of theparticipation of scientists in Unit 731, the chemical and biological warfare research unitof the Imperial Japanese Army, or in Project MKULTRA.11 But Forman made a point!Philip Mirowski made it even more convincingly. I believe Mirowski gathered a hugeamount of evidence that allows one to confidently speak of a new regime of academiclife governed by iron economic constraints (cf. Mirowski 2011; Mirowski and Sent2002).

Q: What about episodes considered to be more marginal?

AM: Against all odds, I did some studies on marginal scenes. Among them: the adventand destruction of science and scholarship in Yiddish in eastern Europe (cf. Metraux2007; Finkelstein and Metraux 2010). One may think of historical events taking placein geographical or social margins as welcome incentives to enhance comparative studiesof the history of the sciences. An interesting case is that of early women scientists inItaly, in particular, Evangelina Bottero and Carolina Magistrelli, around the turn ofthe nineteenth century; Paola Govoni (2007) convincingly showed that women doingresearch in the “hard” sciences in Italy at that time considered their profession to benot only a social promotion for themselves, but also a prerequisite for good educationprovided by women.12

Add to all this the narrative of scholars finding the force and the courage to work inthe Amsterdam ghetto during the occupation of the Netherlands in WWII (cf. Metraux2012). This aspect of modern scientific and/or scholarly life shows what happens whennetworks of communication collapse, resources dwindle, when reading and writingare hindered by lost access to libraries, or hunger. Focussing on historical conditionssuch as those to which the emigre German psychologist Otto Selz, an innovative

10 Shapin (2008, passim) considers, among many other things, the transformation from vocation to job andentrepreneurship in the sciences; both Biagioli et al (2011) and Pestre (2013, 93–98) emphasize the impact ofpatent laws and of intellectual property in diachronic perspective.11 See Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification. Joint Hearing Before the SelectCommittee on Intelligence [etc.], Ninety-Fifth Congress, First Session, August 3, 1977.12 Thanks to Paola Govoni for most helpful information on this Italian case. See also her recently publishedarticle in this journal (Govoni 2013).


researcher on thought processes, was exposed – he was not the only one scholar livingin a ghetto exile – helps one to move away from the too often apologetic, progress-and success-driven bias of plots too easily taken for granted in the history of scienceand scholarhsip, you know, the stories of great men, more rarely of great women, ofgeniuses, even of giants on whose shoulders we are said to stand . . .

Q: To conclude, why do you practice history at all?

AM: The French historian Pierre Chaunu gave an answer in an astonishingly straightmanner: “I am a historian because I’m the son of my dead mother and because themystery of time is haunting me since childhood” (Chaunu 1987, 61). I don’t havesuch a direct answer at hand. I was not haunted by the mystery of time to begin with.Rather, I guess that I am driven by the desire to understand what it means to bean autonomous citizen and, at the same time, to be facing the pervasive, sometimeinsidious presence of the sciences in social and individual life. There’s hardly any aspectof human life on the northern hemisphere that isn’t affected or even determined by thesciences. This presence of “whichever scientific” in contemporary life calls for politicaland moral choices. Why are immense sums invested in the discovery of traces of wateron Mars (this is said to be a goal of disinterested inquiry), rather than in solving waterproblems here on Earth? Why do high-ranking researchers compromise with sociallyundesirable policies, for fame or money or worse? The list is endless. But if I can moreeasily understand what is involved in today’s life of citizens, I will hopefully be able tograsp the historical changes that have caused the sciences to become such dominantlyconditioning factors in our existence. And this will have been worthwhile.

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the history of science as unending steeplechase: a dialogue

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