The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies

Over the past decade, literary and sociological studies have increasingly enriched our understanding of the textual dimensions of modern science. These new insights are now helping to create some of the work currently under way in the history of science. In this volume, seven historians of science examine the historical creation and meaning of a range of scientific textual forms from the 17th to the late 19th centuries. They consider examples from the fields of chemistry, medicine, physics, zoology, physiology and mathematics, exposing possibilities for a new, historically-rooted approach to our scientific cultural heritage. Peter Dear presents the case for taking texts seriously - asking historians of science to confront issues and techniques moving to the forefront in a number of disciplines, and asking literary scholars and literary-minded intellectual historians not to treat science as a mere source of cultural metaphors, but to understand it in terms of historically specific textual construction.