PubMed · 11628467
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G Folch Jou, S Muñoz Calvo, J Olmedilla y Puig. 1980. [Not Available].. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11628467/
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A survey of the secondary literature of Albrecht Haller's medical work after his death (1777) reveals that already in the 19th century most of his topics and his methods were discussed and appreciated. Within physiology his doctrine of irritability and sensibility received most attention. The 20th century shows a considerable expansion of the secondary literature. However, there is still a lack of monographs dealing with Haller's medical work in a comprehensive way. Not only was the appreciation of Haller's medical work in the more than 200 years since his death constantly high but, for whatever reasons, it is even characterized by an increasing interest of researchers from many fields.
The science historian Charles Singer might seem to have shared with positivists a widely held commitment to observation as the foundation of knowledge. Yet in fact Singer's historiography was peculiarly unconcerned with instruments, models and other artefacts. Such tools might have been expected to present crucial empirical evidence for the historical arguments and ideal material for the didactics which pioneers such as Singer associated with their mission of a 'scientific humanism'. In their hands, physical things did not translate into epistemic things. This was deliberate. Yet while the configuration of science history which would distance it from material objects seems to speak of a shift from the visual to texts, the ocular technologies deployed in Singer's histories rather point to a co-existence of different kinds of visuality in that period's scholarship. As the academic and the museological aspects of science history pulled apart, the visuality of the museum came to be complemented by texts that vitally relied on images. The function of such images was to create proximity with the cognitive desires around whose traffic these histories became paper theatres of knowing. In bypassing material theatres and crafting realities that he understood to be empirically undemonstrable, Singer purposefully developed the story of understanding nature not as entailing obedience to its established results, but instead as embodying an attitude of continuing enquiry.
There is a crisis of readership for work in our field, as in many other academic disciplines. One of its causes is a pathological form of the professionalism that we so greatly value. "Hyperprofessionalism" is a disease whose symptoms include self-referentiality, self-absorption, and a narrowing of intellectual focus. This essay describes some features and consequences of hyperprofessionalism in the history of science and offers a modest suggestion for a possible cure.