Gesnerus-Swiss Journal of the History of Medicine and Sciences最新文献

At the turn of the twentieth century, French entomology seemed divided between a multitude of fans and few official scholars. On the one hand, thenetwork of the French Entomological Society, and on the other, a chair at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle. To illustrate this duality betweenacademic entomology and a more domestic entomology, we present a study based on two men: Charles Janet, a little-known province engineer who could be seen as a mere amateur among the professionals, Eugène-Louis Bouvier who was a scholar at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle and the Academy of Sciences. The biographical approach developed here will allow us to meet close associates of these two men. Considering their own perceptions we will see how these actors situated themselves within their discipline. This approach will allow us to give a broader picture of French entomologists around 1900: their number, their institutions, their relationships and their means of communication. This text shows that the amateur/professional dichotomy is an unsuitable tool to describe entomology at that time.

Ornithology has emerged as a science at the turn of the 18th century. To become a self-sufficient scientific discipline, studies of birds had to distinguish themselves from luxury, trade and poetry. Scholars had to invent new ways of writing, different from the beautiful and ornamented books on birds, even if these books were often published by other scholars who had been expelled from academic institutions and therefore considered as «amateurs». The same scholars needed the help of «amateurs» in order to observe and explain bird migration. First ornithological discourses in Europe and the United States illustrate the relationships between scholars, authors and «amateurs» and show how these words can be used in different meanings.

At the beginning of the XXth century, Wegener proposed a theory – that of the roaming drift of the continents – unifying the rival theories of the Europeans and the Americans. As the work of a non-specialist who didn’t trouble himself with specific details, it raised numerous criticisms from specialists in various disciplines though others welcomed and supported it. Some even understood that despite its flaws, it started a new research program. Paradoxically, as regards its simplicity, nonspecialists – engineers, popularizers, secondary school teachers and even believers in para-sciences – gave it a favorable reception. Being amateurs, they continued to endorse it when specialists abandoned it.

Neither pedants nor amateurs? Psychological journals in Germany in the last three decades of the 18th century The Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde introduced a new tone in the evolving field of psychology. For the first time, attention was paid not to the abstract relationships between body and soul, but to suffering individuals from the «common folk». The collection and systematic publication ofaccounts of readers should eventually allow the formulation of an empirical «science of the soul». The readers would eventually send accounts of personal and experienced «cases». By 1800, this conception of the science of psychology was called into question by educated philosophers who, in journals opened only to specialists, endeavored to develop a more professional psychology. They nevertheless failed in formulating general criteria of scientificity. The main argument of this article is that the distinction between amateurs and scientists was not an outcome of the inner evolution of the field of psychology, but that it developed through practices of communication in which periodicals play a major role.

This article traces the unusual astronomical career of Jean Chacornac (1823–1873) during the French Second Empire. This clerk in a bazaar in Marseille became in just a few years astronomer at the Paris imperial observatory, and was then brutally expelled from this prestigious institution. The «Chacornac affair», largely forgotten, was an asymmetric struggle between a self-taught astronomer and the most famous professional French astronomer of the time, Urbain Le Verrier. Through the study of this case, we want to shed a light on people and practices kept on the margins of science by the process of professionalization of astronomy. Although he was excluded from the institution, Chacornac tried to continue to be an astronomer, independently, «from below». But the construction of a new social identity for State astronomy, in particular by Le Verrier, was inseparable from the attribution of indelible social stigma, which made Chacornac an «obligatory amateur».