Research Catalog
The making of modern science : science, technology, medicine and modernity : 1789-1914 / David Knight.
- Title
- The making of modern science : science, technology, medicine and modernity : 1789-1914 / David Knight.
- Author
- Knight, David M.
- Publication
- Cambridge : Polity, c2009.
Items in the Library & Off-site
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1 Item
| Status | Format | Access | Call Number | Item Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Text | Request in advance | Q125 .K56 2009 | Off-site |
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Details
- Description
- xii, 370 p. : ill.; 23 cm.
- Summary
- Of all the inventions of the nineteenth century, the scientist is one of the most striking. In revolutionary France the science student, taught by men active in research, was born; and a generation later, the graduate student doing a PhD emerged in Germany. In 1833 the word "scientist" was coined; forty years later science (increasingly specialised) was a becoming a profession. Men of science rivalled clerics and critics as sages; they were honoured as national treasures, and buried in state funerals. Their new ideas invigorated the life of the mind. Peripatetic congresses, great exhibitions, museums, technical colleges and laboratories blossomed; and new industries based on chemistry and electricity brought prosperity and power, economic and military. Eighteenth-century steam engines preceded understanding of the physics underlying them; but electric telegraphs and motors were applied science, based upon painstaking interpretation of nature. The ideas, discoveries and inventions of scientists transformed the world: lives were longer and healthier, cities and empires grew, societies became urban rather than agrarian, the local became global. And by the opening years of the twentieth century, science was spreading beyond Europe and North America, and women were beginning to be visible in the ranks of scientists. This book brings together the people, events, and discoveries in the field of science for this period in history.
- Subject
- Genre/Form
- History
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (p. [289]-952) and index.
- Processing Action (note)
- committed to retain
- Contents
- Introduction : approaching the past -- Science in and after 1789 -- Science and its languages -- Applied science -- Intellectual excitement -- Healthy lives -- Laboratories -- Bodies, minds and spirits -- The time of triumph -- Science and national identities -- Method and heresy -- Cultural leadership -- Into the new century.
- ISBN
- 9780745636757 (hbk.)
- 0745636756 (hbk.)
- 0745636764 (pbk.)
- 9780745636764 (pbk.)
- OCLC
- 430510717
- Owning Institutions
- Harvard Library