Dissertation Research: The Science of Small Things: The Botanical Context of German Bacteriology, 1840-1910

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This is a Science and Technology Studies dissertation improvement grant. The project will consider the contributions of plant physiology to the development of bacteriology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. The researcher will use funds from the grant to support five months of archival research in Berlin with travel to other archives. The researchers will examine the changes in research paradigms that began in the 1840s and characterized academic botany by the 1860s. Ultimately, it is expected that these changes became the methodological basis for a bacteriology whose roots were grounded in botany rather than in scientific medicine. Although histories of public health and medical triumphs continue to dominate the history of bacteriology, its development owed a significant debt to botanists-- a claim that offers a powerful alternative to a historiographical concern with pathogenicity and conquering disease. Developing this alternative allows plant physiology to enrich an otherwise exclusively medical narrative. More important, studying the history of bacteriology as botany illustrates the need to examine the history of biology through the communication networks and methodologies that united botany, zoology, and medicine, rather than as a series of independent histories of distinct, independent disciplines. This approach offers a unique analytical model which, if extended to a broader biological context, has the power to construct an inclusive history of biology that prioritizes the nuanced relationships between its component sciences rather than perpetuating ingrained assumptions of distinct boundaries between biological and medical, plant and animal. The shift from descriptive botany to a laboratory-based, physiological study of plants that stressed cellular investigation was crucial in providing the intellectual medium for the growth of botanical bacteriology.