CONCEPT OF "SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE"* Editorial Committee, MENTAL HEALTH BOOK REVIEW INDEX**
The current concern with the fate of scientific writings is not new, but new is the shift of emphasis which has put information, not literature, in the center of attention. We may wonder what has happened to the literature of science. Has it been superseded by the computer? Or have we, in the excitement over acquiring a gigantic robot memory, suffered a lapse of our human memory and lost sight of scientific literature as a cultural possession? DIVORCE OF SCIENCE FROM LITERATURE At the dawn of Western civilization, literature and science were intimately linked. Literature not only absorbed the thought of its time, but could express insights that foreshadowed a knowledge yet to come. Thus Lucretius' poem, De Rerum Natura, has been acclaimed for showing an amazing foreknowledge of atomic science and electronics (1). This unity of literature and science lasted as long as a unifying view of the world prevailed. The kinship between the ideas of poets and the poetic response of men of science, still strong in contemporaries like Donne and Kepler, then gave way to a new spirit, which severed modern science from literature as an art (2).
De Quincey was the first to delimit literature clearly as a fine art, excluding from it "all books in which the matter to be communicated is paramount to the manner or form of its communication" and, therefore, excluding "all science whatsoever." Thus the expulsion of science from literature became an explicit part of literary theory. De Quincey was aware, however, that the common use of the word literature was not as discriminating as he would have it: "Popularly, and amongst the thoughtless, it is held to include everything that is printed in a book," or it was "a mere term of convenience for expressing inclusively the total books in a language." I n a philosophical sense, he asserted, it would be ludicrous to reckon a pharmacopoeia, the Court Calendar, etc., as part of the literature (3).
Throughout the remainder of the 19th century, dictionaries, in their definitions of literature, reflected the adoption of De Quincey's perceptive distinctions, but without retaining his value judgments. I n the 1860's it became necessary to record another meaning: "the whole body of literary productions or writings upon a given subject, or in reference to a particular science or branch of knowledge" (4). Thus, in relation to scientific writings in a given field, literature was now again defined in the single, all-inclusive sense which De Quincey had branded as popular, thoughtless, and ludicrous.