Until recently, it was popularly believed that science was done by heads, or more specifically, brains. After all, aren't scientists cleverer than everyone else? Einstein's brain in particular, as Roland Barthes pointed out, epitomizes this hyper-decontextualized folk philosophy of science. Yet even Einstein had to labor in the Swiss Federal Patent Office for seven years, a formative experience that, according to Thomas P. Hughes, prepared him well for drafting relativity theory. Scholars such as Janet Browne, Roy Porter, and Steven Shapin, among others, have now demonstrated that dirty hands as well as clean minds are prerequisites for successful science. In this exciting and important book, Elizabeth Green Musselman further advances our understanding of the complex relationships between heads and hands, bodies and minds, and science and society in the nineteenth century.
Between 1780 and 1860, Britain experienced rapid industrialization, a vigorous growth of towns, and the emergence of a variety of nonconformist religions. It was widely believed that such potentially destabilizing forces must lead to the creation of more extensive and effective national government. Natural philosophers such as John Dalton, the Manchester chemist; George Airy, the Astronomer Royal; David Brewster, editor of the Philosophical Magazine; and John Herschel, the astronomer and photography pioneer, were at the forefront in calling for political reform. Musselman's meticulous research reveals profound homologies between the political ambitions of this philosopher class, their epistemologies of science, and, most provocatively, their strategies for managing their own nervous conditions.
It was a period of great commotion and confrontation. In part a reaction against industrialization, Romanticism challenged the Enlightenment's privileging of perception at the expense of sensation, and male minds at the expense of female bodies. The coming of the railways confronted the upper classes with the lower classes, and metropolitans with provincials. Nonconformists defied Anglican authority. In one way or another, post-Romantic generations of natural philosophers were compelled to admit a role for women, the working classes, rural people, and nonconformists in the production of science-on the condition they followed procedures imposed on them from above. Like the steam engine, human bodies and minds had to be appropriately calibrated if collisions were to be avoided and information transported reliably from periphery to center. Local knowledge gathered by amateur fact collectors and presented at regional scientific societies was acceptable, so long as its interpretation was left to the London elite.
But it was through seeking to understand their own visual defects that these men came to their inclusive political vision. All of those studied here suffered from various complaints. Dalton-whose eyes are preserved at the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry-was color-blind, a potentially devastating defect for a chemist. Airy, Brewster, and Herschel all suffered from hemiopsy, a disorder of the visual field that was brought on by and interfered with the making of meticulous scientific observations. Galton was fascinated by his own and others' hallucinations, partly because it allowed him to rationalize religion. In fact, ontological insecurity was an opportunity-to develop "the will" and powers of self-discipline, and to present nervous struggles "as a kind of pilgrim's progress that imbued [the natural philosophers]