Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities

Description

Periodicals played a vital role in the developments in science and medicine that transformed nineteenth-century Britain. Proliferating from a mere handful to many hundreds of titles, they catered to audiences ranging from gentlemanly members of metropolitan societies to working-class participants in local natural history clubs. In addition to disseminating authorized scientific discovery, they fostered a sense of collective identity among their geographically dispersed and often socially disparate readers by facilitating the reciprocal interchange of ideas and information. As such, they offer privileged access into the workings of scientific communities in the period. The essays in this volume set the historical exploration of the scientific and medical periodicals of the era on a new footing, examining their precise function and role in the making of nineteenth-century science and enhancing our vision of the shifting communities and practices of science in the period. This radical rethinking of the scientific journal offers a new approach to the reconfiguration of the sciences in nineteenth-century Britain and sheds instructive light on contemporary debates about the purpose, practices, and price of scientific journals. Dedication Contents Introduction: Constructing Scientific Communities • Gowan Dawson and Jonathan R. Topham Part 1: New Formats for New Readers 1 Scientific, Medical, and Technical Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: New Formats for New Readers • Gowan Dawson and Jonathan R. Topham 2 Redrawing the Image of Science: Technologies of Illustration and the Audiences for Scientific Periodicals in Britain, 1790–1840 • Jonathan R. Topham 3 Proceedings and the Public: How a Commercial Genre Transformed Science • Alex Csiszar Part 2: Defining the Communities of Science 4 “An Independent Publication for Geologists”: The Geological Society, Commercial Journals, and the Remaking of Nineteenth-Century Geology • Gowan Dawson 5 Natural History Periodicals and Changing Conceptions of the Naturalist Community, 1828–65 • Geoffrey Belknap 6 “The Sympathy of a Crowd”: Imagining Scientific Communities in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Entomology Periodicals • Matthew Wale 7 Periodical Physics in Britain: Institutional and Industrial Contexts,1870–1900 • Graeme Gooday 8 Late Victorian Astronomical Society Journals: Creating Scientific Communities on Paper • Bernard Lightman Part 3: Managing the Boundaries of Medicine 9 “A Borderland in Ethics”: Medical Journals, the Public, and the Medical Profession in Nineteenth-Century Britain • Sally Frampton 10 “National Health Is National Wealth”: Publics, Professions, and the Rise of the Public Health Journal • Sally Shuttleworth Acknowledgments Select Bibliography List of Contributors Index