By Marianne Klemun, Ulrike Spring
This assortment specializes in diversified expeditions and their position within the means of wisdom acquisition from the eighteenth century onwards. It investigates a variety of kinds of clinical perform carried out in the course of, after and ahead of expeditions, and it areas this dialogue into the medical context of experiments. In treating expeditions as experiments in a heuristic feel, we additionally suggest that the day trip is a version at the laboratory within which diversified practices may be carried out and the place the transformation of doubtful into definite wisdom is confirmed. The experimental positioning of the excursion brings jointly an ensemble of options, ideas, fabric brokers and social actors, and illuminates the stairs prime from commentary to proof and documentation. The chapters convey the range of clinical pursuits that stimulated expeditions with their concentrate on typical historical past, geology, ichthyology, botany, zoology, helminthology, speleology, actual anthropology, oceanography, meteorology and magnetism.
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51 Asking questions based on experience and prior knowledge became constitutive for the design of an experiment. By analogy, we may also ask how this dialogue with nature is formulated in the very varied contexts of expeditions. This is the subject of the studies in this volume at a wide range of levels. This volume thus re-evaluates the significance of expeditions in the process of knowledge acquisition from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and does so in a different way than has been done so far.
11. Rousseau, “Fragments de botanique”, 1250; see also Rousseau, “Discours sur l’Origine de l’Inégalité”, 133; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Rousseau Juge de Jean Jaques, Dialogues”, OC, i (1959), 667–976, here 833. 12. Rousseau, “Rêveries”, 1073. 13. My emphasis; Dictionnaire de l’Académie Française, 2. 14. Pace Kuklick and Kohler, we should not assume that Rousseau’s reference to the laboratory invests the fields and thereby botany with a seriousness and significance that they were thought to lack; botany had long been a respectable part of medicine while chemistry was a relative newcomer trying to shed dubious associations with alchemy.
41 might appear instead. Poor conditions might call the undertaking to a halt. Like the experiment in the traditional laboratory, the botanical expedition entailed risk and difficulty, but also the possibility of a good result. The botanist’s excursion was therefore truly “work” and the fields his or her “only laboratory”. Acknowledgements The research presented in this article was financed by a General Research Fund grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No.