In No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, Charles E. Rosenberg writes, “Contemporary notions of heredity, sexual behavior, and physiology all illustrated the way in which ostensibly scientific ideas played a prominent role in the way late-nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans framed and understood their world and legitimated – by naturalizing – existing social relationships” (pg. xii-xiv). He continues, “Science has lent American social thought a vocabulary and a supply of images; it has served as a source of metaphor and, like figures borrowed from other areas, the similes of science have variously suggested, explained, justified, even helped dictate social categories and values” (pg. 1). Further, “on many levels – not only that of institutional support – society constantly helps shape the scientific enterprise; even the internal texture of scientific ideas is not entirely insulated from such pressures” (pg. 2). According to Rosenberg, “Analogies and arguments drawn from science became, as the nineteenth century progressed, an increasingly plausible idiom in which to formulate – and in that sense to control emotionally – almost every aspect of an inexorably modernizing world” (pg. 7). Rosenberg argues, “One can, I think, mark the beginning of modern academic science in the United States at the moment investigators began to care more for the approval and esteem of their disciplinary colleagues than they did for the general standards of success in the society which surrounded them” (pg. 14). Finally, “Major precedents in the development of federal support for scientific research in the universities and states were created almost through inadvertence, not because of a reasoned commitment to the need for supporting the scientific enterprise, but because of the political power and peculiar ideological status of agriculture in American life” (pg. 19).
Rosenberg uses heredity as a case study. He writes, “The vogue of social hereditarianism was already well under way by the mid-nineteenth century, while the optimism and confident manipulativeness which characterized these ideas in the middle third of the century was far different from the self-conscious pessimism which had come to inform them by the early years of the twentieth” (pg. 25). He continues, “Heredity thus became one of the necessary elements in the endlessly flexible etiological model that served to underwrite the social effectiveness of the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century physician. Natural endowment, environmental stress, inadequate or improper diet, climate – all interacted to produce health or disease” (pg. 33). In terms of social roles, Rosenberg writes, “During the nineteenth century, economic and social forces at work within Western Europe and the United States began to compromise traditional social roles. Some women at least began to question – and a few to challenge overtly – their constricted place in society. Naturally enough, men hopeful of preserving existing social relationships, and in some cases threatened themselves both as individuals and as members of particular social groups, employed medical and biological arguments to rationalize traditional sex roles as rooted inevitably and irreversibly in anatomy and physiology” (pg. 54-55).
Rosenberg writes, “In mid-nineteenth century [sic] most practicing American scientists served as college teachers; such positions entailed enormous teaching burdens and assorted pastoral duties. Research was never assumed to be a condition of employment” (pg. 136). Further, “Progress and technology were not only integral but justifying elements in the widely accepted vision of America’s higher moral order” (pg. 140). Rosenberg argues that the Adams Act (1906) changed the former while asserting the latter. He writes, “It provided much-needed support for new and centrally important disciplines, for genetics, for biochemistry, and for bacteriology. It permanently strengthened the scientific departments of the land-grant colleges. The Adams Act provided the opportunity for willing men to enter upon the path of abstract research. More than this, however, it demanded a precise definition of agricultural research and – by implication – of the experiment station’s proper task” (pg. 182).
Rosenberg concludes, “Although intellectual history and the history of particular areas of pure and applied learning have a long and often distinguished tradition, the bulk of such scholarship has been undertaken by practitioners of the relevant mystery – physicians concerning themselves with the history of medical ideas or philosophers with the genealogy of canonical philosophical problems. Not surprisingly, they have been often unconcerned with the social and institutional context in which the ideas they study were elaborated, and demands for such research have on occasion been derided as an imposition of the trivial and temporal – the merely circumstantial – into higher and more meaningful realms of thought” (pg. 226). ( )

Excellent. Must read for social science and medicine historians. ( )