Dissertation Research: The Science of Small Things: The Botanical Context of German Bacteriology, 1840-1910

这是一项科学技术研究论文改进资助。该项目将考虑植物生理学对19世纪和20世纪初德国细菌学发展的贡献。该研究人员将使用这笔资金在柏林进行为期五个月的档案研究，并前往其他档案馆。研究人员将考察从19世纪40年代开始、到19世纪60年代以学术植物学为特色的研究范式的变化。最终，预计这些变化将成为细菌学的方法论基础，而细菌学的根源是植物学而不是科学医学。尽管公共卫生史和医学成就继续主导着细菌学的历史，但它的发展很大程度上要归功于植物学家——这一主张为关注致病性和征服疾病的历史编纂提供了一个强有力的选择。开发这种替代方案可以使植物生理学丰富原本专门的医学叙述。更重要的是，把细菌学的历史作为植物学来研究，说明需要通过将植物学、动物学和医学结合起来的交流网络和方法来研究生物学的历史，而不是作为一系列不同学科的独立历史。这种方法提供了一种独特的分析模型，如果扩展到更广泛的生物学背景下，它有能力构建一个包容性的生物学历史，优先考虑其组成科学之间的微妙关系，而不是使生物和医学、植物和动物之间的明显界限根深蒂固的假设永续下去。从描述植物学到以实验室为基础的植物生理学研究的转变，强调细胞研究对于为植物细菌学的发展提供智力媒介至关重要。

This is a Science and Technology Studies dissertation improvement grant. The project will consider the contributions of plant physiology to the development of bacteriology in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. The researcher will use funds from the grant to support five months of archival research in Berlin with travel to other archives. The researchers will examine the changes in research paradigms that began in the 1840s and characterized academic botany by the 1860s. Ultimately, it is expected that these changes became the methodological basis for a bacteriology whose roots were grounded in botany rather than in scientific medicine. Although histories of public health and medical triumphs continue to dominate the history of bacteriology, its development owed a significant debt to botanists-- a claim that offers a powerful alternative to a historiographical concern with pathogenicity and conquering disease. Developing this alternative allows plant physiology to enrich an otherwise exclusively medical narrative. More important, studying the history of bacteriology as botany illustrates the need to examine the history of biology through the communication networks and methodologies that united botany, zoology, and medicine, rather than as a series of independent histories of distinct, independent disciplines. This approach offers a unique analytical model which, if extended to a broader biological context, has the power to construct an inclusive history of biology that prioritizes the nuanced relationships between its component sciences rather than perpetuating ingrained assumptions of distinct boundaries between biological and medical, plant and animal. The shift from descriptive botany to a laboratory-based, physiological study of plants that stressed cellular investigation was crucial in providing the intellectual medium for the growth of botanical bacteriology.