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

这是一项科学与技术研究论文改进基金。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。这位研究人员将使用赠款中的资金支持在柏林进行的为期五个月的档案研究，并前往其他档案馆。研究人员将考察始于19世纪40年代、到19世纪60年代以学术植物学为特征的研究范式的变化。最终，预计这些变化将成为细菌学的方法学基础，细菌学的根源是植物学而不是科学医学。尽管公共卫生和医学胜利的历史继续主导着细菌学的历史，但它的发展欠了植物学家很大的一笔债--这一说法提供了一种强有力的替代方案，取代了历史学对致病性和战胜疾病的担忧。开发这一替代方案使植物生理学丰富了原本只有医学上的叙述。更重要的是，将细菌学的历史作为植物学来研究表明，需要通过将植物学、动物学和医学结合在一起的通信网络和方法来考察生物学的历史，而不是作为一系列不同的、独立的学科的独立历史来研究。这种方法提供了一种独特的分析模型，如果将其扩展到更广泛的生物学背景，就有能力构建一部包容各方的生物学历史，优先考虑其组成部分科学之间的微妙关系，而不是永久存在生物与医学、植物与动物之间不同边界的根深蒂固的假设。从描述性植物学到以实验室为基础的、强调细胞研究的植物生理学研究的转变，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.