Servants of Nature: A History of Scientific Institutions, Enterprises, and Sensibilities

From time to time one comes across a book that seems like a 19th-century study of everything, descriptive rather than analytical in nature. This volume by the late Susan Sheets-Pyenson (Cathedrals of Science) and her husband, Lewis Pyenson (Empire of Reason; Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences) is one of those books. In attempting to discover how scientific practice and public life have interacted over the ages, the Pyensons touch on just about every aspect of life except cooking (and one wonders how they missed that): reading and education, museums and zoos, maps and books, religion and knowledge. But after nearly 500 pages of an encyclopedic survey of science and society over the ages, the reader is left alone to mull over the deeper connections between all these many, often fascinating, facts and figures; the introduction and conclusion are the weakest parts of the book. At their best, the authors can adroitly craft long and richly detailed chapters: on how the military throughout the ages has furthered scientific research thats benefited humankind; on how religious institutions have supported scientists and advanced knowledge even when their chief goal was to promote dogma; on how methods of courting have changed scientific method. An attractive aspect is the books attention to Islam and Asia, especially China, too often relegated to the intellectual peripheries in Eurocentric histories of science. Readers who have never dipped into history of science books might find this a good introduction, if they are game to take on a cornucopian agglomeration of information and draw their own conclusions. (May)