Museums and the History of Science: Practitioners Postscript Author(s): Jim Bennett Source: Isis, Vol. 96, No.

4 (December 2005), pp. 602-608 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/498596 . Accessed: 04/10/2011 23:06
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Museums and the History of Science

Practitioners Postscript
By Jim Bennett*

ABSTRACT

This response from the museum workplace to the previous three Focus essays has two main thrusts. First, it seeks to place the recent interest in museums from historians of science within the broader study of museums in general and points to the value of this broad context for locating scientic practice. Second, it reminds historians of science that museums are not only objects of study but also living resources for public communication, and it reects on how the Focus essays relate to the role the history of science can play in museums with science collections.

NTEREST IN MUSEUMS AMONG HISTORIANS OF SCIENCE has grown very signicantly in recent years. This may derive from the recognition of the historical study of museums in general as a distinctive discipline. A landmark symposium celebrating the tercentenary of the Ashmolean Museum in 1983 brought together the scattered and individual work of a range of scholars, while the publication of the proceedings as The Origins of Museums in 1985 helped to create the perception of a distinct area of work dealing with the history of museums and of collecting.1 Arthur MacGregor, who played a leading part in the Ashmolean initiative, which included an exhibition as well as the symposium, went on to found the Journal of the History of Collecting, a signicant indicator that a disciplinary domain had indeed been born. Since then we have seen not only many books and articles, but also exhibitions and galleries, as museums themselves have discovered the attractionsfor their public as well as their staffof historical self-reection. Although the programs adopted by museums over the centuries have varied widely, several purposes have been consistently included to survive, to preserve, and to displayand so a number of museums have found themselves equipped for presenting their historical selves to modern visitors. As soon as this process was under way, the history of science was drawn into the plot. It may have surprised many of the participants to discover how much of their early history
* Museum of the History of Science, Broad Street, Oxford OX1 3AZ, United Kingdom. 1 Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenthand Seventeenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985).

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involved what today would be classied as scientic. The Ashmolean itself, though foregrounding its ne art and archaeology today, was no exception, since much of the foundation collection looks to us like natural history. In the original building this material was displayed only on the top oor of three, the others being occupied by a teaching room for experimental natural philosophy and a chemical laboratory. The laboratory was in the basement, which was also used for human dissection when the opportunity occurred and, as has recently been discovered, contained a display of human anatomy.2 The history of science connection was obvious already in The Origins of Museums, the contributors to which include Wilma George, Michael Hunter, Giuseppe Olmi, William Schupbach, Hugh Torrens, and Gerard Turner. Not only did the content and character of the collections compel symposium organizers and book editors to call on historians of science, but the wider intellectual and social programs of early modern natural philosophers included museums along with laboratories in projections for ideal institutions for the reform of learning, along the lines of Solomons House. Not all were mere projections, and in England, for example, such projects took substantial form in the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal Society, as well as the Ashmolean.3 So while the content of collections called for historians of science, so too in some cases did their institutional settings and the programmatic ambitions of their founders. One very positive feature of a dynamic that drew historians of science into the research program of a broader discipline was its reversal of the familiar and more troubled model where historians identify what might have been taken for science or natural knowledge in the past and make that the object of study. In the study of museums and collections, the objects of science took their places evidentially in the context of all their other contents. The place and signicance of science in the order of things derived from the structure and ambitions evident in the collection and from nowhere else, thus offering historians ready access to a contextualized account of this scientic practice. It is not only early museums, whether they were largely collections of marvels or had the more coherent agenda of Solomons House, that present a ready context for activities of interest to historians of science.4 The same is true of their later successors, even if successor may not be the most appropriate description, since new museums were generally founded with missions that were distinct from those of well-established ones. Museums reect the intellectual and social order of their time, especially new museums, since they are not idling on but have been conceived, structured, and organized anew. In each case, if the historian of science nds material of interest, it will come conveniently packaged, and generally there is plenty to nd. The museums of the Enlightenment, as museum historians continue to think of the eighteenth-century foundations, included natural specimens and instrumentation within their encyclopaedic ambitions. The international exhibitions and industrial fairs of the nineteenth century established new ambitions for the display of technology in the context of manufacture, and from this culture grew permanent
2 James A. Bennett, Stephen A. Johnston, and Anthony V. Simcock, Solomons House in Oxford: New Finds from the First Museum (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science, 2000). 3 Charles Webster, The College of Physicians: Solomons House in Commonwealth England, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1967, 41:393412; and Michael Hunter, The Cabinet Institutionalized: The Royal Societys Repository and Its Background, in Origins of Museums, ed. Impey and MacGregor (cit. n. 1), pp. 159168. 4 There have been many studies of the early period, cited in the other papers in this Focus section; a good place to start is still Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientic Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1994).

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museums with a more populist educational mission. Twentieth-century institutions maintained an educational agenda but with a stronger prole for science and with greater specialization: now there were museums of science, and even of the history of science.5 The articles in this Focus section demonstrate the range of different approaches to museums as objects of study for historians of science. Museum buildings, in their organization and their architecture, can be decoded for their assumptions about the place of science in civic life, the classication of its subjects, and the management of its activities. As well as providing working environments for scientists, museums are spaces for social and educational engagement with science, and they control one set of conventions for how these worlds will intersect and relate to each other. Sophie Forgan shows that the museum visitor has a mediated experience of science that can be studied at least as closely as that of a scientic reader.6 We have both sides of the experience, from the personal accounts of visitors to the vast literature of guides and catalogues, and at the meeting point between the two we often still have the galleries and even the collections. Objects, we are taught to believe, are central to museum culture, so to study the lives or, as Sam Alberti puts it, to write the biographiesof objects in museums must be a powerful tool for understanding the sets of assumptions, ambitions, and beliefs the museum embodies and how these change over time. Such biographical trajectories are almost always one-way, from outside the museum to inside. Secured by institutionalized protection, objects can change their status in radical waysthey can move between gallery and store, between departments, and even between museums through the transfer of collections and the reorganization of institutionsbut until recently they have rarely escaped with their lives. Destruction, decay, and loss have been much more likely ends to an objects sojourn in the museum than a further spell in the extramural world. Only relatively recently have improvements in the clerical and material management of objects raised a chronic problem of sustainability, and pressure on budgets has obliged museums to introduce procedures and programs for deaccessioning. So for most museum objects, crossing the institutional threshold has been, since their manufacture, the most important moment in their lives. Some, of course, had an eventful time before their capturethey belonged to a monarch, had been lost at sea, played a role in a celebrated experiment, or whateverbut for the most part objects are merely novel, ingenious, skillfully made, beautiful, rare, typical, not hitherto represented in the collection, or possessed of some other of the many attributes cited by curators in justifying their connement. Most objects in science collections, especially the earlier items, have no provenance before the record of their acquisition. If our understanding of museums in the history of science can be enhanced through considering them as designed contexts for the management of knowledge, or as rich re5 On the museums of the Enlightenment see Kim Sloan and Andrew Burnett, Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (London: British Museum Press, 2003); and Robert G. W. Anderson et al., eds., Enlightening the British: Knowledge, Discovery, and the Museum in the Eighteenth Century (London: British Museum Press, 2003). On changes in the nineteenth century see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London/New York: Routledge, 1995). For an outline account of twentieth-century developments see Stella Butler, Science and Technology Museums (Leicester: Leicester Univ. Press, 1992). For some particular studies see James A. Bennett, Museums and the History of Science at Oxford and Cambridge, British Journal for the History of Science, 1997, 30:2946; Svante Lindqvist, ed., Museums of Modern Science (Canton, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2000); Sharon Macdonald, ed., The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London/New York: Routledge, 1998); and Macdonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (Oxford/New York: Berg, 2002). 6 Cf. the section Focus: Scientic Readers, Isis, 2004, 95:420448.

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sources for object prosopography, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt presents a more varied agenda for the critical study of museums, as it has been practiced in social, intellectual, and cultural history and commentary. By surveying a wealth of recent material, she demonstrates even more emphatically than before the signicance and productivity of the current focus on the activities of museums. The intensity and acuity of that focus and the subtlety of the resulting insights might well give museum practitioners in our own discipline, working with science collections, pause for thought, as they decide on their acquisitions, plan their displays, and negotiate the themes and content of special exhibitions with managers, designers, conservators, educators, accountants, public relations professionals, security experts, carpenters, electricians, and any number of other museum specialists. Since there are historians of science who ply their trade in museums and there are many other museums that are, or could be, important public resources for our discipline, in conclusion I want to turn our thoughts toward a different understanding of museums and the history of science. The three main articles in this Focus section look to museums and their history for new insights into the history of science; they nd plenty of promising outcomes from existing work; and they recommend an expansion of effort along similar lines. As the only contributor currently working in a museum, I shall add that it is important for historians to be active in museums as well as to analyze them and their past. The rst reason for this is the obvious one that the collections held in museums are primary material in the manner of libraries and archives. They are not so easily and readily consulted, perhaps, and historians, working in a profession where a measure of bookishness is essential for success, are not always at ease with the study of objects. But whatever the practical difculties, the principle that objects too are evidence is well accepted and need not be insisted on here. What is less evident is our appreciation of the potential of the museum as a public platform for the history of science. For communication beyond the profession, popular books have certainly been to the fore in recent years, but museum galleriesspecial exhibitions in particular and all the events that can be associated with themdeserve more of our attention, and more considered thinking, than we generally give them. What do the insights derived from the work on museums by historians of science offer to museum curators? It should be the case that they reinforce and rene sensibilities that are already de rigueur for the modern curator. After all, the profession at large has been struggling with anxieties over collection, display, and interpretation for many years and has demarcated a disciplinemuseologyas a space for dealing with such issues.7 Questions surrounding the status of objects, more than institutional histories, have been the major stimulus here. Schooled in the impossibilities of collecting, or displaying, or interpreting in any neutral or objective manner, everything curators do makes them uncomfortable agents in Albertis object biographies, as they add new layers of meaning and distortion for historians or cultural critics to deconstruct and expose. Curators of historical science collections, belonging to the wider museum world, are sensitive to the contingent nature of collection and display and are aware of the impossibility of an objective and neutral museum practice. So we might expect their familiarity with the broader discipline of museology to lead to history of science shows with which their academic colleagues would be entirely at ease. But there has been another powerful
7 Peter Vergo, ed., The New Museology (London: Reaktion, 1989); and Bernard Schiele and Emlyn H. Koster, La re volution de la muse ologie des sciences (Lyon: Presses Univ. Lyon, 1998).

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inuence at work in science museology in recent decades that has taken museum practice in quite a different directiontoward a reinstatement of the unambiguous and objective. The rise of the science center in a museum context has had a baleful inuence on the esteem accorded to historical objects. Where the new ambitions demanded clear and decontextualized presentation of the science, objects seemed ambiguous and contingent. Insufciently malleable to the new mission, they retained too much of their own agenda, derived in large part from their preexisting biographies. Galleries full of them seemed to raise too many questions where what was wanted were answers. Better to start afresh, to engage the visitor with newly created objects and present them in galleries that could manage and direct the visitors experience of learning the science.8 Where historical objects are given a place in such a display, historians of science will often nd themselves out of sympathy with their use. Although they accompany factual information about the past, beyond that their role is not fundamentally historical. They reinforce well-rehearsed stories of discovery that serve for the founding accounts of current disciplines and research traditions. They are not used for opening and questioning our understanding of the past, so that it illuminates the present; the present illuminates these objects, not the other way round. But given what we have been told by our colleagues about conicts of interest in museum building, the eventful biographies of individual objects, and the malleable nature of museums, can we be at all surprised or outraged by this? Most museums with historical collections were not founded to pursue the history of science. Where they have taken on this responsibility, it has come with aging collections that have grown historical. It is much more likely that their original mission mixed improvement and rational entertainment in an educational agenda that was allied with civic or national identity. In such a context displays of the material remains of past science may seem to us like bad history, but it was never intended to be good. So if we have concluded from our analysis of museums and their history that former assumptions of objectivity and neutrality were no less contingent on political circumstance than any of the other agendas adopted by public museums, that must carry through to our own disciplineto museums of the history of science and to the history of science interest in larger museums. History of science has no divine right to rule just because the objects in the museum are old. If it is to inform displays and exhibitions, these must succeed on their merit, and the measures of merit will themselves be dened by criteria set by contemporary museum policies. What practical implications might ow from this analysis for museums of the history of science? How, for example, does a museum of the history of science differ from a science museum? There are not yet, so far as I know, museums commemorating our disciplinary practice or preserving its material culture. Such a museum might contain the rst Sarton Medal, awarded to George Sarton himself; a bow-tie worn by Bernard Cohen, found in a desk drawer at Harvard; travel ticket stubs donated by Owen Gingerich following visits to copies of De Revolutionibus. Instead, museums of the history of science contain old instruments and apparatus, just like any science museum. If it is not the nature of the collections that is different, it should be the assumptions about what the collections
8 Andrew Barry, On Interactivity: Consumers, Citizens, and Culture, in Politics of Display, ed. Macdonald (cit. n. 5), pp. 98117; Jim Bennett, Beyond Understanding: Curatorship and Access in Science Museums, in Museums of Modern Science, ed. Lindqvist (cit. n. 5), pp. 5560; John Durant, ed., Museums and the Public Understanding of Science (London: Science Museum, 1992); and Michael Shortland, No Business Like Show Business, Nature, 1987, 328:213214.

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are for, which will inform how they are selected and how they are used. These will be relevant also to a museum with a more general remit, where it is decided, on merit rather than on principle, that a particular gallery or exhibition should be a history of science show. I want to end with a practical example. When the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford reopened after extension and refurbishment, the entrance gallery was a particular challenge. How were we to signal to visitors what kind of institution they had entered? Many arrive casually, with expectations we will not fulll, since so often now any combination of museum and science signals interaction and playful distraction. I mention the two most prominent elements in our solution. One group of seven showcases illustrates the temporal, cultural, and intellectual extent of the collections; items range from medieval to modern, from the West to Islam and to the Orient, from science to magic. The idea here is to say that we do not discriminate between knowledge traditions; we do not particularly celebrate contemporary Western science; we are historians rather than scientists. Then, in the four cornerseach with three large showcaseswe present four of the individual collections of the museum. One, formed by the Earl of Orrery in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, is the earliest known English example of a private collection of scientic instruments. It ranges from traditional mathematical instruments, such as very ne armillary spheres, to the new optical instruments, such as microscopes and telescopes.9 Through the labels and audio guide, visitors are encouraged to think about the purpose of the collection and to see it more as an ornament for the owner than a scientic tool kit, belonging more in a library than a laboratory. The second collection is that of the Royal Astronomical Society. Here visitors learn that this was a working, loan collection from the nineteenth century, where instruments were not kept for long in the societys rooms but taken to the homes of fellows and returned when they were nished with them. It was only in the early twentieth century, when many of the instruments were becoming obsolete and accumulating at the society rather than going out on loan, that the society realized that it had a historical collection for which it should nd a home. The third collection came from another nineteenth-century foundation, the Royal Microscopical Society, but these microscopes were kept at the societys premises and used there by the fellows. As it developed with the addition of new models, it became obvious fairly quickly that a collection was being created, and at that point there was an interesting turn in the pattern of acquisitions. Two of the three showcases actually contain microscopes that predate the founding of the societythey were acquired mainly by gift but considered appropriate additions even though they would have had no use as working microscopes.10 It seems that the society found it appropriate to extend the collection back as well as forward in time and so to write the history of their unusual disciplinebased on an instrument, rather than on an area of natural knowledgein a material form. In the nal corner is an appropriately crowded display from the very large collection of Lewis Evans, the founding benefactor of the museum. He was self-consciously a collector in the modern senseacquiring instruments from dealers and sale rooms, as well as pieces he came across on his travels. He was one of a group of collectors and dealers who dened
9 Anthony Turner, Early Scientic Instruments: Europe, 14001800 (London: Sothebys, 1987), pp. 231 254. 10 For a catalogue of the collection see Gerard LE. Turner, The Great Age of the Microscope: The Collection of the Royal Microscopical Society through 150 Years (Bristol/New York: Hilger, 1989).

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what it would mean to collect scientic instruments, and in doing so they brought together types of instrument that were not closely associated in the history of science. In each of these corners the message is repeated that you cannot take what you see in museums at face value as a straightforward record of the past. Museums show what has been collected and preserved, and this can yield a very distorted material record. In the examples on display we see that each of the individual collections came into being for very particular, localized, and contingent reasons, and none was created as an archive for the history of science, the subject condently announced in the title of the museum. So we seek to qualify the condence visitors generally place in museum authority: dont, we say, take what you see as an unbiased presentation of the past, as it is anything but. To be honest, I do not think that our visitors have really noticed. The sheer quality, ingenuity, and beauty of what they see overwhelms our efforts to register our curatorial anxieties. Only if we give a guided tour and so present visitors with a fellow human being, concerned about things they had never imagined would worry anyone, do they take the issue on board and sympathize for a moment. However, one message that visitors do warm to is the museums profession of a catholic approach to natural knowledge, demonstrated by the eclectic presentation I mentioned in the rst group of showcases. The aim of treating on their own terms the accounts of the world given in different periods and in different cultures does strike a chord and elicits murmurs of approval from guided groups. There is little evidence that many visitors want to conne their interest to that narrow concept of the science, bereft of its human history. That, at least, is an encouragement to historians of science seeking to speak for their discipline, to the public, through collections of historical objects, in museums.