The Professional and the Scientist in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract

In nineteenth-century America, there was no such person as a "professional scientist". There were professionals and there were scientists, but they were very different. Professionals were men of science who engaged in commercial relations with private enterprises and took fees for their services. Scientists were men of science who rejected such commercial work and feared the corrupting influences of cash and capitalism. Professionals portrayed themselves as active and useful members of an entrepreneurial polity, while scientists styled themselves as crusading reformers, promoters of a purer science and a more research-oriented university. It was this new ideology, embodied in these new institutions, that spurred these reformers to adopt a special name for themselves--"scientists". One object of this essay, then, is to explain the peculiar Gilded Age, American origins of that ubiquitous term. A larger goal is to explore the different social roles of the professional and the scientist. By attending to the particular vocabulary employed at the time, this essay tries to make clear why a "professional scientist" would have been a contradiction in terms for both the professional and the scientist in nineteenth-century America.

Prospecting for dinosaurs on the mining frontier: The value of information in America’s Gilded Age

“…Anyone who had proven themselves expert in the field was thus highly sought after by industry. Academic geologists were not immune to the promise of wealth, and many took advantage of the opportunity to make the most of their training (Lucier, 1995(Lucier, , 2009). …”

“…Specimens, like works of art, have served as emblems of learning, markers of elevated taste, and repositories of material wealth since the European Renaissance, if not before (Cook, 2007;Daston and Park, 1998;Findlen, 1994). It was only during the late 19th century that natural history began to distance itself from the world of commerce (Lucier, 1995(Lucier, , 2009. But even then, specimens were not drained of their pecuniary value.…”

APS at 125: a look back at the founding of the American Physiological Society

“…That is, the rise of philanthropy after the Civil War and the development of endowments to universities provided funding that allowed, for the first time in America, the pursuit of science as an occupation rather than an avocation (17). In addition to Dalton, Mitchell, Bowditch, and Martin, Russell Henry Chittenden (1856 -1943; Fig.…”

Early Research on Insect Pests in the Russian Empire: Bureaucracy, Academic Community and Local Knowledge in the 1830s-1840s

“…It has been suggested, for example, that the binary opposition between applied and theoretical research (with an implicit belief that the latter is intrinsically superior to the former) was itself historically contingent, being rooted in 19th century developments (Bud, ; Gooday, ). Also scholars have become more sensitive to their usage of such concepts as ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ in relation to science (Secord, ; Barton, ; Alberti, ; Desmond, ; Phillips, ; Finnegan, ; Allen, ; Lucier, ; Naylor, ; Vetter, ). Certainly, the production and circulation of knowledge has never been an egalitarian enterprise: some participants of this process have always been considered as more credible than others.…”