Hans‐Uwe Lammel. Klio und Hippokrates: Eine Liaison littéraire des 18. Jahrhunderts und die Folgenfür die Wissenschaftskultur bis 1850 in Deutschland.Klio und Hippokrates: Eine Liaison littéraire des 18. Jahrhunderts und die Folgen für dieWissenschaftskultur bis 1850 in Deutschland. (Sudhoffs Archiv, 55.) by Hans‐Uwe LammelReview by: Reviewed by Claudia SteinIsis, Vol. 99, No. 2 (June 2008), pp. 428-429Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/591367 .

Accessed: 18/06/2014 07:41

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Isis.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:41:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

on p. 57) buttressed the new norm of experimen-tally backed scientific investigation, and, lateron, songs about a saddened and confused gorillahumorously took up the discussions on the ori-gins of man prompted by Charles Darwin andhis more radical German advocates ErnstHaeckel and Carl Voigt.

Despite this minor quibble, I can warmly rec-ommend this book to all readers interested in awell-balanced synthesis of the cultural and so-cial history of the nineteenth century with aclose analysis of contemporary scientific andmusical practices.

KLAUS HENTSCHEL

Hans-Uwe Lammel. Klio und Hippokrates:Eine Liaison litteraire des 18. Jahrhunderts unddie Folgen fur die Wissenschaftskultur bis 1850in Deutschland. (Sudhoffs Archiv, 55.) 505 pp.,bibl., index. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag,2005. €64 (paper).

The eighteenth-century German professor ofmedicine Kurt Sprengel (1766–1833) is com-monly celebrated as the “founding father” of thediscipline of history of medicine. His lastingfame is based on his Versuch einer pragmatis-chen Geschichte der Arzneikunde [Essay on aPragmatic History of Medicine] (1792). Withphilological rigor, enlightened enthusiasm forrational reasoning, and skillful storytelling,Sprengel worked his way through mountains ofhistorical source material, arranging his inter-pretations chronologically. The result was thefirst universal history of medical ideas and prac-tices from antiquity to the eighteenth century.Sprengel labeled his method “pragmatic”: notonly should medical history be engaging to read,he thought, but above all it should be “useful” tothe medical profession. Sprengel’s notion of theutility of a philologically rigorous history for theeducation as well as the daily practice of physi-cians became hugely influential in Germany.Until the 1960s it dominated German medicalhistorians’ understanding of their trade and pro-vided them with an identity.

But, though the “birth” of German medicalhistory is identified with Sprengel’s work,Sprengel himself was not the first son of Hip-pocrates to fall in love with Clio during theGerman Enlightenment. Hans-Uwe Lammel ex-plores earlier courtships among German aca-demic physicians as well as some of Sprengel’shistorian contemporaries. A converted Habilita-tionsschrift, Klio und Hippokrates investigatesthe emerging historical debates on medical his-tory at the universities of Gottingen, Halle, Jena,

and Berlin, as well as within enlightened soci-eties such as the Academie Royale des Scienceset Belle-Lettres and the Mittwochgesellschaft inBerlin.

The most striking feature of this monographis its ambitiousness. Unfortunately, however,this is also its greatest flaw. An armada of his-torians, historians of science and medicine, phi-losophers, sociologists, and literary scholars,each with different theoretical concepts, crowd atortuous and long-winded introduction, and thefollowing eight chapters offer little respite. Evenfor a German, the convoluted theoretical lan-guage makes it almost impossible to followLammel’s argument; even to summarize thechapters is virtually impossible. It takes severalreadings eventually to gain the impression thatLammel is in fact trying to jockey two horses.One is the historiography of the French Annalesschool, particularly Roger Chartier’s recentwork on cultural representation. Borrowingfrom this, Lammel tries to reconstruct a socialhistory of eighteenth-century ideas on medicalhistory. Through a close reading of various pub-lished materials by academic physicians (aca-demic dissertations, monographs, newspapers,journal articles, and lectures), he seeks to resus-citate the theoretical and practical engagementof these men with the history of their professionand to examine how this engagement alteredover the eighteenth century in response to social,institutional, and cultural changes. But medicalhistory writing during the German Enlighten-ment was not only shaped by external sociocul-tural factors, Lammel insists. It was also deeplyaffected by major changes in the structure ofhuman thinking. Here Lammel rides his otherhorse, Michel Foucault. He argues for an epis-temological rupture in German medical historywriting around 1800, a break mirroring the onein medicine and the natural sciences famouslydescribed by Foucault in Birth of the Clinic. ForFoucault, this break separated a “representa-tional” mode of thinking from a “historical” one.While the former mode saw all events as prede-termined and in total atemporal interdepen-dence, the latter arranged events into a chrono-logical time line, following a new logic of causeand effect. Foucault demonstrated how this newtime-oriented historical mode of thinking en-tered medical practice and the theory of humandiseases. It signified the end of tables of dis-eases, which gave way to the empirical investi-gation of illness and experimentation throughpathological anatomy.

Lammel’s attempt to marry Chartier’s socialhistorical approach with Foucault’s “archaeo-logical” one is certainly a noble effort. And

428 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 2 (2008)

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:41:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Lammel tries hard to show how, over roughly acentury, the notion of time slowly transformedthe way German physicians wrote about thehistory of their profession. But, on the whole,the links that he tries to establish between the“birth of the clinic” and the “birth of medicalhistory” remain too scattered and abstruse.Overextended and laden with theoretical jargon,Klio und Hippokrates never succeeds in itsgrand theoretical aim. Neither the choice ofsource materials nor their presentation (often inlong quotations from texts) serves to illuminate.On the contrary, confusion runs riot and frustra-tion results. As a romance, this is one that goesterribly wrong.

CLAUDIA STEIN

Bo Liang. Ji shu yu di guo yi yan jiu: riben zaiZhongguo de zhi min ke yan ji gou [Researcheson Technology and Imperialism: Japanese Co-lonial Scientific Research Institutes in China].(Zhongguo jin xian dai ke xue ji shu shi yan jiucong shu.) 345 pp., figs., tables, bibl., index.Jinan: Shandong jiao yu chu ban she [ShandongEducation Press], 2006. ¥38 (paper).

Jianping Han; Xingsui Cao; Liwei Wu. Ri weishi qi de zhi min di ke yan ji gou: li shi yu wenxian [Colonial Scientific Institutions during theJapanese Occupation and Puppet ManchukuoPeriod: History and Literature]. (Zhongguo jinxian dai ke xue ji shu shi yan jiu cong shu.) 468pp., figs., bibl., index. Jinan: Shandong jiao yuchu ban she [Shandong Education Press], 2006.¥49 (paper).

With the advance of industrialization and tech-nology, the European powers expanded theirspheres of influence from Africa to the south-western Pacific. Japan, though a latecomer toimperialism and initially imitative, became aformidable power after defeating Qing China in1894 and Russia in 1905. After the completionof internal colonization in Hokkaido in the1880s, Japan acquired the colonies of Taiwan in1895 and Korea in 1911 amid the new wave ofWestern intrusion into East Asia.

The Japanese administrator of the colonialgovernment in Taiwan, Goto Shimpei (1857–1929), a medical doctor by training, was thepreeminent architect of the Japanese empire.Facing pressing problems in Taiwan—amongthem “bandits,” “savages,” epidemics, languagebarriers, and a lack of harbors and transporta-tion—Goto formulated his vision of empirebuilding through the “biology politics” doctrine

(p. 234). He perceived the foundation of biologyand scientific progress—as embodied in trade,industry, sanitation, policing, communication,and education—to be the essence of colonialmanagement. On the basis of this doctrine, hebelieved that Japan would become the “fittest”in the international struggle by devising appro-priate schemes of improving the quality of lifeso as to achieve glory in the management ofTaiwan. Goto advocated his famous motto that“colonization is the spread of civilization” (p.236). As he saw it, the civilizing project—es-tablishing hospitals and sanitation practices, forexample—was no more than the political expe-diency of instrumental rationality. In 1906 Gotobecame the first president of the South Manchu-rian Railway Company (Mantetsu); as such, hearticulated the Mantetsu enterprise as the prep-aration of cultural, economic, industrial, and so-ciopolitical facilities for future wartime mobili-zation. He envisioned Japanese imperialism as aking-like way of government by justice and ahegemonic practice of government by force.This vision took material form throughout Jap-anese colonial rule in the scientific institutionsdiscussed in the two books under review.

Bo Liang’s book first defines “technological im-perialism” as the instrumental forces facilitatingthe capitalist expansion and military campaignsand considers its problematic characteristics of ag-gressiveness, practicality, transnationalism, de-struction, and monopoly. Chapter 2 presents thescholarly literature of technology and imperialismin the West and Japanese studies of colonial sci-ence since 1968, when decolonization was invogue. Chapter 3 provides an overview of theJapanese colonial system and the establishment ofroughly four hundred research institutionsthroughout the periods of imperial expansion andwartime mobilization. The apparatus created tosteer the research orientation toward military im-plementation and the war system was the NationalScientific Review Council, supervised by the StatePremier. Chapter 4 explores the Japanese colonialresearch institutions and other research activities inTaiwan. There is a rather small section that focusesparticularly on the “southward research activities”at the Taipei Imperial University, which was thegateway facilitating Japanese colonial expansionin Southeast Asia in the 1930s.

Chapter 5 centers on the institutional devel-opment of the Mantetsu Central Experiment In-stitute from 1908 to 1949 and its research focuson the chemical analysis of industrial goods.Some of the research fellows stayed in Chinauntil the postwar era and helped rehabilitateChina’s energy technology. The renowned Man-tetsu Geological Survey Institute is discussed in

BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 99 : 2 (2008) 429

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.216 on Wed, 18 Jun 2014 07:41:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions