ABSTRACT

Science is divided into fields, or disciplines, such as physics or chemistry. Disciplines and the disciplinary structures themselves have a history. Scientific knowledge has promised to solve social and individual problems. Medicine and science have been closely interlinked for millennia, and much of life science has been practiced with the hope of curing diseases. Much early scholarship, on Islamic science in particular, was "contributionist," concerned with identifying specific "contributions" that non-Western science had made to Western science. Before the European discovery of Australia, the only marsupial, pouch-bearing animal known to Western science was the opossum of the Americas. Governments themselves have increasingly become the most important scientific institutions, employing hundreds of thousands of scientists and being the major funders of scientific research. Russia under the Romanov dynasty of tsars adopted Western science as part of a state-driven process of "modernization".