ABSTRACT
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Enlightenment was usually portrayed as a time of intellectual fervour that was closely tied to the rise of ‘science’. In recent decades, many professional historians of the long eighteenth century have dug deeper into this interpretation by focusing on the larger cultural factors that underpinned contemporary notions of rationality and experimentation as practiced in the fields of medicine, natural history and natural philosophy. These studies convincingly established that the methods and assumptions that guided experiments were often linked to the larger goals of a company, guild, patron, philosophical society or university faculty.2 One of the ironic results of these conclusions, however, is that historians of science, medicine and technology have tended to focus on the social or rhetorical uses of experimentation rather than the
1 John Walker, ‘An Account of a New Medicinal Well, lately Discovered near Moffat, in Annandale, in the County of Dumfries. By Mr. John Walker, of Borgue-House, near Kirkudbright, in Scotland’, PT, 49 (1757), 117-147, page 119.
