ABSTRACT
Galen, Aristotle, and Ptolemy, Hippocrates, Plato, and Archimedes were read and taught that is, until about the mid-seventeenth century the history of science was part of the fabric of science itself. Paracelsus's bonfire of old authors at Basle was not at all typical of the early stages of modern science. Galileo and Newton were fully conscious of their Greek antecedents and sought to make their own work equally solid. Even the mathematization and mechanization of nature the two great accomplishments of seventeenth-century science had been anticipated in antiquity. Only in the eighteenth century did the remoter past become a distinct element in the dimension of time, and the history of science something more and less than a preface to present science. Modern knowledge of medieval science was founded by a French physical chemist, Pierre Duhem, whose first great work, with the deceptive title tudes sur Lonard de Vinci, was published in 1906-13.
