ABSTRACT
Science increasingly came to form its own bastion, but at the same time it was subject to the influence of the profound social shifts that began in the nineteenth century. Governments increasingly relied on a new class of professional experts – lawyers, but also doctors, mathematicians and engineers. In the nineteenth century, scientific research increasingly became the business of university professors, and this meant it was no longer a game played by aristocrats but was absorbed into the hierarchical university system. Some professors had a handful of assistants, others ran whole laboratories, but in essence they were all little potentates, most of them highly enamoured of their own authority. One of the most high-profile elements of nineteenth-century science was physiology, or research into the phenomena of life. The new professors of exact science felt compelled to develop a new ideal of knowledge. They believed that the modern study of nature itself laid the foundations for human civilization and social progress.
