The Peculiar Maturation of the History of Science

This paper takes as its topic how the history of science, as a separate field of study, came into being in the early twentieth century and how it developed thereafter. The first signs of the institutionalization of the field as an academic discipline were the first international conference on the history of science held adjacent to the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900, the start of the journal Isis in 1912, and the founding of the History of Science Society in 1924. This journal and the society still occupy a prominent position in the field today. The period also saw the first chairs, textbooks and specialized courses in the history of science come about. To be sure, before the twentieth-century works on the history of science were written. As a matter of fact historians operating in the first half of the twentieth century reacted to the philosophically informed views on the historical development of science of, for example, Comte, Whewell, Mach, and Duhem. ² Nothing ever starts in a void. Yet in the nineteenth century nothing resembling a modern academic specialization came about. ³ For this reason I have chosen the early twentieth century as a starting point of this overview of the development of the field.