1One of the biggest gaps in the history of science is the paucity of studies
of the history of the meanings of “science” and other labels used by in-
vestigators of nature to describe their own activities. Recent developments
within the discipline suggest that such a study is long overdue, for it is
now commonly claimed—rightly or wrongly—that “science” is an inad-
equate and unhelpful way of describing the systematic study of nature in
the past. As a university discipline, the history of science is a relatively
young fi eld that traces its origins to the late nineteenth century. Early his-
torians of science often tended to assume that while the science of the past
differed in many ways from the science of the present, it was nonetheless
essentially the same kind of enterprise. A key feature of these early histo-
ries of science was an emphasis on the progressive and cumulative nature
of science. Past scientifi c achievements were understood in terms of the
contribution they had made to an increasingly more sophisticated and
rational understanding of the natural world. George Sarton (1884–1956),
often regarded as the father of the history of science, thus insisted that all
material and intellectual progress “can be traced back in each case to the
discovery of some new secret of nature or to a deeper understanding of
an old one.”^1 For Sarton and a number of his fellow pioneers in the fi eld,
the importance of the history of science lay in the fact that it was the one
discipline which more clearly than any other demonstrated the progress
of human civilization. In his inaugural lecture at Harvard, Sarton ventured
INTRODUCTION