Science, Pseudoscience, and Science Falsely So- Called 289They also paralleled a number of important shifts in widespread ways of
talking about pseudoscience. An 1896 letter to the editor of Science from
one reader criticized “‘practical’ or pseudo- science” men, by which he
meant those uneducated in theory.^27 Equations between pseudoscience
and popular science also became far more common than earlier in the
century. As men of science (or “scientists” as they were increasingly being
called) began to privilege research over the diffusion of science—which in
their opinion often simplifi ed and degraded pure scientifi c knowledge—
popularization often found itself associated with pseudoscience. An 1884
article in the New York Times leveled as one of its primary complaints
against the “pseudo- science” of phrenology that books and pamphlets
about it were “within reach of everybody.”^28
The growing sense of “popular science” as something distinct from sci-
ence itself that informed such characterizations of science and not- science
went hand in hand with evolving ideas about the nature of the public
that was consuming popularized science. One of its chief characteristics
in late- nineteenth- century depictions was its credulity. A variety of com-
mentators noted, particularly in the years before 1900, that the scientifi c
discoveries of the previous hundred years had been so dramatic and exten-
sive that ordinary people had become “ready to accept without question
announcements of inventions and discoveries of the most improbable and
absurd character” or that the “general public has become somewhat over-
credulous, and untrained minds fall an easy prey to the tricks of the maga-
zine romancer or to the schemes of the perpetual motion promoter.”^29
According to some observers, “an army of pseudo- scientifi c quacks who
trade upon the imperfect knowledge of the masses” had grown up along-
side legitimate purveyors of orthodoxy. In this sense, the enormous and
bewildering power of science was itself to blame for the spread of pseudo-
scientifi c ideas. But the “evil infl uence of a sensational press” also played
a deleterious role.^30
Such concerns refl ected genuine worries, but they also paralleled the
growth of the commercialized mass media as a new cultural force, as well as
the creation of a new kind of mass public such publications made possible.
By the early 1900s, many Americans had adopted the habits and methods
of the advertising industry to promote everything from public- health cam-
paigns to religious revivals. An article in an 1873 issue of the Ladies’ Reposi-
tory decried the supposed tendency of many magazine readers to “swallow
any bolus that speculative doctors of chances may drop into their gullets,”
particularly when an article began “‘Dr. Dumkopf says.’”^31 The geologist
and science- popularizer Joseph LeConte similarly complained about mis-
takes “attested to by newspaper scientists, and therefore not doubted by