Q: A question, which seems to be of more than casual interest, relates to the significance of the fact, manifested in the contributions to the present issue of Science in Context, that history is written by historians for different reasons – some complementary perhaps, but not all – and to different ends. What does this mean for history as a discipline, as a process, and as a product? Is history (the writing of history) one thing, or many things? And if many, what does this entail for memory more generally, and for our relation, as humans, to our past?

If history, including the history of science, is more than one thing, how are we to teach it? How are we to speak of its provenance, and its raison d'être? More fundamentally, somewhat less internally: how does this realization impact upon our collective and personal relationships to the past when it comes to knowledge and science?

AM: The question, “How are we to teach it?” − meaning: how are we going to teach the history of science? − is no longer of concern to me, since I quit academic teaching more than twenty years ago.

More troublesome to me is the word “collective” used in connection with “relationships to the past when it comes to knowledge and science.” Let me briefly refer to one example. In La pensée sauvage, Claude Lévy-Strauss (Reference Larousse1962) reflects on a prehistoric period during which plants were domesticated. He argues that grass was turned into cereal. But no traces of the practices of our nameless forebears survive. What we consume day after day, if we are lucky enough, refers back, materially and historically, to that presumably tortuous process of plant domestication. I doubt that many of us, collectively, are aware of the expertise accumulated in prehistoric times that was transmitted from generation to generation. One might argue now that, given the significance of plant domestication for humanity today, some lieu de mémoire Footnote ¹ should remind us of this achievement. But if collective memory needs to be reminded of great or not so great past events, of heroes and presumably famous scholars, conflicts over what is more or less significant will never end, then this compels us to raise various questions: Is it the task of political authorities (legislators, judges, and so on) to decide what ought to be remembered, and how we should remember the past? Recent events in French law-making illustrate the controversial character of politically motivated prescriptions which prevent professional scholars, school teachers, and historically minded lay persons from proposing in public research hypotheses which do not accord with the law (cf. Journal officiel 2001a and 2001b as well as 2005).Footnote ² The need for remembering is, indeed, so variegated and heterogeneous that it seems preferable not to tame it by law enforcement measures or any such socio-political move.

The notion of a collective relationship to the past causes me some trouble, for it needs to be divided into partial collective relationships to the past: the relationship of children to the past, of professional groups to the past, and so on. Marc Ferro examined how history was taught to children in different countries. His monograph focused on the ways teachers shape historical knowledge through politically or otherwise biased reconstructions. One may as well read this excellent contribution as an analysis of how history is taught to children rather than to grown ups studying in a department of history (cf. Ferro Reference Ferro1984 and 2004).Footnote ³ To put it differently, speaking of a “collective relationship to the past” is meaningless as long as one doesn't specify which ensemble of individuals is concerned . . .

Q: . . . and what about teaching the history of the sciences?

AM: My experience as an academic teacher was highly limited. I purposely gave up teaching the history of one science − psychology − after ten years, due to an obvious lack of interest on the part of the students for the history of that discipline. The history of psychology was not a compulsory course. They thought that attending a course on the history of the discipline of their choice would offer them some orientation in a field divided into several sub-fields (from neuropsychology to social psychology, and from clinical psychology to industrial psychology, and so on). So their overall aim was to situate themselves within the present state of the discipline. My aim, in contradistinction, was to create a critical distance between the present state of the discipline and its past. The students remained rooted in one regime – that of being engaged in reproducing scientific knowledge in order to enable themselves to participate in producing scientific knowledge − whereas I was interpreting the mechanisms, means, tools, social and material prerequisites of the production of scientific knowledge from the standpoint of a different regime. My guess is that they took my accounts to be just more or less funny stories about something that had vanished in earlier decades.

Q: So you quit the history of psychology. What came next?

AM: I couldn't get along in the history of psychology for yet another reason. Psychology combined with other disciplines − physiology, neurology, psychiatry, etc. The study of its history necessitates excursions into the history of these closely neighboring disciplines. Under such conditions, why not look for interesting topics that cut straight through current academic demarcations? One topic I chose was nerves: anything and everything relating to nerves or neural substance in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century. Helmholtz's sensory physiology was among my favorites.

Q: What did you consider to be important in the domain of the historiography of the sciences?

AM: One issue I could not avoid because it bothered me again and again was that of the status of narrative accounts. Are such accounts explanations in disguise? What are narratives likely to convey? Do they necessitate the occasional fiction when gaps in the archival records are unavoidable?

I read a lot of contributions on the challenges that historiography confronts − contributions of book length by Paul Ricoeur (1983–1985), Jörn Rüsen (1983–1989), Peter Novick (Reference Novick1988), Arthur Danto (Reference Danto and Danto1999a; Reference Danto1999b), or Aviezer Tucker (Reference Tucker2004), and contributions of essay length, e. g. by Paul Roth (Reference Roth1989) or Eelco Runia (Reference Runia2006) – to refer to a modest sample of authors. This was all in all beneficial food for thought. Ultimately, however, such meta-historical, meta-historgriographical, philosophical reflections and the ensuing theoretical proposals were not of much help. Indeed, meta-historiography led me to think about who or what is the “primary custodian” of memory, to refer to a splendid expression of Yoseph Yerushalmi (1989, xxxiii). Which form to choose for a narrative? How many quotes from primary sources does a narrative bear without becoming dry or boring? In short, the issue of skill revealed itself to be more challenging than meta-historiographical problems.

Q: Was there nonetheless a particular historiographer who you found to be exemplary?

AM: I indulge in naming only one – the Russian (formerly Soviet) historian Aaron Gurevich, whom I had the chance and the honor to translate (cf. Gurjewitsch [Gurevich] Reference Gurjewitsch [Gurevich] and Métraux1993). He had a delicate sense for medieval culture in all its complexity. I was most impressed by his analyses of knowledge transfers from the sphere of friars to the sphere of the flock by way of exempla, that is to say, in Gurevich's words, by way of examples, as “short entertaining stories, anecdotes from contemporary life or borrowed from ancient literature” built into sermons. The exempla illustrate the collision between the earthly world and the transcendent world of the (Christian) god:

Q: Gurevich was not a member of Soviet/Russian school of history of science, was he?

AM: No. But what he had to say was also relevant for historians of the sciences. Not because he dealt with topics of the history of science in the narrow sense of the term, but rather because of the manner in which he studied knowledge transfers in medieval Europe and the social tensions caused by competing bits of knowledge. Gurevich drew from the semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin (cf. Gurevich Reference Gurevich1987a, 354), and more particularly from the dialogical approach of Bakhtin and his co-workers. Had Gurevich not had anything to offer to the historians of the sciences, I presume that he would not have been invited by the editors of Science in Context to contribute to an issue dealing, among other things, with Pierre Duhem and medieval philosophy and science (cf. Gurevich Reference Gurevich1987a and Reference Gurevich1987b).

Bakhtin's dialogical approach appealed to me for two reasons. First, it takes vocal, and especially linguistic expressions (from a shrill scream to books, from road signs to speeches, from one-line ads to a treatise on magnets, etc.) as the starting point of analysis. Thus, problems regarding truth, pure knowledge, inference, hypotheses, validity, refutation, and other such logical and epistemological matters, are deemed to become secondary in comparison to problems of operations involving signs, hence of operations of handling signs – of working on, with, and for signs.

The second reason is that the dialogical approach, according to its name, allows one, as Gurevich put it, to grasp the inner aspects of past acts: “It would be very helpful for historians to study historical sources so as to discover in them the sign systems that were employed in different societies.” And he added that the historian “does not fuse his mind with their mind [sc. the mind of the agents], but begins a sort of dialogue with them, affording them to express the possibility to express their own mode of vision” (Gurevich Reference Gurevich1987a, 353).

Q: Which means that the dialogical approach does not restrict itself to one's own encounter with sources of any kind. . . .

AM: Yes. When we read some text dating from, let's say, 1550, we also may happen to read the author's opinion (response) to, let's say, Lucretius's De rerum natura or to comments by Galen on some work authored by Hippocrates, or even to a text which in itself reflects its author's response to comments by Galen on some work by Hippocrates. We might thus read “through” several palimpsests.

Q: Does this semiotic approach yield historiographically justifiable results? Given the fact that you apprehend traces of the past within your own semiotic system, which, however, may also be that of many other contemporaries, but most probably not that of people who lived many decades or centuries ago, you might unknowingly distort that which you intend to grasp as content of the traces you analyze. . . .

AM: To begin with, I don't conjure some ultimate certainty concerning the objective truth of our interpretations of the past (I know, both terms, “objective” and “truth” are problematic, but let's ignore that for the moment). However, absence of ultimate certainty is quite different from obtaining relative certainty that narratives do indeed offer reconstructions of historical processes and thereby show how things happened.Footnote ⁴

Q: This still squares with a modernist approach to facts, to non-fictional narratives, to methodically guided empiricism, doesn't it?

AM: Recently I read a thin book advertising on its title page new thoughts on an old discipline. The author contrasts mainstream historians who “strive for ‘real historical knowledge’, for objectivity, for the evidentially-based synoptic account and for truth-at-the-end-of-enquiry” with historians who don't believe in narrative closure, or, the other way round, who believe in “interminable openness” which allows for “new, disrespectful, contentious, radical readings and rereadings, writings and rewritings of the past” (Jenkins Reference Jenkins2003, 3). This reminded me, though the wording differs, of the entry on history in one of the huge monuments of positivist scholarship, Pierre Larousse's universal dictionary. In that entry, right in the opening, one reads that “history changes its aspect in each generation. . . . Each epoch studies it from a viewpoint of its proper concern. The material aspect of history, that is to say the factual knowledge, changes likewise over time because of the uncertainty inherent to the givens of human testimonies” (Larousse 1866–1877, 300).Footnote ⁵ Do you perceive any propensity towards closure, any striving for the ultimate version of but one, of the master narrative? I don't. The new thoughts look like new words for old thoughts. . .

Coming back to an earlier question concerning the collective relationship to the past, in that entry on history, Larousse's dictionary emphasized that the (French) “historical movement” of the seventeenth century was shaped by Bossuet, that of the eighteenth century by Herder, Vico, and Condorcet,Footnote ⁶ and that of the nineteenth century by “many remarkable minds” (which remained unnamed) (ibid.). Condorcet's work doesn't inform either professional or lay approaches to history any more, which illustrates the fact that Larousse had observed that even the history of science had had a deeper effect upon both the study of, and the public interest in, political, social, and economic history. . .

Q: But the spirit in which mainstream historians are writing history seems to be different from that for which the author. . . .

AM: . . . . you mean Jenkins?

Q: . . . . yes, well, mainstream historiography seems to be different from that which he pleads for, meaning that they are often dogmatic. . . . .

AM: . . . . pardon me, non-mainstream historians are often dogmatic as well. But let's turn to something else.

Q: How do you organize a narrative? How do you structure it?

AM: It depends on the wealth of material (primary and secondary sources) and on the topic. If I have to write a brief story about a single, well-documented event, I resort to other means than if I have a complex story to tell which is not too well documented, but which extends over a considerable stretch of time.

Q: Such as?

AM: Such as the strange chapter in the annals of ornithology concerning swifts’ and swallows’ hibernation under the surface of water. I'll come back to this topic a bit later. The crucial point of a narrative is to adequately frame the scene − a place with people and other living and non-living beings (e. g. Siamese twins in jars or armies of insects in drawers), instruments, or places more or less filled only with writings and drawings. . .

Q: Laboratories and lecture halls and libraries?

AM: Yes, of course, but also observatories, hospitals, museums, zoos, planetariums, botanical gardens, mobile labs, sites for observers in exotic places recording on demand what they see, ships, submarines, airplanes, psychotherapeutic settings, conference rooms, pubs . . .

Q: Pubs?

AM: Yes, of course. Anne Secord published some years ago a splendidly illumining essay on the history of Lancashire artisans engaged in scientific botany who would meet in pubs; her essay is also an account of working-class people dealing with matters of science not just in well circumscribed spaces, but also in everyday situations characterized by social tension (cf. Secord Reference Secord1994). And recall Robert Hooke's frequent visits to coffee places and taverns where he met likeminded polymaths with whom he dined or drank chocolate and discussed matters of physics or natural history or architecture or instrument making (cf. Hooke Reference Hooke, Robinson and Adams1935, e.g. 102, 197, 284, etc.).Footnote ⁷

Let me refer, as well, to Angelo Mosso, the Italian physiologist, who played the lead part in a particular scene. He measured the blood flow on the brain's surface of subjects whose head had been injured − these patients had successfully undergone medical treatment following a head injury, but their skull showed a relatively large open “window” through which Mosso could apply the sphygmograph specially designed by him. So this was a scene with clearly demarcated boundaries, with identifiable instruments and other equally well identifiable equipment, with easily recognizable mechanical inscriptions documenting the variations of blood pressure in the subject's brain.Footnote ⁸ In contradistinction, there exist scenes with hardly graspable boundaries, stretching over centuries, with no easily definable actors or agents.

Q: Such as?

AM: Such as that already mentioned chapter in the history of ornithology. A firm belief among natural philosophers of the seventeenth century had it that swallows and swifts would not migrate, like geese or ravens, but instead would endure the cold season somewhere under the surface of the sea. By mere chance I stumbled over a review of a monograph on this topic (among other similar topics) in the French Journal des sçavans. I dare say that the editors of that journal wouldn't have published such a review if the monograph's content hadn't been considered to be trustworthy and dealt with in scholarly ways. But the bibliographical information given in the Journal des sçavans was misspelled. This was a dead end – I didn't find the source. Some years later I stumbled, again by chance (I was looking for something else), on a very similar review in the Transactions of the Royal Society. And there, the bibliographic information was not misspelled, as it turned out. I found the book − its author was the German physician Johann Pechlin (cf. Pechlin Reference Pechlin1676). This made it possible to draft a narrative that focused on a piece of traditional knowledge, on a belief firmly entrenched in natural history and transmitted from generation to generation over several centuries. The same belief, though adumbrated by some doubt, was still held in the entry “hirondelle” (swallow) of Jacques Valmont de Bomare's dictionary of natural history, in spite of the fact that the location of the birds’ wintery sleep had moved from the sea to ponds and muds (cf. Bomare Reference Valmont de Bomare1764).

Pechlin, the physician, plus the authors quoted by him, plus the people mentioned in the sources he consulted − e.g. fishermen discovering living swallows among the dead fish-bodies in their nets and witnessing the birds’ awakening in heated rooms − are no doubt agents of the story to be told. But there is no direct link between these agents, and we can't possibly reconstruct the paths along which this taken-for-granted piece of ornithological knowledge circulated from somewhere to northern Europe and from there to Paris and London and again back to France. One could nearly say that interwoven beliefs were the agents of this story. However, I am not even faintly able to ascribe some disposition or causal efficacy of agents (or agencies) to disembodied beliefs, however stubborn they seem to persist as socially acceptable convictions.

Why this (perhaps too long) comment? Because it refers to a narrative that shows that words were literally taken to be twins, and equally credible twins, of direct observations. To read texts dealing with birds was like doing some real bird watching. The text needed to be credible if the words standing for one's potential eye- or ear- or hand-witness observation were to be accepted as trustworthy testimonies. And what did Pechlin do? He looked for anatomo-physiological mechanisms in the bodies of swallows and swifts that would entirely concord with, i.e. epistemically confirm the validity of, the words “through” which he had been watching fishermen discovering living swallows and swifts in winter. Since Pechlin seems to have been convinced that the anatomical findings supported the hypothesis that swallows and swifts could hibernate according to “observations by reading,” it nicely followed that the corresponding words were as trustworthy as one's eyes.

Which is to say that the hardly visible scene is still a scene for a narrative, and the narrative suggests that the epistemic attitude towards words and observation in the seventeenth century differed vastly from that of later times as well as from that of many other scholars of that period. And then things start to become thrilling. You notice the co-existence of more or less archaic and recent, innovative modes of working (intellectual or mental work, manual work, linguistic and somehow artistic, at least iconic work, etc.) at the same time and in the same places. Today, a similar co-existence of modes of working is likely to be observed when you look at the difference between techno-scientific entrepreneurs, on the one hand, and traditionally trained philologists studying early medical treatises, on the other.Footnote ⁹

Q: Who would represent, in that period, a mode of working radically different from that of Pechlin?

AM: Probably Antony van Leeuwenhoek who sought to make his microscopic observations credible by having them confirmed by honest eyewitnesses from his neighborhood. Leeuwenhoek observed nature and then spoke or wrote about her, contrary to Pechlin who first read “into” nature and then examined her by direct inspection.

Q: If you insist on scenes as frames of narratives, aren't you sooner or later forced to find out what the actors were thinking and feeling, what beliefs they shared, which kind of moral conduct they would adopt?

AM: It would probably be of some help if we were able to know from the inside of the actors what happened, let's say, when a model of the human ear was presented to the fellows of the Academy of Science at Vienna. We might then tell what they thought apart from what they said; we would be able to ascertain who argued tactically and who argued candidly. We could perhaps add some details to the narrative of what happened on that one day at the Viennese Academy of Science. Measured against this (hypothetical) ideal, the achievable narrative is riddled with gaps and silences.

Q: There are silences and gaps everywhere in history, that's nothing unusual . . .

AM: Yes! I don't mention such gaps and silences as handicaps met only by historians of the sciences. The job of writing any history is one of facing silences and gaps anyhow. When you visit archives, look around first in order to see what is missing. I like the metaphor of shadows living in archives. And shadows of all sorts are living, or stubbornly surviving, in historical records anyway. In spite of inevitable gaps and silences, it's still better to have a rich, dense record at one's disposal. It permits the historian to write narratives that give a voice to the actors. . . .

Q: Are you then nearly compelled to take an ethnographer's stance?

AM: No, not quite. When Bronislaw Malinowski presented in 1922 the outcome of his field-work done in New Guinea, he formulated three “lines of approach” − his words (Malinowski 1922, 24) −, which he then summed up in an oft quoted and no less often rejected injunction, according to which the ethnographer needed “to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world” (ibid., 25). No doubt, historians of science are also, in a sense, dealing with persons who are natives − natives of other epochs, natives of other societies, natives with other beliefs and convictions. But most of the historian's natives are dead, except those who can be interviewed as eye-witnesses or bystanders. Thus, Malinowski's urge to fully understand, up to the point of identifying with, the vision of the native's world, is doomed to fail when actors of the past are at stake, and I wonder whether it could be applied at all even by participant observers in labs or in hospital wards or in big science organizations such as CERN in Geneva. The crucial question is whether one can do without following an injunction as demanding as that of Malinowski.

Q: Why?

AM: As an historian of the sciences, I do not study the everyday lives of researchers or scholars or professors in their encompassing totality. Not each and every action of the actors in the domain under scrutiny is relevant. The ethnographer of a Malinowskian inspiration, however, should pay attention to virtually all everyday actions of his or her subjects. Hence, the narrator of laboratory life in chemistry in mid-nineteenth century London can afford to not know whether August Hoffmann preferred wine to ale or ham to fish, whether he shared some strong religious beliefs with his wife, whether his wife was religious to begin with, or even whether he was married at all. Nor is it necessary to know what the religious creeds of Hoffmann's aids were. Here's a curious coincidence, which supports the rejection of Malinowski's injunction: The diaries of one of Hoffmann's aids, Herbert McLeod, were made available as a document concerning the religious practices of a young man around 1860. This same document, however, is replete with entries relating to laboratory life − entries which indicate what Hoffmann asked his aids to do, what kind of experiments the latter performed as half-amateur, half-professional chemist in their spare time, how they behaved in the lab, how they kept contact with manufacturers of dyestuffs, and so on. This information turns out to be obviously relevant to a narrative of early dyestuff chemistry at a particular place and at a given period of time; it also turns out to be useful in spite of the overall intention by which the diaries were kept, and, arguably so, in spite of the fact that I don't need to grasp the actors’ vision of the world to begin with in order to come up with a narratively dense account of some chemists’ practices at the forefront of organic chemistry (cf. Métraux Reference Métraux2003).

Q: Do you, accordingly, adopt tacitly an injunction negating that of Malinowski to fellow ethnographers?

AM: No, of course not. And why should I? Aren't the cases with which historians of the sciences deal most variegated, and, indeed, requiring a large array of methods, of reading guidelines, and of forms of writing narratives? If I'm deeply committed to the reconstruction of the life history of a scholar (let's assume for a while that the scholar is willing to submit to extensive interviews), I'm not going to ban from the outset everything that it not bound to his or her research practices. To put it differently: why should I look merely at what's going on behind the doors of the institution where a scholar was working, and not also pay some attention to what an ethnographer would be wanting to know? But I wouldn't adopt this approach (ask as much as possible about everything in one's life history from birth to the point of time of the last interview session, or death) as a guideline or a self-imposed injunction; a dialogical attitude as mentioned earlier in this conversation is sufficient.

What counts, after all, is not the actor's vision of the worlds, the representations in her head, but an ensemble, a chain, a sequence of acts and actions – worldly, spatio-temporally determined events which are enacted, performed, carried out, realized for reaching goals. I do not deny that actors’ or agents’ intentions are part and parcel of the events to be described and examined by historians. But in order to describe and examine such events in context, one doesn't need to know the whole network of interwoven beliefs and convictions, creeds and opinions of the agents. Except in rare cases such as that of George Price whose theoretical work on altruism was most strongly interlinked with his moral convictions and, above all, with his moral conduct (cf. Harman Reference Harman2010).

Q: Would you mind giving an example or two?

AM: We finally reach the part I consider to be central to my way of doing historical research.

Alexandre Yersin, a collaborator of Louis Pasteur and Émile Roux, was sent for a mission to Berlin. His task was to take a course offered by two of Robert Koch's assistants, a course for doctors who wanted to acquire practical knowledge in elementary microbiology, as one would say today. This was not the grand tour of American students who would spend some months in the German Empire and visit one or more universities. Rather, it was a small tour, a limited expedition intended to gather inside information – in one word: soft medical espionage. Yersin was not even a go-between between the Pasteurians in Paris and their Kochian opponents in Berlin. So he took the course in Koch's “fabric” as if he were just one among several doctors eager to become experts on a promising front of microbiological diagnostics and, perhaps, therapy. Yersin was present from the first to the last lesson. He recorded what either of Koch's assistants taught him and his fellow “students,” i.e. how to cut a potato in two halves without spoiling the surface (cleanliness is a must when you track a pathogenic agent according to Koch's approach), how to grow microbiologically fertile cultures, how to stain pathogenic agents, and so on.

The scene, or space, if you prefer, is nicely defined by the rather large room where the course was given. You do not have to know who the single actors were, nor what kind of mental representations they had in their minds regarding male fashion, political parties, public transportation facilities in Berlin (as compared to, let's say, those in Paris). And the guiding intentions of what was happening in that one large room (the scene, the space) are to be inferred from Yersin's description of the single acts to be performed in order to reach this or that microbiologically relevant goal or sub-goal. If one then looks into the publications on laboratory practices of the Kochian type, one notices that there existed a correspondence between the authors of these publications, the experts’ instructions (in the present case, the authors were the expert teachers), the single acts or manipulations to be learned, and the knowledge recorded on paper or memorized by the “students.”

Q: Now I see what you meant earlier. You don't need to know what beliefs were in the heads of the persons involved at that time and in that place. You simply assume that the expert teachers were teaching microbiological expertise, and that they intended to be good teachers, that Yersin and other “students” wanted to learn something, and that, in the end, there was a body of standard practices of the Kochian type . . .

AM: . . . that's it. Yersin's report opened the door for the narrative to be told. But the key subject matter of that narrative was what I called a “script,” something anybody could learn (like a film script, or the script of a sketch), and something which did not depend upon the particular dispositions, whether motor or mental, of the agents involved (cf. Métraux Reference Métraux and Maines1991). That's not all that is to say. I hope you do agree that Yersin and the other persons attending the course in that one large room in Berlin were not dreaming that they would cut potatoes in order to grow microbiological cultures and that they were not imagining in their dreams that they would handle pathogenic agents or bodies which looked like pathogenic agents. They were not dreaming, nor fancying anything. What they did in terms of manual work was quite real – as real, in the literal sense of the word, as the tables and the chairs and the gas flames and the bottles, and as real as the explosions which happened to occur from time to time in Hoffmann's laboratory at the Royal College of Chemistry in London. Whatever they expected to happen, whatever they were daydreaming from time to time while waiting for the next step to be taken, their work adapted itself, and constantly, as I would maintain, to the things around them. They were cutting potatoes and not cabbage, they used knives instead of scissors, the vessels for microbiological cultures were made of glass, not of clay, they worked in daylight, not close to the dim light of candles, and so on. Yersin's report refers to these real things, and I assume his report was faithful to what he had experienced during the lessons at Koch's institute, that he didn't want to fool Roux, and that the information written down was so much to the point that the “script” could be enacted somewhere else by other persons without loss of the real things referred to in the report. Finally, when one writes a narrative of this episode in the history of bacteriology, pathology, microscopy, phytology, something past is made present, perhaps not all too well, perhaps not all-encompassing enough, perhaps in dull language, perhaps even unknowingly indulging in some mistakes. But rather than ask what historiography can not achieve in general and especially in the history of the sciences because of an insuperable lack of ultimate evidence, I prefer to go along with some provisional interpretations of events taken to be real. Such interpretations, after all, can always be improved by future historians. What Koch's assistants had been doing when giving that course, what they had conveyed to their “students,” depended on the material properties of the objects they were manipulating. This is trivial, a truism − and yet a triviality that ought not to be taken figuratively. Whatever recent historiographers may have voiced about impossible ultimate interpretations, about the lack of objectivity, when I write on Yersin, I'm writing on acts of manual work, and these acts would most certainly have failed if they hadn't corresponded to, i.e. hadn't materially adapted to, the objective properties of potatoes, pathogenic agents, jars, water, air, and germs.

Q: You emphasize the importance of the notion of scene for unfolding narratives.

AM: Yes, when you work on the basis of this notion, you may modify the temporal and the spatial parameters (cf. also Ophir and Shapin Reference Ophir and Shapin1991). You may have a one-actor-one-day-one-room scene, you may as well vary the size and the duration of scenes. Rather than reconstructing narrative scenes in Paris from the point of view of native actors, I can glimpse, just barely glimpse, some bits of what the scene looked like for a scholarly trained Arabic observer traveling to Paris from Cairo in the late 1820s and early 1830s (cf. Rifâ’a at-Tahtâwî Reference at-Tahtâwî and Louca1988). But I would be utterly unable, due to the lack of required linguistic skills, to write a narrative on Rifâ’a at-Tahtâwî's perception of institutions of learning in Paris.

Q: What else?

AM: The actors’ impact upon social groups or even upon societies, the self-perception, motivations, economic status, etc., in one word, the variables which define academic workers acting in, and on, scenes to be narrated, also change.Footnote ¹⁰ One of the recent transformations of the world of learning and of research has to do with the shift towards an economical optimization of science administration. Paul Forman grieves over the loss of the regulative ideal of disinterested inquiry and deplores the overtaking of research by shortsighted economic interests. Forman's diagnosis draws a slightly too apologetic picture of the lost paradise of pure science (cf. Forman Reference Forman2010). If you look closely into the past of research, you'll see that pure science, though responding to a more or less sincere vocational ethos, was rarely transparently pure. The modern, not the postmodern era promoted research on poisonous gas for use in battlefields, the modern, not the postmodern era saw the birth of eugenics, research on nutrition, national statistics, and so on, clearly never disinterested endeavors, not to speak of the participation of scientists in Unit 731, the chemical and biological warfare research unit of the Imperial Japanese Army, or in Project MKULTRA. Footnote ¹¹ But Forman made a point! Philip Mirowski made it even more convincingly. I believe Mirowski gathered a huge amount of evidence that allows one to confidently speak of a new regime of academic life governed by iron economic constraints (cf. Mirowski Reference Mirowski2011; Mirowski and Sent Reference Mirowski and Sent2002).

Q: What about episodes considered to be more marginal?

AM: Against all odds, I did some studies on marginal scenes. Among them: the advent and destruction of science and scholarship in Yiddish in eastern Europe (cf. Métraux Reference Métraux2007; Finkelstein and Métraux Reference Finkelstein and Métraux2010). One may think of historical events taking place in geographical or social margins as welcome incentives to enhance comparative studies of the history of the sciences. An interesting case is that of early women scientists in Italy, in particular, Evangelina Bottero and Carolina Magistrelli, around the turn of the nineteenth century; Paola Govoni (Reference Govoni2007) convincingly showed that women doing research in the “hard” sciences in Italy at that time considered their profession to be not only a social promotion for themselves, but also a prerequisite for good education provided by women.Footnote ¹²

Add to all this the narrative of scholars finding the force and the courage to work in the Amsterdam ghetto during the occupation of the Netherlands in WWII (cf. Métraux Reference Métraux, Herrmann and Zeidler2012). This aspect of modern scientific and/or scholarly life shows what happens when networks of communication collapse, resources dwindle, when reading and writing are hindered by lost access to libraries, or hunger. Focussing on historical conditions such as those to which the emigré German psychologist Otto Selz, an innovative researcher on thought processes, was exposed – he was not the only one scholar living in a ghetto exile – helps one to move away from the too often apologetic, progress- and success-driven bias of plots too easily taken for granted in the history of science and scholarhsip, you know, the stories of great men, more rarely of great women, of geniuses, even of giants on whose shoulders we are said to stand . . .

Q: To conclude, why do you practice history at all?

AM: The French historian Pierre Chaunu gave an answer in an astonishingly straight manner: “I am a historian because I'm the son of my dead mother and because the mystery of time is haunting me since childhood” (Chaunu Reference Chaunu and Nora1987, 61). I don't have such a direct answer at hand. I was not haunted by the mystery of time to begin with. Rather, I guess that I am driven by the desire to understand what it means to be an autonomous citizen and, at the same time, to be facing the pervasive, sometime insidious presence of the sciences in social and individual life. There's hardly any aspect of human life on the northern hemisphere that isn't affected or even determined by the sciences. This presence of “whichever scientific” in contemporary life calls for political and moral choices. Why are immense sums invested in the discovery of traces of water on Mars (this is said to be a goal of disinterested inquiry), rather than in solving water problems here on Earth? Why do high-ranking researchers compromise with socially undesirable policies, for fame or money or worse? The list is endless. But if I can more easily understand what is involved in today's life of citizens, I will hopefully be able to grasp the historical changes that have caused the sciences to become such dominantly conditioning factors in our existence. And this will have been worthwhile.