History of Science
SECTION A
1 How has the relationship between the sciences and mathematics changed
throughout history?
2 What is the difference, if any, between the history of science and the history of
technology?
SECTION B
3 Either (a) Was there a scientific revolution in sixteenth-century and seventeenthcentury Europe?
Or (b) What effects did new societies and academies have on natural
philosophy in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Europe?
4 Either (a) ‘Between 1500 and 1700 medical ideas changed more than medical
practices.’ Discuss.
Or (b) Why did the stethoscope become the emblematic instrument of the
Clinical School of post-revolutionary Paris?
5 Either (a) ‘Thus entrenched as the Cartesian system was, it was not to be
wondered at that the doctrines of Newton’s Principia were distrustfully received.’
(David Brewster, Life of Newton, 1831). Discuss.
Or (b) Were botanic gardens more significant than chemical laboratories for
the development of natural knowledge in eighteenth-century Europe?
6 How did the medical community come to accept that many diseases are caused
by specific micro-organisms?
7 ‘In the nineteenth century the “is” of nature was being made a justification for
the “ought” of politics, and vice versa.’ Discuss.
8 Compare and contrast the institutionalisation of physics in Britain and Germany.
9 Critically assess Mendel’s status as a discoverer.
PLEASE TURN OVER/
2
10 Either (a) ‘Psychiatry has always been a mixture of fads, fashions and torture.’ Is
this true?
Or (b) ‘Freud, not Einstein, was the greatest scientist of the twentieth
century.’ Discuss.
11 Either (a) What difference have patients’ demands made to biomedical
technologies since World War II? Discuss with reference to sickle cell anaemia
AND the oral contraceptive pill.
Or (b) Why isn’t there a contraceptive pill for men? Provide a historical
answer.