History of Science
SECTION A
1 What was the difference between natural philosophy and science?
2 ‘The theoretical content of science should receive the lion’s share of historical
attention.’ Do you agree?
SECTION B
3 Between 1543 and 1687, why did any European believe the Earth orbited the
Sun?
4 Either (a) Did the study of anatomy have a ‘Renaissance’ between 1500 and
1700?
Or (b) Was the ‘one-sex body’ the dominant model of the human body in
pre-Enlightenment Europe?
5 Either (a) Why did rulers patronise scientific societies and academies in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe?
Or (b) How and why did seventeenth and eighteenth century naturalists
attempt to classify living beings?
6 Either (a) Did Newtonian natural philosophy imply a clockwork universe?
Or (b) Is chemical inquiry in eighteenth-century Europe best described as
a ‘postponed scientific revolution’?
7 ‘The hospitals of post-revolutionary Paris were museums for the analysis of
disease’. Discuss this claim in relation to other museums of the period.
8 Either (a) In what ways was Charles Darwin a typical nineteenth-century
man of science?
Or (b) Why was the Origin of Species an important book if most
scientists rejected the mechanism of natural selection?
PLEASE TURN OVER/
2
9 How and why did universities emerge as centres for original scientific research
during the nineteenth century?
10 Either (a) ‘Psychiatry came of age when it was taken over by the drug
companies.’ Discuss.
Or (b) ‘I don’t think that the conceptions of nuclear fission have strained
any man’s attempts to understand them, and I don’t feel that any of us have
really learned in a deep sense very much from following this up’ (Robert
Oppenheimer). Was the making of the atomic bomb a scientific or a
technological accomplishment?
11 Either (a) Was molecular biology born in 1953?
Or (b) In 1949, the journal Science called sickle-cell anaemia ‘a
molecular disease’. What made this claim possible and what consequences did
it have?