Science, Medicine and Empire
You should answer four questions in total. Answer one question from
Section A and three questions from Section B. All questions carry equal
weighting.
Begin each answer on a separate sheet.
Write legibly and on only one side of the paper.
Answers must be tied up in separate bundles, marked 1, 2, 3, etc.
according to the number of the question.
Attach a completed coversheet to each bundle and complete a master
coversheet listing all questions attempted. It is essential that you write
your examination number and not your name on the coversheet and on
each bundle.
You may not start to read the questions printed on the subsequent
pages of this question paper until instructed to do so by the
invigilator.
Page 2 of 3
SECTION A
1. What roles did empire and global trade play in the emergence and
character of field sciences such as geology, botany, epidemiology and
anthropology?
2. “It mattered little whether nineteenth-century researchers were based in
laboratories, hospitals, observatories, museums, surveys or any other
kind of institution. What made the difference was the country where they
worked.” Discuss.
3. Discuss professionalisation as it relates to both medicine and science
during the nineteenth century.
SECTION B
4. You have been commissioned to write a book entitled A History of
Medicine in Ten Objects. Select three objects from the period between
1780 and 1914 and justify your choices.
5. How have sites of anthropology changed over time?
6. “The science of calculation becomes continually more necessary at each
step of our progress, and must ultimately govern the whole of the
application of science to the arts of life” (Charles Babbage, 1832). Did
the development of the sciences in the nineteenth century confirm
Babbage’s prophecy?
7. “Laboratory researchers did not set themselves up in opposition to
hospital doctors in the nineteenth century, but rather learned from and
worked in harmony with them.” Assess this claim.
8. To what extent was the theory of evolution by natural selection a product
of Britain’s informal empire of commerce and trade?
9. Were physical standards a prerequisite for scientific internationalism?
10. “Depiction may have mattered increasingly in medical science through
the nineteenth century, but by its end, description still mattered more.”
Discuss.
11. What were the aims of the Beagle when it left Plymouth harbour in
December 1831?
12. Was the category of “race” biologized in the nineteenth century? Use
examples to support your view.
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13. Is “Humboldtian science” just another way of talking about “imperial
science”?
14. How did nineteenth-century bacteriologists respond to their critics, and to
what effect?
15. Discuss the role of sciences in shaping conceptions of the future during
the nineteenth century.
E