![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
A previous paper (Journal of Biological Education 22(1), 45–50) discussed the general principles of using the history of biology to teach intermediate and advanced students something of the wider implications of their discipline. Here, three controversial incidents from the history of biomedical science are reviewed for the lessons they may teach about the nature and context of scientific discoveries. The examples considered are William Harvey and blood circulation, Pasteur, Pouchet and spontaneous generation, and the discovery of insulin by Frederick Banting and its possible prediscovery by Ernest Scott.
Notes
Accessible sources about Harvey, his work and his times are as follows: Frank, R. G. (1980) Harvey and the Oxford physiologists, Berkeley: University of California Press; Keynes, G. (1978) The life of William Harvey, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Whitteridge, G. (1971) William Harvey and the circulation of the blood, London: Macdonald.
Several collections of historical abstracts and reprints exist for different areas of science. The edited translation of Harvey which I use is in King, L. S. (1971) History of science readings: a history of medicine, London: Penguin.
An excellent brief introduction, with plates, to the machine designs of the early seventeenth century can be found in Keller, A. G. (1964) A theatre of machines, London: Chapman and Hall. The rationalist Descartes was also unable to see the heart as a machine. He used the alchemical analogy of an alembic, seeing the heart as an intensely hot vessel into which liquid fell to be instantly vaporized and condensed in the arteries. Descartes, R. trans. Sutcliffe, F. E. (1968) Discourse on method, London: Penguin.
Biographies, books, and papers about Pasteur are legion. For my purposes I have used the following sources: Nicolle, J. (1961) Louis Pasteur, London: Hutchinson; Reid, R. (1974) Microbes and men, London: BBC Publications; Vallery-Rodot, R. trans. Devonshire, R. L. (1902) The life of Pasteur, London: Constable; Farley, J. and Geison, G. L. (1974) Science, politics and spontaneous generation in nineteenth-century France. The Pasteur-Pouchet debate, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 48, 161-198.
The literature on the discovery of insulin is voluminous. The best account of the events of 1921–23 is in Bliss, M. (1982) The discovery of insulin, Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing. General background is drawn from Medvei, V. C. (1982) A history of endocrinology, Lancaster: MTP Press.