La cultura médica instrumental: los viajes políticos de los esfigmógrafos entre Europa y América
Generally explained by the association between precision and instrument, the instrumental dominion of medicine in actual days is assumed as a natural and necessary destiny. Placed in the practices of Mexican physicians of the XIX century, I discuss this naturalized image of medical instruments. Taking as a case the Sphygmograph, device recorder of the cardiac pulse, I interrogate the reasons of the massive import of instruments from the European markets. I have found that the political search for affirming normality and civilization of the Mexican population encircle an epistemological dimension; the instruments are revealed as appliances of knowledge and objects of consumption, in this case, of the colonial market, which hierarchies determined how in this side of America medical doctors were creating knowledge and instruments importing Europe’s instruments.
Introduction: Instruments in the History of Science
IN THE 1943 VOLUME of Isis there appeared a two-page article entitled "Traduttore-Traditore: A Propos de Copernic et de Galilee," written by Alexandre Koyre. Besides the normal problem of accuracy in translating scientific texts from another era, Koyre argued that there is the additional danger of "involuntarily substituting our conceptions and our habits of thought for those, entirely different, of the author." Among the examples he cited was a passage at the beginning of the third day of Galileo's Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences, translated by Henry Crew and Alfonso de Salvio, in which Galileo's comperio was rendered in English as "I have discovered by experiment." Koyre argued that the word "experiment" was simply added by the translator who, "obviously committed to empiricist epistemology, could not imagine that one could demonstrate or discover something other than by experiment." It was no wonder, according to Koyre, that the legend of Galileo the empiricist and experimenter was so firmly established in America, for even the best American historians cited the translation by Crew and de Salvio.' Koyre set out to change all that. In his Etudes galileennes of 1939 he drew a different portrait of Galileo, a Platonist, who found things in his head and used instruments only by way of illustration. In the same year that his little article appeared in Isis, there appeared in The Philosophical Review his article "Galileo and the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century," in which he made the following statement:
Galileo and the Problem of Free Fall
There can be little doubt that 1973 will remain notable as a year in which knowledge of Galileo's mechanics increased dramatically. Professor Stillman Drake's publication, in May, of some of Galileo's early work on the law of free fall was followed in the autumn by the publication of a number of important manuscripts clearly indicating Galileo's use of precise measurement. From a discussion of these manuscripts and Thomas Settle's performance of Galileo's inclined plane experiment, Drake implies that a clear view of Galileo's use of experiment is now emerging. Added emphasis was given to Drake's thesis that doubts concerning Galileo's use of experiment were largely unfounded, by James MacLachlan's realization of a Galilean experiment which was previously described as ‘imaginary’ by Koyré. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that, while it cannot be doubted that Galileo used experiment and precise measurement, his attitude to observation may well have been far more complex than Drake has supposed. My point of departure is James MacLachlan's remark that continuing disagreement over Galileo's use of experiment should lead to further examination of Galileo's experimental claims. I shall indicate that more than one view of Galileo's use of experiment may prove capable of explaining our present knowledge—a corollary of this being that alternative explanations may be proposed for the manuscripts recently published by Drake.