> There is an essence of science - curiousity.
> 
> This technical language problem, is the fundamental question simply that
> many History graduates do not have all of the tools required to start a
> PhD in the HoS? Is there not need for some kind of taught masters in
> general science to get them up to speed on the basic ideas and
> nomenclature?
> -- 
I'm glad that Colin Axon redeemed himself by saying that perhaps 
historians *can*, learn about science as until that moment he seemed 
to be making the standard attack on historians and their scientific 
ineptitude.  (You know, the one where you get collared by  
some old doc at a conference and he asks you why you're doing history 
of medicine since you are only a historian.)  Personally I think some 
kind of conversion Masters, aimed at historians going into HSTM, isn't 
such a bad idea, but perhaps we should ask ourselves why it might 
be necessary.

Personally I never wanted to make a choice betweem studying arts 
subjects and studying the sciences but the educational system in 
England virtually forces us to do so.  I managed, quite unusually at 
the time, to combine arts and science 'A' levels.  My English and 
History teachers were very encouraging, supporting my argument that a 
well educated person should know something about science.  However, 
my science teachers were altogether different, informing me that I 
would fail chemistry if I did not also study either maths or physics 
and that one science 'A' level was no good to anybody as it 
wouldn't get me into University.  The message was quite clear - 
science is specialist territory and unless you intend to specialise, 
stay clear, you just won't understand.  I had to lie just to enrol on a 
science 'A' level; it was my first encounter with scientists and 
their notion that science is a distinct form of knowledge available 
 to and understood by an elite few.  I wouldn't have had a 
'technical-language problem' if scientists had been more willing to 
teach their subject to someone they perceived as a non-scientist.

So HSTM seemed an ideal topic for me, here I could make use of my 
training in history, and also that one (useless) science 'A' level.  
Here, also, I could unravel science as a process, not as a series of 
landmark discoveries or noteable publications, or big pronouncements 
made by white, middle-aged, middle-class men living in the West.  I 
could begin to get under the skin of science (or to take the lid off the black box 
if you prefer an inorganic metaphor) and find out just what it was 
that scientists had attempted to exclude me from.

I don't think any of us expected the BSHS PG conference to spark off 
a debate on the future of HSTM, classical and technical languages, 
the nature of this thing called 'science' and when the human race 
came into existence.  I know that Aileen thinks we have moved away 
from her original question about what future HSTM has when so many 
graduates concentrate on medicine and biology in the nineteenth and 
twentieth centuries.  I don't think attempting to define science is 
going to help answer that question, particularly when so many of the answers given 
are present-centred and define 'science' as exclusive in one way or 
another.  As I seem to remember saying before, *that* goes against 
all my historical training.

Helen Blackman

PS, as far as I'm concerned, curiosity is the stuff that's bad for 
cats.




Helen Blackman
CHSTM
Maths Tower
Manchester University
Oxford Road
M13 9PL

Tel: 0161 275 2000 ext.5929


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