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florisw's review
It’s a tough book to get through, even in English. Fortunately, it’s very short, and Fleck is relatively clear in his ordering of chapters and sub-chapters. In essence, the book has two identities. The first is that of a history of medicine book, which looks at the origins of syphilis as a disease of the blood and the medical diagnostics developed to identify it. The second is that of a sociology of science book, which uses the history of syphilis as a case study to explore how facts are created within communities of likeminded thinkers. Fleck calls these communities thought collectives, and their like-mindedness thought styles. In describing the need to study the history of syphilis in order to understand it as a concept, he also argues for the need to study the history of cognition if one is to study the history of science (21). His conclusion: cognition is a social process, and facts are not objectively given but collectively created. In this sense his ideas anticipate those of later 20th-century philosophers and sociologists of science; ideas which are still highly relevant today, as we continue to debate the place of scientific knowledge in society.
mburnamfink's review
4.0
No matter what you do in life, you will never be as awesome as Ludwik Fleck. A Jewish Polish doctor most active in the interwar years, Fleck published 120 medical articles in 6 languages, wrote a proto-STS tract, invented a typhus vaccine while imprisoned in the ghetto by the Nazis, survived Auschwitz, testified against Mengele and co at the Nuremburg trials, and finally fled Soviet occupied Europe to Israel in 1957. They were a different breed then.
Fleck traces syphilis from the 16th century to the 20th century, from a moral scourge to one of many genital ulcerating diseases, to a bacteria, to the contemporary Wasserman antibody test. But syphilis merely serves as the primary example for a much grander project in what Fleck terms comparative epistemology, as he explains how scientific knowledge work. Fleck develops a detailed theory around 'thought collectives' and 'thought styles', the collective work that determines what it regarded as scientifically valid, the circulation of knowledge, and the definition of relevant problems and details.
It's a clear precursor to Kuhn and Foucault, in terms of genealogical approaches to understanding previous scientific theories as true in their time, not as false ideas to discarded in the Whiggish march to absolute truth. Fleck, however, does not share Kuhn's belief in incommensurability, choosing instead a more continuous view of scientific history. The approach to communities of individuals, techniques, tools, tactic knowledge, and norms, prefigures Bruno Latour's lab ethnography and the social constructivist turn.
However, this is a strange, strange book, the scholarly equivalent of a coelacanth. It's not much formally cited (I don't think I've ever seen it in a contemporary paper). Later authors took the form of Fleck's ideas, while discarding his terminology. The medical details that Fleck uses to support his claims are often hard to follow. While the assertions sparkle ("A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking"), they're embedded in a glutinous mass of anti-Vienna school sociology. I can't really say that anybody should read this book, but if they'll do, they'll be a better person.
Fleck traces syphilis from the 16th century to the 20th century, from a moral scourge to one of many genital ulcerating diseases, to a bacteria, to the contemporary Wasserman antibody test. But syphilis merely serves as the primary example for a much grander project in what Fleck terms comparative epistemology, as he explains how scientific knowledge work. Fleck develops a detailed theory around 'thought collectives' and 'thought styles', the collective work that determines what it regarded as scientifically valid, the circulation of knowledge, and the definition of relevant problems and details.
It's a clear precursor to Kuhn and Foucault, in terms of genealogical approaches to understanding previous scientific theories as true in their time, not as false ideas to discarded in the Whiggish march to absolute truth. Fleck, however, does not share Kuhn's belief in incommensurability, choosing instead a more continuous view of scientific history. The approach to communities of individuals, techniques, tools, tactic knowledge, and norms, prefigures Bruno Latour's lab ethnography and the social constructivist turn.
However, this is a strange, strange book, the scholarly equivalent of a coelacanth. It's not much formally cited (I don't think I've ever seen it in a contemporary paper). Later authors took the form of Fleck's ideas, while discarding his terminology. The medical details that Fleck uses to support his claims are often hard to follow. While the assertions sparkle ("A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking"), they're embedded in a glutinous mass of anti-Vienna school sociology. I can't really say that anybody should read this book, but if they'll do, they'll be a better person.
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