The Treatise on Fevers and Miscellaneous Diseases: Vicissitudes during The Millenium after its Completion

Abstract

The history of science is not only the history of scientific discovery but also of the socialization of scientific knowledge. Science is, by its very nature, social, with respect to both scientific activity and knowledge. However, scientific research can only be conducted by individuals. (For a long time, research was carried out by individuals working alone and more recently by’ small teams’.) Any scientific discovery, when it is first ‘born into the world,’ must consist of knowledge that only ‘individuals’ or’ small teams’ have mastered. The transfer of individual scientific discoveries and individually controlled scientific knowledge to the control of society, i.e., the socialization of scientific knowledge, is often a tortuous process. The study of this process is an important task for historians of science.

Journal of Dialectics of Nature VII(3) (1985) 55-59.