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By Root 2052 0

as it in fact emerged in 1831 was not the body Brewster had wanted. In fact he played little active part in steering the nascent group, and before long apowerful Cambridge cohort, led by the still smarting Whewell, moved to the fore. Under Whewell's oversight the Association moved away from Brewster's preoccupations. It devoted itself to mechanical science, not mechanical arts - the distinction being that science was theoretical, whereas arts were learned by personal contact and often had industrial aspects to them. The idea of campaigning on patent issues was quietly abandoned. The BAAS was not to return to the political activity that Brewster had envisaged until the mid-185os.13

Still, one well-known achievement of these early meetings deserves to be noted. This was the coining of the term scientist to connote the new kind of specialist expert to whom the Association appealed. Whewell seems to have proposed it himself. He referred to it in print anonymously in the 9narterly Review of March 1834, and called seriously for its adoption in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences six years later. 14 Whewell saw that active researchers were devoting themselves increasingly to what were becoming discrete technical fields, and that, as they did so, so they grew "estranged from each other in habit and feeling." As a result, it was no longer clear what investigators of nature should be called collectively. Theypaid little attention to general or philosophical questions, it seemed, and therefore Coleridge had "properly" denied them the title of philosopher. There was a sorely felt need for a new name for the specialist, technical, and professional pursuer of natural knowledge. The new word was intended from the start to mark out real cultural distinctions, in a society increasingly characterized by mechanized industry. And in that light, one distinctive attribute of the scientist was a propensity to make discoveries. Earlier figures (Newton, Boyle, Priestley, and others) had certainly discovered things, but in general early modern natural philosophers had been charged with explaining nature in its usual course; they had not been charged with pursuing novelty. Discovery was not a central and defining aspect of the natural philosopher's role. For the scientist's, it was. This was a major reason why the issues of patenting and the scientific practitioner arose together and were to remain inseparable.

The invention of the scientist took place in a generation when major changes were occurring in other realms of professional and vocational knowledge, most notably engineering and medicine. In each case, one can identify a pivotal role played by activities decried- or praised -at the time as piratical in forging a new identity and authority for the practitioner. Medicine is the best-known instance, in which the British Medical Association acted as a radical union in support of the new "general practitioners" against the licentiates of the old Royal College of Physicians. Thomas Wakley's agitation was as much a contribution to this fight as his launch of The Lancet. Run with the help of Cobbett (long after Mathew Carey denounced him as a corsair), The Lancet built its reputation on the serial piracy of medical lectures, and frequently had to defend itself in court for its actions. When it did, it gleefully printed the court cases too. It combined this with a consistently acid tone in opposition to conservative forces in medicine and society at large. The Lancet became the house journal of the radical general practioners-until it was usurped in the early 183os by the London Medical and SurgicalJournal, which undercut its price and usurped its sources. These organs (there were more, not now remembered), and the camps they appealed to, fought bitterly with accusations of piracy and counterpiracy. The struggles over professional identity in medicine in this era were as affected by such accusations as those over identity in science. And both were much less clearly distinct from the realm of radical and materialist pirate printers like Richard