The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [150]
William Murdoch’s ‘sun and planet’gearing system.
William Farr’s use of statistics in 1852 to show how the incidence of cholera deaths diminished as the height of habitation above the Thames increased.
This self-balancing structure was radically changed by the introduction of steam power. Society became predominantly urban. Relationships were defined in terms of cash. The emergence of industrial capitalism brought the first forms of class struggle as the new means of production generated material wealth and concentrated it in the hands of the entrepreneurial few. Consumerism was born of mass-production, as were the major ideological and political divisions of the modern world.
Before the early years of the nineteenth century the nature of disease was unknown, except as a list of symptoms each of which was the manifestation of the single ‘disease’that attacked each body separately and produced individual effects. In this situation the doctor treated the patient as the patient dictated. Each practitioner used idiosyncratic remedies, all of which were claimed to be the panacea for all forms of the disease.
The rise of surgeons to positions of responsibility during the wars of the French Revolution and the use of recently developed probability theory combined to produce a new concept of disease as a localised phenomenon. Statistical surveys established the nature and course of the disease and the efficacy of treatment. In the new medical practice the bedside manner gave way to hospital techniques and a consequent loss of involvement on the part of the patient in the diagnosis and treatment of his ailment.
As medical technology advanced it became unnecessary to consult the patient at all. Information on the nature of his illness was collected at first without his active participation, and later without his knowledge or understanding. Along with these changes came the great medical discoveries of the nineteenth century and dramatic improvements in personal and public health. By the end of the century the doctor had assumed his modern role of unquestioned and objective arbiter. Patients had become numbers.
The biblical version of history reigned until the middle of the nineteenth century. The six days of Creation and the garden of Eden were regarded as matters of historical fact. The age of the earth was established by biblical chronology at approximately six thousand years. The Bible was also the definitive text of geological history. The flood was an event which accounted for the discovery of extinct organisms. The purpose of natural history was only to elaborate God’s Grand Design. Taxonomy, the listing and naming of all parts of nature, was the principal aim of this endeavour. The patterns which these lists revealed would form God’s original plan, unchanged since Creation.
The discovery of more fossils as well as geological evidence of a hitherto unsuspected span of history led to the theory of evolution. The cosmic view became a materialist one. Man, it seemed, was made of the same stuff as the rest of nature. It was accident of circumstance, rather than purposeful design, which ensured survival. The universe was in constant change. Progress and optimism became the new watchwords. Man, like the rest of nature, could be improved because society obeyed biological evolutionary laws. The new discipline of sociology would study and apply these laws.
From the Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century the cosmological view had changed only once, as the Aristotelian system gave way to Newton’s clockwork universe. All objects were now seen to obey the law of gravity. Time and space were universal