Rewriting the System of Nature: Linnaeus's Use of Writing Technologies. (360G-Wellcome-087231_Z_08_Z)

Although the cultural turn in the history of science and medicine has considerably raised awareness for the contextual importance of material artefacts and practices, medical and scientific knowledge itself is still largely seen as something which is exemplified by cognitive entities: the concepts, theories, and methodologies that scientists hold and use. This project would start from a different perspective by assuming that any form of socially organized knowledge is essentially written knowled ge, and proceeds through the development, deployment and dissemination of writing technologies. While the project focuses on the corpus of manuscripts and publications of a single scientist, Carl Linnaeus (1707 1778), I conceive it as a pilot project that will serve to develop both a terminology and a methodology that is attentive to the materiality of writing, and will have ramifications for how the history of science and medicine is done in general. In particular, it will bring historiography closer again to the defining mark of modern science and medicine: their reliance on forms of inductive reasoning operating on a social and global scale, and the concurrent emergence of ontological concepts of collective entities like species, disease categories, and human types .