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History of Medicine Guide
HSS Awards the 2009 Pfizer Prize
The History of Science Society recently presented its Pfizer Prize, for the best scholarly book in the history of science, to Harold J. Cook, for Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (Yale University Press, 2007). This magnificent book makes a powerful argument for the interrelationships of commerce and science in the early modern period. Cook maintains that the energetic exploration and meticulous description of natural objects were hallmarks of Dutch science in the late 16th and 17th centuries, reflecting a commercial culture that valued travel, curiosity, honesty, clarity of expression, and a detailed knowledge of things.
While reaffirming the sociologist Robert Mertonâ??s association of science and the commercial life of the 17th century, Cook challenges the other, more famous, theme that emerged from Mertonâ??s work, the linkage between science and Puritanism. While conscious of the classical and humanist influences on early modern science, Cook plainly sees more immediate and worldly concerns as giving the enterprise momentum, a hands-on style, standards of expression, and criteria for success. He shows that the new science of natural history was fundamentally global, a lesson with far reaching consequences for the historical understanding of science.
Harold Cook is the Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine in London and professor at University College London. The History of Science Society, est. in 1924, is an international society devoted to fostering interest in the history of science.
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