Thesis ID: CBB001561282

The Science of Small Things: The Botanical Context of German Bacteriology, 1830--1910 (2007)

unapi

Matta, Christina (Author)


University of Wisconsin at Madison
Nyhart, Lynn K.


Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Advisor: Nyhart, Lynn K.
Physical Details: 257 pp.
Language: English

This dissertation argues that reforms in German academic botany in the late 1830s and early 1840s engendered new scientific methods that became the basis for a bacteriology whose roots were grounded in plant physiology and cryptogamic studies rather than in medical studies of pathogenicity. Matthias Schleiden initially proposed studying cryptogams--unicellular organisms such as algae, lichens, and fungi--in 1842. Because cryptogams lacked differentiated systems, they could model physiological processes in individual plant cells. This reliance on cryptogams as models led to the emergence of a distinct subspecialty of botany that focused on their biological properties. Botanists' newfound interest in unicellular and microscopic organisms led them to study bacteria in the 1850s and 1860s. The connection between botany and bacteriology is especially evident in the research of Anton de Bary and Ferdinand Cohn. De Bary's experiments on plant pathogenic fungi demonstrate his commitment to disproving spontaneous generation--an objective he included in his bacteriologal research as well, and which also figured prominently in Cohn's research on bacteria and heat- resistant spores. Cohn's early research on cryptogamic development led him to argue against plasticity of bacterial form--a claim he supported through his physiological research and upon which he based his taxonomic system. Both Cohn and de Bary were influential in the proliferation of botanical bacteriology through their respective institutes; the biological questions their students addressed echoed the physiological problems Schleiden had outlined 40 years earlier. By the end of the century, however, botany and bacteriology had diverged into distinct areas of study. Contextualizing bacteriology within botany brings to light research heretofore ignored by histories of medical bacteriology. More important, this study challenges the underlying assumptions that have defined how historians of science and medicine depict bacteriology's development into a scientific discipline. This dissertation decenters pathogenicity as a guiding principle in the history of bacteriological research by emphasizing bacteriology's beginnings in plant physiology, thus acknowledging bacteriology's debt to physiology, botany, and agriculture.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/08 (2008). Pub. no. AAT 3278930.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001561282/

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Authors & Contributors
Werner, Petra
Jahn, Ilse
Huentelmann, Axel C.
Gradmann, Christoph
Schütz, Mathias
Aeka Ishihara
Concepts
Bacteriology
Botany
Public health
Cholera
Medicine and government
Disease and diseases
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
18th century
Places
Germany
Anatolia (Turkey)
Weimar Republic (1919-1933)
Japan
France
Ottoman Empire
Institutions
Institut für Infektionskrankheiten, Berlin
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Institut Pasteur, Paris
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