The Rise of the Specialist

Abstract

It is almost certain that Michael Faraday was not afflicted by a lisp. The many glowing reports of his lectures at the Royal Institution would surely have referred to it. Yet he objected to a word ‘both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never be able to use it’. The excessively sibilant word complained of, with the ‘equivalent of three separate sounds of S’, was ‘physicist’.¹ His correspondent William Whewell, soon to become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, had a flair for inventing new scientific words, such as anode, cathode, anion, cation, etc. He had recently suggested ‘physicist’ as the equivalent of the French physicien, meaning someone who ‘proceeds upon the ideas of force, matter and the properties of matter’.² It was now coming into vogue as the expression of their sense of social identity by a body of scientific practitioners who wished to make it clear that their concerns were not to be confused with those of chemistry, astronomy or any of the other recognised scientific disciplines. Instead of the older ‘natural philosophy’, their preoccupation was to be narrower and more specialised. The chemists, with their ancient tradition of assaying, alchemy and medicine, had acquired their distinctive name even before the publication of Robert Boyle’s Sceptical Chymist (1662).