Includes bibliographical references (p. 393-540) and index.

Lowering the tone in the history of science : a noble calling -- Cordelia's love : credibility and the social studies of science -- How to be antiscientific -- Science and prejudice in historical perspective -- The house of experiment in seventeenth-century England -- Pump and circumstance : Robert Boyle's literary technology -- "The mind is its own place" : science and solitude in seventeenth-century England -- "A scholar and a gentleman" : the problematic identity of the scientific practioner in seventeenth-century England -- Who was Robert Hooke? -- Who is the industrial scientist? : commentary from academic sociology and from the shop floor in the United States, ca. 1900-ca. 1970 -- The philosopher and the chicken : on the dietetics of disembodied knowledge -- How to eat like a gentleman : dietetics and ethics in in early modern England -- Trusting George Cheyne : scientific expertise, common sense, and moral authority in early eighteenth-century dietetic medicine -- Proverbial economies : how an understanding of some linguistic and social features of common sense can throw light on more prestigious bodies of knowledge, science for example -- Descartes the doctor : rationalism and its therapies-- Science and the modern world.