The electro-therapeutics chapter starts on page 658
This might seem crazy to hear now, but when Maxwell first published A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field in 1865, no one cared, it received very little attention at the time.
It was decades later in 1888 with the work of Hertz that Maxwell's equations started to gain significance within the scientific community.
I think you will also find that the publications of the 1800-1900s are quite well preserved.
You posted this less than 15 minutes after my comment, friend.
The fact that you can recall those reinforces the point that the value is determined by how long it is useful and remembered, not the fact that it was published.
There are of course incredible scientists that went down disappointing paths (eg Shockley, Dyson, Pauling) in terms of their research output later on, though one must remember that typically this occurs outside their original field of expertise.
If you read my comment you will see that I am asking for the references to the claims the previous author made. I simply provided my own references which werew written at the time and are representative of the times that do not corroborate the tall tale of the previous author. If you have any references to support their claim I would be interested in perusing them.
Picking the winners as examples is not good sampling.
Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted. I think that this assertion should be backed by considerable evidence, and that burden is of course mostly on you
I don't dispute that there were doctors applying electricity and/or magnetism to the body in an "un"-rigorous manner, but is there documentation that suggests that the scientists at the time had come to the conclusion that it worked?
Also notably, Whittaker's work was a 'loser'. I chose it specifically for this purpose. I had read parts of it previously because it was a 'loser' as he chose to dispute Einstein's contributions to special relativity.
I will say that
> Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted.
Is not correct as far as I believe. Instead, we're saying that there's no reason to believe any study until it has stood the test of time. The longer it remains impactful the better.
I am building from this statement:
> The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a good amount of time reading their methodology yourself.
Saying that textbooks from Maxwell's era had misunderstandings and bad information is not saying they are inept, it's saying that that is how it works, it always has and always will be that way. That's it, really. The fact that good science came from it is to be expected, and the fact that bad science existed is also not to be suprising.
I think you interpreted the statement about the 1900s textbooks being wrong as a slander against the entire era, which is not how I read it, and certainly not what I meant to imply by any of my comments.
Upon rereading I agree, I apologize to you and OP for my misunderstanding. However, ultimately in general I still have to disagree at least semantically with "standing the test of time". I am not really familiar with the processes in biological or social sciences, but from a physical science background, any result of interest will need to be built upon quite quickly. Either some kind of design will be reproduced to improve it or use it, or in the case of a theoretical result it will be awaiting some kind of experiment to validate it.
>> The scientific method works over a long period of time, but to blindly trust a peer review study that just came out, any study, is almost as much faith as religion, specially if you're not a high level researcher in the same field and have spent a good amount of time reading their methodology yourself.
I don't necessarily disagree with this statement (besides the 'long period of time'). Though I would also say that simply mistrusting the result has the same issue, so the only correct way forward seems to me to be to act as if it does not exist until you gain the expertise.
>Saying that textbooks from Maxwell's era had misunderstandings and bad information is not saying they are inept, it's saying that that is how it works, it always has and always will be that way. That's it, really. The fact that good science came from it is to be expected, and the fact that bad science existed is also not to be suprising.
I'm not familiar with textbooks of that era as through personal curiosity I've only read a few. I would still like to see an example of such an occurrence to understand the context under which these treatments are discussed. If these fallacious techniques were widespread enough to be popular in textbooks there must be some kind of literature supporting them?
>I think you interpreted the statement about the 1900s textbooks being wrong as a slander against the entire era, which is not how I read it, and certainly not what I meant to imply by any of my comments.
I will admit to being a bit hotheaded in the initial response, which I apologize for.
>Again, you and the original poster seem to have this understanding that scientists and engineers from the mid 1800s to early 1900s are not to be trusted.
No, once again that's not what was said. The concept being communicated is that the scientific method works over long periods of time, not short ones. Over long periods of time, such as 200 years, the work that survives peer review and remains significant today are things like Maxwell's work on electromagnetism as opposed to Dr. Franz Mesmer's work on animal magnetism.
You are taking little bits and pieces of what people are saying, misconstruing them and reinterpreting them, and then forming an argument that is not a genuine representation of the original comment.
I will admit to some mistakes in comprehension and a poor literal quoting, though I will also maintain that I captured the majority of the essence of what was written in the quote. In the case of "any book about electricity..." vs "any engineering book" the only books that would be relevant to the discussion should be engineering OR science books relating to electricity.
>No, once again that's not what was said. The concept being communicated is that the scientific method works over long periods of time, not short ones. Over long periods of time, such as 200 years, the work that survives peer review and remains significant today are things like Maxwell's work on electromagnetism as opposed to Dr. Franz Mesmer's work on animal magnetism.
With respect to "time" I will refer to another comment I made below in response to the previous OP.
I think it's interesting that you use Mesmer as an example because his work failed to gain the acceptance of the scientific societies of the time, and was in the late 1700s, significantly earlier than the proposed mid 1800s to early 1900s
> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.
Anyone on this site who doesn't know what this is from should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype around machine intelligence, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if you aren't already familiar with this paper.
Unfortunately he is out of his area of expertise in physics and human biology/neuroscience (? not sure where telepathy would be if it was to be rigorously studied). This is akin to Freeman Dyson on global warming.
That scientists can have strange ideas is something nobody can dispute. That those strange ideas enter into scientific legitimacy is another story entirely.
Science even at it's most sincere should always be approached with thoughtful skepticism. The phrase that I hear touted often these days "trust the science", is in essence not how science should be thought of.
1. outside their areas of expertise
2. not validated by independent scientific research
I completely agree that science should be approached with thoughtful skepticism, and I agree that 'trust the science' might not necessarily be the best semantics to use. However, it is not clear that skepticism by all parties should be considered with equal weight. Most of the times, people should "trust the science" because they are not equipped to be skeptical.