Visions of an Instrument

If you have ever looked through a microscope, you probably know the excitement of encountering shapes and textures but also the disappointment and vague anxiety when finding out that many of your observations concern, in fact, air bubbles, water drops, impurities, dirt, tricks of light, and perhaps scratches of the glass slide or the lens. Jutta Schickore 's book is a historical account of how microscope users and builders from Britain and Germany have dealt with such disappointments and anxieties (as well as others surrounding their research and craft) at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Between Galileo's perfecting of the compound microscope around 1624 and Joseph Lister's assembly of a highly performing version in 1830, the eighteenth century especially in its second half seemed to have been a rather stagnant period in the evolution of microscopy, as Schickore points out in the introduction. She argues that even if the instrument as a technology didn't improve significantly during this time, the second-order discourses and practices surrounding microscopy developed and diversified, reaching a maturity that in turn fostered and largely made possible the 1830 landmark leap into official modernity. Furthermore, the ways in which these second-order discourses developed and were negotiated