John V. Pickstone
John V. Pickstone (died 2014) was a British historian of science, technology, and medicine at the University of Manchester, where he directed the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM) and the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine. He is best known for the “ways of knowing” framework developed in his 2001 book of the same name — a typology that allows historians and practitioners alike to identify which mode of knowledge is dominant in any scientific or medical project, and to see how multiple modes coexist and compete rather than simply succeeding each other.
Life and Context
Pickstone trained initially as a physiologist before turning to history of science — a biographical detail that shaped his attention to the material and practical dimensions of scientific work. He spent his career at the University of Manchester, first in Donald Cardwell’s department at UMIST and from 1986 at Manchester University proper.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) He was a product of and contributor to the internationalization of history of science, technology, and medicine that expanded dramatically in British and American universities from the 1960s onward.
Picktone’s book was designed for three overlapping audiences: historians of STM, scientists and doctors who need situated understanding of their own practices, and general citizens trying to relate expert knowledge to political life.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)
The Wellcome Trust supported the partial sabbatical during which he assembled the drafts of Ways of Knowing. He died in 2014, before seeing the framework’s adoption in science studies and history of medicine expand significantly.
The Ways of Knowing Framework
The framework was first published in article form in 1993, then elaborated through successive papers before appearing in full in the 2001 book. Its core move is to dissect “science, technology, and medicine” (STM) into constituent modes — natural history, analysis, experimentalism, technoscience, and world-readings — and to treat each mode as an ideal type in Weber’s sense: an analytic tool, not a box into which historical cases are simply sorted.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)
Pickstone’s starting point was Erwin Ackerknecht’s four types of medicine — book medicine, bedside medicine, hospital medicine, and laboratory medicine — which he extended from medicine to science and technology more broadly.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) His engagement with Foucault was productive but critical: Foucault’s epistemes, which fully displace each other at historical ruptures, gave way in Pickstone’s hands to a coexistence model in which ways of knowing run alongside each other with different histories and power relations.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) His engagement with Kuhn was similarly selective: not the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (with its emphasis on paradigm replacement) but Kuhn’s 1977 essay distinguishing “mathematical versus experimental traditions,” which Pickstone took as the root of his own distinction between natural history and analysis.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)
The insistence on “ways of knowing as ways of working” is equally characteristic.(Pickstone, John V., 2001) Pickstone argued that knowledge practices should be studied as modes of labor with characteristic locations, routines, and products, not merely as mental operations.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)
Intellectual Debts
Pickstone explicitly acknowledged six major debts: Foucault (archaeology of knowledge; rejected succession model), Kuhn (empirical/mathematical distinction; 1977 essay), Lewis Mumford (critical history of technology), R.G. Collingwood (history as understanding; discussion of magic, craft, and art), Owsei Temkin (tradition of German medical history), and Max Weber (ideal types as analytical method).(Pickstone, John V., 2001) To these he added the economic historian David Edgerton as a “stimulating critic throughout,” and acknowledged particular influence from historians at Manchester and continental Europe.
His Weberian methodology was central: ideal types are not meant to be accurate descriptions of any particular case, but tools for comparison, identification of elements, and analysis of power relations between modes. He used “ways of knowing” the way Weber used “bureaucracy” — as a model against which actual configurations can be measured and understood.
The collaborative editorial work Pickstone undertook with Roger Cooter extended this reflexive stance. Their edited volume Medicine in the Twentieth Century (2000) took as a foundational premise — openly stated and defended, if controversially — that although history is about the past, “its interpretations are driven by the conceptual frameworks and political agendas of the present.”(Jackson (ed.), 2011) This was not a confession of relativism but a commitment to transparency about the historian’s position — consistent with the “ways of knowing” framework’s insistence that knowledge practices are always socially located.
Relevance to Herbal and Alternative Medicine
Pickstone’s framework helps understand herbal medicine, eclectic medicine, and physiomedical traditions as practitioners of a natural-historical mode of knowing, working with the biography of the patient and the natural history of plants, resisting purely analytical reduction.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)
His account of popular natural history in industrial England, where artisans studied botany linked to herbalism in working-men’s societies meeting in public houses,(Pickstone, John V., 2001) places alternative healing within a much longer tradition of non-professional natural history that coexisted with (and frequently resisted) elite analytical medicine. His survey of nineteenth and twentieth century movements — Thomas Sydenham’s empiricism, social medicine, the new public health, environmentalism and alternative healing — treats them as recurrent assertions of a natural-historical mode that never disappears.(Pickstone, John V., 2001)
See Also
- ways-of-knowing
- natural-historical-analysis
- analytical-science
- coexistence-of-knowledge-modes
- erwin-ackerknecht
- paris-school-medicine
- biographical-medicine