Historical enquiry

A history of ether and etherification is a welcome, and now rare, focus on an individual compound.72 It covers work by Berzelius, Gerhardt, Hennell, Kolbe, Liebig, and of course Williamson. Acetoacetic ester has received detailed historical notice in a biography,73 as have salicylic acid and the salicylates.74 Apart from natural products, few heterocyclic substances have been recently the subject of historical enquiry. An impressive exception is that of pyrrole, a simple molecule explored by Dippel, Reichenbach, Runge and others, and manufactured by Du Pont.75 There is also an account of the structural problems posed by piperidine.76 Accounts have been given of the discovery of aniline from crystallin (a product of the thermal decomposition of indigo),77 of the history of phenol over the last two centuries,78 and of organic nitrates and their uses in medicine.79... 

Mann, R.D., Modern Drug Use An Enquiry on Historical Principles, MTP Press, Lancaster, England, 1984, pp. 1-769. 

Mann RD. Modern drug use, an enquiry on historical principles. Lancaster MTP Press (Kluwer) 1984. p. 561. 

A related theme of inquiry is the attempt to infer the evolution of a biological system, especially in the context of proteins. For proteins, the ancestral states and historical pathways can be established on the basis of functionalities, typically dependent on amino acids at key sites and the adaptive shifts from precursor arrangements (see, for example, Malcolm et al., 1990 Benner, 2002 Zhang and Rosenberg, 2002 Gaucher et al., 2003). Such an approach is important not only because of its implications for the so-called neutral theory of protein evolution, but also because it opens the possibility of linking these changes to environmental circumstances. Such a line of enquiry also offers the chance to consider whether the evolved system is in any way optimized. 

In Chapter 2, the development and use of interactive historical vignettes (IHVs) is presented as being conducted by an individual teacher who wants to provide an avenue into the history of chemistry for use in particular lessons. Enquiries into students reception of the IHVs, conducted by the teacher, enable each example of the use of the approach to be both further developed and for the general applicability of the approach to be evaluated. 

AUsopp was writing about architecture. It is not only because structural engineering and architecture are professionally so closely tied that the words apply equally well to both. The word history is from the Greek, meaning an investigation or enquiry to fiiid uOhe. truth. Its method is a rational examination of the past and it uses the past to illustrate the present and influence the future. To think historically is to see oneself as part of the human progression... 

In this introduction, we will elaborate this point. In Section 1 we will give a brief overview of the characterisation of scientific practices. In Section 2, we will outline the structure of scientific practice in Germany, which determined the conditions under which the theory of the chemical bond was developed. This section contains a lot of historical material which, I think, illustrates the context of some debates on the relative role of chemistry and physics in quantum chemistry. We then go on to discuss the field of enquiry of chemistry before and after the birth of the old and the new quantum mechanics. 

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