The Medieval Origin of the Ph.D. Dissertation

Radical change can seem small when seen up close. I was deep in the weeds, reading again about Mr. George Starkey, a doctor and alchemist living in London in the 1650s. Starkey's life has been a subject of some study by historians of science precisely because a lot of his work survives. We have his numerous published works, those of his contemporaries, and his especially valuable private work diaries. It was in the passages of one of these diaries that Dr. Lawrence Principe and Dr. William Newman puzzled through precisely how Starkey and his collaborators (Newton, Boyle, and Van Helmont) formulated and practiced what would become the modern scientific method. Starkey, for example, records his experiments in a traditional Scholastic style. In those days schools taught using a method derived originally from Roman jurisprudence later adopted for use in theology: the disputation. There were multiple kinds of disputation, but in each two people debated the merits of a question or quaestio.…