The microscope’s technical capabilities and uses expanded dramatically in the early nineteenth century, when it emerged as an important tool for medical education and played a key role in the development of the cell theory, among other advancements. Focusing on the decades surrounding this crucial period, Jutta Schickore weaves a fascinating story of microscopy by tracing the entwined history of the eye and the optical instrument.

Concentrating on Great Britain and the German lands—home to the period’s most significant developments in microscopy—The Microscope and the Eye examines debates about such subjects as the legitimacy of human trespassing on the microcosm and the nature of light. Schickore also explores the microscope’s role in investigations of the finer structure of the eye and the workings of nerve fibers and the microscopists’ reflections on vision, illusion, artifacts, and the merits of instruments. Fully considering the epistemological, metaphysical, and methodological implications of this centuries-old relationship, The Microscope and the Eye will be an important contribution to the history of the life sciences, vision studies, and scientific methodology.

Jutta Schickore is assistant professor of the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University.

“The Microscope and the Eye will be of great interest to a broad range of historians of science, as well as scholars of visuality and visual culture. Shrewdly applying the most innovative methods in the field to a diverse body of source materials (some of them previously unexplored), this book deepens our knowledge and, more important, clarifies a number of confusions and conundrums that have long surrounded the history of microscopy, instruments, and questions of vision and physiological optics.”

“In The Microscope and the Eye, Jutta Schickore brings a historian’s sensibility to the examination of fundamental philosophical issues surrounding sight and its instrumental extension before 1850. Developing her own instrument, the analysis of ‘second-order’ questions about the value and uses of the microscope, Schickore combines a broad field of view with an exquisitely sensitive resolving power. The resulting finely textured account shows what it meant to ‘know’ with the microscope before 1850 and explains just how this instrument—and the methodological discourses around it—became central to nineteenth-century science.”

"A wonderfully detailed account of the tandem development of the seers (microscopes and their users) and the seen (functional organization of the eye) from the late-18th through the mid-19th centuries. More than a book about scientific advancement, this is a philosophical analysis of passionate human endeavor. . . . Highly recommended."

"While this book is written primarily for historians and philosophers of science, there is much here to interest historians of technology."

In this elegant, fine-grained study, Jutta Schickore makes a significant contribution to the history and philosophy of science and raises some historiographical issues that are likely to be of interest to more general historians."