Given this dominant status of the hormonally constructed concept of the body, I took up the challenge of uncovering the roots of the hormone story to see whether the image of “the hormonal woman” is only a current notion, or whether it had emerged already during the early years of sex endocrinology, as this area of biomedical sciences came to be known. Beyond the Natural Body takes up the course of history where Thomas Laqueur left it in Making Sex: the roaring 1920s and 1930s. In these decades, sex endocrinologists established the basic concepts and techniques that have served as cornerstones in structuring our knowledge of hormones to this day. I decided to study the research practice of Thomas Laqueur’s great-uncle, Ernst Laqueur, who isolated the “female” hormone from the urine of stallions, thereby “raising the uncomfortable possibility of endocrinological androgyny at the very moment when science seemed to have finally discovered the chemical basis of sexual difference” (T. Laqueur 1990:249). In “Biology, Sexism, and Sex Hormones in the 1920s,” Diana Long Hall (1975) first described scientists’ worries about the discovery of something “male” in female organisms, which definitely led me to consider the subject of hormones. What could be more exciting for a feminist biologist than to study a biomedical discourse in which the facts undermine the notion of two stable, opposite sexes, where the “toys” opposed the “boys”?
Beyond the Natural Body is an archeology tracing the very birth of the concept of sex hormone and following its development to mass-production as a drug and its eventual transformation into the contraceptive pill. It focuses particularly on how the facts about hormones came into existence. But how can we deal with scientific facts if we have left the idea behind us that science reveals the truth about nature? A powerful way to go beyond this traditional image of science is to set ourselves the task of exposing the concrete, often very mundane, human activities that go into discoursebuilding in order to explore the processes through which scientific claims achieve the status of universal, natural facts. Such stories may reveal that scientific facts do not suddenly leap into existence as the result of observations by clever scientists, who simply read the reality of nature. The myth of scientific heroes discovering the secrets of nature needs to be replaced by another image of science, an image which enables us to study how scientific facts are deeply embedded in society and culture. Not just in the sense that scientific facts shape society, but even the more radical idea that a scientific fact exists only by virtue of its social embeddedness. In this epistemological view, knowledge claims acquire the status of universal facts by virtue of the extent to which they become interwoven with the institutional settings and practices of scientists and their audiences. Knowledge claims become established as scientific facts only if they become linked to relevant groups. This means that the construction of scientific facts is not restricted to the laboratory. To make science work, scientists have to leave their laboratories and create alliances with other groups. Social studies of science have put forward the notion of networks as a way of conceptualizing how scientific facts and artefacts take their definitive form in an interactive process among and between groups of laboratory scientists and groups outside the laboratory.13
This portrait of science provided me with a model to understand how knowledge claims about hormones and the female body have developed into universal facts and why this has not happened with claims concerning the male body. Are these differences in knowledge production about the female and the male body in one way or the other related to differences in networks in which scientific facts emerge? I therefore decided to focus on the structural relationships and interactions between three groups that were actively involved in the shaping and establishment of sex hormones as scientific facts and artefacts: laboratory scientists, clinicians and pharmaceutical
entrepreneurs.14 I shall attempt to describe how these groups became linked to one another in networks through which sex hormones were transformed into the products we know today.
Exposing the social dynamics of the production of knowledge is only one step in showing how the naturalistic reality of the hormonal body is created by scientists, rather than determined by nature. Another important step is to explore what exactly goes into the formation of new scientific body concepts. What are the ingredients scientists use in discourse-building if they are not simply mirroring nature? Where do the words, the concepts and the theories come from? Feminist studies have pointed out that cultural stereotypes about women and men play an important role in shaping scientific theories. The major question that emerges then is: to what extent do scientists use cultural notions as resources in their research practice?
In trying to answer these questions I was very much inspired by the work of Ludwik Fleck. Fleck introduced the concept of prescientific ideas to emphasize the culturally conditioned character of scientific knowledge. He suggests that scientists use cultural notions as cognitive resources. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact claims that the development of scientific facts is undeniably linked to prescientific ideas that exist in culture, sometimes even centuries before these ideas become embodied in scientific concepts (Fleck 1979:23-27). Fleck developed this concept of prescientific ideas in an eloquent history of syphilis and the introduction of the Wasserman test, and described how syphilis constitutes the modern, scientific expression of the earlier prescientific notion that syphilis involves impure blood. This idea existed centuries before it became embodied in scientific concepts. For Fleck, this idea of syphilitic blood advanced the concept of syphilis to its current form, and explains how it became embodied in the Wasserman reaction, a specific clinical test for the diagnosis of syphilis on the basis of blood samples. Prescientific ideas thus function as guidelines for the development of scientific facts.
The concept of prescientific ideas provided me with a tool for questioning whether the development of the concept of sex hormones was related to any previously existing beliefs about the world, particularly about women and men. Nevertheless, I think that there is more to say than that science reproduces cultural norms. My point is that the image of science as a passive readout of cultural ideas is a rather static image that tends to obscure the role of science as a creative power in producing new meanings and practices for the body. Again, Fleck’s study is extremely useful, because it indicates that the structuring role of prescientific ideas does not necessarily imply that these ideas will remain unchanged once they become incorporated in scientific concepts. Fleck described how the idea of impure blood became modified and transformed through the years.15 The use of the concept of prescientific ideas therefore enables me to analyze what happens to cultural beliefs once they become integrated into scientific theories and practices. To what extent are these prescientific ideas changed by scientific practices? If so, how do these changes occur? Moreover, what exactly constitutes the scientific practices through which prescientific ideas become transformed? Fleck’s study suggests that the disciplinary background of scientists may be considered as one of the factors that structure the modification of prescientific ideas. His case study of syphilis shows that changes in the specific form in which the prescientific idea of impure blood was framed coincided with the emergence of new cognitive approaches. The chemical and the bacteriological approach each had its own interpretation of the idea of impure blood. This suggests that scientists tend to adopt a specific style of doing science that is closely related to their disciplinary background.
The concept of style is elaborated by different scholars in the philosophy and sociology of the arts and the sciences. Nelson Goodman captured the concept of style with the metaphor of a signature. In Goodman’s terms, a style is “a complex characteristic that serves somewhat as an individual or group signature.” His concept of style, which he developed for the arts, consists of features that are characteristic of an author, period, place or school, which enable historians and critics of art to distinguish between different works, performances and objects of art (Goodman 1978:34).
But what exactly is the “signature” of a scientist? Sociologists of science have developed the concept of “cognitive style” to emphasize that the development of knowledge must be understood on a higher level of aggregation than on the level of statements, hypotheses and theories (De Vries and Boon 1986:28). Fleck, for example, speaks of “thought style” to describe how the ideas and practices of scientists may be dependent on habits of thought and practices in their scientific field.16 Richard Whitley, among others, speaks of disciplinary styles. According to Whitley, scientists belonging to the same discipline share a general approach to the analysis of similar problems. They have reached a certain degree of consensus about problem definitions, the acceptability of solutions, and appropriate techniques and instrumentation. Whitley ascribes this consensus to the professional training of scientists. Scientists belonging to the same discipline are socialized in similar educational settings. Whitley now suggests that the activities of individual scientists are to a large extent bound by the cognitive structure of their discipline. He claims that in scientific fields that are highly institutionalized, “we can predict with a fair degree of accuracy what a scientist will be doing, which models he [sic] will use and what sort of ‘ideal’ explanation he will accept” (Whitley 1974:72).
The concept of disciplinary styles enables me to explore how and to what extent scientific disciplines actively change prescientific ideas about sex and the body, once these ideas have become incorporated in scientific concepts. I shall trace both the continuities and the changes in meanings and practices concerning the male and the female body that emerged from the field of sex endocrinology.
In writing this archeology of sex hormones I am particularly interested in stirring up the stones and the mud in which the words are embedded, or to put it more precisely, the materiality of discourse-building.17 Most feminist studies of the biomedical sciences tend to portray science merely as a creation of the (male) mind. In recent studies such as Making Sex (T. Laqueur 1990), for example, sex and the body are portrayed as purely linguistic constructions. This approach does not take into account the ways in which bodies, human and animal, have to be manipulated to make them produce knowledge.18 The debate about sex, science and the body thus becomes located in the domain of ideas, assumptions, images, meanings and theories. The feminist project in science depicts science only in terms of texts and ideas, thus neglecting the material aspects of science;19 while precisely these material aspects are major characteristics of the biomedical sciences. Science is not just words. When we enter a biomedical laboratory, we see how scientists use microscopes, test tubes, X-ray apparatus, staining techniques, etc. Once we are aware of this, it seems implausible to reduce science primarily to theoretical interests. The development of scientific knowledge depends not only on ideas, ideologies or theories, but also on complex instruments, research materials, careful preparatory procedures and testing practices.20 Moreover, as biomedical discourses are the product of material conditions, they have fundamental material effects as well. The biomedical sciences have a material authority that is manifest in the form of diagnostic tools, screening tests, drugs and other regulatory devices. This is a social reality with which millions of people who experience sickness are confronted in their daily lives, a reality that should not be neglected in feminist studies of science. I therefore chose to focus particularly on the materiality of discourse-building, which leads us to the down-to-earth activities of scientists, such as collecting urine and ovaries, as well as the poetically unpromising testing practices at the laboratory bench and in the clinic.
The design of this book is as follows. Chapter 2 focuses on the role of cultural notions in the development of hypotheses and theories in early research on sex hormones. The following chapters focus more specifically on the material conditions for the study of sex hormones and the social networks in which the study of sex hormones took place. Chapter 3 analyzes the experimental practices of hormonal research, which contributed to changing the meanings and practices that became associated with the female and the male body. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 extend the analysis to groups outside the laboratory. Chapter 4 analyzes the role of research materials in structuring the relationships between the laboratory, the clinic and the pharmaceutical company, and describes how the study of female sex hormones—and not male sex hormones—gradually developed into big science and big business. Chapter 5 describes how sex hormones were made into specialized drugs, and analyzes how it happened that the female body became increasingly subjected to hormonal treatment. Chapters 4 and 5 focus more exclusively on the Dutch situation. Dutch laboratory scientists, as well as Dutch pharmaceutical entrepreneurs, were major actors in the emerging field of sex endocrinology. The Pharmaco-Therapeutic Laboratory at the University of Amsterdam, headed by the physician and pharmacologist Ernst Laqueur, was one of the leading research groups in the 1920s and 1930s. This research group was among the first to isolate pure crystalline estrogenic hormone, and the first to isolate the “male” sex hormone testosterone (Parkes 1966). Organon, the Dutch pharmaceutical company founded in 1923, was the major producer of estrogens throughout the world until the Second World War (Tausk 1978:35) and still is among the top three in the present world market for hormonal contraceptives (Anonymous 1992). Chapter 6 takes up the course of history of sex endocrinology in the late 1950s, when American scientists transformed sex hormones into the contraceptive pill. It describes the infrastructural arrangements in which women of color became the guinea-pigs of one of the most revolutionary drugs in the history of medicine.21 Chapter 7, finally, evaluates the major conclusions that can be drawn from this story of sex hormones for the continuing debate about science, sex and the body.