This collection of case studies, focusing on British scientific culture during the first industrial revolution, explores the social basis of science in the period and asks why such an extraordinarily rich variety of cultural-scientific experience should have flourished at the time.

The book analyses science and scientific culture in their local contexts, both metropolitan and provincial, examining where possibel the relations between the two, and emphasizing the range of scientific associations in London, to individual savants in the provinces.

This book was first published in 1983.

Chapter 1 Introduction: Aspects of the history of science and science culture in Britain, 1780-1850 and beyond, Ian Inkster; Chapter 2 Whigs and savants: reflections on the reform movement in the Royal Society, 1830-48, Roy M. MacLeod; Chapter 3 The London lecturing empire, 1800-50, J. N. Hays; Chapter 4 The British Mineralogical Society: a case study in science and social improvement, Paul Weindling; Chapter 5 'Nibbling at the teats of science': Edinburgh and the diffusion of science in the 1830s, Steven Shapin; Chapter 6 Science in a commercial city: Bristol 1820-60, Michael Neve; Chapter 7 Rational dissent and provincial science: William Turner and the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, Derek Orange; Chapter 8 Economic and ornamental geology: the Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1837-53, Jack Morrell; Chapter 9 Medical elites, the general practitioner and patient power in Britain during the cholera epidemic of 1831-2, Michael Durey;