A month or two ago, the Dutch government announced that the Museum Boerhaave would have to raise a certain amount of money to fund itself, or it’d be closed. In case you haven’t heard of it, the Museum Boerhaave is one of the world’s most important museums dedicated to the history of science. It serves the general public and scholarly researchers alike, and it has excellent conservation and curatorial staff of its own. It’s in Leiden, in South Holland, and there really isn’t anywhere like it.
A group of history of science scholars who happened to be in the Hague when the announcement was made were rightly astounded. Who could imagine closing the Boerhaave? They wrote to the Dutch Minister of Culture to express their disagreement. Their letter pointed out that such a closure would be a severe loss to western culture. The choice of phrasing raised a few eyebrows — what is this ‘western culture’, and why would the Boerhaave’s closure not be a loss to non-westerners as well?
Imagine if tomatoes, chocolate, sweet oranges, cinnamon or allspice disappeared. Would that be a loss only to non-western cultures? Of course not. How about if telephones disappeared — a loss only to America, the land of Bell? How about the disappearance of coffee — a loss only to Ethiopia and the Middle East?
We all lose if the Boerhaave closes, because even though the museum concentrates on science and technology produced by the Dutch, the science and technology still belongs to all of us. It’s not as if wave optics would have turned out differently from being written in Gaelic rather than Dutch; in fact Huygens’s Traité de la lumière was written in French! Nor does one have to be Dutch, French, or ‘western’, to appreciate or otherwise benefit from it. The book, like all major science books, was quickly disseminated across all manner of borders.
Anyone visiting the Boerhaave, or any good history of science museum, can learn about what science is, how it functions (how it really functions, not the caricatured ‘scientific method’), and why. You don’t need to be western to learn that, nor to appreciate it. Just as you don’t need to be an Aztec to appreciate chocolate, Vietnamese to eat cinnamon, or Polynesian to enjoy sweet potatoes.
With the Boerhaave gone, there’d be nothing to substitute. While there are large history of science collections at Oxford, Paris, London, Florence, Harvard, the Smithsonian; they’re all unique and don’t replicate each other’s coverage. Were any one of these institutions lost, we wouldn’t just ‘make do.’ We’d lose the direct evidence of our intellectual heritage, much as when Iraq’s National Museum was looted, or when heritage architecture was targetted during the Third Balkan War. Why destroy such things? Because it destroys the identity of a people, and the connection of those people to the rest of us. That’s what’s really lost when we neglect science and its history: a key part of what it means to be human.
