In the late eighteenth century, elite European scientists claimed the authority to sort good air from bad, an authority at once epistemic, aesthetic, and moral. This presentation focuses on a challenge to that authority from a figure on the margins of eighteenth-century science, Marie-Genevieve-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville. I argue that d’Arconville’s experimental investigations constituted a radical program of anti-heroic science and an inversion of Enlightenment views of atmospheric threat.

Deborah R. Coen is a historian of science whose research focuses on the modern physical and environmental sciences and on central European intellectual and cultural history. She earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard, an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. Before coming to Yale, she taught for ten years in the History Department at Barnard College and was Director of Research Clusters for the Columbia Center for Science and Society.