The formidable amount of work contained within the pages of John Burnham’s How Superstition Won and Science Lost remains as daunting today as when it was first published in 1987—evidenced not least by the fact that it contains ninety-one pages of endnotes in eightpoint type. The text likewise bursts beyond the bounds of the standard-issue format of academic monographs in the history of science, then or now. In a conventional treatment, an author examines one scientific discipline (or, perhaps more accurately, one subdiscipline); restricts the temporal scope to no more than a generation or two (although less would not be unusual); focuses on a well-defined research cohort and those with whom its members are allied or at odds (with works centered on a single individual also common); and constrains the view to what happens inside the laboratory (or in the pages of specialist journals). Burnham obliterates these norms in How Superstition Won and Science Lost, a work that encompasses three separate areas of specialist expertise—the natural sciences, health sciences, and psychology; sweeps across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and also expounds at some length on the scientific revolution of the early modern era; incorporates a heavily populated roster of individuals too large to recall after a first reading; and aims at nothing less than producing the definitive analysis of a “struggle . . . [that] was an important determinant of American culture.” I first encounteredHow SuperstitionWon and Science Lostwhen I was about halfway through my doctoral training at UC SanDiego (where I would earn the first Ph.D. in history/science studies granted by the newlyminted interdisciplinary graduate program in 1993). On the one hand, to read it through was a reassuring experience: it was a book that took seriously the history of American science with the public in view, it entertained questions about the circulation of scientific knowledge across different domains, it directly addressed the nature of scientific authority, and it gave extensive consideration to popularization—areas in which I was intensely interested and for which little relevant literature existed. Burnham’s text sprawled across an unusually wide range of topics for a single volume: the professionalization of science, newspapers, the warfare thesis and American religion, elementary education, the nature study movement, editorial ventures such as Science Service, advertising, amateurs, skepticism, high school science, hygiene instruction, the environmental movement, museums, magazines, books, radio, television, andmore.

中文翻译：

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普及、道德化和美国科学的灵魂

约翰·伯纳姆 (John Burnham) 的《迷信如何取胜与科学失落》(How Superstition Won and Science Lost) 中包含的大量工作在今天仍然与 1987 年首次出版时一样令人生畏——这尤其体现在它包含 91 页八点字尾注的事实。文本同样突破了当时或现在科学史上学术专着的标准发行格式的界限。在传统处理中，作者检查一门科学学科（或者更准确地说，是一个子学科）；将时间范围限制为不超过一代或两代（尽管更少也很正常）；专注于定义明确的研究队列及其成员与之结盟或不和的人（以单个个人为中心的作品也很常见）；并限制对实验室内部（或专业期刊页面）发生的事情的看法。Burnham 在 How Superstition Won and Science Lost 中消除了这些规范，该著作涵盖了三个独立的专业领域——自然科学、健康科学和心理学；横扫 19 世纪和 20 世纪，并对近代早期的科学革命作了一定的阐述；包含一个人口众多的人名册，在第一次阅读后无法回忆起；并旨在对“斗争”进行明确的分析。. . [那] 是美国文化的一个重要决定因素。” 当我在加州大学圣地亚哥分校（在那里我将获得第一个博士学位）的博士培训大约进行到一半时，我第一次遇到了迷信和科学是如何迷失的。1993 年新成立的跨学科研究生项目授予的历史/科学研究博士学位）。一方面，通读它是一种令人安心的体验：它是一本以公众的视角认真对待美国科学史的书，它解决了有关科学知识在不同领域之间传播的问题，它直接解决了自然问题。科学权威，它广泛考虑了大众化——我非常感兴趣但相关文献很少的领域。伯纳姆的一本书涵盖了异常广泛的主题：科学的专业化、报纸、战争论文和美国宗教、基础教育、自然研究运动、科学服务等编​​辑事业、广告、业余爱好者、怀疑论、