Entrepreneurs are often driven by vision and they embody that vision for those who choose to join and follow them. I spend some time in my book obser… - Steven Shapin

Between 's birth in 1632 and his death, drunk and drowned, in 1676, he was, at different stages of his convoluted career, classicist and underlibrarian at the , physician to the fashionable in England and Jamaica, publicist of chocolate as a stimulant to "moderate venery," gossip tittle-tattling on the nude tub-frolics of the king's mistress, defender and explainer of 's stroking cures of , and historian of early Christianity and Islam. A prolific pamphleteer, Stubbe's writings on religion and politics were among the most pungently provocative of mid-seventeenth-century England. Historians of science encounter Stubbe mainly as the perpetrator of prose muggings of the in the early 1670s.

In 1680, Robert Boyle published the Second Part of his Continuation of New Experiments Physico-mechanical, Touching the Spring and Weight of the Air. ...According to Boyle's preface, the experimental work... was mainly done by a remunerated technician... Denis Papin. The air-pump with which the experiments were performed was... of Papin's own design... At least some, and perhaps the greatest part, of the design of the experimental project was also owing to the technician. ...It seems also that the technician was partly, if not mainly, responsible for the composition of the experimental narratives.

There is a crisis of for work in our field, as in many other academic disciplines. One of its causes is a pathological form of the professionalism that we so greatly value. “Hyperprofessionalism” is a disease whose symptoms include self‐referentiality, self‐absorption, and a narrowing of intellectual focus. This essay describes some features and consequences of hyperprofessionalism in the history of science and offers a modest suggestion for a possible cure.