Medical Science in the Light of a Flawed Study of the Holocaust

In her PhD thesis Reading Fleck: Questions on Philosophy and Science (Hedfors, 2006) and her papers based on it, Eva Hedfors proposes a sci entifically informed reading of Ludwik Fleck that aims to contest the (puta tive) mythology of Fleck. According to Hedfors, Fleck is believed to have been an important scientist. However, a careful reading of his scientific papers, she claims, reveals that Fleck's studies were poorly done, often meaningless and of doubtful ethical value. Hedfors also hints that one of Fleck's aims in promoting his views on science as a social endeavour was to legitimate his own scientifically weak and ethically suspicious research. Hedfors has also a very low opinion of Fleck's epistemological thought. In the preface to her thesis she explains that when she first read Fleck, she viewed him as a 'Sokal before Sokal on a rather local level', and found a widespread interest in his writings, 'one of those inscrutable facts we often face'.1 This is surely a legitimate point of view. Hedfors' efforts to deflate the Fleck myth can be seen, however, as a somewhat misguided endeavour. Researchers interested in Fleck's life and science provided many years ago a realistic assessment of his scientific achievements. They stressed that in the 1920s and 1930s, when he wrote his important epistemological studies, that Fleck worked in a peripheral 'service' discipline (serology), in a periph eral country (Poland) and a non-academic setting (he headed a routine analysis laboratory). Historians of science and medicine also are aware of the fact that Fleck's scientific papers were as good or as bad as other average studies in his scientific domain.

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