Science Comes to Manitoba‪.‬

During the nineteenth century, Science was transformed from a hobby for leisured gentlemen to an essential influence on the lives of most people in the western world. The discoveries of physicists were lighting the cities and providing new sources of power. The chemists were transforming the look of ordinary life with inexpensive dyes and pigments, and were starting to produce useful drugs. The biologists, along with a new type of medical researcher, were transforming medicine with the theory of the cell, the discipline of physiology, and the identification of bacteria as sources of infection. New, convincing theories were being developed, heavily dependent upon mathematics, which would explain the nature of energy and the structure of matter, and make predictions that could be tested in the scientific laboratory. These obvious signs of progress caught the imagination of the public, as well they might. The public, also, felt the ferment as the reasoning methods of science were applied to more controversial topics--the origin and evolution of life, the nature of mind, and the possibility of communicating with the spirits of the dead. As the reign of Queen Victoria moved along, there was a feeling in the air that humanity was no longer at the mercy of nature, but that, through the good works of science, nature would soon be tamed for the good and progress of humanity. The ability of science to produce terrible armaments--irresistible ordnance, poisonous gas, and unimaginable bombs--would not be revealed until the wars of the next century; after that, there would be a much more uneasy and skeptical relationship between science and the public. But so far, to most people, the workings of science seemed wholly benevolent.