Who shall decide when doctors disagree? Hoaxes and American men of science in the nineteenth century

Self-proclaimed men of science perpetrated an extraordinary series of hoaxes in the U.S. in the 1830s through the 1880s, a period of intense popularization and professionalization of American science. This dissertation identifies the emergence of a pattern testing science's authority: hoaxers' orchestration of tricks actively engaged debunkers and spectators in parodies of the scientific method, forcing professionalizing scientists to confront what I have termed a "democracy of knowledge" among laypeople. Hoaxes injected humor into the tension between two as yet inchoate visions: the democracy of knowledge---a protean discourse rooted in mid-nineteenth-century values celebrating the wisdom of the common man---and rule by expert-scientists' conception of a modern future. Fascinated by the promise of science and technology, the public venerated charlatans and dabblers at science's fringes, whose spectacular attractions were most enjoyable for the layperson. Whether confronting the Moon Hoax, the Feejee Mermaid, spiritualism, or the Cardiff Giant in the proliferating venues of popular amusement, audiences eagerly participated in the working-out of the controversy provoked by each novel "discovery." While exercising their powers of detection, they expressed an expectation that they had as much right as anyone to determine the role of science in American life. For their part, nascent scientists debated among themselves whether to challenge the hoaxers at a time when any hint of fraud threatened to devalue their still fragile professional status. These men improvised a variety of responses across the nineteenth century: they met their adversaries head-on, with mixed results, or waged behind-the-scenes campaigns against the perpetrator of the day. This dissertation argues that in mid-nineteenth-century hoaxes men of science and average people negotiated the limits and benefits of scientific knowledge in American society, science's prestige to be enhanced or undercut in particular by elites' responses to deception. Scientists' lack of unanimity in meeting these popular challenges allowed the persistence of the belief that when "doctors" disagreed, the people ought to decide. This democracy of knowledge symbolically preserved laypeople's right to "do" science, and put scientists on notice that they could not expect complete freedom of action in the exercise of their expertise.