In two conferences, separated by the space of only a few months, in September 1966 and March 1967, Giovanni Polvani—at the time president of the Domus Galilaeana—and the council of the Domus, attempted a series of operations, all ambitious and difficult. The first, and to some extent the simplest, was to gather round the Domus all those who were working in a professional role or as amateurs on the history of science. Also invited were scholars who had become involved in the discipline through the territorial or thematic nature of their particular interests (as was the case with Luigi Firpo, Cesare Vasoli and others), or who had some special relation to the history of science of a more, so to speak, extrinsic kind, people such as archivists, librarians, and so on. Secondly, the organizers wished—and here was where the difficulties began—to start up a discussion (not limited to mere theory) on what people understood the history of science to be, what its relationship was with the history of technology, of philosophy, and with cultural history in general. As hinted above, the discussion was not meant to be on abstract theoretical terms, since it was designed to serve as a premise for an even more complex project, that is to set up a centre for the training of future historians of science. As often happens, in the heat of discussing the concrete problems which were the subject of the first meeting at Pisa (the sources of the history of science, limited to Italy, and only to the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries), there emerged difficulties, various orientations, evaluations and declarations, which were both meaningful and enlightening.

Following some years of declining health, Professor Maurice Crosland passed away on 30 August 2020 at the age of eighty-nine. Author of four influential scholarly monographs, Maurice played major roles in the British Society for the History of Science during the 1960s and 1970s as an active Member of Council, Honorary Editor of the British Journal for the History of Science (1965–71) and Honorary President of the society (1974–6). His academic career began in 1963 with his appointment to a lectureship in the History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. In 1974 the by-then Reader in History of Science secured a £100,000 Nuffield Foundation Grant with which to establish, for the first time, a dedicated history-of-science group at the University of Kent at Canterbury. Appointed Professor of the History of Science and Director of the Unit for the History, Philosophy and Social Relations of Science (known as the ‘History of Science Unit’ or simply ‘the Unit’), his objectives during the five-year Nuffield-funded period were to focus on promoting the research activities of the new group, build up much-needed library resources in a university which was barely ten years old, and effect a transition to a research and teaching Unit that would offer modules to undergraduates in each of the three principal faculties (Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences). His own research centred on French science during and after the Napoleonic period, with particular emphasis on the history of chemistry and the formal institutions and informal networks of Parisian science. In 1984 his work was recognized with the American Chemical Society's award of the Dexter Prize, a rare achievement for a British scholar.