The word scientist was invented in 1833 and met a cool reception
Newton, Galileo and Galvani never called themselves scientists, because the word did not exist. William Whewell coined it in 1833, modelled on artist, after members of a British scientific society complained they lacked a collective name. It first reached print in a review of a book by Mary Somerville, and many people disliked it.
Before then, people who studied the material world went by natural philosophers or men of science, labels that lingered into the late nineteenth century. In ancient Greece, geometry, astronomy and catalogues of plants and animals came from philosophers, physicians and tradespeople rather than a distinct profession. Medieval universities split learning into the trivium, which held natural philosophy, and the quadrivium, which held mathematics and astronomy, so the nearest medieval equivalents were philosophers or mathematicians, while physicians looked after plants and animals.
Many early investigators combined roles we now keep apart. In the Islamic Golden Age, Avicenna and Ibn al-Nafis were physicians who had memorised the Quran, and in Europe Nicolaus Copernicus was a cleric as well as an astronomer. Thales, who lived around 624 to 545 BC, is sometimes called the first scientist for explaining cosmic events as natural rather than divine.
Whewell's argument was about specialisation. With narrow titles such as chemist and naturalist spreading, philosopher no longer fitted, and his anonymous 1834 review of Somerville's On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences floated the new term, citing economist and atheist as precedents. He pressed it more openly in 1840 in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, where he also offered physicist, since physician was taken. Americans adopted scientist in the late nineteenth century; Britain followed around 1900.
Today there is still no licence or formal test for being one, though most professionals train in graduate school, often ending with a PhD and postdoctoral work under a senior mentor. A 2017 survey by Nature of more than 5,700 doctoral students found a little over half hoped to stay in academia. Marie Curie, who was the first woman awarded a Nobel and the first person to receive two, campaigned for scientists' right to patent their discoveries.
Source: Scientist
