McClellan's quoted 'Whiggism'-to-'precursoritis' link diagnoses one book under review, not a general classification of precursorism as Whig history
The only words of James E. McClellan III's 2002 Science review available to this vault — quoted secondhand in Wikipedia's "Precursorism" article, since science.org blocks direct access — tie "Whiggism" to "precursoritis" for a single book under review, not as an abstract taxonomy. McClellan writes that Dick Teresi's Lost Discoveries shows "the author's Whiggism leads him to see non-Western cultures... as... 'being the forerunner of' today's science," a malady "sometimes diagnosed as 'precursoritis.'" The grammar is diagnostic and particular — this author's Whiggism produces this precursor-hunting — not definitional. McClellan never writes a sentence of the shape "precursorism is a species of Whig history."
That general classificatory sentence is the one claim-precursorism-is-named-and-classified-as-a-form-of-whig-history already traces, via the same Wikipedia page's footnote markup, to Marshall Clagett's 1968 Nicole Oresme and the Medieval Geometry of Qualities and Motions (p. 3) — whose own quoted words also avoid "Whig." So even granting McClellan's quoted language at face value, it supports a narrower, case-bound link (Whiggism causing precursoritis, in one book) rather than the general claim question-verify-mcclellan-2002-precursorism-whig-history-classification asks whether any primary source actually makes. See entity-james-e-mcclellan-iii, entity-marshall-clagett, entity-precursorism.
Source
“[T]he author's Whiggism leads him to see non-Western cultures, not in their own terms, but as "mirroring," "presaging," "hinting at," "bearing out," "paving the way for," "evidencing nascent understandings of," and "being the forerunner of" today's science. This malady is sometimes diagnosed as "precursoritis," and every graduate student knows that identifying who got what right or wrong by our lights is not the way--certainly not the best way--to tell the story of what people have thought about nature in other historical contexts or of how we came to know what we now know.”
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