Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography

309 Pages·1996·6.2 MB·English

by  Michael Shortland, Richard Yeo

Images of scientists and ideas about science are often communicated
to the public through historic biographies of eminent scientists, yet
there has been little study of the development of scientific biography.
Telling Lives in Science brings together a collection of original essays
which explore for the first time the nature and development of scientific
biography and its importance in forming our ideas about what scien-
tists do, how science works, and why scientific biography remains
popular.
Written in an accessible style by leading historians of science, sev-
eral of them biographers, the volume explores such questions as how
scientific heroes are fashioned for popular consumption, what relations
exist between scientific biography and autobiography, and the role of
biography in the history of science and medicine. The book comprises
theoretical and historical studies and ranges from the seventeenth to
the twentieth century, paying attention to such
icons as Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Humphry Davy,
Florence Nightingale and Sir Joseph Banks, along with a gallery of
lesser-known figures. In their introduction the editors examine the
development of scientific biography, its relations with literary biogra-
phy, and consider some of the issues at the heart of contemporary
debates in the literary and historical study of biography.
With its broad sweep and careful, imaginative scholarship, this
volume provides a timely and challenging examination of an important
aspect of the culture of science that will be of special interest to his-
torians of science, academics and students, and the general reader
interested in the popularisation of science.
Telling lives in science: essays on scientific biography
Telling lives in science
Essays on scientific biography
EDITED BY
Michael Shortland
Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney
and
Richard Yeo
School of Cultural and Historical Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521433235
© Cambridge University Press 1996
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 1996
This digitally printed version 2008
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Telling lives in science: essays on scientific biography/edited by
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 521 43323 1 (he)
1. Scientists - Biography. 2. Science - History. 3. Scientists -
Biography — Authorship — History. I. Shortland, Michael. II. Yeo,
Richard R., 1948- .
Q141.T45 1996
809'.93592'0245 - dc20 95-47399 CIP
ISBN 978-0-521-43323-5 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-08890-9 paperback
Contents
List of contributors
Preface xi
Introduction l
MICHAEL SHORTLAND AND RICHARD YEO
1 Existential projects and existential choice in science: science
biography as an edifying genre 45
THOMAS SODERQVIST
2 Life-paths: autobiography, science and the French
Revolution 85
DORINDA OUTRAM
3 From science to wisdom: Humphry Davy's life 103
DAVID KNIGHT
4 Robert Boyle and the dilemma of biography in the age of the
Scientific Revolution 115
MICHAEL HUNTER
5 Alphabetical lives: scientific biography in historical dictionaries
and encyclopaedias 139
RICHARD YEO
6 The scientist as hero: public images of Michael Faraday 171
GEOFFREY CANTOR
viii • Contents
7 Tactful organising and executive power': biographies of Florence
Nightingale for girls 195
MARTHA VICINUS
8 Taking histories, medical lives: Thomas Beddoes and
biography 215
ROY PORTER
9 The scientist as patron and patriotic symbol: the changing
reputation of Sir Joseph Banks 243
JOHN GASCOIGNE
10 Metabiographical reflections on Charles Darwin 267
JAMES MOORE
Index 283
Contributors
GEOFFREY CANTOR is professor of the history of science at the University
of Leeds and is currently working in the area of history of science and
religion. His biographical study of Faraday, Michael Faraday:
Sandemanian and Scientist, was published in 1991.
Address: Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT,
UK.
JOHN GASCOIGNE is a senior lecturer in the School of History,
University of New South Wales, Sydney. His most recent work is
Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and
Polite Culture (1994) and he is presently completing a companion
volume entitled Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the
British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution.
Address: School of History, University of New South Wales, PO Box 1,
NSW 2033, Australia.
MICHAEL HUNTER is professor of history at Birkbeck College, University
of London. He has written or edited various books on the early
Royal Society and on intellectual change in the late seventeenth
century. His Robert Boyle by Himself and his Friends was published
in 1994. With Edward B. Davies and Antonio Clericuzio, he is
currently preparing a complete edition of the works and
correspondence of Robert Boyle.
Address: History Department, Birkbeck College, University of London,
Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, UK.
DAVID KNIGHT is professor of history and philosophy of science at the
University of Durham. He is currently President of the British
Society for the History of Science. He is general editor of the series
of Cambridge's Scientific Biographies, in which his own Humphry
Davy: Science and Power is published. He has written widely,
especially on the history of chemistry.
Address: Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, 50 Old Elvet,
Durham, DH1 3HN, UK.
x • Contributors
JAMES MOORE teaches history of science and technology at the Open
University in Milton Keynes. His and Adrian Desmond's Darwin
(1991) won the 1991 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for
Biography and the 1993 Watson Davies Prize of the History of
Science Society. His study The Darwin Legend was published in
1994. He continues to research on Victorian science and religion,
Alfred Russel Wallace and twentieth-century popular science.
Address: The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA,
UK.
DORINDA OUTRAM teaches history at University College Cork,
and is a Visiting Scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut fur
Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, 1995-1996. She is the author of
Georges Cuvier (1984); co-editor of Uneasy Careers and Intimate
Lives: Women and Science 1789-1987 (1987), and The Body and
theFrench Revolution (1989).
Address: Max-Planck-Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Wihelmstrasse
44, Berlin D-10117, Germany.
ROY PORTER is professor of the history of medicine at University College
London, and has written extensively on the social and cultural
history of science and medicine. Amongst his many books are
studies of Edmund Gibbon and Thomas Beddoes, English Society in
the Eighteenth Century (1982), Mind Forg'd Manacles (1989) and
London: A Social History (1994).
Address: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 183 Euston
Road, London NW1 2BN, UK.
MICHAEL SHORTLAND is associate professor in the history and
philosophy of science at the University of Sydney. His recent
writings have been concerned with the social and cultural history of
nineteenth-century science, and include his edited collection Hugh
Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science (1996).
Address: Unit for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of
Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2004, Australia.
THOMAS SODERQVIST is associate professor at Roskilde University,
Denmark, where he teaches history of science. He has written on