Report from Meeting on Scientific Biography Held in Copenhagen

(originally posted in the History of Science Society Newsletter, October 2002, pp. 9-10)

The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology and Medicine

In May [2002], thirty historians from nine different nations gathered in Copenhagen to reflect on current problems in scientific biography. The three-day residential meeting was organized by Janet Browne (London), Geoffrey Cantor (Leeds), Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen), and Richard Yeo (Brisbane) at the Magleas Conference Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark, 22-25 May 2002, under the heading "The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology, and Medicine". Precirculated papers generated intense round-table discussion with a genuinely international and cross-disciplinary flavor, helped along by the wonderful pastoral setting. The aim was to probe the genre in the light of new perspectives and reexamine its history, foundational problems, and metahistorical implications. The meeting included a visit to the Danish National Portrait Gallery (where artworks based on Niels Bohr’s death mask generated much comment) and ended with a convivial boat excursion to the site of Tycho Brahe’s observatory on the island of Venn, conducted by Helge Kragh. Many—if not all—of the participants are actively working in the field.

The problems of self, persona and identity were central. Stephen Gaukroger (Sydney) opened the proceedings with a paper about how the genre of biography was related to the construction of the persona of the early modern natural philosopher. Charlotte Bigg and David Aubin (MPI-Berlin) continued with parallel biography as a tool for analyzing categories central to the public representation of scientists. Ray Monk (Southampton), author of acclaimed biographies of Wittgenstein and Russell, discussed the likelihood of getting into another person’s mind and concluded that a scientist’s inner life is not intrinsically hidden from the biographer. Thomas L. Hankins (U Washington, Seattle), one of the first to defend the use of biography in the history of science in a seminal article in History of Science 1979, drew an analogy between modern biography and the modern patent system, both being part of the reward system of science.

Memory was also a central category for debate. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent (Paris-Nanterre) talked about biographies as mediators of memory and history in science and stressed the importance of the genre as an instrument for expressing the cultural meanings of scientific activites and the construction of national memories. Paolo Palladino (Lancaster) eloquently claimed that "biography is the salve for our longing to feel how it feels to be unique and memorable" and added as comparison between biography and drug addiction: "one dose of this salve can never be enough and soon leads to destruction ... We want more biographies still, to feel how it feels".

Others papers, too, investigated conceptual issues so far not much treated in the literature. Christopher Chilvers (Oxford) brought Aristotle’s notion of tragedy into play in an analysis of the Sovjet historian of science Boris Hessen’s life in terms of hamartia, peripeteia and katharsis. Sujit Sivasundaram (Cambridge) considered the case of the Rev. John Williams and the rhetorical power of the story of his life and especially his volatile death (he was eaten by cannibals) in the creation of his reputation as a godly naturalist and an icon against the trope of the savage cannibal, thereby attempting to deconstruct the fascination with scientific genius. Patricia Fara (Cambridge) approached scientific biography through scientific portraiture, claiming with Edmund Lodge (Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain, 1821) that it is "from the combination of portraits and biography that we reap the utmost degree of utility and pleasure which can be derived from them" – a useful prescription for biographers even today.

In the last decade, historians of medicine seem to have been much more sceptical about biography than historians of science. Nonetheless, in a revisionist paper, Jackie Duffin (Toronto) gave a convincing autobiographical argument, based on her experiences of writing about Langstaff and Laennec, for biography as a central resource for the historian of medicine. Beth Linker (Yale) suggested that American historians of medicine will only come to accept biography once they reasses their own disciplinary founding story and Henry Sigerist’s role in it. Two speakers also addressed biography’s role in the writing of recent science. Rena Selya (Harvard), who has just finished her thesis on Salvador Luria, reflected on the relation between autobiography and biography in writing recent historiography of science. Betty Smocovitis (U Florida, Gainesville) drew on her own experiences in writing about a recent scientist (G. Ledyard Stebbins), claiming that working with living subjects alters the life of the biographer too, who may ultimately incorporate elements of the other’s life in his or her own autobiography.

The history of biography further emerged as a bundle of traditions for writing about individuals. Three papers dealt with such traditions. Helge Kragh (Aarhus) surveyed the lineage of lives of Tycho Brahe, starting with Gassendi’s vita in 1654 which set the framework for the following 300 years, and ending, so far, with John Christianson’s social history of the Tycho clan: On Tycho’s Island (2000). Signe Lindskov Hansen (Copenhagen) talked about the Danish tradition for writing biographies of Niels Stensen (Steno) with a focus on different rhetorical strategies that had served different political aims over time; it was particularly interesting to hear that Marinus Borup’s biography of Steno from 1938 was written as a 300 page prose poem (probably the only major modern biography ever written in poetic form). Rebekah Higgitt (Imperial College, London) also addressed the question of particular agendas for biographies; taking three major contributions to the 19th century picture of Newton – Brewster’s and de Morgan’s Newton portraits and Baily’s account of Flamsteed – as her point of departure, she discussed their modes of presentation and the techniques which made them persuasive.

Finally, the genre as an historical phenomenon was examined. Geoffrey Cantor (Leeds) presented his current work on the British periodical press in the 19th century and raised the question to what extent biographical articles were responsible for shaping the public understanding of both science and the scientist in the period. Thomas Söderqvist (Copenhagen), ended the meeting with an overview of the history of the genre, suggesting that the different valuations over time have been fuelled by vested professional interests, and that a true defense of the genre would be to study it without being prejudiced by present standards for what constitutes good history of science, technology, and medicine. Publication of a volume including the conference articles is currently being investigated.

Janet Browne
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London

Thomas Söderqvist
Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen