I was working on a draft to the first chapter of my biography of Niels Jerne (note 1) when his elder son called me on a Friday morning in October 1994 to tell me that Jerne had died during the night. The funeral would take place on the following Monday. I hastened to say that I was on my way to a History of Science Society meeting in New Orleans and that biographers oughtn’t attend their subjects’ funerals anyway (except perhaps discreetly observing the event from a distance). My excuses were accepted without further ado.
Two days later, while waiting for my connecting flight at the JFK, I bought a copy of the Sunday New York Times which to my pleasant surprise carried a half-page obituary of Jerne, a nice piece of top-notch science journalism. And when arriving at the conference hotel a few hours later, I realized that many other historians of science too had read the obituary, because friends and colleagues who knew about my project came up and gave me their condolences. “I’m so sorry”, said one. “Bad news about Jerne”, said another. “You must be devastated”, said a third. I felt somewhat uneasy, didn’t know what to think, even less what to say.
I got my keys and was just about to go up to my room and get a night’s well-deserved sleep when a tall, white-haired, handsome man in his sixties wearing a worn tweed jacket came out of the restaurant. He caught my eyes, strolled up to me, somewhat hesitantly, and greeted me with a shy smile on his bearded face: “Thomas, you must be relieved!”
In my jet-lagged state I didn’t quite hear if he was serious or in a joking mode. Whatever, his words hit a chord inside me. I stretched out as if to embrace him, then realized that this was perhaps not quite proper procedure, and cried out so that everyone around could hear: “At last, someone who understands how I feel!” That someone was Sam.
Silvan S. Schweber, of all people at the HSS meeting, understood. Not only because he is one of those rare members of American academia who listens to, contemplates and understands what you tell him (another member of this rare breed of academics was the late Larry Holmes). But also because Sam too was living with a problem that had bothered me for years, viz., how to research and write the biography of a living scientist.
A few months before the HSS meeting, we had both attended a meeting at Stanford on oral history of science. Sam and I were the only participants who were writing biographies. I talked about my ongoing study of Jerne, Sam about his work with Hans Bethe. We discovered that not only had we both devoured our subjects’ scientific publications and delved into their personal document files, but also interviewed them at length. And more importantly, we were both interested in the moral lives of our subjects.
To me ethical questions were something new. Sam on the other hand had already spent the better part of a lifetime reflecting on the moral landscape of science, in his case bomb physics (note 2). He was, of course, never involved in any bomb work himself, but the moral aspects of physics have nevertheless loomed large in his intellectual development. Already when arriving in Princeton in the fall of 1949 to do graduate studies in theoretical physics, he was confronted with the debate on whether to develop a hydrogen bomb; he continued as a postdoc with Bethe at Cornell and later became actively involved in the creation of the physics department at Brandeis.
The student unrest that followed in the wake of the escalating Vietnam war in the late 1960s got him even more deeply involved in the moral issues of academia. In the course of this journey Sam has also made a significant detour to the moral grove of biography. In the Shadow of the Bomb (2000) summarizes many years of close insights into the development of theoretical and nuclear physics. In the form of a parallell biography — or rather a sort of modernized, i.e., strongly contextualized, version of the classical Plutarchian format — Sam analyzes the shaping of Bethe’s and Robert Oppenheimer’s moral outlooks and their ensuing struggle with the ethical and political aspects of the new knowledge and technology of atomic fission and its consequences for humankind. Was the Enlightenment ideal still valid? Was knowledge always a good in itself? Should some knowledge be forbidden?
The gist of a Plutarchian biography is the ethical evaluation of two political actors who handle similar kinds of problems in different ways. Oppenheimer and Bethe had much in common, including a strong faith in reason, a conviction that science is always good, and that shared knowledge will sooner or later lead to progress. But they also differed in important respects, and in Sam’s interpretation this was most evident in the way they positioned themselves in the spectrum between individuality and communality.
Whereas Oppenheimer tended to seek individualistic solutions to moral problems and became “a lonely and somewhat solitary personage” (p. 184), Bethe sought solutions at the level of community. Whereas Oppenheimer could so eloquently voice (“and perhaps only voice”) love and the care of mankind, almost as if he were a poet, Bethe created a strong community around him that gave him “sustenance, fortitude, and caritas” ( p. 27).
If Sam would have to choose between the two, he would undoubtedly turn up on Bethe’s side. He does indeed respect Oppenheimer, but his former mentor at Cornell — the subject of the full biography yet to come — is closer to his heart. Even for those of us who do not know Sam well personally, it is evident that Bethe’s ideals are also his. In this sense In the Shadow of the Bomb is a labor of love and a practical demonstration of a central aspect of the Plutarchian biographical tradition, viz., to be edifying. Sam has been edified and wants us to be too.
Much as I sympathize with Sam’s biographical position, however, I am not sure that the future of biography’s edifying capacities lies here. Not because In the Shadow of the Bomb focuses on great men as such and their theories that shook the world; after all, this seems to be a valid account of the situation at the time. But rather because this great men/big theories/dire consequences-kind of biographical poetics may be difficult to apply outside the atomic age, which is unique in that the chain of events could have resulted in the eradication of all of humankind in one singular political act (as it perhaps almost did during the Cuban crisis).
The ethical problems involved in, say, the present development of the biomedical sciences, seem to be of a quite different kind. Unlike classical big physics, biomedicine is a network-like pattern of interaction between the demands of millions of consumers of biomedical products and hundreds of thousands of more or less proletarianized laboratory scientists (with few theoreticians or classical intellectuals among their ranks) in both public and private laboratories; the two sides are mediated by a large number of private biotech companies operating against the backdrop of a volatile stock market. In this scenario there is hardly any place for noble theoreticians who feel responsible for the catastrophic consequences of scientific discoveries.
In other words, even though Sam’s biographical project is commendable for giving us an understanding of the moral dilemmas and responsibilites of scientists in the state-driven atomic era, I believe that today’s fragmented, individualistic, narcissistic and market-driven global technoscientific culture calls for a different sort of ethically-oriented life writing. In short, I suggest that the future for biography as an ethical genre — in contrast to the standard function of the genre as an ancilla historiae, i.e., a way of writing the history of science by other means, or
as sophisticated entertainment á la Dava Sobel — relies on its ability to resonate with the technoscientific culture of the twenty-first century. This resonance lies, I believe, in its capacity for being a Socratic exercise, i.e., for being a genre devoted to the project of “knowing oneself”.
Whereas Plutarchian moral biography has raised monuments to model scientists for us lesser mortals to gaze upon with awe, a renewed Socratic genre of scientific biography (single or double) would rather consist in portraits of how members of the new global technoscientific network (it is rather difficult to see it as a community in the old Mertonian sense), create their scientific and life projects. Such portraits do not have to be restricted to books — in the last decade the film format has proved an increasingly interesting medium for biographical portraits (note 3).
A theoretical and methodological grounding for such a Socratic approach to a renewed ethical biographical genre might be developed with reference to works such as Martha Nussbaum’s, which involves reading fiction as a continuation of the Hellenistic practice of “therapy of desire”, and Pierre Hadot’s — who inspired Michael Foucault to the concept of “souci de soi” (“care of self ”) — proposal that the ancient role of philosophy as a genre for the cultivation of “spiritual exercises” has interesting late modern repercussions (note 4).
By viewing/reading about the cognitive yearnings, professional passions, and life choices of other actors on the technoscientific stage, twenty-first century scientists may thus learn to be more reflexive in their daily life-practices and more willing to engage in practical virtue ethical training. In that way scientific biography might help undo some of the a-morality that permeats today’s global technoscience, not least its biomedical sector (note 5).
Notes:
1. Thomas Söderqvist, Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (New Haven: Yale University Press 2003).
2. I have borrowed the phrase “moral landscape of bomb physics” from Gregg Herken’s review of Silvan S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientists (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 2000) in American Scientist, vol. 88, nr 4 (July–August), 2000 (quoted from on-line version: http://www.americanscientist.org/template/BookReviewTypeDetail/assetid/25926).
3. Like Richard Eyre’s A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (2001). I must confess, however, that I rather prefer Helen Mirren’s portrait of the daily life and work and moral quanderies of fictional detective chief inspector Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect (1991–1996) to Russell Crowe’s quasi-realistic and sentimental rendering of mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (2001).
4. Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press 1994); Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press 2002); Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité. 3: Le souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard 1984).
5. For a more extensive discussion of scientific biography as a genre of virtue theoretically based research ethics, see, e.g., Thomas Söderqvist, “Immunology á la Plutarch: biographies of immunologists as an ethical genre,” pp. 287–301 in: Anne-Marie Moulin and Alberto Cambrosio, eds., Historical Issues and Contemporary Debates in Immunology (Paris: Elsevier 2001), Thomas Söderqvist, “Wissenschaftsgeschichte à la Plutarch: Biographie über Wissenschaftler als tugendetishe Gattung,” pp. 287–325 in: Hans Erich Bödeker, ed., Biographie Schreiben (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag 2003), and Thomas Söderqvist, “What is the use of writing lives of recent scientists,” pp. 99–127 in: Ronald E. Doel and Thomas Söderqvist, eds., The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine (London: Routledge 2006).
(manuscript to be published in J. Renn and K. Gavroglu (eds.), Positioning the History of Science, Springer (2007). Thanks to Finn Aaserud, Adam Bencard, Janet Browne and Ron Doel for constructive remarks. [Added in May 2007: The volume has now been published!]
Combining wikis and blogs for joint document editing
When thinking about possible ways of working out an on-line writing project of this kind, I was inspired by Laura Cohen's post "Why Can't a Wiki Be More Like a Blog?" on her blog Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective. Wikis are great for collective editing, but discourages people who "just" want to add comments. Blogs on the other hand don't have the collective editing feature. Why not create a mix, a sort of Wikiblog? An example of a half-way solution that Laura Cohen mentions is the annotated edition of The Iraq Study Group Report which shows a very nice comment system where you can open windows and comment on each paragraph in the document. Says Laura: "Wikis and blogs could benefit from incorporating each others' features. This could move us toward a truly full-featured integrated publishing platform in which the best of both systems are available".
Metabiography
As the number of biographies has grown over the centuries, so has the number of famous people whose lives have been subjected to several or many renditions; some popular historical figures have in fact occasioned more than a hundred biographies (an anonymous blogger recently proclaimed that she had nearly one hundred Marilyn Monroe biographies on her shelves “and I never get bored reading them”). Thus the emergence of a supergenre, the “metabiography,” which does not restrict itself to writing yet another and infinitesimally “truer” version of a life (perhaps based on a newly discovered letter or diary) but primarily analyzes earlier versions to make a critical appraisal of the tradition of life-writing about a particular subject. An excellent recent example is Lucasta Miller’s The Brontë Myth (2004) which is not so much a biography of the Brontës as a book about biography where the author demonstrates how generations of literary historians and life-writers have remolded the Brontë sisters to fit their own agendas.
Scientists have had their metabiographers too. More than fifty years ago, Henry Guerlac (1954) set the example with an essay on Lavoisier and his biographers. He was followed by Dorinda Outram (1976) on the tradition for Cuvier-éloges; David Cassidy (1979) on biographies of Einstein; Marilyn Marshall (1980) on Fechner-studies; Steven Jacyna (1983) on the succession of nineteenth-century images of John Hunter; Frederick Churchill (1982) and Marjorie Greene (1993) on the Darwin-biographical tradtion; and L. Pearce Williams (1991) on Faraday-biographies. The first scientific metabiography in monograph form was probably A. Rupert Hall’s study on eighteenth-century biographies of Newton (1999). The entries on individual scientists in the Reader’s Guide to the History of Science (ed., Arne Hessenbruch, 2000) follows the same pattern — it is not primarily the details of the life and work of the scientist but the changing interpretations by different biographers that is in focus.
Although Nicolaas Rupke was apparently not aware of this emerging metabiographical literature when completing his study of the Humboldt phenomenon in Germany (Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography. Frankfurt: Peter Lang AG, 2005) his book fits nicely into the tradition. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is a good choice for a metabiographer. A celebrated naturalist, scientific traveller-explorer, physical geographer, and intellectual, indeed one the best known figures in the history of German science and learning, he has been the subject of a huge publication industry. Fellow scientists, science popularizers, journalists, and to some extent historians, have contributed to the facets of the many Humboldt portraits.
“Who did the many writers about Humboldt think he really was?” (p. 17), asks Rupke and answers the question by identifying a number of political camps in modern German history that have appropriated Humboldt over more than 150 years and “aggressively recreated” his life and work “to suit contemporary needs” (p. 208). There is Humboldt the national hero of the revolutionaries of 1848; the subversive democrat at the Prussian court; the culture chauvinist of the Weimar republic; and the Aryan supremacist of the Nazi period. Postwar Humboldts include the antislavery marxist of the East Germans; the cosmopolitan friend of the Jews; and today’s pioneer of globalization (there is, of course, even a “green” and a gay Humboldt). Each of these get a separate chapter in Rupke’s well-researched (the list of printed sources is 75 pages long), densely written and fact-heavy study. The only significant political institutions in Germany that have not been involved in the cultural construction of their own Humboldt are the Lutheran and Catholic churches.
Rupke concludes that a study of the Humboldt phenomenon is attractive as a means for understanding changing modern German identities. Humboldt’s life and work was an “agora” that shaped a discourse not only about the natural world, but as much about his own nation, enabling Germans to deal with “national ambitions, shortcomings, guilt complexes and the like” (p. 206). He also concludes that all the Humboldts — whether good or bad, scholarly or popular — are the product of institutional cultures. The task of metabiography, in Rupke’s view, thus is primarily to explore the ideological embeddedness of biographies, not to settles issues of their authenticity.
Despite a concluding section on metabiographical reflections and “an inevitable moment of self-reflection” (p. 217), Rupke never really becomes self-reflexive, however. He reprimands biographers who thought they were only describing the facts of Humboldt’s life; yet he basically treats the political and ideological circumstances around the successive Humboldt constructions in an similar down-to-earth factual manner. And he does not seem to realize that the phrase “In historiography there does not exist an Archimedean point” (p. 217) is as strongly ideologically embedded in contemporary Western culture as the Humboldt-authors whose writings he has so skilfully analyzed. This is a minor point, however. In general, Rupke’s study is a clear improvement of the earlier scientific metabiographical tradition from Henry Guerlac to A. Rupert Hall. It is well-written, (albeit not elegantly) and will doubtlessly become a standard reference for the Humboldt industry and for writers of scientific metabiographies to come.
Scientists have had their metabiographers too. More than fifty years ago, Henry Guerlac (1954) set the example with an essay on Lavoisier and his biographers. He was followed by Dorinda Outram (1976) on the tradition for Cuvier-éloges; David Cassidy (1979) on biographies of Einstein; Marilyn Marshall (1980) on Fechner-studies; Steven Jacyna (1983) on the succession of nineteenth-century images of John Hunter; Frederick Churchill (1982) and Marjorie Greene (1993) on the Darwin-biographical tradtion; and L. Pearce Williams (1991) on Faraday-biographies. The first scientific metabiography in monograph form was probably A. Rupert Hall’s study on eighteenth-century biographies of Newton (1999). The entries on individual scientists in the Reader’s Guide to the History of Science (ed., Arne Hessenbruch, 2000) follows the same pattern — it is not primarily the details of the life and work of the scientist but the changing interpretations by different biographers that is in focus.
Although Nicolaas Rupke was apparently not aware of this emerging metabiographical literature when completing his study of the Humboldt phenomenon in Germany (Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography. Frankfurt: Peter Lang AG, 2005) his book fits nicely into the tradition. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) is a good choice for a metabiographer. A celebrated naturalist, scientific traveller-explorer, physical geographer, and intellectual, indeed one the best known figures in the history of German science and learning, he has been the subject of a huge publication industry. Fellow scientists, science popularizers, journalists, and to some extent historians, have contributed to the facets of the many Humboldt portraits.
“Who did the many writers about Humboldt think he really was?” (p. 17), asks Rupke and answers the question by identifying a number of political camps in modern German history that have appropriated Humboldt over more than 150 years and “aggressively recreated” his life and work “to suit contemporary needs” (p. 208). There is Humboldt the national hero of the revolutionaries of 1848; the subversive democrat at the Prussian court; the culture chauvinist of the Weimar republic; and the Aryan supremacist of the Nazi period. Postwar Humboldts include the antislavery marxist of the East Germans; the cosmopolitan friend of the Jews; and today’s pioneer of globalization (there is, of course, even a “green” and a gay Humboldt). Each of these get a separate chapter in Rupke’s well-researched (the list of printed sources is 75 pages long), densely written and fact-heavy study. The only significant political institutions in Germany that have not been involved in the cultural construction of their own Humboldt are the Lutheran and Catholic churches.
Rupke concludes that a study of the Humboldt phenomenon is attractive as a means for understanding changing modern German identities. Humboldt’s life and work was an “agora” that shaped a discourse not only about the natural world, but as much about his own nation, enabling Germans to deal with “national ambitions, shortcomings, guilt complexes and the like” (p. 206). He also concludes that all the Humboldts — whether good or bad, scholarly or popular — are the product of institutional cultures. The task of metabiography, in Rupke’s view, thus is primarily to explore the ideological embeddedness of biographies, not to settles issues of their authenticity.
Despite a concluding section on metabiographical reflections and “an inevitable moment of self-reflection” (p. 217), Rupke never really becomes self-reflexive, however. He reprimands biographers who thought they were only describing the facts of Humboldt’s life; yet he basically treats the political and ideological circumstances around the successive Humboldt constructions in an similar down-to-earth factual manner. And he does not seem to realize that the phrase “In historiography there does not exist an Archimedean point” (p. 217) is as strongly ideologically embedded in contemporary Western culture as the Humboldt-authors whose writings he has so skilfully analyzed. This is a minor point, however. In general, Rupke’s study is a clear improvement of the earlier scientific metabiographical tradition from Henry Guerlac to A. Rupert Hall. It is well-written, (albeit not elegantly) and will doubtlessly become a standard reference for the Humboldt industry and for writers of scientific metabiographies to come.
Dictionary of Medical Biography
I 
just want to announce the publication of the five volumes of Dictionary of Medical Biography, edited by Bill and Helen Bynum for Greenwood Press. It came out the day before New Year's Eve (30 Dec. 2006), so I haven't seen it in print yet.
Several of my present and former colleagues here at Medical Museion (and myself) have written articles for it (in addition I was area editor for the Nordic countries, i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden; unfortunately no Icelandic medical doctors are included). The Bynums allowed for 38 entries from the Nordic countries out of a total of approx. 1100, so we had to make some pretty tough decisions -- in fact, not even all medical Nobel prize winners have been incorporated.
I'm curious to read the Bynums' editorial introduction. Judging from the original author instructions back in 2004, this is a fairly conventional biographical dictionary. But I will postpone all critical remarks until I have received my area editor's copy (wouldn't dream of buying it myself; it costs 750 USD! -- hopefully major libraries will buy it, though)
just want to announce the publication of the five volumes of Dictionary of Medical Biography, edited by Bill and Helen Bynum for Greenwood Press. It came out the day before New Year's Eve (30 Dec. 2006), so I haven't seen it in print yet.Several of my present and former colleagues here at Medical Museion (and myself) have written articles for it (in addition I was area editor for the Nordic countries, i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden; unfortunately no Icelandic medical doctors are included). The Bynums allowed for 38 entries from the Nordic countries out of a total of approx. 1100, so we had to make some pretty tough decisions -- in fact, not even all medical Nobel prize winners have been incorporated.
I'm curious to read the Bynums' editorial introduction. Judging from the original author instructions back in 2004, this is a fairly conventional biographical dictionary. But I will postpone all critical remarks until I have received my area editor's copy (wouldn't dream of buying it myself; it costs 750 USD! -- hopefully major libraries will buy it, though)
A research and writing experiment
Besides posting news and occasional thoughts, this blog is also conceived as an experiment in on-line writing.
A couple of months ago I decided to write a small book on "Individuality in biomedicine" -- and now I've found out that I want to do it in the public sphere. In other words, I will try to develop the manuscript on-line by posting new ideas, readings, successive changes in the argument and chunks of text here.
I'm not intending to be too honest: I will probably spare you too many unfinished fragments and stupidities. This is not going to be warts and all. On the other hand I will really do my best to post text, ideas, questions etc. regularly as the book develops.
Some of my colleagues have told me they would never want to do anything like this, because they are afraid of being scooped if they share before 'real' publication. I see the point -- in some areas competition is indeed high, which means that you risk seeing your ideas ending up in someone else's book or paper before you get them out in print.
But this field (I will try to explain what I mean by "Representation of individuality" in later posts) is almost empty, as far as I know. As things stands now, the hope of finding someone out there to share ideas with trumps my anxiety of having my (probably not very original) ideas stolen.
I don't know if this is going to work or not, but I'm ready to give it a try. You are very welcome to comment, both on the substantive content of individual posts and on the experiment as such.
A couple of months ago I decided to write a small book on "Individuality in biomedicine" -- and now I've found out that I want to do it in the public sphere. In other words, I will try to develop the manuscript on-line by posting new ideas, readings, successive changes in the argument and chunks of text here.
I'm not intending to be too honest: I will probably spare you too many unfinished fragments and stupidities. This is not going to be warts and all. On the other hand I will really do my best to post text, ideas, questions etc. regularly as the book develops.
Some of my colleagues have told me they would never want to do anything like this, because they are afraid of being scooped if they share before 'real' publication. I see the point -- in some areas competition is indeed high, which means that you risk seeing your ideas ending up in someone else's book or paper before you get them out in print.
But this field (I will try to explain what I mean by "Representation of individuality" in later posts) is almost empty, as far as I know. As things stands now, the hope of finding someone out there to share ideas with trumps my anxiety of having my (probably not very original) ideas stolen.
I don't know if this is going to work or not, but I'm ready to give it a try. You are very welcome to comment, both on the substantive content of individual posts and on the experiment as such.
Welcome
This is the start of my research blog on representations of individuality in biomedicine. I'm already posting on www.corporeality.net/museion. But that's for our joint project. This blog is about my own subproject.
Why are there so few scholarly biographies in the history of medicine and public health?
This paper was given as a keynote plenary lecture to the 7th Congress of the European Association for the History of Medicine and Health (“Health between the private and the public: shifting approaches”) in Oslo, September 3, 2003. It was later published in Michael: Publication Series of the Norwegian Medical Society, vol. 2 (2004). For web version, see here.
A meeting like this is a welcome opportunity to raise historiographical questions, i.e., questions about the many assumptions (ontological, epistemological, cultural, or ideological) that guide professional practice in the field of history of medicine and public health.
One such set of historiographical questions has to do with the place and role of the individual in interpretations of the past. Is the individual subject just a social, cultural or linguistic construct? Are “agents” and “actors” primarily defined by webs of discourse? Or do individuals have a role as free and independent creators of society and culture, i.e., as sources of culture rather than its results? And if so, to what extent? Further (to raise the “utility”-question), is the ultimate purpose of interpretations of the records of the past to teach lessons for future collective action? Or is it also to emancipate the individual and to turn him or her into a morally competent global citizen? And finally (to raise the “reflexivity”-question), to what extent do such different opinions about the individual’s place in history, express different cultural and ideological assumptions, or even different personal life-experiences, among historians of medicine and public health?
In the wake of such questions and meta-questions about the place of individuals and their experiences in history, there is a whole set of issues concerning the role of biography in relation to other forms of writing about the past. The individual subject and its place in history is one of those historiographical topics we tend to repress, and biography is one of those genres of writing we tend to avoid. Why is this so?
Ten years ago, Ludmilla Jordanova pointed out in an essay review aptly titled “Has the social history of medicine come to age?” that she was struck by “the restricted range of genres and topics tackled” in the history of medicine and public health. She added that “one of the most dramatic examples of this is the almost total absence of scholarly biographies”, and continued: “Even for the really big names celebrated by Whig history, few have been the recipients of sustained biographical treatment” (Jordanova, 1993, p. 438). In fact, not even Edward Jenner has received any substantial modern treatment.
I think Jordanova was right in 1993. And even though we have seen some rather impressive examples of scholarly biographical writing since then – consider, for example, works such as Patricia Spain Ward’s Simon Baruch: Rebel in the ranks of medicine (1994), Jacalyn Duffin’s To see with a better eye: A life of Laennec (1998) and Michael Bliss’s magisterial William Osler: A life in medicine (1999) – I am afraid that Jordanova’s observation is still valid. The absence of scholarly medical biographies, i.e., biographies about people who have been engaged in medical and public health activities in one way or the other, is indeed dramatic if you compare it with the interest in biographical writing in almost all other fields. General scholarly journals like the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books abound with reviews of biographies of all kinds: historical biographies, literary biographies, art biographies, biographies of philosophers, and so on. But rarely medical biographies.
The absence of medical biographies becomes even more dramatic if one takes a look at one of the neighbouring fields: scientific biography. During the last two decades there has been a swell of biographies about naturalists, microbiologists, biochemists, physicists, mathematicians, and geologists; whatever one desires. Books that have made their publishers happy and at the same time have received applause in the scholarly journals. In the last two decades, historians of biology, for example, have produced at least four major Darwin portraits based on meticulous archival research, one even in two volumes (Browne, 1996-2002). Historians of physics have produced several acclaimed studies of Newton and Faraday, and there have been marvellously written treatises of Lord Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Henry Huxley, Fritz Haber, Lise Meitner and Rosalind Franklin, just to mention some random fine examples. In my view good biographies not only show how scientists were integrated into the thinking of their time, and how the life and work can shed light on the cultural, political and social context of science, but also investigate the mind and practice of the individual scientist, and even delve into their private lives and existential dilemmas.
Of course, there are many bad biographies as well; some would say too many. But this is what could be expected in global book market that absorbs around one hundred titles of scientific lives every year. Generally speaking, I think there is a general agreement among historians of science today that biography has become a quite respectable scholarly genre over the last two decades. The genre has blown new vitality into our understanding of science past.
If Academia in general and our disciplinary neighbours in particular, have taken biography to their hearts for some twenty years now, why is this not yet the case in the history of medicine and public health? Why are there still so few scholarly medical biographies?
The question becomes even more topical if one contemplates the fact that the medical-biographical genre has a much longer record than most other biographical genres, including scientific biography. Hippokrates, the celebrated, but elusive phantom figure of ancient medicine, had bioi written of him already in the Hellenistic period, none of which, unfortunately, is extant. A thousand years later, the miraculous healing powers of some of the medieval saints and their relics found the way into their vitae, a genre which later came to be known, somewhat condescendingly, as hagiography (literally saint-writing). And yet another half millennium later, Renaissance and early modern period medical doctors had their given place in the emerging secular biographical tradition, for example in funeral speeches of deceased university professors and in the collections of what was called, obviously by inspiration from Petrarch, “the lives of illustrious men”. Medical biography is thus a very old genre, obviously reflecting the fact that medicine and healing is an old practice, whether pursued by hippocratic doctors, medieval saints or professors in the early modern medical faculties and it continues to be published in great numbers (Morton and Moore, 1994).
In spite of being old and venerable, however, the genre has lagged behind its sister genre, scientific biography, for the last three hundred years (the history of the genres of scientific and medical biography remains to be written; see, for example, Söderqvist, 2002a). The first vitae of the pioneers of the so called scientific revolution, including Copernicus and Kepler, came in the first part of the seventeenth century. As natural philosophy, astronomy and physics, and later chemistry and the biological sciences, advanced toward the top of the academic pecking order, so did biographical portraits of what gradually became known as scientists, whereas the lives of medical men (and later a few women) were gradually assigned a more humble place in the genre spectrum, compared to the lives of the new revolutionary scientists. Consequently, one of the few medical doctors who repeatedly received biographical notice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was Hermann Boerhaave. Of the approximately 1200 medical-biographical essays and monographs published in the three hundred years between 1550 and 1850, almost all were singletons (Oettinger, 1854); Boerhaave, however, received a top score of seven, the most famous of which was that of his admiring English student William Burton, whose Account of the life and writings of Hermann Boerhaave (1743) came only a few years after the great master’s death. The fact that Boerhaave towers higher than any other in the Enlightenment medical biographical tradition confirms the impression that he was, in the eyes of his successors, the man who brought the scientific revolution into medicine (Cook, 2000).
The triumphs of scientific medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, reflected in medical lives, too. But they still lagged behind their more illustrious scientific colleagues. Scientists were conspicuously present in the Lives and Letters-tradition; these spectacular and detailed compilations about the great luminaries of the Age of Imperialism, tomes packed with excerpts from letters, often in two, sometimes three volumes. Darwin, Pasteur, Kelvin, Wallace and the other great stars of nineteenth century science all got their tributes. The mathematician William Rowan Hamilton was the subject of 2100 pages in three thick volumes (Graves, 1882-89); the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz was memorised by three volumes in German (Koenigsberger, 1902-03). But there were not many great medical doctors among them. And when authors of medical lives eventually adopted this grand format, the era of Lives and Letters had already ebbed out, not least thanks to Lytton Strachey’s and André Maurois’s attacks on what they regarded as biographical dinosaurs. Harvey Cushing’s two-volume Life of Sir William Osler in 1925 was one of the most celebrated medical biographies of the interwar period and was indeed a great tribute to the man. In form and outlook, however, it came almost a quarter of a century too late. It was out of fashion before it was even conceived.
I will not try the reader’s patience by going into the medical biographical tradition of the rest of the twentieth century, but will hasten to my conclusion of this look-back on the record of the genre, viz., that one reason why there are so few scholarly medical biographies today, compared to, for example, scientific biographies, is that even if medical biography is a very old genre, it never really has had a strong presence as a scholarly genre. True enough, tucked away on the shelves here and there are some extremely well-written and thoughtful studies. But, with the risk of sounding contentious, there have indeed been a lot of bad medical biographies. The Biography Room of the Welcome Library in London contains every possible variety of eulogistic, panegyric, hagiographic, badly written, badly organised, badly contextualised biography, in all major languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Danish, Swedish, etc. Biographies written by admiring colleagues, devoted students, faithful wives and proud daughters and sons; biographies written out of duty, or as labours of love; biographies that wanted to set the record straight, and so forth, but very few good scholarly biographies.
This lack of a strong scholarly medical biographical tradition may partly explain the absence that struck Ludmilla Jordanova in 1993. But there is also another, and probably more important, reason which has to do with the strong impact that social history has made on the field of history of medicine and health in the last three decades.
If one goes back to the programmatic manifestos of the social historians of medicine in the 1970s and 1980s, one will note the extent to which they were fighting against the biographical genre. They probably did not do so because they were trying to defend a scholarly space of their own against the dominance of scholarly medical biography (because, as we have seen, there was hardly any such tradition), and their fight against biography was probably not driven by a virtuous wish to combat the many bad medical biographies (because there were bad biographies in all possible areas, including lousy art biographies, literary biographies and scientific biographies, now filling dusty shelves in remote library stacks). Neither did the social historians of medicine fight so fiercely against biography because they were influenced by the vague anti-biographical sentiments fuelled by positivism, Marxism, structuralism, new criticism etc., that hovered all over Academia during most of the post-war period (because art historians, literary historians, historians of science etc., continued to produce scholarly biographies apparently without being affected either by the marxist denouncement of individualism, by Roland Barthes’s call for the “death of the author”, or by the young Michel Foucault’s attempt to eradicate the subject (Burke, 1998)).
So why then did historians of medicine in general and social historians of medicine in particular, try to root biography out? Susan Reverby and David Rosner’s influential anthology Health care in America: Essays in social history from 1979 gives a clue. In their introductory chapter, the editors questioned medical doctors’ definitions of health and disease and hegemony over history; they wanted historians to take over professional ownership of the medical past. But there was more at stake. Reverby and Rosner had a much more far-reaching political goal than control of the past: they evidently wanted to have a say about who should control the contemporary medical system. The new social history of medicine was thought to be a weapon that would unmask “the pervasive societal faith in the potential and efficacy of medical science” (Reverby and Rosner, 1979, p. 4). Historians were thought to help break doctors’ control over the health system. Reverby and Rosner took the side of patients against powerful doctors, and in doing so; they particularly questioned biographies of “great men”, because they believed that biographies were an expression of false consciousness. In their view, medical biographies made the presumed real forces in history – social and economic forces, political discourses, ideologies, patients, nurses, etc. – invisible. In short, biographies upheld the power relations in the medical system.
Confirmed social historians of medicine were not alone in attacking biography as an expression of a deplorable “great doctor”-perspective in history of medicine. With very few exceptions, most professional historians of medicine in the 1980s and 1990s have been hostile, or at best indifferent, to biographical writing (Linker, 2002; Söderqvist, 2002a). This is remarkable, because it was in the same period that Academia in general began to shake the ban on biography imposed by Marxism and structuralism off their shoulders. (Indeed, literary and art historians never found it necessary to fight the art establishment and have therefore apparently not felt any strong need to attack biographies of artists. In fact, it seems as if art historians still feel rather cosy with the idea of the “great artist”; more critical approaches to art biography, like Christie and Orton (1988), have not had much impact).
Likewise historians of science have not felt any strong urge to combat the “great men” of science for political reasons; the idea of “great scientists” has just been considered a trifle unfashionable, so it has rather been a question of moving biography out of the “great man” perspective instead of attacking and denying the genre of biography altogether. As Thomas Hankins wrote in an influential article titled “In defence of biography” published in 1979 (the same year as Reverby and Rosner made their attack), the genre could in fact be used productively to show how the political, social, cognitive, philosophical, etc. aspects of science were working together. Hankins did not see biography as the expression of a suppressive professional ideology, but as a useful methodological tool for exploring science in its wider context.
Hankins’s 1979-article announced the come-back of biography as a scholarly genre in the history of science. For the next two decades there has been a surge of scholarly scientific biographies, many of them written with the Hankinsinian purpose in mind. Adrian Desmond’s two volumes about Thomas Henry Huxley (1994-97) is a telling example. “This is a story of Class, Power and Propaganda”, Desmond announced in the preface: this is “a contribution to the new contextual history of science”. And he continued: “Isn’t it the modern function of biography to carve a path through brambly contexts? To become a part of history?... And isn’t that our ultimate aim, to understand the making of our world?” And again:
“Huxley is part of the new contextual history of science. This itself is a reaction to the old history of ideas, which displaced the person, made him or her a disembodied ghost, a flash of transcendent genius. Only by embedding Huxley can we appreciate his role in the vast transformation that staggered our great-grandfathers” (Desmond, 1997, p. 235).
Desmond and other historians of science have thus given good arguments for not setting social history up against biography and the individual. So it may be time for historians of medicine and public health to begin to reconsider the genre of biography. The omnipotent doctor is not the major culprit any more; today the medical system is in the hands of politicians, health administrators, insurance companies and pharmaceutical multinationals as well. Patients’ lobby groups and nursing organisations are beginning to have a say as well. The “great doctor” of the past is largely gone. There is no need to flog dead horses and therefore there is no need to combat biography, because it supposedly obscures power relations, social forces and cultural influences in the medical system.
To use the individual as a lens, as it were, into the larger social and cultural context of philosophy, or science, or art, or literature, or, in this case, medicine and health – i.e., to use biography as a microcosm of history at large, or as an ancilla historiae (a servant of history), as I have called it elsewhere (Söderqvist, 2003) – is probably the most common argument among historians today for the use of biography. It is an important role indeed, which, as I have just tried to argue for, makes it more profitable for historians to work with biography rather than against it. Recent developments in historiographical thinking, such as microhistory and the loose intellectual movement of “new historicism” and its interest in literary tropes, add to the impression that biography and some its salient features, for example the focus on narrativity, are important contributions to medical historiography.
Yet biography is not just history by other means. Even when one speaks of biography as an ancilla historiae, one should remember that servants are never entirely in the hands of their masters. Maybe the notion of biography as a adjunct to history should be dropped altogether? As an alternative I suggest to let the ontological assumption which Plutarch made in the introduction to his life of Alexander two millennia ago – viz., that biography (bios) and history (histoira) are two distinct ways of writing about the past – gloss the present debate about the relation between history and biography.
Remember that historia literally means “an inquiry”. But in the course of time such inquiries of the past have by tradition come to mean studies of phenomena like nations, classes, economic institutions, political movements, social interactions, cultural constructs, etc.. Bios means “an individual life course”, and even if some historians today pretend they are writing biographies of cities or countries or even diseases, most historians nevertheless prefer to think about biography as the art of writing the lives of individual human beings. So whereas historia by tradition deals with the collective phenomena of the past, bioi (vitae, biographies) deal with its individuals. One past, two genres.
In other words, even though most historians today think of biography as a genre that takes a secondary role in assisting its more influential master, history, this is not the only role there is for it. Biography has other, more independent, roles as well; for example, at least in the last two centuries is has also been written and read as an aesthetic genre in its own right; literary scholars would probably say that biography has in fact always been emancipated from being a servant to history, that it has always blossomed in its own right.
Medical biography as literature is an interesting topic, which I will not pursue further here. Instead I will use my remaining few minutes to sketch out yet another possible role for medical biography (and in doing so, I will switch from a descriptive-analytical to a somewhat more normative stance). I am thinking of biographical writing as an example of the ancient practice of “spiritual exercises”, a tradition which has been high-lighted in Pierre Hadot’s (1987, 1995) recent reinterpretation of Hellenistic philosophy (1984) which has also had a seminal influence on Michel Foucalt’s idea of “souci de soi” (care of self) in the third and last volume of Histoire de la sexualité (1984).
Hadot’s point is that already in classical times there was a pronounced difference between “philosophy” in the sense of systems, concepts and theoretical discourses, and “philosophy” as a mode of life. He traces the distinction through the history of philosophy, from Plato, via Petrarch, Montaigne and Descartes, to Kant, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. One thing is to philosophise about what the world is like, or to find out what justice and goodness may be, or what characterises true knowledge, etc. Another thing is to live and practice justice, goodness, truth, etc.
Hadot uses the term “spiritual exercises” for the kind of practical thinking that informs philosophy in this second sense, as a mode of life (the term itself is not crucial; for some readers it may smack of cheap therapeutical practices, which is not the intention). The point is that there is a tradition in philosophy for “spiritual exercises” as a practice of intensive focus on the intellectual matter at hand, not primarily in order to contribute to the theoretical discourse of philosophy or to understand the world (even if this is a nice side-effect), but to change one’s own self in relation to the world.
Hadot restricts his analysis to philosophy. But one can easily extend his distinction to other scholarly activities, in science and medicine as well as in the humanities. Following Hadot, one could then say that it is, of course, a good and admirable thing to do science or medicine to understand the physical world and the human body, or to pursue humanistic scholarship in order to understand language or culture. But it is another, and equally good and venerable thing, to be a scientist or a scholar as a mode of life. Similarly with biography. The purpose of the genre is thus not only to help understand a larger historical context, or to be an aesthetic genre, but also to function as a “spiritual exercise”, i.e., to inform the practice of “souci de soi” (care of self), to use Foucault’s wording. In other words, biographical writing enhances both the understanding of individual action in the past and the writer’s and the readers’ understanding of themselves in the world today, thus making them better fit to cope with the present world (cf. Söderqvist, 2002b; Söderqvist, 2003).
Summing up: I believe medical biography has at least two major roles to play in scholarship today. One is to penetrate the intricacies of the medical system of the past by using individuals as lenses, or microcosms, to show how the political, social, economic, military, cultural, and cognitive aspects of medicine and public health have interacted in complex ways. The other is to write and read medical biography as a “spiritual exercise”, i.e., as a contemplation of one’s place in the contemporary medical and health system and in the world at large. In other words, biographies of scientists, doctors and nurses can help medical and health professionals understand the place of their work in the course of life as a whole; similarly biographical stories of patients may help us all, as potential sufferers, to cope with the situation of being ill. (Maybe even biographies of historians of medicine and public health could be of some use?)
I started by asking: Why are there so few medical biographies? I hope my answer has not scared you from inviting me to the next congress to give the concluding address, but now to answer another question: How can we stem the tide of all these many new and good medical and public health biographies?
References
Bliss, M. (1999). William Osler: a life in medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo academicus. Paris: Editions de minuit.
Browne, J. (1995). Charles Darwin: Voyaging. London: Jonathan Cape.
Browne, J. (2002). Charles Darwin: The power of place. London: Jonathan Cape.
Burke, S. (1998). The death and return of the author: criticism and subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Burton, W. (1746 [1743]). An account of the life and writings of Hermann Boerhaave doctor of philosophy and medicine professor of the theory and practice of physics and also of botany and chemistry in the University of Leyden, president of the Chirurgical College in that city, Fellow of the Royal Society in London and of the Royal Academy at Paris. 2nd. ed., London: Henry Lintot.
Christie, J. R. R. & Orton. F. (1988). Writing on a text of the life. Art History, 11, 545-564.
Cook, H. (2000). Boerhaave and the flight from reason in medicine. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74: 221-40.
Cushing, H. (1925). The life of Sir William Osler. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Desmond, A. (1994). Huxley: The devil’s disciple. London: Michael Joseph
Desmond, A. (1997). Huxley: Evolution’s high priest. London: Michael Joseph.
Duffin, J. (1998). To see with a better eye. A life of R. T. H. Laennec. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. (1984). Histoire de la sexualité. 3: Le souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard.
Graves, R. P. (1882-1889). Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, including selections from his poems, correspondence, and miscellaneous writings. 3. vols., Dublin: Hodges, Figgis.
Hadot, P. (1987). Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. 2nd. ed., Paris: Etudes augustiniennes.
Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell.
Hankins, T. L. (1979). In defence of biography: the use of biography in the history of science. History of Science, 17: 1-16.
Jordanova, L. (1993). Has the social history of medicine come of age? The Historical Journal, 36: 437-49.
Koenigsberger, L. (1902-03). Hermann von Helmholtz. 2 vols., Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn.
Linker, B. O. (2002). Great doctors, great scientists: the career of biography in the history of medicine and science. Unpublished paper at the conference “The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology, and Medicine”, Copenhagen, May 22-25, 2002.
Morton, L. T. & Moore, R. J. (1994). A Bibliography of medical and biomedical biography, 2nd ed., Aldershot: Scholar Press.
Oettinger, E.-M. (1854). Bibliographie biographique universelle, Bruxelles: J. J. Stienon.
Reverby, S. & Rosner, D., eds. (1979). Health care in America: Essays in social history. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Söderqvist, T. (2002a). The poetics of biography and the history of science. Unpublished paper at the conference “The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology, and Medicine”, Copenhagen, May 22-25, 2002.
Söderqvist, T. (2002b). The life and work of Niels Kaj Jerne as a source of ethical reflection. Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, 55: 539-545.
Söderqvist, T. (2003). Wissenschaftsgeschichte à la Plutarch: Biographie über Wissenschaftler als tugendetische Gattung. In H. E. Bödeker (ed.), Biographie schreiben (pp. 285-325). Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.
Ward, P. S. (1994). Simon Baruch: rebel in the ranks of medicine, 1840-1921. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Thanks to Beth Linker, Section of the History of Medicine, Yale University, for drawing my attention to Jordanova’s article, and to Hanne Jessen, Signe Lindskov, Søren Bak-Jensen og Adam Bencard, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, for constructive comments.
A meeting like this is a welcome opportunity to raise historiographical questions, i.e., questions about the many assumptions (ontological, epistemological, cultural, or ideological) that guide professional practice in the field of history of medicine and public health.
One such set of historiographical questions has to do with the place and role of the individual in interpretations of the past. Is the individual subject just a social, cultural or linguistic construct? Are “agents” and “actors” primarily defined by webs of discourse? Or do individuals have a role as free and independent creators of society and culture, i.e., as sources of culture rather than its results? And if so, to what extent? Further (to raise the “utility”-question), is the ultimate purpose of interpretations of the records of the past to teach lessons for future collective action? Or is it also to emancipate the individual and to turn him or her into a morally competent global citizen? And finally (to raise the “reflexivity”-question), to what extent do such different opinions about the individual’s place in history, express different cultural and ideological assumptions, or even different personal life-experiences, among historians of medicine and public health?
In the wake of such questions and meta-questions about the place of individuals and their experiences in history, there is a whole set of issues concerning the role of biography in relation to other forms of writing about the past. The individual subject and its place in history is one of those historiographical topics we tend to repress, and biography is one of those genres of writing we tend to avoid. Why is this so?
Ten years ago, Ludmilla Jordanova pointed out in an essay review aptly titled “Has the social history of medicine come to age?” that she was struck by “the restricted range of genres and topics tackled” in the history of medicine and public health. She added that “one of the most dramatic examples of this is the almost total absence of scholarly biographies”, and continued: “Even for the really big names celebrated by Whig history, few have been the recipients of sustained biographical treatment” (Jordanova, 1993, p. 438). In fact, not even Edward Jenner has received any substantial modern treatment.
I think Jordanova was right in 1993. And even though we have seen some rather impressive examples of scholarly biographical writing since then – consider, for example, works such as Patricia Spain Ward’s Simon Baruch: Rebel in the ranks of medicine (1994), Jacalyn Duffin’s To see with a better eye: A life of Laennec (1998) and Michael Bliss’s magisterial William Osler: A life in medicine (1999) – I am afraid that Jordanova’s observation is still valid. The absence of scholarly medical biographies, i.e., biographies about people who have been engaged in medical and public health activities in one way or the other, is indeed dramatic if you compare it with the interest in biographical writing in almost all other fields. General scholarly journals like the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Review of Books abound with reviews of biographies of all kinds: historical biographies, literary biographies, art biographies, biographies of philosophers, and so on. But rarely medical biographies.
The absence of medical biographies becomes even more dramatic if one takes a look at one of the neighbouring fields: scientific biography. During the last two decades there has been a swell of biographies about naturalists, microbiologists, biochemists, physicists, mathematicians, and geologists; whatever one desires. Books that have made their publishers happy and at the same time have received applause in the scholarly journals. In the last two decades, historians of biology, for example, have produced at least four major Darwin portraits based on meticulous archival research, one even in two volumes (Browne, 1996-2002). Historians of physics have produced several acclaimed studies of Newton and Faraday, and there have been marvellously written treatises of Lord Kelvin, Louis Pasteur, Thomas Henry Huxley, Fritz Haber, Lise Meitner and Rosalind Franklin, just to mention some random fine examples. In my view good biographies not only show how scientists were integrated into the thinking of their time, and how the life and work can shed light on the cultural, political and social context of science, but also investigate the mind and practice of the individual scientist, and even delve into their private lives and existential dilemmas.
Of course, there are many bad biographies as well; some would say too many. But this is what could be expected in global book market that absorbs around one hundred titles of scientific lives every year. Generally speaking, I think there is a general agreement among historians of science today that biography has become a quite respectable scholarly genre over the last two decades. The genre has blown new vitality into our understanding of science past.
If Academia in general and our disciplinary neighbours in particular, have taken biography to their hearts for some twenty years now, why is this not yet the case in the history of medicine and public health? Why are there still so few scholarly medical biographies?
The question becomes even more topical if one contemplates the fact that the medical-biographical genre has a much longer record than most other biographical genres, including scientific biography. Hippokrates, the celebrated, but elusive phantom figure of ancient medicine, had bioi written of him already in the Hellenistic period, none of which, unfortunately, is extant. A thousand years later, the miraculous healing powers of some of the medieval saints and their relics found the way into their vitae, a genre which later came to be known, somewhat condescendingly, as hagiography (literally saint-writing). And yet another half millennium later, Renaissance and early modern period medical doctors had their given place in the emerging secular biographical tradition, for example in funeral speeches of deceased university professors and in the collections of what was called, obviously by inspiration from Petrarch, “the lives of illustrious men”. Medical biography is thus a very old genre, obviously reflecting the fact that medicine and healing is an old practice, whether pursued by hippocratic doctors, medieval saints or professors in the early modern medical faculties and it continues to be published in great numbers (Morton and Moore, 1994).
In spite of being old and venerable, however, the genre has lagged behind its sister genre, scientific biography, for the last three hundred years (the history of the genres of scientific and medical biography remains to be written; see, for example, Söderqvist, 2002a). The first vitae of the pioneers of the so called scientific revolution, including Copernicus and Kepler, came in the first part of the seventeenth century. As natural philosophy, astronomy and physics, and later chemistry and the biological sciences, advanced toward the top of the academic pecking order, so did biographical portraits of what gradually became known as scientists, whereas the lives of medical men (and later a few women) were gradually assigned a more humble place in the genre spectrum, compared to the lives of the new revolutionary scientists. Consequently, one of the few medical doctors who repeatedly received biographical notice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was Hermann Boerhaave. Of the approximately 1200 medical-biographical essays and monographs published in the three hundred years between 1550 and 1850, almost all were singletons (Oettinger, 1854); Boerhaave, however, received a top score of seven, the most famous of which was that of his admiring English student William Burton, whose Account of the life and writings of Hermann Boerhaave (1743) came only a few years after the great master’s death. The fact that Boerhaave towers higher than any other in the Enlightenment medical biographical tradition confirms the impression that he was, in the eyes of his successors, the man who brought the scientific revolution into medicine (Cook, 2000).
The triumphs of scientific medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were, of course, reflected in medical lives, too. But they still lagged behind their more illustrious scientific colleagues. Scientists were conspicuously present in the Lives and Letters-tradition; these spectacular and detailed compilations about the great luminaries of the Age of Imperialism, tomes packed with excerpts from letters, often in two, sometimes three volumes. Darwin, Pasteur, Kelvin, Wallace and the other great stars of nineteenth century science all got their tributes. The mathematician William Rowan Hamilton was the subject of 2100 pages in three thick volumes (Graves, 1882-89); the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz was memorised by three volumes in German (Koenigsberger, 1902-03). But there were not many great medical doctors among them. And when authors of medical lives eventually adopted this grand format, the era of Lives and Letters had already ebbed out, not least thanks to Lytton Strachey’s and André Maurois’s attacks on what they regarded as biographical dinosaurs. Harvey Cushing’s two-volume Life of Sir William Osler in 1925 was one of the most celebrated medical biographies of the interwar period and was indeed a great tribute to the man. In form and outlook, however, it came almost a quarter of a century too late. It was out of fashion before it was even conceived.
I will not try the reader’s patience by going into the medical biographical tradition of the rest of the twentieth century, but will hasten to my conclusion of this look-back on the record of the genre, viz., that one reason why there are so few scholarly medical biographies today, compared to, for example, scientific biographies, is that even if medical biography is a very old genre, it never really has had a strong presence as a scholarly genre. True enough, tucked away on the shelves here and there are some extremely well-written and thoughtful studies. But, with the risk of sounding contentious, there have indeed been a lot of bad medical biographies. The Biography Room of the Welcome Library in London contains every possible variety of eulogistic, panegyric, hagiographic, badly written, badly organised, badly contextualised biography, in all major languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Danish, Swedish, etc. Biographies written by admiring colleagues, devoted students, faithful wives and proud daughters and sons; biographies written out of duty, or as labours of love; biographies that wanted to set the record straight, and so forth, but very few good scholarly biographies.
This lack of a strong scholarly medical biographical tradition may partly explain the absence that struck Ludmilla Jordanova in 1993. But there is also another, and probably more important, reason which has to do with the strong impact that social history has made on the field of history of medicine and health in the last three decades.
If one goes back to the programmatic manifestos of the social historians of medicine in the 1970s and 1980s, one will note the extent to which they were fighting against the biographical genre. They probably did not do so because they were trying to defend a scholarly space of their own against the dominance of scholarly medical biography (because, as we have seen, there was hardly any such tradition), and their fight against biography was probably not driven by a virtuous wish to combat the many bad medical biographies (because there were bad biographies in all possible areas, including lousy art biographies, literary biographies and scientific biographies, now filling dusty shelves in remote library stacks). Neither did the social historians of medicine fight so fiercely against biography because they were influenced by the vague anti-biographical sentiments fuelled by positivism, Marxism, structuralism, new criticism etc., that hovered all over Academia during most of the post-war period (because art historians, literary historians, historians of science etc., continued to produce scholarly biographies apparently without being affected either by the marxist denouncement of individualism, by Roland Barthes’s call for the “death of the author”, or by the young Michel Foucault’s attempt to eradicate the subject (Burke, 1998)).
So why then did historians of medicine in general and social historians of medicine in particular, try to root biography out? Susan Reverby and David Rosner’s influential anthology Health care in America: Essays in social history from 1979 gives a clue. In their introductory chapter, the editors questioned medical doctors’ definitions of health and disease and hegemony over history; they wanted historians to take over professional ownership of the medical past. But there was more at stake. Reverby and Rosner had a much more far-reaching political goal than control of the past: they evidently wanted to have a say about who should control the contemporary medical system. The new social history of medicine was thought to be a weapon that would unmask “the pervasive societal faith in the potential and efficacy of medical science” (Reverby and Rosner, 1979, p. 4). Historians were thought to help break doctors’ control over the health system. Reverby and Rosner took the side of patients against powerful doctors, and in doing so; they particularly questioned biographies of “great men”, because they believed that biographies were an expression of false consciousness. In their view, medical biographies made the presumed real forces in history – social and economic forces, political discourses, ideologies, patients, nurses, etc. – invisible. In short, biographies upheld the power relations in the medical system.
Confirmed social historians of medicine were not alone in attacking biography as an expression of a deplorable “great doctor”-perspective in history of medicine. With very few exceptions, most professional historians of medicine in the 1980s and 1990s have been hostile, or at best indifferent, to biographical writing (Linker, 2002; Söderqvist, 2002a). This is remarkable, because it was in the same period that Academia in general began to shake the ban on biography imposed by Marxism and structuralism off their shoulders. (Indeed, literary and art historians never found it necessary to fight the art establishment and have therefore apparently not felt any strong need to attack biographies of artists. In fact, it seems as if art historians still feel rather cosy with the idea of the “great artist”; more critical approaches to art biography, like Christie and Orton (1988), have not had much impact).
Likewise historians of science have not felt any strong urge to combat the “great men” of science for political reasons; the idea of “great scientists” has just been considered a trifle unfashionable, so it has rather been a question of moving biography out of the “great man” perspective instead of attacking and denying the genre of biography altogether. As Thomas Hankins wrote in an influential article titled “In defence of biography” published in 1979 (the same year as Reverby and Rosner made their attack), the genre could in fact be used productively to show how the political, social, cognitive, philosophical, etc. aspects of science were working together. Hankins did not see biography as the expression of a suppressive professional ideology, but as a useful methodological tool for exploring science in its wider context.
Hankins’s 1979-article announced the come-back of biography as a scholarly genre in the history of science. For the next two decades there has been a surge of scholarly scientific biographies, many of them written with the Hankinsinian purpose in mind. Adrian Desmond’s two volumes about Thomas Henry Huxley (1994-97) is a telling example. “This is a story of Class, Power and Propaganda”, Desmond announced in the preface: this is “a contribution to the new contextual history of science”. And he continued: “Isn’t it the modern function of biography to carve a path through brambly contexts? To become a part of history?... And isn’t that our ultimate aim, to understand the making of our world?” And again:
“Huxley is part of the new contextual history of science. This itself is a reaction to the old history of ideas, which displaced the person, made him or her a disembodied ghost, a flash of transcendent genius. Only by embedding Huxley can we appreciate his role in the vast transformation that staggered our great-grandfathers” (Desmond, 1997, p. 235).
Desmond and other historians of science have thus given good arguments for not setting social history up against biography and the individual. So it may be time for historians of medicine and public health to begin to reconsider the genre of biography. The omnipotent doctor is not the major culprit any more; today the medical system is in the hands of politicians, health administrators, insurance companies and pharmaceutical multinationals as well. Patients’ lobby groups and nursing organisations are beginning to have a say as well. The “great doctor” of the past is largely gone. There is no need to flog dead horses and therefore there is no need to combat biography, because it supposedly obscures power relations, social forces and cultural influences in the medical system.
To use the individual as a lens, as it were, into the larger social and cultural context of philosophy, or science, or art, or literature, or, in this case, medicine and health – i.e., to use biography as a microcosm of history at large, or as an ancilla historiae (a servant of history), as I have called it elsewhere (Söderqvist, 2003) – is probably the most common argument among historians today for the use of biography. It is an important role indeed, which, as I have just tried to argue for, makes it more profitable for historians to work with biography rather than against it. Recent developments in historiographical thinking, such as microhistory and the loose intellectual movement of “new historicism” and its interest in literary tropes, add to the impression that biography and some its salient features, for example the focus on narrativity, are important contributions to medical historiography.
Yet biography is not just history by other means. Even when one speaks of biography as an ancilla historiae, one should remember that servants are never entirely in the hands of their masters. Maybe the notion of biography as a adjunct to history should be dropped altogether? As an alternative I suggest to let the ontological assumption which Plutarch made in the introduction to his life of Alexander two millennia ago – viz., that biography (bios) and history (histoira) are two distinct ways of writing about the past – gloss the present debate about the relation between history and biography.
Remember that historia literally means “an inquiry”. But in the course of time such inquiries of the past have by tradition come to mean studies of phenomena like nations, classes, economic institutions, political movements, social interactions, cultural constructs, etc.. Bios means “an individual life course”, and even if some historians today pretend they are writing biographies of cities or countries or even diseases, most historians nevertheless prefer to think about biography as the art of writing the lives of individual human beings. So whereas historia by tradition deals with the collective phenomena of the past, bioi (vitae, biographies) deal with its individuals. One past, two genres.
In other words, even though most historians today think of biography as a genre that takes a secondary role in assisting its more influential master, history, this is not the only role there is for it. Biography has other, more independent, roles as well; for example, at least in the last two centuries is has also been written and read as an aesthetic genre in its own right; literary scholars would probably say that biography has in fact always been emancipated from being a servant to history, that it has always blossomed in its own right.
Medical biography as literature is an interesting topic, which I will not pursue further here. Instead I will use my remaining few minutes to sketch out yet another possible role for medical biography (and in doing so, I will switch from a descriptive-analytical to a somewhat more normative stance). I am thinking of biographical writing as an example of the ancient practice of “spiritual exercises”, a tradition which has been high-lighted in Pierre Hadot’s (1987, 1995) recent reinterpretation of Hellenistic philosophy (1984) which has also had a seminal influence on Michel Foucalt’s idea of “souci de soi” (care of self) in the third and last volume of Histoire de la sexualité (1984).
Hadot’s point is that already in classical times there was a pronounced difference between “philosophy” in the sense of systems, concepts and theoretical discourses, and “philosophy” as a mode of life. He traces the distinction through the history of philosophy, from Plato, via Petrarch, Montaigne and Descartes, to Kant, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. One thing is to philosophise about what the world is like, or to find out what justice and goodness may be, or what characterises true knowledge, etc. Another thing is to live and practice justice, goodness, truth, etc.
Hadot uses the term “spiritual exercises” for the kind of practical thinking that informs philosophy in this second sense, as a mode of life (the term itself is not crucial; for some readers it may smack of cheap therapeutical practices, which is not the intention). The point is that there is a tradition in philosophy for “spiritual exercises” as a practice of intensive focus on the intellectual matter at hand, not primarily in order to contribute to the theoretical discourse of philosophy or to understand the world (even if this is a nice side-effect), but to change one’s own self in relation to the world.
Hadot restricts his analysis to philosophy. But one can easily extend his distinction to other scholarly activities, in science and medicine as well as in the humanities. Following Hadot, one could then say that it is, of course, a good and admirable thing to do science or medicine to understand the physical world and the human body, or to pursue humanistic scholarship in order to understand language or culture. But it is another, and equally good and venerable thing, to be a scientist or a scholar as a mode of life. Similarly with biography. The purpose of the genre is thus not only to help understand a larger historical context, or to be an aesthetic genre, but also to function as a “spiritual exercise”, i.e., to inform the practice of “souci de soi” (care of self), to use Foucault’s wording. In other words, biographical writing enhances both the understanding of individual action in the past and the writer’s and the readers’ understanding of themselves in the world today, thus making them better fit to cope with the present world (cf. Söderqvist, 2002b; Söderqvist, 2003).
Summing up: I believe medical biography has at least two major roles to play in scholarship today. One is to penetrate the intricacies of the medical system of the past by using individuals as lenses, or microcosms, to show how the political, social, economic, military, cultural, and cognitive aspects of medicine and public health have interacted in complex ways. The other is to write and read medical biography as a “spiritual exercise”, i.e., as a contemplation of one’s place in the contemporary medical and health system and in the world at large. In other words, biographies of scientists, doctors and nurses can help medical and health professionals understand the place of their work in the course of life as a whole; similarly biographical stories of patients may help us all, as potential sufferers, to cope with the situation of being ill. (Maybe even biographies of historians of medicine and public health could be of some use?)
I started by asking: Why are there so few medical biographies? I hope my answer has not scared you from inviting me to the next congress to give the concluding address, but now to answer another question: How can we stem the tide of all these many new and good medical and public health biographies?
References
Bliss, M. (1999). William Osler: a life in medicine. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Homo academicus. Paris: Editions de minuit.
Browne, J. (1995). Charles Darwin: Voyaging. London: Jonathan Cape.
Browne, J. (2002). Charles Darwin: The power of place. London: Jonathan Cape.
Burke, S. (1998). The death and return of the author: criticism and subjectivity in Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. 2nd ed. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Burton, W. (1746 [1743]). An account of the life and writings of Hermann Boerhaave doctor of philosophy and medicine professor of the theory and practice of physics and also of botany and chemistry in the University of Leyden, president of the Chirurgical College in that city, Fellow of the Royal Society in London and of the Royal Academy at Paris. 2nd. ed., London: Henry Lintot.
Christie, J. R. R. & Orton. F. (1988). Writing on a text of the life. Art History, 11, 545-564.
Cook, H. (2000). Boerhaave and the flight from reason in medicine. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 74: 221-40.
Cushing, H. (1925). The life of Sir William Osler. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Desmond, A. (1994). Huxley: The devil’s disciple. London: Michael Joseph
Desmond, A. (1997). Huxley: Evolution’s high priest. London: Michael Joseph.
Duffin, J. (1998). To see with a better eye. A life of R. T. H. Laennec. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.
Foucault, M. (1984). Histoire de la sexualité. 3: Le souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard.
Graves, R. P. (1882-1889). Life of Sir William Rowan Hamilton, including selections from his poems, correspondence, and miscellaneous writings. 3. vols., Dublin: Hodges, Figgis.
Hadot, P. (1987). Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique. 2nd. ed., Paris: Etudes augustiniennes.
Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a way of life: spiritual exercises from Socrates to Foucault, Oxford: Blackwell.
Hankins, T. L. (1979). In defence of biography: the use of biography in the history of science. History of Science, 17: 1-16.
Jordanova, L. (1993). Has the social history of medicine come of age? The Historical Journal, 36: 437-49.
Koenigsberger, L. (1902-03). Hermann von Helmholtz. 2 vols., Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn.
Linker, B. O. (2002). Great doctors, great scientists: the career of biography in the history of medicine and science. Unpublished paper at the conference “The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology, and Medicine”, Copenhagen, May 22-25, 2002.
Morton, L. T. & Moore, R. J. (1994). A Bibliography of medical and biomedical biography, 2nd ed., Aldershot: Scholar Press.
Oettinger, E.-M. (1854). Bibliographie biographique universelle, Bruxelles: J. J. Stienon.
Reverby, S. & Rosner, D., eds. (1979). Health care in America: Essays in social history. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Söderqvist, T. (2002a). The poetics of biography and the history of science. Unpublished paper at the conference “The Poetics of Biography in Science, Technology, and Medicine”, Copenhagen, May 22-25, 2002.
Söderqvist, T. (2002b). The life and work of Niels Kaj Jerne as a source of ethical reflection. Scandinavian Journal of Immunology, 55: 539-545.
Söderqvist, T. (2003). Wissenschaftsgeschichte à la Plutarch: Biographie über Wissenschaftler als tugendetische Gattung. In H. E. Bödeker (ed.), Biographie schreiben (pp. 285-325). Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag.
Ward, P. S. (1994). Simon Baruch: rebel in the ranks of medicine, 1840-1921. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Thanks to Beth Linker, Section of the History of Medicine, Yale University, for drawing my attention to Jordanova’s article, and to Hanne Jessen, Signe Lindskov, Søren Bak-Jensen og Adam Bencard, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, for constructive comments.
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
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
Hagiografi og forskerbiografi
This unpublished paper (written in Danish) was presented at Forum for Theology and Science (Forum Teologi-Naturvidenskab) at the University of Aarhus, November 9, 1998 (file is dated 8 November 1998).
Hagiografi og forskerbiografi
Tak for indbydelsen - glad for at være med i det her forum - har aldrig været her før - meget spændt på diskussionen.
Udgangspunktet for mit oplæg her idag om "Hagiografien og forskerbiografien", er jo at jeg for nylig har forsvaret en forskerbiografi som doktordisputats -- om den danske immunolog og Nobelpristager Niels Kaj Jerne. Det er første gang en forskerbiografi er blevet antaget til forsvar for den filosofiske doktorgrad i Danmark, og derfor knyttede der sig en del interesse til forsvarshandlingen i begyndelsen af september. Bogen blev anmeldt i alle større dagblade -- nogle mere seriøst end andre -- og den gav ophav til seks timers opposition.
Det har været et interessant mønster i kritiken. De, der var positive (og det var da heldigtvis de fleste), har fremhævet bogens komposition, stil, sprog, det historiske håndværk, fodnoteapparatet etc., dvs at jeg har levt op til de akademiske dyder.
De, som har været negative derimod, har næsten udelukkende haft indvendinger imod, at jeg gik så tæt ind på min hovedperson, at jeg så at sige klædte ham af, at jeg viste hvordan hans private funderinger, livserfaringer og verdensanskuele øvede indflydelse på hans videnskabelige virke. Marie Tetzlaff mente i Politiken at denne nærgående behandling af en, i hendes øjne så ubehaglig, person som Jerne var onødvændig og udtryk for manglende kærlighed -- hvis man ikke har mere kærlighed til sin person skal man ikke skrive om ham, sagde hun. Og videnskabsjournalisten Tor Nørretranders skrev (også i Politiken), at det private var helt ligegyldigt i den her sag, for når store videnskabsmænd får sine store ideer så findes der ikke noget at forklare -- sande ideer behøver slet ikke forklares. Så at skrive om Jernes private liv blir det rene dyneløfteri, mente han.
De her meget forskelligartede reaktioner har gjort et stort indtryk på mig, og de er vigtige indput i det arbejde jeg er gået igang med, og som jeg regner med at bruge en stor del af mit 5-årige forskningsrådsstipendium. Det projekt jeg er igang med, handler om at sætte forskerbiografien i perspektiv, både historisk og tematisk -- og formålet med det her oplæg, ihvertfald fra min side, er at få respons på projektet.
At sætte forskerbiografien i historisk perspektiv betyder at jeg vil gøre nogle nedslag i genrens lange træk, fra den antikke filosofbiografi og op til den nutidige forskerbiografi. Og tematisk ved tage fat i nogle af de interesser der knytter sig til genren. Biografien har mange interessenter:
F.eks. den historievidenskabelige interesse der ligger i at se forskerbiografien som et stykke historieskrivning, enten om en person alene eller om personen i en større historisk sammenhæng.
- En litterær interesse der handler om at se biografien som et slags roman.
- En panegyrisk interesse som handler om at biografien skal bidrage til hyldesten af en person og den institution eller nation han/hun virket i.
- En psykologisk interesse -- at se biografien som et stykke psykologisk case-study.
- En moralisk interesse, hvor man ser biografien som et stykke eksemplarisk etik, et forebillede til etisk handling.
- Og måske også en soteriologisk interesse -- det vil jeg lige vende tilbage til tilsidst i oplægget.
Jeg tror at de reaktioner, der er kommet, kan fortolkes udfra ihvertfald nogle af disse interesser. En måde at fortolke de positive reaktioner på bogen, er nemmelig at se dem som udtryk for, at man mener at bogen lever op til de krav til biografien som har været de forherskende indenfor genren i dets helhed under moderniteten -- nemlig at biografien er en kombination af roman og videnskabelig historieskrivning.
Det er biografiens opgave at vise hvordan værket egentlig er blevet til, at male et "sandt" billede af personen, uafhængigt af hvilket eftermæle han selv eller hans elever vil at han skal have, og en historisk fagligt korrekt vurdering af personens historiske forankring og virke -- og alt dette med særlige litterære krav til sprig og stil. Det er et modernistisk syn på biografien som en genre der i litterær form skal give os det sande billede af livet og værket.
Og det er dette syn på biografien som (som jeg ser det) ligger som u-udtalte udgangspunkt for den positive kritik.
Den negative kritik, derimod, er (mener jeg) udtryk for et ganske anderledes syn på biografien, nemlig at genren grundlæggende skal bidrage til at give et hyldest til et betydningsfuldt menneskes betydningsfulde indsats i samfundet og i kulturen. Biografiens opgave er at installere politisk, kulturelt og videnskabeligt betydningsfulde personer i deres plads i historien.
Biografien skal kort sagt være panegyrisk (af he panægyris, festlig fællesforsamling og deraf afledte adjektiv panægyrikos = passende for den offentlige fest, og substantiv ho panægyrikos, dvs. en lovtale). En opfattelse som måske bedst er kommet til udtrykt netop hos Nørretranders som meget apropos har været en de de mest aktive til at skabe offentlige fester omkring naturvidenskaben, og som selv har skrevet en lovtale til Niels Bohr. Ud fra dette udgangspunkt er bogen en stor fejltagelse.
Som i kan høre har jeg formuleret alternativerne her -- kombinationen af roman og videnskabelig historieskrivning hhv. panegyrik -- så at der ikke er nogen tvivl om hvilket af dem jeg går ind for. Og det er ikke kun fordi jeg personlig foretrækker positiv fremfor negativ kritik. Det er også fordi jeg lever i en tid hvor romanen og den videnskabelige historieskrivning er normen og hvor panegyriken er latterlig.
Sådan har det ikke altid været. Under det meste af historien er det panegyriken der har været normen. Biografigenren har jo sine rødder i den arkaiske græske tradition for at skrive lovsange (egkomia) til gode og magtfulde mænd, en sekulær variant af traditionen for lovsange (humnoi) til guderne. Blandt tidlige bevarede enkomier findes f.eks. Isocrates' Euagoras, som førfatteren selv hævdede var den første lovsang i prosaform. En flittig enkomie-forfatter var Xenophon som bl.a. skrev en kombination af øjenvidneskildring og forsvarstale over Sokrates, Apomnemoneumata (også kendt som Memorabilia), og et omfattende, om end delvist fiktivt, biografisk portræt af den persiske konge Kyros (den såkaldte Cyropaedia). Biografier over konger og kendte krigere udviklede sig til en veletableret genre under hellenistisk tid og op igennem senantikken.
På tilsvarende måde er jo den middelalderlige helgenbiografi (hagiografien) i nogle henseender en form for panegyrik. Eller snarare, det er det panegyriske islæt som man senere har lagt mest mærke til. Hagiografien er blevet lagt for had fordi panegyriken til den grad kom at lade den ukritiske hyldest af helgengerningen erstatte den kritiske holdning, fakticiteten og omsorgen om den litterære fremstilling. "This was a period of biographical darkness", slår forfatteren til Encyclopedia Britannicas biografiartikel lakonisk fast når han når frem till middelalderen.
Nu er middelaldermørket i og for sig ikke så kompakt som man man kan tro -- der findes en del sekulære biografier, f.eks. Einhard's Vita Caroli Magni fra 800-tallet, som godtnok har et klart panegyrisk sigte, men hvor forfatteren pointerer, at han har været omhyggelig med ikke at udelade nogle facts. Og indenfor helgenbiografien kan man pege på f.eks. Edmer's Vita Anselmi fra begyndelsen af 1100-tallet (den er jeg ved at læse lige nu) som bær præg af at Edmer var en usedvanligt god iagttager af Anselm's personlighedstræk og havde svært at få øje på nogle af de under han ifølge den hagiografiske tradition burde spække sin bog med.
Men disse er alligevel sjældne eksempler. I det hele taget er panegyriken helt dominerende i hagiografien. Det gælder sådan set også i renæssancen, f.eks. i Vasaris' kunstnerbiografier, selv om det panegyriske element blandes op med et mere historisk-videnskabeligt element. Det er først i 1700- og 1800-tallene at panegyriken for alvor dæmpes ned. I indledningen til den mest kendte og mest toneangivende af alle biografier, Life of Johnson, der udkom i to bind i 1791, skrev James Boswell at han ville skrive om Samuel Johnson som denne "really was", fordi, skriver han, "I profess to write, not his panegyrick, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect".
Den biografiske genres historie i de tohundrede år der fulgte Life of Johnson er en eneste lang indløsning af dette kritiske-realistiske tema -- desværre har jeg ikke tid til at gå i detaljer her. Lad mig bare sige, at sejrsgangen for den kritiske, historisk-videnskabelige biografi ikke er total. Panegyriken har overlevt hist og pist. Og tit finder man i mange biografier en pudsig blanding af kritisk realisme og lovtale. Det gælder John Lennon-biografier, Pelé-biografier og Kennedy-biografier -- hvor modernismens tendens at forklare og afsløre balanceres af at mange af de personer som biograferes er vor tids helte -- en Elvis Presley-biografi kan næsten ikke undgå at blive et enkomion over "The King", en Martin Luther King-biografi en hyldest til medborgerretskæmperen.
Forskerbiografier er ingen undtagelse fra denne blanding af lovtale og kritisk realisme. Den forskerbiografiske tradition har ligesom al anden biografi sine rødder i panegyriken. Hvis vi ser bort fra filosof-biografier, som jo findes helt tilbage til antikken, så kom de første egentlige forskerbiografier med Academie des Sciences' tradition fra slutningen af 1600-tallet om fremover, for at skrive såkaldte éloges, lovprisninger, over sine afdøde medlemmer, en tradition som sidenhen spred sig til andre videnskabelige akademier. Selv om de med tiden blev et mere og mere kritisk-realistisk træk i det franske videnskabsakademies éloges, så er det panegyriske element stærkt, i en udstrækning at i hvertfald en idéhistoriker, Charles B. Paul, betegner akademitalerne som moderne hagiografier.
Og ser man til forskerbiografierne i dette århundrede er det svært at frigøre sig fra en følelse af, at godtnok er biografiforfatterne klare over at man bør leve op til den historievidenskabelige og kildekritiske metode, men at der allerede i valget af hovedperson ligger en mere eller mindre skjult panegyrisk interesse -- at man skriver om Bohr fordi man vil hylde en af nationens store og kendte sønner, at man vil hylde fysikken, at man vil hylde en af vort århundredes store tænkere. Om ikke andet af den grund, tror jeg det ville være gavnligt at mere systematisk diskutere ligheder og uligheder mellem forskerbiografien og helgenbiografien som to former for panegyriker.
For at vende tilbage til listen over interesser bag biografien, så er panegyriken kun ét (omend vigtig) aspekt af helgenbiografien. Et anden nærbeslægtet, og måske lige så vigtigt aspekt, er det moralsk opdragende. Nærbeslægtet, fordi det som i antikken og middelalderen tit blev opfattet som værd at hylde, var ikke bare de store dåd, men også de store dyder som lå bagved dådene.
Det moralsk opdragende aspekt i den antikke biografi kommer bedst til udtryk hos Plutarch, som ekplicit skriver i indledningen til sin Timoleon-biografi, at formålet er (i Loeb-udgavens oversætning) "to adorn my own life in conformity with the virtues therein depicted" -- og når han siger virtues/arætai/dyder henviser Plutarch jo selvfølgelig til hele den antikke dydsetiske tradition, ikke kun til Aristoteles men til hele den hellenistiske dydsfilosofi.
Det moralsk opdragende aspekt er også gennemgående i hagiografien. Helgenbiografier bliver læst højt i klostrene som ren og skær opbyggelseslitteratur. Selv det franske akademis hyldningstaler var præget af et opdragende element, så også her går panegyrik og moralsk dannelse hånd i hånd. Langt ind i sidste århundrede er den moraliske et væsentligt motiv hos biografiforfattere. Et godt eksempel er den skotske forfatter Samuel Smiles, måske bedst kendt for sit didaktiske arbejde Self-Help og for sine mange biografiske essæer over ingenjører og andre heltefigurer under den industrielle revolution, som konkluderede, att "the chief use of biography consists in the noble models of character in which it abounds".
Det er vel egentlig kun i den moderne forskerbiografi, at det moralske islæt forsvinder ud af billedet. I den moderne forskerbiografi møder vi en forholdsvist videnskabelig-kritisk biografi med (som jeg tidligere påpegede) panegyriske islæt, men stort set uden moralske elementer.
Eller hvad? Måske ligger der alligevel et (ubevidst) moralsk element i mange moderne forskerbiografier -- altså at man fremhæver forskerens flid, mod, samarbejdsevne, nysgerrighed, kreativitet m.m. som forebilledlige dyder for unge videnskabsmænd og kvinder, så at de, ved at læse biografier om nysgerrige forskere, selv skal følge i nysgerrighedens spor. Men hvis der er et moralsk element, så er det ikke udtalt. Ingen nutidig forskerbiograf vil eksplicit vove sige at formålet med hans arbejde er at tjæne som moralsk forbillede for unge mennesker.
Jeg prøvede faktisk lidt i skjul i Jerne-biografien, og selv om det var nogle få linier det handlede om, så vækkede det umiddelbart forargelse hos nogle af mine ekstraopponenter, at jeg "dømte ham", som de sagde.
At se biografien som et stykke eksemplarisk etik (narrativ etik, ville Svend Bjerg nok kalde det) er således endnu ikke noget man vil tale højt om blandt videnskabshistorikere og forskerbiografer. Jeg ved ikke om kirkehistorikere og teolog-biografer er anderledes i det henseende (i det hele taget kunne jeg tænke mig at vide mere om forholdet mellem kirkehistorie og teolog-biografi, altså ikke helgenbiografi men teolog-biografi, for det er jo i princippet er form for forskerbiografi).
Men nok om det -- det sidste aspekt af helgenbiografien som jeg tror det er værd at kikke lidt nærmere på, hvis man vil tematisere forskerbiografien, det er hvad jeg vil kalde det soteriologiske (af såtær, redning, frelse), dvs en biografi som opfylder en frelsesinteresse. Og jeg skal skynde mig at sige, at jeg er ude på tynd is når jeg kommer in på den soteriologiske interesse.
Jeg har lånt udtrykket "soteriologisk biografi" af en australsk teolog og biografiforsker der hedder Richard Hutch, men kun selve udtrykket, for jeg synes at hans diskussion af det (i en bog som hedder The Meaning of Lives) er ret uklar.
Når det gælder helgenbiografien er det selvfølgeligt klart hvad den soteriologiske interesse går ud på. Slår vi op på artikeln "Heiligenverehrung-hagiographie" i Realleksikon für Antike und Christentum skriver, så får vi at vide at "sittliche u. geistliche Erbauung der Leser u./oder Zuhører" er en af de vigtigste funktioner af hvad forfatteren (Marc van Uytfanghe) kalder "der hagiographische diskurs".
"Sittliche Erbauung", det ligger allerede implicit i det jeg lige sagde om det moralske aspekt af biografien. Soteriologi handler om "geistliche Erbauung". At den kristne hagiografi, foruden at være et stykke panegyrik og et stykke moralsk vejledning, også handlede om åndelig opbyggelse og veje til frelse, om at indlejre den enkeltes liv i frelseshistorien -- det er der vel ingen tvivl om.
Men vil det være meningsfuldt at også forstå forskerbiografien i termer af åndelig opbyggelse og frelse? Ja, det mener jeg faktisk, og jeg er begyndt på at argumentere for det i en artikel om forskerbiografien som opbyggelig genre, som kom i en antologi over forskerbiografier der udkom på Cambridge University Press sidste år.
Vi er så vandt til at tænke naturvidenskab som en upersonlig aktivitet, hvor den enkelte forsker er et mer eller mindre anonymt redskap, en omvendt forlængelse af det eksperimentelle udstyr, for udforskningen af naturlovene, ofte med teknologiske anvendelser i sigte -- at vi ofte ikke ser denne udforskning som et hiin enkeltes livsprojekt.
Men forskning er jo i høj grad et livsprojekt, vi kunne måske endda sige et eksistentielt projekt. Vi investerer håb og længsler i arbejdet, håb om at se ting ingen anden har set, nogen gange (som jeg prøver at vise i Jerne-biografien) båret af en længsel efter det sublime, efter en dimension af tilværelsen hinsides det daglige trummerum med kollegerne og spektrofotometret der ikke virker. Heri ligger kimet til en religiøs impuls -- ja, hos nogle er forskning endda et religiøst projekt forklædt i mere eller mindre sekulær-sproglig drægt (som hos f.eks. biologen Jesper Hoffmeyer).
Et andet kim til en religiøs impuls kommer af, at den videnskabelige verden er fuld af store bedrifter, af verdslig succéer, af konkurrence, af elitisme og stræben efter den fuldendte prestation, af karriere og statusprivilegier -- kort sagt at verdslig triumf. Men den er jo også fyldt af fejltagelser, af tab, af følelsen af at være mislykket, af stor ensomhed. I disse øjeblikke af sociale og menneskelige nederlag mindes også medlemmer af den videnskabelige verden om sine begrænsninger og sin længsel efter at blive set og at blive elsket. Så heri ligger også kimet til en religiøs impuls.
Når jeg nu siger at man kan se et soteriologisk aspekt i forskerbiografien, så mener jeg vel egentlig bare at den kan hjælpe sine læsere at udvikle disse impulser -- at artikulere de håb om at finde en livsmening i det intellektuelle arbejde og den åndelige længsel som, trods alle Trøjborgske foranstaltninger, stadigvæk findes hos mange enkelte forskere. Tor Johan Grevbo, som er én af redaktørerne for det norske Halvårsskrift for praktisk teologi, taler om biografin som en form for sjælesorg. Men mindre kan også gøre det -- når Grevbo taler om sjælesorg så lægger han selvfølgelig ind en kerygmatisk dimension i biografien (den sjæl som læser om en anden sjæl skal frelses).
Jeg hævder ikke at sjælesorg og frelse nødvændigtvis skal forstås evangelisk. Men der findes utvivelagtigt elementer af noget vi kunde kalde længsel efter frelse hos alle mennesker, og læsning af biografier indholder, vil jeg hævde, altid elementer af noget der ligner sjælesorg.
Så er der tid til at opsummere: der er tre træk af den middelalderlige helgenbiografi (og nogle af disse træk kan genfindes også i den antikke biografi og i den tidlig-moderne biografi), som ville kunne inspirere tematiske studier af den nutidige forskerbiografi -- og det er: det panegyriske træk, det moralske træk, og det soteriologiske træk.
Afslutningsvist vil jeg sige at jeg for nylig er blevet bevidst om yderligere et hagiografisk islæt i Jerne-biografien. Næsten alle de tidlige middelaldersbiografer lagde stor vægt på at udmejsle en slutscene, i hvilken man gør rede for de sidste ord som det døende helgen udtaler. Hagiograferne var specielt interesserede i disse de sidste øjeblikke i den hellige mands eller kvindes liv, fordi disse øjeblikke, mente man, forbandt det jordiske med det himmelske liv.
I epilogen til Jerne-biografien redeviser jag til sidst en telefonsamtalte som Jerne og jeg havde et par måneder inden hans død i efteråret 1994, vores sidste samtale sammen. Jerne havde en terminal cancer. Nogle af jer har måske læst anekdoten eller hørt mig fortælle den før, men jeg vil lige gentage den igen, fordi den så klart illustrerer et træk i min biografi, der går helt tilbage til den hagiografiske tradition (jeg fortæller den på englsk):
At the beginning of August 1994, Alexandra suddenly called me up.
- "Niels doesn't like that title of the book, What struggle to escape," she proclaimed in her usual direct way.
I asked to speak with Jerne, and a few minutes later he came to the telephone, apparently somewhat woozy from pain-killing medicine.
- "What do you mean," I asked. "Why don't you like the title of the book?"
There was a silence.
- "You want to call it 'What struggle to escape', right?" he replied at last, and went on: "Isn't that from a poem by Keats?"
- "Yes," I answered.
- "And the line before it is 'What mad pursuit?'
- "Yes," I answered again.
- "Which is also the title of Francis Crick's autobiography?" he added.
- "That's right," I answered, still not sure just what his drift was.
Then it came, loud and clear, without the least uncertainty in his voice: "I don't want to be second to Francis Crick."
That was our last conversation. Just over two months later, on 7 October, 1994, Niels Kaj Jerne died in his home in Castillon-du-Gard.
Jeg tror ikke at dette islæt af hagiografi i min biografi er så enestående. Jeg tror der er mange sådane træk i mange forskerbiografier og jeg ser frem imod at diskutere det med jer.
Hagiografi og forskerbiografi
Tak for indbydelsen - glad for at være med i det her forum - har aldrig været her før - meget spændt på diskussionen.
Udgangspunktet for mit oplæg her idag om "Hagiografien og forskerbiografien", er jo at jeg for nylig har forsvaret en forskerbiografi som doktordisputats -- om den danske immunolog og Nobelpristager Niels Kaj Jerne. Det er første gang en forskerbiografi er blevet antaget til forsvar for den filosofiske doktorgrad i Danmark, og derfor knyttede der sig en del interesse til forsvarshandlingen i begyndelsen af september. Bogen blev anmeldt i alle større dagblade -- nogle mere seriøst end andre -- og den gav ophav til seks timers opposition.
Det har været et interessant mønster i kritiken. De, der var positive (og det var da heldigtvis de fleste), har fremhævet bogens komposition, stil, sprog, det historiske håndværk, fodnoteapparatet etc., dvs at jeg har levt op til de akademiske dyder.
De, som har været negative derimod, har næsten udelukkende haft indvendinger imod, at jeg gik så tæt ind på min hovedperson, at jeg så at sige klædte ham af, at jeg viste hvordan hans private funderinger, livserfaringer og verdensanskuele øvede indflydelse på hans videnskabelige virke. Marie Tetzlaff mente i Politiken at denne nærgående behandling af en, i hendes øjne så ubehaglig, person som Jerne var onødvændig og udtryk for manglende kærlighed -- hvis man ikke har mere kærlighed til sin person skal man ikke skrive om ham, sagde hun. Og videnskabsjournalisten Tor Nørretranders skrev (også i Politiken), at det private var helt ligegyldigt i den her sag, for når store videnskabsmænd får sine store ideer så findes der ikke noget at forklare -- sande ideer behøver slet ikke forklares. Så at skrive om Jernes private liv blir det rene dyneløfteri, mente han.
De her meget forskelligartede reaktioner har gjort et stort indtryk på mig, og de er vigtige indput i det arbejde jeg er gået igang med, og som jeg regner med at bruge en stor del af mit 5-årige forskningsrådsstipendium. Det projekt jeg er igang med, handler om at sætte forskerbiografien i perspektiv, både historisk og tematisk -- og formålet med det her oplæg, ihvertfald fra min side, er at få respons på projektet.
At sætte forskerbiografien i historisk perspektiv betyder at jeg vil gøre nogle nedslag i genrens lange træk, fra den antikke filosofbiografi og op til den nutidige forskerbiografi. Og tematisk ved tage fat i nogle af de interesser der knytter sig til genren. Biografien har mange interessenter:
F.eks. den historievidenskabelige interesse der ligger i at se forskerbiografien som et stykke historieskrivning, enten om en person alene eller om personen i en større historisk sammenhæng.
- En litterær interesse der handler om at se biografien som et slags roman.
- En panegyrisk interesse som handler om at biografien skal bidrage til hyldesten af en person og den institution eller nation han/hun virket i.
- En psykologisk interesse -- at se biografien som et stykke psykologisk case-study.
- En moralisk interesse, hvor man ser biografien som et stykke eksemplarisk etik, et forebillede til etisk handling.
- Og måske også en soteriologisk interesse -- det vil jeg lige vende tilbage til tilsidst i oplægget.
Jeg tror at de reaktioner, der er kommet, kan fortolkes udfra ihvertfald nogle af disse interesser. En måde at fortolke de positive reaktioner på bogen, er nemmelig at se dem som udtryk for, at man mener at bogen lever op til de krav til biografien som har været de forherskende indenfor genren i dets helhed under moderniteten -- nemlig at biografien er en kombination af roman og videnskabelig historieskrivning.
Det er biografiens opgave at vise hvordan værket egentlig er blevet til, at male et "sandt" billede af personen, uafhængigt af hvilket eftermæle han selv eller hans elever vil at han skal have, og en historisk fagligt korrekt vurdering af personens historiske forankring og virke -- og alt dette med særlige litterære krav til sprig og stil. Det er et modernistisk syn på biografien som en genre der i litterær form skal give os det sande billede af livet og værket.
Og det er dette syn på biografien som (som jeg ser det) ligger som u-udtalte udgangspunkt for den positive kritik.
Den negative kritik, derimod, er (mener jeg) udtryk for et ganske anderledes syn på biografien, nemlig at genren grundlæggende skal bidrage til at give et hyldest til et betydningsfuldt menneskes betydningsfulde indsats i samfundet og i kulturen. Biografiens opgave er at installere politisk, kulturelt og videnskabeligt betydningsfulde personer i deres plads i historien.
Biografien skal kort sagt være panegyrisk (af he panægyris, festlig fællesforsamling og deraf afledte adjektiv panægyrikos = passende for den offentlige fest, og substantiv ho panægyrikos, dvs. en lovtale). En opfattelse som måske bedst er kommet til udtrykt netop hos Nørretranders som meget apropos har været en de de mest aktive til at skabe offentlige fester omkring naturvidenskaben, og som selv har skrevet en lovtale til Niels Bohr. Ud fra dette udgangspunkt er bogen en stor fejltagelse.
Som i kan høre har jeg formuleret alternativerne her -- kombinationen af roman og videnskabelig historieskrivning hhv. panegyrik -- så at der ikke er nogen tvivl om hvilket af dem jeg går ind for. Og det er ikke kun fordi jeg personlig foretrækker positiv fremfor negativ kritik. Det er også fordi jeg lever i en tid hvor romanen og den videnskabelige historieskrivning er normen og hvor panegyriken er latterlig.
Sådan har det ikke altid været. Under det meste af historien er det panegyriken der har været normen. Biografigenren har jo sine rødder i den arkaiske græske tradition for at skrive lovsange (egkomia) til gode og magtfulde mænd, en sekulær variant af traditionen for lovsange (humnoi) til guderne. Blandt tidlige bevarede enkomier findes f.eks. Isocrates' Euagoras, som førfatteren selv hævdede var den første lovsang i prosaform. En flittig enkomie-forfatter var Xenophon som bl.a. skrev en kombination af øjenvidneskildring og forsvarstale over Sokrates, Apomnemoneumata (også kendt som Memorabilia), og et omfattende, om end delvist fiktivt, biografisk portræt af den persiske konge Kyros (den såkaldte Cyropaedia). Biografier over konger og kendte krigere udviklede sig til en veletableret genre under hellenistisk tid og op igennem senantikken.
På tilsvarende måde er jo den middelalderlige helgenbiografi (hagiografien) i nogle henseender en form for panegyrik. Eller snarare, det er det panegyriske islæt som man senere har lagt mest mærke til. Hagiografien er blevet lagt for had fordi panegyriken til den grad kom at lade den ukritiske hyldest af helgengerningen erstatte den kritiske holdning, fakticiteten og omsorgen om den litterære fremstilling. "This was a period of biographical darkness", slår forfatteren til Encyclopedia Britannicas biografiartikel lakonisk fast når han når frem till middelalderen.
Nu er middelaldermørket i og for sig ikke så kompakt som man man kan tro -- der findes en del sekulære biografier, f.eks. Einhard's Vita Caroli Magni fra 800-tallet, som godtnok har et klart panegyrisk sigte, men hvor forfatteren pointerer, at han har været omhyggelig med ikke at udelade nogle facts. Og indenfor helgenbiografien kan man pege på f.eks. Edmer's Vita Anselmi fra begyndelsen af 1100-tallet (den er jeg ved at læse lige nu) som bær præg af at Edmer var en usedvanligt god iagttager af Anselm's personlighedstræk og havde svært at få øje på nogle af de under han ifølge den hagiografiske tradition burde spække sin bog med.
Men disse er alligevel sjældne eksempler. I det hele taget er panegyriken helt dominerende i hagiografien. Det gælder sådan set også i renæssancen, f.eks. i Vasaris' kunstnerbiografier, selv om det panegyriske element blandes op med et mere historisk-videnskabeligt element. Det er først i 1700- og 1800-tallene at panegyriken for alvor dæmpes ned. I indledningen til den mest kendte og mest toneangivende af alle biografier, Life of Johnson, der udkom i to bind i 1791, skrev James Boswell at han ville skrive om Samuel Johnson som denne "really was", fordi, skriver han, "I profess to write, not his panegyrick, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect".
Den biografiske genres historie i de tohundrede år der fulgte Life of Johnson er en eneste lang indløsning af dette kritiske-realistiske tema -- desværre har jeg ikke tid til at gå i detaljer her. Lad mig bare sige, at sejrsgangen for den kritiske, historisk-videnskabelige biografi ikke er total. Panegyriken har overlevt hist og pist. Og tit finder man i mange biografier en pudsig blanding af kritisk realisme og lovtale. Det gælder John Lennon-biografier, Pelé-biografier og Kennedy-biografier -- hvor modernismens tendens at forklare og afsløre balanceres af at mange af de personer som biograferes er vor tids helte -- en Elvis Presley-biografi kan næsten ikke undgå at blive et enkomion over "The King", en Martin Luther King-biografi en hyldest til medborgerretskæmperen.
Forskerbiografier er ingen undtagelse fra denne blanding af lovtale og kritisk realisme. Den forskerbiografiske tradition har ligesom al anden biografi sine rødder i panegyriken. Hvis vi ser bort fra filosof-biografier, som jo findes helt tilbage til antikken, så kom de første egentlige forskerbiografier med Academie des Sciences' tradition fra slutningen af 1600-tallet om fremover, for at skrive såkaldte éloges, lovprisninger, over sine afdøde medlemmer, en tradition som sidenhen spred sig til andre videnskabelige akademier. Selv om de med tiden blev et mere og mere kritisk-realistisk træk i det franske videnskabsakademies éloges, så er det panegyriske element stærkt, i en udstrækning at i hvertfald en idéhistoriker, Charles B. Paul, betegner akademitalerne som moderne hagiografier.
Og ser man til forskerbiografierne i dette århundrede er det svært at frigøre sig fra en følelse af, at godtnok er biografiforfatterne klare over at man bør leve op til den historievidenskabelige og kildekritiske metode, men at der allerede i valget af hovedperson ligger en mere eller mindre skjult panegyrisk interesse -- at man skriver om Bohr fordi man vil hylde en af nationens store og kendte sønner, at man vil hylde fysikken, at man vil hylde en af vort århundredes store tænkere. Om ikke andet af den grund, tror jeg det ville være gavnligt at mere systematisk diskutere ligheder og uligheder mellem forskerbiografien og helgenbiografien som to former for panegyriker.
For at vende tilbage til listen over interesser bag biografien, så er panegyriken kun ét (omend vigtig) aspekt af helgenbiografien. Et anden nærbeslægtet, og måske lige så vigtigt aspekt, er det moralsk opdragende. Nærbeslægtet, fordi det som i antikken og middelalderen tit blev opfattet som værd at hylde, var ikke bare de store dåd, men også de store dyder som lå bagved dådene.
Det moralsk opdragende aspekt i den antikke biografi kommer bedst til udtryk hos Plutarch, som ekplicit skriver i indledningen til sin Timoleon-biografi, at formålet er (i Loeb-udgavens oversætning) "to adorn my own life in conformity with the virtues therein depicted" -- og når han siger virtues/arætai/dyder henviser Plutarch jo selvfølgelig til hele den antikke dydsetiske tradition, ikke kun til Aristoteles men til hele den hellenistiske dydsfilosofi.
Det moralsk opdragende aspekt er også gennemgående i hagiografien. Helgenbiografier bliver læst højt i klostrene som ren og skær opbyggelseslitteratur. Selv det franske akademis hyldningstaler var præget af et opdragende element, så også her går panegyrik og moralsk dannelse hånd i hånd. Langt ind i sidste århundrede er den moraliske et væsentligt motiv hos biografiforfattere. Et godt eksempel er den skotske forfatter Samuel Smiles, måske bedst kendt for sit didaktiske arbejde Self-Help og for sine mange biografiske essæer over ingenjører og andre heltefigurer under den industrielle revolution, som konkluderede, att "the chief use of biography consists in the noble models of character in which it abounds".
Det er vel egentlig kun i den moderne forskerbiografi, at det moralske islæt forsvinder ud af billedet. I den moderne forskerbiografi møder vi en forholdsvist videnskabelig-kritisk biografi med (som jeg tidligere påpegede) panegyriske islæt, men stort set uden moralske elementer.
Eller hvad? Måske ligger der alligevel et (ubevidst) moralsk element i mange moderne forskerbiografier -- altså at man fremhæver forskerens flid, mod, samarbejdsevne, nysgerrighed, kreativitet m.m. som forebilledlige dyder for unge videnskabsmænd og kvinder, så at de, ved at læse biografier om nysgerrige forskere, selv skal følge i nysgerrighedens spor. Men hvis der er et moralsk element, så er det ikke udtalt. Ingen nutidig forskerbiograf vil eksplicit vove sige at formålet med hans arbejde er at tjæne som moralsk forbillede for unge mennesker.
Jeg prøvede faktisk lidt i skjul i Jerne-biografien, og selv om det var nogle få linier det handlede om, så vækkede det umiddelbart forargelse hos nogle af mine ekstraopponenter, at jeg "dømte ham", som de sagde.
At se biografien som et stykke eksemplarisk etik (narrativ etik, ville Svend Bjerg nok kalde det) er således endnu ikke noget man vil tale højt om blandt videnskabshistorikere og forskerbiografer. Jeg ved ikke om kirkehistorikere og teolog-biografer er anderledes i det henseende (i det hele taget kunne jeg tænke mig at vide mere om forholdet mellem kirkehistorie og teolog-biografi, altså ikke helgenbiografi men teolog-biografi, for det er jo i princippet er form for forskerbiografi).
Men nok om det -- det sidste aspekt af helgenbiografien som jeg tror det er værd at kikke lidt nærmere på, hvis man vil tematisere forskerbiografien, det er hvad jeg vil kalde det soteriologiske (af såtær, redning, frelse), dvs en biografi som opfylder en frelsesinteresse. Og jeg skal skynde mig at sige, at jeg er ude på tynd is når jeg kommer in på den soteriologiske interesse.
Jeg har lånt udtrykket "soteriologisk biografi" af en australsk teolog og biografiforsker der hedder Richard Hutch, men kun selve udtrykket, for jeg synes at hans diskussion af det (i en bog som hedder The Meaning of Lives) er ret uklar.
Når det gælder helgenbiografien er det selvfølgeligt klart hvad den soteriologiske interesse går ud på. Slår vi op på artikeln "Heiligenverehrung-hagiographie" i Realleksikon für Antike und Christentum skriver, så får vi at vide at "sittliche u. geistliche Erbauung der Leser u./oder Zuhører" er en af de vigtigste funktioner af hvad forfatteren (Marc van Uytfanghe) kalder "der hagiographische diskurs".
"Sittliche Erbauung", det ligger allerede implicit i det jeg lige sagde om det moralske aspekt af biografien. Soteriologi handler om "geistliche Erbauung". At den kristne hagiografi, foruden at være et stykke panegyrik og et stykke moralsk vejledning, også handlede om åndelig opbyggelse og veje til frelse, om at indlejre den enkeltes liv i frelseshistorien -- det er der vel ingen tvivl om.
Men vil det være meningsfuldt at også forstå forskerbiografien i termer af åndelig opbyggelse og frelse? Ja, det mener jeg faktisk, og jeg er begyndt på at argumentere for det i en artikel om forskerbiografien som opbyggelig genre, som kom i en antologi over forskerbiografier der udkom på Cambridge University Press sidste år.
Vi er så vandt til at tænke naturvidenskab som en upersonlig aktivitet, hvor den enkelte forsker er et mer eller mindre anonymt redskap, en omvendt forlængelse af det eksperimentelle udstyr, for udforskningen af naturlovene, ofte med teknologiske anvendelser i sigte -- at vi ofte ikke ser denne udforskning som et hiin enkeltes livsprojekt.
Men forskning er jo i høj grad et livsprojekt, vi kunne måske endda sige et eksistentielt projekt. Vi investerer håb og længsler i arbejdet, håb om at se ting ingen anden har set, nogen gange (som jeg prøver at vise i Jerne-biografien) båret af en længsel efter det sublime, efter en dimension af tilværelsen hinsides det daglige trummerum med kollegerne og spektrofotometret der ikke virker. Heri ligger kimet til en religiøs impuls -- ja, hos nogle er forskning endda et religiøst projekt forklædt i mere eller mindre sekulær-sproglig drægt (som hos f.eks. biologen Jesper Hoffmeyer).
Et andet kim til en religiøs impuls kommer af, at den videnskabelige verden er fuld af store bedrifter, af verdslig succéer, af konkurrence, af elitisme og stræben efter den fuldendte prestation, af karriere og statusprivilegier -- kort sagt at verdslig triumf. Men den er jo også fyldt af fejltagelser, af tab, af følelsen af at være mislykket, af stor ensomhed. I disse øjeblikke af sociale og menneskelige nederlag mindes også medlemmer af den videnskabelige verden om sine begrænsninger og sin længsel efter at blive set og at blive elsket. Så heri ligger også kimet til en religiøs impuls.
Når jeg nu siger at man kan se et soteriologisk aspekt i forskerbiografien, så mener jeg vel egentlig bare at den kan hjælpe sine læsere at udvikle disse impulser -- at artikulere de håb om at finde en livsmening i det intellektuelle arbejde og den åndelige længsel som, trods alle Trøjborgske foranstaltninger, stadigvæk findes hos mange enkelte forskere. Tor Johan Grevbo, som er én af redaktørerne for det norske Halvårsskrift for praktisk teologi, taler om biografin som en form for sjælesorg. Men mindre kan også gøre det -- når Grevbo taler om sjælesorg så lægger han selvfølgelig ind en kerygmatisk dimension i biografien (den sjæl som læser om en anden sjæl skal frelses).
Jeg hævder ikke at sjælesorg og frelse nødvændigtvis skal forstås evangelisk. Men der findes utvivelagtigt elementer af noget vi kunde kalde længsel efter frelse hos alle mennesker, og læsning af biografier indholder, vil jeg hævde, altid elementer af noget der ligner sjælesorg.
Så er der tid til at opsummere: der er tre træk af den middelalderlige helgenbiografi (og nogle af disse træk kan genfindes også i den antikke biografi og i den tidlig-moderne biografi), som ville kunne inspirere tematiske studier af den nutidige forskerbiografi -- og det er: det panegyriske træk, det moralske træk, og det soteriologiske træk.
Afslutningsvist vil jeg sige at jeg for nylig er blevet bevidst om yderligere et hagiografisk islæt i Jerne-biografien. Næsten alle de tidlige middelaldersbiografer lagde stor vægt på at udmejsle en slutscene, i hvilken man gør rede for de sidste ord som det døende helgen udtaler. Hagiograferne var specielt interesserede i disse de sidste øjeblikke i den hellige mands eller kvindes liv, fordi disse øjeblikke, mente man, forbandt det jordiske med det himmelske liv.
I epilogen til Jerne-biografien redeviser jag til sidst en telefonsamtalte som Jerne og jeg havde et par måneder inden hans død i efteråret 1994, vores sidste samtale sammen. Jerne havde en terminal cancer. Nogle af jer har måske læst anekdoten eller hørt mig fortælle den før, men jeg vil lige gentage den igen, fordi den så klart illustrerer et træk i min biografi, der går helt tilbage til den hagiografiske tradition (jeg fortæller den på englsk):
At the beginning of August 1994, Alexandra suddenly called me up.
- "Niels doesn't like that title of the book, What struggle to escape," she proclaimed in her usual direct way.
I asked to speak with Jerne, and a few minutes later he came to the telephone, apparently somewhat woozy from pain-killing medicine.
- "What do you mean," I asked. "Why don't you like the title of the book?"
There was a silence.
- "You want to call it 'What struggle to escape', right?" he replied at last, and went on: "Isn't that from a poem by Keats?"
- "Yes," I answered.
- "And the line before it is 'What mad pursuit?'
- "Yes," I answered again.
- "Which is also the title of Francis Crick's autobiography?" he added.
- "That's right," I answered, still not sure just what his drift was.
Then it came, loud and clear, without the least uncertainty in his voice: "I don't want to be second to Francis Crick."
That was our last conversation. Just over two months later, on 7 October, 1994, Niels Kaj Jerne died in his home in Castillon-du-Gard.
Jeg tror ikke at dette islæt af hagiografi i min biografi er så enestående. Jeg tror der er mange sådane træk i mange forskerbiografier og jeg ser frem imod at diskutere det med jer.
Biography and the good life in science
This unpublished paper was written for the session "Biography at the Crossroads" at the 3rd British-North American History of Science Meeting, Edinburgh, July 23-26, 1996 (file dated 18 July 1996). Cf. abstract here; for an earlier version, see here).
Biography and the good life in science
The point of departure for this session is that biography is back and that it constitutes a major genre in the historiography of science. One excellent biography follows the other: recent biographies of Lord Kelvin and Heisenberg have become major contributions to the history of physics; historians of biology can now enjoy the third recent new portrait based on the productions of the Darwin industry. The biographies of the 1980's and 1990's are the result of impeccable archival work, they are based on heaps of private letters and laboratory notebooks, and they display a thorough understanding of the social, political, and scientific context of the achievements of their subjects. No wonder that biography is so popular these days.
Yet the genre is not unproblematic. As we put it in the title of this session, biography is at a sort of crossroads. I say a sort of cross-roads, because the metaphor should not be taken too literally. The problem is not which road to travel, but what kinds of roads there are to choose between.
In a couple of earlier papers I have discussed the possible uses of biographies of scientists. Life stories can still be used for hagiographic reasons of course. They can give material for studies of creativity, such as Larry Holmes's two volumes of Krebs or Gerald Geisons recent revision of Pasteur. And they can also be richly textured analyses of the relation between science and its wider cultural and political context, like Adrian Desmond and James Moore's Darwin.
But in addition to these uses of biography, I have suggested (in a chapter that just came out) that we can also distinguish a kind of biography which I have called existential, the use of which is edification: the story of the life of a scientist can function as a guide for the lives of other scientists, as (positive or negative) models. Good examples of what I call existential or edifying biography are Ray Monks biographies, first of Wittgenstein, now of Bertrand Russell.
In this talk I will take the notion of edification a step further. I will suggest that the notions of existential biography and edification prompt us to open up a neglected space of discourse in the history of science. So far historians of science, including biographers, have focused on the (contextualized or not) production of knowledge claims -- in other words, historians of science, including biographers, have usually had epistemological axes to grind. But since biographies are about persons, the genre invites us to a change of focus -- from a study of the production of knowledge to a study of scientists as moral agents. A discussion of the place of biography in the history of science today therefore has to consider the opening up of roads usually travelled by moral philosophers.
There are many kinds of moral philosophy of which two are quite familiar to students of science studies, namely utilitarian consequentialism and deontology. A large variety of positions of both kinds can easily be found in recent debates about, e.g., the consequences of genetical engineering and the ethics of using animals in experimental systems. What the genre of biography almost automatically seems to suggest, however, is not one of these kinds of moral philosophy, but rather the road travelled by the Greek philosophers, namely the road of eudaimonistic ethics, the ethics dealing with the means of obtaining a good life.
This suggestion would not come as a surprise to those of you who are familiar with recent developments in ethical theory. Philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Julia Annas, and Martha Nussbaum have contributed to a renaissance for eudaimonistic moral philosophy and virtue-ethics, a renaissance for the notions of `virtue' and `the good life' in opposition both to utilitarian consequentialism and to deontology[1]. So what I will do here is simply to articulate some of the notions of an eudaimonistic ethics and apply them to the question of what it means to live a good life in science.
As a starter -- one way to articulate the good life in science would be to identify it with the Platonian idea of the search for `truth'. In The Republic Plato sets forth the notion of the good man as someone who, through a disciplined purification of intellect and passion, turns his attention to the idea of pure Goodness in his soul [2]. This Platonic tradition was continued in early Christianity; you find it, for example, in Augustin's view that the highest good is in God. To live the good life is to know God and be like him; and to be a philosopher accordingly means to love God. In The State of God Augustin, inspired by Platonic philosophy, developed the idea of a choice between a political life and a life in the heavenly city, "spent in considering or enquiring into truth"[3]. Such a contemplative religious life was to be searched for in seclusion, so for many centuries a life in the monastery was considered the best life style for those who wanted to search for the highest good.
Substitute God with Truth and you obtain the secular, scientific version of highest good in modernity, namely, to know the `truth' and to love the `truth'. Accordingly the best secular life style in search of the good is that of a life in a major research library or the Department of Molecular Biology at one of the leading research universities -- or, speaking in universal terms, a life in the Republic of Science, the modern, secular version of the heavenly city.
I hardly need to say that this secularized Platonic-Augustinian conception of a good life in science as the intellectually and emotionally disciplined attention to `truth' is not a very popular idea today. An unholy mixture of neo-Nietzschean and post-modernist thought, utilitarianism and emotivist moral thinking has done away with it. Instead, hedonism (that is, pleasure-ethics) has crept into the heart of Academia. For example, a good life in chemistry is thought to consist in using advanced programs to play around with hydrogen and co-valent bonds, creating new and complex organic molecules on the computer screen. It's probably no coincidence that several autobiographies of contemporary scientists, such as Richard Feynman's Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman or Jim Watson's The Double Helix, abound with references to the playful aspects of science, Today's scientists see themselves in terms of Johan Huizinga's `Homo ludens' [4].
Such autobiographical accounts indicate that the good life in science today could be articulated in terms of some variety of pleasure-ethics. But pleasure is not all there is in science. Science is reportedly also painful. Autobiographical accounts tell not only about the pleasure and joy of solving a problem, but also about the intense feelings of pain before the solution comes, the feelings of fear, anxiety, even terror during the process [5]. Pain seems to be an integral part of science [6]. And if this is the case, the good life in science is not sheer pleasure -- remember that in the most influential hellenistic hedonist school, i.e., epicurean philosophy, pleasure is defined negatively as the absence of pain. From an epicurean point of view, if pain has such a central place in the scientific enterprise, we should rather avoid science. So, hedonism is problematic as the sole candidate for articulating the notion of good life in science. We will have to consider other candidates than pleasure-ethics.
For another, and better, foundation of a discourse about the good scientific life I suggest that we go to the core of the virtue-ethical tradition, namely Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. For Aristotle the aim of human life is the attainment of eudaimonia, which literally means `good daemons' and usually is translated as `happiness', but which actually means something like `human flourishing', `doing well' or `a successful life'. Aristotle didn't think much of a life in pleasure, which he considered suitable to cattle. The good life was to lead an active life in conformity with the virtues. The Greek word for virtue (areté, hence the word aretology for virtue-ethics), should not be understood in the Medieval or modern moralistic sense, but as a combination of virtues in the modern sense and `excellent characters'.
Time does not allow me to go further into Aristotle's view of the relation between the virtues and the good life, so I will turn to the recent virtue-ethical discussion instead. The best present-day point of departure for an understanding of the good life in science is probably that given by Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book After Virtue, which came fifteen years ago but has had virtually no impact whatsoever on historians of science or scholars in science studies interested in moral topics [7].
Following MacIntyre one can distinguish between at least three kinds of goods in science. The first kind are those goods that are external to scientific practices, such as honor, reputation, monetary rewards, etc. These goods are certainly important and there is no point in devaluating them. But from an aretological point of view, external goods are uninteresting because they do not involve the expression of virtues (on the contrary they may often collide with the development of a virtuous life in science).
The other kind of goods (which are more important for my discussion) are those that are internal to scientific practicies (intrinsic goods) and which are achieved by means of the expression of virtues specific to these practicies, such as being an honest, courageous, and skilful experimentalist, or being an able and just professor. The category of intrinsic goods also includes the good life that goes with being virtuously absorbed in these practicies. I guess that it is this aspect of the good life that some scientists and graduate students refer to when they say that they want "to develop themselves" or "to express themself". French molecular biologist Francois Jacob says in his autobiography The Statue Within: "Science meant for me the most elevating form of revolt against the incoherence of nature [...] taking part in the new developments that were shaping up in biology [...] I felt, deeply rooted in myself, the sense of being where someting was happening [...] The opportunity to prove what I could do" [8].
From an aretological point of view, these goods associated with scientific practicies are not enough to characterize a good life in science, however. Not only can scientific excellence be utilized for altogether evil purposes (Nazi medicine is a tragic example), but it often collides with the virtues of ordinary life. Think of all scientists who have destroyed their marriages because they were devoted to the goods internal to science! So we obviously need something more to characterize a good life in science.
Here we can again rely on MacIntyre. To ask `What is the good for me?', he says, is to ask how one can bring out a unity in one's life. Not any kind of unity, but a `narrative unity', i.e., a unity which consists in giving accounts of our actions in terms of our past and our future aims. More specifically, the good life is a narratively unified life spent in seeking for the good, i.e., the good which will enable us to evaluate and order other goods in relation to each other, e.g., enable us to evaluate the good life in using PCR skilfully to obtain excellent research results, in relation to the good life in being a just and generous laboratory leader. I say the good, well aware of the fact that it cannot be absolutely defined -- on the contrary the telos of life implicit in this definition of the good life is contingent on historically given moral traditions. Yet it is precisely through this quest for the good that we, pace MacIntyre, will be able to develop the good life [9].
Finally, I want to expand a little on a central idea in neo-aristotelian virtue-ethics of particular importance for the articulation of the good life in science, namely the notion of `the unity of virtues'. This notion is important, I believe, because it opens up for discussion of virtues in science which is different from that offered by Lorraine Daston in her recent studies of `the moral economy' of 17th and 18th century mathematics and quantitative physics. (A somewhat similar approach was taken by Steven Shapin in A Social History of Truth).
In a recent paper Daston identifies a set of qualities which she calls "quantifying virtues", such as precision, accuracy, impersonality, impartiality and communicability; these qualities are said to have "an almost unbroken history in the sciences as well as in public life" up to the present [10]. Daston calls these qualities virtues. But hers is not an aretological understanding of virtues; these and similar qualities in scientific work are rather what MacIntyre would call "professional skills". Because, according to an aretological understanding of the good life, we cannot differentiate between one set of virtues operating in scientific practices and another set of virtues operating in ordinary life. A virtue is not a disposition that makes for success only in one particular type of situation. As MacIntyre puts it, someone who "genuinely" possesses a virtue, "can be expected to manifest it in very different types of situation" [11].
So, if you are displaying courage or honesty in your work as a molecular biologist, but not in your daily life outside the lab, you are not a courageous or honest person, and consequently, your quest for the good life as the narrative unity of life is hampered [12]. As another exponent of the renaissance for virtue-ethics, Iris Murdoch, puts it, not only seems honesty to be "much the same virtue in a chemist as in a historian" but there is a close similarity between
"the honesty required to tear up one's theory and the honesty required to percieve the real state of one's marriage, though doubtless the latter is much more difficult" [13]. And, continues Murdoch, "A serious scholar has great merits. But a serious scholar who is also a good man knows not only his subject but the proper place of his subject in the whole of his life".
This widened sphere of knowledge that Murdoch speaks about is that which the Greeks called phronesis (moral wisdom) -- a wisdom which at least Aristotle thought superior to scientific knowledge [14]. And a scholar who possesses phronesis is, according to Socrates, the quintessence of a happy person living a good life [15].
Time does not allow me to discuss the differences between a virtue-ethical approach to biography and the kind of analysis of the moral economy of science that Steven Shapin and Lorraine Daston are pursuing, and unfortunately I will not have time to discuss Martha Nussbaum's interesting studies of stoic and epicurean moral philosophy either. I will have to stop here, hoping that my main point has gone through -- that the renaissance for virtue-ethics in contemporary moral philosophy opens up for new possibilites for the genre of biography. Biography has helped historians of science to sharpen the analysis of knowledge production. I suggest that biographers might may be able to sharpen the abilities for a good life in a technoscientific world -- even for those who are surfing around on World Wide Web like our next speaker [*which was Steve Fuller :-)].
Notes
[1]It is probably no coincidence that the renaissance of virtue-ethics paralleles that of biography.
[2]Cf. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto & Windus, 1992), p.11.
[3]Quoted in Cary J. Nederman and Kate Langdon Forhan, "Introduction", pp.1-17 in idem (eds), Medieval Political Theory - A Reader: The Quest for the Body Politic, 1100-1400 (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) (quote on p.*).
[4]Johan Huzinga, Homo ludens*
[5]Pain colors and runs through the life of the scientist, irrespective of his or her scholarly standing. As one scientist says in an interview book:
You go through this long, hard period of filling yourself up with as much information as you can. You just sort of feel it all rumbling around inside of you ... Then ... you begin to feel a solution, a resolution, bubbling up to your consciousness. At the same time you begin to get very excited, tremendously elated -- pervaded by a fantastic sense of joy ... But there's an aspect of terror too in these moments of creativity.... Being shaken out from your normal experience enhances your awareness of mortality.... It's like throwing up when you're sick"
(Quoted in Dash, A Life of One's Own (New York: Harper & Row, 1973, p.318).
[6]The quote is an example of the combination of beauty and pain which Burke and Kant called the `sublime'.
[7]2nd. ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
[8]Francois Jacob, The Statue Within: An Autobiography (New York: Basic Books, 1988), p.274. Autobiographical accounts such as this one have frequently been viewed with suspicion, usually with the argument that they express an ideology of individuality and free will which is blind to the collective and power-and statusimpregnated nature of science (cf. Abir-Am; Löwy etc.), but I see no reason to discount such expressions of the `good life' in science.
[9]Thus, instead of a biological telos, which Aristotle meant was the aim of a human life (the `finis ultimus' which Hobbes rejected), MacIntyre introduces a cultural telos, a socially contextual telos, "a conception of the good which will enable us to understand the place of integrity and constancy in life" and "which will enable us to order other goods"; a quest which is never given, but the result of education and self-knowledge (the late Foucault would probably say `self-construction').
[10]Lorraine Daston, "The Moral Economy of Science", Osiris, vol.10 (1995), 3-24 (quotes on p.8-9).
[11]MacIntyre, op.cit., p.205.
[12]This is in contradiction to Merton's standpoint that objectivity and disinterestedness does not at all presuppose any special degree of "moral integrity" or "personal qualities" of scientists (Robert K. Merton, "The normative structure of science", p.*; quoted in Shapin, A Social History of Truth, p.413).
[13]Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1985), p.96.
[14]Murdoch, op.cit., p.96-97.
[15]In Plato's dialogues Apology and Crito Socrates is said to have equated moral wisdom, virtue, the `good life' and happiness.
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