History and Poetics of Scientific Biography

Thomas Söderqvist is Professor for History of Medicine and Director of Medical Museion at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

• Contents: Series editor's preface; Preface; Introduction: A new look at the genre of scientific biography, Thomas Söderqvist; Presenting a 'life' as a guide to living: ancient accounts of the life of Pythagoras, Liba Taub; Biography as a route to understanding early modern natural philosophy, Stephen Gaukroger; Neither genius nor context incarnate: Norman Lockyer, Jules Janssen and the astrophysical self, David Aubin and Charlotte Bigg; Framing the evidence: scientific biography and portraiture, Patricia Fara; Biography and the reward system in science, Thomas L. Hankins; The tragedy of Comrade Hessen: biography as historical discourse, Christopher A.J. Chilvers; Received wisdom in biography: Tycho biographies from Gassendi to Christianson, Helge Kragh; The programmatic function of biography: readings of 19- and 20th-century biographies of Niels Stensen (Steno), Signe Lindskov Hansen; Discriminating days? Partiality and impartiality in 19th-century biographies of Newton, Rebekah Higgitt; Biographies as mediators between memory and history in science, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent; 'La mauvaise herbe': unwanted biographies both great and small, Jacalyn Duffin; Primary suspects: reflections on autobiography and life stories in the history of molecular biology, Rena Selya; Pas de deux: the biographer and the living biographical subject, Vassiliki Betty Smocovitis; Resuscitating the 'Great Doctor': the career of biography in medical history, Beth Linker; 'No genre of history fell under more odium than that of biography': the delicate relations between scientific biography and historiography of science, Thomas Söderqvist; Index.

’The book will be a great addition to medical history courses, especially those which encourage students to explore the theme of biography. Confronted with just a couple of these excellent essays in a seminar, students, if not their lecturers, might begin to engage critically with some of the thousands of under-used medical biographies that currently sit on book shelves and in university libraries.’ Social History of Medicine ’This is a valuable, theoretically informed and yet empirically dense, set of essays which produce a remarkably coherent critical effect. ...so much of the volume deals with scientific lives from the wider European continent and the United States that the volume has a genuinely international reach and appeal.’ David Amigoni, Keele University, in British Society for Literature and Science