History, Memory and Public Life by Anna Maerker Simon Sleight Adam Sutcliffe

Author:Anna Maerker, Simon Sleight, Adam Sutcliffe [Anna Maerker, Simon Sleight, Adam Sutcliffe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Reference, Historiography, European General
ISBN: 9781351055567
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2018-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

scientific ancestors, and encouraging students to emulate role models from the past. Science did not always enjoy the high level of public approval and trust that it has received for much of the twentieth century. In the early modern period, celebratory stories of scientific achievement became an important way to bolster science’s claims to authority and public utility. Leading figures were central to these narratives, which were often modelled on medieval accounts of the lives of saints, hagiographies, which presented models for pious emulation, or even went back to forms of biography from classical antiquity. In ancient Greece and Rome, accounts of ‘heroic teachers’ had served as moral exemplars (Taub 2007: 20), and this function of biography was transferred to the lives of exceptional scientists in the early modern period. The elevation of seventeenth-century natural philosopher René Descartes, for instance, began immediately after his death. His biographer Adrien Baillet claimed that Descartes ‘among philosophers is almost like the saints of the church of God’, and argued that this comparison was justified because Descartes had ‘suffered [his enemies’ reproaches] with the patience of a saint’ (Beretta 2016: 19). In the same period, Galileo’s students worked hard to shape the memory of their master in the wake of his conflicts with the Catholic Church, and to turn him from a controversial figure into a ‘martyr of science’ (Gattei 2016). In the eighteenth century, ‘modelling the self on some figure of ‘representative virtue’ was a commonplace psychological exercise’ (Outram 1996: 90). The newly founded scientific academies of the period used eulogies of deceased members to celebrate their achievements, but also to act as exemplars for young scholars to emulate, and to strengthen science’s claims to authority (Weisz 1988; Söderqvist 2007b). In this period, philosophers debated how science could or should contribute to the creation of an enlightened society, and how eulogies of important figures could help establish this new role of science for the public good. According to philosopher and academician d’Alembert, eulogies had to be ‘interesting, so that the public can hear and read them with pleasure, and understand the deeds of those great men who have died for them and for the good of the nation’ (Adkins 2014: 98). While academicians supported the inspiring potential of such narratives, they did not necessarily agree that the deceased colleague should be turned into a saint-like figure. Thus when philosopher Condorcet was in charge of eulogies for members of the French Academy of Sciences he argued that ‘one owes the dead only that which can be useful to the living – truth and justice’ (Hankins 1979: 1), and his accounts of fellow academicians’ lives revealed their flaws as well as their achievements (see, e.g., Adkins 2014: 99). For Condorcet, only a truthful account of the past could be truly useful.

In the nineteenth century, histories of science and medicine written by practitioners themselves continued to celebrate the achievements of their heroes and their contributions to the improvement of mankind, as well as the nation (Waddington 2011: 2).

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