To many of its critics, psychology is an ‘antisocial’ science, focusing on the properties of individuals abstracted from social relations, reducing social issues to interpersonal ones, servicing an unequal society. There is much of value in such criticisms. But suppose we were to reverse our perspective, to view psychology as a profoundly social science. The subdiscipline of ‘social psychology’ would be located within a broader web of relations that connect even the most ‘individualistic’ aspects of psychology into a social field. It is not only that truth is a constitutively social phenomenon: like any other body of knowledge staking its claims in the commonwealth of science, the truths of psychology become such only as the outcome of a complex process of construction and persuasion undertaken within a social arena. It is also that the birth of psychology as a distinct discipline, its vocation and destiny, is inextricably bound to the emergence of the ‘social’ as a territory of our thought and our reality.

Governing social life

No doubt all humans are social animals. But the social territory is a historical achievement, a shifting and uncertain terrain that began to consolidate in Western societies in the nineteenth century (cf. Deleuze, in Donzelot, 1979). It is he terrain implied by such terms as social security, social welfare, social workers, and social services. The social is a matrix of deliberation and action, the object of certain types of knowledge, the location of certain types of predicaments, the realm traced out by certain types of apparatus, and the target of certain types of program and ambition.

The social psychology that was written in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s makes frequent references to democracy. Gordon Allport's classic article on the historical background of modern social psychology in the first edition of the Handbook of Social Psychology in 1954 asserts that “the roots of modern social psychology lie in the distinctive soil of western thought and civilization,” suggesting that social psychology requires the rich blend of natural and biological sciences, the tradition of free inquiry and “a philosophy and ethics of democracy” (Allport, 1954). Lewin, Lippitt, and White's famous studies of styles of leadership carried out from 1938 to 1942 at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station sought to demonstrate the differences between experimentally created groups with a democratic atmosphere and those that were autocratic or laissez faire – the differences they found were always to the advantage of democracy (Lewin, Lippitt, and White, 1939; Lippitt, 1939, 1940). George Gallup and S. F. Rae entitled their first book on public opinion polling published in 1940 The Pulse of Democracy and argued that “In a democratic society the views of the majority must be regarded as the ultimate tribunal for social and political issues” (Gallup and Rae, 1940, p. 15). And in England too, J. A. C. Brown, in his much reprinted textbook The Social Psychology of Industry, first published in 1954, has much to say about democracy, concluding that “A genuine industrial democracy can only be based on the intelligent co-operation of primary work groups with responsibly-minded managements” (Brown, 1954, p. 301).

The human being is not the eternal basis of human history and human culture but a historical and cultural artifact. This is the message of studies from a variety of disciplines, which have pointed in different ways to the specificity of our modern Western conception of the person. In such societies, it is suggested, the person is construed as a self, a naturally unique and discrete entity, the boundaries of the body enclosing, as if by definition, an inner life of the psyche, in which are inscribed the experiences of an individual biography. But modern Western societies are unusual in construing the person as such a natural locus of beliefs and desires, with inherent capacities, as the self-evident origin of actions and decisions, as a stable phenomenon exhibiting consistency across different contexts and times. They are also unusual in grounding and justifying their apparatuses for the regulation of conduct upon such a conception of the person. For example, it is in terms of this notion of the self that much of our criminal legal systems operate, with their notions of responsibility and intent. Our systems of morality are similarly historically unusual in their valorization of authenticity and their emotivism. No less unusual, historically, are our politics, which place so much emphasis on individual rights, individual choices, and individual freedoms. It is in these societies that psychology has been born as a scientific discipline, as a positive knowledge of the individual and a particular way of speaking the truth about humans and acting upon them.

If there is one value that seems beyond reproach, in our current confused ethical climate, it is that of the self and the terms that cluster around it – autonomy, identity, individuality, liberty, choice, fulfillment. It is in terms of our autonomous selves that we understand our passions and desires, shape our life-styles, choose our partners, marriage, even parenthood. It is in the name of the kinds of persons that we really are that we consume commodities, act out our tastes, fashion our bodies, display our distinctiveness. Our politics loudly proclaims its commitment to respect for the rights and powers of the citizen as an individual. Our ethical dilemmas are debated in similar terms, whether they concern the extension of legal protections to same-sex couples, disputes over abortion, or worries about the new reproductive technologies. In less parochial domains, notions of autonomy and identity act as ideals or criteria of judgment in conflicts over national identities, in struggles over the rights of minorities, and in a whole variety of national and international disputes. This ethic of the free, autonomous self seems to trace out something quite fundamental in the ways in which modern men and women have come to understand, experience, and evaluate themselves, their actions, and their lives.

In writing the essays that are collected in this volume, I wanted to make a contribution, both conceptual and empirical, to the genealogy of this current regime of the self.

Creative science is a game for the young. Those excel in it who retain a childlike curiosity about the world down to an age when most of their contemporaries have got interested in other things like sex, power and money. While politicians, historians and playwrights (whose jobs depend upon understanding people) improve like claret with age, scientists may go off. Those engaged in scientific biography, therefore, face in particularly acute form the problem of dealing with a drama which comes to a climax early on, and then tails off. This makes for a poor read.

Davy's work on laughing gas was done when he was twenty-one; his electrochemical researches led to his discovery of potassium when he was twenty-nine; by his middle thirties he had elucidated the nature of chlorine, and invented the safety lamp for coal miners. If we concentrate upon his life in science as a matter of making discoveries which are still of importance in our own day, then his later life will have little interest for us. This is the approach in Harold Hartley's biography, which is excellent when dealing with the scientific discoveries but where Davy's later years are briefly dismissed. At forty-one, in 1820, he was elected President of the Royal Society; in early retirement from 1827 he wrote dialogues about fishing and then about life in general; and he died abroad, at Geneva, in 1829 after travelling in fruitless search of health.

This is the story of a life of Robert Boyle that was never written, with reflections on the significance of this paradox for our understanding both of Boyle and of the nature of scientific biography in his day. In fact, of course, we have two biographical accounts of Boyle dating from the sixty years following his death, on which almost all subsequent writings on him have been based. One was the sermon preached at Boyle's funeral on 7 January 1692 by his friend, Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, which included a lengthy section described at the time as a ‘Panegyric’ of Boyle. As one might expect of a funeral sermon – a genre in which Burnet specialised – this is an unashamed eulogy of Boyle, with something in common with the various verse ‘elogiesy’ of the deceased scientist that were produced in the aftermath of his death. In it, Burnet drew on his intimate knowledge of Boyle (and on biographical notes that had been vouchsafed him) to paint a memorable but rather onesided view of the great natural philosopher as a truly good man, pious, sober, modest, painstaking and intellectually innovative. His aim was to illustrate ‘to how vast a Sublimity the Christian Religion can raise a mind, that does both throughly believe it, and is entirely governed by it’. In many ways, this image has dominated perceptions of Boyle ever since.

Biography has for long been an important medium in the transmission of images of scientists and ideas about science. Whether in the form of celebratory accounts of the heroes and heroines of science or more rounded, critical studies, the lives of such famous figures as Newton, Darwin, Einstein and Madame Curie have always been assured a ready market and an eager audience. Today, as seldom before, the general public is hungry for news about science and consumes scientific biography with relish.

Perhaps surprisingly, very little criticism or comment has accompanied the recent resurgence of interest in scientific biography; nor are there readily available any detailed or comprehensive studies of the development of the genre, its status and influence. Telling Lives in Science is in fact the first book of its kind.

Since the seventeenth century, memoirs, anecdotes and portraits of leading natural philosophers have been central in forming the way in which the scientific community is perceived by outsiders and perceives itself. Although the history of science has blossomed over the past twenty years and undertaken detailed explorations of the culture of science, biography has until recently been viewed as an old-fashioned, stale and distinctly uninteresting resource. Far more attention has been paid to scientific textbooks, novelistic tales of science and laboratory notebooks than to biographical accounts. While the former, properly interpreted, can be immensely rich and revealing, the latter have been often dismissed as simplistic and self-serving.

Science no less than religion needs its gallery of saints as sources of emulation to provide a sense of continuity and tradition. But, inevitably, posterity is selective in drawing up such a roll-call of the blessed as the past is scavenged for figures who seem best to conform to the needs of the present. Scientists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries accorded most respect to the founding fathers of their discipline who left their mark in the manner most familiar to scientists of a later age. In seeking such a patrimony, science has understandably overlooked the claims of Joseph Banks, who published very little and left no indelible mark on any scientific discipline. But, as science has grown in size, complexity and expense so, too, the scientific estate has come increasingly to value the role of its patrons, protectors and paymasters. As a consequence, more attention has been accorded of late to statesmen of science like Francis Bacon. There are also a few signs that the significance of Banks as a promoter of science is beginning to be recognised, the most notable being the recent appearance of the first fully researched biography of Banks by H.C. Carter – a work which will serve as a precursor to an edition of his papers.

Introduction

François-René de Chateaubriand, the great French romantic, spoke for an entire generation when in his autobiography he described the French Revolution as a ‘river of blood which separates for ever the old world in which you were born from the new world on whose frontiers you will die’. This sense of the French Revolution as a dark and threatening chasm in time, so different from the joyful novus ordo saeculorum of the triumphant New World revolution of 1776, was undoubtedly one of the major reasons for the outpouring of autobiography which is characteristic of that era. This was so not only because autobiography seemed the ideal vehicle, in many cases, to vindicate the actions of the troubled revolutionary era, but also because autobiography became a way of asserting the continuities of existence and identity across the rupture between the pre- and post-revolutionary worlds. Because of this, it is difficult, and misleading, to see the autobiographies of this time as ‘private’ documents: rather, they are involved with the reshaping of the meaning of the revolutionary era, precisely because they are the medium through which many in France worked through the specific nature of their investment in, and exploration of, the ‘new world’ of postrevolutionary time.

Possibly nowhere did autobiography fill this need more urgently than in the case of the scientific élite.

Introduction

During the last decade an increasing number of high quality biographies of scientists have appeared on the book market1 – Richard Westfall's Newton study, Never at Rest, William Provine's Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology, Crosbie Smith and Norton Wise's study of Lord Kelvin and Victorian England, David Cassidy's Heisenberg biography, Geoffrey Cantor's study of Faraday, Adrian Desmond and James Moore's Darwin tome, and Frederic Holmes's first volume on Hans Krebs – just to name some of the most admirable works. Athough still within the traditional confines of the genre, these and similar biographies are more detailed, better researched, more stylishly written, and more penetrating than almost any biography written just a generation ago. Each new biography seems to be unrivalled. For someone who browses through the history of science shelves of an academic bookstore these works indicate that science biography stands out as a most – if not the most – impressive genre of the discipline.

In spite of the recent flourishing state of science biography, however, there is a widespread ambivalence and uncertainty as to the role and place of biography among historians of science. Biographical studies have dominated the history of science for most of its existence:

Navel-gazing is not a noted source of historical insight but a personal perspective is essential to this chapter: in 1991 Adrian Desmond and I published a best-selling biography of Charles Darwin. In reflecting on our collaboration I intend that a biographical, not an egotistical, spirit should prevail.

An early reviewer of our Darwin felt moved to associate it with a text from that famous study of modern industrialism, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Here is the scene witnessed by the book's hero Charlie Bucket in the proprietor's ‘Inventing Room’:

Feminist historians have thoroughly documented the unequal struggle of women who wished to enter the scientific professions, from the very beginnings of modern scientific enquiry in Europe. As long as science remained an amateur occupation of doubtful economic security and without a career structure and public rewards, isolated women from the upper classes – often related to a well-known pioneering scientist – made independent contributions as scientists. But in the nineteenth century matters changed swiftly; while science might still be a hard taskmaster, it brought rewards to many men. Biographies abound of poor boys who found fame as scientists: Michael Faraday, Louis Pasteur, Jean Henri Fabre and others. By the late nineteenth century books aimed at aspiring young scientists appear with titles such as The Romance of Medicine, Microbe Hunters, Famous Men of Science or Heroes of Modern Progress. Women were conspicuously absent in these narratives of scientific adventure. But they did not disappear altogether, either in scientific work itself or in the many biographies for girls. These tokens – Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville, Marie Curie – were eulogised as much for their feminine qualities as their achievements. Ironically, the women who had fought hardest for access to specialised knowledge for the public good – medical women – were rarely mentioned in nineteenth-century biographies.

An examination of the values promoted in these biographies for adolescent girls may help to explain why so few considered a career in science at the very time when it became possible.

Medical biography

The prospects and problems of scientific biography have been extensively discussed in recent years; creativity has been probed and analyses offered of the historical tensions between the private pursuit of science and its public face. If the career of a scientist implants expectations that the biography itself will enshrine ‘scientific’ virtues – factual accuracy and objectivity – the very opposite might be suggested by study of the lives of psychoanalysts. To plumb the murky depths, would not an analyst's biographer need to investigate the unconscious, and thereby advance inferences subjective and unfalsifiable, leading to unfathomable transferences between biographer and biographee? Doubtless tongue in cheek, Freud himself foisted a totally deedoriented deadpan autobiography upon the world, but later non-Freudian accounts of the father of psychoanalysis, notably Ronald Clark's Freud: The Man and the Cause (1980), disappoint because they do little more than skim the surface. If physicians may be situated, vocationally and perhaps temperamentally, somewhere between scientists and psychoanalysts, does that mean that there is, or ought to be, a unique mode of medical biography, to suit the distinctive qualities of their subject? Is there a distinctive genre of medical biography? If not, should there be? These are questions I wish to pose in this chapter. Lest I raise expectations that will be disappointed, let me say from the outset that I cannot pretend to offer any very general or theoretical resolutions. Such a notion would be unrealistic, I believe, in view of the enormous historical diversity of the practice of medicine.