Biomedical subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Patricia Fara.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel learnt the arts of self-promotion from his father, but triumphant images of him conceal failures and disappointments. This article (part of the Science in the Industrial Revolution series) focuses on his first and last great engineering projects--the Thames Tunnel and the Great Eastern steam-ship.
Sigmund Freud claimed to hate being photographed, yet he carefully fashioned his public image. Always immaculately dressed, he sported an old-fashioned beard that helped to establish his status as the founding father of psychoanalysis. An avid collector, Freud chose objects for their symbolic as well as their aesthetic interest.
Appreciating pictures entails a consideration not only of the people, objects and landscape that their artists have chosen to portray, but also an imagining of what has been excluded. The term 'Industrial Revolution' has been given multiple meanings, and this article (part of the Science in the Industrial Revolution series) explores some of these by exposing the messages concealed inside some of the most enduring images of the Revolution.
Michael Faraday was an enthusiastic portrait collector, and he welcomed the invention of photography not only as a possible means of recording observations accurately, but also as a method for advertising science and its practitioners. This article (which is part of the Science in the Industrial Revolution series) shows that like many eminent scientists, Faraday took advantage of the burgeoning Victorian media industry by posing in various roles.
The reputations of scientific heroes shift constantly, modified by politicians as well as by historians. Now that the Scientific Revolution has been reappraised, Nicolas Copernicus is portrayed as a friend of the Catholic Church rather than a scientific martyr. As a German-speaking Pole he has been claimed as a figure of national historical importance by both Germany and Poland, and since the early 20th century has been an important symbol of Polish independence.
In the middle of the 17th century, two founding fellows of the Royal Society -- John Evelyn and William Petty -- commissioned portraits of themselves with skulls. The paintings were commemorative, because Evelyn was celebrating his engagement and Petty had recently acquired an anatomical post at Oxford, but both sitters also intended their pictures to serve as reminders of mortality.
With their mythical creatures and arcane symbolism, coats of arms seem to have little connection with modern science. Yet despite its chivalric origins, the ancient language of heraldry has long fascinated famous scientists. Although this idiosyncratic tradition was parodied by Victorian geologists, who laughingly replaced unicorns and griffins with images of dinosaurs that they had recently discovered, it has been perpetuated since by Ernest Rutherford, who liked to present himself as a new alchemist.
Country houses have long acted as scholarly research centres, and the contents and organization of their libraries reveal how knowledge was created and transmitted through scientific networks: they provide material evidence of intellectual and social cultures. Manuscripts are particularly appreciated in this regard because they are unique, but individual books also differ and copies of the same book are not always identical -- they might be annotated by authors and readers, and the printed text can vary as well -- so they also carry invaluable historical information. When libraries are broken up, access to the past is permanently blocked.
J.B.S. Haldane's photographs reveal that this eminent geneticist was also a militant political agitator. Deeply engaged in left-wing British politics, Haldane eventually joined the Communist party, but found it increasingly difficult to reconcile his scientific beliefs with his Marxist commitments. During the controversy over Stalin's rejection of genetics in favour of Trofim Lysenko's agricultural reforms, Haldane's activities were critically interpreted from various different perspectives.
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Marie Curie challenged many conventions when she left Poland, became a world-famous French scientist and took X-ray machinery to the front line in World War I. Although she was the first person to win two Nobel prizes, many critics found it hard to believe that she could simultaneously be a caring mother and a brilliant researcher. As mythological accounts of Curie's success grew, photographs and caricatures of her reinforced traditional stereotypes of male and female roles in science.
Enlightenment natural philosophers were linked to one another in an extended correspondence network, but the female participants in this international Republic of Letters are rarely mentioned. Gottfried Leibniz relied on several such women not only for financial patronage, but also for intellectual stimulation. Although this hardworking and underpaid librarian at the Hanoverian Court is now one of the world's most famous mathematical philosophers, the women on whom he depended for ideas as well as support have been largely forgotten.
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Few people know the name of the Royal Society's first President, even though he features prominently in Thomas Sprat's famous allegorical frontispiece. In promotional images, his individual identity is irrelevant for proclaiming the Society's allegiance to Francis Bacon and commitment to experimental investigation. By contrast, William Brouncker's name does appear on Peter Lely's large portrait, which hung at the Royal Society. Brouncker was a gifted mathematician as well as a conscientious administrator, and Lely's portrait reproduces the diagram of one of his innovative algebraic proofs.
How do scientists become famous? Carl Linnaeus was an expert at self-promotion who used portraits to gain patronage and consolidate his reputation. His sexualized classification system was hugely controversial, yet his successors celebrated him as a great hero of botany.
There are no established conventions for portraying scientific women. At the Royal Society, the first image of a female scientist was Henry Moore's drawing of Dorothy Hodgkin's hands, cruelly twisted by agonising arthritis. In her famous oil portrait, Maggi Hambling also focuses on Hodgkin's hands, thus symbolising the Nobel-prize winner's dedication to research and the importance of manual dexterity. Although Hambling's picture features a model of insulin, it is very different from photographs celebrating the discovery of DNA.
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