The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography

Abstract

Given the importance of biography to the formation of our discipline, it seems strange that there have not been more systematic studies of the genre by medical historians. This volume offers a refreshing take on a subject which often inspires only clichés from the majority of medical historians, who have traditionally described biographical studies as either ‘whiggish’ or ‘hagiographical’. While recognising that biography is the ugly duckling of contemporary historiography and methodology in the histories of science and medicine, Thomas Söderqvist offers a useful reassessment of this popular literary genre in this edited collection. Originally presented at a conference held in Copenhagen in May 2002, these papers cover a broad time period and offer a critical reading of an under-estimated genre. As one would expect from an historian who has published a very successful scientific biography, Söderqvist expertly explores the full history and various functions of biographical writing. In the opening pages of the introduction, he also presents a paradox, which will resonate with medical historians. Although regularly sidelined by historians of medicine, biography, he notes, has become a respected topic in other fields, including literary studies. Rather than write it off entirely, historians of science, since the 1990s at least, have also reflected on and resuscitated the genre. As a result, this volume offers a far closer, considered analysis of the composition, style and textual quality of the scientific biography than one would expect from a historian of medicine. There was no genre of scientific biography in the Graeco-Roman world, but the opening chapter, by Liba Taub, traces the biographical tradition to the early lives of philosophers. Works in this tradition had two primary aims, to celebrate the individual and trace an intellectual history or lineage. As a result, lives of Pythagoras became particularly numerous, given the long line of thinkers who claimed descent from his intellectual heritage. Like the gospels, the marvels and wonders of each philosopher were recounted by his and other early biographers, who traced their subjects' lives from birth to death, and, in the process, established their status as heroes and moral exemplars.

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