New Chemical Biography

On 20 May 1999, the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry held a meeting prompted by the successful completion of revisions and additions to chemists' entries in the New Dictionary of National Biography (NDNB), which is to be published in 2004. The Society's Chairman, W H Brock (University of Kent at Canterbury) - who had overseen the project as associate editor - began the meeting by placing NDNB in the context of the 19th-century movement for national biographical dictionaries.

The OldDNB was published in 63 volumes between 1885 and 1900. Supplements of missing persons, as well as decennial updates and 'concise versions', continued during the 20th century. By the 1990s, despite the publication of a Missing Persons Supplement in 1993 that added many chemical industrialists, OldDNB was badly out of date. Of the 270 chemists included there was only one woman (Margaret Lloyd). Many entries were little better than bibliographies and errors and misrepresentations made by original contributors, few of whom had any expertise in the history of science, abounded.

In 1992 the British Academy and OUP agreed to underwrite a revision of OldDNB under the editorship of the Gladstone scholar, Colin Mathew, who decided that much of the OldDNB was too sound to abandon. All existing subjects therefore remain in place, albeit revised in the light of modern scholarship, and in some cases (fewer than expected for chemists) replaced. Initially, provision was made for the addition of only 20 'missing' chemists; but some 45 have been added. The criteria for inclusion were: (1) missing chemists from before 1850 (e.g. Andreas Kurz and John Mervin Nooth); (2) more women (Mrs Fulhame, Sybil Leslie, Dorothy Needham, Martha Whitely, and several chemists' wives); (3) European chemists who spent significant portions of their careers in Britain (Debus, Hofmann, Flurscheim, Levinstein, Thudichum); (4) Britons who made important contributions abroad (Divers, Liversidge, Pedler); and (5) personal judgement.

Peter Morris (National Museum of Science and Industry) gave a brief presentation entitled "A Desideratum? A Unified Database of Chemical Biographies". He mentioned that several scholars were building up databases of chemists, and suggested that it would be extremely useful to unify these databases and to make the information available in a searchable form. The world wide web clearly provided the means to achieve this end, but the practicalities of achieving a unified database had not yet been addressed.

David Knight's (University of Durham) paper, "The Art of Chemical Biography", argued that to make sense of our own life is difficult enough, and that to do it for anyone else's inevitably requires the shaping spirit of imagination. Also expectations have changed over time: everyone who has written for NDNB knows how much more interested the new editors (in our secular age) are in the religious affiliations as well as the wealth of the hero and his or her family. One thing an academic should aim at, is good judgement in what to leave out. Even so-called full- length biography has involved a great deal of selection and emphasis. Whereas historians mellow and improve with age, chemists have often done their most exciting science early in life; and their later years may well be, for the student of intellectual history, a falling away into administration. Old eagles teaching young ones to fly higher are worthy role models, but it is not always easy to make the life of the director of a laboratory, or of a Dean of Science, compulsive reading for a wide public which will also have had trouble with equations and symbols. Consideration was given to some ancient and modern examples of chemists resurrected by their biographers, seeing how they make sense of scientific careers. The task is nowadays more difficult because publishers like to claim that scientific biographies do not sell well unless they have as subject someone really well-known already. But whatever our target, we cannot doubt that lives artfully displayed can be excellent reading, and bring chemistry too to life.

Noel Coley (Open University) gave a paper entitled "Some Medical Chemists in the New DNB". Medical chemistry flourished in the century from about 1780 to 1880 in the hands of practising physicians who combined chemical investigations with clinical practice. They came into conflict with physiologists who did not accept that chemistry could explain the nature and functions of living tissues and organs. From the mid-nineteenth century these arguments centred around Liebig's theories of animal chemistry which were ultimately debunked about 1870. Medical chemistry was gradually replaced by physiological chemistry and by the last quarter of the nineteenth century chairs and departments of physiological chemistry began to appear in universities on both sides of the Atlantic. In the early twentieth century the discipline developed into modern biochemistry. Noel Coley's paper discussed a number of entries on medical chemists in NDNB: George Fordyce, MD, FRS, (1736-1802); Alexander Marcet, MD, FRS, (1770-1822); John Yelloly, MD, FRS, (1774-1842); Henry Bence Jones, MD, FRS, (1813-1873); George Owen Rees, MD, FRS, (1813-1889); John Louis Thudichum, MD, FRCP, (1829-1901); and Frederick William Pavy, MD, FRS, (1829-1911).

Robin Mackie and Gerrylynn Roberts (Open University), who are developing a collective biographical database of 9000 late-nineteenth and twentieth-century British chemists, explored the profile of those chemists who were Council members of the Chemical Society, the Institute of Chemistry or the Society of Chemical Industry during the period 1881-1943, and who had entries in Who Was Who. By this means, they aimed to test whether the profile of the chemical elite as defined by membership of one or more of the 'big-three' chemical institutions was similar to the profile of the chemical elite as indicated by having an entry in Who Was Who.

Broadly, it seems that Who Was Who (in which 8% of the entries on the CD-ROM version from 1897 include at least some indicator, however vague, of 'chemical' affiliation) did reflect accurately the way that the chemical elite was defined within the profession over the period 1881-1943 - the exception being that industrial chemists did not appear in numbers commensurate with their participation on the Councils. A particularly striking feature of these chemists' profiles, when compared with wider notions of what constituted the British elite in this period, is the source of their qualifications. London and northern institutions outweighed Oxbridge backgrounds, increasingly during the inter-war years.

John Hudson, Hon Secretary, SHAC
Anglia Polytechnic University