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ISBN: HB: 9780226351360

University of Chicago Press, Synthesis

May 2016

256 pp.

22.8x15.2 cm

8 halftones

HB:
£24,00
QTY:

Experimental Self

Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science

What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth century. Originally a country boy from a modest background, Davy was propelled by his scientific accomplishments to a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. An enigmatic figure to his contemporaries, Davy has continued to elude the efforts of biographers to classify him: poet, friend to Coleridge and Wordsworth, author of travel narratives and a book on fishing, chemist and inventor of the miners' safety lamp. What are we to make of such a man? In "The Experimental Self", Golinski argues that Davy's life is best understood as a prolonged process of self-experimentation. He follows Davy from his youthful enthusiasm for physiological experiment through his self-fashioning as a man of science in a period when the path to a scientific career was not as well-trodden as it is today. What emerges is a portrait of Davy as a creative fashioner of his own identity through a lifelong series of experiments in selfhood.

About the Author

Jan Golinski is professor of history and humanities at the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of "Making Natural Knowledge" and "British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment", both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Reviews

"Humphry Davy is an extremely important figure in the history of chemistry and has attracted a multitude of biographers – but Golinski's fresh, powerful insights are a very welcome addition. With 'The Experimental Self', Golinski wrestles with the noble challenge of evoking a particularly eminent man of science from the Second Scientific Revolution, when specialization and professional careers in science were still a relatively new idea. Golinski's way of making sense of this is novel: he perceives Davy as self-fashioning, presenting a number of personae – the enthusiast, the genius, the dandy, the discoverer, the philosopher, and the traveler. This yields a series of thematic chapters with a broadly chronological flow. Golinski does not attempt a full blow-by-blow biography but instead sees Davy as a fragmented figure, and so we are given a new, perceptive, sophisticated, and thought-provoking study in a readable style" – David M. Knight, emeritus, Durham University

"Golinski has written an outstanding study of the English chemist Humphry Davy. 'The Experimental Self' is significant in two regards: first in the distinction of the six identities discussed, and second in the evidence of Davy's self-inventions. Golinski tells Davy's life as a thematic narrative, a form that is both true to its subject and gripping in its presentation. Anyone with an interest in biography or scientific genius will find 'The Experimental Self' to be fascinating and persuasive" – Gabriel Finkelstein, University of Colorado, Denver

"Engagingly written and insightful, Golinski's 'The Experimental Self' explores the ways in which the iconic Romantic figure and man of science Humphry Davy consciously wove together the identities of a chemist, philosopher, dandy, traveler, poet, genius, and discoverer. Golinski brilliantly reveals a world in which such experimentation and self-invention were necessary, before the establishment of modern science with its institutions and career paths. While Davy has often been treated as an enigmatic figure, Golinski makes sense of his life and sheds light on his many modes of being by eschewing traditional narrative biography and its demands for continuity of selfhood, instead treating separately the many selves of a single individual. It is, therefore, a book that belongs alongside recent histories of science that explore the figure of the scientist and the emergence of science as a professional enterprise, but it is also one that should be read by anyone with an interest in Romanticism, biography, or the nature of selfhood" – Carin Berkowitz, author of "Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform"