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Presents information on the book "Celebrating the Life and Times of Hugh Miller: Scotland in the Early Nineteenth Century," edited by Lester Borley.

Darwin's emotional life has been a preoccupation of biographers and popularizers, while his research on emotional expression has been of keen interest to anthropologists and psychologists. Much can be gained, however, by looking at Darwin's emotions from both sides, by examining the relationship between his emotional experience and his scientific study of emotion. Darwin developed various techniques for distancing himself from his objects of study and for extracting emotional "objects" from feeling subjects. In order to investigate emotions scientifically, his own emotional life, his feelings for others, had to give way--or did it? This question has implications well beyond the life of Darwin, moral implications about the effects of scientific discipline on those who practice it and on the animals and people subjected to it. This dual approach to Darwin's emotions also allows us to address a conundrum of recent histories of "objectivity"--namely, the status of the scientific self as a feeling subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biographical study of scientists, though familiar, has mostly seemed anodyne rather than profound as a tool of history of science. But it bears closely on the public role of the scientist, associated nowadays with the detachment of objectivity and with a sense of the scientific life as a fracturing of "the science" from other aspects of a career. Although this division is indeed characteristic of the modern scientific identity, historians should not take it as natural or inevitable. The life of the statistician Karl Pearson, who endeavored to live out a Bildungsroman, demonstrates the survival into the twentieth century of alternative ideals and, with them, of ambitions for science going far beyond the professionalization of a technical field. Pearson's career offers a model for historicizing the relationship of science to public reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking off from reflections about the relation of biographical writing to fiction, this essay considers the ways in which scientific biography can explore the cultural dynamics of science. The author examines her own experience in using biography to write history of science and refers to several other examples of biographies of eighteenth-century figures that raise issues specific to the persona of the man of science and his audiences in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May 1933 the historian of chemistry. Hélène Metzger addressed a letter to the renowned historian and philosopher of science Emile Meyerson, a cri de coeur against Meyerson's patronizing attitude toward her. This recently discovered letter is published and translated here because it is an exceptional human document reflecting the gender power structure of our discipline in interwar France. At the age of forty-three, and with five books to her credit, Metzger was still a junior scholar in the exclusively male community of French historians and philosophers of science. We sketch the institutional setting of higher learning in France at the time, noting the limited openings it offered to would-be femmes savantes, and situate Metzger in this context. We also describe the philosophical differences between Metzger and Meyerson. Though Metzger never managed to obtain a post of her own, in her letter to Meyerson she forcefully lays claim, at least, to a mind of her own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]