By Jan Golinski
What did it suggest to be a scientist prior to the career itself existed? Jan Golinski unearths a solution within the impressive profession of Humphry Davy, the key chemist of his day and probably the most unique British males of technological know-how of the 19th century. initially a rustic boy from a modest historical past, Davy was once propelled through his clinical accomplishments to a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. An enigmatic determine to his contemporaries, Davy has persisted to elude the efforts of biographers to categorise him: poet, buddy to Coleridge and Wordsworth, writer of go back and forth narratives and a ebook on fishing, chemist and inventor of the miners’ protection lamp. What are we to make of one of these man?
In The Experimental Self, Golinski argues that Davy’s lifestyles is better understood as a chronic means of self-experimentation. He follows Davy from his younger enthusiasm for physiological test via his self-fashioning as a guy of technology in a interval whilst the trail to a systematic occupation used to be now not as well-trodden because it is this day. What emerges is a portrait of Davy as an inventive fashioner of his personal id via a lifelong sequence of experiments in selfhood.
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Additional resources for The Experimental Self: Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science
Sample text
It was pre‑ dictable that the Bristol group should be portrayed as a coterie of en‑ thusiasts, whose indulgence in the mind-altering gas posed a danger to good morals and social order. Beddoes had even anticipated, when he T h e En t hu si a st | 39 published his own account of the episode, “that we might . . ”60 That was exactly what happened. It did not take long for the nitrous oxide investigation to attract criticism and ridicule. 61 An anonymous pam‑ phlet called The Sceptic, published in Nottinghamshire in 1800, made fun of nitrous oxide, along with mesmerism and galvanism, as symp‑ tomatic “wonders” of an age of revolutionary upheaval.
National Portrait Gallery, London. 77 Davy was unwilling to surrender nitrous oxide entirely; it re‑ mained an attribute of his public character as an experimenter. But he sought to avoid the disorder that could result from allowing his audi‑ ence to breathe it, too. What he wanted to display was its effect on himself, to remind those who attended his lectures that he had established his name as a man of science by imbibing this substance and recording its effects. What Dinwiddie witnessed was indicative of the way Davy assimi‑ 44 | Ch a pt er 1 lated nitrous oxide as part of his public scientific persona.
However, there is no single recorded incident that fits all the details of Gillray’s depiction, and even the identity of the principal lecturer (prob‑ ably Thomas Garnett but possibly Thomas Young) remains uncertain. It is likely that Gillray put together a composite scene to satirize the activities of the Royal Institution. © National Portrait Gallery, London. 77 Davy was unwilling to surrender nitrous oxide entirely; it re‑ mained an attribute of his public character as an experimenter. But he sought to avoid the disorder that could result from allowing his audi‑ ence to breathe it, too.