Claire Brock

The public worth of Mary Somerville

This article assesses the reputation of Mary Somerville in the 1830s and suggests that critical confusion over her status in the changing world of early nineteenth-century science is not new. Drawing on Somerville ’s own writings, contemporary newspaper and periodical reviews, political debates and unpublished manuscripts, Somerville’s ‘uniqueness ’ as a public figure is examined through the eyes of both the nascent scientific community of the time as well as the wider audience for her work. Somerville’s status as a popularizer and an educator is more complicated than may have previously been assumed and can be both confirmed and undermined by an analysis of contemporary public opinion. Although her works were directed at the public who indirectly paid her pension for services to science, Somerville’s private and published comments about and within her writings offer an alternative interpretation. Despite an apparent turn to more popular works in order to bolster her finances, Mary Somerville relished the specialist aspect of her writings and valued the difficulties which prevented the ordinary reader from obtaining ultimate insight into celestial mechanics. In November and December 1837, during a debate on the Civil List, the House of Commons witnessed sustained attacks on the recent system of awarding pensions to literary and scientific figures, especially in the light of the perceived injustices arising from the New Poor Law of 1834. Although the pension system came under criticism itself, one name frequently occurred in discussion of the illegitimacy of civil reward: that of Mary Somerville. A scientific expositor and author of an explication, entitled Mechanism of the Heavens (1830), of Laplace’s notoriously complex treatise, Somerville had recently written an original survey of contemporary scientific thought, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834). Somerville’s pension of £200, awarded by the Tory Robert Peel in 1835, had been raised by the newWhig government of Lord Melbourne to £300 per annum. This was a sum equivalent to that granted to practising men of science such as George Airy, David Brewster and Michael Faraday. What angered the debaters was not only the siphoning of funds into the pockets of those authors who already earned their money from the benevolence of the public, but the impropriety of awarding pensions to the likes of Somerville, who, as the radical member for Liskeard and future Poor Law commissioner Charles Buller put it so scathingly, constituted a ‘waste of money’. For ‘no one could undertake to say that [Somerville’s works] added anything to the stock of human knowledge or enlarged # This is an expanded version of the essay awarded the Singer Prize of the BSHS for 2004. * Department of English, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK. Email: cb178@leicester.ac.uk. I would like to thank Simon Schaffer and two anonymous readers for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. My heartfelt thanks also to Ben Dew for all his support and understanding. BJHS 39(2): 255–272, June 2006. f British Society for the History of Science doi:10.1017/S0007087405007612 the bounds of science’. In Buller’s opinion Mary Somerville did not write books which sought to inform and enlighten the public. Mary Somerville’s lack of fit in the history of science is only too apparent in current critical interpretations of her life and writings. Within the past couple of years alone she has been labelled ‘a female popularizer of science’, ‘difficult to categorize as an author’, and most recently ‘an ingenious experimentalist on the one hand, and a brilliant surveyor, interpreter and high-level communicator of contemporary science on the other ’. Somerville’s ‘uniqueness ’, in terms of both her respected position in a nascent professional scientific community and her enormous public popularity, makes her impossible to assimilate into a straightforward narrative concerning the place of the female science-writer in the nineteenth century. But, as the Civil List debates explosively revealed, this uncertainty over Mary Somerville’s scientific worthiness is far from recent. From the House of Commons to societies for the working classes, Somerville’s contemporaries wrangled over her public position in the 1830s and sought frantically to assess her value. An analysis of Somerville’s contemporary reception may also help to explain why economic considerations, rather than propriety or inclination, forced her to popularize her style of writing. After the publication of Mechanism of the Heavens Somerville appeared to choose explanations over equations, not because of the inappropriateness of a woman writing expertly about celestial mechanics, but precisely because she had written so expertly that she was at risk of losing an audience outside the universities. The use of the term ‘appeared’ here is deliberate. Even when presenting the public with a supposedly more popular format, Somerville denied her readers ultimate understanding of abstruse concepts and was thus unable to adhere to the rules of clarity and explanation requisite for popularization. Somerville’s own difficulties when writing for a wider audience were finally reflected in obituaries that summed up her career. In the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Richard Proctor noted that the ‘remarkable and distinguishing quality ’ of Somerville’s mind ensured that, for the general reader, her work was a ‘failure’. Even the very ‘elements of the subjects ’ she attempted to expound were incomprehensible to the vast majority of the reading public. The initial reaction to Mechanism of the Heavens, as Proctor suggested, would in fact colour the reception of Mary Somerville’s future writings. At the core of Charles Buller’s House of Commons argument lay two charges: first, that Mary Somerville’s writing lacked the originality of a scientific discovery which would form the catalyst to much-prized social or industrial progression; second, that 1 Debates on the Civil List appear in Hansard (1838), 39, 23 November, cols. 161–78 and 19 December, cols. 1284–317. This reference is from the latter debate and can be found in col. 1316. 2 Bernard Lightman, ‘Set introduction’, in Science Writing By Women (ed. B. Lightman), 7 vols., Bristol, 2004, i, pp. xi–xix, p. xii. 3 James A. Secord, ‘General introduction’, in Mary Somerville, The Collected Works of Mary Somerville (ed. J. A. Secord), 9 vols., Bristol, 2004 (hereafter Collected Works), i, pp. xv–xxxix, p. xxvi. 4 Allan Chapman, Mary Somerville and the World of Science, Bristol, 2004, 43–4. 5 R[ichard] A. P[roctor], ‘Mary Somerville ’, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (14 February 1873), 23, 190–7, 193, in Collected Works, i. 256 Claire Brock

Risk, responsibility and surgery in the 1890s and early 1900s.

This article explores the ways in which risk and responsibility were conceptualised in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by surgeons, their patients and the lay public. By this point surgery could be seen, simultaneously, as safe (due to developments in surgical science) and increasingly risky (because such progress allowed for greater experimentation). With the glorification of the heroic surgeon in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period came a corresponding, if grudging, recognition that successful surgery was supported by a team of ancillary professionals. In theory, therefore, blame for mistakes could be shared amongst the team; in practice, this was not always the case. Opening with an examination of the May Thorne negligence case of 1904, I will also, in the latter third of this piece, focus on surgical risks encountered by women surgeons, themselves still relatively new and, therefore, potentially risky individuals. A brief case study of the ways in which one female-run institution, the New Hospital for Women, dealt with debates surrounding risk and responsibility concludes this article. The origin of the risks perceived and the ways in which responsibility was taken (or not) for risky procedures will provide ways of conceptualising what ‘surgical anxiety’ meant in the 1890s and 1900s.

British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 1860–1918

When women agitated to join the medical profession in Britain during the 1860s, the practice of surgery proved both a help (women were neat, patient and used to needlework) and a hindrance (surgery was brutal, bloody and distinctly unfeminine). In this major new study, Claire Brock examines the cultural, social and self-representation of the woman surgeon from the second half of the nineteenth century until the end of the Great War. Drawing on a rich archive of British hospital records, she investigates precisely what surgery women performed and how these procedures affected their personal and professional reputation, as well as the reactions of their patients to these new phenomena. Also published as open access, this is essential reading for those interested in the history of medicine. British Women Surgeons and their Patients, 1860– 1918 provides wide-ranging new perspectives on patient narratives and women’s participation in surgery between 1860 and 1918. This title is also available as Open Access.

Women in Surgery: Patients and Practitioners

Women have rarely been depicted as active participants in the history of surgery, appearing more usually as the victims of barbaric, scalpel-wielding men. Yet, female agitation to join the medical profession coincided with technological processes which rendered surgery more intricate, less bloody and purportedly easier to carry out. Even then, for detractors, surgical practice was physically and morally impossible for women. Such opposition made those interested in surgery more determined to wrest the scalpel out of male-only hands, proving their abilities. This chapter considers women patients and practitioners, from the second half of the nineteenth century up until the Great War when, for the first time, female surgeons operated upon men too. It places women back in the operating theatre as surgeons, as well as resisting patient bodies.