Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography by Michael Shortland (Editor), Richard R. Yeo (Editor), Richard Yeo (Editor)

From the Publisher

Images of scientists and ideas about science are often communicated to the public through historic biographies of eminent scientists, yet there has been little study of the development of scientific biography. Telling Lives brings together a collection of original essays by leading historians of science, several of them biographers, which explore for the first time the nature and development of scientific biography and its importance in forming our ideas about what scientists do, how science works, and why scientific biography remains popular. Theoretical and historical studies range from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, concentrating on such icons as Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Humphry Davy, Florence Nightingale and Sir Joseph Banks. With its broad sweep and careful, imaginative scholarship, this volume provides a timely and challenging examination of an important aspect of the culture of science that will be of special interest to historians of science, academics and students, and the general reader interested in the popularization of science.

Books & Culture: A Christian Review - David N. Livingstone

...[T]hese commentaries...make clear [that] the art of telling a life, whether autobiographical or biographical, is never a straightforward matter....[E]ach age asks different questions of biography as it redefines itself....If the lessons that these scholars of scientific biography teach were taken to heart, they might even do a deal of spiritual good.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents