Biographical Histories of Chemistry

Abstract

As Mary Jo Nye noted in an essay in the first issue of Bulletin for the History of Chemistry, the genre of biography maintains a great appeal among general readers, working chemists, and scholars of the academic community. The two books under review belong to this broad and increasingly popular genre of biography of chemists and they are both published by the Springer company. However, otherwise they are quite different and for this reason they will be dealt with separately. Some Forgotten Chemists is a slim volume sold by Springer at an unreasonably high price as part of the series Perspectives on the History of Chemistry, edited by Seth Rasmussen. It consists of seventeen chapters, sixteen of which describe the life and career of a chemist who is claimed to be forgotten or is little known today (one of the chapters is a summary account of “Women Pioneers” in general). The author is Brian Halton, a British-New Zealand chemist who, from 1968 to his death in 2019, worked at the Victoria University of Wellington, where he wrote a series of articles on little-remembered yet significant chemists in the local journal Chemistry in New Zealand. These biographical articles have now been collected into a book format. Somewhat unimaginatively, they appear in alphabetical order, starting with Carl Friedrich Accum and ending with William John Young. In this way each chapter is self-contained, much like in biographical dictionaries such as the authoritative multi-volumeDictionary of Scientific Biography or, to mention a less ambitious example from the history of chemistry, the Lexikon bedeutender Chemiker published in 1989. The obvious disadvantage of this kind of fragmented structure is that the book loses coherence and a common context. It is not possible to compare the separate chapters, nor is that the purpose of dictionary-like publications of this type.