19th century
A01=Jan Golinski
Author_Jan Golinski
baronet
biography
Category=DNBT
Category=PN
chemical change
chemist
chemistry
cornish
education
electrical potential
electricity
electrochemistry
england
english
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eq_biography-true-stories
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herculaneum papyri
historical
history
humanities
humphry davy
identity
invention
inventor
lamp
physical
presentation
president
royal society
science
scientific interests
scientist
self experimentation
selfhood
understanding
Product details
- ISBN 9780226351360
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 16 x 24mm
- Publication Date: 11 May 2016
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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What did it mean to be a scientist before the profession itself existed? Jan Golinski finds an answer in the remarkable career of Humphry Davy, the foremost chemist of his day and one of the most distinguished British men of science of the nineteenth century. Originally a country boy from a modest background, Davy was propelled by his scientific accomplishments to a knighthood and the presidency of the Royal Society. An enigmatic figure to his contemporaries, Davy has continued to elude the efforts of biographers to classify him: poet, friend to Coleridge and Wordsworth, author of travel narratives and a book on fishing, chemist and inventor of the miners’ safety lamp. What are we to make of such a man?
In The Experimental Self, Golinski argues that Davy’s life is best understood as a prolonged process of self-experimentation. He follows Davy from his youthful enthusiasm for physiological experiment through his self-fashioning as a man of science in a period when the path to a scientific career was not as well-trodden as it is today. What emerges is a portrait of Davy as a creative fashioner of his own identity through a lifelong series of experiments in selfhood.
In The Experimental Self, Golinski argues that Davy’s life is best understood as a prolonged process of self-experimentation. He follows Davy from his youthful enthusiasm for physiological experiment through his self-fashioning as a man of science in a period when the path to a scientific career was not as well-trodden as it is today. What emerges is a portrait of Davy as a creative fashioner of his own identity through a lifelong series of experiments in selfhood.
