Experimental Self – Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science (Synthesis) - Hardcover

Golinski, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022635136X ISBN 13: 9780226351360

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2016

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jan Golinski is professor of history and humanities at the University of New Hampshire and the author of Making Natural Knowledge, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022635136X
• ISBN 13: 9780226351360
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256