Before its fairly recent and almost explosive disciplinary growth, the History of Science was primarily done not by professional historians but by practitioners of science. As they approached or reached retirement, as they gained a larger (and more aloof) perspective on their discipline, scientists would become historians of the inquiries in their fields. Their interests would not be driven by theoretical issues or methodological and historiographic concerns. Instead they began reflecting on the bonds among the generations of scientists, on the personal struggles and defeats which make for the life of science in any era. Very sophisticated contemporary historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science sometimes ridicule the seeming naivete of this approach, i.e., of scientists simply telling the story of scientists, inventions, and discoveries. However, those same sophisticates still rely for much of their evidence on the historical researches of the scientists-turned-amateur-historians.
Mike Schuette clearly stands in this tradition, with one marked difference, however. His interests are not primarily or exclusively directed at the history of his own discipline (Optics and Nuclear Research). Instead, he has taken an interest in the history of science at the institution and in the state which he now considers home. This is not limited to physics, but as his presentation showed, extended into the life sciences. Mike introduced us to four scientists who had strong South Carolina connections and participated in the evolutionary debates of the 19th century. They were Thomas Cooper (1759-1839), John Bachman (1790-1874), Joseph LeConte (1823-1901), and James Woodrow (1828-1907). Obviously, this is not the time or space to provide a synopsis of their lives and works.
While Cooper's modern, anti-biblical, geological work prepared some of the intellectual ground for the evolutionary controversy, Bachman's researches (especially on the physiology of quadrupeds and the Unity of Mankind) directly contributed to Darwin's work. Like all Southern naturalists, they had to contend with the political reality of slavery and did so in (from our point of view) seemingly contradictory ways. We find it hard to understand that the political, religious, and scientific radical Cooper was nevertheless an apologist of slavery. The politically rather more conservative Bachman seems easier to understand and remains contradictory: with his work on the Unity of Mankind he argues for the notion of a single human race, and thus against, e.g., Agassiz's conception of three separately created Adams (black, yellow, and white). One can explain Bachman's conception of a single human race in biographical and religious terms: it agrees with the bible and with his childhood experience of being tutored in naturalism by a very bright and knowledgeable slave. The same Bachman who requested a black parish in Charleston (where he worked and lived as a minister) and often expressed his fondness and admiration for his black teacher, still sided with the Confederacy on the political question of slavery.
Mike's talk on Cooper and Bachman left the impression that USC's faculty in the 19th century was composed of 'renaissance'-men with an encyclopedic interest in the various natural sciences, theology, medicine, and politics. His remarks about LeConte and Bachman reenforce this impression.
Bachman, for example, was professor of physiology and geology; he studied the flight of birds and the physiology of the liver; he took a Coast Guard vessel to explore the agency of the gulf stream on the formation of Florida and served as a major in the scientific army of the Confederacy producing chemicals for medical purposes; he was a Presbyterian sunday-school teacher writing on Science and Religion in the context of evolutionary debates and wrote a textbook on sight and principles of monocular and binocular vision. He was a member of the "Lazarones," an informal group of some of the most prominent American scientists, underappreciated by many historians of American science.
Of the four scientists, Woodrow Wilson's uncle James Woodrow was perhaps most dramatically involved in the evolutionary controversies of the 19th century. After studying in Heidelberg under Bunsen and after serving for 8 years as a professor of physics and chemistry at Ogglethorpe University, James Woodrow came in 1861 to the Columbia Theological Seminary. But in 1886 he was dismissed when a Presbyterian ecclesiastical court found him guilty of heretically defending evolutionary teachings. However, while he was relieved of his professorial duties, he continued preaching and editing the Southern Presbyterian. His eloquent defense of evolution and of his scientific conscience before the ecclesiastical court has been published in Marion Woodward (ed.) Dr. James Woodrow as Seen by His Friends (Columbia: Bryan, 1909, part I. pp. 617-645).
In conclusion, here are a few more suggested readings on the lives of the four South Carolina scientists (for an overview cf. the Dictionary of American Biography and the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Dumas Malone, The Public Life of Thomas Cooper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926); Jay Shuler, Had I the Wings: The Friendship of Bachman and Audubon (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Lester Stephens, Joseph LeConte: Gentle Prophet of Evolution (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982). See also volumes 1 and 2 of Daniel Walker Hollis's history of the University of South Carolina (Columbia: USC Press, 1951) and Edwin Green's older A History of the University of South Carolina (Columbia: The State Company, 1916).
Alfred Nordmann
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