Article PDF
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Jacques Loeb to Ernst Mach, 6 April 1891, Ernst Mach Papers, Ernst-Mach-Institute, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, West Germany. The context of Loeb's immigration is described in Philip J. Pauly, “Jacques Loeb and the Control of Life: An Experimental Biologist in Germany and America, 1859–1924,” Ph.D. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1980, pp. 119–143.
For a general discussion of the history of academic disciplines, see Charles Rosenberg, “Toward an Ecology of Knowledge: On Discipline, Context, and History,” in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1870–1920, ed. Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), pp. 440–455; a sociological argument is in Richard Whitley, “Umbrella and Polytheistic Disciplines and Their Elites,” Soc. Stud. Sci., 6 (1976), 471–497.
William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Evolution (New York: John Wiley, 1971), pp. 1–3; August Comte, Cours de philosophie positive, 6 vols. (Paris, 1908), III, 159–163; Georges Canguilhem, “La Philosophie biologique d'August Comte et son influence en France au XIXe siècle,” in Etudes d'histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris, 1968).
Charles Robin, “Sur la direction que se sont proposée en se réunissant les membres fondateurs de la Société de Biologie pour répondre au titre qu'ils ont choisi,” Comptes rendus des séances et mémoires de la Société de Biologie, 1 (1849), i-xi.
Bonnie Ellen Blustein, “The Philadelphia Biological Society, 1857–1861: A Failed Experiment?” J. Hist. Med. Allied Sci., 35, (1980), 188–202. This paper also discusses the Société de Biologie.
T. H. Huxley, “On the Physical Basis of Life” (1868), in Methods and Results (New York: Appleton, 1896), pp. 130–165; “On the Study of Biology” (1876) and “On Medical Education” (1870), in Science and Education (New York: Appleton, 1896), pp. 272–294, 303–322.
Robert E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
These schools were chosen on the basis of their involvement with graduate education or similar institutional innovations in the life sciences before 1900. Were the list to be enlarged, it would be useful to examine (in order of importance): Cornell, Yale, Michigan, Wisconsin, California, and Princeton.
The basic picture of the transformation of the life sciences in America has been provided by Garland Allen and Hamilton Cravens. They have described how the generation of workers coming to maturity in the decades after the Civil War replaced a largely indigenous natural history tradition with a new, more sophisticated approach imported from Europe. This “experimental biology” developed in America in the context of the new research-oriented graduate universities. See Garland E. Allen, Life Science in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 1–39; idem, “The Transformation of a Science: T. H. Morgan and the Emergence of a New American Biology, in Organization of Knowledge, pp. 173–210; idem, “Naturalists and Experimentalists: The Genotype and Phenotype,” Stud. Hist. Biol., 3 (1979), 179–209; Hamilton Cravens, “The Role of the Universities in the Rise of Experimental Biology,” Sci. Teacher, 44 (1977), 33–37; idem, The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), pp. 15–55. Their account has recently been criticized by Jane Mainenschein and Keith Benson, who have questioned the existence of a sharp dichotomy between naturalists and experimentalists, describing instead a more gradual transformation in both interests and methods. The case of Loeb raises questions about the extent and exact nature of European influences. And Frederick Churchill has pointed to the lacunae resulting from Allen and Cravens' failure to define the social, intellectual, and institutional meaning of “biology” at that time. See Jane Maienschein et al., “Introduction: Were American Morphologists in Revolt?” J. Hist. Biol., 14 (1981), 83–88; Maienschein, “Shifting Assumptions in American Biology: Embryology, 1890–1910,” ibid., pp. 89–112; Keith R. Benson, “Problems of Individual Development: Descriptive Embryological Morphology in America at the Turn of the Century,” ibid., pp. 115–128; Ronald Rainger, “The Continuation of the Morphological Tradition: American Paleontology, 1880–1910,” ibid., pp. 129–158; Frederick B. Churchill, “In Search of the New Biology: An Epilogue,” ibid., pp. 177–191. In many ways the present paper is a response to Churchill's comment (p. 188) that “any satisfactory account of the changes in American biology at the turn of the century must include ... institutions in the story, but at the same time must not confuse them with the complete story itself.”
There is a further contrast between the present account and Kohler's description of biochemistry. He presents situations in which academic entrepreneurs with particular programs prospered or failed depending on their ability to attract institutional support. He is less concerned with how changes occurred within what he calls different “styles” of work. My account, on the other hand, focuses on the process whereby the concept of biology itself gradually changed in response to rather fortuitous institutional arrangements. Furthermore, it suggests that once biology had taken shape as a core discipline, it acted as an independent influence in the academic environment, channeling future work in crucial ways.
Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), pp. 366–379; Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology, Annual Report, 1873, pp. 3–6.
Hunter A. Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810–1888 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 333–351; Andrew D. Rodgers III, American Botany, 1873–1892: Decades of Transition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944).
Kenneth M. Ludmerer, “Reform at Harvard Medical School, 1869–1909,” Bull. Hist. Med., 55 (1981), 343–370. The role of anatomy professor Jeffries Wyman, who became head of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology in 1866, remains unclear.
Harvard University, Annual Report of the President, 1873, 1874, 1875, 1876, passim; MCZ Report, 1874, pp. 4–6; ibid., 1875, pp. 5–6, 41.
Hunter A. Dupree, Asa Gray, 1810–1888 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 348–351, 404–405; S. B. Sutton, Charles Sprague Sargent and the Arnold Arboretum (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 22–49, 171–176.
MCZ Report, 1875, pp. 5–14; ibid., 1876, pp. 5–14; ibid., 1879–1880, pp. 14–17; ibid., 1883–1884, pp. 5–10. Cravens “Role of the Universities,” p. 34, argues that expanding resources were a major factor in the development of American university biology. Agassiz's reports indicate that, at least in the short run, the reverse was the case. While individuals could study taxonomy inexpensively, the museum required by a natural history research center was beyond the means of universities.
By 1886 Mark's enrollment reached 128 (MCZ Report, 1885–1886, p. 14). C. O. Whitman to Alexander Agassiz Papers, Museum of Comparative Zoology, of Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. Slow expansion did occur in the 1890s because of Harvard's increasing commitment to graduate education and the availability of teaching assistantships. But career prospects were terrible. G. H. Parker was an instructor for ten years. Walter Cannon quickly shifted from zoology to physiology. Regarding C. B. Davenport, see below.
F. T. Lewis, “Charles Sedgwick Minot,” Anat. Rec., 10 (1915–1916), 133–164.
Ibid., p. 142; C. S. Minot, “The Study of Zoology in Germany,” Amer. Nat., 11 (1877), 330–336.
C. S. Minot, “A Grave Defect in Our Medical Education,” Boston Med. Surg. J., 104 (1881), 565–567.
Minot to Eliot, 24 September 1892, C. W. Eliot Papers, University Archives, Harvard University Library, Cambridge, Mass.; also Lewis, “Minot,” p. 146.
The division between the biological and the medical sciences was not a simple distinction between pure and applied fields. As Gerald Geison has argued in “Divided We Stand: Physiologists and Clinicians in the American Context,” in The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine, ed. M. J. Vogel and C. E. Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), pp. 67–90, clinicians long doubted that laboratory sciences produced results of much value to the practitioner. In the face of this often justifiable criticism, physiologists (among others) claimed that their field was a pure science whose primary service to medicine was inculcating in studients the mental discipline that came from laboratory practice. Yet medical reformers did have a sense that among such pure intellectual pursuits, some were clearly more relevant to medicine than others.
D. C. Gilman, “Inaugural Address,” 22 February 1876, quoted in Allan Chesney, The Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943), I, 43; Hugh Hawkins, Pioneer: A History of the Johns Hopkins University, 1874–1889 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 48; Johns Hopkins Univ. Circular, 1 (1881), 104.
Martin is discussed in Charles E. Rosenberg, “Henry Newell Martin,” Dict. Sci. Biog., 9, 142–143, and in two unpublished papers: Sheila F. Weiss, “Possibilities and Realities of Discipline Building: Martin, Medicine, and the Establishment of an Autonomous Science,” Johns Hopkins University, 1975; and Larry Owens, “Pure and Sound Government: Laboratories, Lecture-Halls, and Playing-Fields in Nineteenth Century American Science,” Princeton University, 1981.
Hawkins, Pioneer, pp. 142–144; Martin, “Modern Physiological Laboratories: What They Are and Why They Are,” Johns Hopkins Univ. Circular, 3 (1884), 87; also his “The Study and Teaching of Biology,” Pop. Sci. Mon., 10 (1877), 298–309, and his nineteen-page manuscript, “Report to the Trustees Containing suggestions with reference to the future of the Biological Department of the Johns Hopkins University — Made in compliance with the request conveyed in President Gilman's letter of April 29, 1881,” 7 May 1881, Daniel Coit Gilman Papers, Department of Special Collections, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.
Hawkins, Pioneer, p. 145; Martin to Gilman, 29 May 1876, 2 January 1877, Gilman Papers. On Brooks see Keith R. Benson, “William Keith Brooks (1845–1908): A Case Study in Morphology and the Development of American Biology,” Ph.D. diss., Oregon State University, 1979. Slightly older than Martin, Brooks began as an associate, became assistant professor in 1878, associate professor in 1883, and professor in 1891. In 1876 Martin's salary was $4,000, Brooks's $1,000; by 1881 Martin received $5,000 and Brooks $2,500. In 1893 Brooks was paid $3,500. (Information provided by Julia B. Morgan of the Johns Hopkins University Archives.)
Fabian Franklin, The Life of Daniel Coit Gilman (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1910), p. 252. The program's lack of popularity resulted from the attitudes of the better medical schools, such as Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, which met “applications from Bachelors of Arts and Philosophy, nearly always of the ‘Johns Hopkins,’ with a refusal to recognize their biology and histology as equivalent to a single day's study at the medical school.” (J. G. Curtis to Seth Low, 5 December 1891, Central Files, Low Library, Columbia University, New York, NY [hereafter CUCF].) On delays in establishing the medical school see Chesney, Hopkins Hospital, pp. 49, 98. W. H. Welch joined the faculty in 1885, but set up his pathology laboratory on the hospital grounds two miles away from the main university buildings. Of the physiology graduates, Henry Sewall was professor of physiology at the University of Michigan; the others were H. G. Beyer, H. H. Donaldson, E. M. Hartwell, W. H. Howell, G. T. Kemp, F. S. Lee, W. T. Sedgwick, and C. Sihler.
W. K. Brooks, “The Zoological Work of the Johns Hopkins University, 1878–1886,” Johns Hopkins Univ. Circular, 6 (1886), 37–41; Benson, “Problems of Individual Development,” pp. 117–118. Tables in Johns Hopkins University, Half-Century Directory, 1876–1926 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1926), pp. 428–429, indicate that fourteen graduate students majored in physiology between 1876 and 1885, while twenty-three concentrated on zoology. Approximately fifty students and visitors attended Brooks's makeshift summer research station, the Chesapeake Zoological Laboratory. Such interest in morphology is understandable, given Harvard's stagnation (as Benson, “Brooks”, p. 76, points out) and the comparative lack of interest in studying abroad on the part of zoology students, as indicated in J. McKeen Cattell, “Statistical Study of American Men of Science,” in American Men of Science, ed. J. McKeen Cattell, 2nd ed. (New York: Science Press, 1910), pp. 537–596, esp. p. 562. The thousand scientists starred as eminent in the first (1906) edition were of ages such that the average data of Ph.D. completion was 1886. When broken down by discipline, zoology was the field with the highest percentage (71%) of eminent men who had done their graduate work in America. It was followed by botany (68%). The medical science of pathology was lowest with 32%, followed by chemistry with 34%.
Benson, “Brooks”, pp. 73–76, discusses the link between physiology and morphology without, however, emphasizing its fortuitousness or the tensions that remained.
Benson, “Brooks”, p. 314; Garland E. Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan: The Man and His Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 45–46; Brooks, “Zoological Work”, pp. 40–41; W. H. Howell, “The Life History of the Formed Elements of the Blood, Especially the Red Blood Corpuscles”, J. Morph., 4 (1891), 57–110. The atmosphere of cooperation at the Chesapeake Zoological Laboratory is described in a series of letters from Brooks to Gilman in the Gilman Papers; see especially the one dated 15 July 1885.
J. P. Campbell, “Biological Teaching in the Colleges of the United States”, U.S. Bureau of Education, Circular of Information, 1891, no. 9. p. 138.
W. T. Sedgwick and E. B. Wilson, General Biology (New York: Henry Holt, 1886).
Bryn Mawr College, President's Report to the Board of Trustees, 1884–1885, pp. 15–16; M. Carey Thomas, “Conversations about College Organization in 1884,” manuscript notebook, College Archives, Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Penn.
E. B. Wilson to M. Carey Thomas, 23 January 1888, M. Carey Thomas Official Correspondence, reel 152, Bryn Mawr Archives, Bryn Mawr, Penn.; Bryn Mawr College, Program, 1889, pp. 46–50; Bryn Mawr College, President's Report, 1898, p. 70.
Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 186–202; Clark University, Third Annual Report of the President to the Board of Trustees. April 1893 (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1893), pp. 90–106; Clark University, Decennial Celebration (Worcester, Mass.: Clark University Press, 1899), pp. 99–107. The biologists were adjunct professor of anatomy F. P. Mall, assistant professor of neurology H. H. Donaldson, docent in morphology J. P. McMurrich, assistant in neurology C. F. Hodge, lecturer in morphology Shoriburo Watase (all from Hopkins); also assistant professor of physiology W. P. Lombard, docent in paleontology George Baur, and (most significant) C. O. Whitman, professor of morphology.
On Whitman see F. R. Lillie, “Charles Otis Whitman,” J. Morph., 22 (1911), xv-lxxvii; C. B. Davenport, “The Personality, Heredity and Work of Charles Otis Whitman, 1843–1910,” Amer. Nat., 51 (1917), 5–30. Whitman did not enter college until the age of twenty-three; after graduation and six years of teaching high school, he decided to become a zoologist. He studied at Harvard, Leipzig, and Naples, then taught for two years at the University of Tokyo. A fight with the Japanese sent him back to America in 1881; unable to find a job, he worked for Alexander Agassiz for three years before shifting to Allis. There were at least two reasons why Whitman found it difficult to get an academic position. As Davenport, “Personality,” p. 26, reported, an “unkind critic once commented that ‘his lectures consisted of pauses punctuated by sentences.’” For M. Carey Thomas (“Conversations about College Organization, 1884”) the problem was that Whitman's wife was “notorious”-“Behaved badly at Naples — All Americ[ans] ashamed of her Certainly not desirable woman for womans college.”
C. O. Whitman, “Biological Instruction in Universities,” Amer. Nat., 21 (1887), 507–519.
My interpretation of Whitman's ideology and his work at the MBL depends upon Donna J. Haraway, “The Marine Biological Laboratory of Woods Hole: An Ideology of Biological Expansion,” paper delivered at Conference on Knowledge in American Society, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, June 1975. The MBL was of major significance in promoting professional cohesion among biologists; but it would have been insignificant without the developments in the universities.
C. O. Whitman, “Report of the Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory for the Fourth Session, 1891,” Amer. Nat. pp. 15–16.
On Whitman's move see Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The Psychologist as Prophet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 218–228; on Harper's aims see Richard J. Storr, Harper's University: The Beginnings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 141. Also University of Chicago, Offical Bulletin No. 1, January 1891, quoted in University of Chicago, President's Report, Decennial Publications, ser. 1, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), I, 511.
F. P. Mall to W. H. Welch, 15 January 1893, quoted in Florence R. Sabin, Franklin Paine Mall: The Story of a Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), p. 112. Harper's expansive views of biomedical cooperation were shared by and apparently encouraged by Mall, who was a close friend of the president's brother, the Assyriologist R. F. Harper. Mall presented his views in “What is Biology?” Chatauquan, 18 (1894), 411–414.
Whitman to Harper, 19 December 1891, 15 January 1892, 26 January 1892, University of Chicago Presidents' Papers, University Archives, Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, Chicago, Ill. (hereafter UCPP); Lincoln C. Blake, “The Concept and Development of Science at the University of Chicago,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1966; Storr, Harper's University, pp. 141–142; University of Chicago, Annual Register, 1894–1895, p. 165.
Whitman to Harper, 15 January 1892, 13 March 1896, UCPP; Whitman, “Report of the Director,” p. 16.
Florence R. Sabin, Franklin Paine Mall: The Story of a Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), pp. 115–117; Whitman to Harper, 9 April 1895, UCPP; Harper to Martin Ryerson, 24 December 1895, UCPP; Howard S. Miller, Dollars for Research (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970), pp. 159–162.
“Exercises in Connection with the Laying of the Corner Stones of the Hull Biological Laboratories,” University Record, 31 July 1896, p. 286.
W. H. Welch, “Biology and Medicine,” Papers and Addresses, 3 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1920), III, 240.
Storr, Harper's University, pp. 141–144, 286–291, 360–362; Ernest E. Irons, The Story of Rush Medical College (Chicago: Rush Medical College, 1953), pp. 32–44; T. N. Bonner, Medicine in Chicago, 1850–1950 (Madison, Wis.: American History Research Center, 1957), pp. 109, 118–121; Kohler, Medical Chemistry, pp. 145–148. Jacques Loeb to Harper, 8 March 1900, 7 July 1900, UCPP; Whitman to Harper, 3 May 1899, 4 September 1899, 12 September 1899, UCPP.
Columbia University, Annual Report, 1891, p. 6; “Report of the Special Committee on the Disposition of the Legacy of Charles M. Da Costa, Recommending the Establishment of the Department of Biology,” Columbia College Papers, 1891: January–May, Manuscript Department, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York (hereafter CUM). Another aspect of the creation of this program is described in Douglas Sloan, “Science in New York City, 1867–1907,” Isis, 71 (1980), 35–76.
Columbia University, Catalog, 1892–1893; J. S. McLane to Seth Low, 1 March 1891, Trustees' Papers, CUM; Low to J. G. Curtis, 4 November 1892, CUCF. On Lee see National Cyclopaedia of American Biography, B, 262–263; H. B. Williams, “Frederic Schiller Lee,” Science, 91 (1940), 133.
Osborn to Low, 4 March 1892, CUCF; Columbia University, Annual Report, 1892, pp. 8, 16; Osborn, “Zoology at Columbia,” Columbia Univ. Bull., 17 (1897), 17–26.
Typed excerpt from Minutes of the Faculty of Pure Science, 20 October 1893, in F. S. Lee Papers, box 1, file “Columbia University-President Butler and Secretary,” CUM; G. S. Huntington, “Comparative Anatomy in the Medical Course,” Amer. J. Med. Sci., 116 (1898), 629–646; Low to Osborn, 12 March 1895, 21 March 1895, 28 March 1895, CUCF; Osborn to Low, 16 March 1895, 22 March 1895, 6 March 1896, CUCF; Huntington to Low, 5 December 1894, 2 March 1895, 7 March 1895, 10 May 1895, CUCF; Low to Huntington, 28 February 1895, 10 May 1895, CUCF; Seth Low to “Faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons,” n.d., J. W. McLane folder, CUCF; G. S. Huntington, printed statement, 5 December 1894, Records of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, file “anatomy,” CUM.
On the general development of the zoology department see Henry E. Crampton, The Department of Zoology of Columbia Universit, 1882–1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942).
F. S. Lee, “The Scope of Modern Physiology,” Amer. Nat., 28 (1894), 388; on Lee's course see Columbia University, Annual Report, 1898–1899, p. 163. Around 1903 the Columbia University Catalog ceased to mention a room maintained by the physiology department at Woods Hole. On the 1909 decisions see F. P. Mall to Jacques Loeb, 23 May 1909, Jacques Loeb to Anne Loeb, 6 July 1909, 8 July 1909, 11 July 1909, Jacques Loeb Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., boxes 9, 17; Columbia University, Annual Report, 1911, p. 83. It is not irrelevant to an understanding of Lee's career that in 1901 he married the daughter of a former president of the Northern Pacific Railway. Slightly later the biochemist Gies had problems similar to those of Lee; see Kohler, Medical Chemistry, pp, 296–300.
G. W. Corner, Two Centuries of Medicine: A History of the School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965); Joseph T. Rothrock, “The School of Biology,” in “Benjamin Franklin and the University of Pennsylvania,” ed. Francis N. Thorpe, U.S. Bureau of Education, Circular of Information, 1982, No. 2, p. 332; Blustein, “Philadelphia Biological Society.”
E. P. Cheyney, History of the University of Pennsylvania, 1740–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1889), pp. 300–303; University of Pennsylvania, Handbook of Information Concerning the School of Biology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1889); Rothrock, “School of Biology,” pp. 333–342; University of Pennsylvania, Annual Report of the Provost, 1884–1885, p. 12; University of Pennsylvania Trustees Minutes, 6 October 1886, 3 January 1888, University Archives, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Penn. (hereafter UPA); [C. S. Dolley] to “Provost and Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania,” n.d., file 1891 Biological Station, UPA.
Leidy was one of the few scientists to reject C. O. Whitman's request for endorsement of the Journal of Morphology — see Whitman to Leidy, 23 June 1886, Joseph Leidy Papers, Collection 1, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. On the influence Jayne's wealth had on his appointment see William Pepper to Leidy, 4 April 1882, Leidy Papers, Collection 1; on relations between university and academy see University of Pennsylvania Trustees Minutes, 5 February 1884, 1 April 1884, UPA; also “Pennsylvania, University. Papers regarding the possible removal of the Academy to the University campus,” Collection 543, Academy of Natural Sciences.
C. S. Dolley to William Pepper, 6 June 1891, file 1891 biology, UPA; C. K. Landis to Dolley, 30 September 1891, file 1891 biology, UPA; Dolley to Pepper, 9 June 1892, file 1892 biology, UPA; manuscript resolution concerning Joseph Leidy Chair, file 1893 biology, UPA.
Pepper to H. C. Lea, 26 September 1889, Pepper Manuscripts III, 603, Rare Book Room, University of Pennsylvania Library, Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania, Annual Report of the Provost, 1892–1894, p. 7; Corner, Two Centuries, pp. 180–184; Isaac Wistar to Samuel Dickson, 29 January 1892, Dickson to Wistar, 1 February 1892, file 1892 Wistar Institute, UPA; Harrison Allen, “The Objects of the Wistar Institue,” Univ. Med. Mag., 6 (1893–1894), 586–593. The Institute changed direction when Milton Greenman became director in 1905.
University of Pennsylvania, Annual Report of the Provost, 1894–1896, p. 93, noted that administrative control of graduate work in physiology, medical chemistry, and hygiene was being relocated from the philosophical department to the medical department.
The botanists, centered in the second-level midwestern universities, recognized the situation by seceding from the “biology” section of the AAAS in 1893, and by complaining about the increasing dominance of a “sham biology” that ignored “one-half of the content of the science.” Conway MacMillan, “On the Emergence of a Sham Biology in America,” Science, 21 (1893), 184–186. As Eugene Cittadino, “Ecology and the Professionalization of Botany in America, 1890–1805,” Stud. Hist. Biol., 4 (1980), 171–198, argues, plant ecology, a science that would combine field observation and “physiological” methods, was promoted by botanists in the late 1890s in large part as a response to the predominance of “zoological” biology.
See note 9; also Allen, “Morphology and Twentieth-Century Biology: A Response,” J. Hist. Biol., 14 (1981), 165–170.
The membership lists from the Records of the American Society of Naturalists provide a rough indication of the spread of biology as an identification. In 1886 six members gave their field as “biology”; ten years later twentyeight used that term, by far the largest percentage increase. Total membership grew from 140 to 204. After that compilers grew careless about members' fields.
This is not to say that the pull was insignificant. When the Hopkins medical school finally opened, the alcoholic Martin was succeeded by Howell. Now in a medical environment, Howell abandoned his earlier broad biological interests for research on sleep and the flow of blood through the brain. Contact between physiologists and morphologists lessened with Howell's move to the hospital complex in the late 1890s; combined with Brooks's poor health, it led to a rapid decline in the significance of the Hopkins biology program. In the longer run, as Robert E. Kohler, From Medical Chemistry to Biochemistry: The Making of a Biomedical Discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 286–323, argues, the impact of general physiology within biology was limited by the medical forces promoting a clinically oriented biochemistry.
Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 173–184, 196–210; Daniel Kevles, “Genetics in the United States and Great Britain, 1890–1930: A Review with Speculations,” Isis, 71 (1980), 441–455.
No Other Gods (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 89–97; E. Carleton MacDowell, “Charles Benedict Davenport, 1866–1944: A Study of Conflicting Influences,” Bios, 17 (1946), 3–50. In contrast to Davenport, Watase had noted that “it is very difficult to make the biological problem which interests us in any way intelligible to the non-biological readers.” (Watase to C. O. Whitman, 16 September 1891, box 11, folder 2, G. Stanley Hall Papers, Clark University Archives, Worcester, Mass.).
Scott F. Gilbert, “The Embryological Origins of the Gene Theory,” J. Hist. Biol., 11 (1978), 307–351; Allen, Morgan, pp. 125–153, 275; Rosenberg, No Other Gods, pp. 196–210. The marginal University of Pennsylvania department was among the first to cultivate a nonacademic constituency — see E. G. Conklin to C. W. Stiles, 25 February 1902, and Stiles to Conklin, 1 March 1902, in Nathan Reingold and Ida H. Reingold, eds., Science in America: A Documentary History, 1900–1939 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 129–132.
Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Genetics and American Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), pp. 35–73.
Philip J. Pauly, “The Loeb-Jennings Debate and the Science of Animal Behavior,” J. Hist. Behav. Sci.17 (1981), 504–515.
William K. Gregory, “Henry Fairfield Osborn,” N.A.S. Biog. Mem., 19 (1938), 53–119, esp. p. 84; Osborn, The Origin and Evolution of Life, on the Theory of Action, Reaction, and Interaction of Energy (New York: Scribner's, 1917); J. M. Flint to B. I. Wheeler, 3 June 1902, President's Files, University of California Archives, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Ca.; W. E. Ritter to B. I. Wheeler, 20 October 1910, President's Files, University of California Archives; Ritter, The Unity of the Organism, 2 vols. (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1919); M. A. Evans and E. E. Evans, William Morton Wheeler, Biologist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 103–108, 127, 231–252; W. M. Wheeler, Emergent Evolution and the Development of Societies (New York: Norton, 1928); H. S. Jennings, The Universe and Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1933); E. G. Conklin, The Direction of Human Evolution (New York: Scribner's, 1921); idem, Man, Real and Ideal (New York: Scribner's, 1943); S. J. Holmes, Life and Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1948).
The combination of expanded influence and looser definition on the level of biological research was paralleled in the more mundane sphere of high school education. Between 1900 and 1920 “general biology” replaced the earlier courses in zoology, botany, and physiology. The content of general biology was quite variable; a sequence of the three older subjects, the so-called earthwormfern course modeled on the text of Sedgwick and Wilson (note 32), and texts in “civic biology” that emphasized ecology and eugenics were all popular into the 1930s. Discussions of their relative merits, however, were restricted to questions of pedagogy and avoided conceptual issues. See Charles W. Finley, Biology in Secondary Schools and the Training of Biology Teachers (Teachers College, Columbia University, Contributions to Education, no. 199), 1926; Otto B. Christy, The Development of the Teaching of General Biology in the Secondary Schools (Peabody Contribution to Education no. 201), 1936; Sidney Rosen, “TheOrigins of High School General Biology,” School Sci. Math., 59 (1959), 473–489.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pauly, P.J. The appearance of academic biology in late nineteenth-century America. J Hist Biol 17, 369–397 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00126369
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00126369