A Scientist as a Silo Solver?
IMAGE: (Detail) Title page from Mary Somerville [Fairfax]’s . The Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 1834.
Connecting Dots
The term “scientist” was 1st printed in 1834, in a book review on a work written by Mary Somerville (1780–1872). Up til then, and through the Victorian era, those in “learned" circles referred to contributors to the advancement of knowledge as “men of science” or "natural philosophers.”
Somerville, a Scottish polymath, who happened to be computing pioneer Ada Lovelace’s tutor, stood apart from the men of science of her times. With her 2nd book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834), she wowed members of the learned community. The work covered the realms of astronomy, chemistry, geology, mathematics, meteorology, and physics.
IMAGE: (Detail) Mary Somerville [Fairfax]. Lithograph after T. Phillips. Wellcome Collection. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Somerville's interdisciplinary knowledge sets and approach to science—her merit—was undeniable. In his review of her treatise, in a 1834 issue of Quarterly Review, then future master of Trinity College in Cambridge, William Whewell wrote:
“Mrs. Somerville’s able and masterly (if she will excuse this word) exposition of the present state of the leading branches of the physical sciences…her professed object is to illustrate 'The Connection of the Physical Sciences.’ This is a noble object; and to succeed in it would be to render a most important service to science.”
He went on:
“The tendency of the sciences has long been an increasing proclivity to separation and dismemberment. Formerly, the ‘learned’ embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge…But these days are past…”
“We adopt the maxim ‘one science only can one genius fit.’ The mathematician turns away from the chemist; the chemist from the naturalist…And thus science, even mere physical science, loses all traces of unity.”(1)
Referring to a deliberation by members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Whewell spoke to their query for a term to describe a person (such as Somerville) who pursues various branches of knowledge vs. just one. A “philosopher” was considered, but deemed “too lofty a term.”
Then, Whewell, anonymously referring to himself, wrote that “an ingenious gentleman” proposed “that by analogy with artist, they might form scientist.” (< the 1st time his coined term was printed)
Somerville was not explicitly called “the scientist, Mrs. Somerville” in Whewell’s review of her work.
In part, a portion of his book review was an exercise as how to describe the significance and importance of “Mrs. Sommerville’s" work, in a Victorian era that had the proclivity to exclude some types of people from “traditional” “learned” circles at the time.
Contemporary scholar Renée Bergland records that Somerville’s interdisciplinary approach and works served as the basis for Cambridge University’s first modern science curriculum.
When Mary Somerville passed in 1872, her obituary in The Morning Post read,
“Whatever difficulty we might experience in the middle of the nineteenth century in choosing a king of science, there could be no question whatever as to the queen of science.” (2)
Sources
“Art. III— On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences. By Mrs. Somerville.,” Anonymously written by William Whewell in The Quarterly Review, volume 51, pp. 54 68, 1834 (University of Kent Blog,, April 2015), https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/sciencecomma/files/2015/04/whewell_1834_scientist.pdf
“Mary Somerville: Her Legacy for Women in Science,” (The Oxford Scientist, February 11, 2022), https://oxsci.org/mary-somerville-her-legacy-for-women-in-science/
