Dorothea Waley Singer

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Dorothea Waley Singer , b. Cohen (born December 17, 1882 in London , † June 24, 1964 in Par near St Austell , Cornwall ), was a British paleographer , science and medical historian and philanthropist.

life and work

Dorothea Waley Cohen was born in London on December 17, 1882, the second daughter of the stockbroker Nathaniel Louis Cohen and his wife Julia Matilda Waley . Her maternal grandfather was the legal scholar and economist Jacob Waley, one of her brothers the industrialist and leader of the British Jewish community, Sir Robert Waley Cohen . Dorothea Waley Cohen graduated from Queen's College in London with a humanistic degree, which roughly corresponds to a bachelor's degree . In 1910 she married the physician Charles Singer . The Singers later adopted two children, Andrew Waley Singer and Nancy Waley Singer. The latter married the then director of the Wellcome Institute for Medical History, London, E. Ashworth Underwood in 1949.

At the time of her marriage, Dorothea Singer was already a budding expert on scientific manuscripts of the Middle Ages, who also devoted herself to numerous philanthropic activities. The marriage to the wealthy palaeographer marked a turning point for Charles Singer's career. His first historical work appeared in 1911, on a forerunner of Louis Pasteur , Benjamin Marten. With the support of his wife, Charles Singer was to become one of the central figures in the English-language history of natural science and medicine in the interwar period. At his side, Dorothea Singer worked intensively into the history of medicine. The couple published various writings together, initially in 1913 a work on contagium vivum , a term coined by Lorenz von Crell and Jakob Henle on the theory of microorganisms as the cause of infectious diseases . By 1927 they published seven other joint medical-historical works, including studies on the plague, the doctor and poet Girolamo Fracastoro and the school of Salerno . Dorothea also took an active part in the planning and implementation of the famous International Congress for the History of Science and Technology, which Charles Singer presided over in 1931.

However, she also ran her own studies. In 1916 she published a treatise on over 100 plague tracts from 1348 to 1485. During Charles' absence from the war, she began the monumental endeavor of cataloging all medical and scientific manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland from the Middle Ages to the early modern period. By early 1919 she had already identified over 30,000 texts; in the same year she presented the results of the History of Medicine Society as the first female lecturer in the history of the Society. The Union Académique Internationale published the first volume of the project in 1924, a catalog of alchemical manuscripts (Greek), followed by three further volumes (1928–1931, texts in Latin and English). Based on her experiences from this endeavor, Dorothea Singer gave lectures on palaeography at the University of California, where the Singers stayed for Charles' visiting professorships in 1930 and 1932. The Singer Collection , Dorothea Singer's index cards on medical and scientific texts from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, survive to this day in the Department of Manuscripts of the British Library, where they fill more than 100 boxes.

In the early 30s she began to grapple with Giordano Bruno's work. The first version of a monograph on the topic was already available in 1932, but the escalating political situation in Central Europe left the socially committed Singers increasingly less time for their historical research. While Charles was actively involved in the mission of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning , founded in 1933 in response to the discrimination in Nazi Germany, Dorothea welcomed refugees and passed them on. In some cases she even made herself available for conversation lessons and helped scientific emigrants from Germany to become 'America-ready'.

Only after the end of the war did she systematically return to her studies. In December 1946 an essay on alchemical texts under Plato's alleged authorship appeared in the magazine Ambix , in 1949 and 1950 a long essay (in three parts) on the Scottish doctor Sir John Pringle . Dorothea Singer's Brumo biography was published in 1950 under the title Giordano Bruno: his life and thought and contains her commented translation of Bruno's third philosophical dialogue De l'infinito, universo e mondi from 1584 (German: About the infinite, the universe and the worlds ) .

In 1956 Dorothea Singer and her husband were awarded the George Sarton Medal , the prestigious prize for the history of science from the American History of Science Society (HSS) founded by George Sarton and Lawrence Joseph Henderson . For many years she served on the board of directors of the Académie Internationale d'Histoire des Sciences, founded in 1928, and as Vice-President of the Union International d'Histoire des Sciences, of which she headed the Bibliographical Commission for a long time. Dorothea Waley Singer was also a co-founder of the British Society for the History of Science and its first vice-president from 1947 to 1950, as well as a member of other scientific associations. She was in close contact with various scientists of her time, including the eminent biologist Julian Sorell Huxley and the sinologist and biochemist Joseph Needham , the greatest Western authority of his time in the field of Chinese natural science history. She had an intensive correspondence with Needham.

The Singers lived in London until 1914, then in Oxford, and from 1920 in Highgate, London. In 1934 they moved into Kilmarth, a stately home on a cliff not far from the fishing village of Fowey, near Par, on the south coast of Cornwall . Dorothea Waley Singer died here four years after her husband on June 24, 1964. Her new tenant in Kilmarth was the novelist Daphne du Maurier . The property, whose foundations date back to the 14th century, formed the background for du Maurier's time travel novel The house on the strand from 1969.

Works (selection)

  • Alchemical texts bearing the name of Plato. In: Ambix. Journal of the Society for the study of alchemy and early chemistry. Volume 2, Issue 3-4, London 1946, pp. 115-128.
  • Catalog of Latin and vernacular alchemical manuscripts in Great Britain and Ireland. Lamertin publishing house, Brussels 1930.
  • Giordano Bruno: his life and thought. With annotated translation of his work - On the infinite universe and worlds. Henry Schuman Publisher, New York 1950, ISBN 1-117-31419-7 ( positiveatheism.org ).
  • Margrieta Beer, 1871-1951: a memoir . Manchester University Press, 1955.
  • Selections from the works of Ambroise Paré. In: Isis . Volume 7, 1924, p. 208.
  • Robert Steele (1860-1944). In: Isis . Volume 38, 1947/48, p. 103 (Obituary Notice).
  • The cosmology of Giordano Bruno (1548-1600). In: Isis . Volume 33, 1941/42, pp. 187-196.
  • List of letters from Dorothea Waley Singer to Joseph Needham (English, at Janus, Cambridge ).

literature

  • Geoffrey Cantor: Presidential Address: Charles Singer and the early years of the British Society for the History of Science. In: British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 30, Issue 1, March 1997, pp. 5-23.
  • Anita McConnell: Singer [née Cohen], Dorothea Waley (1882–1964), historian of medicine and philanthropist. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 74093 .
  • Anita McConnell (rev. Of EA Underwood): Singer, Charles Joseph (1876–1960), historian of medicine and science. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography. Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 36110 .
  • Anna-K. Mayer: When things don't talk: knowledge and belief in the inter-war humanism of Charles Singer (1876-1960). In: British Journal for the History of Science. Volume 38, 2005, pp. 325-347.
  • Julia Sheppard: Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library. Charles Joseph Singer, DM, DLitt, DSc, FRCP (1876-1960): papers in the Contemporary Medical Archives Center. In: Medical History. Volume 31, Issue 4, October 1987, pp. 466-471.
  • Edgar Ashworth Underwood: Mrs. Dorothea Waley Singer (1882–1964). In: British Journal for the History of Science. Volume 2, Issue 3, June 1965, pp. 260-262. JSTOR 4024942

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c E. A. Underwood: Mrs. Dorothea Waley Singer (1882–1964). In: The British Journal for the History of Science, Volume 2, Issue 3, June 1965, pp. 260-262, page 1 of the article at JSTOR
  2. ↑ a b Anita McConnell: Singer [née Cohen], Dorothea Waley (1882-1964), historian of medicine and philanthropist . In: Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography . Oxford University Press, doi : 10.1093 / ref: odnb / 74093 .
  3. ^ Sheppard, Julia: Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library. Charles Joseph Singer, DM, DLitt, DSc, FRCP (1876-1960): papers in the Contemporary Medical Archives Center . In: Medical History . tape 31 , issue 4, October 1987, p. 466-471, p. 467 .
  4. ^ Charles and Dorothea Singer: The development of the doctrine of contagium vivum, 1500-1750. In: Proceedings of the 17th international congress on medicine. London 1913, Section 23, pp. 187-206.
  5. ^ William H. Welch: Diary (copy), Needham Estate, Cambridge University Library . (MS Needham H.141).
  6. ↑ G. Werskey: The visible college: a collective biography of scientists and socialists in the 1930s . London 1978.
  7. ^ MA Dennis: Historiography of science: an American perspective . In: J. Krige and D. Pestre (eds.): Science in the twentieth century . Amsterdam 1997, p. 1-26 .
  8. ^ Dorothea Waley Singer: Some Plague Tractates (Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries) . In: Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine . tape 9 , issue 2, 1916, p. 159-218 .
  9. ^ Hunting, Penelope: The History of the Royal Society of Medicine . Royal Society of Medicine Press, 2001, ISBN 1-85315-497-0 , pp. 330-333 .
  10. ^ Dorothea Waley Singer: Preparation and use of manuscript catalogs. Lecture at the meeting of the Medical Library Association, San Francisco, California, 20. – 22. June 1932; published in Bulletin of the Medical Library Association. Volume 21, Issue 2, 1932, pp. 43-45.
  11. ^ M. Claire Jones: Vernacular literacy in late-medieval England: the example of East Anglian medical manuscripts. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2000.
  12. ^ Geneviève Miller: Charles and Dorothea Singer's help to Nazi victims. In: Koroth. Volume 8, Issue 11-12, 1985, pp 201-217.
  13. ^ RM Cooper, Refugee scholars: conversations with Tess Simpson (Leeds, 1992).
  14. ↑ Kay Schiller: The refugee historian Hans Baron and the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning. In: Anthony Grenville (Ed.): German-speaking exiles in Great Britain. Volume 2. Rodopi, Amsterdam 2000, pp. 59-76.
  15. ^ Dorothea Waley Singer: Alchemical texts bearing the name of Plato. In: Ambix Volume 2, Issue 3–4 (December 1946), pp. 115–128.
  16. ^ Dorothea Waley Singer in Annals of Science. Volume 6, pp. 127-180, 229-247, 248-261.
  17. ^ Janus letters from Dorothea Waley Singer to Joseph Needham , directory (English).
  18. ↑ Anna-K. Mayer: When things don't talk: knowledge and belief in the inter-war humanism of Charles Singer (1876-1960). In: British Journal for the History of Science. Volume 38, 2005, pp. 325-347, p. 336.
  19. ^ M. Shallcross: The private world of Daphne du Maurier . London 1991, p. 162 .
  20. ^ D. du Maurier: Enchanted Cornwall: her pictorial memoir . Ed .: P. Dudgeon. London 1989, p. 171 .
personal data
SURNAME Singer, Dorothea Waley
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cohen, Dorothea Waley (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British historian of science
DATE OF BIRTH December 17, 1882
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH June 24, 1964
Place of death Par at St Austell , Cornwall