“162. I must not, however, anticipate of this eventful history so far as to discuss at present any manner of the resemblance in my fate, or work, or home companionship to those of St Anthony of Padua; but may record, as immediately significant, the delight which both my mother and I took in the possession of a really practical pigstye in our Danish farmyard, (the coach-house and stables being to us of no importance in comparison); the success with which my mother directed the nurture, and fattening, of the piglings; the civil and jovial character of the piglings so nurtured, indicated especially by their habit of standing in a row on their hind-legs to look over the fence, whenever my mother came into the yard: and conclusively by the satisfaction with which even our most refined friends would accept a present of pork – or it might be, alas! sometimes of sucking pig – from Denmark Hill.”

(John Ruskin, Præterita, Volume II, Chapter VIII, p. 346 in the Everyman’s edition.)

“When I was a student I was enjoined to reject the ‘Cleopatra’s Nose’ theory of history, so called after Pascal’s remark in the Pensées: ‘Cleopatra’s nose: if it had been shorter, everything in the world would have changed.’ The intent was not to dismiss biography as a way into the structuring of a historical narrative, but to reject the idea that the properties, ideas, or actions of some particular person were the necessary conditions for the unfolding of events in the world. If Josef Djugashvili had never been born, someone else could have been Stalin.

Despite this injunction, a remarkable amount of the history of science has been written through the medium of biographies of ‘great’ scientists to whose brilliant discoveries we owe our understanding of the material world, and this historical methodology has reinforced the common notion that history is made by outstanding individuals. No respectable historian would claim that if Newton had never been born we would still be ignorant about gravitation. Yet we still refer to the regularities of the behavior of physical bodies as ‘Newton’s Laws,’ the general regularities of simple inheritance as ‘Mendelism,’ and the science of biological evolution as ‘Darwinism.’ Even the famous history of science written by the Marxist J.D. Bernal is a recounting of the discoveries and inventions of individuals.

It would be wrong to say that biography is the sole, or even principal, present pathway into an understanding of the history of science. Certainly since Robert Merton’s founding of modern studies of the sociology of science in his 1938 work on seventeenth-century English science, the social milieu in which the problems of science arise and the institutional structure of scientific investigation have been central to our understanding of the history of scientific work. There are, however, occasions on which there are orgies of idolatrous celebrations of the lives of famous men, when the Suetonian ideal of history as biography overwhelms us. For Darwinians, 2009 is such a year.”

(Richard Lewontin, from “Why Darwin?” in the NYRB.)

“The author of ‘The Golden Age’ and of ‘Dream Days’ has disappointed us. There is no getting away from that melancholy fact. He has written in ‘The Wind in the Willows’, a book with hardly a smile in it, through which we wander in a haze of perplexity, uninterested by the story itself and at a loss to understand its deeper purpose. The chief character is a mole, whom the reader plumps upon on the first page whitewashing his house. Here is an initial nut to crack; a mole whitewashing. No doubt moles like their abodes to be clean; but whitewashing? Are we very stupid, or is this joke really inferior? However, let it pass. Then enters a water rat, on his way to a river picnic, in a skiff, with a hamper of provisions, including cold tongue, cold ham, French rolls, and soda water. Nut number two; for obviously a water rat is of all animals the one that would never use a boat with which to navigate a stream. Again, are we very stupid, or is this nonsense of poor quality? Later we meet a wealthy toad, who, after a tour of England in a caravan, drawn by a horse, becomes a rabid motorist. He is also an inveterate public speaker. We meet also a variety of animals whoso foibles doubtless are borrowed from mankind, and so the book goes on until the end. Beneath the allegory ordinary life is depicted more or less closely, but certainly not very amusingly or searchingly; while as a contribution to natural history the work is negligible. There are neat and fanciful passages; but they do not convince. The puzzle is, for whom is the book intended? Grown up readers will find it monotonous and elusive; children will hope in vain for more fun.”

(E. V. Lucas, review of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows in the Times Literary Supplement, 22 October 1908, pointed out in the 17 October 2008 issue of the same publication. Lucas was also the co-author of the collage-novel What a Life!.)

“11. There is no doubt that all these doctors sought fame by means of some innovation, and irresponsibility trafficked with our lives. This accounts for those wretched arguments at the sick-bed when no two doctors give the same opinion for fear that a colleague’s diagnosis might appear to carry more weight. It also accounts for the sad inscription occurring on some monuments which says: ‘A gang of doctors killed me.’ The art of medicine changes daily and is constantly given a new look: we are swept along by the empty words of Greek intellectuals. It is well known that those who are successful speakers have the power of life and death over us, just as if thousands of people do not exist without doctors or medicine. The Romans did so for more than 600 years, although they are not slow to accept advances – and indeed were even avid for medicine until they put it to the test and rejected it!”

(Pliny the Elder in Book XXIX (“Medicine, Doctors and Medical Practice”) of Natural History; p. 263 in John Healy’s Natural History: A Selection.)