Abstract
In 1838 Dr. William Somerville suffered an almost fatal attack of jaundice (a disease of the liver), though in 1812, while on honeymoon in the Lake District, he had been struck down with a dangerous fever, from which it took him a month to recover. Today we may live in fear of physiologically degenerative diseases such as cancer, but rarely feel seriously threatened by a person-to-person infection, and it is all too easy for us to forget the menace of infectious disease which was faced in the early nineteenth century. Even those who moved in the highest echelons of intellectual society, who were pioneering the thought of the age, still lived in dread of scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus and other diseases. The sudden death of Mary Somerville’s first husband, Captain Samuel Greig, at the age of 29, was almost certainly due to infection, while the deaths of her own small children and of many of her friends recorded in her letters were likewise due to infectious diseases. And as the cause and vector of transmission of all of these diseases were quite misunderstood before the 1860s, even distinguished physicians such as Dr. Somerville were just as vulnerable to them—and as helpless in effectively treating them—as was everyone else.
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Notes
- 1.
See Ref. [1].
- 2.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections (London 1873), post mortem note by Martha Somerville: ‘Her remains rest on the English Campo Santo of Naples’ 377.
- 3.
Mary Somerville to John F.W. Herschel, Florence, 14 April 1857, Royal Society MS, Herschel Papers HS16 [359].
- 4.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 301, 351. She also received the Victoria Medal of the British Royal Geographical Society, p. 350.
- 5.
Caterina Bon-Brenzoni to Mary Somerville, Verona, 28 May 1853: Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 297–309. See also Martha Somerville’s note. A translation of Countess Bon-Brenzoni’s letter is printed in Queen of Science. Personal Recollections of Mary Somerville, ed. Dorothy McMillan (Canongate Classics 102, Edinburgh 2001).
- 6.
Mary Somerville to Woronzow Greig (her son), Rome, 3 August 1845, reprinted in Personal Recollections [n.2], 275–276.
- 7.
Maboth Moseley, Irascible Genius. A Life of Charles Babbage (Hutchinson, London, [2]) pp. 167.
- 8.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 332.
- 9.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 99, for her ownership of a Veitch telescope: ‘… a very small one: it was the only one I ever possessed.’ The subsequent whereabouts of this telescope is unknown. She also had a microscope by Adie and Sons of Edinburgh: see T.N. Clarke, A.D. Morrison-Low and A.D.C. Simpson, Brass and Glass. Scientific Instrument Making Workshops in Scotland, as illustrated by instruments from the Arthur Frank Collection of the Royal Museum of Scotland (National Museum of Scotland, 1989), p. 22 Ref. [31] for Veitch telescope; p. 63 Ref. [273] for Adie microscope.
- 10.
For the cost of Lord Rosse’s telescope, see Thomas Woods, The Monster Telescope (1845), 4. The same sum is given in John Pringle Nichol’s article ‘The Wonders of the Telescope’, c.1850, a single cutting of which is preserved in Dr. John Lee’s ‘Scrapbook’ No. 4: Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, Gunther 37, Vol. 4, 42. For Rosse’s 30 h/year of good skies, see Earl of Rosse to Mary Somerville, 12 June 1844, reproduced in Personal Recollections [n.2], 215–216.
- 11.
Mary Somerville to John F.W. Herschel, Rome, 12 November 1843, Royal Society MS, Herschel Papers HS16 [347].
- 12.
John F.W. Herschel to Mary Somerville, 18 March 1844, in Personal Recollections [n.2], 265–268. Also, Mary Somerville to John Herschel, Rome, 12 November 1844, Royal Society MS, Herschel Papers HS16 [347], for further references to the Jesuit Observatory and its ‘inaccessibility to women’.
- 13.
Mrs. (Elizabeth Oke) Gordon, The Life and Correspondence of William Buckland, D.D., F.R.S. (London 1894), 122–123. Also Elizabeth Patterson, Mary Somerville and the Cultivation of Science, 1815–1840 (Martinus Nijhoff, Kluwer Group, Boston, The Hague, Lancaster, 1983), 192.
- 14.
In spite of Eliza Young’s social caution not to appear a blue-stocking, when her husband, Arago and Gay-Lussac were discussing optical diffractions and the wave theory of light, she quietly left the room, only to return a minute later ‘with an enormous quarto under her arm’ (one of a series containing her husband’s published researches). ‘She placed it on the table, opened the book, without saying a word, at p. 387, and showed with her finger a figure where the curvilinear course of the diffracted bands which were the subject of the discussion, is found to be established theoretically’: George Peacock, Life of Thomas Young, M.D., F.R.S. and C. (London, 1855), 388–389, taken from Arago’s subsequent Éloge to Young.
- 15.
Jane Marcet to Mary Somerville (Geneva), 6 April 1834, in Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 209–210.
- 16.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 344.
- 17.
Mary Somerville had the greatest regard for John Stuart Mill, while Mill clearly regarded Mary as one of the most influential women of the age and a vital signatory to his Parliamentary Petition: J.S. Mill to Mary Somerville, 12 July 1869, Personal Recollections [n.2], 345. Martha Somerville added a note amplifying her mother’s admiration for the ‘noble character and transcendent intellect of Mr. J.S. Mill’, in the passage included in Queen of Science [n.5], 277.
- 18.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 344.
- 19.
Receipt slip for one guinea and ten-shilling donations to Mary Somerville and her daughters from ‘The London National Society for Women’s Suffrage’, 12 November 1868: Bodleian Library, Somerville Papers, Dep. c. 374 Folder MSBUS-12, S.C. Box 24.
- 20.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 345–346.
- 21.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 346–347.
- 22.
Margaret B. Herschel to Mary Somerville, 14 April 1869: Bodleian Library Somerville MS. Dep. c. 370, Folder MSH-3. 34: file 42.
- 23.
Martha Somerville’s note: Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 346. Several paragraphs regarding women’s rights, education and professional prospects that were omitted from the published Personal Recollections were included by Dorothy McMillan in Queen of Science [n.5], 277–280.
- 24.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 100. Mary does not mention Mrs. Veitch’s Christian name, although her maiden name had been Betty Robson: cited without primary source by J.N. McKie, ‘James Veitch 1771–1838’, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, 87, 1 (1976), 44–50, from G. Watson, The Border Magazine, V (1), January 1900.
- 25.
Samuel Smiles, Men of Invention and Industry (London [3]), 328.
- 26.
Roger Langdon, The Life of Roger Langdon told by himself, with additions by his Daughter Ellen (London [4]), 65–6.
- 27.
The most comprehensive, and most readable, history of religion in early nineteenth-century Britain is Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part I, 1829–1859 (S.C.M. Press, 1966).
- 28.
Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part I [n.27], 527–572. Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II, 1860–1901 (S.C.M. Press, London 1972) deals at length with these new intellectual problems in Chapters I, II and III. Also R.J. Berry, ‘Evolution’, in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought, ed. Adrian Hastings, Alistair Mason and Hugh Piper, with Ingrid Lawrie and Cecily Bennett (Oxford University Press 2000), 224–226.
- 29.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 374, 376. Religious as she undoubtedly was, Mary Somerville had nothing but contempt for superstition, and in an earlier draft omitted from the published Personal Recollections she indicated her scorn for the Victorian craze for spiritualism and ‘table rapping’: Dorothy McMillan, Queen of Science [n.5], 277.
- 30.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 374.
- 31.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 353.
- 32.
Mary Somerville, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, 3rd edn. (London, 1836), 412. These words concluded all of the editions of Connexion.
- 33.
Adam Sedgwick to Mary Somerville, 21 April, 1869, in J. W. Clark and T.M. Hughes, The Life and Letters of the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S., II (Cambridge University Press, 1890), 446. Sedgwick’s letter is reprinted in Personal Recollections [n.2], 365–6.
- 34.
Mary Somerville to Sir John F.W. Herschel, Naples, 12 November 1868, Royal Society, Herschel Papers HS16 [375].
- 35.
Sir John F.W. Herschel to Mary Somerville, 20 January 1858, Royal Society, Herschel Papers HS16 [360].
- 36.
Maty Somerville to John F.W. Herschel, 23 October 1866 (‘Spezia’), Royal Society, Herschel Papers HS16 [374].
- 37.
Mary Somerville to John F.W. Herschel (Naples), 26 June 1868, Royal Society, Herschel Papers HS1.6 [376].
- 38.
John F.W. Herschel to Mary Somerville, 14 March 1869, Royal Society, Herschel Papers IIS16 [378]. For the controversial passage about Adams and the 1846 discovery of Neptune which, upon Herschel’s advice, was struck out of Mary Somerville’s published Personal Recollections, see the manuscript Bodleian Library, Somerville MS. Dep. c. 355 Folder MSAU-2, p. 65, in the original hand, but refoliated in pencil, 221. A milder version of the passage was composed, and appears in the same Bodleian Somerville MS., 220 verso. The version which eventually appeared in Personal Recollections [n.2], 290, was shorter, and less judgmental of those English astronomers who were supposedly responsible for not acting upon Adams’ calculation.
- 39.
Margaret B. Herschel to Mary Somerville, 28 May 1871, Bodleian Library Somerville MS. Dep. 3. 370 HSH3, Folder 42.
- 40.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], 361.
- 41.
Printed by Elizabeth Patterson, Mary Somerville 1780–1872 (Oxford, 1979), 44. Dr. Patterson says that the passages comes from ‘towards the end of her long autobiographical manuscript’; however, I was not able to find it in the Bodleian Library, Somerville Papers, Dep. c. 355, MSAU-2 or 3 (although this was probably an oversight on my part).
- 42.
Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], pp. 373–374.
- 43.
Martha Somerville’s note: Mary Somerville, Personal Recollections [n.2], p. 377.
References
Elizabeth, P. (1979). Mary somerville 1780–1872 (p. 33). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moseley, M., & Genius, I. (1964). A life of Charles Babbage (p. 167). London: Hutchinson.
Smiles, S. (1884). Men of invention and industry (p. 328). London: John Murray.
Langdon, R. (1909). The life of roger langdon told by himself, with additions by his daughter ellen (pp. 65–66). London.
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Chapman, A. (2015). A Full, Rich Life. In: Mary Somerville and the World of Science. SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09399-4_5
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