'Equal though different': Laboratories, museums and the institutional development of biology in late-Victorian Northern England

Alison Kraft, Samuel J M M Alberti

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    Abstract

    Traditional accounts of the emergence of professional biology have privileged not only metropolis over province, but research over teaching and laboratory over museum. This paper seeks to supplement earlier studies of the 'transformation of biology' in the late nineteenth century by exploring in detail the developments within three biology departments in Northern English civic colleges. By outlining changes in the teaching practices, research topics and the accommodation of the departments, the authors demonstrate both locally contingent factors in their development and continuities with existing traditions in natural history. The appointment of Arthur Milnes Marshall in preference to Louis Miall to the new zoology chair in Manchester in 1879 casts light on contemporary views of the laboratory and museum as 'equal though different'. The transformation in biology, in Northern England at least, was shaped more by such local institutional changes than by a phoenix-like rise of the laboratory from the ashes of the museum-more by the rhetorical construction of a professional academic community than any dramatic shift in sites. In this period the biology laboratory supplemented, rather than eclipsed, the museum, and the dichotomy between the 'naturalist' and the 'experimentalist' was far from clear-cut. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)203-236
    Number of pages33
    JournalStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C :Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
    Volume34
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Jun 2003

    Keywords

    • Leeds
    • Manchester
    • Marshall
    • Miall
    • Natural history
    • Sheffield

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