Abstract
Ronald Scott Vasile provides, with this monograph, a close biographical study of the scientific zoologist William Stimpson’s life. Vasile traces, in detail, the key stages of Stimpson’s life from his birth (1832) and earliest years in Boston through to his time at the Smithsonian. Vasile discusses Stimpson’s work at the Chicago Academy (that burned down twice, destroying his work), to his eventual death from tuberculosis in 1872. Vasile provides a chronological account of these events, highlighting Stimpson’s relationships with family and friends, his dredging expeditions and career progression in Washington and later Chicago, as well as his publications and losses of significant portions of his work. The narrative traced here allows some room for discussion of other key figures in American natural history such as S.F. Baird, Robert Kennicot and Louis Agassiz, but only so far as they crossed paths with Stimpson. Vasile keeps the narrative focus tightly upon his subject of study.
William Stimpson was 40 when he died, only a few months after the Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed his life’s work that had been stored at the Academy’s ineffective, fire-resistant building. It was this destruction and the resultant lack of publications accredited to Stimpson that Vasile believes has led to a neglect of the scientific zoologist in the history of science. The purpose of Vasile’s account, therefore, is to rectify this, ‘this book will provide some measure of redemption for his character and contribution to American Natural History’ (p.4). The book certainly lauds Stimpson’s work as interesting and important, while also providing a commentary on his apparently friendly demeanour and good humour despite his setbacks and illnesses.
Unfortunately, Vasile’s account appears to conflate accomplishment in Stimpson’s work with accolade, and provides little explanation as to why the work is impactful, or what motivated the work in the first place. Beyond this apparent need to reaffirm Stimpson as a significant actor in American natural history, the text does not address the broader world of American natural history and fails to supply sufficient evidence as to why Stimpson, above others, deserves to be recalled in such detail until the epilogue. Indeed, it is not until the appendix that Vasile makes a clear case for Stimpson’s broader importance, as he complies a brief note on the contributions that Stimpson made to American taxonomies in natural history, indicating that their continued use today demonstrates Stimpson’s importance in the field. Furthermore, it is only in the short epilogue that Vasile makes any attempt to argue why taxonomy should be considered as a significant contribution to the field of natural history more broadly. Though this assertion may be regarded as reasonable, some indication of its importance would have been welcomed earlier in the text to clarify why Stimpson’s work, in particular, should be given such detailed consideration.
The book also suffers from some conceptual gaps and a lacks direct engagement with certain key literatures. For example, Vasile’s discussion of Katie Doggett highlights a lack of engagement with work on women in the history of science. Vasile defines Katie Doggett by her relationships with her husband and her male cousin and describes her as ‘attractively unconventional’ before reducing her to her lack of children, and her role as one of the ‘Doggetts’ through her husband does not appear to have had any impact on the narrative (p.154). This description highlights Vasile’s lack of engagement with current literature on women in the history of science as it is one of the lengthiest and most detailed discussion of women in the book (other women discussed in similar detail are those that held romantic interest for Stimpson). Most of Vasile’s descriptions of black and indigenous individuals are similarly problematic. There is a vast literature on science in the Americas from feminist, colonial, indigenous, and black perspectives that could have informed Vasile’s writing and allowed a more nuanced and up to date discussion.
Furthermore, Vasile does not appear to directly engage with Maritime Historiography. Beyond some brief diversions on Stimpson’s dredging trips, Vasile does not appear place his work within or alongside any of the current historiographic trends in the fields of, for example, exploration and ships as spaces of scientific knowledge construction. Vasile also does not seem to have engaged with any of the significant literature in the fields of history of science, professionalisation, or histories of institutions, all of which could have been relevant and useful here. He boldly claims that ‘Science plays by its own rules… based not on power or influence but on objective observation’; a fact that his previous discussion of the position of Agassiz in Boston and his influence over his students and their publications directly contradicts. This is also a position that is contradicted by almost all works in the history of science in the last 60 years.
The epilogue to the text provides the only in-depth analysis of Stimpson’s life and work, though it is sadly only a few pages long. Here Vasile asserts that biographies of men such as Stimpson will ‘plug the gaps’ in American natural history in the late nineteenth century. While biography certainly has its advantages as a methodology in history, fundamentally the question must be asked; do we require more histories of white ‘western’ men of science? Highlighting such lives would seem only to support and perpetuate out-dated narratives of the ‘great men of science’.
Outside of these conceptual gaps Ronald Scott Vasile has provided, with William Stimpson and the Golden Age of American Natural History, a strong example of narrative biography. He tells Stimpson’s life story, his setbacks, and triumphs, with attention to detail and some emotive language that can be quite engaging. There is a sense that Vasile is particularly connected to his subject which comes through in his writing and his assertion that William Stimpson has been wrongly sidelined within the broader narrative of American Natural History. If the read er is seeking precise archival details on the life of a less well-known American naturalist during the late nineteenth century, this book provides a clear, detailed, and focused account.