August 31, 1884

George Sarton, (August 31, 1884 to March 22, 1956) a scholar and scientist, was born in Belgium and at the end of his life, was a resident of Cambridge USA. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, Salton did much to make the subject of the "history of science" an independent discipline.

'A student of chemistry, celestial mechanics, and mathematics at the University of Ghent (Ph.D. mathematics, 1911), Sarton immigrated to England at the onset of World War I. In 1915 he arrived in the United States bringing with him the international quarterly review Isis, which he had founded in 1912, the first periodical to coordinate the results of historical research in all the sciences. He later (1936) founded a second journal, Osiris, devoted to lengthier papers on the history and philosophy of science, editing both periodicals until his death.

Sarton was appointed research associate at the Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C., in 1918 and two years later became a lecturer at Harvard University, where he served as professor of the history of science (1940–51). After publication of the first volume of his classic work, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vol. (1927–47; from Homer through the 14th century), he travelled through Syria, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco (1931–32) to learn the Arabic language and to study original manuscripts necessary for completion of the second volume.

'At the time of his death, Sarton had completed the first two—Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (1952) and Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries BC (1959)—of a projected nine volumes that he had planned for a history of all the sciences up to 1900.'

The significance of the journal Isis is outlined for us:

'The intent and content of Isis since its inauguration in 1913 have in some ways tracked changes in both a professionalizing history of science and in the cultures of scientific disciplines. George Sarton saw history as part of an overall metascientific project in which the sciences themselves participated, and his perspective was often duplicated by the constructive appropriation of history by scientists: a century ago, scientific culture often incorporated a sense of itself as an ongoing historical enterprise. After one hundred volumes, however, Isis caters above all to a professionalized historical discipline, while the identity of the scientist has typically ceased to rely on a sense of historical embeddedness.'

At the time, the early 20th century--

'the interest of scientists in the history of science ....was not avocational. For most scientists at that time, much more so than is the case nowadays, the past of their disciplines was an integral part of the science itself.

'Historians of science often think of “scientists' history of science” as the intellectually impoverished token described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: a kind of deliberately falsified view of the past intended as a justificatory prehistory for glorifying the present state of their specialty. Kuhn's whipping boy was a history of science that was supposedly “a repository for … anecdote or chronology.” When Isis first appeared, in 1913, a legitimatory role could easily be attributed to scientists' accounts of the background to their work; these were seldom Kuhn's sketchy afterthoughts added to textbooks for students, however, and much more usually a part of the establishment of the “state of the question” with which scientists would explicate the rationale for their work. 

.....

'Where scientists today cite recent papers to indicate their own starting points, a century ago they often made use of a much broader chronological scope in which to situate their work. This scope displayed a qualitative difference from much present‐day science: at that time, scientists tended to represent themselves as participants in a historically ongoing cultural enterprise.

'[There] was nothing new in this, of course. One notable example from earlier, yet unquestionably modern, physics illustrates the point: in the preface to their Treatise on Natural Philosophy (1867), William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait sought to align their subject, and their particular conception of that subject, with the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton: “The term Natural Philosophy was used by Newton, and is still used in British Universities, to denote the investigation of laws in the material world, and the deduction of results not directly observed.” They also mention the significance of Ampère, Laplace, Lagrange, and Joule to their work, but Newton's legacy is the one they wish to identify themselves with. Even that new component of their physical world picture, energy, is fathered on Newton: “It is satisfactory to find that Newton anticipated, so far as the state of experimental science in his time permitted him, this magnificent modern generalization.” To a large extent, this emplotment of the history of science into the presentation of new work seems to have been a scientific norm when Isis was founded....'

This photograph of George Sarton, with kittens whose names we do not know, shows another dimension to the life of a scholar.




Certainly the accomplishments of her father make May Sarton's writing a bit more interesting.