One of the challenges for historical biographers is to decide how far it is appropriate or legitimate to try to psychoanalyse their subject. On the face of it, such analysis might seem an obvious part of the biographical enterprise in a twentieth-century context. We are all heirs to the revolution in thought brought about by Freud's discovery of the unconscious in the nineteenth century, since when it has become commonplace that beneath people's conscious thoughts and statements lie deeper, more fundamental drives and motives, of which they are not aware and which are not under their conscious control. Indeed, speculation about such subconscious desires and impulses is normal in day-to-day conversation: this reflects and is reflected by the fact that words that originated as technical, psychoanalytical terms have become part of the general language, such as ‘neurotic’, ‘paranoid’, or even ‘death wish’ and ‘Oedipus complex’.

It is hard to think of a better subject for the exercise of retrospective analysis with which we are here concerned than Robert Boyle, the leading British scientist of his day, and arguably the most significant before Newton. A prolific and influential author, Boyle was lionized in his time both for his scientific achievement and for his piety and philanthropy. Of late, he has been the subject of attention from a variety of viewpoints which, as we shall see, raises the issue of how he is best understood. In particular, I want to argue that, for all his eminence, there are complications about Boyle's personality that cry out for scrutiny, and it is on the implications of these that I will dwell in the latter stages of my paper.

Boyle was born into one of the most privileged aristocratic families in England. His father, Richard Boyle, Earl of Cork, was Lord High Treasurer of Ireland before the Civil War, and Robert, the youngest – and, as he himself claimed, favourite – son, was brought up in an opulent, privileged setting, surrounded by servants and with an entrée at the royal court. His elder brothers were suave and active figures, only too ready to be involved in the fighting of the Civil War – in which one, Viscount Kinalmeaky, was killed, though two others, Lords Dungarvan and Broghill, survived to go on to high state office under both Cromwell and Charles II. This background undoubtedly had a significant influence on Boyle, giving him an aristocratic demeanour to which his contemporaries almost automatically deferred. It also made him familiar with the mindless social milieu of landed society, in which it was all too easy (in Boyle's own words) to ‘squander away a whole afternoone in tatling of this Ladys Face & tother Lady's Clothes; of this Lords being Drunke & that Lord's Clap; in telling how this Gentleman's horse outrun that other's Mare’.

On 31 May 1936 Professor Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, wrote a letter to the Austrian littérateur Arnold Zweig, warning him about the dangers of undertaking biographical research. Freud intoned that ‘anyone turning biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn't be used’.

As a psychoanalyst, Freud knew only too well how readily each individual person employs the ubiquitous mechanisms of defence such as repression, projection, splitting and idealization, all of which operate to conceal our deepest, innermost affective states; and he questioned therefore how accurately someone could write a life history. Freud harboured other anxieties about the craft of biography. In his classic monograph on Leonardo da Vinci, published in 1910, the great Viennese analyst not only lamented ‘the uncertainty and fragmentary nature of the material relating to him which tradition makes available’, but also questioned the very enterprise of psychologically informed biographical work itself.

Privilege brings obligations – noblesse oblige. Boyle came from a deeply privileged background. If we are to locate him through twentieth-century eyes in order to rediscover his psychic space, then this background needs to be borne in mind. It was a constant shaping force for him. Twentieth-century eyes mean a new perspective. As Eliot wrote of Pascal, Boyle's contemporary, ‘every generation sees preceding ones differently. Pascal is one of those writers who will be, and who must be, studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it’ – and so it is with Boyle.

Boyle's childhood was beset by tragedy. From a psychological point of view, there can be fewer worse tragedies than the premature loss of a mother. His mother died of consumption when he was three. She was forty-two and he was her fourteenth and penultimate child. It seems clear that this early loss haunted him for the rest of his life, its unconscious effect always there. At some level he may have felt partly responsible for her death – that his birth had helped to wear her out, to finish her off, to consume her. It would seem that he missed out on mourning in the conventional sense, or rather in the sense that Freud emphasized as being all-important in his paper ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. Boyle did use, in his autobiographical writing as ‘Philaretus’, the word ‘disaster’ to describe this early tragedy, and it is a powerful enough word in the context. But what happened to his grief ? Was it worked through? Was it lived with? Or was it just sublimated into his work, his wide range of preoccupations? Was it something that remained as a constant, underlying refrain in his life, that he needed to defend himself against?

It is a tempting exercise, both historically and psychoanalytically, to contribute to a psychoanalytic understanding of Robert Boyle. Over many years, historians of science have been amassing evidence of science as a social activity, part of the culture of its time. As these studies progress, they stumble into psychoanalytic territory willy nilly. Indeed, the very notion of enquiry into nature becomes a psychoanalytic issue, as soon as we think of it as an emotionally charged approach to an object. If we think of Boyle as an early modern scientific investigator and as a personification of the tensions surrounding the investigation of nature as an object in the psychoanalytic sense, then we have a double reason for bringing a psychoanalytic understanding to bear upon him.

One of the criticisms of a psychoanalytic enquiry into any historical figure or situation is that the object of study is not present in the way a patient is present. It is not simply that the patient is not there – after all, there is documentary evidence to stand in for the missing person – but that the key feature that makes the enquiry psychoanalytic is missing. There is no transference, and no way to monitor the accuracy of interpretations. That means that the analyst cannot sit in the place of the objects in which the subject has an intense emotional investment, and from which vantage the subject of these investments can be studied. In that sense, the enquiry cannot be said to be properly psychoanalytic in method.

When Michael Hunter first publicized the idea of ‘Psychoanalysing Robert Boyle’ I understood that his main aim was to test three competing psychoanalytical theories against the historical evidence provided by the life and work of Robert Boyle. Although this would have been a valuable exercise, and one that the British Society for the History of Science meeting partly engaged, the papers by Brett Kahr, John Clay and Karl Figlio published here raise some far more compelling issues which I shall explore in the ensuing discussion. Before turning to this discussion I offer a few introductory remarks.

Refrigeration has become so well established over the last 125 years that today a crude ice maker becomes a boon for primitive people in the jungle or desert. Only a total dislocation in energy sources will quickly loosen the connections between people and cooling. A few centuries ago, Hippocrates (460–377? B.C.) observed: ‘most men would rather run the hazards of their lives or health than be deprived of the pleasure of drinking out of ice’ … In the U.S.A. [today], 750 million frozen Eskimo Pies are sold annually and seven ice cream plants are said to be operating in Moscow … Like the men of Hippocrates, a lot of people will resist any curtailment in food and freezing operations. They have come to expect these for survival in our present social and industrial orders.

These remarks, asserting the extent to which the people of the United States of America regarded refrigeration not as an optional luxury but as a necessity for survival even at the height of the energy crisis of the late 1970s, formed part of a contribution to a massive 11-volume international compendium, Alternative Energy Sources, produced in 1978 in response to Western concerns about rising oil prices and falling reserves. An enthusiastic advocate for geothermal energy, the contributor's perception provides a vivid contextual starting point for our study of Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito Coast (1981). In this novel the central narrative focuses upon a New England family's rejection of post-war American consumer society with its imperative to ‘build automobiles that would fail within five years and refrigerators that would fail in ten’. The novel indeed explores some of those very kinds of alternative energy sources which had been exciting scientists and inventors (often on or beyond the fringes of scientific orthodoxy) since the early 1970s when journals such as The Ecologist had begun to prophesy an end to energy-driven economic growth in the western world.

It is with deep regret that we record the death of John Anthony Chaldecott on 2 May 1998 at the age of 82. He was a founder member of the BSHS and served as Honorary Secretary and as President.

After graduating in physics at London University, John took up teaching and lecturing, but this was interrupted by war service in the RAF Meteorological Branch. In the fighting in the Netherlands, he was mentioned in despatches. In 1949, he joined the Science Museum as Assistant Keeper in the Physics Department. There, he was in charge of the Optics Collection and also the Heat and the George III Collections, for which he produced catalogues. For some years, he acted as Secretary to the Museum's Advisory Council.

In 1961, John became Keeper of the Science Museum Library, a post he held until his retirement in 1976. His time there was active and eventful. First, the transfer of the Library's nation-wide loans service, together with many of its periodicals, to the National Lending Library of Science and Technology in 1962 entailed a redirection of the Library's resources and services. Then, he was closely involved in the planning of the present Library building on the Imperial College campus in South Kensington, opened in 1969. He made a thorough study of the latest library design and equipment, so as to incorporate as many modern features as possible within a very tight budget. The success of the building owed much to his untiring and meticulous attention to detail.

While building was in progress, his attention was assailed from a fresh quarter, this time from the National Libraries Committee. Their conclusions disconcerted the Science Museum and the fact that the Library remained under the Museum's wing, with a redefined role, owed much to John's skill and determination in negotiation. The Library was to specialize in the history of science and he did much to turn the Library towards the new direction. It was his decision to assemble the Library's scattered books and periodicals in this field and house them in a special history of science reading room. All this chimed in with his own interest in this subject. He had gained an M.Sc. in the history and philosophy of science at University College London in 1949, followed up later with a Ph.D. He was active in the BSHS from the beginning and he was Honorary Secretary during 1963–68. He was elected President for the year 1972–73; his presidential address was entitled ‘Josiah Wedgwood (1730–1795), scientist’. He published a number of papers on historical subjects, but his abiding interest lay in scientific instrument makers; he formed a massive record of information about those active in London from 1750 to 1840, now deposited in the Science Museum Library Archives Collection. Soon after his retirement, he was responsible for a major exhibition at the Science Museum illustrating Wedgwood's life and work and he published an accompanying monograph.

Throughout his life, John preserved that calm and even-tempered manner which made him such a pleasant colleague and genial, good-humoured friend. He was always fair and even-handed in his dealings with others.

The three books reviewed in this essay all cross disciplinary boundaries. The first book illustrates, and argues for, the importance of history of technology and science for general history, for instance by looking at the linkages between technology transfer and agricultural reform in the late eighteenth century. The second book combines art history with history of technology: a painting is examined with a view to learning about networks among men of industry. The third book could be said to argue for the relevance of the private in the history of science by rendering theoretical innovation dependent upon resources gained outside public scientific life.

I have been careful not to mention the most important commonality of these books first, because I am aware of the general disinterest which reigns about most peripheral places. The three books are all about Denmark and written in Danish. But they should not be placed in the drawer labelled ‘ethnographic oddity’. Quite apart from their relevance under the rubric of centre and periphery, each one has a historiographical point rendering them more generally relevant. They probe historiographical boundaries and provide incentives for thinking about historical resources that have not been tapped. It should also be mentioned that all three books are beautifully illustrated. Danish academic books are cushioned from the stringencies of the market through the existence of a variety of funds. The market of Danish readers is too small to sustain a market of its own and so the infrastructure for the support of books which will inevitably make a loss is substantial. By tapping into these resources, the authors have managed to make all three books more appealing than an anglophone reader has come to expect.

BBC Education and The Wellcome Trust:Medicine Through Time. Videotape: incorporating five 25 min programmes. London: BBC Educational Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0 563 376953, £24.99.

Teachers' Resource Pack, with four theme booklets, over 40 picture sources, posters, time lines, pupils' worksheets etc. London: BBC Educational Publishing, 1998, ISBN 0 563 376392, £19.99.

BBC Education Website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/medicine/.

It was in the late 1970s that the Schools History Project first launched its ‘developmental studies’ programme to help youngsters understand how changes in science and technology have impacted upon human life at different periods. Possible topics included Farming through the ages – surely one of the most important as we might see it today – and Warfare through the ages, but in the event it was Medicine Through Time and Energy Through Time which were developed most fully. By the 1990s the first of these had achieved a firm and regular place as a component of GCSE courses and about one third of all those taking history exams in the GCSE now study it. The involvement of the BBC and the Wellcome Trust in developing resources to support the work was therefore amply justified by its standing in the current curriculum.