¹ Basic details of Haldane's life and scientific work can be found in Douglas, C. G., ‘John Scott Haldane 1860–1936’, Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, 2 (1936), 115–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more extended biographical studies, see Steve Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole: The Life and Work of John Scott Haldane’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1987); Martin Goodman, Suffer and Survive: The Extreme Life of Dr. J. S. Haldane (2007).

² Romano, Terrie M., Making Medicine Scientific: John Burdon Sanderson and the Culture of Victorian Science (Baltimore, 2002)Google Scholar.

³ Robert F. Bud and Gerrylynn K. Roberts argue that the language of ‘pure’ and ‘applied science’ acquired particular salience in the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction and the Advancement of Science (Devonshire Commission) appointed in 1870: Science Versus Practice: Chemistry in Victorian Britain (Manchester, 1984), 140–51. The rhetorical use of that language in late nineteenth-century Britain is also discussed in Gieryn, Thomas, ‘Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists’, American Sociological Review, 48 (1983), 781–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On parallel developments in the USA, see Kline, Ronald, ‘Construing “Technology” as “Applied Science”: Public Rhetoric of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1880–1945’, Isis, 86 (1995), 194–221Google Scholar.

⁴ The literature on the growth of physiology as a scientific discipline at this time is correspondingly large. See, inter alia, Geison, Gerald L., Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society (Princeton, 1978)Google Scholar; Butler, Stella V. F., ‘Centres and Peripheries: The Development of British Physiology, 1870–1914’, Journal of the History of Biology, 21 (1988), 473–500CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richards, Stewart, ‘Conan Doyle's “Challenger” Unchampioned: William Rutherford F.R.S. (1839–99), and the Origins of Practical Physiology in Britain’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 40 (1985–86), 193–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ Douglas, ‘John Scott Haldane’, 135; Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole’, passim.

⁶ Sturdy, Steve, ‘Biology as Social Theory: John Scott Haldane and Physiological Regulation’, British Journal for the History of Science, 21 (1988), 315–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole’, 251–6.

⁸ See for instance, Anon., ‘The Oxford Medical School’, British Medical Journal, 1 (1906), 1479–91, which characterises Gotch as ‘an original investigator . . . an inspiring teacher’, but considers Haldane to be ‘universally recognised as one of the first of living physiologists’ (1486). It is telling that although Gotch was a Fellow of the Royal Society, no obituary of him was ever published in the Society's Proceedings.

⁹ Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole’, 271–3.

¹⁰ Apart from the work he undertook during the first world war, which is described in detail in Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole’, 276–355, and in Goodman, Suffer and Survive, 268–328, Haldane's career after resigning his Oxford University readership has received only incidental scholarly attention. His contribution to the development of diving suits and high-altitude pressure suits is discussed at length in Alexander von Lünen, ‘Under the Waves, Above the Clouds: A History of the Pressure Suit’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Technische Universität Darmstadt, abridged version, 2010), and his role in debates over miners’ lung diseases in McIvor, Arthur and Johnston, Ronald, Miners’ Lung: A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining (Aldershot, 2007), 69–73Google Scholar.

¹¹ Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (1989).

¹² R. D. Anderson, Universities and Elites in Britain since 1800 (1992); Engel, A. J., From Clergyman to Don: The Rise of the Academic Profession in Nineteenth-Century Oxford (Oxford, 1983)Google Scholar; Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (1968). The role of science in that transformation is examined in T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (1982).

¹³ Bonner, Thomas Neville, Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750–1945 (New York and Oxford, 1995), 236–79Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Noel G. Annan, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, in Studies in Social History, ed. J. H. Plumb (1955), 241–87.

¹⁵ Anderson, Perry, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review, 50 (1968), 3–57, at 15–16Google Scholar; Whyte, William, ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy Revisited’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 10 (2005), 15–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ Gosse, Edmund, ‘Biography’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn (Cambridge, 1910), iii, 952–4, at 952Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Peterson, Linda H., Victorian Autobiography (New Haven, 1986), 156–91Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Gosse, ‘Biography’, 953.

¹⁹ Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into its Laws and Consequences (1869), 7.

²⁰ Cf. Schaffer, Simon, ‘Genius in Romantic Natural Philosophy’, in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Cunningham, Andrew and Jardine, Nicholas (Cambridge, 1990), 82–98Google Scholar.

²¹ David Amigoni looks at how a new generation of professional academic historians sought to wrest biography from the hands of gentlemanly ‘men of letters’, and thereby to assert their own authority over the training of young minds for public service: Victorian Biography: Intellectuals and the Ordering of Discourse (Hemel Hempstead, 1993).

²² Ira Bruce Nadel, Biography: Fiction, Fact and Form (1984), 13–38. See also Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991)Google Scholar.

²³ Gray, Robbie, ‘Self-made Men, Self-narrated Lives: Male Autobiographical Writing and the Victorian Middle Class’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 6 (2001), 288–312, at 307Google Scholar. See also Loftus, Donna, ‘The Self in Society: Middle-class Men and Autobiography’, in Life-Writing and Victorian Culture, ed. Amigoni, David (Aldershot, 2006), 67–86Google Scholar.

²⁴ Nadel, Biography, 13–66.

²⁵ Amigoni, David, ‘Life Histories and the Cultural Politics of Historical Knowing: The Dictionary of National Biography and the Late Nineteenth-century Political Field’, in Life and Work History Analyses: Qualitative and Quantitative Developments, ed. Dex, Shirley, Sociological Review Monograph 37 (1991), 144–66Google Scholar.

²⁶ Paul, Charles B., Science and Immortality: The Éloges of the Paris Academy of Sciences (1699–1791) (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1981)Google Scholar.

²⁷ Biographies of individual scientists did become increasingly common during the early nineteenth century, but these were usually iconic founder-figures rather than more ordinary practitioners. See e.g. Yeo, Richard, ‘Genius, Method, and Morality: Images of Newton in Britain, 1760–1860’, Science in Context, 2 (1988), 257–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jacyna, L. S., ‘Images of John Hunter in the Nineteenth Century’, Medical History, 21 (1983), 85–108Google Scholar.

²⁸ Given the interest that historians of science have taken both in the professionalisation of science and the function of scientific biography, it is surprising to find that they have scarcely considered the relationship between the two. See, for instance, Shortland, Michael and Yeo, Richard, eds., Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (Cambridge, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Söderqvist, Thomas, ed., The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (Aldershot, 2007)Google Scholar.

²⁹ Haldane, J. S., ‘The Work of Max von Pettenkofer’, Journal of Hygiene, 1 (1901), 289–94Google Scholar.

³⁰ Nuttall, George H. F., Haldane, John and Newsholme, Arthur, ‘Introduction’, Journal of Hygiene, 1 (1901), 1–2CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

³¹ The most comprehensive account of Pettenkofer's rise and fall can be found in Evans, Richard J., Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years 1830–1910 (Oxford, 1987), 237–75, 490–507Google Scholar.

³² Haldane, ‘Max von Pettenkofer’, 294.

³³ This consolatory function is even more apparent in the biography he published of J. J. Waterson, a Scottish scientist who, far more than Pettenkofer, was marginalised in his lifetime and only recognised some years after his death: Haldane, J. S., ‘Memoir of J. J. Waterston’, in The Collected Scientific Papers of John James Waterston, ed. Haldane, J. S. (Edinburgh, 1928), xiii–lxviiiGoogle Scholar.

³⁴ Haldane, J. S., ‘The Heredity of the Gleneagles Family’, in J. Aylmer L. Haldane, The Haldanes of Gleneagles (Edinburgh, 1929), 269–72Google Scholar.

³⁵ Samuels, Warren J., Johnson, Kirk D. and Johnson, Marianne F., ‘The Duke of Argyll and Henry George: Land Ownership and Governance’, in Henry George's Legacy in Economic Thought, ed. Laurent, John (Cheltenham, 2005), 99–147Google Scholar.

³⁶ Haldane, ‘Heredity of the Gleneagles Family’, 270.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ Ibid., 269.

³⁹ Haldane's emphasis on the inheritance of tradition, rather than biological traits, effectively set him apart from the efforts of Frances Galton, among others, to naturalise inheritance as a biological phenomenon.

⁴⁰ Haldane, ‘Heredity of the Gleneagles Family’, 269. Haldane was not alone in arguing thus. Mrs Humphry Ward, herself a member of the intellectual aristocracy through her family connection to Matthew and Thomas Arnold, worked similar arguments into her best-selling novel Marcella. Her literary success had recently enabled her to acquire an estate in Hertfordshire. Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward, Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian (Oxford, 1991), 141–2Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole’, 12–75.

⁴² Anon. [J. S. Haldane], Letter to the Edinburgh Professors by a Medical Student – Edited, with Preface, by a Graduate of Eminence (1890), 1.

⁴³ Garland Allen includes both Sherrington and Haldane among those who effected a shift from the ‘mechanistic materialism’ of mid-nineteenth-century physiology to a position that he calls ‘holistic materialism’: Allen, Garland E., Life Science in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1978), 74, 88–94, 97Google Scholar. See also Haraway, Donna Jeanne, Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors of Organization in Twentieth-Century Developmental Biology (New Haven, 1976)Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ The most detailed historical study of Sherrington's scientific work is still Swazey, Judith P., Reflexes and Motor Integration: Sherrington's Concept of Integrative Action (Cambridge, MA, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁵ Sherrington, C. S., The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, 2nd edn (New Haven, 1947), 236, 238Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Sherrington, C. S., Man on his Nature: The Gifford Lectures, Edinburgh 1937–8, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1951), 290Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ R. B. Haldane and J. S. Haldane, ‘The Relation of Philosophy to Science’, in Essays in Philosophical Criticism, ed. Andrew Seth and R. B. Haldane (1883), 41–66, at 54.

⁴⁸ Haldane, J. S., ‘Life and Mechanism’, Guy's Hospital Reports, 60 (1906), 89–123, at 104Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Haldane, J. S., Organism and Environment as Illustrated by the Physiology of Breathing (New Haven, 1917), 16–17Google Scholar. By ‘vitalism’, Haldane did not mean the kind of dualistic vitalism that supposed that some kind of immaterial vital principal was super-added to a mechanical body. Such a view involved ‘a breach, or rather innumerable breaches, in the intelligibility of the universe’, he argued: J. S. Haldane, Religion and the Growth of Knowledge (1924), 14. His own view was determinedly monistic, and late in life he would complain that ‘It has always been difficult for me to prevent confusion between the ideas which I had adopted and the old fashioned Vitalism’: J. S. Haldane, ‘Autobiographical Notes’ (n.d.), National Library of Scotland, MS 20235, fo. 181.

⁵⁰ J. S. Haldane, Mechanism, Life and Personality: An Examination of the Mechanistic Theory of Life and Mind (1913), 88.

⁵¹ Haldane, ‘Life and Mechanism’, 118, 121.

⁵² J. S. Haldane, The Sciences and Philosophy: The Gifford Lectures, University of Glasgow, 1927 and 1928 (1929), 50.

⁵³ Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (1992), 179–90.

⁵⁴ See for instance his chef d'œuvre, Respiration (Oxford, 1922), which emphasised the mediating role of the blood in regulating a host of organic functions, and which ended with a chapter of ‘General Conclusions’ arguing that the facts of respiration made clear the impossibility of a mechanistic account of life.

⁵⁵ Smith, Roger, ‘Biology and Values in Interwar Britain: C. S. Sherrington, Julian Huxley and the Vision of Progress’, Past and Present, 178 (2003), 210–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Mitman, Gregg, ‘Defining the Organism in the Welfare State: The Politics of Individuality in American Culture, 1890–1950’, in Biology as Society, Society as Biology: Metaphors, ed. Maasen, Sabine, Mendelsohn, Everett and Weingart, Peter (Dordrecht, 1995), 249–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁶ See Hobson, J. A., ‘The Re-statement of Democracy’, Contemporary Review, 81 (1902), 262–72Google Scholar, for an instance of such reasoning by neurological metaphor.

⁵⁷ For an earlier view of scientists, and intellectuals more generally, as belonging to the social sensorium, see Musselman, Elizabeth Green, Nervous Conditions: Science and the Body Politic in Early Industrial Britain (Albany, 2006)Google Scholar; Christopher J. Lawrence, ‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, ed. Barry Barnes and Steve Shapin (1979), 19–40.

⁵⁸ Those whose political ideas were informed by philosophical idealism, in particular, were inclined to denounce both the ‘mechanical’ economics of laissez-faire liberalism and the ‘mechanical’ socialism of the Fabians and others further to the left, and to urge instead what Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant call a ‘moralised capitalism’ that located the impetus to social betterment in the shared sentiments of citizens: Philosophy, Politics and Citizenship: The life and Thought of the British Idealists (Oxford, 1984), 31–3, 83–7.

⁵⁹ Sturdy, ‘Biology as Social Theory’. Haldane's elevation of humoral over nervous regulation, and the preference for decentralised rather than centralised government that he associated with it, has interesting parallels with the view of Arthur Keith and Morley Roberts, discussed in Hayward, Rodhri, ‘The Biopolitics of Arthur Keith and Morley Roberts’, in Regenerating England: Science, Medicine and Culture in Inter-war Britain, ed. Lawrence, Christopher and Mayer, Anna-K. (Amsterdam, 2000), 251–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Haldane's views on how to effect reforms in industrial practice, and the limits of legislation to do so, are discussed in Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole’, 160–3, 174–83.

⁶¹ On the relationship of science, authority and identity in the practice of self-experiment during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Schaffer, Simon, ‘Self-Evidence’, in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. Chandler, James, Davidson, Arnold I. and Harootunian, Harry (Chicago, 1994), 56–91Google Scholar; Jackson, Noel B., ‘Critical Conditions: Coleridge, “Common Sense”, and the Literature of Self-Experiment’, ELH, 70 (2003), 117–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶² Haldane's experimental style is discussed further in Sturdy, ‘A Co-ordinated Whole’, 201–41.

⁶³ Haldane, J. B. S., ‘The Scientific Work of J. S. Haldane’, in Penguin Science Survey 1961, ed. Barnett, S. A. and MacLaren, Anne (Harmondsworth, 1961), Part 2, 11–33, at 19Google Scholar. McKenzie's contribution to the physiological redefinition of heart disease is described in Christopher J. Lawrence, ‘Moderns and Ancients: The “New Cardiology” in Britain 1880–1930’, Medical History, Supplement No. 5 (1985), 1–33.

⁶⁴ Lawrence, Christopher and Shapin, Steven, eds., Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge (Chicago and London, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ Cf. Söderqvist, Thomas, Science as Autobiography: The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne, trans. Paul, David Mel (New Haven, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a more psychologistic approach to science as self-realisation.

⁶⁶ The risks Haldane ran in the course of his work are well described in Goodman, Suffer and Survive, passim.

⁶⁷ Cf. Smith, Roger, ‘The Embodiment of Value: C. S. Sherrington and the Cultivation of Science’, British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000), 283–311CrossRefGoogle Scholar.