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Dalziel's mother
DISSECTING ROOM
more bizarre “mutations” that survive. The mind’s complex inference systems allow few “supernatural concepts” to survive, examples being death and mortality, and this, argues the author, is why the world’s religions have features in common. Boyer is right to say that religion is possible without membership of a particular religion, but his labelling as futile a historical pursuit of religion is odd when set beside the fairly precise starting-points that some organised religions clearly have. And then we have the editor of the journal Science and Christian Belief, Denis Alexander, a molecular immunologist. His review of the history of scientific thought challenges the notion that science and faith are incompatible today—ie, the old argument that science has made or will one day make all gods and religions redundant. He goes further by showing how many of the assumed previous confrontations between scientists and the church (a book covering other religions would be
too long, he pleads) were not like that at all. Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley lost head and home, respectively, for their political views not their chemistry. Nor was it a question of Vatican one, scientist nil in the match between Pope Urban VIII and Galileo. The debate in 1860 between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley on Darwin’s theory did not, Alexander convincingly argues, symbolise an irreconcilable dichotomy between biological science and a Church of England locked in to a literal interpretation of the Old Testament. If a clash between church authority and discovery is a paradigm, it is a false one—as false as the belief that before Copernicus everyone believed the earth to be flat. That particular myth can be blamed on the 19th-century American novelist Washington Irving. Isaac Newton left behind 1345 books, but only one-third of this library was science, the majority being theology, philosophy, history, and the classical authors. Indeed, until around 1900 scientists were very widely read. Darwin
studied both medicine and theology with no great love for either; one of the founding editors of Annals of Botany, I recall, was a physician; Priestley was elected fellow of the Royal Society for his writings on electricity not oxygen, and he practised as a non-conformist minister, and had a working knowledge of eight foreign languages. Alexander yearns for science to have more men and women with that breadth of learning. It is they who will rebuild the enterprise of science with a “theistic framework” that renews respect for human values. Curiously—and I do wish he had explored this possibility further—it does seem more likely to be biologists these days who believe that their unravelling of DNA explains all. Physicists, who always seem to be on the verge of a multidimensional general theory of everything, are the more likely to retain some belief in a supernatural power. David Sharp c/o The Lancet, London, UK
From the medical museum Dalziel’s mother
risked her life giving birth, and that his touching picture, by her child might not survive. Many Thomas Dalziel (1823–1906), women had their own shrouds ready shows a mother contemplating alongside the baby clothes, and wrote the little robe prepared ready for notes of farewell before the onset her new baby. She stands, her dress of labour. swollen out around her, looking down This woman cuts rather a lonely at the little garment so intently that we were so closely related that all hopes figure, until we ponder the presence of see only the top of her mob-cap. were admixed with fear. At the the sketcher, and sense the intimacy Her home is poor, and sparsely time Dalziel made this sketch in of this tableau. Might the awaited furnished. Cracks show in the wall. the 1850s, for every 200 livebirths, child belong to the artist himself? Yet the preparations this mother one mother and 20 babies were lost. Thomas Dalziel was the youngest has made for the new arrival of seven sons of a remarkable suggest no poverty of feeling. artistic Northumbrian family, The cradle, an old-fashioned most of whom moved hooded rocker, stands alongsouth to form the famous side, ready for the precious firm of wood engravers burden. A linen chest stands whose works illuminated in the shadows, and the chest thousands of Victorian of drawers is clothed in white books and magazines. He for a domestic shrine: a married, in 1856, a young bottle and a candle flank a painter, Louisa Gurden. lace-frilled cushion, bearing Thomas joined the family the greeting “Welcome Sweet firm in 1860. It is with gladBabe”, pricked out in shiny ness that we discover that he new pin-heads. and Louisa had a large family, Past generations echo in several of whom themselves the old cradle and traditional became successful artists. greeting, while the baby’s Welcome Sweet Babe by Thomas Bolton Gilchrist Dalziel Ruth Richardson gown and the mother imply c/o The Lancet, London, UK the pressure of the future. The artist These figures are probably undershares the pathos of the woman’s estimates. Especially in times of With thanks to: Dinah Eastop and Donato contemplation, pregnant with uncerdearth, and in the charitable lying-in/ Esposito at the British Museum Prints and Drawings Department, London, UK; Charles tainty: who shall wear this garment? maternity hospitals (which were Newton at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Is it a christening robe, or a shroud? often foci of epidemics of puerperal London; Noreen Marshall at the Museum of From time immemorial, birth and sepsis) child mortality rates were Childhood, Bethnal Gree, London; and to the death—for both mother and child— much higher. Every mother knew she work of Irvine Loudon and Simon Houfe.
T
THE LANCET • Vol 359 • March 2, 2002 • www.thelancet.com
807
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.
more bizarre “mutations” that survive. The mind’s complex inference systems allow few “supernatural concepts” to survive, examples being death and mortality, and this, argues the author, is why the world’s religions have features in common. Boyer is right to say that religion is possible without membership of a particular religion, but his labelling as futile a historical pursuit of religion is odd when set beside the fairly precise starting-points that some organised religions clearly have. And then we have the editor of the journal Science and Christian Belief, Denis Alexander, a molecular immunologist. His review of the history of scientific thought challenges the notion that science and faith are incompatible today—ie, the old argument that science has made or will one day make all gods and religions redundant. He goes further by showing how many of the assumed previous confrontations between scientists and the church (a book covering other religions would be
too long, he pleads) were not like that at all. Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley lost head and home, respectively, for their political views not their chemistry. Nor was it a question of Vatican one, scientist nil in the match between Pope Urban VIII and Galileo. The debate in 1860 between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley on Darwin’s theory did not, Alexander convincingly argues, symbolise an irreconcilable dichotomy between biological science and a Church of England locked in to a literal interpretation of the Old Testament. If a clash between church authority and discovery is a paradigm, it is a false one—as false as the belief that before Copernicus everyone believed the earth to be flat. That particular myth can be blamed on the 19th-century American novelist Washington Irving. Isaac Newton left behind 1345 books, but only one-third of this library was science, the majority being theology, philosophy, history, and the classical authors. Indeed, until around 1900 scientists were very widely read. Darwin
studied both medicine and theology with no great love for either; one of the founding editors of Annals of Botany, I recall, was a physician; Priestley was elected fellow of the Royal Society for his writings on electricity not oxygen, and he practised as a non-conformist minister, and had a working knowledge of eight foreign languages. Alexander yearns for science to have more men and women with that breadth of learning. It is they who will rebuild the enterprise of science with a “theistic framework” that renews respect for human values. Curiously—and I do wish he had explored this possibility further—it does seem more likely to be biologists these days who believe that their unravelling of DNA explains all. Physicists, who always seem to be on the verge of a multidimensional general theory of everything, are the more likely to retain some belief in a supernatural power. David Sharp c/o The Lancet, London, UK
From the medical museum Dalziel’s mother
risked her life giving birth, and that his touching picture, by her child might not survive. Many Thomas Dalziel (1823–1906), women had their own shrouds ready shows a mother contemplating alongside the baby clothes, and wrote the little robe prepared ready for notes of farewell before the onset her new baby. She stands, her dress of labour. swollen out around her, looking down This woman cuts rather a lonely at the little garment so intently that we were so closely related that all hopes figure, until we ponder the presence of see only the top of her mob-cap. were admixed with fear. At the the sketcher, and sense the intimacy Her home is poor, and sparsely time Dalziel made this sketch in of this tableau. Might the awaited furnished. Cracks show in the wall. the 1850s, for every 200 livebirths, child belong to the artist himself? Yet the preparations this mother one mother and 20 babies were lost. Thomas Dalziel was the youngest has made for the new arrival of seven sons of a remarkable suggest no poverty of feeling. artistic Northumbrian family, The cradle, an old-fashioned most of whom moved hooded rocker, stands alongsouth to form the famous side, ready for the precious firm of wood engravers burden. A linen chest stands whose works illuminated in the shadows, and the chest thousands of Victorian of drawers is clothed in white books and magazines. He for a domestic shrine: a married, in 1856, a young bottle and a candle flank a painter, Louisa Gurden. lace-frilled cushion, bearing Thomas joined the family the greeting “Welcome Sweet firm in 1860. It is with gladBabe”, pricked out in shiny ness that we discover that he new pin-heads. and Louisa had a large family, Past generations echo in several of whom themselves the old cradle and traditional became successful artists. greeting, while the baby’s Welcome Sweet Babe by Thomas Bolton Gilchrist Dalziel Ruth Richardson gown and the mother imply c/o The Lancet, London, UK the pressure of the future. The artist These figures are probably undershares the pathos of the woman’s estimates. Especially in times of With thanks to: Dinah Eastop and Donato contemplation, pregnant with uncerdearth, and in the charitable lying-in/ Esposito at the British Museum Prints and Drawings Department, London, UK; Charles tainty: who shall wear this garment? maternity hospitals (which were Newton at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Is it a christening robe, or a shroud? often foci of epidemics of puerperal London; Noreen Marshall at the Museum of From time immemorial, birth and sepsis) child mortality rates were Childhood, Bethnal Gree, London; and to the death—for both mother and child— much higher. Every mother knew she work of Irvine Loudon and Simon Houfe.
T
THE LANCET • Vol 359 • March 2, 2002 • www.thelancet.com
807
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.