![]() ![]() It has recently been argued that comparative historical analysis can play a major role in public health policy ( 6, 7). I also briefly analyze the similarities and differences between the Victorian and contemporary vaccination debates. Wallace’s interventions were influential he was popular and well liked inside and outside scientific circles and, despite his controversial social reformism, commanded deep respect for his achievements and his personal qualities until the end of his long life. ![]() I provide a short introduction to Wallace’s life and work and then describe his contributions to the British antivaccination campaigns. Unlike Darwin, Wallace did not leave behind a large number of private letters and other personal documents therefore, his more private thoughts, motives, and deliberations will probably remain unknown. He published copiously because this served for a long time as his major source of income, but these writings only show the public face of Wallace. The motives behind Wallace’s campaigns are sometimes difficult to fathom. Wallace made without any doubt lasting contributions to biologic science, but the second half of his life was by and large devoted to what from today’s perspective are utterly lost causes: He became a passionate advocate of spiritualism, supported land nationalization, and fervently objected to compulsory smallpox vaccination. But unlike Darwin, Wallace always was and probably will remain a serious challenge to the history of science: he stubbornly refuses to fit into the mold of the typical scientific hero. In the past few years, Wallace’s work has in fact enjoyed increasing attention among the historians of science, as several new biographies and studies prove ( 1– 5). ![]() These occasions also directed the view of a wider public to the unjustly neglected figure of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) ( Figure), explorer and codiscoverer of the principle of natural selection. In 2009, the scientific community commemorated the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Perhaps best remembered today in history of science as the codiscoverer of the principle of natural selection, Wallace also played a prominent role in the antivaccination movement. In addition, there are excellent websites with extensive information about the life, scholarship and collections of Wallace: The Alfred Russel Wallace Page, The Alfred Russel Wallace Website, and the Wallace Collection.Figure. There are many recent biographies of Alfred Russel Wallace. There are also portraits that were used for cartes-de-visite (as is the case for the center portrait above). Some were published in his books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are many photographic portraits of Alfred Russel Wallace, spanning his extremely long life. The other papers, "On the Habits of the Orang-Utan of Borneo" (1856), "Attempts at a Natural Arrangement of Birds" (1856), "On the Natural History of the Aru Islands" (1857), "Note on the Theory of Permanent and Geographical Varieties" (1858) represent the most important published scholarship on evolution in the decade leading up to the Wallace and Darwin publications on the process of natural selection. The first of these papers (1855) "On the Law which has Regulated the Introduction of New Species" was to have an enormous impact on the thinking of Charles Lyell. Beyond his remarkable insights into evolutionary biology, he would also be widely known for his ardent advocacy of spiritualism, land nationalization, anti-vaccinationism, and for much of his later life, a highly teleological view of evolution.īefore Charles Darwin published his first clear (and public) statements on evolution in 18, Alfred Russel Wallace had already published a series of brilliant papers that bear on the process of evolution and species formation. Wallace would live a long life (1823 - 1913). And like Charles Darwin, he too would credit the reading of Malthus' On Population as a central stimulus for the key insight of natural selection. Like Charles Darwin, he too had a vast experience of field work in South America (four years of professional collecting from 1848 - 1852). Alfred Russel Wallace, codiscoverer of the principle of natural selection was also the founder of the field of biogeography. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |