Find out more
Websites
Channel 4 Television takes no responsibility for the content of any
third-party sites.
Charles Babbage
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Babbage.html
Interesting biography that tells, among much else, how, when Babbage was instrumental
in getting legislation passed that would eliminate street entertainers – he
said they destroyed 25% of his working power – he was persecuted by the
latter (one brass band played outside his windows for five hours with only
one brief intermission).
Charles Darwin (1809-82)
www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/
Science/Darwin.htm
Enthusiast's biography of the English naturalist famously known
as the author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
Contains lots of quotes from Darwin and his contemporaries.
Delta Omega – Honorary Society in Public Health
www.deltaomega.org/classics.htm
Online texts including The Mode of Communication of Cholera by John
Snow, Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale and an article by Dr
William Budd on an outbreak of typhoid fever in London in 1857.
The Naming of Ada
www.iste.uni-stuttgart.de/ps/AdaBasis/
pal_1195/ada/ajpo/pol-hist/history/lady-lov.txt
Augusta Ada Byron (1815-52), daughter of Lord Byron, is regarded as the
world's first computer programmer. A software language developed by the
US Department of Defense was named 'Ada' in her honour in 1979. She anticipated,
by more than a century, modern technology and computing.
Nineteenth-century British Public Health Overview
www.victorianweb.org/science/health/
healthov.html
Articles on medicine and medical care in Victorian Britain.
Physics in the 19th Century
www.victorianweb.org/science/physintro.html
Gateway site with links to articles and information on 19th-century physics
in Britain, including biographies of James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday.
Richard Owen (1804-92)
www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/owen.html
Thorough biography of the comparative anatomist whose refusal to support Darwin's
theories publicly made him look foolish when his mistakes in primate anatomy
became apparent.
Sir Joseph John Thomson
www.nobel-winners.com/Physics/
joseph_john_thomson.html
An interesting rundown of Thomson's life and achievements, particularly the
discovery of the electron. On the Nobel Timeline website.
Science and Learned Culture in Victorian Britain
www.history.ox.ac.uk/hsmt/pdf/
science_victorian_britain.pdf
Oxford University's modern history faculty offers an e-booklet (PDF format)
containing outlines and resources of a series of lectures, which dealt with
geology, natural theology, Darwin, anthropology and general science during
the 19th century.
Victorian Medicine
www.geocities.com/victorianmedicine/
index.html
Student study that looks at traditional medicinal practices, the scientific
theories of the time, the common treatments used and Victorian health trends.
Victorian Science – An overview
www.victorianweb.org/science/sciov.html
Information and articles on the sciences and the key scientists during this
period.
Books
The First Five Lives of Annie Besant and The Last Four
Lives of Annie Besant both by A H Nethercot (Hart-Davis, 1961,
1963). Out of print; may be available from libraries and second-hand
bookshops.
Two volumes covering the biography of one of the most compelling women of the
Victorian era.
 John Stuart Mill: Autobiography edited by John Robson (Penguin,
1989)
Stuart Mill was a prolific journalist, brilliant logician, philosopher, liberal
MP and pioneer of women's suffrage, whose remarkable educational feats caused
him a severe mental crisis in his 30s.
Get this book
 Making Medicine Scientific: John Burdon Sanderson and the culture
of Victorian science by Terrie M Romano (Johns Hopkins University,
2002)
Romano uses the life and eclectic career of Sir John Burdon Sanderson (1829-1905)
to explore the Victorian campaign to make medicine scientific.
Get this book
 The Meaning of Everything: The story of the Oxford English Dictionary by
Simon Winchester (Oxford University Press, 2003)
Winchester charts the fascinating life of the OED from the appointment
of the first editor to the dictionary's triumphant publication in 1928 and
beyond.
Get this book
 Mesmerized: Powers of mind in Victorian Britain by Alison
Winter (University of Chicago Press, 2000)
Surveys the rise and fall of mesmerism in Victorian Britain, from animal magnetism
to hypnotism, table-turning and other fads. By ostensibly telling a history
of mesmerism, the author offers a cultural history of the making of medical
knowledge.
Get this book
 Reproductive Physiology and Birth Control: The writings of Charles
Knowlton and Annie Besant edited by S Chandrasekhar (Transaction
Publishers, 2002)
A history of the world birth control movement that establishes a context for
understanding the advocacy of birth control in 19th-century England and how
it helped the women's movement. Included are two of Besant's own pamphlets
on birth control and an account of the Bradlaugh–Besant trial.
Get this book
 Revealing New Worlds: Three Victorian women naturalists by
Suzanne Le-May Sheffield (Routledge, 2001)
The story of 19th-century science often tells a tale of a male-dominant domain.
This work relates the stories of three Victorian women of science: naturalist
Margaret Gatty, botanical artist Marianne North and entomologist Eleanor Anne
Ormerod.
Get this book
 The Victorian Amateur Astronomer: Independent astronomical research
in Britain 1820-1920 by Allan Chapman (Praxis Publishing,
1998)
A fascinating exploration of Victorian astronomy, this describes the technical
issues that astronomers faced, the problems of finance and patronage, and the
dissemination of scientific ideas. It also examines the relationship between
amateur and professional astronomers.
Get this book
 The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (Phoenix, 1999)
The story of the spread of the telegraph and its transformation of the Victorian
world. The telegraph was greeted with the same concerns, hype, social panic
and excitement that now surround the internet; this work provides an insight
into the past and a context in which to think differently about today's concerns.
Get this book
 Victorian Science in Context edited by Bernard Lightman (University
of Chicago Press, 1997)
Sets out to capture the essence of the Victorians' fascination with science,
charting the many ways in which it influenced and was influenced by the larger
Victorian culture.
Get this book
Top
|
