Dr John Lidwell-Durnin
My research is focused on the history of science in Europe in the long 19th century. My previous research explored popular understandings of heredity in the early 19th century, examining the role played by deep-set social attitudes towards food security and production, population, and race. My publications to-date focus on the role played by citizens as a base of evidence and experimentation in debates over the mechanics of heredity in Britain and America, prior to the emergence of eugenic terminology. My current research examines the intersection between the agricultural sciences and the environment, with a particular interest in how citizens and the wider public understood the impact of farming, mining, and deforestation.
- Agricultural and environmental sciences
- Heredity and eugenics
- Citizen science and public participation
My previous research examined how scientific authorities and institutions employed the public as a source of evidence, particularly in support of theories on the laws of heredity. During the 19th century, arriving at an understanding of the laws of hereditary transmission was one of the most pressing goals of scientific enquiry, with applications and consequences in agriculture, medicine, and the family. My forthcoming monograph explores the importance of compilation and diffusion to medicine and agriculture during this period, and the crucial role played by the public in producing evidence and experimentation.
I am currently developing a project on the global environmental history of soil, which will explore the anxieties that resulted from mining, deforestation, and changing agricultural practices near the close of the 18th century.
-
-
Cultivating famine: data, experimentation and food security, 1795–1848
June 2020|Journal article|The British Journal for the History of Science<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Collecting seeds and specimens was an integral aspect of botany and natural history in the eighteenth century. Historians have until recently paid less attention to the importance of collecting, trading and compiling knowledge of their cultivation, but knowing how to grow and maintain plants free from disease was crucial to agricultural and botanical projects. This is particularly true in the case of food security. At the close of the eighteenth century, European diets (particularly among the poor) began shifting from wheat- to potato-dependence. In Britain and Ireland during these decades, extensive crop damage was caused by diseases like ‘curl’ and ‘dry rot’ – leading many agriculturists and journal editors to begin collecting data on potato cultivation in order to answer practical questions about the causes of disease and methods that might mitigate or even eliminate their appearance. Citizens not only produced the bulk of these data, but also used agricultural print culture and participation in surveys to shape and direct the interpretation of these data. This article explores this forgotten scientific ambition to harness agricultural citizen science in order to bring stability and renewed vitality to the potato plant and its cultivation. I argue that while many agriculturists did recognize that reliance upon the potato brought with it unique threats to the food supplies of Britain and Ireland, their views on this threat were wholly determined by the belief that the diseases attacking potato plants in Europe had largely been produced or encouraged by erroneous cultivation methods.</jats:p> -
William Benjamin Carpenter and the Emerging Science of Heredity
June 2019|Journal article|Journal of the History of Biology -
Inevitable Decay: Debates over Climate, Food Security, and Plant Heredity in Nineteenth-Century Britain
December 2018|Journal article|Journal of the History of Biology -
The production of a physiological puzzle: how Cytisus adami confused and inspired a century’s botanists, gardeners, and evolutionists
September 2018|Journal article|History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Prelims |
FHS |
|
Authority of Nature Histories of Madness and Mental Healing in a Global Context The Scientific Movement in the 17th Century |