Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
profession. Nevertheless? There are still differences between it and the
classical motif which a superficial viewer of the portrait might ignore.
Pasteur holds a bottle rather than a flask, the bottle is filled with a solid
instead of a liquid, and he looks down at the bottle in his right hand and a
paper note in his left hand as if he were comparing them. In Robert
Thom's portrait of Pasteur from the mid-twentieth
century (Figure 11b),
these differences are corrected: Pasteur gazes at the liquid-filled flask at
eye level. In addition, since Thom painted this portrait as part of his
extensive series of paintings of “historical moments in science and
pharmacy” (Metzl & Howell 2004), he was certainly aware of the his-
torical iconology and symbolism of his image. The image was intended
to capture Pasteur's experiments disproving the spontaneous generation
of life. Anyone familiar with the history of these experiments would
know that it is not the flasks but the connection between the flasks that
was crucial to Pasteur's experiments. The connection is visible in
Thom's painting, but the emphasis is clearly on the flask, so as to repeat
with slight modification the classical uroscopy/imposter motif. A clear
reiteration of the motif appears in the bronze statue of Pasteur in Figure
11c, which is probably from the early twentieth century when many such
statues were created to commemorate Pasteur's fame. It is unfortunate
that, although today's chemists might consider this statue a tribute to
Pasteur's greatness as a scientist, it is actually fraught with unsavory
historical allusions.
Misunderstandings of cultural symbolism can be particularly prob-
lematic if one deliberately strives to create a professional identity. A
chemist with such an ambition was Charles F. Chandler (1836-1925). He
was co-founder of the American Chemical Society, and its president in
1881 and 1889, and co-founder of the
Journal of the American Chemical
Society
and its predecessor, the
American Chemist
(1870-7), which he
co-edited with his brother. He was also “an organizer and first president
(1898-1900) of The Chemist's Club, a club whose goal was to foster a
social and professional identity in the chemical community” (Bowden
1997, p. 155). It must have been during these years that the photograph
shown in Figure 12 was taken: Chandler in front of his porch under a tree
with suit, tie, and hat, holding a flat-bottom flask in his right hand. Al-
though it is a variation of the classical uroscopy/imposter motif (
e.g.
Fig-
