Scientific lectures: a history of performance

Abstract

In the anatomy theatres of Renaissance Europe, professors became performers; and right down into the nineteenth century, seeing corpses cut up could entertain as well as enlighten an audience. From about 1700, lectures on natural philosophy escaped from universities and attracted a public looking for polite learning, and valuing science as a momentous part of high culture. A calm eloquence, some exciting experiments, and a framework of natural theology were the recipe for success. In 1799 the Royal Institution in London began its project of attracting the fashionable, unable to visit the Continent, to lectures, with experiments that always worked. Davy was a great lecturer there, in a century where such performances promoted a scientific reputation; and he competed successfully with the theatres andopera houses nearby in the West End. His was a rhetoric of intellectual excitement, patriotism, and usefulness, and he held audiences spellbound. So, a generation later, did Faraday, with a more sober eloquence appropriate to the Victorian era. The wealthy and fashionable were not the only audiences for scientific lectures: T. H. Huxley among others delighted in addressing working men, to whom he never spoke down—whereas at the Royal Institution he might as a plebeian decide to affront his hearers, making excellent theatre. If education is a matter of lighting fires rather than filling bottles, then we should still see professing as a performance art.