dsgood

I don't think we actually have to claim she invented science fiction, because to the best of my recollection and without going and looking it up, various people in the C17th were doing similar things. Also, honestly, why can we not claim women among the Great Eccentrics of History? What we like about Margaret Cavendish is that she appears to have heartily embraced this identity rather than having it plonked upon her by a judgemental world: The Duchess Who Invented Science Fiction.

Though I am slightly muttering under my breath about the women of the time who were also Doing Science and Being Intellectual in a rather less flamboyant fashion e.g. Lady Ranelagh, and indeed women in the Evelyn circle....

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Quiet persistence and a lucky combination of first husband dying after a few years of marriage and sympathetic second husband (see also Mrs Delany): Mary Somerville – the first scientist - she taught Ada Lovelace, plus she lived to be 92. (You know, I am sorry for those women in science who died tragically young, but we hear a lot less about the ones like Dorothy Hodgkin who had a long and spectacularly effective career in crystallography while suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and actually GOT THE NOBEL. I also mark her up for persistence in humanitarian concerns.)

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Okay, Amy Levy did die, by her own hand, distressingly young: but her personal archive, up till now in private hands, has now been acquired by the University of Cambridge Library: The archive of enigmatic 19th-century writer Amy Levy has a new home at Cambridge University Library

Noted as of interest a day or so ago, ‘I don’t want anyone to suffer like I did’: the intersex campaigners fighting to limit surgery on children - am a bit gloomed to think that this is Still An Issue because I look back and surely this was brought to wider attention, oh, at least twenty or years ago?

Ah. A little delving shows me that the person I remember as doing pioneering research on the subject, published around the late 90s, and also involved in intersex activism, has become A Figure of Controversy and I think we probably do not mention them.

But quite coincidentally this emerged today: who, according to work done by A Very Reputable Scientist sequencing DNA which does appear to be his, had a Disorder of Sexual Development (as intersex conditions are sometimes termed)? Did Hitler really have a ‘micropenis’? The dubious documentary analysing the dictator’s DNA.

Here is a thoughtful and nuanced piece by an actual scientist taking issue with some of the more tabloidy accounts A slightly different take on the news that Hitler’s DNA reveals some genetic anomalies. The most interesting thing to me is that history has a profound capability for irony.

That Hitler himself had a condition that was discovered and named by a Jewish man who also held some responsibility for the scientifically misguided murderous policies of the Nazis is at least a reflection that history is often imbued with a sense of complex and confusing irony.