Abstract
AbstractFeminist, anti-vivisectionist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains notably absent from recent studies of Victorian science and spiritualism. Her efforts to synthesize occult and scientific worldviews have been side-lined by those of male contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace, ones whose professional status and gender coordinates more readily align with implicit assumptions about the kind of person for whom disenchantment posed an intellectual problem that might best be solved in the laboratory. My paper positions Kingsford at the very heart of the late Victorian project to accommodate scientific innovation and spiritual belief by tracing her attempts to forge an intuitive epistemology superior to what she viewed as the deeply suspect championship of objectivity. In doing so, it aims to expose and redress blind spots within recent esotericism studies-based approaches to the disenchantment debate.
Highlights
The month is December 1877, in a frigid teaching theatre operated by the Université de Paris’ prestigious medical faculty
Anti-vivisectionist, occultist, and one of the first British women to qualify as a medical doctor, Anna Kingsford remains notably absent from recent studies of Victorian science and spiritualism
Her efforts to synthesize occult and scientific worldviews have been side-lined by those of male contemporaries such as Oliver Lodge and Alfred Russel Wallace, ones whose professional status and gender coordinates more readily align with implicit assumptions about the kind of person for whom disenchantment posed an intellectual problem that might best be solved in the laboratory
Summary
From the 1970s onwards, the historiography of science and spiritualism has developed under the long shadow of Max Weber’s highly influential if much challenged—primarily influential through its persistent rebuttal—disenchantment thesis. I place Kingsford within the historical and conceptual space of the enchanted laboratory—not to legitimize her often dubious, even dangerous, scientific claims, but to render her and others like her visible as key players within a newly-complex understanding of the spread and resistance to scientific authority at the end of the nineteenth century.[22] Disenchantment was never just men’s business; women entered its lists, The latter opens with a rare scene of a scientific woman—in this case, Marie Curie— at a spiritualist séance with Eusapia Palladino This remarkable encounter between two women at seemingly opposite ends of the spiritualism and science spectrum is not developed into one of the book’s core case studies. Ferguson not as experimental tests subjects or strategically passive vessels, but as engaged problem solvers
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