Mary Somerville, née Mary Fairfax, (born December 26, 1780, Jedburgh, Roxburghshire, Scotland died November 29, 1872, Naples, Italy), British science writer whose influential works synthesized many different scientific disciplines. As a child, Fairfax had a minimal education. She was taught to read (but not write) by her mother. When she was 10 years old, she attended a boarding school for girls for one year in Musselburgh, Scotland. Upon her return home, she began to educate herself from the family library. She was encouraged only by her uncle, Thomas Somerville, who helped her with Latin. In 1804 Fairfax married a cousin, Samuel
New beech leaves, Gribskov Forest in the northern part of Sealand, Denmark. Malene Thyssen, Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link.
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. Brett Clark is associate editor of
Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the University of Utah. Hannah Holleman is a director of the Monthly Review Foundation and an associate professor of sociology at Amherst College.
“The old Greek philosophers,” Frederick Engels wrote in
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, “were all born natural dialecticians.”
1 Nowhere was this more apparent than in ancient Greek medical thought, which was distinguished by its strong materialist and ecological basis. This dialectical, materialist, and ecological approach to epidemiology (from the ancient Greek
Mary Somerville: the life of the Scottish scientist
November 30, 2020 at 11:16 am
Mary Somerville was a celebrated lady of science of her day. Her name lives on in the Oxford College named after her, there’s a crater on the Moon that bears her name and in 2017 her face featured on the Scottish £10 note. But who was Mary Somerville, and why is she so celebrated?
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Like many women within the history of science, her story is complicated. While their male peers were allowed to join and be educated within prestigious institutions, publish original work under their own name and be declared discoverer, inventor and theorist, women did not have those options.