OBITUARY
Gerald L. Geison, 58,
Professor of the History of Science and Medicine,
Princeton University
History Professor Gerald L.
Geison dies.
Gerald L. Geison, a history
professor who was well known for his teaching and research on the history
of medicine, was found dead in his home in Princeton Monday. He was 58
and died of an enlarged heart.
Professor Geison, a professor
in the history department and the Program in History of Science, came
to Princeton as an assistant professor in 1970. Born in Savanna, Ill.,
he was a star basketball player and class valedictorian in high school
and won a scholarship to Beloit College in Beloit, Wis. The first person
in his family to attend college, he was introduced to the history and
philosophy of science at Beloit. He went on to earn a doctorate in Yale
University's Department of the History of Science and Medicine in 1970
and then joined the Princeton faculty.
Professor Geison was an especially
popular and rigorous teacher at Princeton, noted Robert Tignor, the incoming
chairman of the history department. His course, "Disease and Doctors in
the Modern West," attracted many students each year for more than two
decades, and was high on the list of non-science courses taken by Princeton
pre-medical students. Professor Geison was scheduled to teach the course
again in the fall semester.
"He was, above all, a passionate
teacher of the history of science," said his colleague, Professor Angela
N. H. Creager. "His devotion to his graduate students was legendary. He
had a special ability to bring the best out of his students, in part because
he knew how to give praise as well as criticism. Possessed of a
keen editorial eye, Gerry was an astute reader of the works-in-progress
of his students and colleagues. Always approachable and down to earth,
he drew students to see science and medicine as human enterprises."
Professor Geison wrote two books, "The Private Science of Louis Pasteur"
(1995) and "Michael Foster and the Cambridge School of Physiology: The
Scientific Enterprise in Late Victorian Society" (1978), and edited four
more. In addition, he wrote about 40 scholarly essays and book reviews
and contributed 20 articles to the Dictionary of Scientific Biography.
His biography of Pasteur was viewed as an outstanding work of scholarship
which penetrated the secrecy that had surrounded much of the legendary
scientist's laboratory work. Professor Geison used Pasteur's laboratory
notebooks and published papers to described some of the most famous episodes
in the history of science - including their darker sides, such as the
human risks entailed in Pasteur's haste to develop the rabies vaccine.
A reviewer wrote in the "New England Journal of Medicine" that the book
"requires us to reevaluate our heroes and consider the complexities of
science*instead of merely clinging to comforting and heroic myths." At
Princeton, Professor Geison served as director of the Program in History
of Science from 1980 to 1986 and was the program's director of graduate
studies for many years. He was associate dean of the college from 1977
to 1979, master of the Graduate College from 1982 to 1985, and secretary
of the Committee on the Course of Study from 1977 to 1979.
He received many honors and invitations to lecture on his work. The American
Association for the History of Medicine awarded its 1996 William H. Welch
Medal to Professor Geison's book on Pasteur. He was a visiting scholar
at the Institute for Advanced Study, a visiting historical scholar at
the National Library of Medicine and a visiting senior Wellcome fellow
at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. He received
a Howard Foundation fellowship in 1979-80.
Early in his academic career, Professor Geison was a postdoctoral fellow
at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University
and a research fellow at the University of Minnesota Medical School.
Professor Geison was a member of the editorial board of the "Journal
of the History of Medicine" (1996), a contributing editor of "Osiris"
(1984-1991), and advisory editor of "Isis" (1979-82). He was a member
of the History of Science Society and served on several society committees.
He also served as a referee and consultant for the National Endowment
for the Humanities, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science
Foundation, the American Physiological Society, and the university presses
of California, Cambridge, Harvard, Notre Dame, Oxford and Princeton.
He is survived by two sons, Christopher and Andrew, both of San Francisco,
Calif.; and five siblings: Carmen Kellogg of Rockford, Ill.; Roger Geison
of Savannah, Ill.; Rita Huizenga of Moline, Ill.; Stan Geison of Bloomington,
Ill.; and Lt. Col. Gordon Geison of Sterling, Va.
Plans for a memorial service have not been finalized.
(posted 7/12/01)
12 July 2001 | Contact
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