George Eliot’s support for physiology

In 1879 the novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans) established, in memory of her close companion, the writer and amateur scientist George Henry Lewes, a studentship for the support of physiology ‘the science least adequately studied in England’ (1). At this time there was much public and professional concern about the role of science and the inadequate level of its funding in Britain. There were several recurring, overlapping needs: for educational reforms, to encourage scientific teaching in schools and advanced training at the universities: for proper endowment, to provide salaries for scientists both to teach and to research, and adequate facilities for their studies; and for recruitment of more scientists and the use of scientific methods in industrial manufacture. Meetings and editorials, articles and letters, particularly, but not exclusively, reported in the pages of Nature, reflected a growing and increasingly vocal apprehension (2). Creating a studentship in physiology was a small but important step in the development of professional science in Britain. Although the Lewes Trust is extant and active, its unique importance was during its early years when it helped some of the country’s most eminent scientists at the beginning of their careers. Of the early holders, listed in table 1, fourteen were elected Fellows of the Royal Society (two becoming President) and three (Dale, A. V. Hill and Sherrington) were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (3)

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• Henry Dale, histamine and anaphylaxis

  Open Access•E M Tansey, Tansey Em•Studies in History and Philosophy…•2003

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