Corresponding Naturalists

• Event Date: Thursday, November 10, 2005
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Talk

Speaker: Janet Browne
George A. Miller Endowment Visiting Professor, UIUC and The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College, London

Letters were once an essential component in natural history research and one of the main means by which men and women actively participated in transforming private ideas into public knowledge. This talk explores the role of correspondence networks in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, their role in the exchange of specimens and the way that groups of naturalists used them to create and validate results. Charles Darwin's correspondence is a particularly striking case and this will be compared with the letters of other contemporary figures.