In 1916, a 41 years old woman with little formal scientific education became the secretary of the New York Aquarium (NYA). In becoming the Aquarium's first female officer, Ida M. Mellen realized her lifelong dream of successfully pursuing a career in the biological sciences and broke with the limitations and low expectations surrounding her sex and class backgrounds. By 1930, Mellen left the NYA and pursued a career in popular hobbyist writing, becoming the foremost expert on aquarium fishes and domesticated cats in the United States. Margaret Rossiter and other historians of science have illuminated women's common career paths in the sciences, but little work has been done on individuals whose gender and class impacted their career. Building on Rossiter's framework, this case study suggests that class, as much as gender, structured the scientific career of women. Through the narrative of the outsider scientific practitioner, we can more fully illuminate the social structure of scientific work. Examining the struggles of Mellen to enter and maintain a scientific career sheds light, not just on her own career path, but those alternately closed to her. If we wish to understand science in the early twentieth century, especially questions of inclusion and exclusion in the scientific process, we must examine those individuals who operated on the periphery of the "traditional" scientific path.
This paper seeks to contribute to understandings of practice and place in the history of early American neurophysiology by exploring research with jellyfish at marine stations. Jellyfish became a particularly important research tool to experimental physiologists studying neurological subjects at the turn of the twentieth century. But their enthusiasm for the potential of this organism was constrained by its delicacy in captivity. The discovery of hardier species made experimentation at the shore possible and resulted in two epicenters of neurophysiological research on the American East Coast: the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Carnegie Institution's Dry Tortugas Laboratory. Work done in these locations had impacts on a wide range of physiological questions. These centers were short lived-researchers at the MBL eventually focused on the squid giant axon and the Tortugas lab closed after the death of Mayer-but the development of basic requirements and best practices to sustain these organisms paints an important picture of early experimental neurophysiology. Marine organisms and locations have played an integral role in the development of experimental life sciences in America. By understanding the earliest experimental research done at these locations, and the organisms that lured researchers from the campus to the coastline, we can begin to integrate marine stations into the larger historical narrative of American physiology.
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