This project has been more than a decade in the making, which means I have a lot of people to acknowledge.
Many years ago, at the University of Calgary, I wrote a fateful essay for a class taught by Maggie Osler. As it happened, that class—and that essay—changed my life. Maggie became a mentor, and then a friend. She refused to accept anything but my best effort, and as I ventured off into the wilds of academe she was both my biggest supporter and my most incisive critic. I will always be grateful to her, as well as tremendously saddened that she did not live to see this book appear in print.
Larry Principe continued the work that Maggie started, and his encyclopedic knowledge, inexhaustible patience, and dry wit remain as valuable now as when I was his student at Johns Hopkins. I have learned a great deal from him, and his example continues to inspire me.
Research for this book has benefited from the support offered by several institutions, including a Smithsonian Institution Graduate Student Fellowship, a Roy G. Neville Fellowship awarded by the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and the Charles S. Singleton Fellowship awarded by the Johns Hopkins University. I also want to thank the Folger Institute, and Jim Bono, for the “Imagining Nature” colloquium that took place in 2003–2004, where I found the opportunity to present the first seeds of this book to an enthusiastic and welcoming group of fellow scholars.
The many, many iterations of this project have been reviewed more often than I would like to remember. Not all of the anonymous reviewers were kind, but all of them were useful in one way or another, so they have my thanks. My particular gratitude goes to Audra Wolfe, for her insightful editorial help, and to Mark Largent and Liam Brockey, who both provided valuable feedback on this manuscript.
I would not have persevered in this process, nor survived those many reviews, without the support of a great many friends and colleagues, including Michael Austin, Jeff Bale, Jen Baggot, Kendra and Jubin Cheruvelil, Jeremy Herliczek, Allison Kavey, Susan Lamb, Tulley Long, Georgina Montgomery, Cheryl Murphy, George Oppel, Manon Parry, Katie Reinhart, Robby Richardson, Sophie Rollins, Steve Stowe, Naoko Wake, Pam Warren, and (because she asked to be included) Cassie Wieckhorst.
I want to thank my family—near and far, extended and otherwise—for their support as I struggled to make this book a reality. My mother, Margaret, passed away long before I started this project, but I think that she would be proud to see it finally finished.
Last, but never least, I want to thank Matt, my fixer of innumerable problems, who has managed to be all things to me.