Louis Agassiz enjoyed nothing more than spending time with his friends. Well, almost nothing. I do suspect that jellyfish, for example, did interest him quite a bit more. But they are hard to keep at the table with you, and so Agassiz, a devotee of good food and wine, settled for human company instead. As I struggled to understand the less appealing sides of Agassiz’s character—his impatience, his racial prejudices, his treatment of his first wife—I was often heartened by the frank delight Agassiz took in friendship. Fortunately, during the many years I spent working on his book I was never without friends myself, never without my family, and never without excellent advice. I salute Frank Kearful, my friend for more than two decades, who read many drafts of this book and sustained me when I lost courage; Daniel Weinstock, who knows natural history as well as medicine and helped me rewrite some knotty passages; Scott Russell Sanders, one of my favorite living writers and a fountain of good advice, whose presence can be felt on every page I write; and, especially, my editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Deanne Urmy, who believed in this book, saved me from numerous errors and missteps, and sharpened my thinking as well as my prose. Her vision is evident on every page of this book. Susanna Brougham was a congenial manuscript editor; she treated this book as if she had written it herself. Lisa Glover efficiently oversaw the production process. I am also grateful to Nicole Angeloro and Ashley Gilliam for much editorial support, and to Gail Cohen for her expert proofreading. Tom Cronin, of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, an internationally known expert on marine invertebrates, corrected my science as well as my grammar. Alan Braddock of Temple University kept my art history honest. Edward McCarthy of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions explained Agassiz’s autopsy records to me. My dear friend Raphael Falco helped me make some tough and much-needed decisions when I thought I was almost done; the final version of this book is immeasurably improved because of my conversations with him. John T. Bethell, with infinite patience and kindness answered numerous questions about the history of Harvard, a subject he knows better than anyone. And nothing of what you have just read would have ever seen the light of day had it not been for Robert Meitus, who stepped in and lifted me up when things looked dark and hopeless. One of the best things that has come out of the decade-long process of my preoccupation with a dead man’s life is what happened at the end: the beginning of my friendship with Robert and his wife, the singer Carrie Newcomer.
Among the many friends who have given me advice and support I want to acknowledge Jessica Berman, Lawrence Buell, Jordi Cat, Christopher Corbett, Jonathan Elmer, Sandy Gliboff, Donald Gray, Susan Gubar, Paul Gutjahr, Michael Hamburger, George Hutchinson, and Linda Lear. My deep gratitude also to the endlessly creative Alita Hornick at Indiana University, who always saw to it that I had what I needed for my work, and to Stephen Burt at Harvard University, who obtained a much-needed resource for me from the Schlesinger Library. Jackson Lears and Stephanie Volmer again allowed me to try out some of my ideas in the pages of Raritan. In the early stages of my work on this book, Polly Winsor, who created the foundation on which most current work on Agassiz must rest, provided me with articles and references. I would also like to thank my students at Indiana University, graduate and undergraduate, for putting up with my interest in jellyfish, turtles, and autopsy reports when I should have been discussing Emerson or Whitman with them. They have helped me think through the ideas in this book so many times that I am often no longer sure which ones were mine originally. I am particularly indebted to Robert Arbour and Emer Vaughn for their expert research assistance. Two anonymous reviewers read this manuscript in an earlier incarnation and gave excellent advice.
Work on this book was supported by several grants: a full-year faculty fellowship of the National Endowment for the Humanities that gave me more time for my writing than I’d ever had; the Rodney G. Dennis Fellowship in the Study of Manuscripts awarded by Houghton Library; and generous support from the Dedicated Research Initiative Fund (DRIF) of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, which allowed me to hire two excellent research assistants, Asynith Palmer and Ilse Schweitzer, who have since become wonderful scholars in their own right. A grant-in-aid from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., allowed me to attend a highly productive seminar on “Writing Scientific Biography,” directed by Steven Shapin. I was more than fortunate to be able to complete my work in the perfect setting of Indiana University’s Lilly Library, with daily access to the most knowledgeable library staff I know: Rebecca Cape, David Frasier, Breon Mitchell, Joel Silver, Gabriel Swift, and Cherry Williams, among others. I challenge everyone who doesn’t believe me when I say that this is the single best place in the world for the study of rare books and manuscripts to spend a day in the Lilly’s Reading Room.
Librarians and curators at other institutions have facilitated my research and answered multiple inquiries (some of them quite annoying, I’m sure). Among many others I want to single out Dana Fisher at the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, who readily provided me with images, sources, and other assistance; Leslie Morris and Peter Accardo of Harvard’s Houghton Library, who responded to numerous pleas for help; Lisa DiCesare of the Arnold Arboretum at Harvard; Jack Eckert of the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard; as well as Malcolm Beasley and Andrea Hart on the staff of the Museum of Natural History in London. Diana Carey at the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America and Robin G. McElheny at the Harvard University Archives provided generous assistance at the eleventh hour. Two brilliant photographers, Tim Ford of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Zach Downey of the Lilly Library, prepared the majority of the images in this book.
I truly could not have written these pages without the people closest to me: the ageless Daniel Aaron, who knows me better than anyone else and has been my mentor and teacher for longer than I can remember; Lauren Bernofsky, my wife and loveliest critic, who cheered me on when I most needed it; our beautiful, wonderful children Nick and Julia; my beloved mother Elisabeth; and Jeremy, my old Maine Coon cat, who constantly reminds me of something Agassiz knew too, though his theology forced him occasionally to suppress that knowledge: that the boundaries between human and nonhuman animals are fleeting at best.
Finally, I do want to commemorate those who are no longer here to see this book finished: my beloved great-aunt Elisabeth Mueller, who many years ago instilled in me the love of travel, languages, and rare books; Janice Thaddeus, whose voice I still hear every time I start a new semester; Tom Ford, a gentle soul if ever there was one, whom illness prevented from finishing his own book; and, of course, my dear father, Hans Dietrich Irmscher, whose death two years ago tore a hole in my heart and my life that no one and nothing can ever fill. Like my previous books and like anything I will do hereafter, this one is for him too.