George Sarton

• 1. Introduction

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  George Sarton buried his life's work in a garden in Belgium. It was August 1914, and German soldiers were advancing on Ghent. Sarton, a young scholar who had spent years compiling notes for a sweeping history of science, wrapped his Civil Guard coat in cloth, dug a hole, and lowered both the coat and his manuscripts into the earth. If he had been caught wearing that coat, he would have been shot as a spy. So he hid it, and fled. Those buried notes were the seed of something enormous: a nine-volume history of science that would never be finished, a journal called Isis that would run for nearly four decades under his editorship, and an entirely new academic discipline that did not exist before him. How does a man who fled a war zone with almost nothing become the founder of a field? And what did he believe science could do for humanity that no other force could?

• 2. A Ghent Education

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  On the 31st of August 1884, George Alfred Leon Sarton was born in Ghent, Belgium, to Alfred Sarton and Leonie Van Halme. His mother died within a year of his birth. He attended school first in Ghent, then for four years in the town of Chimay. When he enrolled at the University of Ghent in 1902 to study philosophy, he found the subject did not match his thinking and stopped attending. Two years later, after a period of reflection, he re-enrolled to study the natural sciences instead. That shift from philosophy to science turned out not to be a retreat from big questions but a redirection toward them. By 1908, four Belgian universities jointly awarded him a gold medal for chemistry. That same year the city of Ghent gave him a silver laurel for a memoir he wrote. In 1911, he completed his doctorate with a thesis in celestial mechanics. Twelve days after graduating, on the 22nd of June 1911, he married Elanor Mabel Elwes, an artist and distinguished furniture designer. The couple settled in Wondelgem, and in 1912 their only child, a daughter named Eleanore Marie, known as May, was born there.

• 3. Flight and Reinvention

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  Twenty-six German soldiers were billeted at the Sarton family home during the occupation of Belgium. Sarton was held personally responsible for their safety. Had any of those soldiers missed curfew, the terms of occupation gave authorities grounds to shoot him. The family fled to England, first passing through the Netherlands before reaching London. Sarton found work in the War Office but his salary could not support three people. He left for the United States alone, and his wife and daughter followed in September 1915. He taught at the University of Illinois that summer and received the Prix Binoux from the Academie des Sciences in Paris for his work in the history of science. From 1916 to 1918 he lectured at Harvard University, covering philosophy in the 1916-17 academic year and history of science in 1917-18. He also taught at Teachers College at Columbia University during the summer of 1917. His persistence eventually paid off in 1919. After persistent requests to Robert S. Woodward, then the second president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and with the support of Andrew Dickson White, Sarton was appointed a research associate there. That position, which he held until 1948, finally gave him the institutional stability to pursue his central project.

• 4. Harvard and the New Field

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  Sarton became an unpaid lecturer at Harvard in 1920, a title he accepted not for pay but to keep his rooms in Widener Library, where he did much of his research. He did not become a full professor of the history of science there until 1940, and he held that post until his retirement in 1951. Over those decades Harvard's history of science program produced its first PhDs in America, and Sarton personally supervised two of them to completion: Aydin M. Sayili and I. Bernard Cohen. Two other students, Louise Diehl Patterson and Helen L. Thomas, finished their doctorates at Harvard under Cohen's supervision after Sarton's retirement. Sarton was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1927 and to the American Philosophical Society in 1934. He also edited the journal Isis from 1913 to 1952, nearly four decades, making it the central publication for the field he was building. He founded not only Isis but also the journal Osiris and the History of Science Society itself. The History of Science Society's highest honor, the George Sarton Medal, has been awarded annually since 1955 to recognize lifetime scholarly achievement in the field.

• 5. The Unfinished Monument

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  Sarton's central ambition was a nine-volume work called Introduction to the History of Science, a title he began publishing through the Carnegie Institution of Washington starting in 1927. The project was staggering in its scope. The three volumes he completed ran to 4,296 pages. To prepare the second volume, he learned Arabic and traveled through the Middle East to examine original manuscripts written by Islamic scientists. He believed the Islamic contribution to medieval learning was the most progressive element of that era, and he was genuinely angry when Western medieval studies ignored it. During that period, Sarton worked with the school of Spanish Arabists, beginning in 1928. The group was then led by Julian Ribera y Tarrago and Miguel Asin Palacios. Sarton acknowledged Ribera as the leading figure and helped publish some of the Spanish Arabists' work in Isis. He even connected his interest in the diffusion of scientific knowledge to Ribera's research on how Eastern music traveled to the West, noting that in medieval times music was classified with mathematics as part of the quadrivium. At his death on the 22nd of March 1956 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sarton had completed only volumes one through three: From Homer to Omar Khayyam; From Rabbi Ben Ezra to Roger Bacon; and Science and Learning in the Fourteenth Century. The project had been inspired by his study of Leonardo da Vinci, yet he died before reaching that period in his narrative. A series of lectures he gave during his first year at Harvard, entitled "Science and Civilization in the Time of Leonardo da Vinci, Scientist and Artist," offered the only glimpse of where he had intended to arrive.

• 6. The New Humanism

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  Sarton described his lifelong goal as achieving what he called "the new humanism": an integrated philosophy that would connect the sciences and the humanities rather than treating them as separate realms. That phrase was not casual rhetoric. He published a book under the title The History of Science and the New Humanism in 1931. The phrase shaped everything from his editorial choices at Isis to his collaborations with the Spanish Arabists, whose broad definition of science matched his own. In 1948, in an obituary, Sarton coined the term Medical Humanities, a phrase now embedded in hospital training programs and university curricula worldwide. After his death, a representative selection of his papers was edited by Dorothy Stimson and published by Harvard University Press in 1962. The project he could not finish in nine volumes laid the groundwork for every scholar who came after, including I. Bernard Cohen, who would go on to shape the field Sarton created and train the next generation of historians of science in America.