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Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

nature.com

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Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#51

Post by mbg721 »

throwaway3699 wrote: post #47
dash2 wrote: post #9

Arguments like this make me suspicious. Essentially, we've got no way of knowing how much Lady Ranelagh would have achieved if... so that leaves us free to speculate about how she was an unknown genius. There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with. Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton? M…

> Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton? Surely Boyle's law is well taught in high schools?

At my high school it was kind of lumped into the Ideal Gas Law; Boyle's name didn't get much mention.

Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#52

Post by klelatti »

dash2 wrote: post #9

Arguments like this make me suspicious. Essentially, we've got no way of knowing how much Lady Ranelagh would have achieved if... so that leaves us free to speculate about how she was an unknown genius. There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with. Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton? M…

I searched the article for "genius" and couldn't find it - are we looking at the same piece?

"Incomparable" is used in the headline but that was used of her by some of her contemporaries.

Seems like you're knocking down a straw man here. For me article simply says that Lady R played an influential role within the constraints that Society imposed on her and maybe deserves to be remembered for that?

Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#53

Post by vagrantJin »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #46
zozbot234 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> assuming there is greater difficulty to achieve things as someone with a particular quality than the difficulties others face in achieving similar things leads one to naturally consider that without those difficulties perhaps they would have achieved much more. This might apply to Warner just as well, since it seems that his work was dispersed and then likely destroyed after his death. It just goes to prove that mi…

good point, and while I do not think she should be classified as an incomparable intellectual given what little we know it would seem reasonable to think she probably had greater unrealized potential based on her gender in the same way that I look at someone like George Washington Carver and think what could he have achieved unobstructed by racism.

You raise a good point. My take on this is similar to yours in that if we can wax lyrical about an aristocrat who happens to be a woman, what about the genuises not even afforded the opportunity to engage with the high minds of the time. Literature like this tends to hyperfocus without context and that makes it uncomfortable to read as a fellow learned individual.

My point is Im not going to cry a river over some aristocrat who rubbed shoulders with the greats as compared to someone who had nothing but worked their way into recognition and forgotten by history.

Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#54

Post by cainxinth »

dash2 wrote: post #9

Arguments like this make me suspicious. Essentially, we've got no way of knowing how much Lady Ranelagh would have achieved if... so that leaves us free to speculate about how she was an unknown genius. There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with. Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton? M…

Your argument makes no sense to me.

Article: “We don’t know much about this woman because she was overshadowed by her famous brother.”

You: “How do we know she was a great scientist? We don’t even know much about her, but everyone in science knows of her brother!”

Yeah... that’s literally what the article is about.

Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#55

Post by bobthechef »

wayoutthere wrote: post #48
andrepd wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this is a much better argument than all the overheated comments about how I'm a misogynist pig. What is the purpose of this kind of victimisation? Nobody said such a thing. Or do you simply want to let everyone know how brave you are to voice such an opinion knowing full well the PC firing squad will be knocking down your door at any minute and yadda yadda? I don't find this kind of flame-baiting productive…

Yeah there’s always this strawman (strawwoman?) argument against feminists for questioning the male-dominated status quo. Misogyny is deeply embedded in society and it’s not productive to go around blaming men for every problem; but neither should we accept that history is a complete telling of the world as it was. History is dialectical, meaning its interpretation changes over time according to the norms of the time…

Curiously, what articles like these do, the more they accumulate, is to discredit the notion of a dark, "misogynistic" arc of history (where "misogyny" is understood in the erroneous categories of our day; the false notion that for men and women to be equal as persons and in dignity, they must be the same). After all, the more of these women you find, the more it undermines this narrative according to its own criteria.

Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#56

Post by jl2718 »

andrepd wrote: post #43
DromedaryCase wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except oppression isn't necessarily an end and allowing certain groups to define oppression or deriving it from immutable historical fact simply creates another privileged class and gives one a stick to beat oppressors who may not even intentionally participate in so called "oppressive acts" with. I argue fighting oppression is only useful insofar as it presents a utilitarian good for society and that certain levels…

> At the end of the day, there always needs to be a (large) class of street sweepers, accountants and restaurant workers for the benefit of the rest of society. As long as they're not you. Furthermore the argument is't "nobody should have to be a garbageman", it's "perhaps garbagemen deserve more than 1/3500th the pay of a CEO"

But ‘deserve’ is something you can analyze to death and make no progress on except to justify violence or implied threats to make things ‘fair’.

A peaceful way to analyze problems and arrive at solutions looks at what positive actions (violence or implied threat in law) create that condition, and remove those, or devise solutions to make those actions obsolete. For instance, in most places there is a law against competition in the garbage business. There are also laws requiring a whole host of hugely expensive and complicated business operation and employee benefit costs and liabilities to running a small garbage business. There’s little natural reason why the benefits of operational scale should extend much beyond the truck, but all our efforts at social justice have somehow increased this benefit. We also have numerous policies that encourage the growth and import of a massive under-skilled lower class that all competes for these jobs for lack of options at their abilities, and discourages high-skilled labor in the middle classes by positive action, forcing the latter to pay for the former. In 1000 years, this system will not be distinguishable from serfdom, and the justifications for it will be just as peculiar as the ones we look back on today. And finally, we come to skill acquisition, the primary means of which teaches an utterly useless narrative of historical victimization and justified violence, instead of skills for useful work and peaceful technical solutions to structural problems.

Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#57

Post by Grustaf »

dash2 wrote: post #9

Arguments like this make me suspicious. Essentially, we've got no way of knowing how much Lady Ranelagh would have achieved if... so that leaves us free to speculate about how she was an unknown genius. There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with. Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton? M…

> how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle

Boyle's law, I presume? Having important physical laws named in your honour is a good indication of your level of achievement... But I do agree with your point, contrafactual praise is just not the same.

Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#58

Post by bnralt »

dash2 wrote: post #9

Arguments like this make me suspicious. Essentially, we've got no way of knowing how much Lady Ranelagh would have achieved if... so that leaves us free to speculate about how she was an unknown genius. There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with. Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton? M…

Reminds me of something I noticed in the discussion about Hedy Lamarr. It's not uncommon to hear people say, "If she was a man, you'd hear about her being a great inventor." But her co-inventor, George Antheil, gets talked about much less , and often only in conjunction with her (search for discussions about either of them on Reddit, Hacker News or the like to see examples of this).

Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#59

Post by _Nat_ »

dash2 wrote: post #9

Arguments like this make me suspicious. Essentially, we've got no way of knowing how much Lady Ranelagh would have achieved if... so that leaves us free to speculate about how she was an unknown genius. There's an infinite supply of these figures for feminist academics to make hay with. Meanwhile, how many people can name an achievement of Robert Boyle, who actually was the greatest English scientist before Newton? M…

These are weird stories.

I was curious what Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, may've been known for, so checked out [their Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katherine_Jones,_Viscountess_R...).

The most substantial-looking claim was at the start of the "Science" section:

> Jones is known for her genius in medicine. In a letter to her brother, Lord Burlington, she described a friend of hers, Lady Clarendon, having “fits” and how she attended to her even when the doctors had given up on her. Jones used her own concoction and that seemed to be the only thing that helped Lady Clarendon.

What "concoction" did they invent? Following the source, there seems to be a [PDF dissertation about them](http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/3146/1/WRAP_THESIS_DiMeo_2009.pdf), PDF-page 79 (printed-page 67):

> Lady Ranelagh’s critique of the doctors’ treatment plan continues in this letter, where she maintains that her Spirit of Hartshorn was the most effective treatment. She then says that the doctors agreed with her (though perhaps somewhat hesitantly) that her remedy was a suitable choice, and she takes the opportunity to suggest it to her brother in his treatment for his own sick wife, telling him where he can find it and recommending the appropriate dose.

Appears that the "spirit of hartshorn" Jones was using and advocated would today be known as smelling-salts, basically emitting ammonia that'd wake someone up (if I'm reading the history correctly).

It's really weird for Wikipedia to start off by saying that someone was "known for her genius in medicine", after reading a Nature.com page describing them as an "incomparable intellectual", only to then see the first actual example of what they did being use of some smelling-salt.

Re: Lady Ranelagh: The Incomparable Life of Robert Boyle’s Sister

#60

Post by kofddfjdfdfdff »

zozbot234 wrote: post #30
kofddfjdfdfdff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So she was popular and so - that probably was true for many, many people throughout history. Not saying she wasn't a formidable thinker, but many people were and are. Only a few become famous because their inventions have long lasting effects.

> So she was popular and so - that probably was true for many, many people throughout history. The weird thing is that she seems to have been popular, yet she isn't mentioned (so far as I can tell) in the main sources of pre-20th c. biography (e.g. the DNB). Uncovering such minor but influential figures that hadn't yet been comprehensively described has always been a main interest of historians and antiquarians, so I…

Even describing the lives of normal people would be interesting. The problem is that "feminist scholarship" carries a very real risk of history revisionism.
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