Here's one from the vault. Specifically, an excerpt from Volume III of the Annals of Science, wherein we presented vignettes on auto-experimentation. We'll offer the first two here for starters, one of which is a counter-example.
George Berkeley and tar water
This guy was hooked on tar water. Yep, tar water. It's a
thick, black, viscous liquid obtained by the distillation of wood or coal.
(I googled it.) He drank it for everything--said it was for medicinal purposes,
but I think we know how that story goes. Here's a guy, an Irish bishop,
who once wanted to found a college in Bermuda. This is all early 1700s.
He's now famous for his Idealism, by which we mean anti-Materialism,
by which we mean he believed nothing exists outside our perception of it, which is a pretty big problem if you want science to predict stuff, to be about real things.
But don't worry, he was famously "refuted thusly" when Samuel Johnson
banged on a wooden table or kicked a rock--I don't know, the story
changes--to show its reality, which, by the by, seemed to miss the
point as far as I can tell, but is sort of a famous incident now. Anyhow.
While visiting America on his way to that failed attempt at Bermuda U.,
our Bishop Berkeley somehow got the idea that tar water was a cure-all.
Asthma, smallpox, dysentery, you name it. So he began a years-long
course of imbibing. He even dissertated on the various benefits of pine-
based or fir-based tar. It's fair to say he was addicted. The guy had a
lot of problems--planning, among other things, to kidnap Indians and
reeducate them on the Bermuda campus, believing they were the lost
tribes of Israel--so who knows what was cause and what was effect.
The point being, yum, tar water.
Dmitri Mendeleyev and vodka (a counterexample)
Now, if you're Russian (I'm not) and Dmitri Mendeleyev
(he was), your identity has something to do with vodka. No getting
around it. So let's say your father went blind soon after you were born,
you had thirteen older siblings, your mom had to take over breadwinning
duties: she ran a glass factory--and, did I mention, you lived in Siberia?
Let's add that this mother of fourteen then hitchhiked 14,000 miles to
Moscow so you could get an education but that since you were a
Siberian they wouldn't let you in, and you had to trudge another 400
miles to St. Petersburg. If you're not into the drink after that, and
you are somehow already nationalistically predestined to guzzle
vodka, and as part of your doctoral dissertation (1864, i.e. pre-periodic
table) you hammered out some details about the mixing of alcohol
and water that would later help your comrades levy excise taxes
more effectively, then there's just no way you're not tipping back
beakers of 80 proof. But you're not. You didn't. Maybe because
one of those older brothers died of dipsomania and, though this
was later, your son Ivan did too. As it happens, Georgian wine
was your thing. And you always kept it away from the lab. We
cherish you for that.
Don't give me a hard time that Berkeley wasn't a scientist. Read on and defer to Humphry Davy if you must.
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Interesting tidbit about Humphrey Davy: He was also a friend of the philosopher and English radical William Godwin, and review copies of Davy's papers on electrochemistry and his work with voltaic piles littered the Godwin home, where they fell into the hands of Godwin's precocious daughter Mary.
Alas, little Mary never became a scientist, but Davy's presence did seed her lifelong interest in dandies and fops, and when she turned 18 she married über-dandy Percy Bysshe Shelley. She also wrote a book in which voltaic piles and chemical experimentation play a pretty big role.
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