Dorothea Waley Singer (1882–1964)

Dorothea Waley Singer, née Cohen, was born in London to a prominent Anglo-Jewish family. She studied arts at Queen's College, London. In 1910, she married Charles Singer, a physician, with whom she adopted two children. At the time of her marriage, Dorothea was already becoming an expert on scientific manuscripts of the Middle Ages. With her support, her husband became an important figure in the study of the history of science and medicine. His first book, on Benjamin Marten, a precursor of Louis Pasteur, was published in 1911. Meanwhile, Dorothea trained herself as a medical historian and historian of science. By 1927, the couple had published eight scholarly papers together, among them studies on the plague, the physician and poet Girolamo Fracastoro, and the school of Salerno. Dorothea's own paper on plague treatises from 1348 to 1485 was published in 1916. During Charles's absence in World War I, she began to dedicate herself to the monumental project of cataloguing all the medical and scientific manuscripts in Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the Middle Ages to the early modern era. By 1918, she had found more than 30,000, and presented her results at the History of Medicine Society, the first women to do so. The first volume of her catalogue of alchemical manuscripts was published in 1924 by the Union Académique Internationale. A further three volumes on Latin and vernacular manuscripts appeared in the years up to 1931. In the early 1930s, she began to study the work of Giordano Bruno. However, the escalating political crisis in Europe caused by the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany increasingly absorbed the couple's attention. Charles became active in the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, founded in 1933, and Dorothea assisted refugees from the Nazis in England. After World War II, Dorothea was able to return to her studies. In 1946, her essay on alchemical texts under Plato's alleged authorship appeared in the journal Ambix, followed by a long treatise in three parts on the Scottish physician Sir John Pringle (1949-1950). Her intellectual biography of Giordano Bruno was finally published in 1950 under the title Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, and contained her translation with her commentary of his philosophical dialogue De l'infinito, universo e mondi of 1584 (On the Infinite, the Universe and the Worlds). In 1956, Dorothea was awarded the George Sarton Medal jointly with her husband. She was a founding member of the British Society for the History of Science and its first president from 1947 to 1950, as well as a member of several international societies.