It all started with her internship at the University of Leicester during her research master’s programme in Cultures of Arts, Science and Technology (CAST). “I thought I was going to work with a literary scholar there, but the person who was supposed to supervise me had delegated the job to a historian. The first couple of weeks were difficult, but then I started to like it. The University of Leicester has an archive with a big collection of scientific periodicals. It was in one of these periodicals that I read an article about microscopy. I found out that people in the 19^th century saw microscopy as a discipline, like geography or biology. That seemed so odd to me that I wanted to learn more.”

Correspondence

“The CAST programme is very interdisciplinary; it covers art, visual culture, literature, technology and history. We like to think we prepared Lea well for the sudden switch during her internship. She was able to adapt very easily,” Mody says. “She wrote such a good master’s thesis on the microscopy subject that her supervisor at the time, Raf de Bont, suggested that she apply for an NWO fellowship and write a dissertation. We managed to convince her.” Beiermann received the fellowship and started her PhD research at UM. “I found out that the old periodicals were citizen science avant la lettre. Microscopists had their own correspondence columns where they communicated and shared information with others. A lot was happening on those pages, almost like a continuous question-and-answer thing. They exchanged not only knowledge, but also slides, for example slides of bugs against butterflies. That was in the 1870s.”

People and periodicals

How did people interested in, say, slides of bugs find one another in those days? “These periodicals were passed around a lot,” Beiermann explains. “Microscopy and scientific societies had their own collections that members could borrow and find people interested in the same subject. Then they would write to the editor, who connected them with people in the correspondence column.” Were they always scientists? “This was at a time when scientific training was relatively new. Also, the boundary between a scientist and a non-scientist was more permeable. Disciplines like biology and life science were quite new. For a long time, you couldn’t get a degree in those fields, and besides, a degree did not distinguish you as a scientist. To me, it didn’t matter whether they were scientists or not. I was interested in a very diverse group of people. Some just liked to look at things through a microscope; for them it was more of a hobby.”