The appearance of academic biology in late nineteenth-century America

In 1891 the German-Jewish physiologist Jacques Loeb wrote to Ernst Mach, describing his recent experiments at the Naples Zoological Station on forced movements and on removal of the otoliths in the shark. The experiments were successful, but Loeb was gloomy about his career prospects. While he could become a privatdocent under his old teacher Friedrich Goltz at the University of Strasbourg, he felt the future held only disappointments, largely because "my work is not in a direction recognized in physiology, and I have not kept up personal contacts with the physiologists in Germany." Newly married to an American, Loeb soon decided to look for an academic position in the United States. He discovered that the situation there was quite different from that in Germany; within four months he had a job at Bryn Mawr College and a year later was appointed assistant professor of physiology at the new University of Chicago. How could Loeb, a man on the periphery of the life sciences in Germany, move so quickly to one of the central positions in the American academic system? I Part of the answer to this question lies, of course, in the rapid expansion and relatively low standards of American universities of the time. But there were also positive aspects. In Germany the discipline of physiology took its shape from the university medical environment that had nurtured it; Loeb's career problems there derived from the perceived insignificance of his results for that basic medical science. His position at Chicago, on the other hand, was in a "division of biology." Loeb prospered because he could integrate his work into this new fundamental unit of American academic culture. My aim in this paper is to explore the process whereby biology acquired the status of a core discipline in America; that is, how it became an intellectual and organizational focus around which many