DISCOVERING THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE LAB NOTEBOOKS
How I came up with Dr. Trask’s lab diary entries
13 May 2024
Welcome to Monday Mermaid Musings where I talk about my new book The Mermaid Riot (Fire and Ice YA, March 19, 2024) and how much of the story was created. I hope you enjoy these tidbits as I hope to extend the conversation around the book beyond the mythology, lovely as that is most of the time.
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DISCOVERING THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE LAB NOTEBOOKS
How I came up with Dr. Trask’s lab diary entries
Dr. William G. Trott was a real person who lived and worked in Charleston, South Carolina following the U.S. Civil War. He was at the center of “the mermaid incident,” also known as the mermaid riot that happened in June of 1867. If you’ve read my book or been following this blog, you know that Dr. Trott’s experiences served as the inspiration for The Mermaid Riot.
I fully own that I played around with the murky facts of the original story to concoct my fantasy novel. However, I worked to achieve historical accuracy in several other areas of the time period. My research didn’t lead me to much detail about who Dr. Trott was as a person or professional, but that gave me the freedom to create the corresponding fictional character Dr. Nathaniel Trask to be the genesis of the melee. I envisioned him as a man of science who had been educated in important learning centers and someone who would have made serious notes about his work. Once I decided all of this, I needed to know about the history of the science lab notebook.
My memories of writing science lab notes in biology and physical science classes were only helpful as far remembering that my teachers required certain items recorded in a particular order with specific details. We were not allowed to offer any personal observations or enter any feelings about the experiments. I really wanted to write how disgusting I thought it was to dissect a baby pig but resisted for want of a grade. I’d have memorized those organ parts just fine from the diagram we were given. The only thing I learned from the actual dissection was about the interconnectedness of organs and that the smell of formaldehyde makes me deathly ill. Anyway, in light of that restriction, I was interested and surprised to read the lab diaries of Nineteenth Century researchers and discover personal comments such as:
“…as a student in Bonn, in 1831, while having a walk with Muller, I had told him my idea that respiration may involve…” (Parnes 127).
And
“One day, when I was dining with M. Schleiden, this illustrious botanist pointed out to me the role that the nucleus plays in the development of plant cells” (Parnes 130). These lines are taken from a science diary written by Theodor Schwann in October 1837. It’s tone, exquisite punctuation, word choice, and sentence construction served to support how I decided that Dr. Trask would write his own science notes in The Mermaid Riot:
“This discovery may be the salvation of my career. It will at least boost my standing with the scientific societies and undoubtedly give the apothecary a much-needed injection of business and visibility” (Held 44).
I was searching for syntax and organization over scientific content, but I ended up reading pages and pages of notes about the process of digestion, putrefaction of organic matter, the synthesis of bug repellents, and more. It led me to understand that, like everything else, the practice of keeping lab notes has progressed and changed over time.
“One of the most striking things about Schwann’s diaries is the inconsistency of the entries” (Parnes 128).
These lines from Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the History of Science liberated me from thinking that the science notebooks I had been instructed to produce as a student had to serve as the model for how my character would write his own in 1876. I discovered that it was typical and accepted to write like a human being might think and wonder besides recording the step-by-step actions and results of the experiment. When you read Dr. Trask’s “Laboratory Diary” entries in The Mermaid Riot, try to envision a man influenced by the science writings of the day like I did. They were just as much journals and places to ruminate as they were depositories of valuable research.
Here are the two resources I found most enlightening during my search into the history of writing science lab notebooks.
Holmes, Frederic L., et al. ARCHIMEDES, New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology; Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the History of Science. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003.
Kanare, Howard M. Writing the Laboratory Notebook. American Chemical Society, 1985.
Keep making waves!
~Joy
The Mermaid Riot is a work of fiction inspired by a true event that happened in Charleston, South Carolina in 1867 which became known as the mermaid riots. Names, dates, and locations have been fabricated to accommodate the plot.
The Mermaid Riot by Joy E. Held is available in ebook and print form from online retailers. Read a sample and purchase here
https://www.fireandiceya.com/authors/joyeheld/mermaid.html
JOY E. HELD is an author, educator, editor, entrepreneur, and literary citizen responsible for this site and its contents. She is the author of
Writer Wellness: A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity (Headline Books, Inc., 2020)
Writer Wellness Workbook: A Guided Workbook and Journal to Accompany Writer Wellness: A Writer’s Path to Health and Creativity (Headline Books, Inc., 2023)
The Mermaid Riot (Fire and Ice YA, 2024) Young Adult Historical Fantasy
She writes spicy historical fiction under a pen name.
She is the winner of multiple writing and book awards:
West Virginia Writers, Inc. Annual Writing Contest, Honorable Mention, Novel, 1998.
New York Book Festival, Honorable Mention, Writer Wellness, 2020.
Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Finalist, Writer Wellness, 2021.
Northeast Ohio Romance Writers of America, Member of the Year, 2020.
Northeast Ohio Romance Writers of America, First Book Award, 2020.
She is an adjunct faculty member in the Southern New Hampshire University Online MFA Creative Writing.
She is a proud graduate of Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA with an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction.
She is a member of The Authors Guild and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.
Joy is the founder and CEO of My WRITEDAY Subscription Box for writers and readers.
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