ABSTRACT
David Knight has noted how great rows were characteristic features of nineteenth-century science. Soon after he and author completed a joint paper on the atomic debates in 1964, author received an invitation to write the entry on William Crookes for the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Crookes had many spectacular rows during his long career. None, perhaps, was more spectacular than the six-year running feud with the physiologist William Benjamin Carpenter that forms the subject of this essay. Crookes on the other hand never wrote an original book apart from his popular Diamonds. Crookes never enjoyed such early fortune. Carpenter was not Crookes’ only critic. John Parsons Earwaker, a lawyer and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, related Crookes’ work on psychic powers to the history of mass delusions. Crookes’ gullibility was like that of the chemists who invented phlogiston as an explanation for combustion or of the physiologists who evoked a vital force to explain the mystery of life.
