Name |
Emily A. NUNN |
Birth |
2 Jul 1843 |
Chevington, Suffolk, England, UK |
- England & Wales, FreeBMD Birth Indexes
|
Gender |
Female |
Census |
1851 |
Turnpike Rd, Great Barton, Suffolk, England, UK |
Census |
1860 |
Medina, Ohio, USA |
Census |
1870 |
Greenfield, Huron, Ohio, USA |
Census |
1900 |
Falmouth, Barnstable, Massachusetts, USA |
Census |
1910 |
Woodtown Ave, Chicago Ward 7, Cook, Illinois, USA |
Occupation |
Zoologist |
Death |
19 Oct 1927 |
Ithaca, New York, England, UK |
Notes |
- Details of Emily's life and family are included in the following publication:
Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British women in science, 1800-1900: A survey of their contributions to research. Mary R.S.Creese. The Scarecrow Press, p.89, 1998.
The writer describes Emily as having been born in Barton Mills, western Suffolk (however the 1851 census records her as having been born at Chevington along with several of her siblings).
That aside, she was born 2 July 1843, the third of 11 children to Charles Robert Nunn and Miriam Towler Kendall. Charles joined Miriam as a dissenter from the Church of England (as a Baptist) and this was the reason the family moved to the US where Charles began farming in Ohio.
The family farmed successfuly at Peru near Horwalk, Ohio, which enabled them to send Emily, Miriam and Lucius to a private academy in 1867.
In 1869, Emily joined another sister, Ellen, in Dresden (Germany), to learn German. She later returned to the US as a German teacher in Chicago.
In 1874, aged 30, Emily went back to England and studied biology at Newnham College, Cambridge as well as at Zurich Univeristy (albeit unofficially).
On returning to the US, Emily was involved with the Boston Society of Natural History and
Wellesley College, Boston.
Her first paper was a report on the change in frog epidermis brought about by metals and was published in the Journal of Physiology (1878-79). She also completed a course in zoology and continued her research but was eventually dismissed from Wellesley College because of what is described as "eccentric behaviour and undisguised agnoticism".
Afte that, in 1881, she returned to the UK where she worked with Thomas Huxley at the Royal College of Science. She wrote a paper on the enamel layer in teeth that was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1883.
In 1882, she spent six months at the Naples Zoological Station but fell out with the station's founder and returned to the US where she worked for Alexander Agassiz's marine biological laboratory at Newport.
There she met and married fellow zoologist Professor Charles Otis Whitman, an associate at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard. She was aged 40 and gave birth to two sons, Francis (1887) and Carroll (1890).
Her brother Lucius who had made a fortune from mining and electrical power transmission projects, gave significant monetary support to his brother-in-law Charles Whitman.
Because Whitman spent so much time on his research and largely ignored Emily and his sons, the couple basically living separate lives.
After Whitman died in 1910, Lucius supported his sister and nephews.
Note: Emily's struggle to be recognised as a woman in science is referenced at this link:
http://pages.jh.edu/jhumag/1107web/women2.html
Some of her papers:
The Zoological Station at Naples, published in The Century Magazine, 771-848, September 1886. It can be found at this link: https://www.unz.org/Pub/Century-1886sep-00791
Nunn EA (1878). The structural changes in the epidermis of the frog, brought about by poisoning with arsenic and with antimony. J Physiol 1, 247-256.
|
Person ID |
I8538 |
Warren Nunn's family tree |
Last Modified |
1 May 2016 |