Martin Lister was an English naturalist and physician. He contributed numerous articles on natural history, medicine and antiquities to the Philosophical Transactions.
Background
Lister was born on April 12, 1639, in Radcliffe, England, the son of Sir Martin Lister, a member of Parliament for Brackley in the Long Parliament, and his wife Susan Temple, the daughter of Sir Alexander Temple. Lister was connected to a number of well known individuals. He was the nephew of both James Temple, the regicide and also of Sir Matthew Lister, physician to Anne, queen of James I, and to Charles I. He was also the uncle of Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough who corresponded with him throughout her life.
Education
Lister was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1658, and Master of Arts in 1662. He also studied medicine at Montpellier from 1663 to 1666 but did not graduate.
He received a Doctor of Medicine degree from Oxford in 1684.
In 1669 Lister began to practice medicine in York, where, in comparative isolation, he carried out and published pioneer studies in several fields of invertebrate zoology.
In 1684, after receiving an Oxford M.D. - largely because of his donations to the Ashmolean Museum - he moved to London. A fellow of the Royal Society since 1671, he now regularly attended its meetings and was vice-president from January 1685. Two years later, however, he was involved in some personal controversy at the Society and ceased attending. He became a fellow of the College of Physicians in 1687.
Lister’s energies were, from the middle 1690’s, concerned mainly with the College of Physicians, of which he was censor in 1694. In 1698 he accompanied Lord Portland as paid physician on his embassy to Paris; his account of the city, satirized at the time for its attention to detail, is now a valuable source book. In 1702 he was appointed one of Queen Anne’s physicians, apparently largely through the influence of his niece, Sarah Churchill. This influence, and his philosophical activities, appear to have helped to make Lister unpopular among his fellow physicians.
After 1700 Lister almost ceased scientific activity, although he did publish some medical works. His attempt at a comprehensive physiology, Dissertatio de humoribus (1709), is extremely speculative, containing little observation or experiment. It was old-fashioned in its reliance on humors, and Lister was unsympathetic to the mathematical physiologists of his day - Keill, Friend, and Pitcairne, The book completes the course of Lister’s work, from the diligent and original fieldworker of 1670, through the laboratory anatomist and systematist of 1690, to the armchair philosopher of 1709. The superficiality of much of Lister’s thought, largely concealed by his early enthusiasm, was now obvious.
Lister’s work on mollusks was at first confined to natural history and taxonomy. The latter, although conventionally artificial, attempted to be comprehensive; his spider classification was, for its date, masterly, and agrees remarkably well with a modern system. Based ex moribus et vita and on a wide range of characteristics, it includes, for example, exemplary descriptions of the eye arrangement in each group. He was aware of intraspecific variation and came close to a biological definition of the species. Lister’s systematic attention to field observation is noteworthy; some of his notes on courtship behavior and on the early stages of some species have never been repeated. This work was not appreciated fully at the time, even by other zoologists; and Thomas Shadwell clearly had Lister in mind when he created Sir Nicholas Gimcrack.
Lister’s early enthusiasm is seen in his work on the life histories of several parasites - gall wasps, ichneumons, gut worms, and horsehair worms - which had been used by others as evidence of spontaneous generation. Lister was very close to giving a complete account of the life histories of these animals, but his enthusiasm declined about 1676. It revived in the early 1680’s, but in a different direction.
Lister’s work was now concentrated on mollusk anatomy and taxonomy. His best-known work, the Historia … conchyliorum of 1685-1692, consists entirely of engravings by his wife and daughter, with no real text or even titles. Because of the popularity of conchology, the work became well-known; but the three illustrated anatomical supplements were of greater scientific value. These were the first attempt to cover the morphology of a whole invertebrate group in detail. Each contained detailed descriptions of a small number of types, with briefer notes on the structure of a number of other species. Although not of Swammerdam’s standard. Lister’s dissections were reasonably competent. Not surprisingly, he had difficulty with the complex mollusk reproductive system, and he suffered from the contemporary tendency to overanalogize; thus, he assumed that the “gill” of a snail must receive blood directly from the heart, as in the fish, and thus believed the blood to circulate in what is in fact the wrong direction. On the other hand, he used sound comparative methods to show the true nature of the mollusk “liver.”
His concern with mollusk classification brought Lister into the controversy on the nature of fossils. Many ideas on the origin of these “shell stones” had been suggested, ranging from the supernatural theories of Paracelsus to those of writers such as Palissy and Leonardo da Vinci, who accepted their animal origin. The problem could not become of fundamental importance, however, until the second half of the seventeenth century, when the rejection of the idea of spontaneous generation caused a clear distinction to be made between the living and the nonliving. The controversy was centered in England, where the interest in natural theology made important any evidence for the Noachian flood and the interest in natural history encouraged the collection of fossils and the gathering of reliable information on them. In the period 1660-1690 an animal origin was generally accepted in England for formed stones; but those natural philosophers accepting this idea, such as Robert Hooke and John Ray were not themselves collectors and systematizers of fossils.
Membership
Royal Society of London
,
United Kingdom
Personality
Lister was a difficult man in any case; and the only close friends he ever had appear to have been John Ray in the 1670’s and Edward Lhwyd in the 1690’s.
Connections
Lister's daughters, Anne Lister, and Susanna Lister were both credited as his illustrators and engravers.
Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters: The Art of Science in the Seventeenth Century
A royal physician and fellow of the Royal Society, Martin Lister was an extraordinarily prolific natural historian with an expertise in shells and mollusks. Disappointed with the work of established artists, Lister decided to teach his daughters, Susanna and Anna, how to illustrate images of the specimens he studied.