This brief commentary reflects on navigating two dangers of historical research into psychiatry: hagiographic representations of psychiatrists; and accusations of their self-interest and oppression of vulnerable people.

At the 1988 IAU General Assembly in Baltimore, among many who offered reminiscences of earlier meetings was Charlotte Moore Sitterly. She first attended the 1932 GA meeting, in Cambridge, Mass., though she already “helped to assemble material for delegates” since the 1920s, for astronomers at Princeton, Mount Wilson and Lick Observatory. She was an ardent member of the new Commission 14 (then called “Fundamental Spectroscopic Data”), eventually becoming its president. In her 1988 reminiscence, she recalled that the Commission meeting was sparsely attended and very informal, but astronomers’ “never-ending demand for tables and data analysis” soon changed all that (Sitterly 1988). Here we provide a brief overview of how Charlotte Moore Sitterly came to be at the very center of that change, which Donald Menzel early on described as having “turned chaos into order” and just a “little short of miraculous” (Menzel 1928) We will recount highlights of her early life, aspirations, training, and contributions during her years at Princeton, Berkeley, Mount Wilson, and the National Bureau of Standards.

In this paper I follow the demise of the ether in the first half of the twentieth century to show how the first obituaries of the ether were instrumental in creating an object with specific and largely simplified properties related to, but different from, nineteenth-century ethers. I suggest that writing the history of dead objects (or objects an author wants to be dead) is not epistemologically neutral but, on the contrary, it involves a reformulation of the object itself. I show that this was indeed the case with the ether: those arguing for its demise in the early twentieth century tended to overlook as irrelevant one of the ether’s most important properties, namely being the seat for the transmission of electromagnetic waves. Instead, they emphasized the contradictions between other properties of previous ether(s), so as to advocate for its disappearance.

Publications of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), such as Proceedings of IAU Symposia and Colloquia, contain biographical notes and papers as well as obituaries. Of great value are also the death announcements in the IAU Information Bulletins that contain the only biographical data known for about 200 astronomers. The kind of data given in these announcements varied over time. References to these data can be found in the Biographical Index of Astronomy. Recently the printed announcements were replaced by entries in the on-line IAU membership database.

Muriel Anderson, former Librarian of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, died peacefully on the morning of 25 June 2006. Staff at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, where she spent much of her career, learned the sad news the next day and a brief notice was issued to the professional community.

Obituaries and other accounts of well-known people at their death offer a narrative defining identity through the life story. It is particularly poignant when the story is told of an author, and draws upon not only life course metaphors but also features of the author's fiction. In this paper we look at a case where the dementia of a famous author figures in the tributes at her death. The predominant narrative of dementia has until recently been that of a tragic loss of self. This has reinforced an image of social death. Biomedical determinism has similarly focused on the disease, rather than seeing the person and allowing their voice to be heard. While Iris Murdoch may not have wanted tributes to tell her story, they have allowed us to examine conventional narratives of a person with dementia. We chart the ‘career’ of a person with dementia, and their perceived transformation of identity, defined in terms of being demented rather than with dementia. Bad and good are attributed to aspects of Iris Murdoch's life through a repertoire of available stereotypes. These appear to involve the retrospective application of characteristics of dementia, along with those of goodness and purity. Common gender representations relating to Iris Murdoch's married life and the caring situation are interwoven in the accounts. We are told a story that reflects and reproduces conventional narratives of the life course and of dementia, characterising the deceased in terms of a moral career.