This article analyses the travel letters of the Dutch medical researcher and early geneticist Marianne van Herwerden (1872–1933) written during a scientific journey to the United States in 1920, and published in the Dutch Journal of Medicine. Aim of the analysis is to trace whether and in what way she changed her scientific identity performance or persona in the wake of the cultural encounter with American science. The construction of a scientific persona implies three related aspects: 1) impressing the (academic) audience with the reliability, credibility or trustworthiness of the scientist (m/f) while 2) making use of a bricolage of old and new repertoires of identity performance that 3) are related to the world of science and to social categories of identity. It means that at any time old repertoires of scientific being can be invoked or discarded, and twisted according to the gender of the protagonist in constituting a convincing scientific persona. In her early career Marianne van Herwerden fashioned herself as the ascetic disembodied scientist, who with small means and a weak body pursued her scientific aims, or even as the aristocratic learned woman, who combined laboratory research with creativity and artistic genius. In contrast to that, her travel letters suggest that she had converted to the standard of American scientific practice and its concomitant ethos of full time dedication, programmatic research and social or practical orientation.

Lector in de celleer, arts