Donald Harnish Fleming
Donald Harnish Fleming, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History, Emeritus, died in June 2008 after 41 years of service to Harvard University. A scholar of intellectual history and the history of science and medicine, he was the latest in a long line of Harvard’s charismatic lecturers on history who informed and delighted generations of students with brilliant, compelling lectures—witty and epigrammatic, yet packed with details of the ideas, assumptions, and beliefs of philosophers, social and physical scientists, and literary figures and their critics.
Following his undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins University, Fleming completed his doctorate at Harvard in 1947, and three years later published his first, prize-winning book, both biographic and thematic, “John William Draper and the Religion of Science.” The research for that work drew him into the detailed history of medicine, which he explored in his second book, again both biographic and thematic, “William H. Welch and the Rise of Modern Medicine” (1954). By then Professor of History at Brown University, he had become prominent as a leading intellectual historian. After a year at Yale (1958-1959), he accepted an appointment at Harvard, where he remained for the rest of his career. He served as chairman of the history department from 1963 to 1965 and as director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History from 1973 to 1980.