A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table

Michael D. Gordin's A Well-Ordered Thing, Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table, published by Basic Books in 2004, is a scholarly biography of the Russian chemist who devised the periodic table, covering in detail an episode less familiar than his chemistry, Mendeleev's 1875 to 1876 service on Russia's Commission for the Investigation of Mediumistic Phenomena, a formal scientific inquiry into contemporary Spiritualist seance phenomena that Mendeleev helped lead and that concluded firmly against the mediums' claims. Its strength is that it treats this episode with the same archival seriousness as Mendeleev's chemistry, drawing on the Commission's own records. Its limit is that the book's primary subject is Mendeleev's scientific career broadly, so the Commission material, while thoroughly documented, is one chapter within a larger biography rather than a dedicated study of nineteenth century Russian Spiritualism.