The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

THE AESTHETICS OF EXPERIENTIAL MEDICINE:

LITERATURE AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY IN THE NINETEENTH

CENTURY

A Dissertation in

Comparative Literature

by

Atia Sattar

© 2012 Atia Sattar

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

May 2012

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The dissertation of Atia Sattar was reviewed and approved* by the following: Jonathan P. Eburne Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Susan M. Squier Brill Professor of Women’s Studies, English, and STS Charlotte Eubanks Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Japanese, and Asian Studies Robert E. Lougy Professor of English Willa Z. Silverman Professor of French and Jewish Studies Caroline D. Eckhardt Professor of Comparative Literature and English Department Head of Comparative Literature *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School

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ABSTRACT

The Aesthetics of Experiential Medicine: Literature and Scientific Inquiry in the

Nineteenth Century examines the medical enterprise as a literary and aesthetic practice.

The nineteenth century witnessed not only the rise of specialties in the natural and

physical sciences in Europe but also an unprecedented development in printing

techniques and publishing practices. In newspapers, journals, novels, and plays, medical

scientists presented an increasingly specialized array of knowledge. At the same time,

literary works by authors outside the bounds of science proper were equally enmeshed in

the creation and dissemination of scientific concepts. Working with the imperatives of

literary criticism, history of science, and science, technology and society (STS) in mind, I

study how this co-development of literary and scientific thought in nineteenth-century

France and England informed and enabled medical scientists to situate their own

experiences of a newly empirical medicine and medical technology.

Rather than focus on the representation of medical ideas in literature or that of literary

ideas in medicine, I argue for a consideration of science and art as mutually constitutive

domains of understanding, which together shape and even produce what we call

“knowledge.” Whether in the laboratory, operating theater, or public stage, the

framework within which nineteenth-century medical experiences are articulated and

made sense of is decidedly aesthetic. This dissertation accordingly analyzes the dynamics

of a scientific enterprise that not only established the scope of bodily aesthesis or sensory

perception, but also fashioned itself aesthetically through textual publication and

theatrical display, catering to the very sensory frameworks it predetermined. For

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example, experimental psychologist Alfred Binet, in both his treatises and medical plays,

described the onset of mental illness as the unfolding of a two-act play. Similarly,

Frederick Treves articulated the work of surgery as a handicraft, encouraging the artistic

practices of etching and carving in the education of the surgical hand. As texts which

influence public perceptions about medical practice as well as the more significant

actions of future medical practitioners, literatures of experiential medicine recount, reveal

and critique existing medical practices, and also propose new possibilities for medical

encounters between individuals.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………….……... vi Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………….... 1 PART I: PHYSIOLOGICAL AESTHESIS Chapter 2. THE AESTHETICS OF LABORATORY INSCRIPTION: CLAUDE BERNARD’S CAHIER ROUGE………………………………………………....... 28 i. The Laboratory According to Claude Bernard........................................... 32

ii. The Cahier Rouge………………………………………………………. 42 iii. Bernard’s Physiological Aesthetic………………………........................ 72 Chapter 3. THE SENSORY POETICS OF GRANT ALLEN…………………...... 76 i. Physiological Aestheticism………………………………………………. 81 ii. The Physiological Aesthetic of Poetry………………………………….. 97 iii. Aesthetic Appreciation………………………………………………..... 119 PART II: MEDICAL PERFORMANCE Chapter 4. OPERATIONAL AESTHETICS: THE SURGICAL ARTS OF FREDERICK TREVES…………………………………………………………………………….124 i. The Origins of the Armamentarium………………………………………131 ii. Narratives of Tactile Genius…………………………………………….. 150 iii. Treves’s Surgical Arts………………………………………………….. 162 Chapter 5. ELECTRIC CURRENTS AND CADAVERIC CONTRACTURES: THE HORRIBLE EXPERIMENT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THEATER………….... 165 i. Theater of Diagnosis……………………..………………………………. 169 ii. The Horrible Experiment……….……………………………………….. 182 iii. Terror between Science and Theater…………………………………… 191 Chapter 6. CONCLUSION………………………………………………………… 196 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………... 205

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To quote my favorite experimental physiologist, Claude Bernard, this completed

dissertation “is like a flowering and delectable plateau which can be attained only after

climbing craggy steeps and scratching one’s legs against branches and brushwood.” Now

that I have reached the Ph.D. plateau, I find, however, that I have to learn how to walk on

stable ground again, how to stop and look at the flowers, and how to relinquish for a

while my desire to seek other craggy steeps with which I am all too comfortable. I find

myself identifying with the experimentalists I study in this thesis. While I have not

myself occupied an amphitheater, laboratory, or hospital (except on account of the

occasional graduate school stress related illness), I feel that I have passed through “a long

and ghastly kitchen” and stirred “the fetid and throbbing ground of life.” But I have not

stirred alone.

I would like to acknowledge, first and foremost, my advisor and dear, dear friend,

Jonathan Eburne, who told me in our very first meeting six years ago that a journal and a

therapist were what one needed to survive graduate school. He was right. I consider

myself extremely lucky in my dissertation committee—Charlotte Eubanks, Susan Squier,

Willa Silverman and Robert Lougy—who have made time for me whenever I needed

help, as well as in the continuous support and encouragement of Caroline Eckhardt and

Judith Roof. I am especially grateful for my frequent and open conversations with

Charlotte and Susan, who have helped me realize the kind of woman in academia I want

to be and am in fact becoming.

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In my struggle to establish myself as an interdisciplinary scholar, I am very fortunate to

have found what is in many ways my true home at Penn State—the Science, Technology,

and Society Reading Group (SSRG)—and I shall be extremely fortunate if I ever find

myself in the presence of such a wonderful and welcoming community in my future

academic life.

On a more personal note, I am thankful to my parents and siblings who have put up with

my constant anxiety for the past six years (and more likely my entire life), and who

continue to be proud of me even when I have a hard time being proud of myself.

Similarly, I owe much of what is left of my sanity to the wonderful women in my life, my

closest friends who have passed through this ghastly kitchen before me and have lived to

tell the tale: Beate Brunow, Rebecca Zajdowicz, Nicole Sparling, and Kathryn Johnson.

Lastly, I am grateful for the unflinching support of the Department of Comparative

Literature and the financial support of the Pennsylvania State University and the College

of Physicians of Philadelphia.

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“It has been said with justice that literature is the elder sister of science. It is the law of the intellectual evolution of nations, which have always produced their poets and their philosophers before forming their savants. In this progressive development of humanity, poetry, philosophy, and the sciences express the other phases of our intelligence, passing successively through sentiment, reason, and experience; but in order that our knowledge may be complete, an inverse elaboration must be accomplished, and experience, tracing facts to their cause, must in turn enlighten our mind, purify our sentiment, and fortify our reason. This proves to me that letters, philosophy, and science must unite in the search after truth.”

— Claude Bernard, Reception at the French Academy, May 28, 1869

 

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Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION

The scientist was born in a journal of literature. In 1834, The Quarterly Review, a

popular literary and political periodical committed to “the zeal, the liberality, and the

attachment to the interests of Literature,”1 published an anonymous book review

introducing the term “scientist.” The review was dedicated to Mary Somerville’s On the

Connexion of the Physical Sciences; and its reviewer, philosopher and historian of

science William Whewell, saw the work as an opportunity to articulate the quandary

faced by practitioners of science in an era of increased specialization. “The

mathematician turns away from the chemist; the chemist from the naturalist; the

mathematician, left to himself, divides himself into a pure mathematician and a mixed

mathematician, who soon part company […] And thus science, even mere physical

science, loses all traces of unity.”2 In response to this “increased proclivity to separation

and dismemberment,”3 Whewell offered to readers several suggestions for a unifying

professional category: the “too wide and too lofty” possibilities of “philosopher”; a

“rather amusing” and French “savans”; an untranslatable German “natur-forscher”; and,

at last, “by analogy with artist,” the term “scientist.”4

Whewell’s suggestion of “artist” by analogy presents more than a mere suffix to

describe scientific practitioners. Rather, the artist offers a particular relational

configuration for designating those engaged in the disparate practices of science. This

                                                        1 Announcement of Quarterly Review, Courier, January 31, 1809, n.p. 2 William Whewell, “ART. III.-On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences,” The Quarterly review 51, no. 101 (Mar 1834): 59. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid.

 

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latter configuration comes to light a few years after his book review when, in 1840,

Whewell advocated the expression more ardently in his Philosophy of the Inductive

Sciences: “We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I

should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician,

Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.”5 In providing a

description that cultivates a general relationship between specialists, the artist delivers to

science a lexical model of unity. What is more, the inaugural publication of the term

“scientist” in a widely read, non-specialist literary journal that also launched the career of

Jane Austen is hardly incidental. Epitomized in the moment of its categorization, the

“scientist” is multiply embedded in mechanisms of literary and artistic production.

Certainly, Whewell’s identification of the paradigmatic connection between

science and the arts was not novel for his day;6 nonetheless, his coinage marks a defining

moment in the history of scientific literatures. The nineteenth century witnessed not only

the rise of specialties in the natural and physical sciences but also an unprecedented

                                                        5 William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences: Founded upon Their History, vol. 1 (London: John W. Parker, 1840), cxiii. 6 On the historical connection between the arts and sciences, see, for instance, Lorraine J. Daston, Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone, 2007); Lorraine J. Daston, and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone, 2001); Peter Galison, and Caroline A. Jones, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998); Martin Kemp, Seen|Unseen: Art, Science, and Intuition from Leonardo to the Hubble Telescope (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Pamela H. Smith, and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

 

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development in printing techniques and publishing practices.7 In newspapers, magazines,

medical journals, novels, and plays, scientists made public an increasingly specialized

array of knowledge. At the same time, literary works by authors outside the bounds of

science proper were equally enmeshed in the creation and dissemination of scientific

ideas. Through their various literary and aesthetic engagements, scientists and popular

authors both responded to and co-constructed social and cultural conceptions of science.

The Aesthetics of Experiential Medicine: Literature and Scientific Inquiry in the

Nineteenth Century examines the scientific enterprise as a creative and highly integrated

aesthetic and literary practice. The literatures of scientific inquiry, generated by both

scientists and popular authors, offer more than experiments, facts, and case studies to the

institutional annals of science. Rather, I contend, they bring to light a more personal and

subjective world of science—a world of intuition, indecision, judgment, and even

sentiment—integral to grasping the full scope of scientific practice. The numerous

literary articulations of science capture the contemplative, intuitive and emotional

concerns of those partaking in scientific knowledge production.

                                                        7 For more information on the rise of publishing practices in the nineteenth century, see Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, eds. Histoire de l'édition française, 4 tômes (Paris: Fayard, 1990); Christine Haynes, Lost Illusions: The Politics of Publishing in Ninteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); John O. Jordan, and Robert L. Patten, eds. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Willa Z. Silverman, The New Bibliopolis: French Book Collectors and the Culture of Print, 1880–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008); and Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836–1916 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2003). For works on nineteenth-century general periodical press and its relation to science, see, for instance, Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Science Serialized: Representations of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004); and Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

 

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In what follows, I analyze the scientific turn in nineteenth-century medicine—

that is, the adoption of the experimental method in medical research and practice—

through its coincident literary and artistic engagements. Interdisciplinary studies in the

literature and medicine of France and England at the time have traditionally focused on

how medical discourses translate into popular culture or how medical knowledge itself

represents the cultural, ethical, and philosophical concerns of its time.8 Rather than focus

on the representation of medical ideas in literature or that of literary ideas in medicine, I

argue for a consideration of science and art as mutually constitutive domains of

understanding, which together shape and even produce what we call “knowledge.”

The literary texts examined in this dissertation illustrate the varying ways in

which the domains of nineteenth-century medical science and art are mutually

constituted. As he kept records of experiments in his laboratory notebook, French

physiologist Claude Bernard made sense of his visceral work through the aesthetic

philosophies of Goethe. At the same time, these physiological discoveries influenced the

sensory turn in Romantic and Victorian poetry, illustrated in the criticism and science-

writings of evolutionist Grant Allen. In the arenas of medical practice, the treatises and

                                                        8 For recent examples of this tendency in French and English literary criticism, see Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Arts of Being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Katherine Byrne, Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Janis McLarren Caldwell, Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britian: From Mary Shelley to George Elliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Allan Conrad Christensen, Nineteenth-Century Narratives of Contagion: ‘our feverish contact’ (New York: Routledge, 2005); Mary Donaldson-Evans, Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857–1894 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Lilian R. Furst, Idioms of Distress: Psychosomatic Disorders in Medical and Imaginative Literature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003); Tabitha Sparks, The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices (Surrey, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2009); and Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

 

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short stories of British surgeon Frederick Treves declared the work of surgery a

handicraft, and in his amphitheater lectures and medical plays, experimental psychologist

Alfred Binet elucidated the onset of mental illness as the unfolding of a two-act play.

Whether in the laboratory, operating theater, or public stage, the framework within which

nineteenth-century scientific ideas are articulated and made sense of is decidedly

aesthetic.

Even at the most basic level, literary practices are enfolded within the

epistemology of science. “Literary inscription,” as articulated by Bruno Latour and Steve

Woolgar,9 serves first as a material means to keep track of, verify and disprove

hypotheses. Secondly, writing provides an archive from which to select, consolidate, and

ultimately “produce a written document,” that is, a finished article that future scientists

can use to foster research.10 The publication of treatises, case studies, articles, short

stories, novels and dramatic texts for a diverse range of audiences offers to analysis a

complex domain of interactions between literary and scientific work. One the one hand,

as I will discuss below, advances in medical inquiry in the nineteenth century influenced

an understanding of literature and aesthetic experience as physiological and embodied.

On the other hand, the development of literary ideas and techniques informed and

enabled medical scientists to situate their own experiences of a newly empirical medicine

and medical technology. The experience of medicine and aesthetics in the nineteenth

century is thus reciprocally configured.

                                                        9 Bruno Latour, and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 45–53. 10 Ibid., 52.

 

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The English word “experience” derives from expérience in French and

experientia in Latin, both of which refer not only to one’s individual consciousness as the

subject of a state or condition, but also to experimentation in the acquisition of

observable, empirical knowledge. Within the domain of scientific medicine, experience

consists first of the experimental method in its theories, practices, spaces, and labor. At

the same time, it includes the subjective experience and intellectual labor of the scientist

doctor who undertakes this enterprise and imparts the knowledge thus attained. The

patient occupies a peculiar place in this arena, both as object of inquiry and as subject of

personal perception. The experience of science is shared, too, by its audience, whether

composed of students sitting wide-eyed in a medical amphitheater, social critics reading

and responding to scientific writings, or literary authors weaving new meanings into the

threads of science they harness from their own encounters. The objective and subjective

modes in “experience” are thus effectively intertwined. This dissertation attempts to

grasp the full scope of this intertwining for the arena of medicine in nineteenth-century

France and England.

Whereas in 1847, fewer that 5 percent of 1000 medical practitioners in London

ascribed to specialty interests, by 1889, 69 percent of medical officers in general

hospitals were also attached to specialty hospitals.11 The recognition of medical

specialization in England, as evidenced by this data, took the form of specialty hospitals

and hospital posts for doctors.12 In France, by contrast, the same phenomenon manifested

itself in the institutionalized specialization of medical education, research, and training.

                                                        11 George Weisz, Divide and Conquer: A Comparative History of Medical Specializaton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 30. 12 Ibid., 39.

 

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In 1860 the major medical directory Annuaire Roubaud registered only 37 self-identified

specialties in Paris, a number increasing to 233 in 1884.13 Despite variations in

institutional structures, doctors in both England and France increasingly aligned

themselves with specific medical specialties in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

How did these now specialized doctors articulate their encounters with experimentation?

How did they judge the efficacy of their presentations? What principles determined their

practices of selection and disclosure? In answering these questions, this dissertation looks

at the scientist as an agent of aesthetic experience. It destabilizes the reliance of art and

literary criticism upon scientists as models for empiricism and objectivity by implicating

the latter within imaginative, emotive, and aesthetic discourses that are entirely subjective

and incalculable. I contend that aesthetics is part and parcel of scientific inquiry, in the

Foucauldian sense of “the system of emergence of objects, the system of the appearance

and distribution of enunciative modes, the system of the placing and dispersion of

concepts, [and] the system of the deployment of strategic choices.”14 As such, I unveil the

aesthetic processes implicated within the performance and publication of experimental

work.

The Aesthetics of Experiential Medicine

The dynamic between medical experiment and experience in the nineteenth

century operates aesthetically. Aesthetics can be understood, first and foremost, as a

scientifically inflected concept, drawing on “aesthesis,” or sense perception, as a

                                                        13 Ann La Berge, and Mordechai Feingold, French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), 171. 14 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Random House, 1971), 79.

 

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physiological category. It is the science that contains the rules of sensation and maps the

range of sense perception. It is, accordingly, the manner and means for setting in motion

an experiment, for observation, and its resulting empiricism. Such a conception of

aesthetics was introduced in the late eighteenth century by the German philosopher

Alexander Gottlied Baumgarten. Baumgarten in fact founded the modern theory of

aesthetics in his major work Aesthetica, observing that “Aesthetics (as the theory of the

liberal arts, as inferior cognition, as the art of beautiful thinking and as the art of thinking

analogous to reason) is the science of sensual cognition.”15 As the science of sensuous

knowledge, aesthetics is empirical in nature. It was then understood as the systematic

enterprise by which knowledge was produced, organized, and perceived through the

senses. For poetry in the age of romanticism, this meant the creation, through artistic

language, of “new compositions of feeling.”16 The romantic poet, drawing upon his or her

own sentiments and perceived knowledge, crafted language to appeal to the readers’

faculties of sensory cognition. In so doing, the poet aimed not only to trigger similar

cognitive and emotional experiences in readers, but also to enable novel experiences that

transcended the limitations of nature. The work of poetry then was to instrumentalize

sensation with the ultimate goal of surpassing sensation itself.

The rise of scientific physiology in the latter half of the nineteenth-century added

an as yet unimagined material reality to the science of sensual cognition. Many theories

of aesthetics at the time accordingly turned away from the romantic sense of natural

                                                        15 Gottlied Baumgarten, quoted in Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7. There is no complete English translation of Baumgarten’s Aesthetica available. 16 William Wordsworth, “Letter to John Wilson written June 1802,” in English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 351.

 

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transcendence to the material ground of visceral life, to objective and demonstrable truth.

It is in this context that we come across works such as Sir Charles Bell’s Essays on the

Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (1824), G. B. Duchenne de Boulogne’s

Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression)

(1862), and Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872).17

In his 1890 A History of Aesthetic, British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet accordingly

recognized the influence of “the scientific spirit” on aesthetic ideas of the day:

First, it brought nature nearer to man, and showed him his own intelligence both mirrored in its causation and rooted in its evolution; and secondly, it revealed in all phenomena, inorganic, organic, and belonging to humanity, the definite distinctive characteristics which on the one hand had stamped them for what they individually were, and on the other displayed them in their microscopic relations at meeting-points in the complex influences that permeate the universe.18

Through scientific inquiry, the relationship between “nature and man,” according to

Bosanquet, becomes one whereby the latter can simultaneously observe the holistic,

“distinctive characteristics” of phenomena as well as witness and decipher “their

microscopic relations.” Aesthetics is thus an intelligent and cognitive discourse, yet it is

nonetheless rooted in and evolved through the natural physical self: the site of aesthetic

experience is the physical body. In fact, Robert Michael Brain regards aesthetics as “a

                                                        17 Charles Bell, Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression (London: John Murray, 1824); Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (London: John Murray, 1872); and Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, trans. and ed. R. Andrew Cuthbertson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 18 Bernard Bosanquet, A History of Aesthetic (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1890), 444.

 

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critical third term” which mediated between art and physiology at the end of the

nineteenth century.19

In conjunction with the physiological turn in aesthetics, the romantic

transcendentalism of the first half of the century found itself replaced by a scientific

naturalism in the domains of art and literature. A prime example of this sensibility can be

found in French historian Hippolyte Taine, who ends his Histoire de la littéraire anglaise

(History of English Literature) with an extended critique of the romantic poets:

Le concert de leurs lamentations a rempli tout le siècle, et nous nous sommes tenus autour d’eux, écoutant notre cœur qui répétait leurs cris tout bas. […] le plébéien, comme le sceptique, atteint d’une mélancolie précoce et flétri par une expérience prématurée, livrait ses sympathies et sa conduite aux poètes, qui disaient le bonheur impossible, la vérité inaccessible, la société mal faite, et l’homme avorté ou gaté. […] La science approche enfin, et approche de l’homme ; elle a dépassé le monde visible et palpable des astres, des pierres, des plantes, où, dédaigneusement, on la confinait ; c’est à l’âme qu’elle se prend, munie des instruments exacts et perçants […] Non, l’homme n’est pas un avorton ou un monstre ; non, l’affaire de la poésie n’est point de le révolter ou de la diffamer. It est à sa place et achève une série. […] Qui est-ce qui s’indignera contre la géométrie ? Surtout qui est-ce qui s’indignera contre une géométrie vivante ? Qui, au contraire, ne se sentira ému d’admiration au spectacle de ces puissances grandioses qui, situées au cœur des choses, poussent incessamment le sang dans les membres du vieux monde, éparpillent l’ondée dans le réseau fini des artères et viennent épanouir sur toute la surface la fleur éternelle de la jeunesse et de la beauté ? The concert of their lamentations has filled their age, and we have stood around them, hearing in our hearts the low echo of their cries. […] The plebian, like the sceptic, attacked by a precocious melancholy, and withered by a premature experience, delivered his sympathies and his conduct to the poets, who declared happiness impossible, truth unattainable, society ill-arranged, man abortive or marred. […] Science at last approaches, and approaches man; it has gone beyond the visible and palpable world of stars, stones, plants, amongst which man disdainfully confined her. It reaches the heart, provided with exact and penetrating implements […] No, man is not an abortion or a monster; no, the business of poetry is not to revolt or defame him. He is in his place, and

                                                        19 Robert Michael Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Aesthetic Avant-Gardes Circa 1900,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39, no. 3 (September 2008): 394.

 

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completes a chain. […]Who will rise up against geometry? Who, especially, will rise up against a living geometry? Who will not, on the other hand feel moved with admiration at the sight of those grand powers which, situated at the heart of things, incessantly urge the blood through the limbs of the old world, disperse the showers in the infinite network of arteries, and spread over the whole surface the eternal flower of youth and beauty?20

Science, it would appear, has rescued society from the deeply felt doldrums of

romanticism. With the arrival of “des instruments exacts et perçants” (“penetrating

implements)”, one is able to discover one’s situation within the interconnected systems of

nature, a synchronized “géométrie vivante” (“living geometry”). Science offers one a

much more intimate relationship with the world. Not surprisingly then, for Taine, “Dans

cet emploi de la science et dans cette conception des choses il y a un art, une morale, une

politique, une religion nouvelles, et c’est notre affaire aujourd’hui de les chercher” (“In

this employment of science, and in this conception of things, there is a new art, a new

morality, a new polity, a new religion, and it is in the present time our task to discover

them”).21 The discoveries made possible by scientific inquiry are thus not limited to the

empirically accessible world; rather, they encroach upon the aesthetic, moral, and civil

structures of society.

In his course of lectures on art at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris in 1864, Taine

likewise advances an empirical method of pursuing aesthetic inquiry: “La méthode

moderne que je tâche de suivre, et qui commence à s’introduire dans toutes les sciences

morales, consiste à considérer les oeuvres humaines, et en particulier les oeuvres d’art,

comme des faits et des produits dont il faut marquer les caractères et chercher les causes;

                                                        20 Hyppolyte Taine, Histoire de la littérature anglaise, tome quatrième (Paris: L. Hachette, 1905) 386–90; trans. H. Van Laun as History of English Literature, vol. 2, (New York: Holt & Williams, 1871), 310–312. 21 Ibid., 390; 312.

 

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rien de plus” (“The modern method, which I strive to pursue, and which is beginning to

be introduced in all the moral sciences, consists in considering human productions, and

particularly works of art, as facts and productions of which it is essential to mark the

characteristics and seek the causes, and nothing more”). Aesthetics is in fact so attuned to

science that it “est elle-même une sorte de botanique appliquée, non aux plantes, mais

aux oeuvres humaines” (“is itself a species of botany, applied not to plants, but to the

works of man.”)22 What is more, Taine proposes that just as she does in the case of

plants, nature herself makes “un choix entre les différentes espèces de talents, ne laissant

se développer que telle ou telle espèce” (“a selection among different species of [artistic]

talent, allowing only this or that species to develop.”)23 Artistic talent, as Taine would

have it, is naturally selected. Taine’s evolutionist philosophy of artistic production is

shared by Alexander Bain and Grant Allen, who are discussed further in chapter two, and

for whom aesthetic sense constitutes the physiological outcome of naturally selected

pleasures and pains.24

Taine is not himself concerned with the nature of beauty, nor the artist’s

production of its associated pleasures and pains; for him, the goal of the artist is instead

an intellectual one. The artist focuses on the structural variations in nature over its mere

reproduction, his/her purpose being “reproduire l’ensemble des rapports par lesquels sont

liées les parties, rien d’autre; ce n’est pas la simple apparence corporelle que vous devez

                                                        22 Hippolyte Taine, Philosophie de l’art, tome 1, (Paris: L. Hachette, 1895), 14–15; trans. John Durand as Lectures on Art, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1875), 38. 23 Ibid., 62; 94. 24 Nonetheless, for Taine, while an individual’s talent, or moral temperature for art, may have been selected, the specific production and manifestation of an artwork is a combination of both nature and the essential structures of society, the influence of one’s race (la race), environment (le milieu), and the historical moment (le moment).

 

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rendre, c’est la logique du corps” (“to reproduce the aggregate of relationships, by which

the parts are linked together, and nothing else; it is not the simple corporeal appearance

that you have to give, but the logic of the whole body”).25 The aim of aesthetics is

accordingly to show how a fact of nature, that is, “some essential condition of being in

the object,” is made apparent through art. While the essential, metaphysical turn in Taine

is a far cry from his empirical methodology, he nonetheless posits his aesthetics in

corporeal terms, an endeavor aimed at deciphering “la logique du corps” (“the logic of

the whole body”), the goal of the nineteenth-century physiological scientist. The

empirical nature of Taine’s aesthetic philosophy had a significant influence on Émile

Zola, the exemplar for the naturalist movement in literature. In his acclaimed essay, Le

roman expérimental (The Experimental Novel), Zola emphasizes the role of

experimentation for naturalist writers.26 Zola draws specifically on the growing field of

experimental physiology, in particular the works of Claude Bernard, to formulate his

positively inclined naturalist philosophy. The experimental novelist, for Zola, begins with

the empirical observation of life and then sets in motion literary scenarios that unfold as

experiments.

As his lectures on art suggests, Taine turned to botany as a model for

disentangling the characteristics and causes of artistic facts. This move, in its blatant

appropriation of a scientific disciplinary framework for aesthetics, provides a context

within which to understand the aesthetic and decadent movements later in the century, for

example Walter Pater’s description of the aesthetic critic “as a chemist notes some

                                                        25 Ibid., 31; 57. 26 Émile Zola, Le roman expérimental (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1881).

 

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natural element, for himself and others…”27 Here the chemist serves as model for a

scientific aesthetic mode, which sought to uncover the laws of nature and body. The end

of criticism for Pater “is to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the

virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this

special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is,

and under what conditions it is experienced.”28 Much like a scientist, the aesthete is

devoted to empirical study. Yet he attempts to encompass how beauty and pleasure

manifest themselves before him. Albeit disengaging the impression from its immediate

conditions as in positivism, the aesthetic method is a scientific analysis of subjectivity.

Nonetheless, the scientific turn in aestheticism reduces art to its sensory and observable

impressions, divesting it from the moral or utilitarian imperatives propounded by the

likes of Matthew Arnold or John Ruskin.29

A more radical approach to aesthetics of the day was that of German experimental

psychologist Gustav Fechner (1801–1887), who founded the domain of experimental

aesthetics. In his 1876 work Vorschule der Aesthetik, Fechner argued for an approach to

aesthetics that rejected philosophical studies “from above” and established in its place

                                                        27 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), xxvii. 28 Ibid. 29 See, for example, Edward Alexander, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and the Modern Temper (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1973); Kenneth Daley, “From the theoretical to the practical: Ruskin, British Aestheticism, and the Relation of Art to Use,” Prose Studies 20, no. 7 (1997): 90–107; and David A. Kaiser, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). The turn to “art for art’s sake” by the end of the century raised pertinent, historically grounded questions regarding the amorality of scientific inquiry itself. See Christine Ferguson, “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment,” PMLA 117, no. 3 (2002): 467. Ferguson notes, “naturalism and decadence unite in the cultural imagination not because they evidence similar techniques or traits but because they appear as the troubling results of nineteenth-century scientific orthodoxy when carried to its logical limits.”

 

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aesthetic analyses “from below.” Aesthetics was thus declared to be decidedly empirical,

taking as its main focus “the laws of liking” and “aiming at clarification rather than

intellectual elevation.”30 With a background in mathematics and physics, he derived

mathematical ratios to explain aesthetic responses by studying the effect of paintings on

individuals in comparison to that of geometric shapes.31 Fechner’s quantitative approach

to aesthetics represents a more absolute adoption of the scientific method than that of

Taine, Pater, or Zola.

The promise of scientific fact production, whether in botany, chemistry or

mathematics, provided nineteenth-century critics with a broad physiological framework

for disengaging from individualized perceptions, insights, and feelings of pain or

pleasure. Only through this disengagement from the individual are aesthetic production

and appreciation deemed empirically possible; only through this disengagement can one

attain an objective, aesthetic standard of disinterestedness, in the classically Kantian

sense. For the scientifically inclined aesthetic critic, to used Kant’s words, “cannot

discover, underlying this [aesthetic] liking, any private conditions, on which only he

might be dependent, so that he must regard it as based on what he can presuppose in

everyone else as well.”32 And what better way to presuppose aesthetic responses in others

than through the sensory and cognitive facts of scientific physiology? In sum, the

                                                        30 Gustav Th. Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetick, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Nachdruck d. 2. Ausg, 1925), 3s, quoted in Christian G. Allesch “Fechner’s Aesthetics – A provocation?” (lecture, International Society for Psychophysics, Leipzig, October 19, 2001). The website for Universität Salzburg.; uni-salzburg.at. 31 See Gustav Theodor Fechner, “Various attempts to establish a basic form of beauty: Experimental aesthetics, golden section and square,” trans. Monika Niemann, Julia Quehl, and Holger Hőge, Empirical Studies of the Arts 15, no. 2 (1997): 115–30. 32 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 54.

 

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insistent, even ontologically grounded objectivity attributed to science provides a

pathway to the subjective universality of an ahistorical aesthetics.

In contrast to Kant, however, who does not consider any “private conditions” in

aesthetic reasoning, I focus on exactly the personal circumstances articulated by those

undertaking the aesthetic perceptions and judgments of scientific medicine. What

happens to the scientific promise of universal aesthetic experience, I ask, if instead of

assuming an ontological objectivity in the processes of scientific inquiry, we recognize

the tangle of actions, sensations, insights, and creativity that epistemically underpin and

shape outcomes of scientific work? While it is the bodies of scientists that navigate

experimental spaces, use instruments and chemicals, and carry out the tasks of

experimentation, these bodies bear/bare conscious perceptions, ideas, aspirations, and are

capable of individual experience.33 The performance of scientific research is in turn

determined through the interplay of spaces, tools, instruments, preexisting medical

knowledge, and professional codes of conduct. The work of science can thus be described

more accurately as Andrew Pickering puts it, “an open-ended, reciprocally structured

interplay of human and non-human agency, a dance of agency.”34 Indeed, considering

science and art solely at the “logic of the body” is to forget that the practitioners of art

and science are themselves invested in the socio-historical, political, and moral ideas of

their time, in short, that their realm of experience transcends bodily logic.

                                                        33 Yiannis Koutalos, “The Docile Body of the Scientist,” in The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, ed. Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 206. 34 Andrew Pickering, preface to The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, ed. Andrew Pickering and Keith Guzik (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), vii.

 

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It is significant to note here that my consideration of the aesthetically engaged

scientist seeks not to return to the romantic sentimentalism of the late eighteenth and

early nineteenth centuries. Rather, I elucidate the various ways in which nineteenth-

century medical scientists, engaged in the profession of researching, diagnosing, and

curing the physiological body, came to understand and articulate the bodily, intellectual,

and emotional investments of themselves and others. How did individuals determining

the nature of nervous sensation make the move from aesthetic sense perception to

aesthetic making sense? I examine the discursive mechanisms employed by nineteenth-

century scientists as they harnessed their individual sensations, their self-consciousness

as experiencing individuals, and their socio-historical and aesthetic ideals, in order to

understand and to deem pleasing or otherwise the work of their own science.

My navigation of the discursive interplay of biological and aesthetic systems in

the nineteenth century begins with an understanding of aesthetics as sensory perception. I

then I transition to the aesthetic judgment of scientific presentations, in terms of their

formal and material aspects, in their performance and articulation. In short, I examine

how aesthetic experience is systematized in the performance of medical science. In the

nineteenth-century context, when medicine is becoming scientific, the presentation of

medical research and ideas serves two functions: on the one hand, it conveys the results

of medical work, and on the other, it seeks to establish, by calling attention to technique

and form, the processes of medical inquiry as justifiably scientific. In fact, the production

and proliferation of scientific knowledge does not and cannot exist, as Steven Shapin

 

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notes, “outside a social system.”35 In order to become accepted knowledge, scientific

facts require validation from the right collective of individuals in the right social settings.

As Ludwig Fleck notes, “a firm foundation for epistemology cannot be established

without investigation of the thought community.”36 How is science then presented to its

thought community, that is, to other scientists? And how does it engage with public

knowledge? I regard the presentational modes of medical science as instantiations of

what Bruno Latour calls “the theater of proof.” Designating the demonstrations of

scientific phenomena aimed at establishing objectivity, such a theater relies on “the

simplicity of the perceptual judgment on which the setting up of the proof culminated.”37

In considering the aesthetics of experiential medicine, I analyze the dynamics of an

experimental undertaking that not only establishes the scope of sensory aesthetic

experience, but also fashioned itself aesthetically, catering to the very sensory tendencies,

to the “perceptual judgment” it predetermines.

This form of aesthetics includes the display of patients in hospital amphitheaters,

the performance of medical plays on the public stage, and the presentation of medical

work in plays and novels as well as the publication of articles and book reviews in a

rapidly expanding periodical press. Theatrical display and textual publication together

serve as medical science’s performance oriented means of grounding its principles in the

                                                        35 Steven Shapin, “The House of Experiment in Seventeenth-Century England” Isis 79 (1988): 375. See also Steven Shapin, and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 36 Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton, trans. by Frederick Bradley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 45. 37 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 86.

 

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very social realm from which it traditionally demands isolation.38 As T. Hugh Crawford

explains, “The epistemology of the theater of proof entails simple, direct knowledge

attained through pure, untrammeled vision, but as a site that produces reliable scientific

evidence, the theater depends on the cultural context the audience creates.”39 To begin

with theatrical performance, mechanisms of visible scientific display in the nineteenth

century are subsumed within a broader social and cultural environment. For example, the

technological apparatus made use of by doctors in the amphitheater lectures at the

Salpêtrière asylum, such as stage lighting and image projectors, were also those utilized

in popular cabaret and concert halls.40 The scientist thus not only presents the data of

newfound knowledge before audiences, but also makes sense of it for them in a

framework that is already culturally configured.

Scientific texts are themselves a “theater of proof,” appealing to perceptual

judgment through both the textual and visual depiction of experimental results.41 In

addition to phenomenal description in words, scientific articles in the nineteenth century

                                                        38 Ibid., 85–87. 39 T. Hugh Crawford, “Imaging the Human Body: Quasi Objects, Quasi Texts, and the Theater of Proof,” PMLA 111, no. 1 (1996): 70. 40 For more information on the performance based aspects of nineteenth-century French psychiatry, see, for instance, George Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003); Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987); Rae Beth Gordon, “From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 3 (2001): 515–49; Jonathan Marshall, “Dynamic Medicine and Theatrical Form at the fin de siècle: A formal analysis of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot’s pedagogy, 1862–1893.” Modernism/modernity 15, no. 1 (2008): 131–53; Felicia McCarren, “The ‘Symptomatic Act’ circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis, Electricity, Dance,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 4 (1995): 748–74; and Mark S. Micale, The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2004). 41 T. Hugh Crawford, “Imaging the Human Body,” 70.

 

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are riddled with tables and figures, depicting both “relationships visible in nature, such as

those between insects and plants or relationships in nature not visible to the naked eye,

such as crystalline structures and geological sections.”42 Geometric diagrams, line

drawings, and tables enable readers to perceive and imagine relationships in nature that

may have as yet been in accessible to them. Not surprisingly, the vast array of

represented empirical knowledge, graphically and textually, requires clarification, and “as

the 19th century progresses increasingly more complex argument becomes a unifying

force, a common bridge from observations and experimental results to responsible

theorizing, whether in the pure or in the applied sciences.”43 Through the art of theorizing

and complex argument, the scientist yet again appeals to the reader’s perception, this time

determining the nature of its judgment. It follows that in order to theorize, and to do so in

a manner deemed responsible, he/she must necessarily prevail upon audiences within a

frame of reference that the latter can comprehend.

In addition to employing literary tropes that are “personal, openly polemical and

journalistic,”44 nineteenth-century scientists deployed popular literary and aesthetic

criticisms in the explanatory schemes for their experiential encounters and outcomes. For

example, as I discuss in chapter one, experimental physiologist Claude Bernard draws on

the romantic idealism of German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in

order to understand the relationship between the living physiological processes he

investigated and the whole of art and nature. Similarly, experimental psychologist Alfred

                                                        42 Alan G. Gross, Joseph E. Harmon, and Michael Reidy, Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002), 148. 43 Ibid., 140. 44 Ibid., 138.

 

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Binet, the subject of chapter four, elucidates the onset of mental illness as the unfolding

of a two-act play. If we agree with Ludwig Fleck that “every theme in the sequence of

ideas originates from notions belonging to the collective,”45 then Bernard and Binet

together exhibit a pre-existing tendency concerning scientific thought collectives and

their own cultural embeddedness.46 The turn to popular literary and artistic ideas does

more than appeal conceptually to audiences and their cultural contexts. It enables

scientists to cognize and situate their own socially systemic bringing-into-being of facts.47

Chapter Outline:

The Aesthetics of Experiential Medicine charts the domain of experiential

medicine from the emergence of the nervous impulse in experimental physiology to the

presentation and performance of medical experiments on the public stage. I draw

attention to the reciprocal selection and processing of meaning between the domains of

medical science and art. In this configuration, the medical researcher, as dual agent of

science and art, “is a perspectivist considering goals, boundaries, structure, input, output,

and related activity inside and outside the system.”48 The perspective thus obtained

consists of both the physiological and philosophical concepts used to articulate, reflect

upon and judge the scope of experimental work. As such, these concepts enable the

                                                        45 Fleck, Genesis and Development, 41. 46 Pickering notes that “existing culture constitutes the surface of emergence for the intentional structure of scientific practice”; see Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995), 21. 47 For Fleck, “cognition must not be construed as only a dual relationship between the knowing subject and the object to be known. […] Rather it is the result of a social activity, since the existing stock of knowledge exceeds the range available to any one individual.” See Fleck, Genesis and Development, 38. 48 Jack Burnham, “Systems Esthetics,” Art Forum 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 30–35.

 

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stable, on-going relationships between human and material agents within the domain of

experimental science.

The chapters that follow trace distinct moments of aesthetic awareness in the

domain of nineteenth-century experiential medicine through its literary configurations.

These configurations are organized into two parts, where the first focuses on

physiological bodily aesthesis and the second on the performance-based aesthetic of

medical practice. “Physiological Aesthesis,” the initial half of my dissertation, explores

the particular relationship between physiological and aesthetic philosophies at the time,

from the laboratory where facts of physiology are being experienced to the body of the

aesthetic critic and poet who understands poetry as the perfect sensate discourse. Chapter

one, “The Aesthetics of Laboratory Inscription: Claude Bernard’s “Cahier Rouge,”

examines the aesthetic sensibilities of Claude Bernard, whose theory of the self-

sustaining bodily milieu intérieur, a precursor to homeostasis, has earned him the

moniker of the first systems biologist. In particular, I analyze the Cahier Rouge (1850–

1860), Bernard’s acclaimed laboratory notebook. In this notebook, Bernard articulates the

range of his experience as an experimental physiologist, juxtaposing without

differentiation details of laboratory procedure to more personal queries, doubts, and

reflections on experimentation, life, and art. Bernard’s insights offer an aesthetic and

phenomenological template for considering experimentation. His physiological point of

view ranges from his own bodily aesthesis or sensory perception, through personal

reflections on scientific discovery as an artistic process, to a broader metaphysical

conception of life as an artistic creation. Such an aesthetic approach to physiology

enables Bernard to reconcile with his empirical methodology and his romantic idealism.

 

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Furthermore, it offers to the history of laboratory science a framework for considering the

individual, bodily, and emotional labor inherent in physiological experimentation.

Chapter two, “The Sensory Poetics of Grant Allen,” illustrates the impact and

adoption of experimental physiology in the critical works and poems of acclaimed author,

science-writer, and evolutionist Grant Allen. Allen’s extensive process of poetic criticism

seeks “to distinguish, to analyse, and separate” the particular linguistic means by which a

poem produces a “special impression of beauty of pleasure.” This impression, however,

operates first and foremost at the sensory level; the mention of a color, scent or sound

elicits previously experienced sensations of those very faculties, and it is through this

process of recall that emotional and intellectual pleasure is derived. Unlike the

psychological turn of Pater discussed above, Allen’s locus of inquiry remains strictly

within the physiological and it is from the arena of the bodily that any and all

psychological associations are able to emerge. I also examine here, by looking at his own

poetic endeavors, Allen’s resulting fashioning of the sensory aspects of beauty and its

ideal emotional and intellectual elements. As a poet, Allen is certainly aware of the

means by which to put together sensory elements in the composition of a poem, yet as a

critic, his aim is to model and provide readers with the tools by which to scientifically

make their own way through such an analysis.

The second half of my dissertation, “Medical Performance,” turns away from the

immediate derivation of physiological sensation in science and art to focus on the arenas

of operating theater, amphitheater, and public stage where medical experience is

explicitly grounded in performance. Chapter three, “Operational Aesthetics: The Surgical

Arts of Frederick Treves,” focuses on the particular work that surgeons perform with their

 

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tools, turning to the gestural and embodied practices of operating, such as feeling,

cutting, or setting. In other words, I place emphasis upon the actions that compose

surgical performance, that is, upon surgical hands. The hands of surgeons provide the

epistemic structure of surgery; they are literal bearers of the surgical point of view,

guiding an empirical form of diagnosis and therapy even before medicine itself became

scientific. I specifically consider the writings of British Surgeon Frederick Treves,

pioneer in abdominal surgery and one of the most recognized medical practitioners in late

nineteenth-century Britain. Whether directed to medical or more public audiences, his

literary works allow us to see beyond the empirical and ever-progressing veneer of

medical science. They enable us to focus on the rhetorical moves he makes, the

arguments he privileges, the knowledge and epistemology he assumes, and, more

significantly, on how he imagines the surgical enterprise itself. The literature of surgical

experience takes us not only into the professional arenas of surgical practice but into the

mind of the surgeon himself; it does so by providing one with access to the language in

which the nineteenth-century surgeon understood and articulated the individual, aesthetic

nature of his handicraft.

The final chapter, “Electric Currents and Cadaveric Contractures: The Horrible

Experiment between Science and Theater,” takes on a theatrical encounter in the history

of late nineteenth-century experiential medicine. Here I analyze the dramatic

collaborations between experimental psychologist Alfred Binet and famous playwright

André de Lorde for the Grand Guignol, France’s premier theater of horror. The plays

written by Binet and de Lorde for the Grand Guignol blur the boundaries between real

science and theatrical artifice. Science was here popularized through the proliferation of

 

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medical and psychiatric techniques—on stage, actors were hypnotized, lobotomized,

dissected, and enough vitriol was spilt so as to disturb even the most thrill-seeking

spectator. The theater even boasted an on-site doctor to attend to viewers. The version of

mental illness presented to audiences on this stage not surprisingly parallels Binet’s own

classifications of mental maladies. As mentioned above, Binet presented a two-part

framework for insanity—symptom and attitude—which unfold “as two acts of a play.”

Yet even as Binet and de Lorde staged experiments legitimizing positive knowledge,

spectators were confronted with a subversion of scientific rationality that transformed the

very method of its inquiry into a feat of horror. Nonetheless, for these two men, the

Grand Guignol’s arena of unreason in fact facilitated the study of medical questions and

empirical science.

The narrative of my dissertation thus moves from the laboratory, the fundamental

facility for experimental work, to the theatrical stage, the space where science is most

publicly performed. As such, I examine the predominant aesthetic modes of medical

inquiry in its various spaces. My reading of nineteenth-century aesthetics through these

literary and linguistic configurations draws, to a certain extent, on Paul Gilmore’s

assessment of romantic literature and electricity in his work Aesthetic Materialism:

The individual body is the site of aesthetic experience, but that experience occurs due to the stimulus produced by some object or a representation of an object whose history is grounded in the broader sociohistorical situation. The sociohistorical situation similarly structures the senses that apperceive the object, while the representation of the object itself is only accessed through the material structures of the medium itself—for literary studies, language—which, once again, are to a large extent the product of the historical situation.49

                                                        49 Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 10.

 

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In my own approach to the study of medical experience in the 19th century, I share

Gilmore’s attention to the bodily nature of aesthetic experience and its material mediation

through language. Yet whereas Gilmore finds in discourses of technology a template for

romantic writers to understand and imagine aesthetic experience in relation to objects of

art, I conceive of scientific work itself as aesthetic practice. In this dissertation I seek to

understand how the aesthetic systems of the body correspond and engage with the

scientific systems used to investigate and elucidate them. Such a reciprocal aesthetics

operates as both epistêmê and technê, as a priori knowledge about the current state and

possibilities of aesthetic sensation and as an apparatus involved in the very making or

doing of this knowledge within the medical context.

 

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PART I:

PHYSIOLOGICAL AESTHESIS

 

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Chapter 2: THE AESTHETICS OF LABORATORY INSCRIPTION: CLAUDE

BERNARD’S CAHIER ROUGE

“Physiologie, physiologie, c’est en moi…” —Claude Bernard, The Cahier Rouge (1850–1860)1

Written between 1850 and 1860, the Cahier Rouge of French physiologist Claude

Bernard (1813–1878) remains a significant text in the history of the field of human

physiology. The acclaimed red laboratory notebook evidences physiological inquiry at a

time when the discipline was establishing itself as a science, and when medical

institutions in Western Europe began to appropriate laboratories for experimental

research.2 A pioneering figure in experimental physiology, Claude Bernard was a key

advocate of laboratory inquiry in French medicine. His medical contributions range from

the discovery of the functioning of the pancreas, liver, and vaso-motor system to the

development of the concept of a stable internal living environment. He likewise

published numerous treatises, lectures, and articles on surgical anatomy, blood, diabetes,

                                                        1 “Physiology, physiology, it is within me…” Claude Bernard, Cahier de notes (1850–1860), ed. Mirko Grmek (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). For the translated English text, see Claude Bernard, The Cahier Rouge of Claude Bernard, trans. Hebbel H. Hoff, Lucienne Guillemin, and Roger Guillemin, in Claude Bernard and Experimental Medicine, ed. Francisco Grande and Maurice Visscher (Cambridge: Schenkman Pub., 1967). In this essay, I shall largely be quoting from English translations of Bernard’s texts, translating from the original only when those translations are absent or insufficient. 2 See, e.g., and William Coleman and Frederic L. Holmes, eds., The Investigative Enterprise: Experimental Physiology in Nineteenth-Century Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, eds., The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and John E. Lesch, Science and Medicine in France: The Emergence of Experimental Physiology, 1790–1855 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).

 

  29

anesthesia, fermentation, and experimental pathology. Presented in these well-ordered

literary genres, the procedures and outcomes of Bernard’s investigations were widely

acknowledged by scientific peers, thereby entering the realm of received scientific

knowledge.3

The Cahier Rouge depicts the emergence of Bernard’s most significant

physiological investigations.4 Yet, even as it details the necessary conditions and

resulting facts of scientific knowledge production, the notebook recounts the day-to-day

intricacies of laboratory work. Unlike the published treatise or article, which articulates

seamlessly and impersonally the results of years of scientific reasoning and calculation,

the laboratory notebook expresses scientific activity as it occurs.5 It represents a literature

of and within the laboratory space. One does not encounter in its pages a retrospective

framework that abstracts scientific knowledge from the actual physical work that

produces it.6 Rather, the notebook bares to its readers the messy, oft-repeated, and

                                                        3 See, e.g., Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 69–88; and David Gooding, Preface to Experiment and the Making of Meaning: Human Agency in Scientific Observation and Experiment (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), xi–xviii. 4 In his introduction to the Integral Edition of Claude Bernard’s Cahier de notes, Mirko Grmek discerns “the echo of notes from the ‘Cahier Rouge’ in certain published oeuvres, notably in the Lessons in Experimental Physiology Applied to Medicine (Paris, 1855–1856), Lessons on the Effects of Poisons and Drugs (Paris, 1857), Lessons on the Physiology and Physiological Properties and Pathological Alterations of Fluids in the Organism (Paris, 1859), Lessons on Experimental Pathology (course of 1859–1860; published in 1872), Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (Paris, 1865) and Report on the Progress and Development of General Physiology in France (Paris, 1867)” [My translation]. See Mirko Grmek, “Introduction,” in Bernard, Cahier de notes, 19. 5 Geoffrey Cantor, “The Rhetoric of Experiment,” in The Uses of Experiment, ed. David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 160. 6 Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 69; Paul White, Introduction to “Focus: The Emotional Economy of Science,” Isis 100 (2009): 793; and Frederic L. Holmes, “Scientific Writing and Scientific Discovery,” Isis 78 (1987): 220–21.

 

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frequently unsatisfying transactions that constitute scientific inquiry. As Frederic L.

Holmes notes in his study of French Chemist Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794), the

notebook enables a reading of the scientific enterprise as a creative process, where one

can “observe [the scientist’s] efforts to define a problem,” “watch him interpreting the

immediate results of each experiment,” and even “observe new insights come to light in

the very process of writing.”7 The Cahier Rouge similarly reveals a record of Bernard’s

own decidedly personal experiences within the lab. Bernard here unveils physiology as a

science that registers first and foremost at the level of sensory perception. He then adds to

its myriad sensations the complex array of actions and sentiments inherent in

physiological experimentation. The scientist performs certainly, but he also feels, intuits,

and attempts to make sense of the details of experimental procedure. The notebook

displays the manner in which the scientist himself engages, in both action and thought,

with the material realities of experimentation, what David Gooding describes as

“experience in the making.”8

In the following sections of this chapter, I shall demonstrate the material and

conceptual circumstances that led to the production of Claude Bernard’s Cahier Rouge as

well as the scholarly opportunities presented by this notebook for analyzing

experimentation in the history of laboratory science. I focus on the experimental

enterprise as composed of dynamic encounters between the spaces, materials, ideas, and

agents of experimentation, where writing emerges as an integral component of scientific

practice. While I recognize the laboratory notebook as a register of Bernard’s daily

                                                        7 Frederic L. Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life: An Exploration of Scientific Creativity (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), xvi. 8 Gooding, Experiment and the Making of Meaning, 135.

 

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laboratory activity, I nonetheless agree with Gerald Geison’s assertion that “even

laboratory notebooks are incomplete traces of activity, much of which remains tacit, none

of which can be observed directly, and all of which must be deduced from recorded

inscriptions that are often difficult to decipher and interpret.”9 My intention in analyzing

the Cahier is not to reconstruct an investigative narrative for Bernard’s laboratory work,

nor do I evaluate the scientific value of his method and findings. Rather, in examining the

“intimate interplay of thought and action that constitutes the fine structure of scientific

creativity,”10 I bring to light Bernard’s philosophical musings on creativity itself. To this

end, I begin with how Bernard understood the conditions of scientific knowledge

production and how he theorized the study of experimental medicine and its literatures. I

then examine the ways in which he articulated his own experiences of medical

experimentation within the Cahier Rouge, placing particular emphasis on the creative and

aesthetic aspects he discerns. Strewn amidst the bare details and drawings of

experimental procedure, readers of the Cahier repeatedly encounter Bernard’s theoretical

deliberations on physiology—as both a discipline and a phenomenon of life. Ultimately, I

argue that Bernard’s Cahier reveals, in both its content and form, a deeper connectivity

between his thoughts and actions. The abstract ideas and material proceedings of his

laboratory life are not here simply juxtaposed. They are, in fact, commensurate with one

another, systematized into a framework that operates aesthetically.

                                                        9 Gerald L. Geison, The Private Science of Louis Pasteur (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 15. 10 Holmes, “Scientific Writing and Scientific Discovery,” 221.

 

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i . THE LABORATORY ACCORDING TO CLAUDE BERNARD

In his most influential work, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

(1865), Claude Bernard presents his major discourse on the scientific method. He argues

most significantly for a turn to experimentation in medicine: “la médicine scientifique ne

peut se constituer, ainsi que les autres sciences, que par voie expérimentale, c’est-à-dire

par l’application immédiate et rigoureuse du raisonnement aux faits que l’observation et

l’expérimentation nous fournissent” (“Scientific medicine, like the other sciences, can be

established only by experimental means, i.e., by direct and rigorous application of

reasoning to the facts furnished us by observation and experiment”).11 The text

effectively captures the scope of experimental medicine, from a justification for

experimentation in the study of living organisms, particularly its potential for bringing

vital phenomena under the scientist’s control, to specific examples of experimentation on

animals and its philosophic implications. Furthermore, Bernard’s campaign for

experimental medicine was simultaneously a campaign for the laboratory system in

medical research.12

                                                        11 Claude Bernard, Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale (Paris: J. B. Baillière & fils, 1865), 7; trans. Henry Copley Greene as Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (New York: Dover, 1957), 2. 12 See Bernard, Introduction, 258; 146. The true physician, for Bernard, must pass through the laboratory: “Je considère l’hôpital seulement comme le vestibule de la médicine scientifique; c’est le premier champ d’observation dans lequel doit entrer le médecin, mais c’est le laboratoire qui est le vrai sanctuaire de la science médicale; c’est là seulement qu’il cherche les explications de la vie à l’état normal et pathologique au moyen de l’analyse expérimentale” (“I consider hospitals only as the entrance to scientific medicine; they are the first field of observation which a physician enters; but the true sanctuary of medical science is a laboratory; only there can he seek explanations of life in the normal and pathological states by means of experimental analysis”).

 

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Bernard’s advocacy for a sanctified and sheltering laboratory derived in no small

part from his own experiences experimenting in inadequate settings. The laboratory

spaces within which he researched for most of his life left much to be desired. Even

though he served as assistant to the esteemed Francois Magendie (1783–1855), Chair of

Medicine at the College of France, the college’s laboratories were insufficient and largely

unfunded. As a result, Bernard performed his private investigations at home or in the

laboratories of his friends. When in 1854, he finally received the Chair of General

Physiology at the Faculty of Science in Paris, the position “provided minimal facilities

and these only for lecture demonstrations; there was no laboratory for research or

teaching purposes. Bernard’s personal researches were carried out in a narrow, damp

chamber beneath a staircase.”13 On account of this architectural and institutional

constraint,14 Bernard continued primarily to conduct his experimental activities alone,

assisted on occasion by a small group of volunteers. It was only in December 1868,

towards the end of his career, that Bernard obtained the newly equipped laboratory of

general physiology at the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle.15

The physiological laboratories within which Bernard conducted his most essential

experiments thus eschewed the multifaceted social order of doctors, technicians, staff,

secretaries, and caretakers that one finds in scientific laboratories today. As a result, his

research does not lend itself to approaches of scientific inquiry that focus on how social

                                                        13 William Coleman, “The Cognitive Basis of the Discipline: Claude Bernard on Physiology,” Isis 76 (1985): 57. 14 For more on how scientific architecture serves as an agent in the establishment of scientific identity work, see Peter Galison, “Buildings and the Subject of Science,” in The Architecture of Science, ed. Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3. 15 Coleman, “The Cognitive Basis of the Discipline,” 59.

 

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interactions within the lab influence and shape technical knowledge.16 Bernard was

nevertheless acutely aware of the greater social necessities of his profession: the

publication of experimental results for consideration by scientific peers and, most

particularly, the training of new scientists.17 He describes the laboratory as “la pépinière

réelle du vrai savant expérimentateur,” (“the real nursery of experimental scientists”),18

nurturing and protecting the physiologist as he undertakes investigations of living

subjects. The laboratory cultivates, alongside a body of knowledge, a corps of

experimental scientists who continue to generate information.19 Karin Knorr Cetina

accordingly observes, “Not only objects but also scientists are malleable with respect to a

spectrum of behavioral possibilities. In the laboratory, scientists are ‘methods’ of going

about inquiry; they are part of a field’s research strategy and a technical device in the

manufacture of knowledge.”20 It follows that objects of inquiry and agents of inquiry are

together manipulated and molded to form the double output of experimental medicine—

medical knowledge and its experimental scientists.

The details of experimental procedure within the laboratory are determined by the

various theories, methods, and tools made available to scientists. Bernard asserts that the

                                                        16 See, e.g., Karin Knorr Cetina and Michael Mulkay, eds., Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (London: Sage Pub., 1983); Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life; and Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 17 See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-pump, ch. 2, 8; and Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. Frederick Bradley, ed. Thaddeus J. Trenn and Robert K. Merton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 38–51; 98–111. 18 Bernard, Introduction, 261; 148. 19 Coleman, “The Cognitive Basis of the Discipline,” 63. 20 Karin Knorr Cetina, “The Couch, the Cathedral, and the Laboratory: On the Relationship between Experiment and Laboratory in Science,” in Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 119.

 

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knowledge required for physiological experimentation implements the resources and

methods of other life sciences such as anatomy, physics, and chemistry:

Alors le physiologiste appelle à son secours pour résoudre le problème vital toutes les sciences; l’anatomie, la physique, la chimie, qui sont toutes des auxiliaires qui servent d’instruments indispensables à l’investigation. Il faut donc nécessairement connaître assez ces diverses sciences pour savoir toutes les ressources qu’on en peut tirer. Ajoutons en terminant que de tous les points de vue de la biologie, la physiologie expérimentale constitue à elle seule la science vitale active, parce qu’en déterminant les conditions d’existence des phénomènes de la vie, elle arrivera à s’en rendre maître et à les régir par la connaissance des lois qui sont spéciales.

To solve the problem of life, physiologists therefore call to their aid all the sciences,—anatomy, physics, chemistry, which are all allies serving as indispensable tools for investigation. We must, therefore, necessarily be familiar enough with these various sciences to know all the resources which may be drawn from them. Let us add, in ending, that from every biological point of view, experimental physiology is in itself the one active science of life, because by defining the necessary conditions of vital phenomena it will succeed in mastering them and in governing them through knowledge and their peculiar laws.21

“From every biological point of view,” experimental physiology emerges as master and

governing authority, harnessing the intricacies of organic function and consolidating the

other sciences of life. The elements of life are no longer divided into component sciences

of anatomy, chemistry, or physics, but are integrated under the aegis of an “active”

physiology. As such, “le laboratoire du physiologiste médecin doit être le plus compliqué

de tous les laboratoires, parce qu’il a à experimenter les phénomènes de la vie, qui sont

les plus complexes de tous les phénomènes naturels” (“the laboratory of a physiologist-

physician must be the most complicated of all laboratories, because he has to experiment

with phenomena of life which are the most complex of all natural phenomena”).22 In

order to do so, he requires complex instruments: “Pour étendre ses connaissances, il a dû

                                                        21 Bernard, Introduction, 194–95; 112. 22 Ibid., 247–48; 141.

 

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amplifier, à l’aide d’appareils spéciaux, la puissance de ces organes, en même temps qu’il

s’est armé d’instruments divers qui lui ont servi à pénétrer dans l’intérieur des corps pour

les décomposer et en étudier les parties cachées” (“To extend his knowledge, [man] has

had to extend the power of his organs by means of special appliances; at the same time as

he has equipped himself with various instruments enabling him to penetrate inside of

bodies, to dissociate them and to study their hidden parts”).23 These “special” instruments

of science expand the sensory capabilities of the scientist, whereby he can reach and see

further into the living organism than he could unassisted. Still, the manner in which

various facets of experimental practice merge, their methodological manifestations,

determines the interactions and outcomes of experimentation: “Dans l’investigation

scientifique, les moindres procédés sont de la plus haute importance. Le choix heureux

d’un animal, un instrument construit d’une certaine façon, l’emploi d’un réactif au lieu

d’un autre, suffisent souvent pour résoudre les questions générales les plus élevées” (“In

scientific investigation, minutiae of method are of the highest importance. The happy

choice of an animal, an instrument constructed in some special way, one reagent used

instead of another, may often suffice to solve the most abstract and lofty questions”).24 To

sum up, the experimental enterprise can best be conceived of as a coming together and

assembly of its participant aspects—in this context, the structures of knowledge it

presupposes, the complexity of the physical laboratory space, the instruments and

animals of investigation, and lastly, the actual and timely choices made in the moments of

experimentation.

                                                        23 Ibid., 11; 5. 24 Ibid., 27; 14.

 

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Laboratory Expérience:

At the core of this laboratory endeavor rests the act of experimentation, what

Bernard rightly refers to as expérience. The French word expérience means both

experiment and experience, capturing modalities of acting and being beyond the

empirical alone. Bernard recognizes this duality of meaning and addresses it as follows:

Dans la langue française, le mot expérience au singulier signifie, d'une manière générale et abstraite l'instruction acquise par l'usage de la vie. Quand on applique à un médecin le mot expérience pris au singulier, il exprime l’instruction qu’il a acquise par l’exercice de la médicine. Il en est de même pour les autres professions, et c’est dans ce sens que l’on dit qu’un home a acquis de l’expérience, qu’il a de l’expérience. Ensuite on a donné par extension et dans un sens concret le nom d’expériences aux faits qui nous fournissent cette instruction expérimentale des choses. In French, the word expérience in the singular means, in general and in the abstract, the knowledge gained in the practice of life. When we apply to a physician the word experience in the singular, it means the information which he has gained in the practice of medicine. Subsequently the word expérience (experiment) in the concrete was extended to cover the facts which give us experimental information about things.25

Pertaining to both the practices of life and experimentation, to abstract knowledge and

concrete information, the concept of expérience unveils a dynamic within medical inquiry

that is simultaneously empirical and personal. Bernard explains further the meaning of

expérience in relation to the experimental method:

L’observation est donc ce qui montre les faits; l’expérience est ce qui instruit sur les faits et ce qui donne de l’expérience relativement à une chose. Mais comme cette instruction en peut arriver que par une comparaison et un jugement, c’est-à-dire par suite d’un raisonnement, il en résulte que l’homme seul est capable d’acquérir de l’expérience et de se perfectionner par elle. Observation is what shows facts; experiment is what teaches about facts and gives experience in relation to anything. But as this teaching can come through

                                                        25 Ibid., 21; 11.

 

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comparison and judgment only, i.e., by sequence of reasoning, it follows that man alone is capable of gaining experience and perfecting himself by it.26

Doubly experiential, the laboratory system of research evidences more than the

production of facts and tangible knowledge through experimentation. Rather, the

necessary earning of experience “in relation to anything” draws attention to the

unavoidable intellectual and even intuitive investments of the individual experimental

physiologist.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, medical laboratory expérience was

fairly novel. Theorizing the turn to experimentation in medicine, Nicolas Jardine draws

particular attention to how this “laboratory revolution” brought about “changes in the

lived experience of medicine […], changes in what it was like to be involved in

medicine—as a teacher, clinician, general practitioner, pharmacologist, microbiologist,

orderly, nurse, patient, experimental animal, etc.”27 He includes within the arena of “lived

experience,” the following: “local and specific practices and routines, the architecture and

layout of the institutions of medicine, temperamental instruments, tormented animals and

pulsating preparations.”28 To really acknowledge the lived experience of a medical

professional and specifically that of an experimental physiologist, one must therefore

recognize the institutional and procedural elements of physiological experimentation—its

practices, routine, architecture, instruments, and animal subjects. While I acknowledge

the structural components of lived medical experience articulated by Jardine, my usage of

the term expérience also takes into account the abstract modalities of experience

                                                        26 Ibid., 22; 11. 27 Nicholas Jardine, “The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine as Rhetorical and Aesthetic Accomplishment,” in The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine, ed. Cunningham and Williams, 315. 28 Ibid., 320.

 

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conceptualized by Claude Bernard. Laboratory expérience, by my definition, denotes the

external spaces, materials, and actions of vivisection alongside elements that are

decidedly more personal. The latter include increasing the range of one’s knowledge

through perception and reasoning, reconciling newfound knowledge with old, and

earning experience “in relation to anything.” Laboratory expérience is undoubtedly

functional, empiric, and calculable, but it is simultaneously cognitive, intuitive, sensory,

and even emotional.

Laboratory Inscription:

The laboratory essential for Bernard’s experimental medicine reveals an

inextricable relationship between scientific work and scientific literature. Comprised of

its instruments, animals, knowledge, methods, and the perceptions of its experimenters,

laboratory expérience bears its own mechanisms of scientific erudition and instruction.

Bernard first expresses this affiliation as follows: “Les bibliothèques pourraient encore

être considérées comme faisant partie du laboratoire du savant et du médecin

expérimentateur” (“Libraries may also be considered as part of the laboratory of a man of

science or experimenting physician”).29 Yet the library is essential to laboratory life only

insofar as it complements and fosters medical experimentation: “C'est pourtant toujours

ainsi que l'érudition scientifique devait se pratiquer. Il faudrait toujours l'accompagner de

recherches critiques faites sur la nature, destinées à contrôler les faits dont on parle et à

juger les opinions qu'on discute” (“Such should always be the practice of scientific

erudition. It should always be accompanied by critical investigations of nature, planned to

                                                        29 Bernard, Introduction, 248; 141.

 

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verify the facts about which we seek, and to decide the opinions which we discuss”).30

The scientific assertions of past scientists are important resources for current

experimentalists. Still, they are not to be taken as given; scientific literature is valued for

its ability to engender future experimental work. In lieu of turning to “attardés et vieillis

de l’antiquité” (“the belated and aged commentaries of antiquity”) for scientific truth,

Bernard advocates a literature that looks forward,

que diriger [la medicine] vers les laboratoires et vers l’étude analytique expérimentale des maladies, c’est marcher dans la voie du véritable progrès, c’est-à-dire vers la fondation d’une science médicale expérimentale. C’est chez moi une conviction profonde que je chercherai toujours à faire prévaloir, soit par mon enseignement, soit par mes travaux. guiding medicine towards laboratories and toward experimental, analytical study of disease is an advance along the path of true progress, that is, toward the foundation of experimental medical science. With me, this is a deep conviction; I shall always seek to make it prevail both in my teaching and in my work.31

Turning to himself in this last statement, Bernard draws attention to another aspect of

scientific literature—its actual production by the scientist. The scientific text is no longer

merely an artifact of the past that is useful for a prospective science; rather, it is part of

the processes of scientific production in the present. More specifically, Bernard here

unveils the writing of scientific teachings and works as self-reflexive, whereby the

scientist sets himself in relation to a pre-existing science as well as a science that does not

yet exist but which will, nonetheless, be assisted by the work at hand.

This literature of scientific progress emerges from within the laboratory space.

Bernard gestures towards the necessity of writing, and particularly of noting or recording,

during experimentation:

                                                        30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 256; 145.

 

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Une fois les conditions de l’expérience instituées et mises en oeuvre d’après l’idée préconçue ou la vue anticipée de l’esprit, il va, ainsi que nous l’avons déjà dit, en résulter une observation provoquée ou préméditée. Il s’ensuit l’apparition de phénomènes que l’expérimentateur a déterminés mais qu’il s’agira de constater d’abord, afin de savoir ensuite quel contrôle on pourra en tirer relativement à l’idée expérimentale qui les a fait naître. Or dès le moment où le résultat de l’expérience se manifeste, l’expérimentateur se trouve en face d’une véritable observation qu’il a provoquée, et qu’il faut constater, comme toute observation, sans aucune idée préconçue. L’expérimentateur doit alors disparaître ou plutôt se transformer instantanément en observateur ; et ce n’est qu’après qu’il aura constaté les résultats de l’expérience absolument comme ceux d’une observation ordinaire, que son esprit reviendra pour raisonner, comparer et juger si l’hypothèse expérimentale est vérifiée ou infirmée par ces mêmes résultats. When the conditions of an experiment are once established and worked up according to the mind’s preconceived idea, an induced or premeditated observation will, as we said, result. Phenomena then appear which the experimenter has caused, but which must now be noted, so as to learn next how to use them to control the experimental idea which brought them to birth. From the moment when the result of an experiment appears, the experimenter is confronted with a real observation which he has induced and must note, like any other observation, without any preconceived idea. The experimenter must now disappear or rather change himself instantly into an observer; and it is only after he has noted the results of the experiment exactly, like those of an ordinary observation, that his mind will come back, to reason, compare and decide whether his experimental hypothesis is verified or disproved by these very results.32

Having conducted an experiment, the ensuing results “s’agira de constater” (“must now

be noted”); the experimenter “faut constater” (“must note”); and “ce ne’est qu’après qu’il

aura constaté les resultats” (“only after he has noted the results”) can he formulate a

conclusion for his work. The word that Bernard uses for this expression is constater,

meaning: to observe; to notice; to constitute; to record or certify.33 Within the laboratory,

constater certainly signifies an evidencing of experimental outcomes. But it is more

significantly representative of a means by which to record results in order to return to

them “absolument” (exactly”), “savoir ensuite quell contrôle on pourra” (“to learn next

                                                        32 Ibid., 40–41; 22. 33 Ibid.

 

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how to use them”), and to verify or disprove the originary “l’hypothèse expérimentale”

(“experimental hypothesis”). Writing, that is, the taking of notes and records in the

laboratory, materializes as part and parcel of experimental experience. It is through

writing, through practices of literary inscription, that scientific ideas are constituted, and

new fangled observations, experiments and theories weave their place amid the past and

future of scientific procedures.34

Bernard wrote at every step of laboratory inquiry. He inscribed in his numerous

laboratory notebooks the ideas, hypotheses, processes, and outcomes pertaining to his

own experimentations. It is to his most acclaimed notebook—the Cahier Rouge—that

this essay now turns.

ii . THE CAHIER ROUGE

A material component of experimentation, Claude Bernard’s Cahier Rouge is

embedded within the conditions of knowledge-production of his laboratory space. Its

pages register the subjects, procedures, assumptions and findings that accompanied the

performance of physiological experiments. In addition, the notebook captures the more

subjective modality of laboratory expérience. It demonstrates Bernard’s engagement with

                                                        34 See Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 52. Latour and Woolgar assert that the act of recording is an essential feature of laboratory work. By filling in, writing, or penciling in text at the various junctures of experimental experience, lab technicians produce a body of literature. See also Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, introduction to Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the History of Science, eds. Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), viii: “They [research notes] are literary activities in their own right, circumscribing a space that lies between the materialities of experimental arrangement, or the unexplored potentials of theoretical formalisms, and the structured formats of printed communication that are released eventually to the scientific community.”

 

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what he called “le terrain fétide ou palpitant de la vie” (“the fetid and throbbing ground of

life”)35—active encounters with experimental subjects, surrounding space and

instruments, and even thoughts fleeting through his mind. Not only did Bernard author

the Cahier Rouge, he also administered and participated in the mechanisms whereby the

notebook materialized. The pages of Bernard’s Cahier evidence the gestures, insights and

experiences significant to him in the process of scientific knowledge production. In the

following analysis, it is therefore not the vagaries of animal vivisection that I examine,

but the manner in which Bernard expressed his vivisectional work.

In the pages of Bernard’s Cahier, readers find the body of Bernard’s own thought

articulated—particular experiments, physiological queries, and views on science at large

lie exposed amid philosophical and poetic contemplations. Scientific inquiry for him does

not evade meta-analysis. In an undated entry, he ponders the nature of scientific writing,

differentiating it from the aspirations of the more literarily inclined:

Un littérateur est un homme qui parle agréablement pour ne rien dire. Un savant qui écrit bien ne sera jamais un littérateur, parce qu’il n’écrit par pour écrire, mais pour dire quelque chose. Le littérateur est l’homme qui, par sa spécialité, doit sacrifier le fond à la forme. C’est le confectionneur d’habit, le tailleur qui pare un mannequin aussi bien qu’un grand homme. Jamais un observateur ne peut donner les faits dépourvus de son esprit. A litterateur is a man who speaks agreeably about nothing. A scientist who writes well will never be a litterateur because he does not write in order to write, but to say something. The litterateur is the man, who by his specialty, sacrifices fundamentals for form. He is the dressmaker, the tailor, who dresses up a manikin as well as a great man. An observer can never give facts divorced from his mind.36

                                                        35 Bernard, Introduction, 28; 15. 36 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 117; 67.

 

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The harsh separation Bernard makes between writing in the domains of science and

literature operates as a distinction between content and form.37 For the litterateur, the act

of writing alone is key; it is embellishment and frippery. He is akin to “le confectionneur

d’habit” (“the dressmaker”), caring more for the manner of adornment than for the figure

his work adorns. The scientist may certainly write well, but he is bound to the “le fond”

(“fundamental”), to content, the substantial “quelque chose” (“something”) of his

seemingly more practical work.

While the writing of science relies on observation and does not emerge from an

imaginary “rien” (“nothing”), it is still not devoid of form. Even though Bernard’s Cahier

is less formalized than his treatises or articles, the lists, figures, and poetic refrains

scattered through its pages do well to “pare” (“dress up”) the visceral work of laboratory

science. They reveal the creative aspects of scientific discovery, which, in practice and

written expression, is never “dépourvus” (“divorced”) from the scientist’s mind. Facts of

experimentation are recorded as they are perceived by the author; he is the medium

through which the scientific “quelque chose” (“something”) is perceived, imagined, and

organized on paper.

The Body of the Laboratory Scientist:

The laboratory notebook is a bearer of process. Bernard recounts each step of

experimentation, often presenting his actions as a series of declarative sentences in the

past tense. In a study of the Spleen on October 20, 1850, for instance, he notes the

                                                        37 Bernard’s derision for the litterateur appears starker still when one considers his own literary aspirations prior to studying medicine. See J. M. D. Olmsted and E. Harris Olmsted, Claude Bernard and the Experimental Method in Medicine (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), 14–20.

 

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following of his experimental interactions: “J’ai enlevé la rate”; “j’ai constaté que le sang

était rouge comme à l’ordinaire”; “j’ai remarqué […] tous les ganglions lymphatiques”;

“ell l’a été dans les 4 cas que j’ai vus” (“I removed the spleen”; “I ascertained the blood

was red as usual”; “I noticed […] the lymph nodes;” and “that was what it was in the 4

cases I saw”).38 As he perceives and notes the experimental components exterior to him,

Bernard reveals a sense of his own physical self, a proprioception of his body39—its

position, orientation, and movement—as it engages with the participant spaces,

instruments, and subjects of experimentation. Between the internal realm of scientific

reason and judgment and the external arena of scientific observation and interaction lies

the body of the scientist, a material medium where the procedures and ideas of science

are together embodied.

Bernard’s personal bodily engagement with the materials of experimentation

makes itself apparent most notably in an entry regarding the reaction of sugar with white

corpuscles: “Les globules blancs décrits dans le ventricule sont mes globules blancs

produits avec le sucre. D’où viennent ces globules? De spores qui sont dans le sang sans

doute, car dans le cas de globules trouvés dans le Coeur, ils n’ont pas eu contact de l’air”

(“The white corpuscles described in the ventricle are my white corpuscles produced with

sugar. Where do these corpuscles come from? From spores that are in the blood, no

doubt, for in the case of the corpuscles found in the heart, they have not had contact with

the air”).40 Surrounded by procedural references to blood, corpuscles, sugar and spores,

the word “my” stands out. As before, the scientist performs the tasks of drawing blood

                                                        38 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 34; 5. 39 I derive my use of proprioception from David Gooding in Experiment and the Making of Meaning, xii–xiii. 40 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 110; 62 (emphasis added).

 

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with a syringe, of orienting and activating his physical self in relation to his space and

subjects. But the blood has now been withdrawn from his very veins and becomes a

depersonalized object of empirical inquiry. Bernard’s experiment engenders a

compounded sensory engagement—it mediates between a subject and an object that

derive from the same individual. Nonetheless, the intense moment of personalization,

“mes globules blancs” (“my white corpuscles”) quickly transforms into the imperative

mode: “Faire des expériences en pressant le sang dans une seringue pour qu’il n’ait pas le

contact de l’air ou maintenir le serum à l’abri du contact de l’air sur du mercure ou avec

une couche d’huile à la surface” (“Carry out experiments taking the blood with a syringe

so that it has no contact with air—keep the serum protected from contact with air over

mercury or with a layer of oil on the surface”)41 Bernard’s personal engagement with this

experiment is also absent from his exposition of it in Leçons de physiologie

expérimentale appliquée à la médecine (Lessons in Experimental Physiology Applied to

Medicine).42 In a more institutional setting, particularly in the literary inscription intended

for a public audience, the experimentalist is disembodied.

Bernard’s privileging of method certainly supports his assertions regarding good

scientific literature and his desire to foster experimentation “soit par [son] enseignement,

soit par [ses] travaux” (“both in [his] teaching and in [his] work”). He states in

Introduction, “La première condition pour instituer une expérience, c’est que les

circonstances en soient assez bien connues et assez exactement déterminées pour qu’on

puisse toujours s’y replacer et reproduire à volonté les memes phénomènes” (“The first

                                                        41 Ibid. 42 Claude Bernard, Leçons de physiologie expérimentale appliquée à la médecine, Tôme 1 (Paris: Baillière, 1855), 255. In these Lessons, Bernard published annually the results of experiments and summaries of courses.

 

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condition for making an experiment is that its circumstances must be so well known and

so precisely defined that we can always reconstruct them and reproduce the same

phenomena at will”).43 Yet these circumstances are not all illustrated in the same manner

in his notebook. As noted above, certain experiments are described in narrative past tense

form while others are presented in the imperative, gesturing toward future action. These

latter endeavors betray a more sure process for Bernard; they exist not solely in a state of

previously having been done, but pave the way for subsequent procedures. In an entry

titled “Extraction of Pancreatic Juice” from January 10, 1851, he describes a sound

method for extracting pancreatic juice:

Après avoir réfléchi à tous les moyens les plus propres à recueillir le suc pancréactique, je me suis arrêté au suivant: 1. chercher le grand canal pancréatique; 2. faire un pli à l’intestin qui comprenne ce conduit; 3. pincer ce pli de manière à y fixer au tube et à laisser une possibilité

d’écoulement au suc pancréatique dans l’intestin; 4. avoir le soin d’interposer entre le pince et les parois de l’intestin un peu

d’épiploon pour empêcher la coupure des parois intestinales. Ce procédé sera toujours bon temporairement, car je pense que n’introduisant pas le tube dans le conduit pancréatique, on irritera moins l’organe et on aura du suc pancréatique meilleur. After having considered all the most appropriate means of collecting pancreatic juice, I have settled upon the following: 1. Look for the main pancreatic duct. 2. Make a fold in the intestine compressing this duct. 3. Clamp this fold so as to attach a tube in it and leave the pancreatic juice free

to flow into the intestine. 4. Take care to interpose a little omentum between the clamp and the wall of the

intestine to prevent damaging the intestinal wall. This procedure will always be good temporarily, because I believe that, since the tube is not inserted in the pancreatic duct, the organ will be less irritated and provide a better pancreatic juice.44

                                                        43 Bernard, Introduction, 201–202; 115. 44 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 42–43; 12.

 

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Bernard’s imperative assertions, particularly their presentation as a list, render the acts of

experimentation into instructions. Furthermore, such a presentation depersonalizes his

role as experimenter, as the man who originally “settled upon” this order of action. The

actual procedures of collecting pancreatic juice are made uniform; any scientist may

perform them. At the same time as it records the performance of past experiments, the

laboratory notebook transforms into a dramatic script for future performances.

Science in Fragments:

Bernard’s aspirations for a sounder method and novel facts in medical inquiry do

not always pronounce themselves so proficiently in his Cahier. Its realm is “une longue

et affreuse cuisine” (“the long and ghastly kitchen”),45 and as such it exhibits the

uncertainty and inconsistency of discovery inherent in day-to-day laboratory life. It is no

surprise then, that one comes across less certain proclamations such as the following of

September 18, 1850:

Pour étudier les mouvements du coeur, la température du sang dans les cavités de cet organe, etc., il serait utile de pratiquer des ectopies artificielles du Coeur sur de jeunes chiens. Le procédé que j’ai suivi chez le lapin en regardant le Coeur au travers de la plèvre est insuffisant.

To study the movements of the heart, the temperature of the blood in the cavities of the organ, etc., it would be useful to make artificial ectopies of the heart in young dogs. The procedure I have followed in the rabbit, of observing the heart across the pleura, is inadequate.46

Still there are other entries where the method of experimentation is never made clear,

where all we have is query: “A quoi est due l’insensibilité asphyxique? A l’absence de

l’oxygène?... non, évidemment. Rechercher à quoi” (“To what is asphyxial insensibility

                                                        45 Bernard, Introduction, 28; 15. 46 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 31; 2 (emphasis added).

 

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due? To the absence of oxygen? Evidently not. To what then?”); “Je n’ai pas pu produire

le chaleur du rectum en enlevant le ganglion rectal du grand sympathique. Pourquoi? Sur

le foie, je n’ai pas produit non plus ce phénomène” (“I have not been able to produce heat

in the rectum by removing the rectal ganglia of the sympathetic. Why? In the liver I have

not produced this phenomenon either”); and “quand on a enlevé le cerveau à une

grenouille, il devient bien plus difficile de l’empoisonner par le curare. Pourquoi?”

(“when the brain of a frog is removed it becomes much more difficult to poison with

curare. Why?”).47 As it facilitates actual experimentations on living beings, the laboratory

system generates even more ideas for future experimental inquiries. In these particular

cases, one cannot even be sure that an experiment did in fact occur. Scientific process no

longer reads as a script; instead, we are presented with fragmented thoughts and

observations that surface alongside the experimental process.

Occasionally, one comes across simple stated facts lacking context or

explanation: “Le matière glycogène fait partie du blastème général” (“The glycogenic

material is part of the general blastema”); and facets of procedure without mention of a

pertaining experiment: “Oeuf qu’on ôte” (“Egg that is removed”) or “Injecter du suc

pancréatique dans le canal cholèdoque” (“Inject pancreatic juice in a bile duct”).48 In the

latter examples, one is inclined to wonder whether Bernard has not perhaps written

himself reminders to start working where he may have previously left off. One cannot be

sure in the least; yet what is certain is that the Cahier Rouge is a text very much

embedded in the fleeting moments of experimentation, in the scenarios of science in its

unfolding.

                                                        47 Ibid., 70, 72, and 88; 33, 35, and 47. 48 Ibid., 142, 77, and 175; 83, 39, and 103.

 

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Undifferentiated from the disjointed clauses of his experimental directives,

queries, and observations, the more philosophical musings of Bernard riddle the pages of

his Cahier. One consequently finds a similar array of unexplained declarations:

“Hommes à idées fixes: persécuteurs de la nature” (“Men with fixed ideas, persecutors of

nature”); “La nature des choses, c’est la nature de notre esprit” (“The nature of things is

the nature of our mind”); and “La vie est une création. Quand on parle d’une belle

oeuvre, on dit tune belle création” (“Life is a creation. When one speaks of a fine work,

one says a fine creation”).49 These instances mark a change in Bernard’s thought from

the details of procedure to broader ideas on the metaphysical nature of life itself. Their

seeming conceptual shift, however, is inseparable from laboratory work. What is more,

his reflections that life “est une création” (“is a creation”) akin to a “belle oeuvre” (“fine

work”), the “esprit” (“mind”) drives our knowledge of “La nature des choses” (“the

nature of things”), and the “mind” has a “nature” akin to that of other “things,” are

essential to the epistemological underpinnings of his physiology. Taken together,

Bernard’s reflections upon the general arena of life reveal an understanding of nature and

of the mind that is decidedly creative and aesthetic.

Bernard’s Aesthetic Framework:

In order to understand Bernard’s theoretical perspectives on art, which surface

time and again amidst the experimental details of his Cahier, we must begin with his

philosophical approach to physiology. For it is here that we encounter the conceptual

bases for his scientific inquiries and their unavoidable aesthetic implications. Essential to

                                                        49 Ibid., 174, 124, and 144; 102, 72, and 84.

 

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his establishment of Experimental Physiology as a discipline was his disavowal of the

materialism and vitalism that dominated the physiological arena of his day.50 The first of

these doctrines, mechanism, or what Bernard calls materialism, regarded the human body

as reducible into its component parts, each functioning according to fixed natural laws. In

the nineteenth century, mechanistic approaches derived largely from research in physics

and chemistry and imagined the living organism as constructed entirely of physico-

chemical processes. The contrasting philosophical doctrine, vitalism, attributed life to a

divine and vital principle, unexplained by chemical and physical science. The whole of

the organism is thus greater than the sum of its parts, governed by a principle that

transcends the material and physical. In the former case, the causes of the phenomena of

life are material and reducible, whereas in the latter, they are immaterial and irreducible.

Bernard critiqued these two predominant theoretical approaches to the science of

life as irrelevant to physiological inquiry. He in fact began his Course in General

Physiology at the Museum of Natural History in 1872 with the following declaration:

La physiologie étant la science des phénomènes de la vie, on a pensé que cette définition en impliquait une autre, celle de la vie elle-même. C'est pourquoi l'on

                                                        50 Paul Q. Hirst, Durkheim, Bernard, and Epistemology (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), 59–64. For more information on mechanism and vitalism in the nineteenth century, see, e.g., David F. Channell, The Vital Machine: A Study of Technology and Organic Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); William Coleman, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Everett Mendelsohn, “Physical Models and Physiological Concepts: Explanation in Nineteenth-Century Biology,” The British Journal for the History of Science 2 (1965): 201–19; Oswei Temkin, “Materialism in French and German Physiology in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 20 (1946): 322–27; and Elizabeth Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

 

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trouve dans les ouvrages des physiologistes de tous les temps un grand nombre de définitions de la vie. Devons-nous les imiter et croirons-nous nécessaire de débuter dans nos études par une entreprise de ce genre? Oui, nous commencerons comme eux, mais dans le but bien différent de prouver que la tentative est chimérique, étrangère et inutile à la science. Since physiology is the science of the phenomena of life, it has been thought that this definition implied another, that of life itself. This is why a great number of definitions of life are to be found in the works of the physiologists of all time. Should we imitate them, and do we believe it is necessary to begin our studies by an enterprise of this kind? Yes, we shall begin like them, but with the quite different purpose of proving that the attempt is chimerical, alien, and useless to the science.51

Bernard situates the machinist and vitalist turn in the discipline of physiology as a fault of

definition. Research into the nature of life’s phenomena need not be conflated with the

causality of life itself. He adds, “En réalité, on ne peut être spiritualiste ou matérialiste

que par sentiment; on est physiologiste par démonstration scientifique” (“In reality, one

can be neither spiritualist nor materialist except by sentiment; one is a physiologist by

scientific demonstration”).52 Bernard thus ascribes to physiology a tangible, demonstrable

method and discards the more philosophical doctrines of vitalism and materialism as

“chimérique, étrangère et inutile” (“chimerical, alien, and useless”). Furthermore,

“spiritualiste” and “matérialiste” are set forth as categories separate from “physiologiste,”

excising the former from the field of physiology altogether.53 Scientific inquiry—or

rather, a structure of knowledge production based on experiment and demonstration—is

                                                        51 Claude Bernard, “Première Leçon,” in Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux (Paris: J. B Baillière, 1885), 22; trans. Hebbel H. Hoff, Roger Guillemin, and Lucienne Guillemin as “First Lecture,” in Lectures on the Phenomena of Life Common to Animals and Plants (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1974), 17. 52 Ibid., 45–46; 33. 53 Hirst, Durkheim, Bernard, and Epistemology, 24. As Hirst writes, “Bernard conceives science as an autonomous form of the discovery of ‘truth,’ independent of and different from philosophy.”

 

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the key to physiology. The experimental method, then, not only provides a means for

discovering facts, but it also comprises the physiological point of view, determining what

counts as physiological knowledge and how this knowledge can be determined. “The

issue” as Canguilhem notes, “is not using experimental concepts but experimentally

constituting authentically biological concepts.”54 Bernard’s theoretical foundation for

experimental physiology establishes a reciprocal systematicity between processes of

physiological inquiry and physiological, living processes themselves.

Bernard’s famed experimentations on nutrition, and on the chemical and physical

properties of blood, exhibited exactly such a reciprocal relationship. These inquiries fixed

further his determination that living phenomena can neither be understood mechanically

nor vitalistically. In 1857, Bernard communicated his discovery of glycogen to the

Société de Biologie. By uncovering the glycogenic function of the liver, that is, its ability

to produce and secrete glucose into the blood, Bernard changed the prevailing scientific

conception of animal and plant nutrition. The predominant view of nutrition at the time,

based on the theories of French chemists J. B. Dumas (1800–1884) and Jean Baptiste

Boussingault (1802–1887), assumed that the plant kingdom was responsible for

synthesizing all organic compounds.55 Upon ingesting plants, animals oxidized these

compounds into inorganic matter, which they then used to build their own tissues.

Bernard’s finding that glucose can be present in blood, even when a living being does not

actively ingest it, suggested that blood was composed not simply of whatever an animal

consumes. Rather, blood had the ability to regulate itself and as such retain a stable

                                                        54 Georges Canguilhem, “Experimentation in Animal Biology,” in Knowledge of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 6. 55 See Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Jean Baptiste Boussingault, Essai de statique chimique des êtres organisés, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1842).

 

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chemical composition.56 This ability of blood to maintain a constant environment within

a complex living organism formed the basis of Bernard’s acclaimed concept of the milieu

intérieur [internal environment]: “c'est la lymphe ou le plasma, la partie liquide du sang

qui, chez les animaux supérieurs, pénètre les tissus et constitue l'ensemble de tous les

liquides interstitiels, expression de toutes les nutritions locales, source et confluent de

tous les échanges élémentaires” (“this is the lymph or plasma, the liquid portion of the

blood which in the higher animals perfuses the tissues and constitutes the ensemble of all

the interstitial fluids, is an expression of all the local nutritions, and is the source and

confluence of all the elementary exchanges”).57 Most significantly, this capacity for

sustaining an internal environment rendered the animal body into a self-regulating

system.58

The milieu intérieur accordingly signified, for Bernard, “la condition de la vie

libre, indépendante” (“the condition for free and independent life”).59 As such, the

concept of milieu intérieur enabled Bernard to uncover the unique expression of complex

organic life. In other words, the steady internal environment provided him with the basis

                                                        56 For a broader context of Bernard’s discovery, see Kenneth Carpenter, “Early Ideas on the Nutritional Significance of Lipids,” The Journal of Nutrition 128 (1998): 423S–26S; Frederic L. Holmes, Claude Bernard and Animal Chemistry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974); Joseph Larner “The Discovery of Glycogen and Glycogen Today,” in Claude Bernard and Experimental Medicine, ed. Grande and Visscher, 135–62; and F. G. Young, “Claude Bernard and the Discovery of Glycogen,” British Medical Journal 1 (1957): 1431–37. 57 Claude Bernard, “Deuxième leçon,” in Leçons sur les phénomènes, 113; trans. Hoff, Guillemin and Guillemin as “Second lecture,” in Lectures on the Phenomena of Life, 84. 58 See Dennis Noble, “Claude Bernard, the first systems biologist, and the future of physiology.” Experimental Physiology 93 (2008): 16–26; and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory (New York: George Braziller, 1969), 12. 59 Bernard, “Deuxième leçon,” in Leçons sur les phénomènes, 113; trans. Hoff, Guillemin and Guillemin as “Second lecture,” in Lectures on the Phenomena of Life, 84.

 

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for a unique physiology distinct from mechanist and vitalist conceptions of life.60 He

declares at the conclusion of a lecture on the varying forms of life: “La loi de la finalité

physiologique est dans chaque être en particulier et non hors de lui: l’organisme vivant

est fait pour lui-même, il a ses lois propres, intrinsèques” (“The law of physiological

finality is within each particular being and not outside of it; the living organism is made

for itself, and it has its own intrinsic laws”).61 He states more poetically in his Cahier:

“Le larynx est un larynx et le cristallin, c’est-à-dire que leurs conditions mécaniques ou

physiques ne sont réalisées nulle part ailleurs que dans l’organisme vivant” (“The larynx

is a larynx, and the lens, a lens. That is to say, that their mechanical or physical

conditions are not realized in any place other than in the living organism”).62 Opposed to

a mechanistic ideology and to indeterminable notions of a vital spark, the realm of

physiological inquiry consists always only of the processes by which life exists.63

Bernard’s discovery of a unique organization for life did not in the least alter his

belief in the experimental method. He maintained that physiological phenomena, albeit

unique in their organization, could be studied empirically. Their order of functioning

remained similar to inorganic processes, based on mechanical and physico-chemical

laws. Processes of life were thus special not on account of their mode of functioning

                                                        60 See Charles G. Gross “Claude Bernard and the Constancy of the Internal Environment,” The Neuroscientist 4 (1998): 383; and Georges Canguilhem, A Vital Rationalist, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 266. Canguilhem notes that “the discovery [of the milieu intérieur] paved the way for a general physiology, a science of the life functions, and this discipline immediately gained a place in the academy alongside comparative physiology.” 61 Claude Bernard, “Troixième leçon,” in Leçons sur les phénomènes, 147; trans. Hoff, Guillemin and Guillemin as “Third lecture,” in Lectures on the Phenomena of Life, 107. 62 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 171; 101. 63 See Sebastian Normandin, “Claude Bernard and An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine: ‘Physical Vitalism,’ Dialectic, and Epistemology,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 62 (2007): 519–20.

 

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(which was entirely determinable), but rather because of their creation into an organized

entity and their consequent ability to develop:

De sorte que ce qui caractérise la machine vivante, ce n'est pas la nature de ses propriétés physico-chimiques, si complexes qu'elles soient, mais bien la création de cette machine qui se développe sous nos yeux dans les conditions qui lui sont propres et d'après une idée définie qui exprime la nature de l'être vivant et l'essence même de la vie. What distinguishes a living machine is not the nature of its physicochemical properties, complex as they may be, but rather the creation of the machine which develops under our eyes in conditions proper to itself and according to a definite idea which expresses the living being’s nature and the very essence of life.64

Even though he recognizes here “une idée définie” (“a definite idea”), an “essence même

de la vie” (“very essence of life”), the creative component of life by no means signifies

the all-encompassing, spontaneous force touted by proponents of vitalism. Instead, it

denotes an organized principle: “Ce n’est pas l’action qui est vitale d’essence particulière,

c’est le mécanisme qui est spécifique, particulier, sans être d’un ordre distinct. La

doctrine que je professe pourrait être appelé le vitalisme physique; je crois qu’elle est

l’expression la plus complète de la vérité scientifique” (“it is not vital action and a

particular essence; it is a specific, particular mechanism, without having a distinct

quality. The doctrine that I profess could be called physical vitalism; I believe this to be

the most complete expression of scientific reality”).65 Bernard’s “physical vitalism” is

distinct in that it recognizes a directing force for life, but does not consider it entirely

metaphysical; rather it belongs to the realm of preexisting law. Robert Perlman

recognizes this vitalistic tendency in Bernard “as much [as] an epistemological as an

                                                        64 Bernard, Introduction, 162; 93. 65 Claude Bernard, “Leçon XIV,” Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie communs aux animaux et aux végétaux, tome deuxième (Paris: J. B. Baillière & fils, 1878), 219 (my translation).

 

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ontological claim; physiologists had to accept development was inaccessible to

experimental science.”66

Bernard’s philosophy of physiology may seem contradictory in its simultaneous

disavowal and synthesis of materialism and vitalism. Yet, his self-ascribed “vitalisme

physique” represents a highly selective combination of the two doctrines. What he

derives from his predecessors in chemistry and physiology, Antoine Lavoisier and Xavier

Bichat (1771–1802), whom he considers “représentants des deux grandes tendances

philosophiques opposées” (“representing those two great disparate tendencies of

philosophy”),67 is a distinct approach to understanding living function. He duly notes in

his piece “Définition de la vie” (“The Definition of Life”) that “en analysant avec soin

tous les phénomènes vitaux dont l'explication appartient aux forces physiques et

chimiques, nous refoulerons le vitalisme dans un domaine plus circonscrit et dès lors plus

facile à determiner” (“by analyzing carefully all vital phenomena whose explanation

concerns physical and chemical forces, we will push vitalism back into a domain more

limited and therefore more easy to define”).68 From his “plus circonscrit” (“more

limited”) vitalistic stance, he derives a singular active agent, le germe (the germ),

contained within the living egg, as the cause for life and its organization. The germ

organizes the phenomena of organic synthesis, generation, regeneration, redintegration

and healing.69 Bernard concludes the essay as follows:

                                                        66 See Robert L. Perlman, “The Concept of the Organism in Physiology,” Theory in Biosciences 119 (2000): 174–86. 67 Claude Bernard, “Définition de la vie, les théories anciennes et la science moderne” La Science expérimentale (Paris: J. B. Baillière & fils, 1878), 163. All translations from this text are my own. 68 Bernard, “Définition de la vie,” 204. 69 Ibid., 192.

 

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Si nous pouvons définir la vie à l'aide d'une conception métaphysique spéciale, il n'en reste pas moins vrai que les forces mécaniques, physiques et chimiques, sont seules les agents effectifs de l'organisme vivant, et que le physiologiste ne peut avoir à tenir compte que de leur action. Nous dirons avec Descartes : on pense métaphysiquement, mais on vit et on agit physiquement. If we can define life with the help of a particular metaphysical conception, it remains no less true that mechanical, chemical, and physical forces are the only efficient agents in the living organism, and the physiologist need only consider their action. We will thus say with Descartes: “We think metaphysically, but we live and act physically.70

Bernard’s philosophical debt to René Descartes asserts itself here. Like Descartes, he sees

fit to tackle the material, physical aspects of physiological life while both recognizing and

waiving its more metaphysical aspects as unscientific.71 Sebastian Normandin thus

regards Bernard’s particular brand of vitalism as marking “the end of the ‘vital force’ or

‘vital principle’ as a legitimate scientific concept,” a fact that has often led Bernard to be

inaccurately conceived of as a raging empiricist.72 But even as he ascribes to the

Cartesian separation of body and mind, he explores further the indeterminable and

essential creative force of life. As he states in his Cahier, “Il faut être matérialiste dans la

forme et vitaliste dans le fond” (“One must be a materialist in form and vitalist at

heart”).73

It is in his explorations of the metaphysical principle for life that readers see

Bernard at his most poetic; in fact, more often than not, his musings on the nature of

creative existence give rise to his reflections on art and the artist. In these instances,

                                                        70 Ibid., 211–12. 71 For a greater analysis of Bernard’s associations with and mention of Descartes and also Leibniz in his writing, see Reino Virtanen, Claude Bernard and his Place in the History of Ideas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 27–48. 72 Normandin, “Claude Bernard and An Introduction,” 526. 73 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 200; 119.

 

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Bernard’s ideas owe less to a Cartesian dualism than to a holistic idea of nature akin to

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), himself a scientist as well as a poet and

philosopher. As Bernard writes:

Quand on observe l'évolution ou la création d'un être vivant dans l'œuf, on voit clairement que son organisation est la conséquence d'une loi organogénique qui préexiste d'après une idée préconçue, et qui s'est transmise par tradition organique d'un être à l'autre. On pourrait trouver dans l’étude expérimentale des phénomènes d'histogenèse et d'organisation la justification des paroles de Gœthe, qui compare la nature à un grand artiste. C'est qu'en effet la nature et l'artiste semblent procéder de même dans la manifestation de l'idée créatrice de leur œuvre. When we observe the evolution or the creation of a living being in an egg, we clearly see that its organization is the consequence of an organogenic law that pre-exists following a preconceived idea, and that is transmitted from one being to another by organic tradition. One could find in the experimental study of histogenic and organizational phenomena justification for the words of Goethe who compares nature to an artist. It is in fact that nature and the artist seem to proceed similarly in the manifestation of their creative idea into their oeuvre.74

Bernard’s conception of the creative idea of life is certainly not as concrete as his

excursions in physiology: life, for Bernard, is based on an organogenic law that becomes

more and more abstract as it is seen to “préexiste” according to “une idée préconçue” (“a

preconceived idea”) transmitted through “tradition organique.” The actual “law,” “idea,”

and “tradition” remain undetermined and indeterminable. Even so, Bernard’s idealism is

rooted in empiricism. The reciprocal relationship between his physiological philosophy

and method can in fact be regarded as a phenomenology, whereby his perceptions and

experiences of living phenomena during experimentation enable him to draw greater

                                                        74 Claude Bernard, “Les problèmes de la physiologie générale,” La Science expérimentale (Paris: J. B. Baillière & fils, 1878), 134 (my translation).

 

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aesthetic connections between the characteristics of living processes and those of art and

nature.75

Bernard thus finds himself in harmony with the romantic and phenomenological

sentiments of Goethe. He notes again this artistic association in his Introduction:

La nature, comme l’a dit Goethe, est un grand artiste; elle ajoute, pour l’ornamentation de la forme, des organes souvent inutiles pour la vie en elle-même, de même qu’un architecte fait pour l’ornamentation de son monument des frises, des corniches et des tourillons qui n’ont aucun usage pour l’habitation. Nature, as Goethe said, is a great artist; to ornament forms, she often adds organs that are useless to life in itself, as an architect makes ornaments for his building, such as friezes, cornices and volutes which are useless for habitation.76

In both these quotes, Bernard appears to be making reference to the famous “Nature”

fragment from Goethe’s Tiefurt Journal in 1783. Nature is described in the piece as “the

sole artist, creating extreme contrast out of the simplest material, the greatest perfection

seemingly without effort, the most definite clarity always veiled with a touch of softness.

Each of her works has its own being, each of her phenomena its separate idea, and yet all

create a single whole.”77 Although originally conceived of by Georg Christoph Tobler

and misattributed to Goethe, this fragment captures Goethe’s thoughts on nature at the

time. Goethe himself notes, in an entry from September 6, 1787 of his Italian Journey:

“sublime works of art are also the sublimest works of nature, created by men following

                                                        75 My use of the term phenomenology refers generally to an emphasis on direct experiential contact in the study of an object and its deeper meaning. I do not approach Bernard’s philosophy through the particular phenomenology of Edmund Husserl or any of its movements that came after Bernard. Rather, I regard his phenomenological tendencies in a vein similar to Goethe’s. See David Seamon and Arthur Zajonc, eds., Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 76 Bernard, Introduction, 192–193; 110. 77 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Nature [A Fragment by Georg Christoph Tobler],” in Goethe: Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3.

 

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true and natural laws.”78 Situated within the context of romanticism, Goethe’s works

illustrate the principles of unity between man and nature. His scientific endeavors

likewise present a “subject-oriented aesthetics” that focuses on self-understanding and

one’s experience of nature.79 Unlike the more idealistic Naturphilosophie of Schelling or

Fichte, however, Goethe followed a method that centered on the tenets of observation and

experiment. In fact, Reino Virtanen conjectures that “Goethe could recommend himself

to Bernard by virtue of being a scientist and not merely a speculative thinker.”80 Indeed,

in referencing Goethe, Bernard is able to articulate a pre-existing framework for readers

to comprehend the consistency between his own romantic idealism and empirical

methodology.

Early in his Introduction, Bernard explains his own understanding of expérience

through Goethe, noting that, “L’expérience, suivant l’expression de Goethe, devient alors

le seule médiatrice entre l’objectif et le subjectif, c’est-à-dire entre le savant et les

phénomènes qui l’environnent” (“Experiment, then, according to Goethe’s expression,

becomes the one mediator between the objective and the subjective, that is to say,

                                                        78 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner (Princeton, Princetion University Press, 1989), 316. 79 Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., “Introduction: The Age of Reflection,” Romanticism and the Sciences (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2. For more on Goethe’s scientific proclivities, see, e.g., Frederick Amrine, Francis J. Zucker, and Harvey Wheeler, eds. Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1987); Henry Borcroft, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way toward a Science of Conscious Participation in Nature (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1996); Karl J. Fink, Goethe’s History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science, trans. W. Lindeman (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1988). 80 Reino Virtanen, Claude Bernard and his Place, 43.

 

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between the man of science and the phenomena which surround him”).81 Referring here

to Goethe’s essay, “Experiment as Mediator between Subject and Object,”82 Bernard

recognizes the inescapably individual aspects and investments of scientific inquiry. What

is more, the nature of this mediation between object and subject is decidedly aesthetic,

visible most starkly in Goethe’s Theory of Colors where he instituted an experiential

method for investigating the properties, manifestations, and effects of colors.83 Dennis

Sepper proclaims Goethe’s approach in this text as a “comprehensive science in

aisthesis.”84 Indeed, his subject-oriented aesthetics begins at the site of sensory

perception, or aisthesis, as a physiological category. But his mode of perception also

encompasses complex and inextricable experiential components of sensation such as

emotion and intellect. Goethe thus writes of color:

The eye sees no form, inasmuch as light, shade, and colour together constitute that which our vision distinguishes object from object, and the parts of an object from each other. From these three, light, shade and color, we construct the visible world, and thus, at the same time, make painting possible, an art which has the power of producing on a flat surface a much more perfect visible world than the actual one can be.85

Our ability for sensory perception and experience thus unveils simultaneously the

possibility of a visible material world created in nature and a world that can be created

                                                        81 Claude Bernard, Introduction, 55; 31. 82 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject,” in Goethe: Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 11–17. 83 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colors, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1970). This significant work presents an exploration of the phenomena of color that considers the greater wholeness between characteristics of colors and the perception and experience of them. 84 Dennis Sepper, “Goethe, Colour and the Science of Seeing,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Cunningham and Jardine, 195. 85 Goethe, Theory of Colors, lii–liii.

 

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through art, or as Goethe noted earlier “created by men following true and natural laws.”

The creative idea in nature and in art is thus one and the same.

The aesthetic proclivities in Bernard’s oeuvre follow a similar framework, and his

Cahier Rouge provides a medium wherein readers can encounter them in their unedited

and contradictory variations. Whereas elsewhere he attributed the artistic associations of

Nature to Goethe, here he proclaims so himself:

Nos règles de perspective, etc., l’art, etc., est dans notre esprit comme dans toute la nature. Ainsi, sur les ailes de l’argus, sur les ailes du paon, il y a des dessins avec des ombres portées, avec des vues perspectives comme celles que nous avons. La nature est un artiste. Our rules of perspective, etc., art, etc., are in the mind, as in the whole of nature. Thus on the wings of the argus, on the wings of the peacock, etc. there are designs with projected shadows, with perspective senses, such as we have. Nature is an artist.86

Like Goethe, Bernard situates “nos règles de perspective” (“our rules of perspective”),

our ability to perceive and understand, and the facility to produce “art” within the same

plane of existence. It is extremely important to note here that art, for Bernard, does not

merely provide a ready comparison for explaining the preconceived, vitalist organogenic

law. More notably, the conception of art as an expressive form and as a category of

perception is essential to understanding the “organic tradition” of life at its most basic

level. Art is part and parcel of the epistemology of natural knowledge. As such, the wings

of an argus or a peacock are themselves bearers of “ombres portées” (“projected

shadows”), of “vues perspectives” (“perspective senses”). No longer concerned simply

with the determination of mechanical physiological processes, the Cartesian separation of

consciousness from nature no longer holds. It follows that the experiences that create the

                                                        86 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 141; 82.

 

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possibility for science also create the possibility for art. Nature, it need be remembered, is

not compared to an artist; Nature is an artist. The natural systems of the body thus

necessarily correspond with the scientific and philosophical systems used to study them.

Bernard’s aesthetic expérience of physiological inquiry is as much an experiment on a

natural being as it is an experience in being part of nature and its creative whole.

The Aesthetics of Laboratory Inscription:

Bernard’s laboratory notebook presents to readers a “comprehensive science of

aisthesis” in its own right. It bears to readers the complex dynamic of his laboratory

expérience, ranging from direct sensations of procedural actions and observations to

physical perceptions and imaginative reflections on the experiment and on the meaning of

physiological function itself. On the first of November 1850 Bernard notes, in his Cahier,

the occurrence of endosmosis, the inward movement of fluid across a membrane, in

rabbits that he injected with potassium prussiate:

Sur un lapin, j’ai injecté du prussiate de potasse dans le péritoine. Au bout de très peu de temps, 10 minutes environ, j’ai fait pisser le lapin et j’ai trouvé que son urine contentait de prussiate. Cela était le fait d’une endosmose, car sur un autre lapin mort depuis deux jours j’ai fait la même expérience et j’ai vu que, au bout de très peu de temps aussi, le prussiate de potasse était passé dans l’urine. C’était bien là évidemment par endosmose purement et simplement. Il y a une même marche de l’esprit dans toutes les productions de l’esprit humain. Partout, en musique, peinture, discours de toute espèce, science et arts, il y a un même principe pour présenter les objets. C’est cette partie qui constitue l’artiste : 1. Il y a un ensemble, une harmonie générale, un but vers lequel toutes les parties

convergent. 2. Chacune des parties pourrait aussi à la rigueur constituer un même petit tout

également harmonisé. Cours sur le sentiment de l’Art.—Partout il existe, même dans les sciences. L’Art des sciences, considérées dans leur exposition. I injected potassium prussiate in the peritoneum of a rabbit; after a very short time, about ten minutes, I made the rabbit micturate and found that its urine

 

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contained prussiate. This was a phenomenon of endosmosis because I carried out the same experiment on another rabbit two days after death, and I saw that at the end of a very short time also, the prussiate of potassium had passed into the urine. This was most evidently by endosmosis pure and simple. The mind moves along the same path in the productions of the human mind. Everywhere, in music, painting, oratory of all kinds, sciences and arts, there is a similar principle for presenting the objects. It is this aspect that constitutes the artist. 1. There is an ensemble, a general harmony, a goal toward which all aspects

converge. 2. Each of the aspects could thus also, strictly speaking, constitute a similar

small, equally harmonious entity. A lecture series on artistic feeling. It exists everywhere, even in the sciences. The art of the sciences, considered in their exposition.87

Bernard begins by recounting his specific actions during this experiment: “j’ai injecté”

(“I injected”), “j’ai fait” (“I made”), and “j’ai vu” (“I saw”). He then draws a parallel

between the specificity of physiological function and the nature of the human mind,

turning from the direct and empirical bodily engagement with objects of experimentation

to the productions of the artist. Through his parallel between artistic production and

endosmosis, Bernard’s experimental framework extends out of the animal body under

analysis and even the sphere of scientific reasoning to broach the realm of artistic

process. He finds himself faced again with “un même principe” (“a similar principle”)

uniting art and nature, “un ensemble, une harmonie générale, un but vers lequel toutes les

parties convergent” (“an ensemble, a general harmony, a goal toward which all aspects

converge”). The principles that determine his estimation of art and the artistic process are

bound to his findings in physiology. For Bernard, art is implicated within the scientific

enterprise. Artistic feeling exists “partout” (“everywhere”); it is the creative force in art

and in nature.

                                                        87 Ibid., 37; 6.

 

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Bernard’s seamless movement in thought from empiricism to abstraction and vice

versa evidences the convergence of concrete and abstract that is intrinsic to laboratory

expérience. Moreover, his particular choice of the word “ensemble” captures the dynamic

form of the assembled whole of life. First, Bernard’s use of “ensemble” captures his

conception of a harmonious relation between living parts and the whole, both within and

without the organism (an organ in relation to the body and the body in relation to other

productions of nature or in the production of art). Second, it implies simultaneity of

function; the creative functions of life signify a dynamic assemblage that exists at once in

art and in nature. He writes again:

En effet, le caractère de chaque chose est dans cet ensemble qui, on pourrait le dire, n’a pas de substratum matériel déterminé et qui se résume par l’expression des appareils d’autant plus parfaits qu’on les considère dans un organisme plus élevé; c’est, pour ainsi dire, l’âme de la chose. Il y aurait beaucoup à dire sur cette espèce d’idéalité de la matière qui existe, puisque c’est là ce que l’artiste cherche et trouve parfois. Cela n’est nulle part, car on peut le trouver et le placer dans divers points. C’est peut-être le beau dans l’art et la nature. In fact the character of everything is in this ensemble which, one might say, has no determined material substratum, and which is expressed by the activity of parts which are all the more perfect as they are observed in a higher organism. This is so to speak the soul of the thing. There would be much to be said about this kind of ideality of the matter that exists, since it is there that the artist searches and sometimes finds. It is in no single place, because it can be found and located in many places. It is perhaps the beauty in art and in nature.88

Bernard thus arrives at “l’âme” (“the soul”) of the thing, a stark contrast to the material,

fetid and throbbing ground of life. This “espèce d’idéalité de la matière” (“kind of

ideality of the matter”) operates unconsciously, has no “substratum matériel” (“material

substratum”), and is expressed by parts “d’autant plus parfaits” (“all the more perfect”) in

that they cannot be rendered visible by materialism. What is more, it is from this

                                                        88 Ibid., 99; 54.

 

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intangible ideality that he derives a concept of “le beau” (“beauty,”) thereby entering the

realm of aesthetic taste. Bernard’s derivation of beauty, however, is decidedly distinct

from that of Kant, who regards beauty as a judgment of form divorced from any actual

objective property of the thing deemed beautiful. Instead, we once again find his

sentiments akin to Goethe’s, for whom “the beautiful is a manifestation of secret laws of

nature, which, without its presence, would never have been revealed.”89 Indeed, for

Bernard as well, nature and art manifest and emerge from an unknowable, harmonizing

living principle. He notes again in the Cahier:

On dit: voilà une belle création, une inspiration. Un artiste ne sait jamais comme il arrive aux choses. De même, un savant ne sait pas comment il trouve les choses. Mais une fois trouvées, on raisonne et on applique; mais il faut le point de départ, il faut trouver et c’est là qu’on ne sait plus, car il faut toujours des prémises et elles sont inconnues. One says: that is a beautiful creation, an inspiration. An artist never knows how he arrives at things—just as a scientist does not know how he discovers things. But once found, one rationalizes and applies. But the starting point is necessary; invention is necessary, and it is this that is no longer known, for premises are always necessary and they are unknown.90

Indeed, the underlying precepts for artistic creation and those of scientific discovery are

identical. Cognitive perception in experimentation thus constitutes more than mere

observation, rationalization and application; in addition to the processes of sensation and

intellect that define empirical inquiry, Bernard introduces a non-empirical factor:

premises that are unknown. Describing, in his Introduction, the nature of these premises,

Bernard likewise asserts: “Dans la recherche de la vérité, au moyen de cette méthode, le

sentiment a toujours l’initiative, il engendra l’idée à priori ou l’intuition; la raison ou les

                                                        89 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (London: Macmillan & co., 1906), 171. 90 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 135; 78.

 

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raisonnement développe ensuite l’idée et déduit ses conséquences logiques” (“In the

search for truth by means of this method, feeling always takes the lead, it begets the a

priori idea or intuition; reason or reasoning develops the idea and deduces its logical

consequences”).91 The a priori idea stems from sentiment; the root of scientific inquiry is

intuition and emotion, not intellect. In turning to “premises,” Bernard draws attention to

the nonsensory components of scientific knowledge.

Bernard does not, however, leave the originary “l’âme de la chose” (“soul of the

thing”) in art and science entirely unexplained. He posits limitations of sensory

perception as the reason behind its decisive unknowability:

On ne peut pas avoir une âme, une intelligence spéciale dans chaque organe. Cependant, on voit une intelligence qui agit librement, c’est-à-dire avec choix, en raisonnant, qui est dans l’ensemble, comme la forme générale d’un monument donne une idée qu’on ne saurait trouver dans aucune pierre en particulier, encore moins dans la composition chimique de la pierre. One cannot envisage a soul, a special intelligence, in each organ. Nevertheless, one sees an intelligence that acts freely, that is to say, with choice and with reason, which is within the whole, as a general form of a monument gives an idea that one cannot find in any particular stone, even less in the chemical composition of the stone.92

It is only through an understanding of the whole that any notion of the causality of an

individual part can be derived. Moreover, Bernard here attributes to this causal

intelligence the ability to act “librement, […] avec choix, en raisonnant” (“freely […],

with choice and reason”), deviating from his previously articulated definite “loi

organogénique” (“organogenic law”). He conducts a thought experiment along the same

lines:

                                                        91 Bernard, Introduction, 50; 28. 92 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 69; 32–33.

 

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En supposant qu’un element histologique de notre corps raisonne, il ne pourra avoir aucune notion de la forme de l’ensemble et de l’intelligence qui le gouverne et qui le dirige, mais il devra comprendre qu’une intelligence supérieure le conserve et travaille pour lui. Nous sommes placés dans la même circonstance relativement à l’intelligence totale dont nous avons l’idée comme veillant sur nous, sans pouvoir nous en donner la preuve par nos senses, parce que pour cela il faudrait sortir du monde, comme il faudrait que la cellule sortît du corps pour voir l’ensemble. Il y a dans l’organisme des phénomènes, des facultés qui ne sont la propriété d’aucun corps en particulier, mais de réunion de corps. Supposing that a histological element of our body were able to reason, it would have no notion of the form of the whole and of the intelligence which governs and directs it, but it ought to understand that a superior intelligence preserves and works for it.

We are placed in the same situation, relative to the total intelligence, which we think of as watching over us, without being able to give ourselves proof thereof by our senses, because for that it would be necessary to leave the world, as it would be necessary for the cell to leave the body to see the whole.

There are phenomena and faculties in the organism which are not the property of a single organ in particular but of the assembly of the parts.93

Beginning with a histological element, Bernard situates the dilemma of perception at the

core of metaphysical understandings of life. Were such a physical entity able to reason, it

would still be unable to see and, consequently, to grasp the entire and much bigger

organic self it constitutes. Just as a cell is bound to its milieu and can never really know

itself from without, so too is the organism or human being bound in relation to anything

larger than it. In order to grapple the “des phénomènes, des faculties” (“phenomena and

faculties” in the organism, it follows that one cannot examine a histological unit in

isolation or “aucun corps en particulier” (“a single organ in particular”). Rather, one must

look to the assembly of organic parts. We need keep in mind here that the “reunion de

corps” (“assembly of parts”) refers not to the organization of physiological components

within an organism alone, but also to the position of this assembled organism in relation

                                                        93 Ibid., 123; 70.

 

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to nature that is directed and governed by “l’intelligence totale” (“the total intelligence”).

By highlighting the constraints of perceptibility in studying life, Bernard realizes the

limits of experimental physiology itself. 94

While the physiologist may be able to observe the functioning of an animal’s

vaso-motor system, for instance, situated as he is outside its physical being and can thus

see it in entirety, he is no more equipped than the animal itself to perceive the “general

harmony […] toward which all aspects converge.” We can now fully understand

Bernard’s particular meaning in the earlier noted statement “an observer can never give

facts divorced from his mind.” The mind is the locus of cognitive reasoning but, more

significantly, also of intuition, of the a priori and artistic feeling that “exists everywhere,

even in the sciences.” Bernard’s expériences in physiology are thus doubly aesthetic and

phenomenological. He does not consider an object abstractly and analytically, but rather

understands it through the experience of its sensation and the resulting effects produced

on the imagination.

Insofar as Bernard derives the source of scientific inquiry from a creative idea

and artistic feeling, we can regard the details of his experimental procedures, in both their

performance and inscription, as aesthetic practices in their own right. In fact, it should not

surprise readers that the pages of his Cahier bear instances where Bernard more visibly

performs his artistic inclinations in the form of poetry. Perhaps the best summary of his

ideas on the causality of life, in both content and form, can be regarded in the following

poem:

                                                        94 See Normandin, “Claude Bernard and An Introduction,” 498. I agree with Sebastian Normandin that “one of the most important elements of Bernard’s thinking [is] not his enthusiasm for the value of experiment but his realization of its limits.”

 

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Le matérialisme tue l’art et la poésie, le sentiment. Il faut deux choses, la science et l’art. La raison et le sentiment. Je ne suis pas matérialiste. Je ne suis pas vitaliste non plus. Les vitalistes affirment; les matérialistes affirment en sens contraire. Moi, je dis: je n’affirme rien, je ne sais rien; c’est la vérité, et c’est cette ignorance où je suis qui me permet de faire des hypothèses, de poétiser, de broder sur mon sentiment et suivant ma nature. Materialism kills art and poetry, emotion, etc. Two things are necessary—science and art, reason and emotion, etc. I am not a materialist. I am not a vitalist, either. The vitalists affirm, materialists affirm the opposite. Myself, I say, I affirm nothing. I know nothing. It is the truth, and it is this ignorance in which I find myself that permits me to make hypotheses, to be a poet, to embroider upon my feelings according to my nature.95

Revisting his antagonism to the all-encompassing ideologies of materialism and vitalism,

Bernard avows that he knows “rien” (“nothing”) of life’s causality. “la science et l’art. la

raison et le sentiment” (“Science and art, reason and emotion”), intellect and intuition are

together necessary; the philosophical tenets and the material consequences of his method

are reciprocally determined. He believes in “la vérité” (“the truth”) of an unknowable,

creative premise, in the unavoidable “ignorance” of its real nature. And it is this very

ideality of the matter, the cause of all artistic feeling, of intuition, that gives rise to his

scientific hypotheses and his poetic musings “suivant sa nature” (“according to [his]

nature”). Where previously he chided the litterateur’s adherence to form, here the very

form of poetry captures his central philosophical principles. Yet, Bernard’s physiological

aesthetics is simultaneously subject-oriented and fact-based. His poetic outbursts bring to

mind Goethe’s following assertion: “The world is so great and rich, and life so full of

variety, that you can never want occasions for poems. But they must all be occasioned;

                                                        95 Bernard, Cahier Rouge, 118; 68.

 

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that is to say, reality must give both impulse and material!”96 The occasions for Bernard’s

poetry, the roots of his metaphysical and aesthetic conception of life, are the visceral and

phenomenological undertakings of his laboratory science.

iii . BERNARD’S PHYSIOLOGICAL AESTHETIC

Having thus examined the acclaimed Cahier Rouge, we find ourselves presented

with the varying modalities of laboratory expérience for Claude Bernard. In the pages of

this notebook, we see the listed descriptions of his visceral procedures, fragmented

observations and reflections on experimentation and on physiology in general, and

finally, his more abstract musings on the artistic assembly of life. The laboratory

notebook exposes instantiations of Bernard’s bodily and intellectual investments in the

experimental space. Such a reading of laboratory science eschews any retrospective

examinations of the Cahier as bearer of scientific truth and/or falsehood.97 Nor does it

adopt the sociological imperative in the history of science that focuses on the interactive

creation and acceptance of scientific facts and notions of objectivity within and without

the lab. Instead of focusing on the nature and validity of the facts of experimentation, I

                                                        96 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, quoted in Sir Charles Sherrington, Goethe on Nature and on Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1949), 9. 97 The official annotated text of Bernard’s notebook, published by the Collège de France, for instance, consists of four hundred and twelve end notes by Mirko Grmek, who not only provides additional context for Bernard’s experiments but also informs readers of their accuracy by modern scientific standards. See Bernard, Cahier de notes.

 

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have placed emphasis on the scientist’s own process and experience of laboratory

research.98

In comprehending the processes of scientific representation in the laboratory,

then, one needs to recognize the notebook-writing experimentalist as bringing together

(1) the conditions of experiment, ranging from material spaces and instruments to

conceptual understandings and pre-existing knowledge (2) a sensory discernment of the

experiment undertaken, (3) the scientist’s own “proprioception” as observer and

instigator of the experiment, (4) the knowledge of how to convey these experiences

through language, already informed by the expectations of a scientific community, and

finally (5) the idiosyncratic decisions, reflections and emotions that, on account of the

scientist’s being human, are implicit components of laboratory expérience.

My study of the sentient and affecting entanglements of physiological

experimentation finds itself faced, again and again, with Bernard’s comparisons and

deliberations on art. All scientific practice originates from feeling—“an inspiration”; as a

scientist, Bernard is like “a poet”; he “embroider[s] upon [his] feelings;” nature is artist to

a harmonious assembly of “fine creation[s]”; and our natural “rules of perspective” orient

the minds of science and art alike, enabling them to arrive at “the soul of the thing.”

Bernard’s literary configuration of his laboratory expérience offers art not simply as

metaphor, but rather as an aesthetic template for experimental work. His reflections upon

art demonstrate the creative and emotive components of experimentation.

                                                        98 For a reading similarly focused on the experimenter’s experience of scientific discovery, see the work of David Gooding, as well as Frederic L Holmes, Lavoisier and the Chemistry of Life.

 

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Even though Bernard can be seen to exhibit aesthetic tendencies in a frame

similar to Goethe’s, it is significant to note that he does not completely ascribe to

Goethe’s aesthetic philosophy. He differs most starkly in relation to the latter’s endeavors

in transcendental anatomy, that is, Goethe’s attempts to discover the ideal plan or

archetype for living organisms.99 Bernard expresses his disdain for such attempts in

Introduction: “Il faut admirer sans doute ces vastes horizons entrevus par le génie des

Goethe, Oken, Carus, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Darwin, dans lesquels une conception

générale nous montre tous les êtres vivants comme l’expression de types” (“We must

doubtless admire those great horizons dimly seen by the genius of a Goethe, an Oken, a

Carus, a Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a Darwin, in which a general conception shows us all

living beings as the expression of types”).100 In lieu of such sweeping, harmonious

approaches to life, he asserts that medicine aims to identify and cure morbid conditions.

As such, the goal of the physiologist and physician “comprendra les individualités

comme des cas spéciaux contenus dand la loi générale, et retrouvera là, comme partout,

une generalization harmonique de la variété dans l’unité” (“will learn to understand

individualities as special cases included in a general law, and will discover everywhere,

an harmonious generalization of variety in unity”).101 We are once again presented with

the seeming contradictions of Bernard’s physiological vitalism. On the one hand, he

contemplates the generally creative nature of life but, on the other hand, he is acutely and

necessarily aware of its specificities, in particular, its eventual application to cure an

idiosyncratic morbid condition. As such he can never lose himself to

                                                        99 See Philip F. Rehbock, “Transcendental Anatomy,” in Romanticism and the Sciences, ed. Cunningham and Jardine, 144–60. 100 Bernard, Introduction, 158–159; 91. 101 Ibid., 161; 93 (emphasis added).

 

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transcendentalism.102 Nevertheless, Bernard is able to reconcile the varying threads of his

embroidering science through an empirical phenomenology, his own “comprehensive

science of aesthesis.” The aesthetics of Claude Bernard’s Cahier Rouge range from the

articulation of his own bodily aesthesis to the metonymic extension of organic sensory

units out into a world teeming with artistic creations.

As a key figure in the shift to scientific medicine, the laboratory notebooks of

Claude Bernard elucidate the significant influence of aesthetics upon the experimental

core of experiential medicine. Yet where Claude Bernard discovered, through the

performance of his empirical work, a more abstract, general harmony between the

processes of art and nature, the results of his and other physical inquires spurred an

empirical turn in literary and aesthetic philosophies of the time. Most notably, Émile

Zola, set out to give the novelist of naturalism the decisiveness of scientific truth in his

essay “Le roman expérimentale” (“The Experimental Novel”), where he draws on

Bernard’s Introduction to such a great extent that he borrows entire sentences, replacing

only the word “doctor” for “novelist.” The next chapter focuses on a similar

philosophical turn by science writer and evolutionist Grant Allen who, most significantly

for the purposes of this dissertation, coined the term “Physiological Aesthetics.” In so

doing, I move from the private world of Bernard’s laboratory life to the public and much

published arena of Allen’s sensory poetics.

                                                        102 Nils Rolls-Hansen, “Critical Teleology: Immanuel Kant and Claude Bernard on the Limitations of Experimental Biology,” Journal of the History of Biology 9 (1976): 59–91.

 

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Chapter 3: THE PHYSIOLOGICAL POETICS OF GRANT ALLEN

A prolific novelist, essayist, and man of letters in the latter half of the nineteenth

century, the abundant writings of Grant Allen (1848–1899) have justifiably earned him

the label of “The Busiest Man in England.”1 Indeed, readers of publications such as

Cornhill Magazine, The Fortnightly Review, Gentleman’s Magazine, or The St. James

Gazette were sure to encounter Allen’s regular columns on nature, science, home décor,

art, and poetry. Well-versed in such a varying array of subjects, Allen’s work offers a

configuration of nineteenth-century aesthetics which brings into conversation the ideas of

physiology, evolutionism, popular science, literary criticism, and creative writing,

particularly poetry. Allen began his writing career as a man of science, publishing a

treatise entitled Physiological Aesthetics in 1877. In this work, he presented a decidedly

physiological basis for aesthetic feeling. His purely scientific venture, however, did not

achieve very much success, and he turned to popular science writing and fiction to earn a

living, a career change that proved to be immensely fruitful. In “the age of the feuilleton,

of space that had to be filled,”2 Allen was never shy to voice his bold and frequently

controversial political opinions. What is more, his point of view remained unequivocally

scientific.

Whether writing articles on natural history and popular science for Cornhill

Magazine or a story for The Cosmopolitan, Allen’s stance was decidedly evolutionary:

                                                        1 Peter Morton, The Busiest Man in England: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2 William Greenslade, and Terence Rodgers, eds. Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle (London: Ashgate, 2005), 47.

 

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Whether in the dissection of a simple flower or of an elaborated creed, Allen, as a consistent evolutionist, applied the same method. The critical coolness which he brought to analysis of things held dear and sacred was not due to wantonness, nor to disregard of susceptibilities, but to the unshakable conviction that the methods of science are universal in their application. Hence things possessed for him a reality which made him scarcely tolerant of the ‘muzzy’ philosophies wherewith men confuse themselves and their fellows.3

In his universal application of “the methods of science,” Allen left no genre untouched. In

addition to his scientific writings, popular essays, short stories and novels, Allen was an

enthusiastic poet. His poems were published in various magazines, and he also published

a single book of verse, The Lower Slopes (1894), which bears the aesthetic qualities he

discussed in his 1877 treatise.4 The combined corpus of his prose and poetry provide a

unique opportunity to trace the trajectory of Allen’s particular brand of empirical

aesthetic philosophy from literary theory to poetic practice.

The empiricist turn in nineteenth-century British poetry, however, began with the

era of Romanticism.5 For the romantic poets, while it facilitated a transcendent aesthetic

                                                        3 Edward Clodd, Grant Allen: A Memoir (London: Grant Richards, 1900), 195–196. 4 Grant Allen, The Lower Slopes: Reminiscences of Excursions Round the Base of Helicon, Undertaken for the Most Part in Early Manhood (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894). 5 My discussion of romantic poetry and science in this essay remains summative and cursory. For more detailed analyses of this relationship, see Andrew Cunningham, and Nicholas Jardine, eds., Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee, and Peter J. Kitson, Literature, Science and Exploration in the Romantic Era: Bodies of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Noah Heringman, ed., Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002); Noel Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Maureen L. McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

 

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experience, poetry was inextricably intertwined with the facts of natural knowledge. In

his introduction to Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry, Noel Jackson points out

that romantic poets were “working from a contemporary understanding of aesthetics as a

science of aisthesis or sensuous experience.”6 Such a conception of aesthetics was

introduced in the late eighteenth century by the German philosopher Alexander Gottlied

Baumgarten (1714–1762). Baumgatern in fact founded the modern theory of aesthetics in

his work Aesthetica, observing that “Aesthetics (as the theory of the liberal arts, as

inferior cognition, as the art of beautiful thinking and as the art of thinking analogous to

reason) is the science of sensual cognition.”7 As the science of sensuous knowledge,

aesthetics is empirical in nature. It was then understood as the systematic enterprise by

which knowledge was produced, organized, and perceived through the senses. For poetry

in the age of romanticism, this meant the creation, through artistic language, of “new

compositions of feeling.”8 Epitomizing the romantic relation between science and poetry

is the oft-quoted statement by William Wordsworth (1770–1850) from his “Preface” to

Lyrical Ballads that “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the

impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.”9 The romantic poet,

drawing upon his/her own accumulated, perceived knowledge through faculties of

sensory cognition, crafted language to appeal to the readers’ faculties. In so doing, the

                                                        6 Jackson, Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry, 1. 7 Alexander Baumgarten, quoted in Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 7. 8 Wordsworth, “Letter to John Wilson written June 1802”, English Romantic Writers, ed. David Perkins (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967), 351. 9 William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” in Wordsworth’s Literary Criticism, ed. W. J. B. Owen (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 80–81.

 

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poet aimed not only to trigger similar cognitive and emotional experiences in readers, but

also to enable novel experiences that transcended the limitations of nature itself.

The rise of scientific physiology in the latter half of the nineteenth-century added

an as yet unimagined material reality to the science of sensual cognition. Many theories

of aesthetics at the time accordingly turned away from the romantic sense of natural

transcendence to the material ground of visceral life. It was no longer enough for art to

harness knowledge and sensation in the creation of new aesthetic feelings; but aesthetic

sensibility itself became a subject of immediate scientific scrutiny. One could now

explain, by referring to the physiological and nervous structure of the eye or ear, the

processes by which pleasure and pain came to be experienced. “Whereas the predominant

eighteenth-century model of poetic transmission privileged the mind’s interpretive role

(the brain acting as mediator between the poem and the individual), nineteenth-century

readers gave credit to the body as an arbiter of poetic truths.”10 In fact, Robert Michael

Brain regards aesthetics as “a critical third term” which mediated between art and

physiology at the end of the nineteenth century.11 Aesthetics was a sensory discourse and

the site of aesthetic experience was the physical body itself. Indeed, “whether we look to

Alfred Tennyson’s ‘poetics of sensation,’ the midcentury ‘Spasmodic’ phenomenon, or

the so-called fleshly school of the 1870s, Victorian poetry demands to be read as

physiologically inspired: rhythms that pulse in the body, a rhetoric of sensation that

                                                        10 Jason R. Rudy, Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2009), 3. 11 Robert Michael Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Aesthetic Avant-Gardes Circa 1900.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 39, no. 3 (September 2008): 394.

 

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readers might feel compelled to experience.”12 Added to the mix of this physiologically

inclined poetics were the positivist doctrines of Lamarck, Cuvier, and Darwin,

inculcating broader and more varied theories of creation quite distinct from religious

teachings.13 Suffice it to say that, in the Victorian era, nature, previously romantic and

metaphysical, became subject to materialist paradigms of knowledge.

The literary endeavors of Grant Allen emerge out of such Victorian materialist

paradigms. While Allen was not widely acclaimed as a poet, his vast poetical endeavors,

as well as his assertion in Physiological Aesthetics that poetry is “the absolutely ideal and

representative form of aesthetic gratification”14 cry out for analysis. In this chapter, I

attempt to do just that. My use of the term “Sensory Poetics” in relation to Grant Allen

speaks to Jason Rudy’s conception of a Victorian “physiological poetics.” Rudy, adopts

the term to refer specifically to “the metrical, rhythmic, and sonic effects that, along with

other formal poetics features, were increasingly imagined as carrying physiological

truths,”15 I use “sensory poetics” to refer more holistically to the physiologically and

sensibly experienced dynamics of poetic production, appreciation, and criticism. Sensory

poetics, by my definition, is a consideration of poetics as a physiological and experiential

science.

I begin by examining the philosophical underpinnings and intricacies of Allen’s

physiological and evolutionary aesthetic. I then turn to an examination of the particularly

                                                        12 Jackson, Science and Sensation, 2. 13 Alan Rauch, “Poetry and Science,” in A Companion to Victorian Poetry, eds. Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Antony H. Harrison, (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 479; see also Daniel Brown, “Victorial Poetry and Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 137–159. 14 Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King, 1877), 133. 15 Rudy, Electric Meters, 3.

 

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poetic turn in his philosophy. Allen’s poetry positively challenges the seemingly “muzzy”

transcendentalism of romanticism. In fact, I regard Allen’s conception of poetry as

corresponding almost entirely with that of Baumgarten: “By poem we mean a perfect

sensate discourse, by poetics the body of rules to which a poem conforms, by

philosophical poetics the science of poetics, by poetry the state of composing a poem, and

by poet the man who enjoys that state.”16 For Allen, the poetic endeavor is likewise

positivist, a discourse of the senses operating through language. Allen posits

physiological aesthetic criticism as a scientific endeavor, without which one cannot grasp

the true nature of poetry.

i . PHYSIOLOGICAL AESTHETICISM

Allen begins Physiological Aesthetics by declaring his attempts to appeal to both

“scientific readers” and “worshippers of art.”17 As such, he “at once exhibits the positive

point of view” and then proceeds “from these elementary principles to the more and more

complex gratifications of natural scenery, music, painting, and poetry.”18 The positive

view residing at the core of his aesthetic philosophy is, as indicated in the title, decidedly

physiological. Allen accordingly places aesthetic feelings within the arena of

physiologically determined pleasures and pains. He begins his analysis with a section on

the pleasures and pains in general “as are commonly referred to a purely bodily origin,

                                                        16 Alexander G. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, trans. Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 39. 17 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, xiii. 18 Ibid., xiii–ix.

 

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those namely of the five senses and of the general organic and muscular sensibility.”19

Here he derives his theory from the principles lain down by the Scottish Philosopher

Alexander Bain (1818–1903): “States of pleasure are concomitant with an increase, and

states of pain with an abatement, of some, or all, of the vital functions.”20 It follows that

disagreeable actions upon the body, such as the severing of a limb or the action of an

acrid substance upon the nerves of the tongue, cause pain equivalent to the amount of

organic degradation.

As for pleasure, Allen offers readers a variation to Bain’s premise regarding the

“increase” of vital function. Pleasure, for Allen, “is the concomitant of the healthy action

of any or all of the organs or members supplied with afferent cerebro-spinal nerves, to an

extent not exceeding the ordinary powers of reparation possessed by the system.”21 In

other words, physiological pleasure derives from the healthy functioning of an individual,

a condition of the body which enables “free play to all the activities of the system,

nervous and muscular,—as in taking a morning walk on a sunny day in spring, after a

good night’s rest, and a hearty breakfast.”22 Pleasure is incurred from the apt stimulation

of nervous centers that are already well rested and does not exhaust the organism to an

irreparable degree. Rather, it ensures the healthy functioning of an individual.

Distinct from these purely life-preserving feelings of pain and pleasure, the

aesthetic feelings emerge when an individual with fully nourished organs and nervous

structure is able to engage in activities of leisure. Active involvement in such exercises,

                                                        19 Ibid., 6. 20 Alexander Bain, Mental and Moral Science: A Compendium of Psychology and Ethics (London: Longmans, Green, & co., 1868), 75. 21 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 21. 22 Ibid.

 

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such as participating in a sport, is termed by Allen as Play. More significantly, it is

passive involvement, such as the sensory observation of art and nature and its resulting

appreciation, that truly gives rise to aesthetic feelings. Allen considers “Aesthetic

Feelings as something noble and elevated, because they are not distinctly traceable to any

life-serving function.”23 Such feelings are distinct from the pleasure arising from sensory

“life-serving functions,” such as the consumption of food or the reproductive faculties.

He notes of the sense of smell, for instance, “it is true that those odours which have

obvious reference to vital organic processes (such as the smell of roast meats and fish, on

the one hand, or of decaying animal matter on the other) have no pretence of reaching the

aesthetic standard of disinterestedness.”24 In lieu of such smells of meats and flesh, he

offers the smell of a flower, a sensory experience leading instead to pleasurable feelings

and emotions. The “noble and elevated” nature of aesthetic pleasure or pain thus derives

from the fact that the sensations of pleasure and pain, while themselves physiological, do

not meet a physiological end; rather, these visceral sensations produce a more exalted and

refined sentiment. They are disinterested.

Allen’s definition of the aesthetic standard using the term “disinterestedness” is

quite distinct from the Kantian sense typically associated with aesthetic judgment. Both

Kant and Allen would agree that aesthetic pleasure is disinterested in that it emerges not

from a place of desire for a particular object, nor does it inculcate such a desire. Yet

while Kant regards aesthetic judgments of taste solely in “reference to the subject’s

                                                        23 Ibid., 39. 24 Ibid., 83.

 

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feelings,”25 in other words, as a judgment ultimately unaffiliated with the faculties of

perception which made it possible, Allen considers “Aesthetic Feelings [as] the

cumulative effect of many infinitesimal physiological factors.”26 And while aesthetic

reflection certainly leads to nobler, finer feelings, these emotions are, for Allen, a

condition of sensory experience and the “exercise of attention, a faculty of our

intellectual and volitional nature.” They are, as such, “too little emotional [in origin] to be

referred to a purely internal origin.”27 Unlike Kant’s “merely subjective (aesthetic)

judging of the object,”28 Allen’s physiological aesthetic pleasure is a consciously derived

sensory experience. Allen’s philosophy thus resides more firmly in the lowly arena of

what Kant refers to as an empirical “judgment of sense,” always “a cognitive judgment

about the object […] that presupposes a concept of the object” and can as such never be a

judgment of aesthetic taste.29

Allen’s aesthetic philosophy can nonetheless be legitimately understood when

considering the theories of Kant’s contemporary Baumgarten—an empirical aestheticism

much more in concordance with the “infinitesimal physiological factors” Allen declares

essential to aesthetic perception. The emotional faculties harnessed through aesthetic

appreciation are, for both Baumgarten and Allen, a result purely of the disinterested and

attentive utilization of one’s senses towards an object. Allen draws most decisively here

on Bain: “The productions of Fine Art appear to be distinguished by these

characteristics:—(1) They have pleasure for their immediate end; (2) they have no

                                                        25 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 63. 26 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 43. 27 Ibid., 39. 28 Kant, Critique, 62. 29 Ibid., 415.

 

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disagreeable accompaniments; (3) their enjoyment is not restricted to one or a few

persons.”30 Allen’s theory of disinterested aesthetic feelings situates pleasure, and only

pleasure, as both the immediate end and perception of art.

Aesthetic sense:

In his evaluation of sensory aesthetics, Allen presents to readers a hierarchy of the

senses which proceeds as follows in descending order: sight; hearing; touch; smell; and

taste. By placing sight and hearing at the height of his aesthetic scale, he complies with

the traditional and classical hierarchy of the senses laid out since the classical era.31

Aristotle, in fact, begins the first book of his Metaphysics by stressing the significance of

sight “for it is not only with a view to action but also when we have no intention to do

anything that we choose, so to speak, sight rather than all the others. And the reason for

this is that sight is the sense that especially produces cognition in us and reveals many

distinguishing features of things.”32 It is thus on account of its immediately perceptual

and cognitive value that sight finds itself as the primary sense, “not only for practical

purposes,” in other words, Allen’s “life-serving functions,” “but also when not intent on

doing anything,” that is, when engaged in play or aesthetic creation/appreciation. Sight,

                                                        30 Alexander Bain, Mental Science: A Compendium of Psychology, and the History of Philosophy (New York: D. Appleton, 1868), 290. 31 See Robert Jütte, “Classifications: The Heirarchy of the Senses,” in A History of the Senses: From Antiquity to Cyberspace, trans. James Lynn (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 54–71. For further analyses of the history of the senses, see David Howes, Empire of the Senses: the Sensual Culture Reader (London: Berg, 2004); Mark Michael Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Mark M. Smith, Sensory History: An Introduction (London: Berg, 2007). 32 Aristotle, The Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (New York: Penguin, 2004), 4.

 

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over all other senses, is most directly associated with the intellect. It sets the “aesthetic

standard of disinterestedness.”

Allen’s hierarchy of the senses derives at its core from “physiological factors.” In

preference to the cognitive, aesthetic, or use value of each sense, he stresses the structure

of their physiology: “For the most part, large masses of gustatory and olfactory nerves are

stimulated at once; and their connected centres afford us identical factors of

consciousness. But every single fibre of the optic and auditory nerves seems capable of

differential stimulation, and yields us a distinct and separate impression.”33 What

Aristotle thus termed the ability to make “many distinguishing features of things,” is now

understood as a direct outcome of the complex nature of optic and auditory nerves.

“Accordingly, they, above all others, are subjects for that minute intellectual

discrimination which we recognized as one of the marks that differentiate the Aesthetic

Feelings from other pleasures and pains.”34 The other senses are decidedly less

intellectual.

Where Allen varies in his sensory heirarchy, however, is in his appointment of

touch as intermediary between taste and smell at the bottom and hearing and sight and the

top of his scale. Touch has traditionally held a particularly contentious position in the

ranking of the senses. According to Robert Jütte, while it historically ranks “fifth in order

of merit” based on cognitive value, “from the point of view of natural aptitude the sense

of touch merited priority.”35 For Aristotle, Avicenna, and Aquinas, touch held a primary

position on a scale that considered its significance for the development of humans and

                                                        33 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 97. 34 Ibid., 100. 35 Jütte, “Classifications,” 69.

 

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other sensitive life forms. Touch nonetheless found itself ill fated in its connection with

the sexual urge and was affiliated with sinful behavior from the Middle Ages onwards.

For Allen, touch lies neither at the top of the scale nor at the bottom but is situated

securely in its very middle. “Touch is the first of the senses, in the order of examination

which we have adopted, to afford us feelings which may be unreservedly classed as

aesthetic, in the actuality as well as in the idea.”36

Taste, at the bottom of Allen’s hierarchy, is least disinterested on account of its

direct association with the life-preserving function of eating. Smell is the most purely

emotional, and as such the least intellectual. “We may occasionally employ it to

discriminate the contents of a bottle or the nature of a doubtful substance; but for the

most part it yields us relatively large emotional waves, and relatively small intellectual

information.”37 Unlike taste and smell, which lie below it, touch enters most directly into

the creation of art, yielding feelings of both an emotional and intellectual nature beyond

mere physiological pleasure and pain, which are the sole arena of the olfactory and

gustatory senses.

As for the association of touch with sinfulness, Allen does not address it directly,

stating only the following of sexual feelings in relation to poetry: “Closely bound up as it

is with our most powerful complex emotions, it yet defies introduction into Poetry,

because the feelings aroused, though they may be pleasurable, obviously fall short of

aesthetic disinterestedness.”38 The removal of sexual feelings from Allen’s aesthetic

considerations does not then depend on an association with sinfulness but has more to do

                                                        36 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 89. 37 Ibid., 83. 38 Ibid., 261.

 

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with individual desire and interest. It follows yet again that the pleasure that defines

aesthetic experience, albeit sensual, operates on a level of disinterest. Such is the

differentia of aesthetics.

Naturally selected aesthetics:

Having laid out his theory of disinterested aesthetic pleasure in both active play

and passive appreciation of an artistic object, Allen finally turns to the creation of art:

“when we arrange certain colours or musical notes in certain orders, expressly for the

pleasure which their perception will give us, we call the result, Art. So that what Play is

to the active faculties, Art and Aesthetic Pleasures are to the passive.”39 Even though the

making of art itself is an active engagement, in its creation through the paintbrush or pen,

for instance, Allen stresses its association with the passive faculties. For him, art is

merely the means by which “we arrange […] expressly for the pleasure which their

perception will give us.” The motivation for art is subjective, it is a desire for personal

perceptive pleasure, pleasure that an individual can knowingly derive. What is more, art

occurs not in its doing, that is, in the process of arranging “certain colours or musical

notes”; instead, “we call the result, Art.” To sum up, art is a product of coordination

spurred by the passive aesthetic sense that already exists on account of one’s nervous

composition.

The relationship between art and nature manifests itself similarly through the

physiological aesthetic: “Finally, just as pleasure in the muscular sense is not necessarily

limited to Play, but may incidentally arise from the ordinary exercise of the limbs, so

                                                        39 Ibid., 37.

 

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pleasure in the higher senses is not necessarily limited to Art or to consciously-sought

aesthetic objects, but may incidentally arise in the contemplation of nature generally.”40

Art and nature both react upon the senses to produce nervous harmony and as such,

aesthetic pleasure. Yet where the pleasure inculcated by the former is deliberate, insofar

that it is created “expressly” for aesthetic effect, the pleasure derived from nature is

incidental. Nature, it follows, does not bear the express function of inculcating such

pleasure. Art and nature do not share a romantic or transcendental creative force. The

former is a manifestation of physiological aesthetic impulses, as art is meant to produce

aesthetic pleasure in its perception, and the latter exists around us “generally,” capable of

producing similar physiological effects in its contemplation.

Yet even though nature may spur aesthetic pleasure incidentally, the aesthetic

sense derived from one’s nervous composition is itself a product of nature, and

particularly that of natural selection. We are, first of all, “perpetually impelled by our

fully-fed nervous centres to be employed upon some kind of occupation,”41 ranging from

life-sustaining actions to the comparatively useless work of play and art. When

elucidating the essential role played by the senses in determining aesthetic pleasure,

Allen stresses the naturally selected aspects of each. He writes, for instance, of the sense

of taste:

the pure gustatory nerve has been specially modified in the course of our development so as to be chemically stimulated by certain absorbed substances which do not equally effect the other nerves. […] The modification is of such a nature as to make the nerve be healthily stimulated by those objects which are called sweet, and destructively attacked by those objects which are called bitter.42

                                                        40 Ibid., 37. 41 Ibid., 218. 42 Ibid., 69.

 

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The special modification of the gustatory nerve, as discussed here, is deemed a matter of

health. Those objects that are beneficial for the individual are associated with sweet

sensations and vice versa. Allen elucidates further that “we might expect the same natural

selection which added the development of a taste for sugar to aid the development of a

converse affection of the tongue by the common vegetable poisons.”43 In line with this

advantageous development in the nervous composition of humans, Allen notes a natural

“consensus of the organs”44 that has likewise matured over time. Such a consensus is one

that “is necessary between the whole fauna and flora in order that animal and vegetable

life may each be kept up.”45 The articulated physiological consensus of the individual

being stresses a unity of purpose between flora and fauna—life. It is not only, however,

life preserving functions that have been favored in the sensory development of human

beings. The very tastes, smells, sounds, sights, and textures that best suit human existence

manifest in the naturally selected response of sensory pleasure. And these pleasures and

pains compose the aesthetic sense. In other words, the aesthetic sense, as an outcome of

selected sensory pleasure and pains, is a physiological outcome of natural selection.

Even so, Allen acknowledges the presence of anomalies in the all-encompassing

aesthetic sense he affirms. “If it be objected that some poisonous gases, such as carbonic

oxide, do not smell disagreeable,” he states, “the answer must be that this is one of those

failures of adaptation—those incomplete establishments of the consensus, which must

always be expected in all imperfect organisms.”46 Allen draws again from the framework

                                                        43 Ibid., 72. 44 Ibid., 70. 45 Ibid., 73. 46 Ibid., 82.

 

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of Darwinian natural selection as he draws an answer that “must be.”47 What is more, in

addition to such inconsistencies in natural selection, which result in failures to detect

through displeasure the presence of harmful natural objects, objects that do not readily

exist in nature but are manufactured do not register aesthetically. “Of course the organism

can only be expected to adapt itself to those agencies in the environment which most

frequently and directly affect it. So that we need never concern ourselves in this inquiry

with those sapid or odorous bodies which are mere laboratory products, but only with

those which occur spontaneously in nature.”48

Determined by the pleasure educed and selected from agencies within a natural

environment, what then is the purpose of art in relation to nature? Allen reveals his

opinions regarding the role of art in relation to nature most starkly in his criticism of

perfumery. Perfumery fails to be aesthetic as its “artificial essences never yield the same

pure and delicious fragrance as natural flowers and fruits. There is always a sickly tinge

about their sweetness.” 49 Perfumery can thus neither evoke the same pleasurable

sensations that arise from the perception of nature nor refine them further: “This inability

to compete with nature is a fatal objection to perfumery as the basis of a fine art. It is

characteristic of the true aesthetic arts generally that they are more beautiful that nature,

because they gather together all that is lovely, and omit all that is low, discordant or

ugly.”50 The purpose of art then is not simply to imitate nature. Rather in providing

                                                        47 In his preface, Allen states his intention in writing as one to solve the mystery Darwin sees in determining the physiological/natural basis for conceptions of the beautiful. See also Charles Darwin, “Difficulties on Theory,” in The Origin of Species (1959; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 140–168. 48 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 83. 49 Ibid., 87. 50 Ibid.

 

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sensations that are composed of “all that is lovely” and removing “all that is low,

discordant or ugly,” art provides access to an aesthetic pleasure that transcends natural

perception. Allen’s assertion here certainly echoes the romantic sentiments of Percy

Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) for whom poetry “creates anew the universe, after it has

been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration,”51

and Wordsworth who wrote that “a Poet ought … to a certain degree, to rectify men's

feelings, to give them new compositions of feelings, to render their feelings more sane,

pure, and permanent, in short, more consonant to nature, that is, to eternal nature, and the

great moving spirit of things.”52 Poetry augments nature, creates new possibilities of

experience from a nature already perceived. Allen likewise declares, “Human additions

go far to enliven natural beauty. The unrelieved vegetation of tropical mountain scenery

yields us the painful consciousness of an emotional blank. We long for the sight of man’s

handiwork.”53 It follows that such a transcendent pleasure is only possible through art:

“Thus the Discobolus or the Medici Venus is more beautiful than any living nude human

figure, because it combines all the best points of many; a landscape painting is lovelier

than reality, because it excludes all unpleasant accompaniments; a great poem takes us

into a region of ideal delights; a grand oratorio immeasurably surpasses any natural

collection of sounds.”54 Despite his romantic conception of the aggrandizing role of art in

relation to nature, Allen remains devotedly empirical as his aesthetics derives not only

from nature but also natural selection.

                                                        51 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry,” in A Defence of Poetry, ed. Albert S. Cook (Ginn & Co.: London, 1890), 42. 52 Wordsworth, “Letter to John Wilson,” 351. 53 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 184. 54 Ibid., 87.

 

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Physiologically aesthetic taste:

If then, as Allen asserts, the aesthetic sense has evolved in existing human beings,

it follows that the aesthetic sense is a universal facet of the faculty of human emotion.

Allen derives a universality of aesthetic sentiments from his own brand of

disinterestedness. “As they are only remotely connected with life-serving functions, it

follows that they can give pleasure to thousands without detracting from the enjoyment of

each.”55 Furthermore, Allen’s theorizing of the artistic impulse exhibits his evolutionary

stance. The impulse to art, for him, is evident from the earliest stages of human

development, in the child as in the savage. And just as the child and the human race grow

to be more developed, “The pleasure of art-production and the pleasure of art-perception

grow up side-by-side.”56 What is more, “Art will gradually select for imitation only what

is most beautiful in nature, rejecting all that is ugly, discordant, and base. But many ages

will be required for this passage from mere imitation to developed fine art.”57 Allen’s

assertion that “art will gradually select,” posits a process of artistic selection parallel to

natural selection proper.

While he advocates the aesthetic sense as a physiological phenomenon, Allen

nonetheless acknowledges that there exist great variations in the perception of aesthetic

pleasure, in the determination of objects that count as art. He accordingly theorizes that

how the aesthetically beautiful are perceived is based on one’s individual nervous

constitution, which differs “infinitely with regard to minute details in different persons.”

                                                        55 Ibid., 41. 56 Ibid., 221. 57 Ibid., 222.

 

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This “personal equation”58 in aesthetic perception determines the nature of individual

taste. “Bad taste is the concomitant of a coarse and indiscriminative nervous organisation,

an untrained attention, a low emotional nature, and an imperfect intelligence; while good

Taste is the progressive product of progressing fineness and discrimination in the nerves,

educated attention, high and noble emotional constitution, and increasing intellectual

faculties”59 It is thus not enough for Allen to indicate variations of taste among

individuals; he classifies the range of these tastes, pre-judging them for readers as good

or bad. It is further striking to note that while bearers of good taste are “progressing” in

fineness and “increasing” in intellectual faculties, those of bad taste bare a static

“indiscriminative nervous organisation, an untrained attention, a low emotional nature,

and an imperfect intelligence.” The latter are hardly a “progressive product,” denied even

the active possibilities of the present participle.

John Fizer notes Allen’s turn to the primacy of refinement in aesthetic experience

as a decidedly elite stance: “reorienting its attention toward ‘the thoughtful,

contemplative mind’ which alone can educe aesthetic delight, this aesthetics resorted to

intellectual elitism, thus excluding from the ‘permanent pleasure-field’ all those who lack

intellectual resourcefulness and finesse.”60 While certainly espousing the theories of an

intellectually elite class, Allen’s philosophical composition of physiological aesthetics

relies on very specific and timely conceptions of those “who lack intellectual

resourcefulness and finesse,” conceptions that bear more than a simple intellectual

                                                        58 Ibid., 47. 59 Ibid., 48. 60 John Fizer, “Physiological Aesthetics: Édoné, the Key to it All,” in Psychologism and Psychoaesthetics (Amsterdam: John Benjamins B.V., 1981), 70.

 

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elitism. Fizer no further explores the variations of those who lack such resourcefulness

and finesse—certainly the poor, but also entire races, genders, and age groups.

Having thus far relied on the natural selection of Darwin to elucidate the validity

of his theories on the development of aesthetic perceptions, Allen’s turn to intellectual

refinement exhibits the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). As he

describes the varying nature of the aesthetic personal equation, his words mirror those of

Spencer in his work Social Statics. Noting in his introduction to the text the “mutations of

mankind,” Spencer writes:

Between the naked houseless savage, and the Shakespeares and Newtons of a civilized state, lie unnumbered degrees of difference. The contrasts of races in form, colour, and feature, are not greater than the contrasts in their moral and intellectual qualities. That superiority of sight which enables a Bushman to see further with the naked eye than a European with a telescope, is fully paralleled by the European’s more perfect intellectual vision. The Calmuck in delicacy of smell, and the red Indian in acuteness of hearing, do not excel the white man more than the white man excels them in moral susceptibility. Every age, every nation, every climate, exhibits a modified form of humanity.61

Allen asserts similarly: “savages and children, whose nerves are fresh and strong, are

pleased by the violent stimulation of beating a tom-tom or a tin kettle, shouting an

unvaried note, or blowing a penny whistle: while most civilized adults are annoyed by

such noises, and valetudinarians cannot endure the creaking of a door or the noise of

wind round the eaves” and again, “the vulgar are pleased by great masses of colour,

especially red, orange, and purple, which give their course nervous organisation the

requisite stimulus: the refined, with nerves of less caliber but greater discriminativeness,

require delicate combinations of complementaries, and prefer neutral tints to the glare of

                                                        61 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics or The Conditions Essential to Human Happiness (1851; reprint, Baltimore: United Book, 1995), 32.

 

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primary hues.”62 The distinction between Spencer and Allen lies in their application of

perceived sensory difference in those who are more or less civilized. Whereas Spencer

writes of the less-evolved savage as bearing senses utilitarian to his/her way of life,

Allen’s aesthetic sense draws on such selected utility to render the savage incapable of

perceiving nature in its more “delicate combination,” that is, the beauty in nature.

Consequently, where Spencer notes, “every age, every nation, every climate, exhibits a

modified form of humanity,” Allen deduces, “everywhere we see minor variations of

structure—central or peripheral—entailing minor variations in Aesthetic Feeling, of

which we ordinarily speak of as Taste.”63

As Allen elucidates variations in aesthetic taste, he does not hide from his readers

his criteria for judging tastes as good or bad. While he acknowledges that society on the

whole is as yet in an imperfect state, he declares that “we are yet bound to accept as a

relative and temporary standard, the judgment of the finest-nurtured and most

discriminative, the purest and most cultivated of our contemporaries, who have paid the

greatest attention to aesthetic perceptions; assured that while it may fall short of absolute

perfection, it will at any rate be far truer and higher than that of the masses.”64 We must

thus turn to those who are most well developed, those who can perceive and experience

the emotional outcomes of beauty in its most refined state. For Allen, these are also the

individuals who can truly experience happiness: “To live in a noble building, standing

amid beautiful grounds, surrounded by objects of fine art, which lend an aesthetic charm

to even the commonest processes of daily life, such as eating and drinking, is of course

                                                        62 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 44. 63 Ibid., 44–45. 64 Ibid., 49.

 

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the final crown of beauty to an existence otherwise free from urgent cares and the sordid

shifts of poverty.”65 Allen’s physiological aesthetics then, though universal in its

perceptibility by senses, is a rather high-class pursuit, depending on the refinement of

bodily senses in individuals as well as the amount of time and aesthetic pleasures to

which these senses can readily avail themselves.

ii . THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AESTHETIC OF POETRY

Of all the “great synthetic totals,” that is, works of art, Allen regards poetry as the

finest. From the introductory chapter of his treatise, Allen presents the trajectory of his

investigation into aesthetics as one that commences at the level of nervous sensation and

physiological structure and ends in the literary arena of poetry. He writes, “speaking

popularly, the subject-matter of our investigation will be the feelings aroused in man by

the beautiful in nature, and in the arts of architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and

poetry: special attention being paid throughout to the component factors of the last.”66 It

is “more exclusively aesthetic in its purpose than any other form of composition,

embraces all the specific points of other forms, besides a few almost peculiar to itself.”67

Unlike painting or music, which appeal directly to the senses of sight or sound,

poetry, in making use of language, draws directly upon the emotional and intellection

associations of raw sensations. “The medium through which Poetry gratifies the aesthetic

sentiment is language: and in the great difference between language on the one hand, and

                                                        65 Ibid., 55. 66 Ibid., 4. 67 Ibid., 244.

 

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colour, shape, and musical sound on the other, we have the groundwork for the

distinction between Poetry and the sister arts.”68 Words, for Allen, “are symbols which,

when heard or read, call up into consciousness a faint form of certain previously

experienced sensations or emotions, singly or in groups […] But words derive their

power of gratifying the aesthetic sentiment from the fact that accompanying the faint

form of sensations which they arouse is a faint form of the appropriate associated

emotion.”69 It is this pleasurable power of language that enables a reader to experience

words sensorially, ranging from the evocation of simple colors or scents and of complex

sensations of entire concrete objects, to the inextricably emotional and intellectual

associations within the perceiving subject. Allen’s derivation of the role of language in

poetry certainly renders it a sensate discourse, as argued by Baumgarten, and his

consequent analysis of poetic composition emphasizes the positive, embodied enjoyment

of such a discourse.

Allen classifies poetry into two presentative and two representative elements:

“First, Simple or Abstract Ideal Sensuous elements; second, Complex or Concrete

Sensuous Elements; third, Ideal Emotional Elements; and fourth, Intellectual

Elements.”70 Poetic appreciation is experiential: it commences with one’s ability to recall

sensation at the most basic level from a single word, and then proceeds, on account of the

more complex presentations of “material repetition, rhythmical recurrence, assonance, or

alliteration” in poetry, to the appropriately associated idealistic feelings and intellectual

                                                        68 Ibid., 247. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 249.

 

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insights.71 Poetic compositions appealing particularly to the ideal emotional elements

string together words to evoke emotions of the Sublime, the Ridiculous, Pity, the

Domestic Feelings, or the Amatory Passions. The intellectual elements, by contrast,

consist of the pleasure derived from the cognizance of poetical skill, evident in the poet’s

use of plot-interest, skillful imitation, ingenuity of form and content, and even the use of

scientific and metaphysical conceptions. The latter two elements, it need be remembered,

still derive from the usage of sensory language, of word-choice which elicits a particular

image, emotion, or insight. Poetry, thus, “lifts us into an atmosphere of sensuous and

emotional delight, a land of perfect happiness, an imaginative realm where nothing

common, base, or hateful is ever seen. Its object may be described as the attempt to

arouse in the hearer the largest possible amount of massive pleasurable ideal aesthetic

feeling.”72 In this section, I turn to the sensory aspects of poetry as seen by Allen and

examine, by looking at his own poetic endeavors, his resulting fashioning of its ideal

emotional and intellectual elements.

Sensory poetics:

In his evaluation of the presentative aspects of poetry, Allen turns to the

individual senses and their ability to evoke emotion both in a single sensory reference and

in their compounded manifestations. He begins with taste, a sense which “is in the

actuality eminently unfitted for aesthetic purposes on account of its connexion with

necessary vital processes, becomes poetically possible in the ideal, but only in those

forms which are least intimately allied with the digestive process, and which we classed

                                                        71 Ibid., 244. 72 Ibid., 247.

 

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as Tastes Proper”73 He presents to readers one such a “Proper” rendition from

Tennsyson’s poem “Audley Court”:

And, half cut down, a pastry costly-made, Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret, lay Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied.74

Allen considers this passage an exemplar of poetic skill pertaining to the sense of taste.

While “in itself a game pie is vulgar and inartistic enough, appealing to a sense which is

both monopolist and closely connected with vital function,” Tennyson’s poem

successfully overcomes this difficulty “by presenting the pie to us in such a light that we

see only its beautiful pictorial points.”75 Allen himself attempted such a poetic discourse

of taste in his poem titled “Tommy Tucker’s Calendar,” which he published under the

fitting pseudonym C. Plumb Jamme. The first stanza of the poem reads as follows:

In January, cold and bleak, Warm ginger-nuts I mostly seek. In February, “Good,” I cry; “Now Pancake Day is drawing nigh!” March winds are nipping; when in luck, Peppermint balls are what I suck. April’s the month for Sally Lunns, For Easter eggs and hot-cross buns.76

Allen’s version of the nursery rhyme “Little Tommy Tucker” who sings for his supper,

the poem complies with the principle that alimentary objects be presented in poetry “not

                                                        73 Ibid., 253. 74 Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Audley Court,” quoted in Physiological Aesthetics, by Grant Allen, 261. 75 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 261. 76 C. Plumb Jamme, “Tommy Tucker’s Calendar,” box 1, folder 26, Grant Allen Literary Manuscripts and Correspondence, 1887–1937, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University.

 

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as food but as part of a scene.”77 Indeed, through direct poetic associations with months

and seasonal changes, Allen embeds food items into Tommy Tucker’s very calendar.

“The poetical feeling is entirely due to their picturesque character.”78 What is more,

unlike Tennyson, who transforms an otherwise unaesthetic food into a picturesque object

through descriptive language such as “Imbedded and injellied,” Allen sticks to food

objects that are in themselves sweet and pleasurable in taste. “We all feel,” he notes, “that

dessert is the Poetry of dinner.”79

From the poetry of dinner, Allen moves to the sense of smell, which he considers

the “least intellectual and most purely emotional”80 of the senses. Too much of the sense

is in fact connected with vital functioning, as in the case of determining the edibility of

food items; yet, Allen notes that “the fragrance of fruits and spices very nearly

approaches the requisite freedom from life-serving function; because the taste which it

suggests is of the kind least intimately connected with organic wants.” Other items,

entirely unconnected with food, are more apt for aesthetic use in poetry. In this arena

reside “the perfume of a rose, a violet, or a lily-of-the-valley, the smell of new-mown

hay, the aroma of newly-ploughed land[;] we feel that these, even in the actuality, are in

almost every respect raised into the aesthetic class.”81 It follows that “Fragrant, sweet,

perfumed, scented, odorous, and all other words denoting pleasant sensations of smell are

highly poetical: while those denoting ill odours, such as stench, stinking, &c, are so

intensely unpoetical that they almost defy introduction into Poetry unless strongly

                                                        77 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 261. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., 259. 80 Ibid., 83. 81 Ibid., 83–84.

 

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recommended by intellectual effects or emotional association.”82 His own approach to

scent in his poems is similar, referring to “the lilac’s fragrant mist”83 or to a garden

“flooded with violet odour and perfume of heliotrope.” 84

Allen then turns to the intermediary sense of touch. As regards the appeal of the

tactual sense to ideal or intellectual poetic elements, Allen considers touch, particularly in

the discrimination of textures, to be highly intellectual. “The emotional element is week”

still “its few emotional aspects are ideally reproduced in Poetry, affording us the

adjectives soft, waxen, fleecy, smooth, delicate, and tender, in contrast with hard, rough,

harsh, touch, and coarse.”85 As for entire concrete objects, “soft and yielding objects,

such as wax, down, the marble forehead and glistening shoulders of Glycera, a baby’s

arm, owe part of their poetical effectiveness to their tactual properties. Smoothness, too,

adds beauty to gems, polished stone and crystal, as well as to certain leaves and human

skin.”86 When writing of snow, “Poets accordingly dwell chiefly on the fleeciness of its

gently falling flakes” and “Rose petals are the poetical embodiment of delicacy […] To

‘die of a rose in aromatic pain’ is our idea of aesthetic fastidiousness.”87 Alexander

Pope’s acclaimed line from his “Essay on Man” utilizes the tactile delicacy associated

with a rose to capture the epitome of aesthetic sensitivity.

Allen’s own poem “For A Poet’s Statue” likewise attempts to articulate the

discriminatory elegance of texture. This particular piece also bears an instance where the

                                                        82 Ibid., 252. 83 Grant Allen, “Forecast and Fulfilment,” in The Lower Slopes: Reminiscences of Excursions Round the Base of Helicon Undertaken for the Most Part in Early Manhood (London: Elkin Mathews & John Lane, 1894), 78. 84 Grant Allen, “In the Night Watches,” in The Lower Slopes, 62. 85 Ibid. 86 Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 255. 87 Ibid., 95.

 

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poet imbues the structural and sensory composition of the poem with ideal emotional

elements, in this case, a poet’s “soul”:

See that your marble know not fleck or flaw! See that your bronze live while the sun endures! This stainless soul, pure effluence of pure law, Shed on your souls, that gold or gain allures, Some glimmerings of a light you never saw, Some largess of a life that is not yours.88

Instead of telling readers what the statue of the poet looks like and recall sensations of

sight, Allen presents to readers only the substances with which the statue form may be

composed—marble or bronze. Allen’s choice of these two materials to depict a statue is

especially apt. Sculpture, for him, “aims primarily at affording us the highest pleasure of

mere form, unalloyed by any considerations of colour. To do so, it chooses mostly that

form with whose minute turns we are most conversant, the human body, and renders it in

uniform marble or bronze.”89 The tactile aspects Allen associates with these two

materials are the following: “Rough sawn marble sends through us the peculiar

discordant jar produced by jerky stimulation […] when polished, it yields us a pleasant

sense of harmonious and regular excitation.”90 Bronze, on the other hand, already has

“the tactual element strongly developed.”91 In statuesque form, these two materials fulfill

the task of providing pleasure through the representation of a human form. What they

cannot do, however, is provide considerable emotional appeal to viewers, for “the

expression of the emotions, because they depend so largely upon the eye, which cannot

be properly represented without the aid of color and chiaroscuro.” Yet where the statue is

                                                        88 Grant Allen, “For a Poet’s Statue,” box 1, folder 26, Grant Allen Literary Manuscripts and Correspondence, 1887–1937. 89 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 235. 90 Ibid., 91. 91 Ibid., 94.

 

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more an aesthetic of form and thus intellectual appreciation than of ideal emotions, the

poem is able to infuse within the marble the “stainless soul” of the poet. It is no doubt the

“distinction of permanent character” without “fleck or flaw” that the marble knows, and

that the bronze lives “while the sun endures.” While in the simple sensation of touch, the

emotional element may be weak, the poetic endeavor artfully raises the aesthetic feelings

to “some largess of a life that is not yours.”

Another truly delightful focus on the tactile sense is Allen’s poem “The First

Idealist.” Here, Allen isolates the sense of touch from the others and explores its

epistemological implications. The first part of the poem reads as follows:

A JELLY-FISH swam in a tropical sea, And he said, ‘This world it consists of Me: There’s nothing above and nothing below That a jelly-fish ever can possibly know (Since we’ve got no sight, or hearing, or smell), Beyond what our single sense can tell. Now, all that I learn from the sense of touch Is the fact of my feelings, viewed as such. But to think they have any external cause Is an inference clean against logical laws. Again, to suppose, as I’ve hitherto done, There are other jelly-fish under the sun, Is a pure assumption that can’t be backed By a jot of proof or a single fact.92

Allen here illustrates the limitations of the tactile sense in acquiring a true perspective on

the world. Indeed, the jelly-fish’s existential dilemma resides in its experiencing the “fact

of [its] feelings” through touch alone, lacking sight, hearing or smell.

The poem tends to contradict itself certainly; the jelly-fish does not know if “there

are other jelly-fish under the sun,” but nonetheless uses the plural first-person pronoun to

describe its dearth of sensory range: “we’ve got no sight, or hearing, or smell/Beyond

                                                        92 Grant Allen, “The First Idealist,” in The Lower Slopes, 19.

 

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what our single sense will tell.”93 Nonetheless, this particular poem articulates the

traditionally debatable position of touch in the hierarchy of the senses. Certainly, even if

the jelly-fish had its pick of all the senses, touch is the one above all others that would

keep it alive. And yet, even though it draws “logical” inferences of its singularity from

sensory experiences, it remains nothing more than an impractical idealist. It comes as no

surprise then that

That minute, a shark, who was strolling by, Just gulped him down, in the twink of an eye; And he died, with a few convulsive twists.94 Perhaps Allen is warning readers against the futility of idealistic vision, or at least of a

vision that is limited only to one realm of experience. Considering Allen’s irrefutable

belief in natural selection however, one could ask if the jelly fish is in fact (ill)fated to be

an idealist. How, after all, is the jelly-fish to comprehend a world view other than its own

except in the jaws of another?

Turning from the aesthetic vagaries of touch to those of sound, Allen presents to

readers the intellectual and emotional range of this more complex and discriminatory

sense. Allen begins here with the perception of metre. “What the rhythm of dance is to

our muscular energies,” he writes, “the rhythm of poetry and music is to the ear.”95 Not

only does rhyme and metre differentiate poetry from prose, but its realization “in the

auditory apparatus as a recurrent rhythm of nascent simulation” results in immense

                                                        93 Allen may himself have recognized this; in the handwritten manuscript, he crosses out “we’ve” and “our” and replaces them with “I’ve” and “my.” Yet these changes did not carry through in the published volume The Lower Slopes. See “The First Idealist,” box 1, folder 26, Grant Allen Literary Manuscripts and Correspondence, 1887–1937. 94 Allen, “The First Idealist,” 20. 95 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 115.

 

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intellectual pleasure.96 Moreover, the composition of poetic content in particular metres

should also keep in mind the desired sensory effect of the work as a whole: “Iambics (in

English) are slow and solemn; spondees, heavy; dactyls, graceful and rapid; trochees,

stirring and suitable for martial pieces.”97 Allen thus underscores meter as a necessary

component for experiencing the “sound” and as such, the embodied sentiment, of a poem.

His particular approach to meter is apt for his time, as Yopie Prins illustrates,

“nineteenth-century theories of meter […] uncover a form of linguistic materialism that

complicates the claim to vocal presence. Instead of hearing voice as breath or spirit, we

see it materialize through the counting of metrical marks.”98 The auditory component of a

poem in Victorian poetry, it would appear, materializes any transcendent poetic voice; the

beating rhythm of meter physically stimulates the sensory apparatus within the ear. It is

only when one detects the rhythmic regularity and metrical accuracy of verse, that

pleasure can be experienced.

Not surprisingly, in his works of poetic criticism, Allen is quick to analyze the use

of rhyme and metre in the writings of others. In doing so, he is also very clear about his

own preferences. In his essay “A Fragment from Keats,” he remarks on Keats’ use of the

Spenserian stanza in “The Eve of St. Agnes”: “To begin with, the stanza in its mere

technical arrangement of verses and rhymes possesses many notable beauties of its own

[…] When we try to analyse the beauty of the metre, we find that it depends partly upon

the apt disposition of rhymes, and partly upon the grand impressive close which is given

                                                        96 Ibid., 116. 97 Ibid., 117. 98 Yopie Prins, “Victorian Meters,” in Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92.

 

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to every stanza by its termination in a long rolling Alexandrine.”99 In fact, so great is his

fondness for the Spenserian stanza that for him, “The Spenserian stanza and the true

sonnet combine the two high artistic merits of due variety and perfect simplicity.”100 In

“Note on a New Poet,” Allen likewise brings to light the less well known poetry of a Mr.

William Watson: “It is not surprising our poet should most affect the sonnet and the

quatrain, forms of verse in which great technical perfection and a certain austere dignity

of thought and language are above all indispensible.”101 In addition to his mention of

“technical perfection,” Allen’s concern for the “apt disposition,” “perfect simplicity” as

well as “dignity of thought and language” inculcated by metrical choice suggests more

than sensory effect. Metrical variations in verse, in stimulating the “auditory apparatus,”

produce not only pleasure of rhythm but also certain socially derived aesthetic standards

of propriety and refinement. “The various pleasures and disappointments enumerated in

this section are composed of very slight emotional elements, require for their perception

much trained attention and delicacy of nervous constitution, and belong consequently to

the most distinctively aesthetic class.”102

Apart from the metric form of the poem, Allen stresses the use of words that

emphasize musical and harmonious tones in reference to sounds. “Such are clear,

ringing, silvery, musical, sweet, melodious, mellow, rich, and low.”103 A poem that most

fully elicits the sensations of sound, in both plot-development and ideal emotional

aspects, is Allen’s “The Return of Aphrodite,” written in octaves of dactylic trimeter with

                                                        99 Grant Allen, “A Fragment from Keats,” Gentleman’s Magazine 244 (June 1879): 679. 100 Ibid. 101 Grant Allen, “Note on a New Poet,” Fortnightly Review 56 (August 1891): 200. 102 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 119. 103 Ibid., 252.

 

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a last line in dimeter. The poem recounts the tale of Aphrodite who, having been sent

back to the depths of the ocean by a “horde of ascetics,” is called to rise again:

Now in the ends of the earth Tenderer singers and sweeter, Smit with a ravening dearth, Cry on the goddess and greet her; Cry with their rapturous eyes Flashing the fire of emotion; Call her again to arise Fresh from the ocean. Hot as of old are their songs, Breathing of odorous tresses, Murmur of amorous tongues, Ardour of fervid caresses; Trilled with a tremulous mouth Into the ear of the comer, Warm as the breath of the South, Soft as the Summer. Under the depth of the wave, Hearing their passionate numbers, Piercing her innermost cave, Waken her out of her slumbers, Soothed with the sound of their strain, Beautiful, merciful, mighty, Back to the nations again Comes Aphrodite.104

Through his use of descriptive language, Allen here captures not only the audible quality

of the song as a “murmur,” as it “trilled,” but he also conveys the great intensity of

emotion conveyed by these “Tenderer singers” who “strain.” What Allen has in fact here

managed to accomplish is a presentation of sound as an entire bodily, and thus complex

sensory experience. The cries operate audibly of course, but they bear scent, “breathing

of odorous tresses,” are visible in “their rapturous eyes/Flashing the fire of emotion,”

tactile through the “ardour of fervid caresses,” and even gustatory, “smit with ravening

                                                        104 Grant Allen, “The Return of Aphrodite,” in The Lower Slopes, 13–14.

 

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dearth,” a “murmur of amorous tongues.” The song to Aphrodite thus transcends the

auditory sense alone, registering emotionally and ideally through each of the senses.

Of all the senses, however, the one that plays the greatest part in poetry and in a

manner consolidates all the others, is sight. For Allen, “the greater part of the sensuous

elements of Poetry consist of ideal visual sensations. Poetry in mainly pictorial, and much

of its art is, to use the well-chosen modern phrase, word-painting.”105 The primary impact

of poetic language, then, is the evocation of visual associations in the reader. In his earlier

mentioned discussion of taste, for instance, Allen stresses that the use of food items in

poetry take on a “picturesque character.” His particular mention of “word-painting” here

refers to the tendency in poetry and prose at the time to use visually-oriented scenes as

means of blending together narrative and description as well as conveying emotions.

Word painting is perhaps best articulated by Rhoda Flaxman as follows:

Visually oriented language in the late eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century relies on painterly devices to establish a narrator/viewer whose coherent perspective allows him to scan foreground and background; to note contrasts between light and dark, between volume and mass; and whose own limits of vision frame the vista. This “narrator of landscape” operates somewhat as a painter who composes a landscape within the bounds of a single canvas. And, as the viewer explores the scene before him, does he not engage in a kind of metaphoric journey through the natural world, noting and commenting on those features that strike him?106

Flaxman charts the progress of word-painting in poetry from the literary gothic work of

James Thompson, through the romantic communion of man and nature in Wordsworth, to

Tennyson’s more Victorian and innovative use of landscape to glance into the future, a

practice which she argues proved influential to modern poets such as T. S. Eliot. Allen’s

                                                        105 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 258. 106 Rhoda L. Flaxman, Victorian Word Painting and Narrative: Toward the Blending of Genres (Ann Arbor, UMI Research Press, 1987), 125.

 

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attempts at word painting bear greater similarities to Wordsworth and Tennyson’s

narrations of landscape. In “Sunday at Braemar,” he presents to readers a poetic figure

discovering the sullen sentiments of sublime nature. The poem begins with the following

verses:

Alone amid the solemn heathy desert Whose bleak brown sides o’erhang Braemar, I sit, this misty Scottish August Sabbath, High up the spurs of Lochnagar. Above, fierce swirls of moaning autumn weather Drive on thin wreaths of vaporous cloud; While hanging low, the blight that dims the back- ground Spreads o’er heaven’s face its sullen shroud. Beneath me heaves afar one solid ocean, Wave after wave of moor and ben, Flung seething up in granite-crested billow, Or sunk in troughs of sweeping glen. No laughing eye of silver-rippled lakelet, But black expanse of peaty loch, Whose moody depths unstirred obscurely mirror Fantastic forms of gaunt grey rock.107

Allen here provides readers with a powerful prospect of nature, moving their eyes from

“heathy desert,” to “the spurs of Lochnagar,” “wreaths of vaporous clouds,” “one solid

ocean” and finally to the “fantastic forms of gaunt grey rock.” His choice of landscape

mirrors most those of Tennyson in the likes of Idylls of the King. Here too we see “the

enigmatic image of the seer standing on the shore of an immense water, enclosed and

protected by the landscape behind him. Dwarfed by the immensity of a nature that

ultimately remains opaque to vision, he nonetheless bravely attempts to see a coherent

                                                        107 Grant Allen, “Sunday at Braemar,” in The Lower Slopes, 15.

 

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pattern in the distance.”108 Allen’s particular use of color is here key; the “bleak brown,”

“granite-crested billow,” “black expanse of peaty loch,” and “gaunt grey rock” do not set

a joyous scene. As Allen notes in Physiological Aesthetics, “absolutely black and dull

surfaces scatter no appreciable amount of light […] Consequently, they give no

stimulation to the optic nerve. […] Black is the almost universal hue for mourning; and

most of the fabrics used for the purpose are, like crepe, as rough as possible. Here the

original intention is to show sorrow by the complete absence of decorative colour.”109

The use of the adjectives “sullen,” “fierce,” “seething,” “sunk,” and “bleak” likewise

reinforce the melancholy nature of the scene.

As seen in “Sunday at Braemar,” Allen paid particular attention to a poet’s ability

to recall color and light. It is not enough that a poet stimulate an accurate perception and

mood through mention of particular color, but also that his/her evocation of color be

more pleasing and harmonious than similar experiences in nature itself. “The whites of

nature,” Allen writes, “are mostly grayish in tinge: poets, on the contrary, dwell upon the

purity and spotlessness of the white objects they introduce.”110 The white of purity and

light can truly come alive in poetry, whereas in the reality of material existence such a

substance remains an ideal alone. Once again, we see the idyllic and transcendent

propensities of poetry over nature. Poetry can accordingly provide relief from seeing in

nature itself: “As a relief from over-stimulation we insist upon the pleasure of a normal

amount of light in a shady walk or a dim cathedral aisle. Poets and painters are fond of

                                                        108 Flaxman, Victorian Word-Painting, 124. 109 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 151–152. 110 Ibid., 152.

 

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such subdued illumination, and dislike the garishness of full sunshine.”111 Even through

sensate discourse, then, poets aim not to over-stimulate their readers senses.

By adequately representing sense and sentiment through language, a poet is able

to create an entire aesthetic experience for readers. Yet the impact on the senses is greater

than the sum of sensory experience itself in that word choice is able to call upon the

emotional aspects of a sensation: “while sweet sounds, meadow scents, and other

sensuous elements are originally chosen as factors of Poetry because of their intrinsic

pleasurable nature, yet their ideal employment in verse re-acts upon the actuality, so that

our pleasure in their positive perception is mixed up with literary and poetical

recollections.”112 It is thus, through the incorporation of the “ideal,” that poetry and the

aesthetic appreciation of poetry comes to be felt as a whole greater than the sum of its

particular sensate and discursive parts: “Poetry depends for its effect upon the unbroken

succession of beautiful ideas and images, not upon the separate result of individual

impressions.”113 In order to experience aesthetic feelings, one cannot from the outset

attempt to parse through its sensory composition through language and the resulting

bodily response. One must be allowed to encounter and perceive the poem as a whole, as

an “unbroken succession.”

The ability to produce such a harmonious sensory, emotional, and intellectual

experience is the mark of a superior poet: “Poetical skill is shown in nothing more than in

preparing the mind of the reader and bringing it into harmony from the beginning with

                                                        111 Ibid., 149. 112 Ibid., 262. 113 Ibid., 257.

 

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the dominant emotion of the piece.”114 Allen thus ends the treatise with surety that he has

scientifically delineated for readers the positive conditions of production of a poetical

work:

First in his mind rises vaguely the conception of some touching tale or some stirring lyric. Next comes the spontaneous choice of a metre that harmonises with his theme. Gradually he shapes his idea and fleshes it out with episode or sentiment. Finally he selects for every stanza and every line the loveliest and choicest words for pictures, drawn from the inexhaustible stores of his memory and his imagination, where he has gathered together, as in a treasure-house, all that is glorious and beautiful, without and within, in the boundless universe or in the soul of man. The total result so obtained is that harmonious and noble work of art, a Poem.115

In order to produce a higher aesthetic effect, a poet needs to select “the loveliest and

choicest words.” “The language itself differs studiously from that of everyday life. It is

either more antiquated, or more special, or more personified, or in some other way more

sublime.”116 Using the word cerulean instead of blue, for instance, would have a greater

aesthetic impact, evoking novel sensations and combinations of natural elements

previously experienced by the reader. “Hence it is [also] that Poetry clings to archaic

forms and obsolete modes of spelling. The second person is more poetical than the plural;

preterits such as spake, drave, and clomb are preferred to their modern equivalents; and

even rime, ladye, and similar archaisms are considered by a certain class of poets as

prettiness.”117 Perhaps the best instance of Allen’s physiological poetics is his

unpublished “Epilogue to an Anthology.” This particular succession of rhyming couplets

aesthetically captures each of the senses, word-paints, and aptly turns to idyllic and

archaic references to spur ideal emotions as well as intellectual pleasure.

                                                        114 Ibid., 282. 115 Ibid., 283. 116 Allen, “A Fragment from Keats,” 677. 117 Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, 269.

 

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Poets old and poets young, Pearls on a loose string richly strung. Chaucer, like a morn in May When dews are fresh and clouds astray. Shakspere, like a mighty mere, Mirroring men and cities clear. Milton, a pillared Doric shrine, Round whose white shafts wild roses twine. Gray, a shapely marble urn, Set smooth in turf, and bright with fern. Wordsworth like a summer breeze That moves at dusk thro whispering trees. Keats, a beaker, deftly wrought, With must of Tyrian purple fraught. Shelley, like a golden mist, By keen ethereal odours kissed. Coleridge, an orient sorcerer, Drunk with mandragora and myrrh. Tennyson, a Celtic tower, Dim carved with mystic bird and flower. Browning, an olive, gnarled at root, Weighed down with wealth of bitter fruit. Watson, like an anaglyph Smooth chiseled from some Parian cliff. Le Gallienne, ah, a weary lark Trilling sad dirges in the dark. Davidson, a Titan born, Shattering gods in iron scorn. Poets old and poets young,

 

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Thread them here as each has sung.118

This poem is unique in that it not only makes use of each of the senses to elicit complex

aesthetic feelings, but these sensate compositions are also descriptive of poets

themselves. As such, the choice of sense, tone, and ideal emotion is intrinsically

connected to the body of poetic work by each of the mentioned authors. Milton bears all

the aesthetic associations of a round, white, rose-scented “pillared Doric shrine” while

Shakspere (note Allen’s choice of a less familiar spelling) is an alliterative “mighty

mere,/mirroring men and cities clear.” Browning, as it happens, is less fortunate as “an

olive, gnarled at root.” Yet, each of the sensory experiences produced by these poets, be

it the bitterness of Browning or the freshness of Chaucer, are “pearls on a loose string

richly strung.” A meta-poem certainly, where the dominant emotion is in harmony from

beginning to end, this poem engages the reader aesthetically as it performs the work of

aesthetic criticism. “Epilogue to an Anthology” epitomizes the complex sensate discourse

of poetry as realized by Allen in Physiological Aesthetics.

Aesthetic Criticism:

There is yet another end to Allen’s illustration of poetic production and

appropriation as decidedly positive processes. In making readers aware of the poet’s

choice of form and content to stimulate maximum pleasurable aesthetic feelings as well

as the reader’s bodily and sensory dispositions that give rise to these feelings, Allen

demonstrates, through the form and content of his own treatise, a novel, positive mode of

                                                        118 Grant Allen, “Epilogue to an Anthology,” box 1, folder 26, Grant Allen Literary Manuscripts and Correspondence, 1887–1937.

 

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analysis for the critic of poetry. He states this aim most openly in “A Fragment from

Keats”: “enough, perhaps, has been said to suggest a means by which an analytical or

positive method of criticism should supplement the purely appreciative or estimory

method now in vogue. The more we try to realise what it is that pleases us in a poem, the

more shall we love and admire it for what we find it to contain.”119 His goal then is to

have the reader move beyond mere appreciation toward a critical understanding of the

poem both as a whole and as the sum of its sensory parts. Here too he privileges the

picturesque in poetry, observing that such an analytical method is not entirely new but

exists all too readily for art critics.

It is curious that in an age which has brought forth such minute artistic investigations as those of Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Pater, no similar attempt should have been made to account for the peculiar effects which poetry produces upon our aesthetic sensibility. It may, perhaps, be worth while to test a single short passage from an English poet in the same manner as the great critic of the Renaissance painters tests a Madonna or a St. Sebastian. Mr. Pater sets himself about a particular canvas as a psychological aesthetician, and asks himself the definite question, What are the peculiar qualities of this picture and of this artist, that rouse in me the special feeling of admiration with which I regard it? Let us take in the same way a single famour stanza from Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” and ask ourselves in like manner, What are the peculiar qualities which give it a distinctive poetical character?120

While Allen certainly does not comply with Walter Pater’s decadent adherence to “Art

for Art’s Sake,”121 he nonetheless finds in Pater’s psychological aestheticism a positive

method of art criticism. Pater famously describes the function of an aesthetic critic in the

“Preface” to The Renaissance as follows:

to distinguish, to analyse, and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape, a fair personality in life or in a book, produces this special

                                                        119 Allen, “A Fragment from Keats,” 686. 120 Ibid., 678. 121 See Grant Allen, “Novels Without a Purpose,” North American Review 163 (August 1896): 223–35.

 

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impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced. His end is reached when he has disengaged that virtue, and noted it, as a chemist notes some natural element, for himself and others.122

Like Pater, Allen’s process of poetic criticism seeks “to distinguish, to analyse, and

separate” the particular linguistic means by which a poem produces a “special impression

of beauty of pleasure.” This impression, however, operates first and foremost at the

sensory level; the mention of a color, scent or sound elicits previously experienced

sensations of those very faculties, and it is through this process of recall that emotional

and intellectual pleasure is derived. Unlike the psychological turn in Pater then, Allen’s

locus on inquiry remains strictly within the physiological and it is from the arena of the

bodily that any and all psychological associations are able to emerge.

Allen’s focus on the physiological aspects of a poem, in so far as aesthetic

appreciation is an embodied and sensory process, is likewise visible in his own metaphors

for poetic experience. In his essay, “A Side-Light on Gray’s Bard,” Allen renders the

study of a poem akin to a study in physiognomy. “Physiognomy has certainly a kind of

ex-post-facto truth about it. It does not tell us what is the character, from mere inspection

of the face: but when we know the character from long observation, it allows us to read

its record in every curl of the lip and in every movement of the eye.”123 Physiognomy, a

much-revered science in the nineteenth-century, was thought indicative of the mental and

moral character of the individual. Allen’s analysis qualifies physiognomy as really truly

valuable when one knows what to look for in a face—when one is familiar with the

                                                        122 Walter Pater, Preface to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1873), xxvii. 123 Ibid.

 

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content that is to be reflected in the form.124 He compares a well-known yet unexamined

poem to a face “meaningless to us from its very familiarity. We have grown up side by

side with it, perhaps, and have so implicitly taken it for granted, that we really do not

know whether it is plain or pretty, dull or lively, intelligent or stupid. We accept it in the

mass as so-and-so’s face, without ever thinking of its meaning one way or the other.”125

Parallel to such faces taken for granted are “those poems which we learnt in our

childhood, and the words of which have rung in our ears throughout our whole lives.”126

Allen’s main focus here is on poems that we instinctively take to be pretty, recognizing a

stimulation of our aesthetic sensibilities. Yet we never stop to investigate why such

feelings arise: “Such treatment is really very unfair to the great artists who have lavished

their pains and their skill upon these highest products of the aesthetic faculty for our

delight and instruction.”127 To really know a poem, as to really know a face then, is not

only to experience the sensory delight of it, but to uncover what it is about the structure

and construction that engenders such feelings, feelings which undoubtedly harmonize

with the theme and content of the work. As a poet, Allen is certainly aware of the means

by which to put together sensory, ideal and intellectual elements in the composition of a

poem; yet as a critic, his aim is to model and provide readers with the tools by which to

make their way through such an analysis.

                                                        124 Interesting enough, Allen’s own face was theorized in the popular press as indicative of his moral character. See William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers, “Resituating Grant Allen: Writing, Radicalism and Modernity,” in Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics, 14: “In 1893, a popular guide, Phrenology in a Nutshell, depicted the long aquiline head of Grant Allen and made it signify his iconic status as the embodiment of a national type of temperament, of ‘ideality.’” 125 Grant Allen, “A Sidelight on Gray’s ‘Bard,’” Gentleman’s Magazine 245 (December 1879), 721. 126 Ibid. 127 Ibid.

 

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iii . AESTHETIC APPRECIATION

“If a man tells you he wants to write a book, nine times out of ten he means a treatise or argument on some subject that interests him. Even the men who take in the end to writing novels have generally begun with other aims and other aspirations, and have only fallen

back upon the art of fiction in the last resort as a means of livelihood.” Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did128

Allen’s career as a man of letters began with his scientific venture Physiological

Aesthetics, yet his success as a writer depended largely on his essays in magazines and

his novels, of which The Woman Who Did was the most notorious and is now, the most

well-known. As noted in the above quote, Allen perceived the turn to fiction as a “last

resort” of his literary aspirations, even though it was this very recourse which bestowed

upon him great celebrity in the literary arena. Still as Bernard Shaw observed, it was

Allen’s “‘scientific training’ which had ‘saved him . . . from the ordinary writer’s

desperate ignorance of all but the literary aspect of things.’”129 This essay has not

examined the manner in which Allen’s scientific sentiments nevertheless manifested in

his more popular works, nor does it engage with the political and social themes of his

poetry.130 It turns instead to his less well-known and largely un-discussed poetry—the

greatest of the imitative arts for Allen. Edward Clodd notes in his memoir of Allen: “In

the crowd of minor poets, with plenty of voice, but in some cases not much to sing about,

the statelier, more subdued, and reflective note of Allen’s verse caught the ear of only a

few. But it has, like all his work, elements that arrest and interest; it has the distinction of

                                                        128 Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1895), 140. 129 Brian Tyson, ed., Bernard Shaw’s Book Reviews Vol. 1 (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 453. 130 For a more political reading of Allen’s poetry, see Barbara Arnett Melchiori, Grant Allen: The Downward Slope that Leads to Fiction (Bulzoni: 2000).

 

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a certain inevitableness; the themes are serious; the feeling is deep and genuine.”131 As

Clodd observes, Allen never rose above the status of a minor poet, and his only published

book of verse, The Lower Slopes, escaped great acclaim.

Perhaps it is on account of the little success attained by his poetic endeavors that

Allen was at times severely critical of the work of the poet, exclaiming the futility of the

poetic ideal. His poem, “A Poet’s Meed” reads:

“Who fainteth here in the mart, forlorn, While men stand chaffering by? Go ask his trade.” “A poet born, With a song in his flashing eye.” “What hath he to sell—coal, cotton, or corn?” “Fair thoughts.” “Then let him die.” 132

Similarly, in a short story published in The Cosmopolitan, “The Temple of Fate: A

Fable,”133 Allen presents to readers a severe indictment of the poetic sentiment. The story

begins with a mother praying at the temple of fate “praying earnestly for boons for her

unborn infant.” The goddess of fate complies with the mother’s wishes, but decries her

desire for the infant to bear poetic thoughts:

What is wanted for success is a good, sound, able, mediocre intelligence. […] Poetical ideas and beautiful aspirations would only be in the way for him; they are mere will-o’-the-wisps which divert a man from the serious pursuit of success and happiness. […] I have always fancied those men get on most in the world who have fair average intellects, great energy and determination, no marked philosophic or poetical bent, and a steady resolution to succeed before everything.134

One cannot be certain whether Allen was merely mimicking what he believed to be a

popular sentiment pertaining to poetry (somewhat confirmed by his own experiences) or

                                                        131 Clodd, Grant Allen, 150–151. 132 Grant Allen, “A Poet’s Meed,” The Academy no. 1172 (October 20, 1894): 303. 133 Grant Allen, “The Temple of Fate: A Fable,” The Cosmopolitan 31 (August 1901): 386–387. 134 Ibid., 387.

 

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if he in certainty felt this to be the truth of poetic idealism. Even so, Poetry for Allen

bears a clear goal. It is aesthetically pleasing to be sure, but more so, it needs a purpose:

“we all instinctively feel that the greatest and truest poets and romancers are those who

have taught their age somewhat: Wordsworth, not Scott; Shelley, not Byron. […] we also

feel that relative height may best be gauged by intensity of purpose. […] The greatest

novels and the greatest poems are thus clearly seen to be those which most mark time for

humanity.”135 Albeit unrecognized to a large degree, Allen’s poetic work can be seen to

mark time for the late nineteenth-century. He was a man of his time, most avidly in his

political beliefs, but also in his scientific aspirations and his turn to physiology as a

means for deciphering aesthetics, specifically poetic production and appreciation. The

height of his intensity of purpose is comparable with the finest, as he sought to teach his

age “not merely to just understand our poet, but also to sympathise with him, to enter into

the full meaning of his every touch.”136 “We must,” accordingly, “throw ourselves

earnestly into his work,”137 with our whole bodies, letting ourselves appreciate and

explore poetry as an aesthetic physiological experience.

The possibilities for aesthetic experience manifested in the literary endeavors of

Claude Bernard and Grant Allen remain inextricably intertwined with the adoption of

experimentation in physiology. Having thus far established the aesthetic imperative in

Bernard’s empirical physiology and the physiological imperative in Allen’s aesthetic

philosophy, I now turn, in the second half of this dissertation, to the aesthetic

configurations of medical performance in the nineteenth century. In particular, I take the

                                                        135 Grant Allen, “Novels Without a Purpose,” 235. 136 Allen, “A Fragment from Keats,” 678. 137 Ibid.

 

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disciplines of surgery and experimental psychology as demonstrative of the performance-

based aspects of experiential medicine, executed as they are in the surgical operating

theater and the amphitheater and public stage. Esteemed British Surgeon Frederick

Treves owes a heavy debt to precise anatomical knowledge in surgical practice, yet he

articulates a necessary aesthetic sensibility and tacit knowledge achieved only through

practical performance. Alfred Binet, by contrast, finds in theater a paradigm by which to

frame mental illness, and subsequently writes medical plays conforming to his scientific

claims. Together, these men of science illustrate the ways in which, even in an era of

scientific specialization, medical and aesthetic ideas were configured and re-configured

in response to one another.

 

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PART II:

MEDICAL PERFORMANCE

 

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Chapter 4: OPERATIONAL AESTHETICS: THE SURGICAL ARTS OF FREDERICK

TREVES1

“Surgeons cannot, by and large, display the work done with their tools; the eviscerated organ preserved in a bottle is but a partial record of a successful operation, even for a

medical audience” —Ghislaine Lawrence2

“If there be one point of excellence which stands before all in the qualifications of the perfect surgeon, it is bound up in that refined sensibility, that critical perception, that

inestimable cunning, which lies in the surgeon’s touch” —Frederick Treves3

Etymologically speaking, the work of a surgeon is the work of his/her hands:

“The word ‘surgery’ derives from the Greek chieros, a hand, and ergon, work.”4 Yet the

question remains, what is the particular work of surgical hands? By contemporary

standards, such work entails the handling of tools in major operative surgery. Prior to the

emergence of anatomy as a discipline in the eighteenth century, and the ensuing scientific

turn in medicine, however, surgery was considered a meager hand-craft, the technical

component of therapeutic medicine. As such, surgery was thought subservient to physic;

it represented unrefined manual labor, dealing merely with external visible ailments, the

setting of a broken bone, for instance, or the lancing of a blister. The eighteenth-century

                                                        1 Research for this chapter was conducted at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia and Hershey Medical Library. 2 Ghislaine Lawrence, “The Ambiguous Artifact: Surgical Instruments and the Surgical Past,” in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery, ed. Christopher Lawrence (New York: Routledge, 1992), 311. 3 Frederick Treves, “Address in Surgery,” British Medical Journal 2, no. 2066 (1900): 289. 4 Harold Ellis, A History of Surgery (London: Greenwich Medical Media, 2002), 3.

 

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witnessed an increased reliance on anatomical knowledge of the body as well as on

specialized tools in surgery. This change was most prominently noted by Lorenz Heister,

the surgical scholar of the century and father of scientific surgery in Germany, who

claimed, in his General System of Surgery (1739) that “a surgeon’s hand would be of

little service to him, if he was not supplied with a variety of instruments.”5 Heister’s

System, the first systematic treatise of surgery translated into English, soon found itself

“in every body’s hands” in the arena of British surgery.6

The nineteenth century saw a further insurgence of scientific principles and their

ensuing instruments and techniques. In the early 1870s, the Royal College of Surgeons

instituted a Historical Surgical Instrument Collection as an attempt to capture the history

of the surgical profession.7 The hand-craft was thus catalogued through the tools grasped

by surgeons, “as in the case of instruments which have been handed down through

several generations of surgeons in a long established family practice, or have been

associated in some way with an outstanding figure in the surgical profession.”8 As

Ghislaine Lawrence points out, the history of surgery has time and again been written as

a history of its visible, quantifiable artifacts—its innovations and tools. This essay, by

contrast, attempts to grasp “the work done with [surgeon’s] tools,” in other words, the

more performance-based components of surgical practice. Surgery is an operation, first

and foremost, of therapeutic medicine that, as operation, bears the property of being

                                                        5 Lorenz Heister, A General System of Surgery (London, 1750), 11. 6 Samuel Sharp, preface to A Critical Enquiry into the Present State of Surgery (London: J & R Tonson, 1754), A5. 7 W. E. Thompson, “The Historical Surgical Instrument Collection in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England,” Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England 22 (1958): 58–66. 8 Ibid., 66.

 

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active work, includes the exertion of force or influence, and has an effect upon the body.

This operation has historically taken the form of external manual manipulations such as

the setting of bones or the more complex internal interventions required in major

operative surgery. Yet, in either case, in order to be set in motion, to be “operational,” as

it were, surgery requires its spaces, tools, bodies, and codes of conduct, as well as the

knowledge and experience needed to determine what counts as a successful operation.

In focusing on the particular work that surgeons perform with their tools, I turn to

the gestural and embodied practices of operating such as feeling, cutting, or setting. In

other words, I examine the interaction between surgical hands and surgical instruments in

the nineteenth century. As such, I follow Christopher Lawrence’s call “to consider how

the knowledge, created by surgeons, of body parts and their diseases, has built into it the

possibility, indeed the desirability, of surgical intervention.”9 Yet, while I do examine

surgical epistemology, that is, how surgeons create knowledge as well as their bases for

knowledge creation, I focus not on the diseased “body parts” that surgery wishes to cure.

Instead, I bring light to the body parts of surgeons themselves; that is to say, I evaluate

how nineteenth-century surgery, consisting of its array of advancements, imagines the

body of the surgical practitioner. To this end, I place emphasis upon the actions that

compose surgical performance.

I situate nineteenth-century surgery within the arena of scientific practice which

Iwan Rhys Morus recognizes as composed of performative acts: “Thinking about these

acts as genres of performance allows us . . . to start getting to grips with the bodily

                                                        9 Christopher Lawrence, “Democratic, Divine and Heroic: The History and Historiography of Surgery,” in in Medical Theory, Surgical Practice: Studies in the History of Surgery, ed. Christopher Lawrence (New York: Routledge, 1992), 14.

 

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strategies that make for successful science—that is to say, with the identity of the

scientific practitioner.”10 In order to then understand the performative and bodily

strategies of operation, I utilize a theory of aesthetics that captures both (a) the sensory

and embodied aspects and (b) the contemplative and theoretical judgments of surgical

intervention. Firstly, the surgical operation is experienced aesthetically on the body of the

patient on whom it is conducted, and it is also embodied by the surgeon who both

performs the procedural gesticulations and motions of operation and experiences the

physical and nervous perceptions of surgical performance. Surgical aesthesis, or sensory

perception, is thus a deeply individual experience for both surgeon and patient. Whether

diagnosing or curing the patient through touch, “direct sensory evaluation” enables the

surgeon “to understand or interact with the patient as a human being.”11 Secondly, said

surgical performance relies on theories of bodily disease as well as anatomical knowledge

determined to be medically sound.12 The operational feat follows institutionalized rules of

preparation, presentation and management which determine where the operating table is

to be placed, for instance, or where the surgeon is to position his own physical self to best

catch the light.13 Understanding the nature of surgical performance, I argue, is to

understand its multi-faceted operational aesthetic.

                                                        10 Iwan Rhys Morus “Placing Performance,” Isis 101, no. 4 (2010): 776. 11 Stanley Joel Reiser, Medicine and the Reign of Technology, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 230. Reiser laments the turn to instrumentation in medical diagnosis, stressing that the reliance upon the data produced by instruments rather than the of the patient engenders a grave loss. 12 Lawrence, “Democratic, Devine, and Heroic,” 15. Lawrence notes that: “Surgical practices, it is arguable, are never empirical procedures. Even the most simple of them imply a theory of the body and disease, either explicit or implicit.” 13 See, for instance, William Williams Keen, The Organization of an Operation, (Philadelphia: Leas Bros., 1891).

 

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In the absence of witnessing, I regard the written texts of and about the operation

as scenarios of surgical experience and articulation. By using literature to analyze

surgical performance, especially texts composed by those participating in the practices of

nineteenth-century surgical intervention, I privilege the manner in which surgeons put

into words and, as such, understood, the embodied aspects of surgical experience. What

is more, I regard the articulated gesticulations, sensations and judgments of surgery as

expressive of the visceral, contemplative, and even emotional “work done with their

tools.”

This essay analyzes the operational aesthetic of one particular surgeon, Frederick

Treves. A pioneer in abdominal surgery, Treves was one of the most recognized medical

practitioners in late nineteenth-century Britain. Surgeon-Extraordinary to Her Majesty the

Queen, he was also Surgeon-in-Ordinary to His Royal Highness the Duke of York, as

well as Consulting Surgeon to the London Hospital.14 In addition to his success as a

surgeon, Treves was ever present in the public eye on account of his various literary

endeavors. Apart from medical texts, Treves published many works with broader public

appeal; these include a volume entitled The Influence of Clothing on Health and

numerous travel writings including, but not limited to, The Tale of a Field Hospital,

Cradle of the Deep (a study of travels in Uganda and West Indies), and The Lake of

Geneva.15 His most famous work was The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, a

collection of twelve tales derived from Treves’ own surgical casebooks.16

                                                        14 See Stephen Trombley, Sir Frederick Treves: the Extraordinary Edwardian. (London: Routledge, 1989). 15 Frederick Treves, The Influence of Clothing on Health (London: Cassell, 1886); The Tale of a Field Hospital (London: Cassell, 1900); The Cradle of the Deep (London:

 

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Treves’ writings in multiple genres, mainly his medical addresses, student

handbooks, and short stories, epitomize the various venues of surgical engagement.

Unlike his more concise surgical case studies, which present only the technical and

practical details of one specific case at a time, the abovementioned works reveal greater

commentary and reflection upon the surgical craft as a whole. Moving readers through

the various spaces of surgical experience, these works by Treves demonstrate how he

articulated, understood, and even imagined the labors of his profession. I consider his

writings, whether directed to medical or more public audiences, as literary texts that

allow us to see beyond the empirical and ever-progressing veneer of medical science.

They enable us to focus on the rhetorical moves he makes, the arguments he privileges,

the knowledge and epistemology he assumes, and, more significantly, on how he

imagines the surgical enterprise itself.

In particular, I focus on how Treves articulates the defining aspect of his

operational aesthetic: the surgical hand. I begin by presenting a brief analysis of the role

of hands in medicine, as it has been articulated by historians of medicine. I then discuss

broader nineteenth-century surgical discourses pertaining to the use and care of the

surgeon’s hand, taking a close lens to how Frederick Treves perceives and imagines the

hand of the surgeon at the peak of nineteenth-century surgical advancement. Two

particular texts, a medical address entitled “The Surgeon of the Nineteenth Century,” and

a short story “The Idol with Hands of Clay” are particularly significant here as they

present Treves’ major claims and beliefs regarding surgical dexterity at the time. In his

                                                                                                                                                                     Smith, Elder & co., 1908); and The Lake of Geneva (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1922). 16 Frederick Treves, The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences (London: Cassell, 1923).

 

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laudatory professional address, delivered before the British Medical Association in 1900,

Treves traces the major developments in surgery and highlights their beneficial influence

upon the “inestimable cunning” residing in surgical hands. Written for a more popular

audience, “The Idol With Hands of Clay” presents to readers the narrative of an

inexperienced and overconfident, albeit well-educated surgeon, who subjects his young

wife to an operation from which she never recovers. This tale presents the dramatic costs

of lacking in the experiential and tactile components of surgery. Treves’ writings on the

prehensile necessities of surgery, I argue, reveal not only the technological and

epistemological capacities of the surgical hand, but also the embodied investments of

manual therapeutic intervention.

Instigating the palpable interactions of surgery, the hand is the body’s richest

source of physical interaction and tactile feedback. It is the seat of surgical

sensation/aesthesis and, more significantly, one that is attached to the body of the surgeon

himself. Yet the work of these hands consists not of assertive action alone. As receptive

organs, the surgeon’s hands are subject to a myriad sensation, proprioceptive awareness

being especially essential to the delicate maneuvering of surgical implements. So too are

these hands idiosyncratic in their technique, dependent upon the procedural knowledge,

style, and swiftness of their bearer. And lastly, their action is intimately associated with

the intellect, imagination, and emotions of the surgeon who discerns, determines, judges,

and, if necessary, improvises his/her performance. As Treves notes, they are attuned to

“that particular learning,” “that refined sensibility, that critical perception, that

inestimable cunning, which lies in the surgeon’s touch.” The hand resides at the core of

surgical experience. Where historian of medicine Henry Sigerist wrote, in particular

 

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reference to surgery, “The history of medicine is to a large extent the history of its

tools,”17 I instead proclaim: “the history of surgery is to a large extent the history of its

hands.”

i . THE ORIGINS OF THE ARMAMENTARIUM

In The Evolution of Surgical Instruments, John Kirkup places the hand at “the

origins of the armamentarium.”18 As such, the hand emerges as the first medical

appliance from which all others succeed. According to Kirkup, the technological

possibilities of the surgical hand manifest themselves as follows: “a finger prompts items

by virtue of its total structure, the particular position it adopts, and with its nail.

Furthermore, combinations of fingers and of finger and thumb manifest other actions and

capacities.”19 Kirkup presents to readers the postures of the fingers and thumb that allow

them to become probes, dialators, hooks, speculums, tourniquets, pincers and tweezers,

while the fist functions as a hammer and mallet and the nails operate as scalpels, lancets,

curettes, and raspatories. It is thus apt that he declares elsewhere a smooth trajectory

“from hand and mouth to sticks, stones and metal.”20 Yet the presence of the hand as

surgical technology is not exclusively a characteristic of the past. The human index and

little fingers “remain vital instruments for diagnosis, exploration, and treatment,” “the

                                                        17 Henry Sigerist, A History of Medicine: Primitive and Archaic Medicine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), 19. 18 John Kirkup, The Evolution of Surgical Instruments: An Illustrated History from Ancient Times to the Twentieth Century (Novato, CA: Jeremy Norman, 2006), 41. 19 Ibid., 42. 20 John Kirkup, short paper given to Bath Medical History Group, 1994. Quoted in Kirkup, The Evolution of Surgical Instruments, 41.

 

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ulnar margin of the fist is useful as a hammer,” and “fingernails can act as weapons and

primary tools.”21

In recognizing the fingers “as” a retractor, the fist “as” hammer, the nails “as”

lancets, Kirkup articulates a particular relationship between the surgeon’s hand and

surgical instruments. His use of “as” in these constructions indicates a simile; the finger

performs like or in the manner of a retractor. The two are not analogous; they remain

different entities. Their relationship, I argue, is performance-based: “What the ‘as’ says is

that the object of study will be regarded from ‘from the perspective of,’ ‘in terms of,’

‘interrogated by’ a particular discipline of study.”22 The hand as a tool in the

armamentarium is a hand regarded in terms of medicine and, in Kirkup’s particular

context, in terms of the discipline of surgery. Accordingly, the hand’s movements and

positions are teleologically aligned with a technology that emerged after the hand itself. It

is a hand understood through the conditions of surgical knowledge and their subsequent

performance. At the same time as the hands of the surgeon perform upon the body of a

patient, the direct object of the action of the operation, they also operate “as” surgical

instrument. The oppositional grip between thumb and index finger, in acting, behaving,

and showing as a tweezer, bears all the characteristics of performance. “Unquestionably,

surgical instruments must embody surgical knowledge,” writes Ghislaine Lawrence.23 It

follows that the application of the hand as surgical instrument represents a more literal

embodiment of knowledge. Yet this embodiment consists not simply of a translation and

application of existent knowledge. Through its performance of diagnosis and cure, the

                                                        21 Kirkup, The Evolution of Surgical Instruments, 44; 51; 53 (my emphasis). 22 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2006), 42. 23 Ghislaine Lawrence, “The Ambiguous Artifact,” 308.

 

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hand manifests the application of pre-determined surgical knowledge at the same time as

it demonstrates what counts as surgical knowledge as well as how this knowledge is

determined. In other words, the hand embodies the surgical point of view; it bears/bares

the epistemology of surgical intervention.

The tactile, perceptible and localized perspective necessitated by surgical analysis

and intervention is recognized by Owsei Temkin as follows:

Surgeons had to rely on physicians’ signs in their diagnosis and had to correlate the clinical picture to structural changes. […] Wounds, ulcers, abscesses, gangrene, and tumors on the surface of the body presented themselves to the eye or the palpating finger and the probe. The ends of broken bones could be felt, crepitation could be heard, the transparency of a scrotal tumor in case of hydrocele could be seen. The surgeon could hardly operate for hernia, aneurysm, cataract, or lacrimal fistula without visualizing a localized structural change.24

Along with keen eyes, sensible hands provided surgeons with “knowledge of structure,

both normal and morbid” essential for surgical treatment.25 This discerning and empirical

mode of anatomical diagnosis was essential to surgical practice well before medicine

recognized surgery as a scientific craft. In fact, it was the very manual nature of surgery

and its practice of physical intervention that led to its conception as the lower branch of

medicine.

With the rise of anatomy and experimental physiology in the eighteen and

nineteenth centuries, medical doctors were able to learn the internal functioning of the

body.26 As a result, while surgeons were able to practice more invasive techniques in

their disdained art, doctors of medicine adopted, for the first time, a localized perspective

                                                        24 Owsei Temkin, “The Role of Surgery in the Rise of Modern Medical Thought,” in The Double face of Janus and Other Essays in the History of Medicine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 492–493. 25 Ibid., 493. 26 See chapter 1, “The Aesthetics of Laboratory Inscription,” of this dissertation for resources and an analysis of progress in nineteenth-century experimental physiology.

 

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on medical illness. In so doing, “medicine adopted a point of view prevalent among

surgeons.”27 As medicine aligned itself with the surgical perspective on pathology, so too

did it adopt the techniques and implements of surgery—the “‘instrumental’ branch” of

medicine.28 “It was during the period that surgery was rising to the pinnacle of medical

treatment that diagnostic and therapeutic instruments were introduced and applied to the

diagnosis and nonsurgical treatment of diseases.”29 The rise of anatomical knowledge

coupled with the increasingly surgical proclivities of physicians, Christopher Lawrence

asserts, allowed for “a new historical script for surgery, an independent discipline,

growing cumulatively through empirical enquiry.”30 Lawrence charts the transformation

of the historical narrative of surgery as follows: first, surgery was thought subservient to

physic; second, it was considered a separate but equal counterpart of physic; third, it bore

a shared foundation with physic in general pathology; and lastly, by the end of the

nineteenth century, surgery doubtless emerged scientifically superior to physic.

The question, however, is not how such advancement in knowledge and

technology altered the relationship between physic and surgery, but rather, how the

performance-based and epistemological hand of surgery, signifying the very origins of

the armamentarium, found itself understood and represented in the era of surgical

influence and superiority. It is essential here to take into consideration the everyday

complexities of surgical instruments in the nineteenth century, that is, the knowledge they

embodied, the actions/interventions they facilitated or even, as Ghislaine Lawrence notes,

                                                        27 Temkin, “The Role of Surgery,” 496. 28 Reiser, Medicine and the Reign, 38. 29 Audrey B. Davis, Medicine and Its Technology: An Introduction to the History of Medical Instrumentation (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981), 6. 30 Christopher Lawrence, “Democratic, Divine and Heroic,” 4.

 

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the stylized nature of their performance: “The history of operative surgery has almost

exclusively been perceived as the history of the attempted cure of morbid anatomical

conditions. But did surgeons cut like barbers – or, for that matter, like butchers, or cooks,

or carpenters?”31 To this end, I turn to the written words of nineteenth-century surgeons

themselves.

Surgical sense and sensibility:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the workings of the hand as a sense

organ were relatively unknown as a result of the incompleteness of anatomical

knowledge and physiological function of the nervous system. Sir Charles Bell (1774–

1842), the first professor of Anatomy and Surgery of the Royal College of Surgeons in

London, was a key figure in mapping the structure of the nervous response mechanism.32

In addition to describing the sensations associated with the neural connections of

particular sense organs,33 Bell published an entire work on the hand alone. In The Hand,

Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design, Bell notes the superiority of

the sense of touch over all other senses, one that is most perceptive at the extremity that is

                                                        31 Ghislaine Lawrence, “The Ambiguous Artifact,” 307. 32 Leonard Carmichael, “Sir Charles Bell: A Contribution to the History of Physiological Psychology,” Psychological Review 33, no. 3 (1926): 188–217. 33 See first Charles Bell, “On the Nervous Circle which Connects the Voluntary Muscles with the Brain,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116, no. 1/3 (1826): 172. Bell asserts “It is also very remarkable that an impression made on two different nerves of sense, though with the same instrument, will produce two distinct sensations and the ideas resulting will only have relation to the organ affected.” Also see Charles Bell, The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments as Evincing Design (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833), 133. Bell notes, “Experiment proves, what is suggested by Anatomy, that not only the organs are appropriated to particular classes of sensations, but that the nerves, intermediate between the brain and the outward organs, are respectively capable of receiving no other sensations but such as are adapted to their particular organs.”

 

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the hand. “The hand,” it follows, “is not a thing appended, or put on, like an additional

movement in a watch; but a thousand intricate relations must be established throughout

the body in connection with it […]; and there must be an original part of the composition

of the brain, which shall have relation to these new parts before they can be put in

activity.”34 Endowed with its vast network of neural connections, “the human hand is so

beautifully formed, it has so fine a sensibility, that sensibility governs its motions so

correctly, every effort of the will is answered so instantly, as if the hand itself were the

seat of that will.”35 The hand’s propensity for responding swiftly to conscious decisions

thus appears to bestow upon it a mind of its own. This attribution of mindful functioning

can certainly be deciphered in Treves’ conceptions of a surgeon’s hands as bearers of

exquisite cunning, wealth of learning, and intellectual refinement.

Yet the wonders of the hand reside not simply in its ability to disguise the sensory

processes leading to prehensile action. Bell charts the organ as one essential to a

trajectory of human advancement; the hand functions simultaneously as “the instrument

for perfecting the other senses and developing the endowments of the mind itself.”36

It has been said that, accompanying the exercise of touch, there is a desire of obtaining knowledge; in other words, a determination of the will towards the organ of the sense. Bichat says, it is active whilst the other senses are passive. This opinion implies that there is something to be understood—something deeper than what is here expressed. We shall arrive at the truth by considering that in the use of the hand there is a double sense exercised; we must not only feel the contact of the object, but we must be sensible to the muscular effort which is made to reach it, or to grasp it in the fingers.37

                                                        34 Bell, The Hand, 160. 35 Ibid., 23. 36 Ibid., 145. 37 Ibid., 116.

 

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On account of this dual sensibility articulated by Bell, the hand, through its peculiar

functioning, directs its bearer from the sole sense of touch to an understanding of the

phenomena that compose touch itself. Such an understanding consists as much of the

material and sensory networks directing touch as it does the sensory and intellectual

effects of touch, that is, the creation of further awareness and “the desire of obtaining

knowledge.” In fact, Bell goes so far in the conclusion of his text as to chart a trajectory

of hand-held human advancement, beginning with the hand “sustaining the life of an

individual,” then adapting to his progress as “laborer” and “artificer,” leading finally to

the stage of “mechanical ingenuity.”38 Thus guiding humanity to knowledge through

sense experience, the hand, as constituted by Bell, stimulates empiricism and experiment.

And while he nowhere mentions the surgical hand explicitly, by placing the hand at the

center of human science and innovation, Bell’s assertions redeem the hand of the surgeon

from its craft-associations and place it within a framework that is decidedly scientific. As

such, he provides the epistemological underpinnings for the surgical point of view

described by Temkin as one particular to the hands.

The need for a “dexterous hand” in surgery does not escape Bell. In his acclaimed

Institutes of Surgery, a collection of lectures delivered in 1837/8 at the University of

Edinburgh, Bell makes the following recommendations: “the student of surgery should

undertake dissection early. This he must do to acquire an intimate knowledge of structure

and a dexterous hand.” In addition to practicing upon the human body, “it is essential that

he should practice some mechanical exercise, that he may acquire an accordance between

the eye and the hand […] drawing, modeling, and etching […] but perhaps the best

                                                        38 Ibid., 207.

 

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exercise of all is the art of anatomical preparation.”39 The practice of dissection and

anatomical preparation serve to both attune the hand to surgery as they do teach the

young surgeon about the anatomy and physiology of his art.

Yet one cannot help note the more aesthetic and expressive nature of the

“mechanical exercises” recommended by Bell: drawing, modeling, and etching. The

surgical hand is to be fostered through a series of inter-arts exercises, whereby

engagement in the visual arts prepares the hand for the performance-based arena of

surgery. Bell’s own knowledge of the fine arts and their relation to dexterity was

constituted not simply by his own expertise as an artist but also his research into the

physiological and anatomical investments required by artistic practice. His publications

in this arena include Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery: Trepan, Hernia,

Amputation, Aneurism, and Lithotomy (1821) and The Anatomy And Philosophy Of

Expression As Connected With The Fine Arts (1806).40 In recommending the more

refined arts of drawing, modeling, and etching, however, Bell does more than simply

suggest practices for hand-eye coordination or place the fine arts within the arena of

scientific inquiry; rather, he provides a comparison between the kind of work done in the

visual arts and surgery.

Writing a few decades after Bell, John Eric Erichsen (1818–1896), President of

the Royal College of Surgeons in 1880 and Surgeon Extraordinary to the Queen Victoria

prior to Treves, also recognizes the inextricable relationship between art and science in

                                                        39 Charles Bell, Institutes of Surgery: Arranged in the Order of Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh (Philadelphia: Ed. Barrington & Geo. D. Haswell, 1843), v. 40 Charles Bell, The Anatomy And Philosophy Of Expression As Connected With The Fine Arts, 5th ed. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1865); Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery: Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism, and Lithotomy (London: Longman, et al., 1821).

 

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the arena of surgery. In an introductory address delivered at University College, London,

in 1868, he advises future surgeons accordingly:

You must ever, in studying your Profession, bear this in mind,—if you trust alone to Science you are like a Sailor who has studies Navigation on dry land till he has mastered the whole theory of the subject, but who scarcely knows one rope from another when on board ship. If you trust too exclusively to the Art, you are like a Seaman who has to navigate his ship without chart, compass, or quadrant, or knowledge to use if he had these instruments.41

The surgeon cannot then simply learn Anatomy and Physiology and be ready to operate.

He must attune himself to the art of surgery, that is, its physical manual manipulations,

the work of the surgeon’s hand. “Manual skill and dexterity are necessarily of the first

advantage to a surgeon, and he should diligently endeavour to acquire the art of using his

instruments with neatness, with rapidity, and with certainty.”42 As in the case of other

finer arts, the surgical “art cannot be acquired by Solitary Study. It must be taught

practically. It must be learnt by the Pupil from the Master of the Craft. It is transmitted in

this way from one generation of Surgeon to another, not by oral, not by written

instructions, but by seeing how things were done.”43 On the one hand, Erichsen’s

advocacy for apprenticeship in learning surgical performance hearkens back to an older

guild-based model of pre-scientific surgery. On the other, however, Erichsen’s approach

is distinctly scientific in that he does not (and indeed argues that he cannot) divorce the

art from the science it performs. As such, he recommends a series of exercises and

techniques that simultaneously promote dexterity and surgical knowledge. More

specifically, he proposed that the young surgeon learn

                                                        41 John Eric Erichsen, Medicine: An Art-Science and Its Study (London: James Walton, 1868), 24. 42 John Eric Erichsen, The Science and Art of Surgery: Being a Treatise on Surgical Injuries, Diseases, and Operations (London: Walton and Maberly, 1853), 45. 43 Erichsen, Medicine: An Art-Science, 36.

 

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to use his hands, his eyes, his ears, to educate them to the various actions they have to perform, the minute discriminations they have to make. He must manipulate in the Laboratory, dissect in the Rooms, bandage, and apply splint, and do the minor operations of Surgery in the Out-Patient Department; operate and learn the construction, the handling, and the use of his instruments in the Dead House.44

Erichsen’s advice recognizes the sensory and proprioceptive relationship between the

hand and eye in surgery. More significantly, his focus on learning such hand-eye

coordination in medical spaces—the Dead House, Laboratory, and Out-Patient

Department—advocates for an education that not simply renders the hand more able, but

makes it so in the spaces within which such ability is most required and which are

governed by necessary medical knowledge, rules, and codes of conduct. Becoming a

dexterous surgeon, after all, is as much about learning to sense and perform as it is about

doing so in a particular medical arena.

Inheriting these approaches to surgical practice and education, Frederick Treves,

writing at the turn of the twentieth-century, also recognizes the significance of the art of

surgery, but he refers to it more explicitly as a hand-craft: “Operative surgery is a

handicraft, and the accomplished operator must lay claim to be considered a skilled

handicraftsman.”45 In fact, Treves states at the very beginning of his Manual of Operative

Surgery “Every pains should be taken to cultivate what may be termed a surgical

hand.”46 In a less technical text, “The Idols with Hand of Clay,” a short story describing

the failures of an overly-ambitious and clumsy surgeon, Treves articulates in more

colorful terms the necessity of manual dexterity: “The surgeon’s hands must be delicate,

but they must also be strong. He needs a lace-maker’s fingers and a seaman’s grip […] I

                                                        44 Ibid., 35–36. 45 Frederick Treves, Manual of Operative Surgery (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1892), 26. 46 Ibid., 27.

 

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conceive of him then not as a massive Hercules wrestling ponderously with Death for the

body of Alcestis, but as a nimble man in doublet and hose who, over a prostrate form,

fights Death with a rapier.”47 Equating the surgeon’s scalpel with a slender and precise

rapier, Treves paints before readers the portrait of a dainty and tactful hero, one who uses

his nimble yet sturdy fingers “to fight for another’s life.”48

Treves’ advice to aspiring surgeons, however, takes a more practical turn, as he

recommends to them practices that do not simultaneously serve to advance medical

knowledge and experience. Akin to his predecessors, he recommends “such occupations

for a leisure hour as etching on copper, sketching, or wood carving,” but he does so for

the precise intention of improving the action of the “palmar muscles.”49 He likewise turn

to “athletic exercises, involving the upper limbs, such as fencing, rowing, and practice in

a gymnasium, which certainly render the hand for some hours after such exercise

unsteady, although after a longer period of rest precision in the action of the smaller

muscles is with equal certainty improved.” He further suggests:

A surgeon who is careful of the manner in which his scalpel is held should not carry a heavy bag to the scene of his labours, nor should he take part in such muscular exertions as are needed to move operating tables or beds, or to lift a heavy patient. The vigorous efforts which may be necessary to restrain the violence of a patient under chloroform are apt to render the arms of those so engaged very tremulous.50

The focus then for Treves is on the muscular development of the hand and the structures

complementary to it, such as arms, chest, and shoulders. Still, while engaging in a series

of artistic and athletic activities for prehensile advancement, the surgeon needs to be

                                                        47 Frederick Treves, “The Idols with Hands of Clay,” in The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, 184. 48 Ibid. 49 Treves, Manual, 27–28. 50 Ibid., 27.

 

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careful in that he does not partake in activities that may exhaust the “smaller muscles” of

the hand in the critical moments before and during surgery.

Like Erichsen, Treves also recognizes that hands, no matter how agile and well

developed, cannot alone a successful surgeon make. He too stresses the absolute reliance

of the surgical craft on exact anatomical knowledge: “much in the attainment of success

depends upon natural aptitude and physical qualification; but still more depends upon

culture and patient practice […] he may do well who is bold, but he will do better who

has precise knowledge. The surest sense of confidence rests with the operator who knows

accurately what he intends to do, and how to do it.”51 Writing for a more public audience

in his surgical reminiscences, Treves illustrates the value of surgical education and

knowledge in more colorful terms:

He [the surgeon] must know the human body as a forester knows his wood; must know branches of every tress, the sources and wanderings of every rivulet, the banks of every alley, the flowers of every glade. As a surgeon, moreover, he must be learned in the moods and the trouble of the wood, must know of the wild winds that may rend it, of the savage things that lurk in its secret haunts, of the strangling creepers that may throttle its sturdiest growth, of the rot and mould that may make dust of its very heart.52

In fact, so necessary is the knowledge that is to be manifested by and in fact embodied in

the hands of the surgeon, that without it, he is akin to any other craftsman: “A wood

engraver would probably soon find as little difficulty in baring the carotid artery as a

stone carver would find in performing osteotomy.”53 It is then precise scientific

knowledge that differentiates surgery from “other and simpler handicrafts.” To the earlier

question posed by Ghislaine Lawrence, “did surgeons cut like barbers – or, for that

                                                        51 Ibid., 26. 52 Treves, “The Idol,” 183. 53 Treves, Manual, 26.

 

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matter, like butchers, or cooks, or carpenters?” one can now answer that they not only cut

but performed the full range of their handicraft as did artisans: sketchers, drawers, wood

engravers, and stone carvers.

The complex relationship between the art and science of surgery articulated by

these surgeons attests to the “new historical script for surgery” that Christopher Lawrence

deciphers as a direct consequence of the scientific turn in medicine. Certainly, although

Treves may well recognize the etymological handicraft that surgery is, the manifestation

of this handicraft throughout the nineteenth-century and particularly at its close is

indubitably and gloriously scientific. His acclaimed 1900 address to the British Medical

Association, to which this essay now turns, details the inextricable progress of surgical

art and science. Where Bell began the nineteenth century by praising scientific and

mechanical advancement facilitated by human hands, Treves ends the era by illustrating

the effects of nineteenth-century medicine’s most laudable developments upon the

refined and knowledgeable hands of surgeons.

The surgeon in the nineteenth century: Delivered at the annual meeting of the British Medical Association at Ipswich in

August 1900, Frederick Treves’s address on surgery, entitled “The Surgeon in the

Nineteenth Century,” traces the progress of the surgical profession from the beginning of

the century to its close. In this speech, Treves offers to his surgical peers a trajectory of

undisturbed medical advancement, charting in particular the knowledge and practices of

nineteenth-century surgery in anaesthetic and antiseptic use, in addition to novel methods

of arresting hemorrhage. Whereas at the beginning of the 1800s, the surgeon “was but a

sorry element in social life,” the nineteenth century, he declares, “has been without a

 

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parallel in the history of human culture, and so far as the art of surgery is concerned has

embodied an advance in principle and in practice which has been no other than

revolutionary.”54

With his extensive use of figurative language and linguistic flourishes, Treves

dramatically fashions surgery as a practice that, in the short period of a hundred years,

emerged out of disarray and abysmal ignorance. He illustrates a narrative of progress by

referring to the “sleepy villages” that once defined English life, a life without railways,

telegraphs, telephones, or even an effective postal system. And within these conditions,

he situates men living in an “immature” condition, “content to live and die within sights

of fields and spires,” their records “rich with the littleness of personal affairs […] made

living by the very gossip and petty commentaries of those who constituted society when

the century was young.”55 As the century aged, so too did those who constituted society

mature, and it is within the latter context of industry and ambition that Treves finds

surgery—a different animal entirely from where it was a hundred years before.

Treves commences his evaluation of nineteenth-century surgery with the

following words: “I do not propose to attempt a review of the progress of surgery during

the last hundred years. That work has already been done by abler hands. I would venture

rather to deal with the progress of the surgeon himself during this period, and with the

advancement of the individual as an exponent of a grave profession.”56 By dealing with

the surgeon himself, Treves provides his audience with access to the lived experience of

                                                        54 Frederick Treves, “Address in Surgery,” 284; 285. 55 Ibid., 284. 56 Ibid., 284.

 

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the scientific practitioner encountering the material progress of his day.57 And it is in this

account of the surgeon’s lived experiences that the figure of the hand emerges again and

again, no longer merely an organ of prehensility or the site of surgical contact, but the

metonymic extension of the surgical craft as a whole.

Of the many improvements to surgical life that Treves locates in the nineteenth

century, he expresses ardently the employment of anaesthetics: “The changes that the

discovery has wrought in the personality of the surgeon, in his bearing, in his methods,

and in his capabilities are as wondrous as the discovery itself.”58 The an-aesthetic, in its

cessation of sensation, of aesthesis, certainly and most beneficially impedes the

sensibility of pain for its subject, the surgical patient. Yet it is the effect on the surgical

practitioner that Treves regards as truly wondrous. The incredible changes for the

surgeon, of personality, bearing, method, and capabilities register on the tactile organ of

surgical craft: “The mask of the anaesthetist has blotted out the anguished face of the

patient and the horror of a vivisection on a fellow-man has passed away. Thus it happens

that the surgeon has gained dignity, calmness, confidence, and, not least of all, the gentle

hand.”59 The numbing effect on the body of the patient has here a complementary effect

on the touch of the surgeon, needing no longer to rush through his visceral procedures,

                                                        57 I draw my usage of the term “lived experience” from Nicholas Jardine in his essay “The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine as Rhetorical and Aesthetic Accomplishment,” in The Laboratory Revolution in Medicine, edited by Andrew Cunningham & Perry Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 315. Though focusing specifically on the nineteenth-century laboratory, Jardine nonetheless uses the term lived experience as one that describes “what it was like to be involved in medicine” at the time. The arena of lived experience in medicine, and in this instance surgery, includes its practices and routines, architecture and layout of institutions, materials and instruments of procedure, as well as its subjects and patients. 58 Treves, “Address in Surgery,” 288. 59 Ibid.

 

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needing no longer “the quickest fingers and the hardest heart.”60 He is now bestowed

with “the gentle hand” which enhances the dignity, calm, and confidence of his

profession.

Moving from anaesthetic to antiseptic, the prehensile capacities of the surgeon are

yet again brought center-stage. The introduction of antiseptic measures early in the

century by surgeon Joseph Lister in fact altered the very interaction between the hands of

the surgeon and the body of his patient: “When the century was young the touch of the

operator was the touch of a tainted hand; the balm he poured into the wound was

poisoned, and he himself undid the good his science strained to effect. […] The change

has been great, and its greatness lies in its littleness, for it is bound up with no more than

this: that the surgeon has learnt to be clean.”61 With this dramatic description, the

antiseptic emerges as panacea to a faltering science: having learnt to be clean, the

operator no longer bestows upon his patient a poison, no longer the touch of a tainted

hand. The hand is made hallow, embodying more than its capacity for surgical crafts.

While vaunting the appropriation of antiseptic measures, Treves is wary of their

ritualistic implications:

It is possible that the abandonment of the old easy order of things has been followed by a too slavish devotion to mere ceremonial. The remarkable and extravagant preparations with which some surgeons now approach an operation, the cleansings and the washings which precede the laying on of hands, smack a little of fetish worship, and foster the cult of the surgical Pharisee. On the other hand these performances, this “making clean of the outside of the cup and platter,” seem to give assurance, and to render the devotee thankful that he is not as other men.62

                                                        60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid.

 

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The biblical reference on Treves’ part extends further the powers of the surgeon’s hands;

the refinement of their aesthetic capabilities through washing is here recognized as

ritualistic practice. Still, Treves is critical of this turn to the ceremonial that transforms

science into a cult or religious rite. The dangers of ritual lie in the “individual’s

submission to forces ‘larger’ or at least ‘other’ than oneself”63; the surgeon is no longer

simply an actor in the surgical theater, but becomes a ritualized transcendent figure.

Though “making clean of the outside of the cup and platter,” that is, cleansing the visible

surface of the hands, the surgeon’s moral intention, is made questionable, smacking “a

little of fetish worship.” As Pharisee, the surgeon represents a worldview that is flawed,

but even so, Treves acknowledges that “he is not as other men.” The self-aggrandizing

enticements of ceremony do indeed “give assurance” and “render the devotee

thankful”—the ritualized performance of surgical preparation maintains and even

reinforces the authority of nineteenth-century medical science.

On account of the authoritative advancements in the theories, apparatus and

mechanisms of surgical practice—anaesthetics, antiseptics, an improved knowledge of

anatomy, and a readier method of arresting haemorrhage, to name a few—the hand that

commands the art of surgery is a gentler, more stable, and more precise hand. “The

operating theatre of the present day has lost its horrors and has changed from a shambles

to a chamber of sleep. The surgeon’s hand can move with leisurely precision, and

theatrical passes of the knife are favoured only by those who have not yet learnt that mere

                                                        63 Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), 15. On the interrelationship between ritual, theater, and every day performance, Schechner notes, “the differences among ritual, theater, and ordinary life depend on the degree spectators and performers attend to efficacy, pleasure, or routine; and how symbolic meaning and effect are infused and attached to performed events. In all entertainment there is some efficacy and in all ritual there is some theater” (152).

 

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brilliancy is no measure of success.”64 No longer stepping into the operating theatre “as a

matador strides into the ring,”65 the gentler, kinder surgeon turns to precision over

theatricality. His performance, assisted by instruments the likes of the trochar, the

aspirator, or the skiagraph, draws ever closer to absolute scientific certainty. For Treves,

however, the dependence on surgical apparatus is bitter-sweet in that it may lead to a

certain negligence of the oh-so-essential hands: “So many have been the artificial aids to

clinical investigation which recent science has introduced that it comes to be a question

whether the natural acumen will not deteriorate in proportion as he fails to encourage that

particular learning which clings to the finger tips of all great diagnosticians.”66 To

illustrate this point, Treves offers his audience of fellow practitioners several examples:

in the case of abdominal swelling, he cautions against the all too hasty implementation of

an exploratory laparotomy. “Much of the uncertainty of outline,” he writes, “can be

dissipated by a cultured hand which, with infinite patience and repetition, has learnt to

construct a reality out of a shadow.” The materializing hand likewise assists with a

suspicious ulcer: “it is well to devote time to a precise and tedious inspection of its edges

and to a careful tactile examination.” And lastly, for an obscure tumor, the surgeon need

not relinquish the “acuteness of his inquiry,” the knowledge that “his ready fingers have

[…] learnt” in favor of the exploratory incision: “Here once more an advantage is

minimized by a loss.”67 It would appear that knowledge of the surgical craft resides not in

the mind or in the cognizance of the surgeon as a whole being; instead, it is the hand that

is itself cultured, the ready fingers that have themselves learnt, and the very finger tips

                                                        64 Ibid., 286. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 288–289. 67 Ibid., 289.

 

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upon which cling the particular learning of all great diagnosticians. The hands of the

surgeon figure metonymically in that they become possessors of the “refined sensibility,

critical perception, and inestimable cunning.”68 In this manner, the cognizant and

aesthetic movements of the operating fingers are rendered more significant than the larger

corpus of the surgeon himself.

Such, for Treves, is the surgeon of the future: “Those, therefore, who are

concerned with the education of the surgeon of the future would do well to still cherish

this ancient power, and to foster a memory of the fact that surgery is, in its very essence a

handicraft, and that in all that he does the surgeon’s great endeavour should be to make

his own hands self-sufficing.”69 As a handicraft, surgery is certainly a work of hand

labor. But it is, at the same time, here implicated as a delicate and decorative art in its

very procedures. What is more, in the midst of technological progress, the hands possess

an “ancient power”—turning once again to mystical analogy. They are more significant

and more compelling than the surgeon who bears them, so much so that his own great

endeavor, according to Treves, “should be to make his own hands self-sufficing”—so

grand is the desire for aesthetic disembodiment, for the hands to unceasingly maneuver

the scalpel and exhibit the labors of their craft. It is unfortunate, after all, that the surgical

man should die and take his hands with him. Treves laments the unavoidable loss as

follows:

It is sad to think that this hardly-acquired faculty dies with the possessor of it, and never was this more vividly presented than it has been by the loss which surgery has sustained in the death of Sir James Paget. One can picture the great surgeon composed in his last sleep, and can see the once busy fingers lying lifeless on the

                                                        68 Ibid. 69 Ibid.

 

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white sheet, and then comes the wonder at the wealth of learning, at the exquisite cunning, at the refined sense which lay dead in the dead hand.70

The public is here presented with a two-fold demise—the death of surgeon James Paget,

as well as of his surgical prowess, a “hardly-acquired faculty” inhabiting his “busy

fingers.” The loss is made all the more grave in that the surgeon sleeps while it is his

hands that lie “lifeless.” He continues to emphasize Paget’s own magnificent touch as

follows: “No written book can hold a tithe of the dainty knowledge which had been

mastered by those subtle fingers, and no record, however laboured or however loving,

can tell of the power which once rested in that magic touch.”71 With this last statement,

Treves attests once again to the dynamic whereby the experience of surgery is embodied

within the hands that set themselves upon the body of the patient, but at the same time,

these hands are thought to operate as disembodied entities in and of themselves. It is they,

and not the surgeon to whom they inevitably belong, that bear the wealth of learning,

exquisite cunning, and even sensibility for visceral work. The intellectual refinement of

the surgical craft resides in the subtle fingers themselves—the hands determine and the

hands provide what the mind cannot. As such, they seem to bear a knowledge that is

ineffable, an aesthetic experience defying language.

ii . NARRATIVES OF TACTILE GENIUS A significant aspect of Treves’ famous address is his turn to the particular hands

of James Paget. While his speech largely acknowledges the improvements in the tactile

work done by any and every surgeon and expresses the desire for a self-sufficing and

                                                        70 Ibid. 71 Ibid.

 

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disembodied surgical hand, he comes eventually to the individual fingers of this one great

surgeon. In other words, he individuates the as yet overarching and disciplinary surgical

handicraft. It would appear that “the subject [of the hand] is complex, for apart from the

anatomical and physiological facts of motor function, hands in action reflect so much of

intellect and character and furthermore are instruments of sensibility and of

expression.”72 As instruments of sensibility, the surgeon’s hands are as much tools of

diagnosis as they are of cure. As instruments of expression, though no less exact, they are

perhaps much less empirical, subject to the idiosyncrasies of the bodies and minds to

which they are attached. James Paget’s hands are noteworthy not simply because they

successfully manifest knowledge of surgical craft, but because they are the hands of a

man who not only served both vice-president and president of the Royal College of

Surgeons but is attributed as being the father of modern surgery. They refer “so much to

the intellect and character” of his lived everyday experiences in surgery.

Treves’ laudatory mention of Paget is characteristic of nineteenth-century

histories of surgery, when “The surgical ‘genius’ made his appearance as a historical

figure.”73 These histories, as evidenced by Treves’ address, represented modern surgery

first as a paradigm entirely distinct from that of a darker, less civilized age predating

anatomy and physiology. Second, they charted the trajectory of the recently conceived

modern surgery as one marked by the inventions and accomplishments of undoubted men

of genius. Paget’s place in the history of surgery as articulated by Treves and his

contemporaries was thus indicative of a larger trend in the natural sciences of the period.

                                                        72 Norman Capener, “The Hand in Surgery,” The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery 38B, no. 1 (February 1956), 128. 73 Christopher Lawrence, “Democratic, Divine and Heroic,” 7.

 

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“The self-image of the new ‘men-of-science’ was […] largely constituted by Romantic

themes—scientific discovery as the work of genius, the pursuit of knowledge as a

disinterested and heroic quest, the scientist as actor in a dramatic history, the autonomy of

a scientific elite.”74 In the time following his own, Treves himself came to be recognized

as one such man of genius.

In an essay titled “Sir Frederick Treves: A Surgeon who Happens to be a Man of

Genius,” Wilfred T. Grenfell extols Treves, his former professor, as “the ideal all-around

man.”75 He describes the latter as an industrious and methodical man-of-science, a

conversationalist with a magnetic personality, an accomplished sailor, a prolific surgeon

and teacher, and a renowned author. Of his abundant undertakings, Grenfell notes, “his

pen and knife were, when I first knew him, never idle; and I can hardly say from which I

learnt most.”76 It is therefore, finally, through the work done with his hands, in holding

the instruments of operation and inscription, that Grenfell considers Treves most

memorable. He refers to the invaluable help offered by one particular written work:

I doubt if any surgical work yet written can compare with Treves’s “Operative Surgery” for the practical assistance it gives to a young operator who is in doubt. The book is just like the man. It says, “Do this one thing,” “Use that one instrument,” “Make that particular incision.” “Insert that ligature and no other”—so that you can go up to your work confident that all will go well. You are no longer in doubt, and the trepidation resulting from it, even though there be better ways of working; for you are inspired with your author’s own confidence—a feeling so absolutely essential to success in surgery. You seem almost to see your patient walking away well and grateful before you begin.77

                                                        74 Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds., “Introduction: The Age of Reflection,” in Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8. 75 Wilfred T. Grenfell, “Sir Frederick Treves: A Surgeon who Happens to be a Man of Genius,” in Putnam’s & the Reader: A Magazine of Literature, Art and Life, vol. 5 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909), 586. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., 586–587.

 

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The certainty-invoking quality that Grenfell attributes to Treves’ much read Manual of

Operative Surgery is discernible from the very beginning of the text. Treves prefaces the

comprehensive manual by stating that it “concerns itself solely with the practical aspects

of treatment by operation, with the technical details of operative surgery, and with such

part of the surgeon’s work as comes within the limits of a handicraft.”78 Dealing thus

with “the limits of a handicraft,” Treves is only concerned here with the work of the

hands within the operating theater, with standard un-individuated surgical procedure. He

accordingly offers to doubtful students, such as Grenfell may himself have once been,

clear instruction to do, use, make, or insert.

Even while Treves offers students a guide to practical surgery in his Manual, he

nonetheless acknowledges aspects of surgery that are both personal and much less

certain. These are “the indications for operating [with which] I have not dealt, nor have I

entered into the subtle questions, the anxious reasonings, the spectral doubts, which lie

without the operating theater.”79 Treves does not, however, altogether deprive his reading

audience of such indications. One finds them most conspicuously in his collection of

twelve short stories The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences. Based on his own case-

studies and experiences in surgery, Treves describes this oeuvre as “a gathering, indeed,

not of people, but of ‘cases’ recalled by portions of their bodies.”80 Products of

interaction with portions of his own body—his hands and their manifested craft—Treves’

accounts of these cases bear an overarching romantic flair and a dramatization of the

                                                        78 Treves, Manual, v. 79 Ibid. 80 Frederick Treves, “A Case of ‘Heart Failure,’” in The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, 121–134.

 

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surgical enterprise. A particular story in this compilation, “The Idol with Hands of Clay”

is a cautionary tale chronicling a failed application of the surgical handicraft. A critical

reflection on the work of the surgeon’s hands, the story emerged from Treves’ “thinking

of the equipment of a surgeon and of what is needed to fit him for his work.”81 What is

more, it unveils to readers that “subtle questions,” “anxious reasonings,” and “spectral

doubts” do not in fact comfortably reside “without the operating theater.”82

The idol with hands of clay:

In 1921, Treves had been asked to write an autobiography that recounted his

illustrious career as surgeon. He agreed and wrote the book in a few months. However,

shortly after he submitted the book to his publisher, he reclaimed the manuscript, stating

that “the medical director of a rival publishing firm strongly advised him not to publish

details about his patients, especially any story dealing with his treatment of royalty and

the court. […] As a consolation prize, Treves offered to write a different type of book

about his patients who were relatively unimportant figures. This was the origin of The

Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, which is a mixture of fact and fiction.”83

The mixture of fact and fiction that readers encounter within the pages of this

collection does not entirely consist of unimportant figures. One finds here the tale of

Joseph Merrick or the Elephant Man, made famous on account of his severe physical

deformities. Although Treves had previously published his case study of Merrick’s

congenital abnormalities in The British Medical Journal, the combination of personal and

                                                        81 Treves, “Idols,” 184. 82 My emphasis. 83 James G. Ravin, “Sir Frederick Treves and Sympathetic Opthalmia,” Archives of Opthalmology 122 (January 2004): 101.

 

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professional details he captures in this reminiscence have rendered Merrick unforgettable.

Pamela Powell accordingly notes:

Although Merrick’s case is one of the most intriguing medical mysteries of the past 100 years, his story probably would have remained entirely unknown outside of the medical literature if Treves had not recorded it in his book The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences. This account, despite its touch of melodrama and slight inaccuracies, is the one that has truly captured the imagination of all who have read it. Treves’ ennobling story has inspired two books, an award-winning play and a feature film titled The Elephant Man.84

What makes Treves’ stories memorable then is the manner in which they are presented to

readers, their ability to capture the imagination.

Early reviews of the book similarly noted the imaginative capacity of Treves

linguistic craft. An assessment in The British Medical Journal describes that book as

“written with the skill and insight that we have learnt to expect from the gifted surgeon

whose leisure years have been largely devoted to travel and literary craftsmanship.” The

reviewer goes on to add: “Most of these studies are cast in narrative form, and each tale is

told in such a way as to bring out in sharp relief some aspect of human life and

character.”85 Indeed, it was the very humane and sympathetic aspect of Treves’ writing

that appealed to non-medical audiences. A review in the New York Times praises the

book as follows: “Here is revealed the eminent physician and consultant who looks into

the inner consciousness of a strange company of people with emotional experiences of

life common alike to the caveman and the man of the twentieth century.”86 Another

reviewer for The Daily Graphic similarly writes “Sir Frederick Treves… tells a true story

                                                        84 Pamela Powell, “The Single-Case Report in Medical Literature: The ‘Elephant Man’ Serves as an Excellent Example,” AMWA Journal 5, no. 4 (December 1990): 10. 85 “Reviews,” British Medical Journal 1, no. 331 (February 1923): 335. 86 W B Hayward, “The Royal Surgeon Talks at Ease,” New York Times, April 6, 1924: 14.

 

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that surely has never been equaled in any tragedy or romance ever written as fiction,”

adding that “Here are very striking studies in psychology set out with keenness of

thought, sympathy of heart and grace of pen… it is told with a quiet realism.”87 It would

appear that the book, far from being a consolation prize composed of “relatively

unimportant” medical patients, operates instead as a treatise on the nature of human life,

life, that is, for “the caveman and the man of the twentieth century” alike. More

strikingly, Treves is credited with the capacity for psychological study, for looking “into

the inner consciousness” of people and unveiling their “emotional experiences.”

One particular psychological profile Treves presents to readers is that of an inept

surgeon in his piece “The Idol with Hands of Clay.” Undoubtedly referring to the Hebrew

Bible, particularly to the tale of the King of Bablyon, Nebuchadnezzar, who dreams of an

idol with a head of gold but feet of clay, the title of Treves’s tale presents once again a

cautionary tale against the self-aggrandizing surgical Pharisee. In the book of Daniel, the

prophet Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream as representative of the latter’s

kingdom—an idol which bears a firm leader as its head but has a fatal flaw at its very

foundation, signified by clay feet.88 In lieu of such feet, Treves’s reference to clay hands

suggests a flawed foundation for surgical work. He begins his tragic tale with the

following assertion regarding the innate nature of any surgeon: “the good surgeon is born,

not made. He is a complex product in any case, and often something of a prodigy. His

qualities cannot be expressed by diplomas nor appraised by university degrees. It may be

possible to ascertain what he knows, but no examination can elicit what he can do.”89 It is

                                                        87 “Review,” The Graphic 107 (1923): 264. 88 Dan. 2:31–43. 89 Treves, “The Idol,” 183.

 

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not then scientific knowledge required for therapeutic intervention, the head of gold, that

determines the quality of the surgeon, but rather a “complex” combination that cannot

altogether be ascertained and quantified—individual aptitude, skill, experience, and an

aptitude for the handicraft.

The surgeon in question is just the type who bore the right diplomas and

university degrees: “He had obtained an entrance scholarship at his medical school, had

collected many laudatory certificates, had been awarded a gold medal and had become a

Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons.”90 Yet, as Treves melodramatically reveals to

readers, he was not “a complex product” of inexpressible qualities, and “what he can

[actually] do” was far from impressive. His glorious certifications may well have deemed

him brilliant in the eyes of many including his own, but Treves forewarns, “Heaven help

the poor soul who has to be operated upon by a brilliant surgeon. Brilliancy is out of the

place in surgery. It is pleasing in the juggler who plays with knives in the air, but it

causes anxiety in an operating theatre.”91 An image quite contrary to that of “a nimble

man in doublet and hose who […] fights Death with a rapier,” the juggler entertains his

audience with props; he is not one who “fights” but rather “plays.” What is preferred in

surgery is the demonstration of skill resulting in precision without any unnecessary or

flashy risk that is devised solely to reward the performer and not his patient.

The unnamed yet ill-fated doctor had settled and married in a small town and

accordingly had limited opportunities for surgical experience other than setting bones or

applying poultices to wounds. He had a beautiful wife whose “chief charm was her

radiant delight in the mere joy of living.” Perhaps second to her zest for life was her

                                                        90 Ibid., 185. 91 Ibid., 184.

 

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admiration for her husband, whose depth of knowledge she perceived to be nothing short

of magical: “How glibly he would talk of metabolism and blood-pressure; how

marvelously he endowed common things with mystic significance when he discoursed

upon the value in calories of a pound of steak, or upon the vitamines that enrich the

common bean, or even the more common cabbage.”92 She perceives, in the abundant

information her husband displays, a “mystical significance,” perhaps a semblance of the

“ancient power” Treves himself claimed to reside in the surgical handicraft.

Unfortunately, her veneration of him adds to his pre-existing conceit, blinding

him to his own ineptitude: “He was naturally vain, but her idolatry made him vainer.”93

She may have had good reason for idolizing him based on the depth of his knowledge,

that is, the science of medicine. Yet when it came to the surgical arts, however, the veil of

mystical knowledge she imagines soon disappears to reveal a blundering and unskilled

operator who inflicts pain and eventual death upon the one person who believes in him

most.

The surgeon’s wife is suddenly struck with appendicitis and needs to be operated

on. When he suggests that a more experienced surgeon perform the necessary operation,

she would have none of it. “No,” she said, “she would not be operated on by stuffy old Mr. Heron. He was no good. She could not bear him even to touch her. If an operation was necessary no one should do it but her husband. He was so clever, such a surgeon, and so up-to-date […] In his wonderful hands she would be safe, and would be running about again in the garden in no time. What was the use of a fine surgeon if his own wife had denied his precious help.”94

If there was ever a dramatic foreshadowing, Treves has presented his readers with one. It

is not simply that the surgeon’s wife regards her husband as cleverer than the more

                                                        92 Ibid., 187. 93 Ibid., 188. 94 Ibid. 188–189.

 

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experienced surgeon, but rather that she cannot bear for the latter “to touch her.” There is

only one particular set of “wonderful hands” that she desires to undertake the manual and

sensory manipulations required to cure her. Having not only become an idol in his wife’s

eyes but also his own, this young inexperienced surgeon imagines how keenly he would

make use of his hands and how his assistant would be impressed “by the operator’s skill,

by his coolness, by the display of the latest type of instrument, and generally by his very

advanced methods.”95 He thinks little of the fact that he is about to undertake his first

major procedure or that his experience with the operation consisted only of witnessing

minor and fairly uncomplicated cases.

After “elaborate preparations,” the moment of surgery finally arrives. His delicate

wife is led into the operating room. “She smiled as she saw her husband standing in the

room looking very gaunt and solemn in his operating dress—a garb of linen that made

him appear half-monk, half-mechanic. She held her hand towards him, but he said he

could not take it as his own hand was sterilized.”96 Even now, she regards in him a

combination of surgical science and art; he is to her at once a spiritual healer and a

technician repairing her physiological machinery. What is more, his inability to takes his

wife’s hand into his own, underscores his familiarity with forms of ceremony and

preparation over the unpredictable details and actions of actual surgical performance.

Adding further veracity to the sensational operation he is about to relate, Treves

here informs readers that his account comes directly from the mouth of the inexperienced

surgeon himself. “The young doctor told me that as he cut with his knife into that

beautiful white skin and saw the blood well up behind it a lump rose in his throat and he

                                                        95 Ibid., 189. 96 Ibid., 190–191.

 

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felt that he must give up on the venture.”97 Still, the force of his vanity compels him to

continue: “He was showing off, he felt, with some effect. But when the depths of the

wound were reached a condition of things was found which puzzled him all together.

Structures were confused and matted together, and so obscured as to be

unrecognizable.”98 It is precisely at this point that his well-tested though purely

observational and academic knowledge renders him useless; his surgical hands that had

as yet succeeded in feigning adroitness now work as though they were stiff as clay:

He made blind efforts to find his course, became wild and finally reckless. Then a terrible thing happened. There was a tear—something gave way—something gushed forth. His heart seemed to stop. He thought he should faint. A cold sweat broke out upon his brow. He ceased to speak. His trembling fingers groped aimlessly in the depths of the wound. […] He then tried to repair the damage he had done; took up instrument after instrument and dropped them again until the patient’s body was covered with soiled and discarded forceps, knives and clamps. He wiped the sweat from his brow with his hand and left a wide streak of blood across his forehead.99

Certainly not the possessor of a “lace-maker’s fingers,” nor of the “refined sensibility,

critical perception, and inestimable cunning” required of a capable surgeon, the young

man’s smeared face and scattered instruments hold more true to the appearance of a

greasy mechanic. Still, despite his attempts, he cannot successfully mend the damage he

has done to her physiological machinery. “He tried again and again to close the awful

rent, but he was now nearly dropping with terror and exhaustion. […] He closed the

wound, and then sank on a stool with his face buried in his blood-stained hands, while the

nurse and the doctor applied the necessary dressing.”100

                                                        97 Ibid., 191. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., 192. 100 Ibid., 193.

 

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Burying his face in his own “blood-stained” hands, the defeated surgeon brings

himself into more direct sensory contact with the physical remnant of his surgical

incompetence. Having thus far only felt the blood on his hands and seen it at an arm’s

length, he can now smell and feel its fluid warmth on his face as it occupies his entire

range of vision; he takes in the full scale of his handiwork. Ashamed and listless, “he

wandered about, looked aimlessly out of the window, but saw nothing, picked up his

wife’s handkerchief which was laying on the table, crunched it in his hand, and then

dropped it on the floor as the red horror of it all flooded his brain. What had he done to

her? She! She of all women in the world!”101 Whereas, at the beginning of the procedure

he had been unable to touch his wife’s pristine, conscious hands because his own were

sterilized, he can now keep only a souvenir that came into constant contact with them, a

handkerchief which he too soils with blood, with the clumsy performance of his

handicraft. “It was the last thing her hand had closed upon. It was a piece of her lying

amid this scene of unspeakable horror. It was like some ghastly item of evidence in a

murder story. He could not touch it.”102 He regards himself as a murderer who washes his

hand and face but is forever marked by crime, by “the red horror of it all.”

The story ends with the young surgeon unable to ever again hold his wife’s living

hand in his own. Lying on bed, bandaged up and waiting for death, “she tried to move her

hand towards him, but it fell listless on the sheet. A smile—radiant, graceful, adoring—

illumined her face, and as he bent over her he heard her whisper: ‘Wonderful boy.’”103

With these guilt-inducing words, Treves leaves his readers to reflect on the human costs

                                                        101 Ibid. 102 Ibid., 194. 103 Ibid., 197.

 

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of inability and inexactitude in this most refined handicraft. Regardless of the novel

apparatus, knowledge and techniques of a more mature nineteenth-century science, true

surgical superiority continues to reside upon the essential sensory organ belonging to the

surgeon himself. Even if at the end of the tale, the young surgeon persists as an idol to his

wife, he remains, to the rest of his readers, an idol with hands of clay.

iii . TREVES’S SURGICAL ARTS

While recognizing the significance of tools in surgery, this essay set out instead to

chart a history of surgery, or rather, to capture a moment in its history, by recognizing

what it is that the surgeon does with his instruments. I inquired into the particular work

that surgeons perform with their tools, that is, with their decisive hands. The hands of

surgeons provide the epistemic structure of surgery; they are literal bearers of the surgical

point of view, guiding an empirical form of diagnosis and therapy even before medicine

itself became scientific. Certainly, one can glimpse the actual physical work of

nineteenth-century surgery by regarding illustrations from a myriad surgical manuals of

the period that show disembodied surgical hands manipulate specialized tools as they

operate upon the equally disembodied limbs and organs of patients. At the same time, the

hands of surgeons determine the technical structure of surgery, that is to say, the shape of

its technology. The hand “has developed further skills by transferring its dexterity to the

control of instruments via their distinctive handles.”104 Such is the determination made by

most histories of surgery that prefer to follow its tools and their inventors as accurate

                                                        104 Kirkup, The Evolution, 42.

 

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records of its entire lived past. One similar striking attempt to chronicle and represent the

more particular character of surgical work was made by C. J. S. Thomspon, curator of the

historical collection at the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, who, in the early

twentieth century, set on display plaster casts of the hands of eminent surgeons of his

day. The particular cast of pioneering Scottish surgeon James Syme can thus accordingly

be found holding the ankle-knife of his invention.

In lieu of studying or likewise portraying hands separated from the living, sensing

body to which they were undoubtedly attached, I turned to literature, to a corpus of lived

surgical experience as articulated by its participants. The literature of surgical experience

takes us not only into the professional arenas of surgical practice but into the mind of the

surgeon himself; it does so by providing one with access to the language in which the

nineteenth-century surgeon understood and articulated the individual nature of his craft.

The words of Frederick Treves, in his succinct professional address in surgery, his more

comprehensive Manual of Operative Surgery, and in his popular reminiscences,

particularly the tale “The Idol with Hands of Clay” reveal to us not only the work of

surgical hands but also what it meant to bear them. They capture the truly complex nature

of surgical practice: the crucial relationship between the manual art of surgery and its

foundational knowledge as well as the individual skill, experience, and patience required

of those persons possessing hands intended for manual therapeutic intervention.

Whereas Frederick Treves recognizes medical performance as invaluable for the

acquisition of knowledge that is tacit and particular to an individual’s proper execution of

surgery, the French experimental psychologist Alfred Binet resituates the acting out of

medical ideas and knowledge from a medical, educational arena to a melodramatic,

 

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propagandizing public stage. Binet’s research, nonetheless, manifests an all too popular

tendency in the aesthetic of experiential medicine at the fin-de-siècle, an inclination

whereby pathology finds itself, again and again, at the center of a decadent cultural stage.

 

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Chapter 5: ELECTRIC CURRENTS AND CADAVERIC CONTRACTURES: THE

HORRIBLE EXPERIMENT BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THEATER

Founder and editor of France’s pioneering psychological journal L’Année

Psychologique, Alfred Binet (1857–1911) is most famous for his work on the first

intelligence tests, one of the most important psychological developments of the twentieth

century. Though born to a family with a strong medical background, Binet never

completed his studies in medicine and possessed only a law degree. His psychological

vocation was entirely the result of self-education, yet his interest in the workings of the

human mind led him to work at the Salpêtrière with eminent neurologist Jean Martin

Charcot (1825–1893) and at the laboratory of Physiological Psychology at the Sorbonne

of which he was appointed director in 1894. Less commonly known is the fact that in

addition to his wide-ranging œuvre on the classification of mental maladies, hypnotism,

suggestibility, pedagogy, child psychology, and experimental psychology, Binet took a

turn as playwright. In fact, Binet collaborated on plays for the most provocative theater in

Paris, the Grand Guignol—France’s premier theater of horror.

Founded in 1897 by Oscar Méténier (1859–1913) as a popular theater of the

naturalist genre, The Grand-Guignol was a theater poised to challenge the moral

conventions of its time. The theater was situated in the rue de Chaptal in Montmartre,

“home of the ‘blood and thunder’ melodrama houses, the nineteenth century popular

theatres that attracted large working-class audiences with their plays of crime, murder,

 

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and tragedy and overstated, histrionic acting conventions.”1 Jean-Antoine Chaptal, after

whom this shady impasse was named, was a famous chemist and popularizer of science

who, prior to the revolution, facilitated the commercialization of chemical substances

such as sulfuric acid and vitriol. Under the auspices of the Grand Guignol, the rue de

Chaptal undoubtedly continued the work of its namesake. Science was here popularized

through the proliferation of surgical as well as psychiatric techniques—on stage, actors

were hypnotized, lobotomized, dissected, brought back to life, and enough vitriol was

spilt so as to disturb even the most thrill-seeking of spectators. In addition to the instances

of physical and psychological violence displayed on stage, the theater even boasted an

on-site doctor to attend to viewers unable to handle what was presented before them.

Binet’s interest and involvement in the dramatic arts was certainly not a novel

aspect of his time. In this hey-day of scientific positivism, the public exhibition of mental

illness, specifically hysteria, was paramount. France’s burgeoning psychiatric profession

was seeking to establish itself as a ‘true’ science by continually making visible the

essentially organic and thus observable nature of mental illness. The most prominent

figure in French psychiatric discourses was the eminent Charcot, who, between 1878 and

1893, classified the illness of hysteria through not only textual, but visual and

photographic representations of his patients at the Salpêtrière—an insane asylum for

women in Paris. In addition to Tuesday and Friday lectures at the Salpêtrière, attended by

both laypersons and intellectuals, Charcot held weekly soirees at his house that featured a

guest list of “‘le tout Paris,’ all the significant literary, artistic, and political figures of the

                                                        1 Richard J. Hand and Michael Wilson, Grand-Guignol: The French Theatre of Horror (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 27.

 

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capital.”2 Not surprisingly, this spirit of exhibitionism gave rise to what Mark S. Micale

refers to as “l’hysterie litteraire” (“literary hysteria”).3 In fact, mental malady was very

much a part of the period’s visual and literary imagination, demonstrated in publication

of novels not only by authors such as J. K. Huysmans (1848–1907) and Emile Zola

(1840–1902), but also by the scientists themselves. Charles Richet (1850–1935), a

psychologist from the Salpêtrière circle, published works of fiction such as Possession

(1887) and Soeur Marthe (1889), which deal with the complex nature of hysteria,

hypnotism and somnambulism. It hardly comes as a surprise that Binet, who also worked

under Charcot at the Salpêtrière, was to follow suit.

For Théodore Simon (1872–1961), Binet’s colleague and co-creator of the Binet-

Simon intelligence scale, Binet’s theatrical endeavors were just a “repos” (“rest”), while

the true passion of his life was psychology: “La psychologie animait toutes ses pensées.

Pénétrer l’esprit humain, en analyser les ressorts, le comprendre, était un problème

constamment présent pour Binet” (“Psychology animated all his thoughts. To penetrate

the human mind, to analyse its drives, and to understand it was a constant issue for

Binet”).4 Binet’s diversions into theatre undoubtedly exhibited this psychological fervor.

Among his many works on human psychology are those that sought to get inside the

minds of playwrights, for example, his “Études de psychologie sur les auteurs

dramatiques” (“Studies in psychology on dramatic authors”) which he published in

                                                        2 Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 344. 3 Mark S. Micale, The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004), 73. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 4 Theodore Simon, “Souvenirs sur Alfred Binet,” Bulletin, La Société Alfred Binet 415 (1954): 357.

 

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L’Année Psychologique (1894). It was in the process of interviewing acclaimed

playwrights for this study that Binet encountered André de Lorde (1869–1942), the

Grand Guignol’s principal playwright and founder of its genre of “théâtre medical”

(medical theater). Together, they co-authored several plays, including Une Leçon à la

Salpêtrière (A Lesson at the Salpêtrière), (1908), Les Invisibles (The Invisibles) (1912),

and Crime dans une Maison de Fous ou Les Infernales (Crime in a Madhouse or the

Infernals) (1925), L’Obsession (The Obsession) (1905) and L’Horrible Expérience (The

Horrible Experiment/Experience) (1909).

This chapter examines the particular set of sensational and macabre plays co-

authored by Binet and de Lorde for the Grand Guignol. It poses three essential questions:

How did the reasonable, empirical science of Binet find itself manifested and performed

on the unreasonable stage of the Grand Guignol, France’s original theater of horror? How

did the horrifying performances of Binet’s theatrical collaborations present his scientific

researches, particularly his work on the mode of psychological unreason—insanity? And

lastly, did the onstage semiotic convergence of theater and science qualify the Grand

Guignol as a legitimate arena for scientific research? At the same time that Binet’s plays,

in particular their presentation of medical themes, can be considered a vulgarization of

scientific inquiry, they nonetheless valorized the positive logic of his inquiries in

experimental psychology. Rather than rendering his scientific endeavors inefficacious,

the highly stylized performances propagandized Binet’s experimental work. What is

more, for André de Lorde, knowledgeable in the technological and medical

advancements of his day, the Grand Guignol’s arena of unreason facilitated the study of

medical questions and empirical science. For him, contemporary science served as a

 

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means by which to enhance and legitimate theatrical experience. The coming together of

these two seemingly contradictory ambitions can best be described as a theatrical

collision from which burst forth feats of horror on stage, implicating both scientist and

spectator.

i . THEATER OF DIAGNOSIS

In the 1909 issue of L’Année Psychologique, Binet and Simon published a series

of articles on the classification of insanity. The eight consecutive articles encompass a

defense of the scientists’ novel methods of analysis, descriptions of the various

taxonomies of madness, and finally a summary and table that bring to light the nuanced

differences between six categories of mental abnormalities, namely hysteria, insanity

with insight, manic-depression, paranoia, dementia, and retardation. The central thesis of

Binet and Simon’s treatise lies in debunking the psychiatric discipline’s prominent belief

that symptoms alone determined the nature of illness. Instead, they present a mode of

analysis that takes into account a second element—attitude:

On comprend alors que dans l’aliénation il y a deux choses, comme deux actes au drame qui se joue ; il y a d’une part une atteinte portée à une fonction, ou à un groupe de fonctions ; et la fonction pervertie devient ce qu’on appelle un symptôme ; une perception altérée devient par exemple une hallucination, comme un raisonnement qui s’altère devient délire, ou une volonté qui s’altère devient impulsion ; puis, en présence de cette atteinte portée à l’organisme, le reste de l’intelligence et de la personnalité entre en jeu, réagit d’une certaine manière. C’est la réunion de ces deux éléments, les symptômes, l’attitude, qui constitue un état mental complet. We understand that in insanity there are two factors, as two acts of a play that unfold; there is on the one hand damage to a function, or a particular group of functions; and the degenerated function becomes what we call a symptom; an altered perception becomes for instance an hallucination, like reasoning that alters

 

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to become delirium, or a desire that turns into impulsion; subsequently, in the presence of this injury on the organism, the rest of the intelligence and personality enters into play, reacting in a particular manner. It is the meeting of these two elements, symptoms, attitude, that constitute a complete mental state.5

It is therefore not simply the symptom (indisputably organic in nature) that need be

observed, but also the particular fashion, or attitude in which it is manifested by the

individual, that must be taken into account when determining an individual’s mental

state.

By Binet’s definition, a symptom is an already ‘known’ element of malady, one

that is clearly manifested in the eye of the beholder: “Le déjà connu, c’est le symptôme ;

le symptôme est la manifestation la plus visible, la plus bruyante, celle qui tombe sous les

sens d’observateur” (“the symptom is already known; the symptom is the most visible

manifestation, the most blatant, that which falls on the sense of the observer”).

Nevertheless, while a symptom may appear to attest to the nature of a malady, it alone

does not, according to Binet, signify a patient’s mental state. Such an attempt on the part

of a medical practitioner can be misleading. A symptom, “comme les aliénistes n’ont pas

été longs s’en apercevoir, peut donner lieu à bien des illusions de diagnostic, surtout si le

symptôme n’est point analysé avec soin” (“as psychiatrists have not been long in

perceiving, can bring about all kinds of diagnostic illusions, especially if the symptom is

not analyzed with care”). As a result, what is crucial in psychological analysis, and in

effect more difficult to decipher, is the individual “attitude” expressed by a patient:

Le mode de réaction de l’individu à ses symptômes, son attitude, représente quelque chose de moins apparent ; c’est un arrière-fond dans lequel il faut pénétrer ; ce n’est pas affaire d’observation extérieure, mais plutôt d’analyse intérieure. Et nous croyons bien qu’on a eu l’intuition de la difficulté de cette

                                                        5 Alfred Binet, and Theodore Simon, “Conclusions,” L’Année Psychologique 16 (1909): 364.

 

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dernière étude, lorsqu’on a dit que pour connaître profondément un aliéné, il faut savoir distinguer entre la forme et le fond, et sous les apparences découvrir la réalité qui se cache. An individual’s mode of reaction to his/her symptoms, his/her attitude, represents something less apparent; it is a backdrop which one must penetrate; it is not a matter of external observation, but more an internal analysis. And we firmly believe our intuition of the difficulty of this latter study, when we said that to know a lunatic profoundly, it is necessary to know how to distinguish between appearance and depth, and under appearances discover the reality that lurks.6

Binet’s insistence on the need to take into consideration a physical and organic ‘forme’ as

well as an unknown psychic ‘fond’ when diagnosing mental illness lends credence to the

psychiatric profession’s emerging recognition of the psyche itself. At the turn of the

twentieth century, most markedly as a result of studies on hypnotized subjects, the old

“intrusion” and “organic” paradigms of diagnosis were giving way to an “alternate-

consciousness paradigm,” which located “unconscious mental activity as [the] source of

unaccountable thoughts or impulses.”7 Binet’s analysis resides at exactly this threshold

and attempts to enter into conversation with contemporary psychiatrists through

examinations of their varying diagnostic paradigms: Charcot’s claim for the symptomatic

lesion; Joseph Babinski and Hippolyte Bernheim’s emphasis on the notion of

‘suggestibility’ in patients; Emil Kraepelin’s call for a classification of diseases based on

common ‘patterns’ of symptoms; and Josef Breuer, Sigmund Freud, and Pierre Janet’s

focus on unconscious mental states (where the latter is of most significance to Binet).

Binet and Simon’s mode of classification sought to critique and synthesize the

diagnostic practices of alienists. Responding to criticisms of their approach, they argued

                                                        6 Ibid., 371. 7 Adam Crabtree, From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), vii–vix.

 

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yet again in the L’Année of 1910 that a successful method of evaluating mental

abnormality was one that ultimately bridged the gap between psychiatry and psychology:

Un aliéniste ne peut pas se contenter de penser en termes anatomiques, pour ainsi dire, le délire d'un malade, en se représentant des sièges de lésions; il ne peut pas non plus se contenter de le penser physiologique-ment, d'après des appareils nerveux en mouvement; il doit le penser mentalement, se substituer à son malade, vivre les pensées de son malade, et imaginer ce qui se passe dans un esprit d'aliéné... Le penser psychologique s'impose aujourd'hui comme base de la méthode psychiatrique. A psychiatrist cannot content himself to think in anatomical terms, as it were, the delirium of a patient as representing the seat of lesions; he can neither content himself to think of it physiologically, according to nervous apparatus in flux; he needs to conceive of it mentally, to substitute himself for his patient, to live the thoughts of his patient, and to imagine that which passes in the mind of the insane… The psychological thought serves today as the base of the psychiatric method.8

Unfortunately for Binet, his foray into psychiatry remained largely unrecognized by the

alienists of his time. Nonetheless, his analysis of mental illness made its presence felt

before an entirely different audience—the lay-men and avant-garde enthusiasts seated

before the Grand-Guignol stage. Of the illnesses Binet outlined in these articles, Les

Invisibles presents the case of altered perception resulting in hallucinations; L’Horrible

Expérience depicts the grave alteration of reasoning when a doctor becomes delirious at

the death of his daughter; and both L’Obsession and L’Homme Mystérieux delve into the

dangers of desire turning into an uncontrollable impulsion. Furthermore, Binet’s

perception of his two-part framework for insanity “comme deux actes au drame qui se

joue” (“as two acts of a play which unfold”) equates madness with a theatrical

performance. This statement in effect provides one with a method by which to read

Binet’s plays, more specifically the ones confined to two acts.

                                                        8 Alfred Binet, and Theodore Simon, “Définition de l'aliénation,” L’Année Psychologique 17 (1910): 344.

 

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Madness between science and theater:

Binet’s metaphor of insanity as theatrical déroulement can be used as a theory to

analyze his medical plays for the Grand Guignol. The first act of a play may be regarded

as symptom, whereas the second act entails a performance of attitude. In the case of the

former, audiences are able to perceive the various signifiers of a malady, most explicitly

presented on stage in the form of a discussion between a patient and a doctor. It is only in

the latter act, when these symptoms culminate into a discernible ‘attitude’ in the

protagonist in question, that madness has been exposed in its entirety, and can be

diagnosed. In true grand-guignolesque fashion, this latter manifestation is more often

than not demonstrated through an act of violence that jarringly but unquestionably reveals

the “état mental complet” (“complete mental state”). In the play L’Obsession (The

Obsession), for instance, audiences first encounter Jean Desmarets, a young man of

thirty-two years, visiting the eminent alienist Doctor Mercier to discuss the strange and

disquieting impulsion of his brother-in-law. Although they engage in an extended

discussion about the nature of mental malady, and more specifically, the symptoms of

Desmaret’s supposed brother-in-law, Mercier fails to realize that the young man is in fact

speaking about himself. As a result, the doctor feels no qualms as he bids farewell to his

guest, who, upon returning home, finally displays the particular attitude of his illness as

he gives into his compulsion and kills his son.

In utilizing the pre-existing structure of the two-act play in his explanatory

scheme for insanity, Binet imbues the theatrical genre with the efficacy of what Bruno

Latour calls a scientific “theater of proof.” Designating the performance-based

demonstrations of scientific phenomena aimed at establishing objectivity, such a theater

 

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relies on “the simplicity of the perceptual judgment on which the setting up of the proof

culminated.”9 Indeed, to the extent that the plays written by Binet and de Lorde stage the

former’s scientific theories, they become result-oriented performances, where the

audience plays a role beyond being entertained; instead, they are implicated as witnesses

of scientific proof. As T Hugh Crawford notes, however, “The epistemology of the

theater of proof entails simple, direct knowledge attained through pure, untrammeled

vision, but as a site that produces reliable scientific evidence, the theater depends on the

cultural context the audience creates.”10 Binet and de Lorde’s dramatic representations of

insanity are bound within both the metaphors that rendered madness meaningful at the

fin-de-siècle and those signifying the medium of representation. “The interpretation of a

portrait of a madman is a process of disentangling some of the root-metaphors applied not

only to madness but to the idea of portrayal in general.”11 In this sense, what is portrayed

cannot be divorced from how it is portrayed, as it is through the weaving together of their

varying connotations that a single “portrait” of insanity is manifested.

The networks of metaphors between science and theater share a complex history,

one that effectively determines what those metaphors are or have become, as well as the

nature of their entanglement. Theater finds a place in the scientific enterprise where

newly discovered methods and facts require confirmation through observation,12 first in

the deciphering gazes of medical expertise, and then the untrained regards of the as-yet-

                                                        9 Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 86. 10 T. Hugh Crawford, “Imaging the Human Body: Quasi Objects, Quasi Texts, and the Theater of Proof,” PMLA 111, no. 1 (1996): 70. 11 Sander Gilman, Seeing the Insane (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1982), xii. 12 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). See chapter entitled “Seeing and Knowing.”

 

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uninformed masses. In his development and description of the scientific method, even

Francis Bacon declares that natural history reveals a “different universe of things, a

different theatre.”13 The theater of nature denoted a world in which human beings were

now spectators and not simply actors; it was a conception which “conveyed the

encyclopedic ideal of bringing a vast topic under a single all-encompassing gaze.”14 The

result may be interpreted as not only a new paradigm for theater but also a new paradigm

for observation by which nature could be examined and known. Scientists could observe

and classify the world on its natural stage and also appropriate existing more artificial

mechanisms of staging and display: “while nature could be contemplated ‘as if’ in a

theater, natural knowledge could actually be displayed in a theater.”15 Such a sentiment is

exemplified by the late 16th century writer and moralist Pierre de La Primaudaye who

writes, “we presented [man] before everyone as if on a theater, with his main parts and

faculties of body and soul.”16 The theater of nature served as a means by which the

spectating subject surveyed not only his/her surroundings but also him/herself.

Both the laboratory and the stage signify a space, with its specific rituals and

codes of behavior, whereby an object of examination is removed from its natural

surroundings and placed within a realm of observation.17 Where Latour sees theater as

part of science’s projection of its newfound truths upon the social world, Sue Ellen Case

adds that the promise of a novel experience is intrinsic to the theatrical realm.

                                                        13 Francis Bacon, The New Organon, trans. Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 224. 14 Ann Blair, The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 157. 15 Ibid. 16 La Primaudaye, Pierre de. L’Académie Françoise (Saumur: Thomas Portau, 1613) quoted in Blair, The Theater of Nature, 158. 17 Sue Ellen-Case, Performing Science and the Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2007), 10.

 

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Acknowledging that renaissance science organized itself through the paradigm of theater,

she adds to the mix what she calls “the rebirth of European theater,” specifically its

promise of transformation, situated in the Christian Church:

Transformation would be an effect of spectatorship rather than performative action. This promise of resurrection, deferred to the end of one’s life, became the central promissory note in the Christian economy and created the sense that spectatorship could finally pay off. While transformational rites of the period, such as alchemy, or witchcraft, were designed to enhance the participant, theater promised a pay off for the audience. Later, theater would demand payment up front for its performance of deferred transformation, albeit aesthetic rather than religious.18

Certainly, the possibilities for enhancement were inherent in theater much prior to what

Case perceives to be its reemergence in Europe. One cannot too easily forget the potential

for catharsis in tragedy as articulated by Aristotle.19 While Case does not trace theater’s

history back so far, her assertion that theater does indeed pledge a vision to its audience

successfully carries through to her analysis of “performing science.” In theaters of

science, this promise of transformation is displaced by that of knowledge; spectators are

not promised salvation or catharsis, but information.

Just as science makes use of the terms and practices of theater to present itself, so

too does theater make use of the tools of science to enhance its own capabilities. Whereas

theater contributes to the modes of observation implemented by the sciences; the latter

enhances this capacity for observation through technologies such as optics. Similarly,

scientific classifications of newly discovered cultures and natural phenomena provided

theater with a lens for viewing a previously inaccessible world. The result was a “stage

on which new standards of specialized gesture redefined the actor’s art, in which new

                                                        18 Ibid, 9. 19 Stephen Halliwell, ed., The Poetics of Aristotle (London: Duckworth, 1987): 90.

 

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conventions of scenic illusion intensified the relative value of spectacle, and for which

the wider realms of visible nature provided a growing abundance of strange and amusing

objects, localities, and cultures for discovery and categorical appropriation.”20 Where

science created new possibilities for seeing, theater was able to magnify the scope of its

performance, thereby partaking in the advancement of scientific knowledge. In this

manner, theater comes to be influenced, in its own terms and practices, by the field of

science. Charcot, for instance, boasted that the Salpêtrière hospital possessed a

pathological museum, a studio for moulding and photography, a laboratory of

pathological anatomy and physiology, an opthalomogical room, and a lecture hall “which

is provided, as you see, with all the modern apparatus for demonstration.”21

These ‘modern tools of demonstration’ at the Salpêtrière were not intended to

assist patient-doctor relations and/or treatment; instead they facilitated mass publications

of pathological art-books and theater performances of the museum’s living exhibits.

Doctors became directors and photographers, designing, staging and framing a

biologically-determined illness instead of attempting to cure it. Binet’s scientific

interventions into theater, however, differ from Charcot in that the former enters a

theatrical realm he has not himself constructed. In Binet’s displays of scientific know-

how at the Grand-Guignol, the theater of proof is conflated with an already well-

established sensational theater of horror.

                                                        20 Joseph Roach, “The Artificial Eye: Augustan Theater and the Empire of the Visible,” in The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics, ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle G. Reinelt, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 136. 21 Jean Martin Charcot, “Première Leçon,” Oeuvres complètes de J. M. Charcot. Leçons sur les maladies du système nerveux, Vol. 3 (Paris: Bureaux du Progrès Médical, 1890), 5–6.

 

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Science at the Grand Guignol:

Without direct access to the actual performances of the plays in question, a

reading of the sign-systems operating within the depictions of madness at the Grand

Guignol can, as Marco de Marinis notes, “at best reveal to us (or ‘describe

metalinguistically’) the staged performance(s) that it envisions or prescribes.” Therefore,

the juxtaposition of de Lorde and Binet’s plays with the latter’s psychological writings

ultimately serves as a study of “the ‘type’of mise-en-scène that the dramatist imagined

when writing the text, and which, at least according to tradition, is linked to the stage

conventions of his time.”22 This “imagined” mise-en-scène of de Lorde and Binet’s plays

can therefore not be divorced from the larger movements within fin-de-siècle French

theater.

Binet’s analyses of dramatic authors are themselves characteristizations of the

theater of his time. For his study, Binet took as his subjects a diverse array of

playwrights, ranging from those with a penchant for the traditional and romantic, such as

Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–1895), Victorien Sardou (1831–1908) and François Coppée

(1842–1908), to the likes of Edmond de Goncourt (1822–1896) and Paul Hervieu (1857–

1915), who possessed more realist and/or symbolist inclinations. This diversity of

theatrical output is indicative of the period itself, a feat that Michel Autrand sees as a real

problem for historians: “Pas de ces écoles, de ces mouvements qui, bon gré mal gré

réunissent si commodément, ne serait-ce qu’après coup, quelques auteurs importants

autour au moins d’une idée sinon d’une esthétique” (“None of these schools, of these

movements, like it or not, bring together so conveniently, even after the fact, some

                                                        22 Marco De Marinis, The Semiotics of Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 22.

 

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important authors around at least one idea if not an aesthetic”).23 Nonetheless, the

fragmented state of theater in Third Republic France led to the emergence of varying

esthetic movements able to successfully oppose traditional forms of theater.

The Grand-Guignol, though not venturing far into the avant-garde, played its own

part in bringing French theater into a modern era. This was a theater without morality, in

the sense that it left audiences at a moment of violent crisis (a moment of which they

consented to be spectator) without any one being held accountable. It exposed to viewers

a “new abrasive experience of modernity,”24 a world where “rational discourse obscures

any access to truth […] and not infrequently the medical experiments aimed at

uncovering the truth are revealed as acts of random cruelty.”25 Presented in a theatrical

medium, where “all that is on stage is a sign,”26 the symptoms of malady merge with the

semiotics of the stage.

At the Grand Guignol, symptoms were not confined to individual psychology;

instead, the actors, dialogues, gestures, costumes, props, lighting, and even sound effects

all served as the play’s visible diagnostic signifiers. How these signs were deciphered by

spectators is determined by what Kier Elam refers to as a play’s “connotative breadth.”27

Connotative markers provide audiences with a precise framework by which to decode

                                                        23 Michel Autrand, Le Théâtre en France de 1870 à 1914 (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006), 321. 24 Tom Gunning, “The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of André de Lorde,” in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 52. 25 Ibid., 57. 26 Jiři Veltrucký, “Man and Object in the Theater,” A Prague School Reader on Esthetics, Literary Structure and Style, ed. Paul L. Garvin (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1964), 84. 27 Kier Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Routledge, 2001), 10.

 

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what they recognize in the performance of a play. The Grand-Guignol and, more

specifically, Andre de Lorde’s ‘théâtre médical’ was a theater of horror that operated with

the distinct framework of medical discourse, a subject matter with which spectators at the

turn of the century were surely aware. In speaking of the anticipations of film goers

between1895–1910, Rae Beth Gordon asserts:

Knowledge about science was common currency, and the inevitable associations in the minds of spectators around 1900 with other forms of entertainment—in this case, magnetizers’ shows and cabaret performance, as well as Grand Guignol theater, the stereoscope, or wax museums—all are crucial factors…Notions about hysteria, somnambulism, hypnosis, and physiology, popularized in the press, were at work in the Imaginary of the period.28

Audiences making their way to a performance at the theater of horror were similarly

familiar with the larger medical debates of the period. They were thus ready to interpret

the symptoms cautiously revealed before them: “Le public, dans l’attente de ce qui va se

passer, comme plus ou moins chacun, se croit en état de juger de l’état d’un aliéné. Et

comme on daube facilement sur le dos des médecins dès qu’on n’a plus besoin d’eux, les

spectateurs vont pendant l’entracte discuter le cas à leur tour” (“The public, in wait for

what is going to pass, more of less each of them believe themselves in a position to judge

the state of a lunatic. And as we apply medicines easily on our backs even if we don’t

need them, spectators are in turn going to discuss the case during break”).29 Even the plot

of the Grand-Guignol play followed a regular pattern, consisting of a “careful signposting

of events before they occur.”30 The various actors on stage knew well how to manipulate

eager and suspense filled audiences: “Un acteur du Grand-Guignol ne vit pas seulement

                                                        28 Rae Beth Gordon, “From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 3 (2001): 517–518. 29 Simon, Theodore. “Souvenirs sur Alfred Binet.” Bulletin, La Société Alfred Binet 415 (1954): 353. 30 Hand and Wilson, Grand Guignol, 50.

 

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son rôle, il le chronomètre. L’auteur du Grand-Guignol est le rouage parfait d’un bel

instrument de précision : un véritable mécanisme d’horlogerie à retardement. Second par

seconde, le rouage tourne, régulier, implacable, jusqu’à l’explosion finale de la bombe :

le dénouement de la pièce d’épouvante (ou de fou rire)” (“An actor of the Grand Guignol

doesn’t only live his role, he times it. The creator of the Grand Guignol is the perfect

mechanism of a beautiful instrument of precision: a veritable mechanism of delayed

clockwork. Second by second, the mechanism turns, regular, implacable, until the final

explosion of the bomb: the resolution of the horror play [or uncontrollable laughter]”).31

As the theater’s principle playwright, de Lorde was intensely interested in

contemporary psychiatry and medicine, particularly as a means by which to shake

audiences and provoke them to think differently about their own realities: “Une

comparaison me vient : elle est peut-être trop familière, mais son exactitude excuse sa

familiarité. Les pharmaciens sont arrivés à condenser de fortes doses de médicaments très

violents dans certains ‘comprimés’ d’un tout petit volume, faciles à absorber : de même,

je m’efforce de fabriquer des ‘comprimés de terreur.’” (“A comparison comes to me: it is

perhaps very familiar, but its exactitude excuses its familiarity. Pharmacists have come to

condense strong doses of very violent medications in certain very small ‘tablets,’ easy to

absorb: similarly, I strive to fabricate ‘tablets of terror’”).32 Likening theater to pills

manufactured by pharmacists, de Lorde wanted to create the perfect formula for terror,

violent yet compact and easy to digest. In his collaborations with Binet, he was able to

find such a formula. On stage, the production of scientific knowledge remained within

                                                        31 Pierron, Agnès, ed. Le Grand-Guignol : le théâtre des peurs de la Belle Epoque (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), xv. 32 André de Lorde, Avant-propos, Théâtre d’épouvante (Paris: Librairie Charpentier et Fasquelle, 1909), xxv.

 

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the theater’s larger structures of horror production. But it is, more often than not, the very

production of scientific knowledge that triggers and even overlaps the climactic act of

violence. This mise-en-scène of scientific analysis suggests the theater of horror to be

particularly suited to scientific enterprise. One remarkable instance of such a staging is

L’Horrible Expérience (The Horrible Experiment/Experience), a play not simply

portraying the ideas of science but also appropriating the means and objectives of

scientific experimentation. It illustrates, through its slow churning of symptom and

attitude, the nature of madness at its worst.

ii . THE HORRIBLE EXPERIMENT

In L’Horrible Expérience, performed at the Grand-Guignol Theater in 1909,

Binet’s theatrics of science and de Lorde’s scientific staging come together to produce

horror at its finest. The very structure of the play is such that the symptoms of catastrophe

are set up in the first act and revealed in the second, thereby mirroring Binet’s theories.

The play recounts a tumultuous day in the life of Doctor Charrier, who, distraught at

hearing of his daughter’s demise due to a cardiac syncope, attempts to revive her corpse

through electric stimulation. In a cruel twist of fate (cruel twist of theater rather), he not

only fails in this endeavor but also loses his own life in the process. Translated as both

experiment and experience, ‘expérience,’ here refers as much to Charrier’s ill-fated

undertaking as it does to the psychological turmoil he suffers upon learning of his

daughter’s untimely end. Similarly, the horrible experience may well signify the nature of

 

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spectatorship by other characters within the play (who watch this take place) as well as

Grand-Guignol audiences subject to this horrifying spectacle.

The key characters of L’Horrible Expérience are the illustrious Doctor Charrier,

his daughter Jeanne, and his former student and future son-in-law Jean Demare. The play

begins by laying bare the relationships between the three. The first act, in fact, carefully

(and not so subtly) lays out every visible and discursive symptom of the nature of the

crisis that is to befall the doctor in the second act. The doctor’s devotion to his profession

is made visible in the very décor; the stage directions require that a marble bust of

Hippocrates be placed on the chimney centered at the back of the stage. Charrier is

described to audiences as a man truly dedicated to his work; his schedule is as follows:

“Le matin, son hôpital, l’après-midi, sa consulation, ses visites, son laboratoire...

l’Académie de Médicine.” (“In the morning, his hospital, the afternoon, his consultation,

his visits, his laboratory… The Academy of Medicine”).33 Charrier lets it be known to

Jean and perhaps more importantly, to audiences, that he greatly loves his daughter,

whom he himself raised. Charrier’s love for his daughter is, in fact, so great that he is

jealous of Jean. In the past, he has even dared to watch the two of them together, seething

at the sight of Jeanne in Jean’s arms. When he expresses his attachement to his daughter

before Jean, the latter is very reassuring, “Vous savez bien que nous ne vous

abandonnerons jamais…Je suis non seulement votre fils, mais votre élève, un de vos plus

anciens élèves; vous m’avez souvent admis à collaborer avec vous ; j’espère que nous

continuerons. Nous vivrons de la même vie intellectuelle, en famille” (“You know well

that we will never abandon you… I am not only your son, but your student, one of those

                                                        33 André de Lorde and Alfred Binet, “L’Horrible Expérience,” Le théâtre de la peur, ed. André de Lorde (Paris: Librairie Théâtrale, 1924): 36.

 

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oldest students. You have often allowed me to collaborate with you; I hope you will

continue. We will live the same intellectual life as a family”).34 Little does Jean or the

audience know the nature of their upcoming macabre collaboration.

The ideas of science are brought into the play almost at the very beginning, as

Jean, who is also a doctor and a surgeon at the Bureau Central, informs Charrier that at a

recent meeting at l’Institut Marey, he witnessed the head of one dog successfully grafted

onto the neck of another. For Charrier, who is indeed familiar with this experiment, the

continued circulation of blood to the brain after it has been severed from the body is

hardly an issue. He asserts, instead, that his own task is of a different nature: “ce que je

cherche, ce n’est pas la survie du cerveau, mais celle du cœur” (“That which I look for, it

is not the survival of the brain, but that of the heart”).35 From the very beginning of the

play then, the human heart is donned a certain significance. Audiences are informed that

Jeanne, to whom the doctor is deeply devoted, was diagnosed at a young age with a

certain weakness of the heart. Not surprisingly, it is to this very organ that Charrier has

dedicated his research. The agent of illness he chooses to tackle is none other than the

cardiac syncope. Both men of science proceed to discuss the nature of cardiac arrest

which, they declare, is most often the result of a disruption of electrical signals moving

through the heart. This fatal process, first documented in 1849 by German scientists, is

none other than ventricular fibrillation.

Charrier’s quest is in accordance with many a scientist at the latter half of the

nineteenth century attempting to restore activity to the fibrillated heart. Interestingly

enough, he is not at a loss when it comes to a solution: “On aurait sauvé des centaines,

                                                        34 Ibid., 32. 35 Ibid., 40.

 

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des milliers d’existences, si, au moment de la syncope—ou même quelque temps après—

on avait pu remettre le coeur en marche au moyen d’une excitation électrique” (“We will

save hundreds, millions of lives, if, at the moment of syncope—or even several moments

after—we are able to restart the heart at its average march of electric excitation”).36 This

proposition again echoes the scientific discoveries of his day. At the annual meeting of

the Academy of Sciences in 1899, two scientists from the University of Geneva, Jean

Louis Prevost and Frederic Battelli, presented before the scientific community the results

of their experiments on the hearts of dogs and adult cats. Prevost and Battelli asserted that

while electric stimulation induced cardiac arrest, a stimulus of higher strength applied to

the exposed heart could stop fibrillation and restore normal sinus rhythm. They called the

practice cardiac defibrillation.

Drawing from the characteristics of defibrillation, Charrier nonetheless refrains

from ever naming his procedure. The apparatus required for such a task is of his own

invention, and it is shortly thereafter exhibited to Jean (and to audiences of course). This

device consists of a box containing a switch to control the dynamo, an induction coil and

a rack and pinion to generate and regulate current, a blue light bulb to register the flow of

current, and finally, electrodes to transmit this current directly to the subject’s heart. It

would not be a far leap to compare this contraption to the first defibrillators. 37 What is

novel about Charrier’s approach, and perhaps too the point where his method deviates

from scientific historicity, is his desire to use his dynamo on human subjects. While the

play was performed in 1909, the first successful defibrillation of the human heart was not

                                                        36 Ibid. 37 Didier Jacques Duché, “Alfred Binet, auteur dramatique d’un théâtre médical,” Cahiers Alfred Binet 662 (2000): 69.  

 

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conducted until 1947. Yet it is exactly this grand-guignolesque refashioning of the

period’s scientific concerns that transforms the act of experimentation into one of

violence. Before Charrier even considers his daughter as a possible site of scientific

research, audiences are informed that he has once already managed to bring an

asphyxiated man back to life after he lay comatose for twenty minutes.

On this day, Charrier expresses his desire to discover the maximum amount of

time one can possibly allow to elapse before attempting to revive a human heart. His

aspiration to find healthy subjects for these experiments is shortly thereafter realized

when he is visited by an executioner; the two men reach an agreement whereby a tent is

to be put up right next to the local prison’s execution site “la place du Marché.” What

follows is a seemingly unnecessary conversation where the executioner recounts a

particular execution he conducted: “Toute cette scène, je la revois encore… Quand la tête

tomba, tout son corps eut comme une sorte de convulsion et je même sentis tout à coup

saisi au bras… (Il mime la scène.) C’était la main, oui, Monsieur, sa main qui me

serrait…” (“The entire scene, I still see it… When the head fell, the entire body

underwent a sort of convultion and I suddenly felt myself grasped at the arm… [He

mimes the scene.] It was the hand, yes, sir, the hand that clutched me”).38 Not

surprisingly, the currently rational Doctor Charrier and his future son-in-law dismiss the

sudden movement as a purely physical instantiation of post-mortem rigidity and

convulsions. Embroiled in the specialized language of scientific expertise, Charrier has

no idea that he is soon to have as subject the one body he would never want as such. At

the end of the first act, he learns that, as a result of trauma from a carriage accident, his

                                                        38 De Lorde and Binet, “L’Horrible Expérience,” 54.

 

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own daughter has died of cardiac syncope. Upon receiving this news, he is panic-stricken

and collapses to the floor.

To summarize, the first act informs readers about Jeanne’s state of health,

Charrier’s state of mind concerning his daughter, his mechanical apparatus and its

functioning, as well as the possible rigid contractures of a corpse. The discursive and

visible clues made available to audiences in this act are unflinchingly realized within the

second, as these perceptible yet fragmented symptoms synthesize to produce the final

definitive action/attitude of the play. Charrier’s obsession with the heart undoubtedly

reflects upon his daughter, whom he previously complemented with the statement “tu es

jolie comme un cœur” (“You are lovely as a heart”).39 His second appearance in the play

will demonstrate an entirely different attitude (with all its connotations); the hitherto

intense possessiveness for his daughter is transformed into full-blown delirium in his

state of crisis.

When he emerges in the second act, Charrier is a different man. By this time,

Jeanne has been brought back home and the two doctors who were first to reach the scene

inform Jean (and audiences of course) that she is in fact dead. Not surprisingly, it was

Jeanne’s heart that got her after all, for although she had no physical injuries, her death

was the result of a cardiac syncope. Jean is discussing the tragedy of her death with

Maria, the old housemaid, when Charrier appears on the scene completely out of sorts.

The stage directions indicate as follows: “La porte de la chambre de Jeanne s’ouvre. —

Charrier en sort lentement comme un fantôme, se soutenant à peine. Il est effondré de

douleur, tout cassé, tout blanchi, les yeux hagards. Il murmure des mots inintelligibles”

                                                        39 Ibid., 28.

 

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(“The door of Jeanne’s room opens.— Charrier emerges as a phantom, holding himself

up in pain. He has collapsed with depression, broken, pale, eyes haggard. He murmurs

unintelligible words”).40 With a visible change in his mannerisms, a veritable ‘attitude’ of

insanity, Charrier tells Jean that he is going to bring Jeanne back to life, even though she

has been dead for several hours. It is at this stark moment of crisis that Binet’s theatrical

inclinations and de Lorde’s scientific propensities combine on stage to produce a scene of

unforeseeable violence. Despite Jean’s objections, Charrier orchestrates a drastic and

frenzied endeavor to rescue his daughter from death’s clutches. What follows is a curious

convergence of psychological agitation and scientific knowledge, not surprising for the

Grand-Guignol stage. Albeit the fact that this experiment was foreshadowed since the

beginning of the play and even described in rational scientific discourse to audiences

(Binet’s theatric symptoms), its actual performance (attitude) is strikingly perverse.

The subsequent overly-dramatic scene marks the scientific zenith of the play. It is,

in fact, reminiscent of demonstrations in anatomy theaters where “the doctors discover

the corpse, enhancing the mastery of the living body through the observation of the dead

[…] The spectator benefits immediately from his observation of the dead body. The

performing body has reached perfect stasis, while the spectators experience their

recompense.”41 The dissection of Jeanne under the scalpel of her scientist father (or

scientist-turned-father in this case) promises the most to audiences in terms of garnering

knowledge. Yet the vivisection that hitherto seemed so sterile is nothing short of a

violation. Charrier brings out Jeanne’s corpse and lays her on the table before him, cuts

                                                        40 Ibid., 68. 41 Case, Performing Science, 12.

 

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open her shirt, makes an incision in her chest with a scalpel, and once the open blood

vessel appears to clot, attaches the electrodes of his apparatus to her exposed heart.

Indeed, this was also a scene that made use of the best technical equipment the Grand-

Guignol had to offer; stage directions read as follows: “La lampe s’éteint. L’obscurité se

fait en scène.—Un grand silence.— On attend le bruit monotone, sinistre, du courant

électrique. La scène n’est éclairée que par le passage du courant dans l’ampoule” (“The

lamp goes out. Darkness on stage.—A great silence.—We hear a monotonous, sinister

sound of electric current. The stage is only lit by the passage of electric current in the

bulb”).42 Even now, the experiment rests true to its description; it is a simple matter of

electrodes and current.

As both men watch the dreadful display before them, Jeanne’s hand lifts up off

the table. Charrier is frantic with joy whereas Jean, true to his discipline, declares that the

movement is merely the onset of rigor mortis and cadaveric contractures. Charrier

nonetheless frenetically and fatally embraces her hand:

Mais au moment où ses lèvres baisent la paume de la main, la main de sa fille s’est renfermée sur son visage, puis elle a glissé sur le cou de Charrier ; les doigts de la morte serrent de plus en plus et s’enfoncent dans la gorge de Charrier qui, étouffé, étranglé, pousse un cri terrible et tombe sur les genoux, face au public, toujours serré par la main. But at the moment when his lips kiss the palm of her hand, his daughter’s hand encloses on his face, then it slides upon Charrier’s neck; finger of death clasp tighter and tighter, sinking into the throat of Charrier who, suffocated, strangled, shouts out terribly and falls on his knees, facing the crowd, still grasped by the hand.43

                                                        42 Ibid., 79. 43 Ibid., 81. This final set of stage directions is reminiscent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein where the mad scientist falls prey to his own cadaveric creation.

 

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While he was previously able to account for such a post mortem movement scientifically,

a frantic Charrier, convinced that his daughter is coming back to life, succumbs instead to

her very hand of death. With the grisly death of Charrier, the horrible experiment of

science and stage comes to an end.

How are we to read these altered stakes of scientific experimentation? To a

certain extent, L’Horrible Expérience mimics well the language and practices of science.

Yet the play renders more complex the appearance of an unstable mind in that it is the

mind of the doctor that goes awry. Nonetheless, André de Lorde regards the portrayal of

science in this play as far from critical of scientific work:

Faut-il rappeler que L’Horrible Expérience, représentée en 1909, a devancé les essais de Carrel sur l’excitation artificielle du cœur ? Voilà un cas où la fiction dramatique et la science positive se sont prêtées un mutuel appui. Ainsi le théâtre de la Peur a facilité l’étude de questions médicales, de problèmes sociaux dont l’intérêt s’affirme chaque jour plus grand. Need one remember that The Horrible Experiment, performed in 1909, advanced Carrel’s trials on the artificial excitation of the heart? Here is a case where dramatic fiction and positive science find themselves in mutual support. Thus the theater of fear facilitated the study of medical questions, of social problems in which interest is further affirmed every day.44

De Lorde here refers to Alexis Carrel who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or

Medicine in 1912 for his method of suturing blood vessels. As for Binet, the play may too

contain a trace of his own scientific reality, as he himself engaged in psychological

studies of his daughters, Alice and Madeleine, and was worried as to the effect his

research may have had on them.

Perhaps L’Horrible Experiment does, after all, present ‘a case where dramatic

fiction and positivist science find themselves in mutual support.’ Still, Charrier’s

                                                        44 André de Lorde, “Les mystères de la peur,” in Pierron, Le Grand-Guignol, 1334.

 

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transformation from a logical scientist seeking to advance medical knowledge to an

obsessed and desperate father doing whatever it takes to bring his daughter back to life

gravely alters the nature of scientific inquiry. His emotional intervention not only robs the

scientific method of its idealized purity but also turns it into something severe and cruel.

Charrier’s climactic performance is in fact characteristic of those applauded by the

Grand-Guignol’s thrill-seeking spectators. Audiences did not attend this medical theater

to be informed; they did so to be terrified. The moment of horror thus marks a breaking

away from the traditional promise of knowledge inherent in the performance of science.

The Grand-Guignol stage neither turns into a valid medium of experimentation, as de

Lorde would have it, nor does it showcase the unfailing tenets of empirical science, as

Binet would.

i i i . TERROR BETWEEN SCIENCE AND THEATER

When Alfred Binet first encountered André de Lorde, his intention was to study

the latter’s process of literary creation, but instead of garnering a subject, he became

partner in this very enterprise. Like Binet, de Lorde had a degree in law, but he

abandoned a career as a lawyer to write for the theater. De Lorde had collaborated on his

plays with many a scientist, yet none was to compare to the illustrious Alfred Binet and

the success their alliance achieved. Of his relationship with de Lorde, Binet writes:

J’ai bien essayé plusieurs fois, lorsque je me trouvais dans la compagnie d’André de Lorde, de le soumettre à cette investigation méthodique…Mais au bout de quelques minutes, une idée de pièce à faire passait au travers de notre conversation, et comme j’ai des goûts très analogues aux siens, comme j’aime passionnément ce théâtre d’angoisse ou l’on attend, le cœur serré, quelque chose

 

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de terrible et surtout de mystérieux, je n’avais pas le courage de continuer l’étude d’analyse psychologique. I tried numerous times, when I found myself in the company of André de Lorde, to submit him to this methodical investigation…But after several minutes, an idea for a play would pass through our conversation, and as I had tastes very similar to his, as I love passionately the theater of anguish where we hear, heart sinking, something terrible and above all mysterious, I did not have the courage to continue the study of psychological analysis.45

André de Lorde was certainly master of France’s “theater of anguish,” and Binet justly

dubbed him “Prince de la Terreur.” Of their collaborative influence on the public, André

le Lorde asserts : “Alfred Binet—un très grand savant dont je ne puis prononcer le nom

sans émotion—disait souvent que pour faire triompher une idée juste une pièce de théâtre

est plus efficace que de longs discours et de volumineux rapports” (“Alfred Binet—a

great scientist whose name I can’t pronounce without emotion—often said that in order to

make a sound idea triumph, a play is more efficacious than a long discourse in

voluminous reports”).46 At the Grand-Guignol, Binet’s “idée juste” (“sound idea”)—the

diagnostic correspondence of symptom and attitude—led to an on stage semiotic

convergence of theater and medicine which suited well the “théâtre médicale.”

This convergence of theater and science, where neither can authentically stake a

claim in the other, where the production of knowledge is offset by that of terror, suggests

the emergence of a liminal space—“a suspension of quotidian reality.”47 The condition of

being betwixt and between two realms/states, liminality, according to Victor Turner, is

                                                        45 Alfred Binet, “La Prince de la Terreur,” Le théâtre de la peur, ed. André de Lorde (Paris: Librairie Théâtrale, 1924), 9–10. 46 André de Lorde, “Les mystères de la peur,” in Le Grand Guignol, ed. Agnes Pierron, 1336. 47 Victor Turner, “Rokujo’s Jealousy: Liminality and the Performative Genres,” in The Anthropology of Performance, by Victor Turner (New York: PAJ Publications, 1988), 102.

 

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not only a space of withdrawal from the mundane but also a place of resolution, where

utter uncertainty and dissolution facilitates reflexivity. Hinging away from the known and

expected, the liminal is understandably fear-inducing and monstrous. For Turner,

however, this monstrosity too provides the possibility to (re)discover the reality of one’s

world: “monsters are manufactured precisely to teach neophytes to distinguish clearly

between the different factors of reality….much of the grotesqueness and monstrosity of

[the liminal] may be seen to be aimed not so much at terrorizing or bemusing neophytes

into submission or out of their wits as at making them vividly and rapidly aware of …the

‘factors’ of their culture.”48 The monstrosity manifested in L’Horrible Expérience, by

both Charrier and the restless corpse of his daughter, beckons a question other than what

science offers the stage and vice versa. One may ask, instead, what spectators are made

aware of at this threshold between science and theater.

The surfacing of liminality in L’Horrible Expérience is correlative with the

moment of Jeanne’s cardiac syncope. Signifying an absence of consciousness, the loss of

letters or sounds in a word, or the disappearance of a musical beat, the syncope too

resides betwixt and between, that is, in a liminal space. Even so, this phenomenon is not

simply representative of absence. In her book Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture,

Catherin Clement begs the question “where does the syncopated subject reside?” She

urges readers not to perceive the syncope as a loss but as a gain:

Through syncope the motives of desire are swallowed up: passivity, love, the other, God, emptiness, and destruction are there—all mixed up, in the heart of a confusion that one could say was planned. This jerky tremor suppresses the subject’s consciousness. But it is also what sets music, dance, and poetry working.

                                                        48 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 105.

 

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This suppression moves us; this passivity is productive. That is the paradox that must be explained. Why is the last beat of musical syncope a “salvation,” as Rousseau said? What is the point of this little leftover piece of the beat?49

For Clement, the re-emergence from syncope is a creative act, one that announces not

simply a return but a return from. In L’Horrible Expérience, the syncopated subject,

albeit dead, does return to perpetrate the play’s final act of violence. The productive

passivity bestowed upon Jeanne by virtue of the syncope subverts the structure of the

traditional anatomy theater; she is no longer the static body waiting to be explored on the

dissection table. In her strangling of her father, something is thus won.50 Just as she is

violated, so too does she violate, reemerging in the world of the living through a

‘scientifically explained’ cadaveric contracture.

So what is the point of this little leftover piece of the beat? What has emerged in

the liminal space between theater and science? Surely, spectators are not to believe that a

theater of horror is scientific or that scientific experimentation is horrifying. Yet this may

precisely be the case. It is at the moment of syncope—an absence of the breath and

rhythm of life to which we are accustomed—that the fluidity of categorical constructions

such as science and theater is revealed. Binet’s scientific vigor and de Lorde’s theatrical

art divulge to audiences, not the scientific truths they had hoped for, but more significant

factors of their culture: that the networked realms of theater and science are each tainted

                                                        49 Catherine Clément, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture, trans. Sally O’Driscoll and Dierdre M. Mahoney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 18. 50 See Clément, Syncope, 1–2: “‘Syncope’ is a strange word. It pivots from the clinic to the art of dance, tilts toward poetry, finally ends up in music. In each of these fields, syncope takes on a definition. At first there is a shock, a suppression: something gets lost, but no one says what is won.”

 

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by the other, constantly implicating the other in its range of vision. L’Horrible

Expérience unhinges science and theater from specificity, a horrifying endeavor.

 

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Chapter 6: CONCLUSION

In this dissertation, I have argued that the conceptual and philosophical conditions

of experiment always already include within them an engagement with the literary and

artistic perspectives of the time. We see in the writings of Claude Bernard, Grant Allen,

Frederick Treves, and Alfred Binet, a combination of both highly acclaimed and lesser-

known authors of scientific work, the inextricably intertwined complex of experiential

medicine in the nineteenth century. Whether writing a personal laboratory notebook or a

play for montmarte’s thrill seaking audiences, these men of science made visible the

aesthetic configurations of their experiences with experimentation. By paying attention to

the self-aware and creative articulations of nineteenth-century scientists and doctors in

case studies, articles, treatises, short stories, and plays, I have aimed to analyze how

literature, as an aesthetic practice, articulates and mediates the relationship between

science and the social. In other words, I illustrate how the coming into being of scientific

knowlede is unflinchingly an interdisciplinary enterprise.

In their collection of essays, Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the

History of Science, Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

advocate for an interdisciplinary approach to studying laboratory research notebooks:

If microstudies of the scientific enterprise based on research notebooks are intimately interwoven with other ways to approach history of science and with knowledge and methods drawn from other disciplines, they have the potential to become not merely a new subspecialty within the history of science, but rather a point of crystallization for a truly interdisciplinary historical epistemology.1

                                                        1 Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, introduction to Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the History of Science, eds. Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 2003), xiii.

 

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The first chapter of this work proposes exactly such a point of crystallization in the study

of nineteenth-century laboratory science. Nonetheless, the need for such an

interdisciplinary epistemology, as attested by this project, extends beyond the domain of

laboratory science and its research notebooks.

Claude Bernard, certainly, is not alone in subsuming aesthetic philosophies within

the explanatory schemes for his experimental work. His experimenting contemporaries

evoke similar sensibilities in describing their lived experiences of laboratory science.

Here we find the likes of Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936) referring to his laboratory as an

“orchestra,” wherein his researcher and lover Maria Kapitonovna Petrova is a “dear

soloist,”2 and Michael Faraday (1791–1867), who takes note of beauty in scenes of

nature, “a beautiful areal phenomenon observed about St. Paul's Church”;3 in the

phenomenon of circular polarization, “that comes out constant, clear, and beautiful”;4 and

in experiments on spectrum analysis, which “will not be beautiful except to the

intelligent.”5 Similarly, Grant Allen writes of a physiological aesthetics at a time when

the likes of Walter Pater, Émile Zola, and Hyppolyte Taine are turning to empiricism as a

means of understanding and describing individual aesthetic experience. Frederick Treves’

writings illustrate an aesthetic history of surgery as handicraft, which parallels its more

often recognized scientific histories. And Alfred Binet follows in the footsteps of the

                                                        2 Daniel P. Todes, “From Lone Investigator to Laboratory Chief: Ivan Pavlov’s Research Notebooks as a Reflection of His Managerial and Interpretive Style,” in Reworking the Bench, eds. Holmes, Renn, and Rheinberger, 217. 3 Michael Faraday, “1827. OCTR 6TH,” in The Philosopher’s Tree: Michael Faraday’s Life and Work in His Own Words, comp. Peter Day (London: Institute of Physics, 1999), 113. 4 Michael Faraday. Quoted in Silvanus P. Thompson, Michael Faraday: His Life and Work (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 183. 5 Ibid., 240.

 

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hysterical performances staged by the Jean Martin Charcot, the writings of Charles

Richet, in an era of “l’hysterie litteraire” (“literary hysteria”).6

By presenting an aesthetic analysis of these varied authors, both within and

without the laboratory, I offer an interdisciplinary historical epistemology that recognizes

how aesthetics and science are together implicated in the history of ideas. Such an

approach, as noted by Bruno Latour, not only leads “you backstage and introduce[s] you

to the skills and knacks of practitioners, it also provides a rare glimpse of what it is for a

thing to emerge out of inexistence by adding to an existing entity its time dimension.”7

What is more, it is an approach that allows one to analyze the making of social subjects

and objects within scientific spaces, or spaces that are themselves socially, and within

their particular temporal contexts, deemed scientific—the laboratory, the body of poets

and literary critics, the operating theater, and the public stage. We know, for instance,

that in Frederick Treves’ certain hands, “pen and knife were […] never idle,” but what do

we learn of his subjective self once we learn that his writing of “The Idol with Hands of

Clay” emerges from a time dimension where, twenty years before, Treves’ inability to

perform an appendectomy on time led to the death of his own daughter, Hetty?

The aesthetic configurations between science and literature here examined

provide a means by which to contextualize the experiences of those engaged in science,

that is, how scientists understood themselves as social subjects. I thus agree with Susan

Squier that:

                                                        6 Mark S. Micale, The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2004), 73. 7 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 89.

 

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Although the process of “bringing into being” in science may seem more tangible because it frequently has material and conceptual results (a new chemical compound, for example), the imaginative practices and disciplines enforced through literature also have tangible social results, whether in the production of a literary market, or obscenity laws, or a craze for a new kind of clothing or domestic furnishings. And scientific practices also produce social subjects, often in uncanny echoes of literary predecessors.8

First of all, the production of literary markets in the nineteenth century, a result of

advances in publishing, made possible the production of a scientific literary market, that

is, a “bringing into being” of scientific ideas within the realm of a reading public.

Secondly, in addition to participating in mediums of mass literary publication, I have

argued that scientists themselves echoed cultural ideas regarding literature and artistry in

contextualizing their practices in the laboratory or other scientific space. Such echoes of

science’s “literary predecessors” are audible in Claude Bernard’s turn to Goethe, but also

beyond the particular texts discussed in this dissertation. For example, Charles Bell, in his

Institutes of Surgery, describes an unexpected surgical encounter by reference to Daniel

Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year,9 and Léon Daudet (!867–1942), in lieu of writing his

thesis for the Faculty of Medicine in Paris, published a satirical novel attacking the

faculty entitled Les Morticoles (The Deadly Charlatans). One of the tangible social

                                                        8 Susan Squier, Liminal Lives: Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 30. 9 Charles Bell, Institutes of Surgery: arranged in the order of the lectures delivered in the University of Edinburgh (Philadelphia: A. Waldi, 1840), 358. Bell notes: “I was coming home late at night, or rather when it was morning; the streets deserted, and the gas lights seemed to shine for the exclusive enjoyment of watchmen and women of the town. What occurred to me might well have suggested the description given by Defoe, of London, in the time of the plague; when, as he went through the desolate streets, he heard a woman, who had lost all her children, calling from her window, “death, death!” As I turned round into one of the squares, a window was suddenly raised, and a lady screamed out, “my husband has cut his throat, and is bleeding to death—will nobody bring a surgeon?” You will allow it was singular that at such a time there was an hospital surgeon passing through her window.”

 

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results of this last work was noted at the time in The Literary World: “’Morticole’ has

now become a slang word for a Parisian doctor.”10

In addition to the use of literary concepts and mechanisms to explain and

comment on the work of science, one needs to also pay attention to an implementation of

“imaginative practices and disciplines of literature” as an effective means for the

dissemination of science itself. One such case for literature and the possibilities of

performance emerges most ardently from Alfred Binet, as an argument for efficacy:

“pour faire triompher une idée juste une pièce de théâtre est plus efficace que de longs

discours et de volumineux rapports” (“in order to make a sound idea triumph, a play is

more efficacious than a long discourse in voluminous reports”).11 How can we

understand Binet’s use of efficacy in the production of plays, particularly in

contradistinction to the tradition scientific form of writing reports? Richard Schechner

notes the rise of a more socially and politically inflected drama during the latter half of

the nineteenth century “This new naturalistic theater opposed the commercialism and

pomposity of the boulevards and allied itself to scientific positivism. […] Efficacy is the

ideological heart of these theaters – but what efficacy refers to changes over time. From

the late-nineteenth century to mid-twentieth centuries efficacy was positivistic and

scientific.”12 As an efficacious performance, in Schechner’s terms, the dramatic scientific

work would be one that is ritualized, its “purpose is to effect transformations,” it bears

“link to an absent Other” which the “audience believes.”13 The transformation is effected

                                                        10 The Literary World, February 23, 1869, 55. 11 André de Lorde, “Les mystères de la peur,” in Le Grand-Guignol : le théâtre des peurs de la Belle Epoque, ed. Agnès Pierron (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1995), 1336. 12 Ibid., 135. 13 Ibid., 130.

 

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through the delivery of information, believed by the audience to bear the promise of

symbolic and idealized science.14 The Grand Guignol, however, was a theater

simultaneously allied with positivism and pomposity, with efficacy and entertainment. Its

particular brand of education operated through the emotional and sensory impact of

horror and comedy on audiences. We can nonetheless note a similar staging of science in

the amphitheaters of the Salpêtrière visited by “le tout Paris,” where Charcot followed a

particular performance script, displaying patients under spotlights, questioning them, and

inducing hysterical fits on stage.

In lieu of considering which theater is scientifically more efficacious, however, I

have noted the ways in which collaborations between science and theater manifest and in

fact make use of how theater and its dramatic texts hold a “particular epistemological

positioning between knowledge and unawareness.”15 Binet’s turn to dramatic plays

instead of voluminous texts “to make a sound idea triumph” raises interesting issues for

understanding the role of scientific education in relation to the creative and exploratory

potential of literary and theatrical forms. One future direction for study here is the extent

to which institutional educational structures are themselves historically inflected with

tropes of ritual and theater. Theater-science collaborations serve as a more blatantly

visible and exaggerated means, precisely because they are performance based, of

configuring medical experience and education than its text-bound articulations.

Nonetheless, the articles, short stories, and poems of experiential medicine are no less

                                                        14 See also Sue Ellen-Case, Performing Science and the Virtual (New York: Routledge, 2007), 9. 15 Susan Squier, Liminal Lives, 22.

 

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meaningful literary forms through which the work of biomedical science and even

medical education is mediated.

As imaginative practices, both literature and theater explore the possibilities of

human experience. At the same time, the vocabulary and repertoire of literary works

allow for an articulation of past occurrences more true to personal experience than

observation. This is the realm within which reside Treves’ Elephant Man and Other

Reminiscences. In his more directly educational works, however, Treves does not

individualize his medical experiences. A student notes of his Operative Surgery “It says,

‘Do this one thing,’ ‘Use this one instrument,’ ‘Make that particular incision.’ ‘Insert that

ligature and no other’—so that you can go up to your work confident that all will go

well.”16 By contrast, Charles Bell supports a model for medical education which more

overtly brings to light the experiential:

There is a wide difference between the dissertation of a man who is the advocate of a particular measure connected with his own character and success, and the lecture of one sitting before pupils, anticipating their difficulties, and earnestly pointing out to them the occurrences which may befall them, to their extreme mortification, and the injury of their prospects during their first years of practice. I take a more confined view of a clinical lecture than some of my eminent friends, and find it impossible to make it so excursive and so pleasant. An operation is performed: it is our duty to take the occasion, whilst the pupil is animated with interest on account of the scene, to see that it makes a due impression; and especially to prevent him supposing that that is easily done, the successful practice of which has resulted from the combined endeavours of many members of the profession, and after many disappointments and much ill success.17

The goal of medical instruction, for Bell, is to teach students the true and lived

experience of medicine, an experience which is not “so excursive and so pleasant.” The

                                                        16 Wilfred T. Grenfell, “Sir Frederick Treves: A Surgeon who Happens to be a Man of Genius,” in Putnam’s & the Reader: A Magazine of Literature, Art and Life Vol. 5 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s sons, 1909), 586–87. 17 Charles Bell, Institutes of Surgery, 444.

 

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turn to the practical question, to the uncomfortable actuality of surgical intervention upon

the body of a patient, is not intended to be pleasing; it is, as Bell calls it here, a “duty.”

“Is it not the duty, then,” Bell asks again, “of one who even pretends to have an interest

in his pupils, to tell them what has befallen others—to set before them all the difficulties

of the operation, and to contrast the different methods of operating?”18 Bell’s sense of

duty ascribes an ethical imperative to the instruction of future surgeons. He considers the

duty of medical education to include the realties of surgical experience, in its physical

performance, but also in the intellectual and emotional investments of its participants—in

its operational aesthetic.

In setting forth an aesthetic template for reading medical literatures, one that

recognizes the corporeal and abstract investments of medical work, I have stressed the

blurry nature of the disciplinary divide between literature and science. First of all, as

literary texts, the writings of nineteenth-century medical experience recount, reveal, and

critique past medical practices, for instance, Frederick Treve’s commentary on the

surgery at the turn of the twentieth century and the need for tacit surgical knowledge

achievable only through practice. Secondly, they contextualize the experience of those

engaged in experimentation, for example, Claude Bernard’s notebooks show his struggle

to reconcile his romantic transcendentalism with physiological empiricism. And lastly,

these writigs unveil the existing corporeal, aesthetic, and ethical investments of medical

practice and education. Here one can also consider Grant Allen’s poems, which manifest

his theoretical consideration of poetry as the ultimate sensate discourse, or the medical

                                                        18 Ibid.

 

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plays of Alfred Binet which, while aesthetically staging his medical theories, raise

significant ethical questions regarding the conflation of medicine and horror.

In addition to offering “a point of crystallization” for interdisciplinary study in the

history of science, this work has implications for the field of medical ethics. As texts

which influence public perceptions about medical practice as well as the more significant

actions of future medical practitioners, literatures of experiential medicine recount, reveal

and critique existing medical practices, and also propose new possibilities for medical

encounters between individuals. If we are to study the ethics of medical practice and the

texts that determine its education, it is imperative that we conceptualize how aesthetic

choices and influences have tangible consequences for medicine’s undoubtedly social

subjects and objects.

 

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ATIA SATTAR EDUCATION Ph.D. Comparative Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, forthcoming May 2012 M.A. Comparative Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2008 B.A. English, Temple University, Summa Cum Laude, 2005 A.A. Liberal Arts, Bucks County Community College, 2003 SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS “The Aesthetics of Laboratory Inscription: Claude Bernard’s Cahier Rouge,” Isis: An

International Review Devoted to the History of Science and its Cultural Influences (forthcoming in March 2013).

“The Devil in Disease: Illustrating Germs,” Oddball Archives, eds. Jonathan Eburne and Judith Roof (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).

“Certain Madness: Guy de Maupassant and Hypnotism,” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology, (in press).

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE The Pennsylvania State University, 2011–2012 Research Assistant, “Shifting the Focus from Pharma to Food: Industry Sponsorship and Partnership in Health-Related Food Research, Nutrition Education and Practice,” Rock Ethics Institute. Assistantship co-funded by Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, Harvard University. ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS “Tablets of Terror.” Paper delivered at ACL(x): a conference of the American Comparative

Literature Association, The Pennsylvania State University, September 2011. "Scripting Clinical Experience: The Tuesday Lessons of Jean-Martin Charcot." Paper delivered at

the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference (INCS), Pitzer College, April 2011.

“Under the Knife: The Virtual and Material in Nineteenth-Century Surgery.” Paper delivered at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) Conference, Indianapolis, IN, October 2010.

“Operational Aesthetics: The Surgical Arts of Frederick Treves.” Paper delivered at the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Conference, New Orleans, LA, April 2010.

FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS IAH Graduate Student Summer Residency, The Pennsylvania State University, 2010 F.C. Wood Institute Travel Grant, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 2010 Edwin Erle Sparks Fellowship, The Pennsylvania State University, 2008¬–2009 Naomi Schor Memorial Award, Nineteenth-Century French Studies Colloquium (NCFS), 2007 University Graduate Fellowship, The Pennsylvania State University, 2006–2007 ACADEMIC SERVICE Co-chair, Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession, Modern Language Association (MLA), 2011–2013 Graduate Student Representative, American Comparative Literature Association, 2009–2011 Graduate Council, The Pennsylvania State University, 2009–2011