text:
Proving it
The American Provers’ Union Documents Certain Ill Effects
By Alicia Puglionesi
September 4, 2013

What would induce physicians to ingest mercury to the point of vomiting and to painstakingly note down the effects of imbibing large amounts of cannabis tincture? Alicia Puglionesi explores the history of "proving", the practice of auto-experimentation which forms the cornerstone of homeopathic medicine.

Among the many novelties unleashed upon the world by Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, perhaps the most striking is the spectacle of dignified nineteenth-century physicians carefully imbibing graduated amounts of cannabis and attempting to record its effects upon their mental and physical states. Just as you wouldn’t feed dinner guests a dish that you hadn’t sampled, Hahnemann argued, doctors had no right to prescribe their patients remedies that they had not themselves tried. Unfortunately, due to impairment in the record-keeping department, the physicians were “compelled to publish these provings in disjointed symptoms” rather than their usual orderly categories. These hapless explorers of new therapeutic realms belonged to the American Provers’ Union, a group that aimed to attain medical knowledge through firsthand experience. Their records reveal a dimension of medical thinking that has largely disappeared from modern practice: attention to the subjective sensations that link body and mind, physiology and personhood. Built into their quest was a righteous disregard for the considerable hazards of auto-experimentation.
Samuel Hahnemann trained as a physician in late-eighteenth-century Leipzig and Vienna. After three years of medical practice, however, Hahnemann decided to get out of the business and took work translating scientific books (he reportedly mastered Arabic, Chaldaic, and Hebrew as well as the standard Romance languages).
In his later writings, Hahnemann characterized his disillusionment with mainstream medicine as a result of the ineffective and often damaging remedies called for in Western therapeutics, particularly the violence of bloodletting, purging, and other “heroic” treatments in vogue around the turn of the nineteenth century. Many patients were vocally displeased with the disorder unleashed by drugs, like mercury, today regarded as highly toxic, while doctors felt impotent to effect actual cures. Around the time that Hahnemann put down his bloodletting lancet, discontent among patients and practitioners was beginning to manifest in the form of “heterodox” sects that defined themselves against the orthodoxy of medical schools and elite medical practice.
Hahnemann was in many ways a product of this ferment: while translating a medical text that mentioned cinchona bark, a New World plant used to treat malaria, he decided to resolve his doubts about its effectiveness by testing the substance on himself. He observed that cinchona produced effects on his healthy body that mimicked the effects of malaria on a sick body, leading him to theorize that successful remedies worked by treating like with like, fighting disease symptoms with substances that produce those same symptoms in the healthy. Hahnemann’s theory, which he termed “homeopathy,” directly contradicted the accepted model of treating a symptom with drugs that had opposite effects. The medical establishment immediately went on the attack, but the controversy itself attracted interest from practitioners discontented with the current rather violent state of therapeutics.
In 1811, Hahnemann returned to Leipzig to teach his new system of medicine. In order to apply the theory of treating like with like, he had to determine the homeopathic properties of every drug in the standard pharmacopeia. The scale of this project was immense: healthy volunteers would have to sample thousands of substances at varying concentrations over the course of many weeks.
Standardized research subjects did not exist, nor would the concept have served any function in the discourse of early-nineteenth century medicine; even mainstream physicians understood therapeutics to be highly individualized, contingent upon constitution, environment, and behavior. This work of trying medicines on healthy people, which Hahnemann termed “proving,” was intensely subjective. The men recruited to systematically imbibe and record were called “provers,” and Hahnemann chose them individually from among his able-bodied colleagues with the guarantee that “All were persons capable of carrying out observations, and of absolute honesty of purpose, so that I could vouch for them, and I do.”1 Provers had to regard their own minds and bodies with scientific detachment, even as foreign substances wreaked havoc.
By 1814 Hahnemann had formed the Union for Proving Remedies, devoted to the “holy purpose of seeking new and indispensable discoveries for the welfare of suffering humanity.”2 This high-flying rhetoric suffused the proving literature; provers aided medical progress by “giving [their] time, even sacrificing [their] health.” They were held to a rigorous dosage schedule and submitted to regular interviews with Hahnemann. Self-observation, he argued, produced not only better remedies, but also better physicians and scientists: “the best opportunity for exercising our sense of observation and to perfect it, is by proving medicines ourselves.”3
Hahnemann’s followers brought his model of proving to the United States in the 1830s and 40s. One of these followers was Constantine Hering, a German physician who converted to homeopathy during research for an article intended to debunk Hahemann. He fled to eastern Pennsylvania’s German immigrant community after his colleagues at the University of Wurzburg condemned him for his unorthodox turn. There, he established the Allentown Academy, a homeopathic school, and published the first American homeopathic domestic health guide; he would go on to found the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia in 1848.
Hering was also instrumental in organizing a new version of Hahnemann’s Provers’ Union, promoting the same rigorous, systematic project of self-observation among American homeopaths. The American Provers’ Union emerged from a meeting at Hering’s Pennsylvania home in August of 1853. Its organization was quite ambitious: the eleven founding physicians appointed correspondents for every region from New York to Bavaria to Madagascar, so that the American provers could keep abreast of international developments. In a curious imperial metaphor, the Union’s founders describe medical knowledge as “an immense empire which is our dominion,” with the practice of proving analogous to “exploring expeditions” by which homeopaths would annex “territory after territory . . . and state after state.”4
The concept of a union was particularly important for a medical sect as embattled as the homeopaths: they wanted to present a united front against critics, but were often internally divided by petty disputes over dosage and characteristics of drugs. The Union would resolve such  “reproachable animosities . . . without our injuring each other and the common cause.”5 Some homeopaths, the founding provers complained, were too absorbed in making money from lucrative practices to contribute their time to proving, while proving generated the knowledge capital upon which successful practice depended. The Union asked only for one proving per member per year — a modest service and a reminder of the common cause that homeopaths had entered into by rejecting conventional medical theory.
To prove, one first had to know oneself. Hering expected provers to take notes for two weeks before they began consuming their assigned remedy, so they might learn to distinguish “usual, habitual, and frequently appearing morbid symptoms, from the unusual, strange, or new symptoms.” Dosage guidelines for provers were similarly subjective: “The object of the prover is to be affected by the drug, without being poisoned, or his health seriously endangered.” Arriving at this sweet spot was largely a matter of prior experience and analogies drawn from other, similar substances. Although a successful proving required only one properly-calibrated dose, proper calibration could take many attempts. The founding provers warned against increasing one’s dosage steadily for more than a week, as “many symptoms may be caused by the drug but remain latent for a while, and then show themselves in a very inconvenient way.”6
Three years after it formed, the American Provers’ Union issued its first official provings for “ferrum metallicum” (iron), and “mercurius iodatus ruber” (mercury iodide), noting with some disappointment that only ninety-seven physicians of the “many thousands” in the United States had agreed to ingest these substances experimentally. Published provings follow a peculiar format, presenting a digest of symptoms organized by categories such as location in the body, time of day, periodicity, types of sensation, and physical activity. Despite the homeopaths’ emphasis on constitution and individualized response, it isn’t possible to track the set of symptoms experienced by any single prover. Traces of individuals weave in and out of the cascading descriptions:7
“The most abiding symptom was a nervous hysterical feeling . . .”
“Feels as if a dark curtain was let down over her eyes . . .”
“A throbbing pain . . . whenever he moved suddenly . . .”
Sometimes the time of day or periodic recurrence are noted: “. . . dullness in the head (8 A.M.), gradually subsiding towards night”; “Awoke at 3 A.M. with severe stitches, as from a pen-knife . . . rendering her unable to go to sleep again”; “Feverish at 3 P.M.”
We see provers having difficulty with everyday activities: “Unable to see the stitches in sewing . . .”; food “tastes like rotten eggs”; “great restlessness . . . cannot study or go through the daily duties”; “While writing, no power over the pen . . . the letters run into each other.”
Understanding the practice of proving requires us to set aside modern notions of toxicity; it’s impossible to know the purity and concentration of substances that provers consumed, and inadvisable to search out equivalences in today’s medical literature. Provers were trained to note the smallest minutiae of their physical and mental states, so it should not shock us greatly to find pains surfacing in every part of the body: “Slight pain in the small of the back”; “Shoulder sore to the touch”; “Slight headache all day . . .” That said, one can only shudder at symptoms like “violent pressure in stomach” and “burning and acid eructation” that suggest ulceration of the stomach lining by elemental iron.
The impulse to map these symptoms onto current biomedical understandings must ultimately yield to their strangeness. Under the category of “Female Organs,” we learn that a dose of ferrum metallicum gave one subject “Less dryness in vagina on commencing coitus, and more enjoyment of it.” Under the category “Feet,” we learn that the prover “Has to take off boots.” And more literary observations — “In the open air, tears.” We could concoct a rational physiological explanation, but we could just as easily let these experiences speak for the more expansive world in which they occurred — the “immense empire” of the human organism, with its uncharted territories and secret byways linking distant parts in furtive conspiracy.
The last frontier of the immense empire was surely dreams. These, seamlessly incorporated into the provers’ symptomatology between “Sleep” and “Waking”: “Unpleasant dreams of friends and relatives, deceased 25 years since”; “. . . dreamed a great deal of meeting with old schoolmates . . .”; “. . . much disturbed by dreams of old friends”; “Sleep disturbed by many confused dreams.”
Based on these observations, the proving concludes with remarks from Constantine Hering suggesting that ferrum metallicum may be more useful than previously thought in the treatment of bronchitis, catarrh, and certain skin diseases.
The proving of mercury iodide, published in the same volume, looks similar to ferrous metallicum with the addition of much unwelcome drooling. This text represented a great accomplishment for American homeopaths, who could claim an important contribution to their profession’s understanding of standard materia medica. Due, however, to the dearth of participants frequently remarked by Hering and his compatriots, it took another three years for the Union to complete its next published proving.
Another plausible reason for the delay is that the Provers’ Union was testing cannabis indica, a variety of pot known today for producing an even-keel “mellow” sensation rather than a hallucinatory or ecstatic high. Provers reported “disinclination to physical labor,” “excessive sleepiness,” “sound sleep with melancholy dreams.” Hashish being widely recognized for its dubious moral effects, moral symptoms received special consideration, and included “great anguish and despair,” “tendency to blaspheme,” and “laugh[ing] immoderately.” As always, there were some bad trips: “[he] fancies, upon opening his bedroom door, that he sees numberless diabolical imps . . . he thinks he will suffocate . . . suddenly, one of the imps begins playing on a hand-organ . . .” Other hazards: “Constantly theorizing”; bloodshot eyes; “ravenous hunger, which is not decreased by eating enormously,” “excessive venereal appetite with frequent erections during the day.”8
Although, of course, the cannabis was taken as a tincture, and its concentration is unknown, some provers seem to have indulged more than others. A Dr. Neidhard took fifteen drops of the tincture in total, while Dr. Wolfe took “30 to 1000 drops every day,” from May 25 to October 1, “when he had taken it all.”
This proved to be the final and rather shambling proving of Hering’s Provers’ Union. For reasons which went unrecorded, the group disbanded, with some efforts made in subsequent years to revive the project. For the most part the homeopathic materia medica survives unchanged from its early-nineteenth-century form. The problem of replication in today’s biomedical sciences bears a family resemblance to the Provers’ Union’s fate: there is little incentive for laboratories to spend their resources attempting to falsify a widely-accepted finding. For nineteen-century homeopaths, however, firsthand experience was supposed to be more valuable than received knowledge, and professional consensus was, by design, always in flux. In a remarkable passage of the Provers’ Union’s charter document, Hering and his compatriots stated that the theory of homeopathy would “receive either new support every year, or will have to be abandoned” depending on the outcome of their investigations.9
Today’s drugs are developed based on an entirely different understanding of the body, disease, and scientific method. A physician who tried them all would not fare well, and a physician who tried only the fun ones would be a drug abuser, rather than a martyr for the “welfare of suffering humanity.”  Everything that a physician needs to know about drug effects is distilled through controlled trials and the regulatory approval process, bowing, as Hahnemann and Hering refused to do, to the practical necessities of a massive and ever-growing pharmacopoeia.
How nice would it be, though, to speak with a doctor who had carefully observed the effects of a drug upon his or her own body, who could tell you about the anxiety, nausea, stiffness of limbs — the precise conditions of mind and body that you may pass through in hope of a cure. “Our acquaintance with drugs and their effects, is like our acquaintance with men,” Hering and company wrote in 1853. “We are intimate with a few, we like the company of several men, we are glad to see a great many others now and then . . . there are a great many degrees of intimacy, according to the events of our life. . . It is the same with our instruments of healing, our medicines.”10
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 4, 2013

author: Alicia Puglionesi


text:
A Dangerous Man in the Pantheon

By Philipp Blom
October 2, 2013

This October marks 300 years since the birth of French Enlightenment thinker Denis Diderot. Although perhaps best known for co-founding the Encylopédie, Philipp Blom argues for the importance of Diderot's philosophical writings and how they offer a pertinent alternative to the Enlightenment cult of reason spearheaded by his better remembered contemporaries Voltaire and Rousseau.

It was about time. Three hundred years after his birth Denis Diderot is in line for receiving the highest honour France has to bestow on one of her own. President Francois Hollande announced his intention to have the encyclopedist’s remains transferred to the Panthéon in Paris or, as the French language so deliciously puts it, to have him pantheonisé.
The Panthéon is sacred ground in Paris—not because it was built as a place to worship the Almighty, but because the French Revolutionaries turned it into a site for the burial and commemoration of, as the façade proclaims, the grands hommes of the nation. Rising high above the Quartier Latin and illuminated at night by fiery orange lights, the building with its imposing cupola stands also as the memory of the French republic, cast in stone.
The building was constructed originally as the church of Saint Geneviève after Louis XV had sworn to honor the saint should he recover from a grave illness. Because of the exorbitant costs of financing the monarch’s will and whim, construction was finished only in 1791. Meanwhile, the Revolution swept over the country. The church was designated a mausoleum for the nation’s great men, the first of which, the count of Mirabeau, was admitted in 1791, only to be excluded three years later, when political allegiances had changed. History also is subject to changing administrations.
Since then the Panthéon has been the theatre of many ideological battles, the center of consecration of the French sense of self and its many permutations. Félix Éboué, a member of the colonial administration, became the first black Frenchman to enter into the hallowed ground, in 1949; the first woman, Marie Curie, in 1995. The tomb listing reads like the greatest hits of French intellectual history—Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, André Maulraux, Émile Zola. The most famous philosophers interred in the crypt are two stars of Enlightenment thought: Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who were thus honored already during the eighteenth century—despite the fact that the former spent his adult life in exile and the latter was not even French. Tourists often pose for photographs in front of their sarcophagi.
Now it may be Diderot’s turn to receive this secular consecration. This proposed honour that would not only have delighted the passionate unbeliever Diderot who thought of posterity of ‘heaven for atheists’. It is also richly deserved. Diderot, after all, was not only editor of the great Encyclopédie and of several highly influential novels, philosophical works, plays and hundreds of amusing letters, he was also the star of the philosophical salon of Baron Thierry d’Holbach — himself a prolific author — which in its heyday arguably became the intellectual epicenter of Europe.
But things aren’t quite as easy. First of all, Diderot has been denied this honour multiple times, most recently in 1913. He was, still is, thought of as an intellectual troublemaker, someone all too fond of Eros and erotic passion, an implacable enemy of the Church, an incorrigible skeptic when it comes to power and the right of individuals to decide over others. These difficulties could perhaps be overcome in our tolerant and republican age. After all Voltaire, who has preceded him in the sacred site of French national memory, was also not a friend of the Church.
Another difficulty may prove even more intractable, and more indicative of Diderot’s difficult posthumous life. Strictly speaking, we know where Diderot’s bones are. They are in the ossuary of the église Saint-Roch on the rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, directly under the altar, just a mile or so away from their destined final resting place. Holbach, incidentally, is there too, as are a number of other notable Frenchmen. The problem is that we may know where they are, but not which of the bones down there belonged to the philosopher.
During the French revolution the ossuary was vandalized by over-zealous revolutionaries, and the tragic episode of the Paris Commune in 1871 saw a repetition of this posthumous violence. At present the ossuary is closed and it is difficult to know in which state it really is, but it would hardly be appropriate for the body of a convinced materialist if the bones on the sarcophagus bearing his name would in fact be a composite skeleton made up of various denizens of his former place of burial. Perhaps a DNA analysis would solve this problem, but it would hardly be a straight forward task.
In their own day Diderot and his philosophical brothers in arms were revered and reviled in equal measure, much visited and written about. D’Holbach’s famous salon could assemble on a single evening luminaries such as Diderot, David Hume, the economist and anti-colonialist Guillaume Raynal, the novelist Lawrence Sterne, Edward Gibbon, Cesare Beccaria, the Italian legal reformer and opponent of the death penalty. The salon was not a philosophical school with rigid teachings but an ongoing conversation between scientists and poets, atheists and believers, philosophers and practitioners. Called “the personal enemy of God”, d’Holbach invited priests and other critics to his table and even kept a chaplain at his summer house, to say mass for his conventionally minded mother in law.
The radical Enlighteners were well connected but more importantly, their frighteningly uncompromising writings were read and discussed throughout the Western world; The System of Nature, d’Holbach’s materialist masterwork was on the Catholic Index and had to be printed and distributed in secret. It still sold more than a hundred thousand copies during the second half of the eighteenth century.
Condemned by the Church and hated by the Court, d’Holbach and Diderot were beacons of free thinking and directly inspired the America’s Founding Fathers. Franklin is likely to have participated at the dinners and ensuing discussions; Jefferson, whose personal library still testifies to his interests, read and admired Diderot, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and Raynal, as well as their intellectual predecessors.  For the Declaration of Independence, he transformed the Lockean formulation for the pursuit of life, health, liberty, and property into the more properly Epicurean and Diderotean “pursuit of Happiness.”
And yet the radical enlighteners have been pushed into the margins of memory and the footnotes of the history of thought. The Enlightenment is, in our common school understanding at least, the history of a cult of reason whose high priests were Immanuel Kant and Voltaire, not the huge intellectual revolution of Diderot and his friends. Their relative obscurity is not an unsolvable mystery if one compares their thinking to that of Voltaire and Rousseau, who criticized absolutist excess but not the authoritarian rule of the few over the many; they attacked the Church but sung the praises of the “highest being”; their views were solidly deist and authoritarian and lent themselves to justifying the power of a new, post-Revolutionary politics. Robespierre made Rousseau the patron saint of the new state, heaped him with praise and had a bust of him carved from a stone taken from the Bastille.
D’Holbach and Diderot had a very different vision of human nature. Enthusiastic followers of their century’s tidal wave of new scientific discoveries, they concluded that nature was evolved, not created; that it was all material and had no place for immortal souls; that it consisted of nothing but matter and that we are animals within it, a universe empty of sense and without God. In the oppressively clerical environment of their day this last point took a good deal of their attention. In sharp polemics they attacked Christianity and religious faith in general, arguing that it was nothing but a primitive fiction designed to keep the poor in their place, a conspiracy of magistrates and priests.
Diderot saw the truest and the highest goal of human nature not in reason, but in lust. Humanity’s existence is driven by Eros, by the search for pleasure. This sensualist approach had an important metaphysical consequence: in a world without sin, a world in which no wrathful God has condemned all lust and demands suffering from his creatures on this earth in order to soften the blow of eternal punishment, the goal of life becomes the best possible realization of pleasure, the education of desire in accordance with natural laws. In a society without transcendental interference, this chance, the chance of the pursuit of happiness, must be given to all.
These views were anathema to just about everyone who sought to maintain or gain power, from the aristocracy to Revolutionary dictators such as Maximilien de Robespierre and Napoleon, all the way up to the Catholic Restoration that followed. “Men will not be free until the last king is strangled with the guts of the last priest,” wrote Diderot—not the kind of message to appeal to the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Laissez-faire capitalism allowed a self-proclaimed Christian middle class to profit from the misery of the working poor, at home and in the colonies. They could not argue for their position with Diderot, who became ever more scathing about the justification of power, privilege, slavery, and colonial expansion. It was Voltaire’s moderate Enlightenment that offered them the necessary vocabulary and allowed them to see themselves as the guardians of civilization, Enlightenment and religious values, put above the ignorant masses by divine providence.
The radical Enlighteners had understood and condemned this emergent power structure, as a ‘conspiracy of priests and magistrates’. Their thought was evolutionist long before Charles Darwin; they defended the rights of slaves before William Wilberforce and of women before Mary Wollstonecraft. They wanted to see individual fulfillment in a morality built around lust and social justice in a society built on pleasure and free choice, not on pain and oppression. Their potent ideas were unsurprisingly intoxicating discoveries for latter-day revolutionaries; among d’Holbach and Diderot’s ardent readers were Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
Censorship, condemnations, and the threat of arrest had been a fact of life for Diderot, but he could not anticipate the cruel or unusual punishment that they might suffer after their deaths. The twisting of facts and relationships began as Voltaire and Rousseau were ceremonially laid to rest in the Panthéon and eulogized as the noblest minds of humanity. Forgotten were Voltaire’s political cabals, his role as creditor to the very potentates he apparently attacked, his highly ambivalent stance to the aristocrats who kept him rich and famous and his cynical stance to religion as opium for the masses. Forgotten were Rousseau’s tantrums and his betrayal of friends, his advocacy of dictatorship. Two sarcophagi and countless busts and embossed books broadcast their grandeur and unimpeachable probity.
At the same time Diderot and d’Holbach have been denounced as immoral, ridiculed as talentless, kept out of some school syllabi; their bones moldered in an anonymous heap, their books were printed only sporadically and in small editions. When spoken of, Diderot was softened into an eccentrically Gallic novelist and editor of a long-outdated encyclopedia and d’Holbach was relegated to the status of a dim and boring precursor of Marxist theory. The salon and its guests were quickly forgotten: the Parisian house where for twenty-five years Europe’s most brilliant minds—‘Sheiks of the Rue Royale’ Hume called them—met and debated still bears no plaque or visible recognition of any kind.
The grand narrative of a rationalist Enlightenment that freed humanity from superstition only to subjugate it once again, this time to the dictates of reason and rationalization, suited the interests and self-image of an economy driven by entrepreneurship and fuelled by a cult of efficiency and cheap labor. Our own time dominated by the fiction of the market that needs to be obeyed and placated like an ancient deity and a society optimized for maximum consumption are a direct consequence of the Enlightenment cult of reason without the Diderotian emphasis on empathy. We have inherited the truncated history and repeated it to one another, tacitly encouraging a narrowness of thought that bears little resemblance to one of the freewheeling exchanges over candlelight at d’Holbach’s salon. The existence of a second, more radical Enlightenment tradition is not denied completely, but two centuries of historical bias have done their work, slowly but surely.
This will not change if Diderot’s bones, or some of them, really make it to their new and honorific final resting place. There is already a memorial dedicated to him in the Panthéon — as the editor of the Encyclopédie, the image he got stuck with as his philosophical work was marginalized and finally all but forgotten.
But while his role in this magnificent mammoth work was important for the eighteenth century, it is Diderot the philosopher who can still speak to us today. His advocacy of a passionate life, of social solidarity and empathy as the foundations of morality, his interest in science as the basis of all knowledge and in art as and Eros as ways of creating meaning have lost nothing of their freshness, or their necessity. The real potential of the Enlightenment, he says time and again, is not the absolute rule of reason, but the rehabilitation of passion as the basis of a life well lived.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 2, 2013

author: Philipp Blom

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Frederik Ruysch
The Artist of Death
By Luuc Kooijmans
March 5, 2014

Luuc Kooijmans explores the work of Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch, known for his remarkable ‘still life’ displays which blurred the boundary between scientific preservation and vanitas art.

When visiting Frederik Ruysch in Amsterdam in 1697, tsar Peter the Great kissed one of the specimens from his anatomical museum, and afterwards bought the entire collection. Three hundred years later, the Dutch crown prince, Willem Alexander, when visiting St Petersburg, was withheld from seeing Ruysch’s work. Diplomats had decided the prince had to be spared the sight of the ‘macabre, deformed foetuses’ that Ruysch had preserved.
If he had heard this, Frederik Ruysch would have turned in his grave. Not that he would have been surprised to hear that his preparations had survived three centuries, for he would have expected nothing less. Nor would he have been astonished to find a prince taking an interest in his work. But he would have been dismayed to hear his specimens described as macabre, since it was precisely the beauty of his preparations that earned Ruysch long-lasting fame. For centuries, friend and foe alike have agreed that he should be credited, above all, with making anatomy an acceptable pursuit.
At the beginning of Honoré de Balzac’s novel La Peau de Chagrin, the young protagonist is wandering around Paris, planning to put an end to his life, when he decides to go into a curiosity shop. There he encounters what Balzac describes as an ‘enchanting creature’, the embalmed body of a child, which reminds him of his happy boyhood. This ‘sleeping’ child turns out to be a remnant of the collection of Frederik Ruysch, who had been dead for exactly a century when Balzac wrote the novel.
The Italian author Giacomo Leopardi did not find the preparations horrifying either. In his ‘Dialogue of Frederick Ruysch and His Mummies’, Ruysch is awakened at midnight by his cadavers, who have come to life in his studio and are singing in chorus. Ruysch, watching through a crack in the door, exclaims, ‘Good heavens! Who on earth taught music to these dead people, who are crowing like roosters in the middle of the night? I’m in a cold sweat and almost more dead than they are. I didn’t realize that just because I saved them from decay they would come back to life.’ He then enters his studio and says, ‘Children, what kind of game are you playing? Have you forgotten that you’re dead? What’s this racket all about? Has the tsar’s visit gone to your head?’ One of the dead tells Ruysch that they can speak for a quarter of an hour, so he asks them for a brief description of what they felt when they were at death’s door. They assure him that dying is like falling asleep, like a dissolving of consciousness, and not at all painful. They declare that death, the fate of all living things, has brought them peace. For them, life is but a memory, and although they are not happy, at least they are free of old sorrows and fears.
Ruysch’s main trick was heating white wax, and injecting it into blood vessels in liquid form. Once it cooled and set he would have a dissectable preparation. By staining the wax red he managed to give bodies and organs a lifelike tint. The result was amazing. He used his preparations in teaching surgeons and midwives, but there was so much interest in them that he set up an exhibition. It was the first time that people could properly see human internal organs. The exhibition soon became a major attraction.
The museum was more than simply a collection of anatomical evidence. Those who entered were immediately confronted with a tomb containing various skeletons and skeletal remains. Among them was the skull of a newborn baby placed in a box, next to a sign with the motto: ‘no head, however strong, escapes cruel death’. The tomb also contained the skeleton of a boy of three, holding the skeleton of a parrot, which had been placed there as an allusion to the saying ‘time flies’.
Although the admonitory captions were very much in the established tradition of anatomical presentation, the museum was quite unique in that Ruysch had made an effort to give it an attractive design. Amidst the little skeletons in the tomb, for instance, was the embalmed body of a foetus of seven months. Its quite natural colour already made the sight a little less unpleasant, but Ruysch had beautified the child in other ways as well, by putting a bouquet in its hand and crown of flowers on its head. The flowers, too, had been preserved so that they would keep their petals and their bright colour.
Visitors were confronted with the skeletons of a child of four with a toy in its hands, a five-year-old holding a silk thread with an embalmed heart dangling from it, and a girl drying her eyes with a pocket handkerchief.
Decorations, memento mori images and vanitas symbols put the horror of death in perspective by stressing the transience of life, by showing that the body was no more than an earthly frame for the soul. After death it no longer served its purpose — only an anatomist could still make it useful to the living.
Of course, the real goal of the anatomist was not to amaze his audience, even though that ambition, too, could be justified, particularly by arguing that it would impress the viewer with the wondrousness of God’s creation. But the ultimate objective of anatomy was to increase man’s knowledge of the structure and workings of the human body. Ruysch had developed his skills to be able to make structures visible which would otherwise have remained invisible.
Towards the end of the 17th century, after thirty years of practice, Ruysch, assisted by his son, managed to perfect his preparation method, which, as he said, now made ‘the tiniest parts of the human body clear to the eye’. Key to the process was the injection of a substance that would not congeal until it had penetrated the tiniest of blood vessels. Liquid wax went a fair way towards this objective, but not as far as Ruysch wanted. So he had constantly been looking for a better substitute. Once he had that, he made many new anatomical discoveries, and he could make preparations that differed little in appearance from living tissue. Most of them now were stored in glass jars and bottles, in a remarkably clear liquid he called liquor balsamicus, a liquid that preserved their lifelike colour and elasticity. Whereas they used to become hard and stiff, and lost their colour, now they were kept bright and supple.
When Ruysch first made his results public, his technique was considered akin to sorcery. Some people simply refused to believe their eyes. Ruysch was accused of using trickery to make his preparations more attractive. He was often criticized for the way he presented his anatomical material. What was the point of all that embellishment, he was asked, and he countered by demanding to know why people spent so much money burying bodies that were already worm-eaten. His reasons were clear: ‘First of all, I do it to allay the distaste of people who are naturally inclined to be dismayed by the sight of corpses’, he said, but (and this was why he didn’t want to be accused of cheap tricks) he also saw a clear connection between the appearance of his preparations and their scientific validity, for he claimed the ability to restore a body to the state it was in before death. That his corpses seemed to be asleep was not just amazing, it was also significant.
Because his new technique enabled him to work more efficiently and to make better and more beautiful preparations he decided to reorganize his museum, and in doing so, he concentrated more than ever on the presentation. The collection was placed in a number of cabinets that filled three rooms. As before, the arrangement was not systematic: Ruysch turned every cabinet, which he called a thesaurus, a storehouse of knowledge, into an individual work of art, consisting of different kinds of preparations in unique combinations. The centrepiece of every cabinet was an anatomical still life placed on a bed of bladder-, kidney- and gall-stones, from the midst of which rose ‘trees’ of dried blood vessels filled with a red wax-like substance. Among these stood tiny foetal skeletons. They still delivered their grave message to the visitor, but by now they did it with a sense of humour. ※※Indexed under…Treesfashioned from dried blood vesels
Such a combination of seriousness and humour fits in with a long-standing tradition. Sixteenth-century publications abounded in illustrations of skeletons using bones as drumsticks. In a way, Ruysch’s compositions were subtle, three-dimensional versions of those anatomical illustrations showing skeletons in dramatic poses placed in curious settings. Numerous publications on anatomy — the famous atlas of Vesalius, for example — contained pictures of skeletons portrayed as gravediggers, or hanged criminals. But to present skeletons as characters in a tableau non vivant was highly unusual, and an indication of the extent to which Ruysch had distanced himself from his material. In one of his compositions a skeleton says: ‘even after death I’m still attractive!’
Although the collection reflected his search for answers to scientific questions, and could be used to answer such questions — at least when Ruysch could find the preparation he was looking for — it was largely an end in itself. Ruysch did not order his work according to specifically formulated problems. Instead, he confined himself to describing his collection and recording the observations his injections had enabled him to make.
He maintained that he was merely gratifying the desire to observe the miracles of God Almighty, but in fact his motivation was twofold: not only did he exalt the human anatomy as a wondrous product of creation, but he presented himself as a veritable artist of death. His display of his anatomical virtuosity contained the veiled message that he — and he alone — was able to defy death to the extent that he could make a corpse look like a living body. He always emphasized the natural form, colour and flexibility of his prepared bodies, which differed from live ones only in their lack of movement. He was convinced that his art had given him knowledge — and therefore a special status — that others would never be able to attain. This explains his reluctance to divulge his working methods, for it was only by maintaining strict secrecy that he could remain the sole intermediary between the living and the dead.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Luuc Kooijmans


text:
Encounter at the Crossroads of Europe - the Fellowship of Zweig and Verhaeren

By Will Stone
December 11, 2013

Stefan Zweig, whose works passed into the public domain this year in many countries around the world, was one of the most famous writers of the 1920s and 30s. Will Stone explores the importance of the Austrian's early friendship with the oft overlooked Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren.

‘Friendship stands highest on the forehead of humanity. . .’
Keats
I
While still at school, Stefan Zweig had tried his hand at translating a number of French and Belgian poets, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Baudelaire, but also another name almost unknown to us today, Emile Verhaeren. Something about the elemental nature and incendiary vision housed in the rugged and unorthodox language of the Flemish born Verhaeren resonated with the youthful Zweig, jarring somehow with the comfortable, ordered cultural advancement of his existence, where the restless wanderings of later life were calmly incubating. Zweig’s own work in these early days seemed about to follow a very different course. As is well known, Zweig came from a privileged Jewish bourgeois background in Vienna, the intellectually buoyant yet self regarding metropolis at the heart of the sprawling Hapsburg kingdom, where the young Zweig was liberally steeped in art, literature and music from an early age. In Vienna, Zweig maintained good relations with his parents after completing his schooling, but immersed himself completely in the Viennese café lifestyle of a writer, a period in which he learned the importance of personal freedom through wide ranging dialogue with diverse artists and literary figures. This formation period was where Zweig’s undying thirst for wider travel and experience of the foreign was seeded. But as the century turned, Zweig was absorbed with his coming of age literary achievement, the publication of a first collection of poems at the tender age of twenty-one.
Silberne Saiten (Silver Strings) was well-received and unlike most first efforts by a newcomer, found favour amongst Vienna’s critics, even one Rainer Maria Rilke responded gratefully to his copy, by sending Zweig a dedicated book. Yet these ‘smooth, able verses’ yielding to accustomed versification were as Zweig soon realized too much of a borrowing, a reconstituted product of a time and place, or more aptly of a time that had now passed, but was still hanging on in the Viennese literary salons, like incense in a nave, a stale fragrance which the gathering wind of modernity was soon to brutally disperse. Although this book brought Zweig’s name into the limelight for the first time, it served as a temporary shackle, which he sought to remove at the earliest opportunity. When Zweig left for Berlin and university in 1902, he left Vienna as the most prominent of the younger writers, an overnight success, but in essence he had not yet even begun.
In Berlin, apart from his studies and bohemian indulgences, Zweig sought a more expansive freedom in literary terms, and caught the bug of translation. He began to explore further afield, even translating poets such as Keats and Yeats and producing with other translators a collection of Verlaine’s poetry to which he added a critically acclaimed introduction. But all the time he was moving closer to Belgium, drawn by the rich crop of its home grown artists and writers who seemed to integrate their works in fresh and creatively productive ways. So in the summer break of 1902, long anticipating a visit to the ‘little land between the languages’, Zweig made his move.
Verhaeren had come onto his radar while still at school, when he found a copy of the poet’s first Rubenesque collection Les Flamandes (1883) and instinctively attempted a clutch of translations. He had even written to Verhaeren in 1898 to secure permission to publish them in a journal. Now, he was determined to meet the man himself, though it was the novelist Camille Lemmonier, to whom Zweig had recently dedicated an essay, whom he first located in Brussels. Zweig had sent a postcard in rather shaky French to Verhaeren suggesting a meeting, but it was unclear when Zweig arrived in the Belgian capital if this rendezvous would come to pass. On arrival it seemed that Verhaeren was away and Zweig’s hopes were dashed, but by a fateful stroke, Lemmonier then invited him to meet the sculptor Charles van der Stappen, and Verhaeren just so happened to be in the sculptor’s studio sitting for a bust. Zweig’s memories of that first crucial encounter with the older man are pertinent.
For the first time I felt the grasp of his vigorous hand, for the first time met his clear kindly glance. He arrived as he always did, brimming over with enthusiasm and the experiences of the day . . . It seemed as though he projected his whole being towards you . . . he knew as yet nothing of me, yet already he was full of gratitude for my inclination, already he offered me his trust just because he heard I was close to his work. In spite of myself, all shyness faded before the stormy onset of his being. I felt myself free as never before, in the face of this unknown, open man. His gaze, strong, steely and clear, unlocked the heart.1
The vital importance of Zweig’s meeting with Verhaeren in relation to his ensuing career as a writer, emissary of humanism and key proponent for the higher ideal of a Europe of cultural unity, cannot be underestimated. The contrast between Verhaeren’s openness, curiosity, vitality, not to mention the explicit visionary credentials he held, and the self conscious dandified Viennese poetry circles Zweig had moved within was extreme. It was if Zweig himself had suddenly been released from a reserve of pampered elites into the rawness and unpredictability of the wild and could finally breathe real air, taste real food and appreciate the creative potential of risk and unpredictability. In Verhaeren’s verses he saw bold new vistas opening up which seemed to strike a necessary chord with the rapidly transforming epoch, as the fabled ‘golden age of security’, guarded by the Hapsburg realm unceremoniously gave way to something far more restless, ominous and uncertain.
The time demanded a new poet to express its infinite variegations and Verhaeren was evidently the best man for the job according to Zweig, the only one who was prepared to face the new century eyes wide open, a poet who had proved himself wholly authentic and not tainted by any school or movement, who was implicitly true to himself and those around him, a man who wilfully absorbed everything lucidly and without compromise, whatever the cost to his mind and health. Zweig’s almost priest like dedication to Verhaeren was long standing and never wavered. Of the most important men of example in his life, Verhaeren was the most significant. Following Zweig’s crisis after the upheaval of the First World War, Romain Rolland assumed this role, but this was an altogether different entente cordiale for which there is no room here.
The third key master, was the great essay writer Michel de Montaigne, who appeared from the wings as a timely ghost at the close of Zweig’s life, in order to philosophically assist with Zweig’s departure from the world at what was judged the right moment for him. Montaigne closes Zweig’s story, addressing him personally from across five centuries. More than Balzac, Tolstoy or any of the others ‘greats’, it is Montaigne who comes to his aid at the eleventh hour, Montaigne who manages to complete the circle of the men of example. Montaigne shows a desperate and morbidly depressed Zweig, hounded from one country to another, and convinced Europe has finally destroyed itself, an ethical way out of the mental inferno through his essay of vivid historical examples, ‘A Custom of the Isle of Cea’.
Zweig’s literary output is prodigious and notably varied. As well as proving himself a gifted short story writer with Amok and Buchmendel amongst others, and an accomplished novelist with Beware of Pity, Zweig was also the great portraitist of major artists, historical figures, legendary writers and explorers, his books being read in greater numbers than any other German language writer through the 1920’s. But these were never dry academic studies or even biographies per se, but more lyrically borne psychological plumbings around the nature of the subject, the archaeological digging for spiritual affiliations which guaranteed the subject their boarding pass to Zweig’s European ark on the Kapuzinerberg in Salzburg. Zweig, always modest about his own achievements and ultimate legacy as a writer, despite his popularity, seemed compelled to serve, possessing an insatiable need for masters, or fraternal figures to whom he could signal, those writerly kin greater than himself, who set the standard to be judged by, monumental figures like Tolstoy, Balzac, Dostoyevsky. . . and those figures in history who related to his own predicament in the greater predicament of Europe, such as Erasmus and again Montaigne.
All these long dead artists and those still living, were for him crucial sources of personal reassurance at moments of doubt and weakness, examples of nobleness in endeavor, personal sacrifice to art, a reliable crew of patient toilers and visionary explorers. Zweig wanted to collect them all, experience them to the core, and penetrate their secrets, not to ‘consume’ them so to speak, to line them and gloat as a collector of figurines, but to celebrate the spiritual thread of each, which when woven together constituted the unique European consciousness of which he was a guardian. Not only did Zweig excel as a determined collector of manuscripts, scores, letters and memorabilia of Europe’s finest creators, but he collected them in his head as compass points, a series of safe harbours to which he could moor up to sit out the storm, where he could replenish his supplies of fraternity and find the spiritual hospitality he craved. It was Verhaeren, the living man, Nietzsche’s ‘Good European’ who personified this greatness for Zweig, the older Belgian poet whom Zweig encountered on the cusp of the former’s maturing renown, a renown which Zweig himself was personally committed to deepening and upholding.
Over the coming years, Zweig’s close friendship with Verhaeren was consolidated and he was customarily invited to spend part of the summer with the poet and his painter wife Marthe Massin at their idyllic country cottage at Caillou-qui-Bique in southern Belgium. In the decade before the First World War, Zweig took it upon himself to firmly establish Verhaeren’s reputation in Germany, where hitherto Verhaeren’s exposure had been weak. He himself embarked on a marathon translation of a selection of Verhaeren’s poems and through his by now impressive contacts, managed to secure a prominent publisher, so that Verhaeren’s work, backed up by carefully organized reading tours of major cities, began to spread rapidly through Germany.
Verhaeren benefited greatly from the German ‘surge’, in terms of his European profile overall, and all through Zweig’s diligent efforts. Zweig became the ambassador for Verhaeren’s voice and made sure it reached the leading literary circles of the continent, so that by the time of the Belgian poet’s untimely death in 1916, it would be true to say his influence had spread as far as Moscow, with the likes of Blok and Mayakovsky taking an interest and furthermore Verhaeren was in demand on the lecture circuit, for his exuberant delivery, the torch bearer of a new kind of poetry which, like Walt Whitman in America sought to engage with nature at an elemental level.
Whitman’s famous ‘Look for me under your boot soles’, would seem equally apt for Verhaeren, the terrain being Flanders, though the Belgian poet, as Zweig realized, and expounded with fervent persuasion in his biography Emile Verhaeren (1910) had gone much further than Whitman, probing into the destructive excesses and social implications of industrial change and the decimated rural landscapes which were its legacy. For example in his major work Les Villes tentaculaires (1895) Verhaeren optimistically envisages some potential metaphysical transcendence for mankind out of the crucible of power engendered by the frenzied activity of the new urban multitudes and the delirious energy of the blast furnaces.

II
But everything changed with the war. Optimism and idealism were the first casualties, ignominiously swept away, never to return. Ironically, and fatefully as ever, Zweig was on his way from Ostend to visit Verhaeren at Caillou in the late summer of 1914, just as Europe’s borders started to freeze. Only weeks before, Zweig had met the Insel editor Kippenberg, along with Rilke, Rolland and Bazalgette in a café in Paris to discuss the prospect of a Verhaeren ‘Collected Works’, a series of volumes comprising all his poetry to be published in 1916 as a surprise gift to the poet they all admired so deeply. Zweig himself would take on La Multiple Splendeur (1907) and each was allotted his task to find suitable translators.
The project was stillborn. Seemingly out of nowhere, nationalist hatred had engulfed Europe and such noble schemes became but a forgotten trifle of literary history. The friends were forced back to their respective native lands and detained there for the next four years through the great ensuing international convulsions, their high-minded fellowship for European artistic integration temporarily disbanded. At the end of August 1914, Zweig himself, having hung on to see which way the axe would fall, was hurrying at the last minute from Ostend, due to meet Verhaeren for his annual sojourn at Caillou. He was forced to turn back as mobilization engulfed the area, taking the last train from Brussels across the border into Germany, or risk being detained as an enemy alien, a fate he was absurdly to incur later in Britain in 1939. The two men were never to see each other again, nor were they even to communicate.
As former friends were suddenly confronted with the prospect of being national enemies, tensions and uncharacteristic behavior threatened once solid and seemingly unshakeable bonds. Almost overnight the old Europe of freedom of movement and tolerance was annihilated and would only return post 1918 as a disabled version, mortally infected with fresh unrest mutating out of the old. Verhaeren, who had always been a profound admirer of German art and had travelled to Germany as a younger man on lengthy visits for the express purpose of becoming better acquainted with its art, he who had latterly known German acclamation at the hands of Zweig, now sank into bitter hatred of the foe, after the Teutonic fury unleashed throughout his beloved Belgium.
The destruction of Namur, the obliteration of medieval Ypres, the gratuitous murder of civilians, the sacking of Louvain and willful burning of its priceless antiquarian library by German troops, seemingly ordered to lay waste to Belgium, pushed Verhaeren over the edge into a blind hatred of the Prussian ‘barbarians’. The result was La Belgique Sanglante (Belgium bleeding) an ill-starred though understandable ranting diatribe against everything German, a book which became little more than a propaganda coup for the allies. Now wincing to read, it served at the time to enhance Verhaeren’s new figurehead status as Belgian national poet allied to the king. This ‘official’ position he never really wanted, but was saddled with and the rhetoric and pomp which attaches itself to such positions may to some extent may explain in part the velocity of his post war decline.
Zweig, himself the ‘confused’ victim of an initial hot headed rush of national pride, (something he attempts to gloss over in Die Welt von Gestern (1942)) was shocked by Verhaeren’s seeming personality change, this sudden explosion of hate being the complete antithesis of all he had stood for. The rude shock of world war had ripped through the ideal. Normally noble-minded men were scurrying for cover into patriotism, following the nihilistic onslaught of undiscriminating death and destruction. Romain Rolland stood alone in Switzerland, trying to gather the dispersed pacifists about him. Zweig put out feelers to Verhaeren, hoping to rekindle the flame, but draconian censorship did not help and the line stayed dead.
Eventually as the war dragged on into a perverse contest of attrition, the red mist began to lift and Verhaeren reclaimed his lucid self. He sought to weaken his previously entrenched stance vis a vis the Germans, but somehow the line of communication with his most faithful servant Zweig was never repaired and Verhaeren died tragically in November 1916, accidentally crushed by a train in Rouen station after giving a patriotic speech to Belgian exiles.
The true nature of the loss of Verhaeren, the cruel severing of this fellowship by the war, was vividly expressed in Zweig’s moving personal tribute Errinerungen an Emile Verhaeren, published in Vienna in 1917. Here Zweig tries to cauterize the open wound left by Verhaeren’s passing and the final silence between them that was never assuaged. How much Zweig longs for a different ending, in his lamentation you sense so keenly the sense of something unfinished in the emptiness left behind. And yet by indulging in such painful reverie, and acknowledging the death, Zweig unconsciously summons the ghost of his friend, whose replenishing spirit enters into him with ever more vital insistence.
A dark day, I still remember it now and will never forget. I took out all his letter, his many, many letters, all of them there in front of me so as to read them again, to be alone with them, to bring to a close what was now finally ended, for I now knew I would never receive another. But there was something in me which refused to say goodbye to something that lived in me like the incarnated proof of my own existence, of my faith on this earth. And the more I told myself that he was dead, the more I felt him breathing his life through me and even these words with which I am taking leave of him are only making him still more alive, for only the admission of a great loss attest to the true possession of that which is ephemeral. And only the unforgettable dead remain truly alive for us!2
Today, the importance of Verhaeren as an example to younger writers of his epoch, now famous figures of the canon, his stature as ‘maitre’, is, like his poetic legacy, unacknowledged in Britain and other Anglophone countries. Verhaeren is at the moment of writing all but invisible, as if he never existed, an unforeseen casualty of history and yet in his time he was admired and loved with an almost religious devotion, not only by Zweig but many others, notably Rilke, who in Paris, sustained himself on Verhaeren’s expressive life affirming poems, visited him regularly in his St Cloud house.
How is it that a man of such calibre, vision and influence can fall into such devastating obscurity? How can it be that a name once spoken with admiration and awed respect, a name well known to English translators, critics and poetry readers in the first decades of the twentieth century, can now not even raise a glimmer of recognition? Such are the fallacious paths of the historical labyrinth we find ourselves in. Zweig and Verhaeren are irrevocably interlocked, their destinies grafted onto one another. But fame or the absence of it is in the end a peripheral matter; it is only the inner creative destiny of each and where it is touched by the influence of the other that counts.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: December 11, 2013

author: Will Stone


text:
The Naturalist and the Neurologist
On Charles Darwin and James Crichton-Browne
By Stassa Edwards
May 28, 2014

Stassa Edwards explores Charles Darwin's photography collection, which includes almost forty portraits of mental patients given to him by the neurologist James Crichton-Browne. The study of these photographs, and the related correspondence between the two men, would prove instrumental in the development of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin's book on the evolution of emotions.

It’s a curious thing to think of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) sitting alone, closely studying photographic portraits of the afflicted and insane. But in the late 1860s, that’s exactly what he began doing: he sifted through portraits of kleptomaniacs, nymphomaniacs, sufferers of severe self-importance, hysteria, and general mania. The portraits, nearly forty of them, were a sort of gift from neurologist James Crichton-Browne (1840-1938), who, as director of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield, was a notable figure in neuropsychiatric photography.
Crichton-Browne’s photographs, all half-length portraits, attempted to capture the afflictions of his patients; to record the facial expressions of all sorts of manias for the purposes of scientific observation and diagnosis. The results were a strange kind of family album: a group of now-anonymous patients committed to Crichton-Browne’s care stares blankly into the camera’s lens; their expressions are fixed, their faces twisted into a record of their extreme emotional afflictions. Darwin’s meditations on the photographs—guided by Crichton-Browne’s own observations—had a profound impact on the naturalist’s thinking about the physical manifestations of natural selection.
The two men exchanged letters for nearly six years, trading books and photographs and sharing observations on the anatomy of blushing, the physiology of expression, and the mechanics of hair bristling. Most importantly, the men shared an almost zealous faith in photography’s ability to correct the imperfect observations made by the human eye.
Though Crichton-Browne and Darwin’s epistolary exchange covered far ranging ground, it seems that Darwin initially contacted the neurologist with a single need. “Sometime ago I went into several shops in London to try to buy photographs of the insane, but failed,” Darwin wrote in a letter dated June 8, 1869.
Like his father, Dr. William Browne—a “medical commissioner in lunacy” and college chum of the famed naturalist—Crichton-Browne was a bit of a medical iconoclast. He advocated for the “moral” treatment of the insane: no restraints, but diversional and occupational therapy with medication as necessary. Crichton-Browne allowed the residents of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum to imbibe on their favorite beer, he organized dances for their entertainment, and he took their photographs. The photographs served two purposes: first, to shock the lunatic out of her affliction by confronting her with her grotesque appearance, and second, to catalog the true look of different kinds of manias and spur specialized care for individual disorders.
Crichton-Browne eagerly responded to Darwin’s request, providing a handful of photographs but promising more. His portraits joined Darwin’s already expanding collection of photographs, an idiosyncratic collection that the scientist had procured rather haphazardly. Darwin had begun wandering London’s many photography shops as early as 1866, searching out photographs that captured facial expressions. He was hardly discriminating and his collection was far from highbrow: cross-dressed actors, smiling sculptures, stereoscopic prints, amusing collages of dogs and crying babies. It’s the stuff of the nineteenth-century photography market, entertaining curiosities meant to litter the overstuffed chairs of the Victorian drawing room.
Darwin’s weird and wonderful photography collection was acquired not for parlor games but for the study of human and animal facial expressions. His observations were initially intended as a chapter in his groundbreaking book The Descent of Man (1871). But he found himself so enthralled by the subject that he skipped the chapter and expanded his thoughts into the 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals — widely considered the first English-language scientific text to use photographs.
Expression is the most accessible of Darwin’s books. Far from a dry scientific text, it’s rich with colorful anecdotes drawn from theater, painting and, of course, photography. In it, he argues that man’s emotional expressions—his smiles, snarls, and frowns — are the result of natural selection. If facial communication stems from natural selection, then man must share it with other mammals. “With mankind some expressions, such as bristling the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that furious rage, can hardly be understood,” he wrote, “except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition.”
Like all of Darwin’s arguments, it was a radical departure from conventional wisdom — in this case, the leading theory that facial muscles were a divine gift to humans alone, a manifestation of their higher order thinking.
Darwin’s research for Expression was frustrated by a serious problem: the collection of empirical evidence. Actual facial expressions proved difficult for him to scrutinize at any length; their ephemeral nature frustrated his positivist commitment to observation. In the text, he outlined the many problems that arose from observations of the fallible human eye:
The fleeting nature of some expressions (the changes in the features being often extremely slight); our sympathy being easily aroused when we behold any strong emotion, and our attention thus distracted; our imagination deceiving us, from knowing in a vague manner what to expect, though certainly few of us know what the exact changes in the countenance are; and lastly, even our long familiarity with the subject—from all these causes combined, the observation of Expression is by no means easy.
Photography seemed to be a concrete solution to Darwin’s troubles: a relatively new and neutral technology that he perceived as a simple record, unaffected by demands of aesthetics and artistic interpretation. Photographs also enabled continuous observation of fleeting expressions. He could now observe the discreet flexure of facial muscles, free of “strongly excited sympathy” or “imagination” (both abominable sources of scientific error).
But while photography offered a solution to Darwin’s ills, it introduced another problem, a problem of authenticity. Many of the photographs he found captured what he considered “fake” emotions—emotions that were often enacted rather than felt; strained, no doubt, by long exposure times. This led to inevitable errors of anatomy; a cross-dressed German actor might smile, but he was flexing the wrong muscles to be truly happy. Darwin found photographs of the insane to be the quickest remedy to this problem.
The mentally ill, as Victorian mores held, were emotionally uninhibited and unconstrained. Unable to conform to social norms, the insane were hardly concerned with the suppression of emotion required by the cultured and the sane. To Darwin, Crichton-Browne’s photographs represented something more useful than marketable trinkets. The raw emotion of the inmates at West Riding Lunatic Asylum was primitive, more authentic, and certainly closer to man’s evolutionary ancestors. Crichton-Browne’s project, his interest in capturing the true look of mania, proved a valuable discovery for Darwin.
Darwin found in Crichton-Browne a fellow scientist sympathetic to his theories and ready to expound on his observations. The correspondence between the two men is colorful, replete with vignettes from Crichton-Browne’s blushing sister-in-law to the “observed hilarity” of women “labouring under erotomania, nymphomania, or any disorder of the sexual propensities” (Letter from JCB to CD, February, 16 1871). Though Crichton-Browne refers to very few of his photographs specifically, his letters flesh out the otherwise vacant personalities captured by his camera. In a single letter, he describes the “hilarity” of sexually perverse women; the “remarkable lachrymal secretion” of “melancholics, who sit rocking themselves rhythmically backwards and forwards”; and “a stereotyped smile” of “many idiots and imbeciles who are constantly smiling and laughing, who are `pleas[ed] with a rattle, tickled by a straw.’”
The naturalist was eager to solicit Crichton-Browne’s observations on the mechanisms of expression as well as his opinions on the most recent literature on the subject. Darwin forwarded his large volume of Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne’s 1862 book, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions. Duchenne, a physician at the famous Parisian asylum Salpêtrière, had discovered that by using electric probes, he could cause isolated groups of muscles to contract and artificially induce facial expressions in his subjects. Lavishly illustrated with numerous photographic plates demonstrating Duchenne’s grotesque-looking experiments, Mécanisme, was invaluable to Darwin’s research. He and Crichton-Browne exchanged the volume many times throughout their correspondence; Darwin’s copy of the book — now housed at the Darwin Archives at Cambridge University — is filled with their questions and annotations, scribbled in its margins.
Darwin seemed to have been most interested in discreet effects of mania on the body. Crichton-Browne, no casual witness of emotional extremities, wrote detailed descriptions of his patients’ attacks, listing every fiber of musculature that flexed in the action. In a March 15, 1870, letter, Crichton-Brown describes a woman from Huddersfield who:
Believes that her head is burnt & that there is not a drop of blood in her body. She has an agonized expression. There is marked elevation of the outter [sic] third of the left eyebrow, the skin of the forehead over it being gathered into a multitude of minute wrinkles; the corresponding part of the right eyebrow depressed & overhanging. The corrugatores superciliorum, powerfully contracted. The eyeballs much exposed, the upper eyelids having an abrupt angular arch rather to the inside of their central points; a rounded kite-shaped fullness over the upper lid: angles of the mouth pulled down; constant restless movements, rubbing & wringing of the hands, with twisting of the body from side to side, the neck being held rigid as if apprehensions were entertained as to any movement of the head.
Crichton-Browne also responded to Darwin’s specific inquiries about the causes of blushing. “[Y]our theory as to the association of blushing and mental confusion is correct,” he wrote to Darwin in April 1871:
I have read your remarks on blushing to my sister in-law, one of the best or worst blushers I ever encountered— a young lady very sanguine & sensitive and she pronounces them strictly correct. She says that when blushing she often stammers and does not know what she is saying. I suggestd [sic] to her that this was due to a feeling of increased awkwardness knowing that her blushing was observed—but she says, No because she has felt quite as stupid when blushing at a thought in her own room. I can make this young lady blush at any moment by looking at her intently.
A good portion of their correspondence is dedicated to the effects of emotional distress on the hair. Darwin was particularly interested in establishing a link between the bristling hair of unsettled lower primates and humans. In Expression he compared raised hairs on anthropoid apes and on the nape of a canine neck — both of which occurred only when the animals were agitated. Convinced of the truthfulness of the old adage “hair raising,” Darwin plied Crichton-Browne for his own reflections. On June 1, 1869, Crichton-Browne wrote:
With reference to the erection of the hair in acute melancholia & hypochondriasis. There is in both these conditions, a persistent state of painful emotion (either terror or anxiety) varied by paroxysms of more intense suffering. It is in these paroxysms that the bristling of the hair is most frequently noticed . . . It is attributable . . . partly to the sub-acute emotional perturbation . . . which creates a tendency to certain actions & modes of action, & which is operative I am satisfied even upon the hairs.
The wife of a medical man, with whom, a patient of mine a lady suffering from acute melancholia, (characterized by convictions of unpardonable sin, fear of death for herself her husband & her children), said to me the other day, without the faintest suggestion on my part,— “I think Mrs. H. is going to begin to improve because her hair is beginning to get smoother. I always notice that our patients” (a considerable number of lunatics have resided with the speaker) “begin to get better whenever their hair ceases to be rough & untidy & unmanageable” This is a curious empirical observation.

Their exchange on the subject of bristling hair continued for nearly a year. On June 6, 1870, Crichton-Browne sent Darwin a photograph of a “female patient . . . in whom the bristling of the hair was well seen. The woman was in a tranquil mood when the portrait was taken. When she was agitated—the ascendant emotion being horror—the hair stood out like wire.” The accompanying photograph of a placid-faced woman with possibly ethnic hair was the only one of Crichton-Browne’s portraits to appear in Expression, though it was reproduced as a wood engraving.
It is, perhaps, a bit surprising that despite Darwin’s direct solicitation of both Crichton-Browne’s photographs and observations that only one of his portraits was reproduced in Expression. But despite the limited use of Crichton-Browne’s photographs, Darwin found his insights invaluable. Darwin wrote the neurologist in March of 1871 and suggested to him that he should be credited as co-author of Expression. Crichton-Browne politely declined.
It’s likely that the patients of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum diverged too much from the universality of expression that Darwin wished to demonstrate. Though a monomaniac’s expression might be useful for close study, it is hardly typical.
Darwin’s commitment to typicality — the scientific median — was often at odds with Crichton-Browne’s interest in the abnormality of affliction. In addition to his asylum portraits, the neurologist had forwarded Darwin photographs of a family of “imbeciles” committed to an asylum in Scotland, photographs of grotesquely disfigured patients, and a photograph of a child that the neurologist described as a “Yorkshire cretin.”
Darwin seemed to have little use for these photographs; many he returned to Crichton-Browne, but others were placed in an envelope the naturalist had indelicately labelled “Idiots—of no use.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Stassa Edwards


text:
Writing his Life through the Other
The Anthropology of Malinowski
By Michael W. Young
January 22, 2014

Last year saw the works of Bronislaw Malinowski - father of modern anthropology - enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Michael W. Young explores the personal crisis plaguing the Polish-born anthropologist at the end of his first major stint of ethnographic immersion in the Trobriand Islands, a period of self-doubt glimpsed through entries in his diary - the most infamous, most nakedly honest document in the annals of social anthropology.

‘Truly I lack real character.’ [Nie jestem naprawdę prawdziwym charakterm]. With these words, written on 18 July 1918, Polish-born Bronislaw Malinowski abruptly ended the intimate diary that he kept during his final stint of fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands of eastern New Guinea. This diary, along with several others, was discovered in his Yale University office after his death. Written in Polish, it is clear that he had not intended it for publication. Against his daughters’ wishes, however, and to the dismay of many colleagues who had heard rumours of its controversial contents, his widow published a translation under the title A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (Routledge 1967). It would become the most infamous, most nakedly honest document in the annals of social anthropology. With its moral struggles, its Dostoevskian moods, its Conradian allusions, its Freudian subtext of mother-love and frustrated sexual desire, its misanthropic and racist outbursts, the Diary abundantly revealed some unpleasant aspects of Malinowski’s character. In unmasking his personal weaknesses and prejudices it appeared to give the lie to his professional image as an empathetic fieldworker whose methodological slogan was ‘participant observation’. In short, its publication created a minor scandal and helped precipitate the crisis of anthropological conscience that anticipated the postmodern turn in the discipline. The damage to Malinowski’s reputation was only fully restored after the passing of his pupils’ generation with a dawning realization that the Diary was an iconic text that pointed the way towards a more self-aware and reflexive anthropology.
Malinowski was one of the most colourful and charismatic social scientists of the twentieth century. A founding father of British social anthropology between the two world wars, his quasi-mythical status has fascinated his disciplinary descendants who continue to measure themselves against his achievements. Marching under a self-styled theoretical banner of Functionalism, Malinowski revolutionized fieldwork methods, cultivated an innovative style of ethnographic writing, and mounted polemical assaults on a wide array of academic disputes and public issues. By the time of his death, aged 58, in the United States in 1942 he was a controversial international celebrity, a cosmopolitan humanist who dedicated his final years to the ideological battle against Nazi totalitarianism.
It is for his corpus of ethnographic writings on the Trobriand Islanders, however, that Malinowski is revered and best remembered. Most of his books remain in print and continue to be taught, critiqued, and studied as exemplars of anthropological modernism. His best ethnographic writing is a stylistic confection of vivid description, reflexive anecdote, methodological prescription and theoretical aside. Malinowski broke with convention by abandoning the positivist pretence of aloof scientific objectivity by inserting a witnessing self into his narrative. The ‘Ethnographer’ of his books is a somewhat outlandish character (‘a Savage Pole’ in one guise) who never allows his reader to forget that not only was he present at the scene as a participant observer, but that he is also the one, in a fully contextualized first-person sense, who is doing the writing. Malinowski’s ethnographic persona — curious, patient, empathetic yet ironic — was given a tentative outing in his first ethnographic report, The Natives of Mailu (1915) and reached full maturity in Baloma (1916), a monograph-length essay on Trobriand religion. The intrusion of Malinowski’s authorial self blurred the distinction between Romantic travelogue and ethnographic monograph. In Ethnography, ‘the writer is his own chronicler,’ he reminds us, and scolds those whose works offer ‘wholesale generalizations’ without informing the reader ‘by what actual experiences the writers have reached their conclusion’.
Malinowski’s first and most celebrated Trobriand monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), is a richly-illustrated account of the ceremonial exchange of manufactured shell valuables through which the Trobriands are linked to other island groups of eastern New Guinea. A colourful scientific travelogue, Argonauts takes its readers on a canoe-borne voyage around the so-called Kula Ring of islands. The author’s “Introduction” (which has been dubbed the Book of Genesis of the fieldworker’s Bible) contains twenty-five of the most influential pages in the history of social anthropology.
Malinowski’s intention was to raise ethnographic fieldwork to a professional art. The essential rule, he emphasized, was to study the ‘tribal culture in all its aspects’, making no distinction ‘between what is commonplace, drab or ordinary’ and what may seem novel, astonishing or sensational. The ethnographer’s main task is to observe and describe customs in their everyday social contexts and to elicit people’s explanations for their own behaviour. The ultimate aim of social or cultural anthropology is to convert knowledge of other modes of life into wisdom:
Though it may be given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his eyes look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him to be himself — yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our own world’s vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically. In grasping the essential outlook of others, with the reverence and real understanding, due even to savages, we cannot but help widening our own.
As an Enlightenment project, the Science of Man must lead to ‘tolerance and generosity, based on the understanding of other men’s point of view’. And Malinowski famously defined the ‘final goal’ of the Ethnographer: ‘to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world’.
Following Argonauts, he published Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), a short but path-breaking book which described how ‘law and order’ was maintained in the Trobriands through various sanctions, including the threat of sorcery. His insights into the working of ‘the principle of reciprocity’ in everyday exchanges and his pioneering use of the case method laid the foundations of legal anthropology.
Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) contested Freudian dogma concerning the universality of the Oedipus complex. Malinowski proposed that the matrilineal configuration of the Trobriand family cast a boy’s mother’s brother rather than his father in the role of resented authority figure, and his sister rather than his mother as the object of a boy’s incestuous desire. Although Freudians did not take kindly to this interpretation, Malinowski triggered a debate which continues to this day.
The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) is a long and detailed ethnography of Trobriand family life: courtship, marriage, divorce and death, pregnancy and childbirth. Malinowski’s explicit descriptions of sexual behaviour — including as depicted in folklore and fantasy — only narrowly escaped censorship, and for several years the cellophane-wrapped volume was hidden under bookshop counters. While avoiding pornography, it mounted a subversive assault on late Victorian prudery; in the changing mores of the time it had a liberating appeal along with the writings of Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence. Needless to say, it was a pioneering study of human sexuality and of the social and cultural factors which shape it.
Malinowski’s last classic work on the Trobriand Islands, Coral Gardens and their Magic (two volumes, 1935) dealt exhaustively with horticultural practices and their ritual embellishments, with the politics and mythological basis of land tenure, and with the enchanting poetics of magic. The second volume was an important theoretical contribution to anthropological linguistics, but it was ahead of its time and the linguistic profession in America greeted it coolly for its unfashionable concern with semantics. Malinowski believed it was the best work he had produced and he dedicated it to his ailing wife who had assisted him throughout his early writing career. Sadly, Elsie died just weeks before its publication. Coral Gardens had cost him the most time, effort and expense, and although Malinowski regarded it as his personal favourite, he suspected it was cursed. Widely and quite favourably reviewed, it nevertheless sold fewer copies than any of his other books.
In addition to his Trobriand monographs, Malinowski’s oeuvre includes several other full-length works in English, influential enough in their time but esteemed rather less today. The Family among the Australian Aborigines (1913) was a library thesis for which (together with the Mailu report) he was awarded a Doctor of Science degree by the University of London. At the time of death he had four books in preparation, all of which were published posthumously: Freedom and Civilization (1944); A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (1944); The Dynamics of Culture Change (1945), and (with Julio de la Fuente) The Economics of a Mexican Market System (1982). Malinowski’s numerous published pamphlets, lecture series, essays and articles — both academic and popular — need not be mentioned here, nor is there need to list the Trobriand books he had planned and set aside or the unfinished anthropology textbook he had promised to more than one publisher. Suffice to say that had he lived longer he would surely have produced more notable works to add further lustre to an already illustrious publishing career.
Let us return to that fateful day in the Trobriand Islands, 18 July 1918, when Malinowski penned his last diary entry. What could he have meant by his self-castigation? From a later perspective, he would have had every reason to feel pleased with himself. His foundational fieldwork was almost complete, the groundwork of his subsequent career laid. He would soon leave New Guinea and return to Australia with his ethnographic riches (‘laden with materials as a camel,’ as he put it in his dairy); he would marry his fiancée Elsie Masson; and when the war in Europe was over he would return to England to establish his brilliant career at the London School of Economics as a scholar, author, teacher, pundit, and founder of a modernist school of anthropology. Why, then, did he bemoan his lack of character?
Any attempt to answer this question must take his own methodological cue and review the ‘context of situation’ in which found himself when he wrote that final entry. Five weeks earlier news had reached him, after an interval of several months, of the death in distant Cracow of his beloved mother. He was wracked by grief and guilt; he fell into ‘a state of metaphysical instability’ in which he felt ‘cut adrift’ from all life around him. A few weeks later he received another blow in the form of a letter from Nina Stirling, his erstwhile sweetheart and muse in Adelaide, whom he had been stringing along for more than a year, having lacked the moral courage to tell her that he was now in love with Elsie Masson, the woman he proposed to marry. Inevitably, Nina had discovered his deception and wrote to terminate their ‘friendship’. His ‘damnable lack of character’ had been exposed. ‘I feel an absolute brute & unworthy of anyone’s friendship, not to speak of love,’ he wrote to Elsie. Both young women were daughters of eminent scientists with knighthoods, and Malinowski had managed the love triangle so badly that he feared the scandal would ruin his career. His remorse over Nina compounded his remorse over his mother. He regressed. ‘At night, sad, plaintive dreams, like childhood feelings. . . . Everything permeated with Mother.’
The final diary entry as a whole — little more than a page — is a meditation on loss and death. It is populated with memories of his Polish childhood, of his school teachers in Cracow and his relatives in Warsaw, above all of his mother, and his betrayal of their last evening together in London by seeking the company of a mistress. His own extinction seemed possible now: ‘to go to Mother, to join her in nothingness’. Yet at moments he felt it was only the death of something within him: ‘my ambitions and appetites have a strong hold on me and tie me to life. I shall experience joy and happiness (?) and success and satisfaction in my work,’ he wrote. The last thoughts he recorded were of his childhood, his mother and his father (who had died when he was a boy and who is mentioned nowhere else in the diary). And he remembered others who had ‘vanished’ from his life: his former mistress Annie (now living in South Africa), his best friend Staś Witkiewicz (back in war-torn Warsaw), and his spurned girlfriend Nina (at home in Adelaide). It was the conclusion of an experiment in self-creation that had failed: ‘Truly I lack real character.’
What did Malinowski mean by character? In a recent letter to Elsie Masson he told her why he believed keeping a diary was so ‘absolutely indispensable’ to him. It required of him a daily inspection of his conscience and his character, the better to monitor his moods and control his moral lapses: ‘I think “character” might be defined as “persistence of the same real self in one person”,’ he wrote.
Keeping a diary had been an intermittent, decade-long experiment in self-analysis that he had begun in the Canary Islands and was now bringing to an end. He wrote his diary to ransack the contents of his mind, to consolidate his character, to remind himself daily who he wanted to be: an efficient, healthy, single-minded, integrated person. But the diary portrays a man who is utterly fragmented and divided, a hostage to his impulses and passing moods. The pathos of this portrait is redeemed by the author’s unremitting honesty. He has no secrets from himself, and he eventually comes to accept that his quest for a single identity is hopeless, rendered all the more impossible after Freud’s revelations.
His closing sentence, then, is a moral judgment upon himself that can be explicated in these terms: ‘I have failed to integrate myself, to create a unitary self with a solid, dependable core. I am an assortment of conflicting needs, a multitude of opposing selves, an aggregation of wants and desires, some sordid, some sublime, but none constant or true. After all, I am only human.’
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 22, 2014

author: Michael W. Young