Laboratory Life. How Physiologists Discovered their Everyday.

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{"created":"2022-01-31T17:04:12.987821+00:00","id":"art12","links":{},"metadata":{"contributors":[{"name":"Felsch, Philipp","role":"author"}],"fulltext":[{"file":"art12_merged.html","language":"en","ocr_en":"<h3>\n Laboratory Life.\n <br/>\n How Physiologists Discovered their Everyday\n</h3>\n<p>\n Philipp Felsch\n</p>\n<br/>\n<br/>\n<p>\n \"How could anyone ignore the details of our daily work\" uttered molecular biologists from the Californian Salk Institute with astonishment, when, upon reading Bruno Latour's anthropological account of their daily work,\n <i>\n  Laboratory Life\n </i>\n , in 1979, they were informed that Latour's approach was somewhat revolutionary within the social study of science. (Latour 1986, 274) Had scientists always known what historians and sociologists of science were only then beginning to realize: that scientific knowledge was not just a matter of theory and abstract thinking, but the product of everyday practices, shaping scientific results just as much as, and probably even more than, the theoretical, the abstract, and the erudite? Had scientists even actively dealt with their everyday, long before the scholars of the late 20th century?\n</p>\n<div align=\"center\">\n <table border=\"0\" cellpadding=\"0\" cellspacing=\"0\" width=\"359\">\n  <tr>\n   <td colspan=\"3\">\n    <img alt=\"\" height=\"42\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art12/images/img3562_01.gif\" width=\"359\"/>\n   </td>\n  </tr>\n  <tr>\n   <td rowspan=\"2\">\n    <img alt=\"\" height=\"247\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art12/images/img3562_02.gif\" width=\"37\"/>\n   </td>\n   <td>\n    <iframe frameborder=\"0\" height=\"88\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art12/images/pano.html\" width=\"121\">\n     <img height=\"88\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art12/images/curvesStatic.jpg\" width=\"121\"/>\n    </iframe>\n   </td>\n   <td rowspan=\"2\">\n    <img alt=\"\" height=\"247\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art12/images/img3562_04.gif\" width=\"201\"/>\n   </td>\n  </tr>\n  <tr>\n   <td>\n    <img alt=\"\" height=\"159\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art12/images/img3562_05.gif\" width=\"121\"/>\n   </td>\n  </tr>\n </table>\n</div>\n<p>\n</p>\n<br/>\n<p>\n <b>\n  The Crisis of the Sciences\n </b>\n</p>\n<p>\n The relationship between modern sciences and the everyday, in Western\nthought, has been a difficult one since Edmund Husserl's late work. With his\nmomentous concept of the life-world, Husserl introduced extensive reflections on\nthe character and the crisis of the modern sciences: the sciences had lost their\nmeaning for man, he wrote, because their formal abstraction had removed them\nfrom all matters of the practical everyday, the life-world. The sciences were\nthus currently undergoing a deep crisis. Phenomenology itself was the attempt to\novercome this crisis by reconnecting the sciences with their original meaning,\ni.e., by reconstructing their emergence from everyday practices: \"the life of\nacts [Aktleben] practised by working scientists, working with one another [...]\nthe persons, the apparatus, the room in the institute, etc.\" (Husserl 1970, 122ff.)\nRecognizably penned by Husserl, these words, which, in Husserl's own\nunderstanding, circumscribed \"a vast theme for study\", seem to point to the\nlater work of Bruno Latour. (Husserl 1970, 123) Whereas Husserl himself had\nlimited his study of the everyday in science to rather general remarks, for\nexample on the connection of Galileo's mathematical physics to the practical art\nof land survey, Latour undertook lengthy fieldwork amidst molecular biologists\nto record and describe in detail their \"life of acts\", through which the\nscientific facts, they later published, were constructed.\n</p>\n<p>\n</p>\n<br/>\n<p>\n <b>\n  Laboratories\n </b>\n</p>\n<p>\n It is not surprising that Latour chose the laboratory. The success story of\nthe experimental life sciences, which finally turned them into the leading\nscientific paradigm of our time, began a long century earlier, while the first\nphysiological laboratories were being constructed. The laboratory\n <a href=\"images/img5895.jpg\" onclick='bigpicture(\"images/img5895.jpg\", 1022,\n1322);return false;' title=\"detail, click to view the complete image\">\n  <img align=\"right\" alt=\"laboratory scene\" border=\"0\" height=\"312\" hspace=\"3\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art12/images/img5895Detail.jpg\" vspace=\"3\" width=\"249\"/>\n </a>\n offered a space where research\ncould proceed in a controlled and undisturbed manner, a highly artificial\nenvironment, that has been crucial ever since for the emergence of experimental\nsciences. \"Every experimental science requires a laboratory\",\n <link ref=\"per50\"/>\n Claude\nBernard wrote in the 1860s. \"There the man of science\nwithdraws, and by means of experimental analysis tries to understand phenomena\nthat he has observed in nature.\" (Bernard 1957, 140) The physiologists'\nwithdrawal from nature during the 19th century led from the domestic kitchen\ntable past the clinic's broom closet to the fully equipped experimentation site\nin one of the newly-founded physiological institutes. It stands metonymically\nfor the emergence of an experimental life science, which, in Claude Bernard's\nwords, was all about \"foreseeing and directing phenomena\", in contrast to\ndisordered nature. Nature consisted of unforeseen incidents, noise, and romping\nchildren, disturbing the scientist at his kitchen table. (Bernard 1957, 57)\nLaboratories, much like mathematical formula, were, as Husserl would put it some\ndecades later, a way of retreating from the life-world.\n</p>\n<p>\n</p>\n<br/>\n<p>\n <b>\n  A Physiologist's Everyday I\n </b>\n</p>\n<p>\n It is thus surprising, that we find experimental physiologists in\n <link ref=\"sit13\"/>\n one of Europe's foremost laboratories of the time, in Turin,\nduring the 1890s deeply concerned with their everyday life. In 1892, Mariano\nPatrizi, assistant to the institute's director\n <link ref=\"per233\"/>\n Angelo\nMosso, published an article on\n <i>\n  Everyday Changes in Muscular Work\n </i>\n .\nThe short communication described a series of experiments with the so-called\n <link ref=\"tec532\"/>\n Ergograph, literally work-writer, an instrument\ndesigned to both trace muscular performance and fatigue as a curve.\n</p>\n<div class=\"imagebox\">\n <a href=\"images/patriziDetail.jpg\" onclick=\"bigpicture('images/patriziDetail.jpg', 976, 816);return false;\" title=\"view detail\">\n  <img border=\"0\" height=\"109\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art12/images/patriziCurves.jpg\" width=\"400\"/>\n </a>\n</div>\n<p>\n Over a period of several weeks, Patrizi recorded his fatigue curve four times\na day: in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening and after midnight, to\nchart the alternatively stimulating and tiring effects of his day: \"the light,\nthe noises, the impressions of the other sense organs, the emotions, the\nmovement.\" (Patrizi 1892, 46) Since one of his stipulations was that the daily\nstimuli should explicitly be restricted to the range of the ordinary, Patrizi\nexcluded any extraordinary activity from his life for weeks, following strictly\nthe monotonous course of his academic habits: work in the laboratory and at the\ndesk; breakfast, lunch and dinner at fixed hours; a short stroll in the evening;\nlittle wine, and no tobacco. One could have set watches by him. A generation\nbefore Husserl diagnosed that the positive sciences had forgotten their\neveryday, physiology turned it thoroughly into an experiment.\n</p>\n<p>\n</p>\n<br/>\n<p>\n <b>\n  Ergography\n </b>\n</p>\n<p>\n The origins of Patrizi's attention to the humdrum of daily life can be traced\nback to a visit of his director, Angelo Mosso, to\n <link ref=\"per110\"/>\n Carl\nLudwig's famous\n <link ref=\"sit102\"/>\n physiological institute in\nLeipzig in the early 1870s. In Leipzig, Mosso became acquainted with the\ngraphic method and soon developed into one of its most ardent followers. Later,\nhe wrote that the fatigue research\n <link ref=\"per225\"/>\n Hugo Kronecker was\ndoing in Leipzig with frog muscles, \"raised my wish to devote myself to the\nstudy of fatigue. The precision of the method, the elegance of the instruments,\nthe accuracy of the results were such as to enthuse any beginner.\" (Mosso 1892, 83)\nKronecker registered the decreasing contractions of electrically stimulated frog\nmuscles and obtained tracings of impressive regularity. The steady drop of the\nmuscular convulsions, which Kronecker called the \"fatigue curve\", took the form\nof a straight line and could be expressed in a mathematical manner. (Kronecker\n1871, 198) It is striking, while typical of a physiological article of the\nperiod, that Kronecker's original publication dealt strongly with disturbances\nand their prevention. The straight fatigue curve could only be recorded in the\nideal laboratory situation, where the frog muscle was \"good\" and, even more\nimportantly, external irritations of any kind did not occur. Kronecker's\nresearch, one could say, aimed at examining pure muscular work in of itself.\n</p>\n<div class=\"imagebox\">\n <link ref=\"tec532\"/>\n <img border=\"0\" height=\"198\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art12/images/img4066.jpg\" width=\"400\"/>\n</div>\n<p>\n In 1884, ten years after his Leipzig stay, Angelo Mosso began to use a newly\ninvented instrument in his Turin laboratory, the ergograph. Eventually, man's\nmuscular movement could be monitored and, since the subjects were told to bend\ntheir muscles deliberately, induced by will instead of electricity. Immediately,\nMosso observed significant differences between his results and Kronecker's law\nof fatigue: \"What surprised us most in these trials was the fact that each\nperson has its own fatigue curve.\" (Mosso 1890, 97) Moreover, the curves reacted\nmost sensibly to internal and external influences of any kind: \"Even an\nindigestion or a bad night's rest, or any sort of excess, suffices to alter the\ncurve in character.\" (Mosso 1892, 95) In general, and after four years of steady\nergographic registration, Mosso could state that his instrument was best and,\nmore than any other, suited to record the \"accidental changes\" of muscular force\nduring any given period of time. (Mosso 1890, 98) Accident, the worst enemy for\nexperimenters like Claude Bernard or Hugo Kronecker, had thus entered the\nlaboratory and, subsequently, led to studies like Mariano Patrizi's afore\nmentioned. Patrizi called, for the first time, the new object of physiological\nstudy the \"everyday\".\n</p>\n<p>\n</p>\n<br/>\n<p>\n <b>\n  A Physiologist's Everyday II\n </b>\n</p>\n<p>\n Unfortunately, Patrizi's laboratory notebooks have not survived. But his\npublished communications, as well as similar material from the archive of Angelo\nMosso's institute, reveal what they most likely would have contained: a\nsociology of everyday scientific laboratory research. At least, a century later\nand contrary to their original physiological aim, one might have read Patrizi's\nnotebooks as a sociological study. Well before its theoretical discovery in the\nwork of Edmund Husserl, the everyday had begun to matter in physiology. To endow\nhis faithfully recorded fatigue curves with their actual context, Patrizi had to\nrecord his everyday life meticulously, because it was the proper object of\nstudy. The monotony, the accidents, and the little occurrences that composed the\nordinary life of a physiological experimenter in fin-de-si\u00e8cle Turin affected\nhis bodily functions and, thus, needed to be included in his experimentation.\nWhile Patrizi and his colleagues experimentalized their everyday life to test\nits effects upon their nerves, future generations of phenomenologists,\nsociologists, and historians of science began to regard it as the most important\nkey to understand what scientific research was all about. Since Husserl, and his\ninsight that the logic of the sciences can be deciphered in the ordinary\npractice of scientists, scholars have discovered the everyday. Physiologists had\ndone so before.\n</p>\n<p>\n</p>\n<h3>\n Bibliography\n</h3>\n<ul>\n <li>\n  Bernard, Claude. 1957. An introduction to the study of experimental medicine. An unabridged and unaltered republication of the first English translation. New York: Dover Publications\n </li>\n <li>\n  Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The crisis of European sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press\n </li>\n <li>\n  Kronecker, Hugo. 1871.\n  <link ref=\"lit1388\"/>\n  \u00dcber die Erm\u00fcdung und Erholung der quergestreiften Muskeln. Arbeiten aus der Physiologischen Anstalt zu Leipzig: 177-265\n </li>\n <li>\n  Latour, Bruno und Steve Woolgar. 1986. Laboratory Life. The Construction of Scientific Facts. 2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press\n </li>\n <li>\n  Mosso, Angelo. 1890.\n  <link ref=\"lit5539\"/>\n  Ueber die Gesetze der Erm\u00fcdung: Untersuchungen an Muskeln des Menschen. Archiv f\u00fcr Physiologie, Physiologische Abteilung des Archivs f\u00fcr Anatomie und Physiologie: 89-168\n </li>\n <li>\n  Mosso, Angelo. 1892. Die Erm\u00fcdung. Leipzig: Hirzel\n </li>\n <li>\n  Patrizi, Mariano. 1892. Oscillations quotidiennes du travail musculaire en rapport avec la temp\u00e9rature du corps. Laboratoire de Physiologie de l'Universit\u00e9 de Turin. Travaux de l'ann\u00e9e 1891-92. Turin\n </li>\n</ul>\n<h3>\n Related articles\n</h3>\n<p>\n Windg\u00e4tter, Christof. 2005.\n <a href=\"../enc42\">\n  \"...with mathematic precision\". On the Historiography of the Dynamometer.\n </a>\n</p>\n"}],"identifier":"art12","title":"Laboratory Life. How Physiologists Discovered their Everyday.","type":"Essay"},"revision":0,"updated":"2022-01-31T17:04:12.987828+00:00"}