Apollo's Laboratory.

JSON Export

{"created":"2022-01-31T17:04:05.822135+00:00","id":"art8","links":{},"metadata":{"contributors":[{"name":"Dierig, Sven","role":"author"}],"fulltext":[{"file":"art8_merged.html","language":"en","ocr_en":"<h3>\n Apollo's Laboratory\n</h3>\n<p>\n Sven Dierig\n</p>\n<br/>\n<br/>\n<div class=\"imagebox\">\n <img alt=\"Apollo\" height=\"200\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art8/images/apolloHead.jpg\" title=\"Apollo\" width=\"261\"/>\n <br/>\n <br/>\n <br/>\n</div>\n<p>\n</p>\n<div class=\"imagebox\">\n <br/>\n <br/>\n <br/>\n <br/>\n <img alt=\"Apollo's Laboratory\" height=\"158\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art8/images/apolloHands.gif\" title=\"Apollo's Laboratory\" width=\"400\"/>\n</div>\n<br/>\n<table>\n <tr>\n  <td align=\"right\">\n   <i>\n    The human and godly forms of antiquity, surrounded \n\t\tby undying magic; the stories and legends of the Mediterranean peoples, \n\t\tin which almost all beauty and goodness are rooted; the mental exchanges \n\t\tof classical society, indispensable to the natural sciences and from which \n\t\tfavored men have risen to almost unequaled heights: these are the thing \n\t\twhose penetration of young people's minds offers the surest cure in the \n\t\tstruggle against neobarbarism, whose iron arm now holds us loosely, but \n\t\twhose grip will almost certainly tighten. May Hellenism keep Americanism \n\t\tfar from our borders!\n   </i>\n   <br/>\n   <br/>\n   Emil Du Bois-Reymond 1877\n  </td>\n </tr>\n</table>\n<p>\n</p>\n<p>\n In early 1841, Berlin physiologist and anatomist\n <link ref=\"per120\"/>\n Johannes\nM\u00fcller gave his twenty-three-year-old medical student\n <link ref=\"per64\"/>\n Emil Du Bois-Reymond a research report by Italian physicist\n <link ref=\"per114\"/>\n Carlo Matteuci, a paper that had received special\nattention at the Paris Academy of Sciences a year ago. Du Bois-Reymond was to\nrepeat, verify, and extend Matteuci's experiments on the electrical properties\nof frog muscles as described in Matteuci's\n <i>\n  Essai sur les Ph\u00e9nom\u00e8nes\n\u00e9lectriques des Animaux\n </i>\n . After seven years of research, the result appeared\nin 1848-49: Du Bois-Reymond's\n <link ref=\"lit92\"/>\n <i>\n  Untersuchungen \u00fcber Thierische\nElektricit\u00e4t\n </i>\n [see also:\n <link ref=\"lit22222\"/>\n Du Bois Reymond's\nLaboratory Notebooks].\n</p>\n<div class=\"imagebox\">\n <link page=\"z0004table3\" ref=\"lit92\"/>\n <img alt=\"Du Bois-Reymond: Frog Experiment\" border=\"0\" height=\"379\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art8/images/apolloFrog.gif\" title=\"Du Bois-Reymond: Frog Experiment\" width=\"400\"/>\n <br/>\n Du Bois-Reymond: Frog Experiment (1848)\n</div>\n<p>\n This comprehensive text of several hundred pages described the experiments\nconducted by Du Bois-Reymond in minute detail. As an appendix, it offered an\nextensive series of plates illustrating the most important experimental set-ups,\ninstruments, and frog preparations.\n</p>\n<p>\n</p>\n<p>\n Table five (vol. 2, part 2) shows a young man seated before a\n <a href=\"javascript:bigpicture('images/galvanometer.jpg', 385, 465);\" title=\"Photo\nof a galvanometer\">\n  galvanometer\n </a>\n at a simple table, busily adjusting his\nexperimental set-up. The young investigator has the idealized bodily form of\nclassical sculpture. Since Du Bois-Reymond never revealed anything about this\nillustration, either in Thierische Elektricit\u00e4t or anywhere else, one is left\nwith a simple question: what message is conveyed to the reader through this\nillustration of a graceful, classical experimenter that is not written into the\nmain text? Because Du Bois-Reymond evidently intended the reader to interpret\nthis image, I will attempt to do so in this essay. To support my argument, I\nwill use a classical reference popular in Du Bois-Reymond's boyhood: the Greek\nimage of the ever youthful Apollo.\n</p>\n<div class=\"imagebox\">\n <link page=\"z0005table5\" ref=\"lit16148\"/>\n <img alt=\"Du Bois-Reymond: the 'classical' experimenter\" border=\"0\" height=\"313\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art8/images/apolloLab.gif\" title=\"Du Bois-Reymond: the 'classical' experimenter\" width=\"480\"/>\n</div>\n<p>\n My interpretation of this \"classical\" experimenter draws upon the following\nApollo motifs: Apollo as heroic dragon-slayer, Apollo as ideal athlete, and\nApollo as the god of harmonic order. To avoid misinterpretations, I do not\npropose that Du Bois-Reymond's representation of a young experimenter is\nnecessarily an illustration of Apollo. Still, the figure of Apollo can serve as\na point of departure. Relying on the Apollo motif, I will argue that\nDu Bois-Reymond represented himself in\n <i>\n  Thierische Elektricit\u00e4t\n </i>\n in the pose\nof the young male hero, as an athlete who worked out with laboratory instruments\nand as a form-giving artist who combined classical aesthetics and the\ncontemporary notion of\n <i>\n  Bildung\n </i>\n with experimental physiology.\n</p>\n<p>\n</p>\n<p>\n <b>\n  The Heroic Experimenter\n </b>\n</p>\n<p>\n In the early 1840s, Du Bois-Reymond belonged to a group of Berlin students for\nwhom experimental physics was the unshakeable model for the investigation of\nlife.  \"Sworn to demonstrate the truth that no forces operate in living\norganisms except physico-chemical ones,\" Emil Du Bois-Reymond,\n <link ref=\"per58\"/>\n Ernst Br\u00fccke and\n <link ref=\"per87\"/>\n Hermann v.\nHelmholtz saw themselves as the avant-garde of experimental physiology\nand felt obligated to defend it against the 'establishment': the faculty of the\nBerlin medical school, whom they perceived as hostile to experimentation. The\n <link page=\"a0005introduction\" ref=\"lit92\"/>\n introduction to\n <i>\n  Thierische\nElektricit\u00e4t\n </i>\n contains a heated, highly polemical attack on the idea\nof a\n <i>\n  Lebenskraft\n </i>\n (Life-force). Vitalistic outlooks, storms\nDu Bois-Reymond, are nothing but \"a tissue woven of the most arbitrary claims, ... \na murky empire of speculation.\" The concept of\n <i>\n  Lebenskraft\n </i>\n is an\nexpression about which \"reason has been put to sleep in the soft armchair of\nobscurity.\" Against this \"specter,\" which must \"finally be burned out,\" the only\npossible aids were the clear language of physics and the experimental physiology\nconducted with instruments modeled after those in physics laboratories.\n</p>\n<p>\n <img align=\"left\" alt=\"Apollo statue\" height=\"309\" hspace=\"10\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art8/images/apollo.jpg\" title=\"Apollo statue\" width=\"218\"/>\n Phoebus and Lyceus, Apollo's \nepithets, define him as pure, a bringer of light, the enemy of all darkness \nand the defender against evil. \nThe whole enterprising spirit of young Du Bois-Reymond was directed against the \"dark,\nuncertain\" nature of\n <i>\n  Lebenskraft\n </i>\n , and Apollo offered the best classical\nmodel for creating an image of a lone male warrior. \"The highest concept of\nideal, manly youth takes form in the Apollo Belvedere,\" reads\n <link ref=\"per301\"/>\n Johann Joachim Winckelmann's\n <i>\n  Geschichte der Kunst des\nAltertums\n </i>\n .  Apollo is \"the most beautiful of the gods,\" for his form\nsuggests \"a youth born to nobility and great intentions.\" The\nWinckelmann-enthusiast Herder sounds much the same:  Apollo is \"the highest\nsymbol of all the young heroes of mankind,\" and his form is \"a heroic thought\nrendered visible.\" Invoking the Apollo Belvedere, who is armed with a bow and\narrow and in his youth slew the dragon Python to free the Delphic oracle and its\nknowledge of the future, Du Bois-Reymond presents himself in the introduction to\n <i>\n  Thierische Elektricit\u00e4t\n </i>\n as an experimenter armed with laboratory\ninstruments with which he will attack the Python (vitalism) that is darkening\nthe future of science. Interpreted as an experimenting Apollo, Du Bois-Reymond's\nillustration of the classical youth becomes a pictorial introduction to\n <i>\n  Thierische Elektricit\u00e4t\n </i>\n , the self-confidence of organic physics conveyed\nas an image.\n</p>\n<p>\n</p>\n<p>\n <b>\n  The Athletic Experimenter\n </b>\n</p>\n<p>\n At the time the copper engravings for the second volume of Thierische\nElektricit\u00e4t were produced, Du Bois-Reymond was teaching anatomy at the Prussian\nAcademy of Arts. Like the anatomical drawings of art students, Du Bois-Reymond's\nrepresentation of a youthful experimenter was based on a model of a particular\nkind. Du Bois-Reymond's brother, David-Paul Gustave, posed for the photograph on\nwhich the illustration of the young experimenter was based.\n</p>\n<div class=\"imagebox\">\n <img alt=\"Du Bois-Reymond: the\n'athletic' experimenter\" height=\"343\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art8/images/apolloPhoto.jpg\" title=\"Du Bois-Reymond: the 'athletic' experimenter\" width=\"459\"/>\n</div>\n<p>\n This self-experiment that Du Bois-Reymond conducted with dozens of subjects in\nhis laboratory aimed to show that the subject's voluntarily contracted arm\nmuscles created electrical current on his body surface strong enough to deflect\nthe magnetic needle of a galvanometer. The current generated during the muscular\ncontraction was conducted via the subject's index finger, which was immersed in\na chamber of salt solution electrically connected to the galvanometer by a metal\nelectrode and copper wire. To promote the conduction of current, the subject's\nupper body was unclothed. To create a perceptible deflection of the\ngalvanometer's magnetic needle, the subject had to have especially good control\nof his body. Du Bois-Reymond described the decisive moment in a letter to\n <link ref=\"per302\"/>\n Alexander von Humboldt:\n</p>\n<blockquote>\n Just at this instant, I tighten all the muscles of my arm so that I\nproduce an equilibrium between the flexors and extensors of all the joints in\nthe limb, somewhat as one does in gymnastics schools, gingerly testing one's\nmuscular development. ... All other things being equal, the size of the\ndeviation depends largely on the level of development and exercise of the\nmuscles. I have pretty strong arms; until now, of all the many scholars who have\nundergone this experiment in my laboratory, I have found none with whom it has\nsucceeded better than with myself. There are also people who cannot produce a\nperceptible deviation of my galvanometer needle, but in these cases, I am not\nconvinced that the muscles achieve the necessary degree of\ncontraction.\n</blockquote>\n<p>\n Of course, the figure of Apollo was on hand to help represent the nudity and\nathleticism necessary for this self-experiment. In classical mythology, Apollo\nwas not just an excellent archer but a talented gymnast (\n <i>\n  gymnos\n </i>\n means\n\"nude\") heralded as the first winner of the Olympic games.\n</p>\n<p>\n</p>\n<p>\n <b>\n  Self-Perfection\n </b>\n</p>\n<p>\n In neo-classicism, the fully developed body--naked and godlike, for\nWinckelmann achieving its highest expression in the Apollo Belvedere--served as\nthe aesthetic norm. One of the forms of\n <i>\n  Bildung\n </i>\n through which less than\nideal bodies could approach this unreachable norm was gymnastics. The gym, which\nin 1840s Berlin was re-establishing itself after a long period of prohibition,\nwas well-known territory to young Du Bois-Reymond. While performing the research\nfor\n <i>\n  Thierische Elektricit\u00e4t\n </i>\n , he served as a \"model gymnast\" at the\nEiselnchen Institute, organizing teams for many different age groups and working\nout himself on the high bar and parallel bars. The \"drive for perfection\" that\nruled in the gym was also one of the key qualities for successful\nexperimentation. Without \"practice in experimentation,\" one could never solve\nanything at the experimental table. In a letter to\n <link ref=\"per110\"/>\n Carl\nLudwig, Du Bois-Reymond wrote in 1848:\n</p>\n<blockquote>\n I succeeded very quickly in translating the pain that would have\nbeen caused by scalding a frog's leg into an electromagnetic movement. With\n <i>\n  persistent practice and perfection of the experimental technique\n </i>\n , I don't\nsee any reason why I shouldn't also be able to translate the current along the\noptic nerve--of a pike, for instance--that is so critical for vision, into its\nmagnetic equivalent\n</blockquote>\n<p>\n The notion of \"practice\" in a physical sense merges easily with the\nhumanistic goal of\n <i>\n  Bildung\n </i>\n . \"To perfect oneself through practice,\"\n\"self-perfection through practice\" is a quality of higher organisms, but\nparticularly of human beings, declared Du Bois-Reymond in his lecture, \"\u00dcber die\n\u00dcbung.\" From gymnastics to experimentation, one achieved\n <i>\n  Bildung\n </i>\n only\nthrough the form-giving power of practice, through the \"frequent repetition of a\ncomplex bodily activity with the assistance of the mind.\" Through \"frequently\nrepeated experiments and considerable practice\" at the experimental table, as\nHelmholtz indicated, one could finally achieve that simultaneous, implicit\nknowledge of hand and head.\n</p>\n<div class=\"imagebox\">\n <img alt=\"Du Bois-Reymond: the\n'athletic' experimenter\" height=\"139\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art8/images/apolloLab2.jpg\" title=\"Du Bois-Reymond: the 'athletic' experimenter\" width=\"480\"/>\n</div>\n<p>\n In the context of an increasingly physical\n <i>\n  Bildung\n </i>\n Du Bois-Reymond's\ndrawing of a Greek boy becomes a representation of the fully practiced\nexperimenter. Like a gymnast on the bars, through \"practice and perfection,\"\nDu Bois-Reymond slowly converts himself in the lab from a crude, organic\nmass - the untrained nerves and muscles of his own experimenting body - into the\nideal form of Apollo. The gaze of the Greek boy in\n <i>\n  Thierische\nElektricit\u00e4t\n </i>\n , which is directed toward a frog, suggests Du Bois-Reymond's\ngrandfather's drawings of Lavater's physiognomic stages. Self-perfection through\nexperimental practice shaped the experimenter, who step by step converted\nhimself from an ugly, uneducated frog into an ideal, fully educated Apollo.\n</p>\n<div class=\"imagebox\">\n <img alt=\"after Lavater:\nmorphing from frog to man\" height=\"158\" src=\"/static/essays/data/art8/images/apolloLavater.gif\" title=\"after Lavater: morphing from frog to man\" width=\"400\"/>\n</div>\n<p>\n</p>\n<h3>\n Bibliography\n</h3>\n<br/>\nPrimary Literature\n<ul>\n <li>\n  Du Bois-Reymond, Emil. 1848.\n  <link ref=\"lit92\"/>\n  Untersuchungen \u00fcber thierische\nElektricit\u00e4t, Erster Band. Berlin: Georg Reimer\n </li>\n <li>\n  Du Bois-Reymond, Emil. 1849.\n  <link ref=\"lit98\"/>\n  Untersuchungen \u00fcber thierische\nElektricit\u00e4t, Zweiter Band, Erste Abtheilung. Berlin: Georg Reimer\n </li>\n <li>\n  Du Bois-Reymond, Emil. 1860.\n  <link ref=\"lit16148\"/>\n  Untersuchungen \u00fcber\nthierische Elektricit\u00e4t, Zweiter Band, Zweite Abtheilung (Erste Lieferung).\nBerlin: Georg Reimer\n </li>\n <li>\n  Du Bois-Reymond, Emil. 1884.\n  <link ref=\"lit16149\"/>\n  Untersuchungen \u00fcber\nthierische Elektricit\u00e4t, Zweiter Band, Zweite Abtheilung (Zweite Lieferung).\nBerlin: Georg Reimer\n </li>\n <li>\n  <!--<a href=\"/records/lit22222\">Du Bois-Reymond's Laboratory Notebooks</a>-->\n  <a href=\"http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/library/collections.html?id=lit22222\">\n   Du Bois-Reymond's Laboratory Notebooks\n  </a>\n </li>\n <br/>\n</ul>\nSecondary Literature\n<br/>\n<ul>\n <li>\n  Camphausen, Christoph von. 1981. Elektrophysiologische und physiologische\nModellvorstellungen bei Emil du Bois-Reymond. Naturwissen und Erkenntnis\nim 19. Jahrhundert: Emil du Bois-Reymond. edited by Gunter Mann, 79-104.\nHildesheim: Gerstenberg.\n </li>\n <li>\n  Dierig, Sven. 2004. Die Kunst des Versuchens - Emil Du Bois-Reymonds 'Untersuchungen \n\u00fcber thierische Elektricit\u00e4t'. In: Kultur im Experiment, edited by Henning Schmidgen, Peter \nGeimer and Sven Dierig, 123-146, 384-391. Berlin: Kadmos\n </li>\n <li>\n  Finkelstein, Gabriel Ward. 1996. Emil Du Bois-Reymond. The Making of a\nLiberal German Scientist (1818-1851). Diss. phil. Princeton University\n </li>\n <li>\n  Lenoir, Timothy. 1986. Models and Instruments in the Development of\nElectrophysiology. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological\nSciences 17: 1-54\n </li>\n <li>\n  Lenoir, Timothy. 1992.  Laboratories, Medicine and Public Life in Germany\n1830-1849: Ideological Roots of the Institutional Revolution. In: The\nLaboratory Revolution in Medicine, eds. Andrew Cunningham and Perry\nWilliams, 14-71. Cambridge University Press\n </li>\n <li>\n  Lenoir, Timothy. 1997. Social Interests and the Organic Physics of 1847. In:\nInstituting Science. The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines,\nedited by Timothy Lenoir, 75-95. Stanford University Press\n </li>\n <li>\n  Lohff, Brigitte. 1981. Emil du Bois-Reymonds Theorie des Experiments. In:\nNaturwissen und Erkenntnis im 19. Jahrhundert: Emil du Bois-Reymond, edited by\nGunter Mann, 117-128. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg\n </li>\n</ul>"}],"identifier":"art8","title":"Apollo's Laboratory.","type":"Essay"},"revision":0,"updated":"2022-01-31T17:04:05.822141+00:00"}