This essay explores the aesthetic sensibilities of the French physiologist Claude Bernard (1813-1878). In particular, it analyzes the Cahier Rouge (1850-1860), Bernard's acclaimed laboratory notebook. In this notebook, Bernard articulates the range of his experience as an experimental physiologist, juxtaposing without differentiation details of laboratory procedure and more personal queries, doubts, and reflections on experimentation, life, and art. Bernard's insights, it is argued, offer an aesthetic and phenomenological template for considering experimentation. His physiological point of view ranges from his own bodily aesthesis or sensory perception, through personal reflections on scientific discovery as an artistic process, to a broader metaphysical conception of life as an artistic creation. Such an aesthetic approach to physiology enables Bernard to reconcile his empirical methodology and his romantic idealism; it offers the history of laboratory science a framework for considering the individual, bodily, and emotional labor inherent in physiological experimentation.
This essay analyzes the historical development of otology in relation to music. It illustrates the integral role of music perception and appreciation in the study of hearing, where hearing operates not simply as a scientific phenomenon but signifies particular meaningful experiences in society. The four historical moments considered-Helmholtz's piano-keyed cochlea, the ear phonautograph, the hearing aid, and the cochlear implant-show how the sounds, perceptions, and instruments of music have mediated and continue to mediate our relationships with hearing. To have an ear, one does not just bear a physiological hearing mechanism; one experiences the aesthetics of musical sound.
This essay explores the onset of the condition deemed madness in both versions of Guy de Maupassant’s horror story “The Horla” (1886/1887). Madness here characterizes the narrators’ belief in an invisible possessor named Horla, a being identifiable through empirical investigations yet resistant to scientific rationalization. More specifically, the twofold narrative blurs the institutional boundaries between science and the supernatural by introducing the creature Horla to an already unstable scientific history of nineteenth-century hypnotism. Through its depictions of conflict between personal affliction and scientific perception, “The Horla” explores the parameters of science’s unthinkable and unimaginable conceptions. Maupassant’s dual narrative portrays the fantastic experiences made possible by that which lies beyond science—experiences rationalizable only in terms of madness.
This section features original work on pathographies-i.e., (auto)biographical accounts of disease, illness, and disability-that provide narrative inquiry relating to the personal, existential, psychological, social, cultural, spiritual, political, and moral meanings of individual experience.
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