From phrenology to the laboratory

Abstract

The claim that mind is an epiphenomenon of the nervous system became academically respectable during the 19th century. The same period saw the establishment of an ideal of science as institutionalized endeavour conducted in laboratories. This article identifies three ways in which the ‘physiological psychology’ movement in Britain contributed to the latter process: first, via an appeal to the authority of difficult-to-access sites in the analysis of nerves; second, through the constitution of a discourse internal to it that privileged epistemology over ontology; and third, in its articulation of a set of rhetorical tools that identified laboratories as economically productive institutions. Acknowledging the integral place of physiological psychology in the institution of science, it is claimed, has the potential to alter our understanding of the significance of current neurological science for historical scholarship.

Muscle

“…66 Here, Ferrier was echoing the ideas of his former tutor Alexander Bain who, in his 1855 work The Senses and the Intellect, set in motion "a sustained consideration of muscles as active and independent participants in the constitution of mind." 67 Ferrier's own research described a hierarchically organised community of muscles that varied in strength, with "the powerful extensors of the back, and muscles of the thighs keep[ing] the body arched backwards and the legs rigid." 68 Experiments such as Eduard Friedrich Wilhelm Pflüger's decapitated frogs (which continued to twitch after the head had been severed) suggested a degree of autonomy within the bodily fabric, as did tests in which muscles continued to contract when electrical stimulus had been removed.…”