JF Ptak Science Books

Electro-LUXurious 11: Medical Electrifying-Liquid Injector, 1862

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This is the fourth in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.

I'm not sure exactly what Mr. Paige was trying to do with this electrical implement of his--he writes:

which to my mind means that he is passing a "medicine" over or into some part of the body and while doing so either passes a charge through the liquid or provides a small series of shocks to the affected area so that it hurries the treatment along a little faster, or with more efficacy, or something.  Whether this is a topical application, or a delivery to an open wound, or to an incision is not altogether clear to me. As is generally the case with these things, the inventor is given the luxury in the patent report of not having to say what the thing they have invented actually "does" after describing how it is that the machine will "do" it. 

Electro-LUXurious 10: The Wandering Uterus and the Issue of Female Satisfaction

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1492

This is the 10th in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.

As usual there is no explanation for the intended function or outcome was for these belts, although I think that they occupied two ends of a spectrum.  It seems as though the women's belt apparatus was meant to address "female hysteria", which for many centuries was seen as the dementia a woman suffers when she felt the need to fill up her womb with a baby; Plato (in his Timaeus) reckoned that the uterus actually detaches and wanders through the body, causing all manner of havoc, including "hysteria". 

Plato, who lived ca. from the mid 4th to mid 3rd century of the common era, commented so:

 “The animal within them is desirous of procreating children, and when remaining unfruitful long beyond its proper time, gets discontented and angry, and wandering in every direction through the body, closes up the passages of the breath, and, by obstructing respiration, drives them to extremity, causing all varieties of disease.”  --Plato, Timaeus, 91c

 (It is odd that Plato starts this book out with Socrates counting to three, but that's another story I guess.)

The issue of the physiology of the uterus received modern treatment in modern times, though the philosophical aspects of this and other similar issues managed to rip themselves free of biology and culturally implant themselves without the benefit of factual support, lending their entirely questionable weight to the continued issue of the subjugation of women.  The idea of woman's "hysteria" as a very wide term into which all classes of medical concern was dumped seeped into the 20th century, and was answered with devices such as this electro-onanistic medical quackery.

 

 For the men it seemed that the issue of "seminal seepage" and erection control was answered with devices such as this thing, below, a slightly shocking reminder to keep thinking the pure thought:

And of course a belt like this would not be complete without "complete" treatment, and so is included the following "attachments", Fig 7 being the one of some considerable interest to the wearer:

 

Of course it is entirely possible (likely?) that I have gotten this all wrong, completely wrong, and backwards.

Note:

Here's an interesting book:  Maines, Rachel P. (1998). The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria", the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Electro-LUXurious 4: the Curative Electric Chair, Complete with Apparatus for the Treatment of the "Depending Organ", 1891

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This is the fourth in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.

J(osephus) C. Chambers, the patentee of the apparatus below, was the owner of Chambers' National Lightning Protection Company (Newport, Kentucky), and held a number of patents relating to lightning rods, electrical insulators, a telephone apparatus (1881), and a number of associated bits of techno. I'm not exactly sure what this device, below, did, except that it seems like a low-voltage quack-medical electric chair.

The first patent drawing, below, shows a view of the chair and at front, looking backwards towards the  "ornamented" wooden cabinet that contained the guts of the machine, with the seat (which would have a metallic, conductive surface) removed.  You would place your hands on the two capital "H" pads that seem to be just below the two drawers; your feet would go on the two "h" pads at bottom. 

The drawing below references how the various swinging arms and such can be maneuvered to reach any part of the body.  Mind you now the inventor doesn't actually state what this electrical treatment "does", only how you apply it and the technical stuff behind the machine. Also ir is not a solitary experience--there would be another person operating the controls on the top of the wooden case.

I wondered about the cup ("J"), and thought, well, maybe that's not what I think it might be for...but it is, waiting there to treat "the depending organ".

The U.S.  Patent Office report reads as follows:

United States Patent Office.

JOSEPHUS C. CHAMBERS, OP DETROIT, MICHIGAN.
ELECTRICAL MEDICAL APPARATUS.

SPECIFICATION forming part of Letters Patent No. 445,636, dated February 3, 1891.

Application filed April 21,1890, Serial So, 348,911, (So model,)

To all whom it may concern:

Electro-LUXurious 3: Anti-erection "Body Wear" 1889

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Electrical Anti-Erection "Body Wear"  1889

This is the third in a new series of posts on interesting, early applications of electricity, most of which are taken from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office.  Unlike the general post in this blog, many of the Electro-LUXurious post images and documentation can be presented without commentary. 

 

[Source: Google Patents, http://www.google.com/patents/US396212]

An Alphabet of Anatomical Emotions and Feelings--Installment 1

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1488

In a developing thread on oddly-represented alphabets on this blog, this one is a little harder to fill than it seems.  The rules are that all images must be some level of dissection (with the exception of the anatomical Durer), and not a simple artistic study of emotion, and that the images be at least 200 years old.  Part I of this alphabet of emotion and feelings includes awe, burdensome, contempt, disappointment, empathetic, fear, guilt, hope, intrigue, joy, lonesome, majesty, pride, resentment, surprise, trust, vulnerability and wonder.

Awe

Giulio Casserio (ca. 1552-1616, anatomist) and Odoardo Fialetti (artist), Tabulae Anatomicae, published in Venice in 1627.

Burdensome

Juan Valverde de Amusci (ca. 1525-ca. 1588), Anatomia del corpo humano, printed in Rome in 1560. 

 

Contempt

 Giulio Casserio (ca. 1552-1616, anatomist) and Odoardo Fialetti (artist), Tabulae Anatomicae, published in Venice in 1627

Disappointment 

Giulio Casserio (ca. 1552-1616, anatomist) and Odoardo Fialetti (artist), Tabulae Anatomicae, published in Venice in 1627.

Empathetic

Juan Valverde de Amusci (ca. 1525-ca. 1588), Anatomia del corpo humano, printed in Rome in 1560.

Fear

Jacques Gamelin (1736-1803), Nouveau receuil d'ostéologie et de myologie, published in Toulouse in 1779.

Guilt

Jacques Gamelin (1736-1803), Nouveau receuil d'ostéologie et de myologie, published in Toulouse in 1779.

Hope

Hans von Gersdorff (d. 1529),  Feldtbůch der Wundartzney : newlich getruckt und gebesser, published in Strassburg in 1528.  

Intrigue

Giulio Casserio (ca. 1552-1616, anatomist) and Odoardo Fialetti (artist), Tabulae Anatomicae, published in Venice in 1627

Joy

 

Lonesome

William Cheselden (1688-1752), Osteographia, or the Anatomy of Bones, published in London in 1733.

Majesterial

Bartholomeo Eustachi (d. 1574), from Tabulae anatomicae, printed in Rome in 1783.

Pride

 

In the category of "Holy Crap!" anatomical illustration surely Pietro Berrettini da Cortona (1596-1669) must be among its patron saints.  His images are incredible, yelling and screaming for attention as they demand their space onthe printed page.  Further, the man actually accomplished all o fthis in the early 17th century, his work no tbeing published for another 130 years or so. [Source:  Tabulae anatomicae..., Rome 1741.]

Resentment

Albrecht Durer (1471-1528), Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion, published in Nuremberg in 1528.

 

Surprise

William Cowper, The anatomy of humane bodies, printed in Oxford in 1698.

 

Trust

William Cheselden (1688-1752), Osteographia, or the Anatomy of Bones, published in London in 1733.

Vulnerable

Magnus Hundt (1449-1519),  Antropologium de hominis dignitate..., printed in Leipzig in 1501 by Wolfgang Stoeckel. 

Wonder

Charles Estienne (ca. 1504-1564), De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres, published in Paris and printed by Simon Colinaeus in 1545.

 

Species of Explosions: Human Anatomy, Explained

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Species of explosions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and basically release some sort of energy (chemical, nuclear, mechanical and so on), but in the cases we'll look at here they are none-of-the-above.  The energy released in these explosions are in the form of potential, a knowledge-driven, controlled and reversibly ordered demolition, a deconstruction in slow motion.  The medical "explosion view" for the study of anatomy is a remarkable thing, especially when you considered not only the pre-Cat and pre-MRI times, but also the pre-Xray (1895) days of imaging the inside of the body--the images not only show you the bits and pieces alone but also in relation to the other bits around them.  The body becomes an archaeological dig, each level preserved so that a viewer could easily see the dependencies and relations between one thing and another. 

Take for example Paolo Mascagni's (1755-1815) beautiful Anatomia universale (an example seen above), which was printed in Florence in 1833 and has the look and sensibility of something much later.  Mascagni is able to achieve this depth not only from the exploded view, but also for the (somewhat exaggerated) coloring setting the specimen on top of a blank background the combination of the color and the background giving the whole thing a 3-D-ish feel--and if not that, then certainly a living image in which there is some fair amount of depth. 

Another version of the exploded view which is also quite effective from the same work by Mascagni is his "exploded thorax", showing a more limited display of the more closely-aligned organs. 

When these views appear today--which is generally much more uncommon given the other technical ways of envisioning multiple layers of complex associated items--they have more of a sense of the antiquarian, retro feel to them, though they are no less useful for it.  As a matter of fact  I still prefer these views for understanding technical and engineering  and architectural complexes than anything else. And the modern master of this genre for me is Stephen Beisty, who performs his magic mostly in the tech and engineering fields, but who occasionally dips into the messy wet stuff of biology, as we can see in this fabulous exploded view:

There are of course many other examples of (drawn) exploded views in the history of anatomical illustration, but I think these will do for now as good examples of the art.

 

Things-out-of-Place Department: Books in Anatomies and Bridges in Impressionist Paintings

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I've been making a few entries over the last few days on antiquarian anatomy books, and wonder now about books in anatomies. I'm not certain what the appeal is, but it has a strange and immediate affinity for me to bridges in pre- and early Impressionism, a direct line to these bridges and to the other technological and engineering entities that were depicted in these canvases.  I'm not sure what the connection is to the two outside of the obvious verb-y part of "bridge", but there seems to be an innate connection between the two, for me.  Somehow the book shouldn't be of interest to the lifeless and dissected cadaver, but it is, and images of the two together turn up here and there in the history of anatomical illustration.  As much as the anatomist and artist work together to try to remove their subject from the confines of a book so that their work is freer and more accessible to the reader, to remove the illustrations from the pages of the book in which they appear, they do sometimes employ the image of the book to make a more prosaic and allegorical point.And as the object of design and wonder and beautiful geometry, one might think of the bridge as a object in Impressionist paintings from that movement's earliest periods would be not quite the sort of thing that would be the subject of as many paintings as they were.  The unnatural angles of their supplementary parts  seem to make them not quite the fit for the early Impressionists.  But they were, and probably so for their 90-degree assaults on the natural landscape. 

Perhaps what I think of the aesthetics of the treatment of bridges during the Renaissance, and the adoration of the Rialto and Pone Vecchio and all the rest, just wouldn't make their way to the Impressionists' canvases. But of course basically most ot them did paint bridges--Seurat, Cezanne, Van Gogh (a fantastic, small stone-and-wood miniature drawbridge), Derain, Pissarro, Renoir (the Pont-Neuf), Marquet, Sisley and of course and perhaps most famously, Monet (Charing Cross, Giverny, and all the rest)--all painted bridges.  I guess the bridge is just a shorthand for the representation of engineering and technology in general in Impressionism, which to my eye seems quite strong. 

But getting back to books in anatomies:

Govard Bidloo approached the issue of the book in a most unusual fashion, making it appear as though the dissected hand and forearm were emerging from a semi-opened book, the long index finger coming to a pointing pose, suggesting perhaps that the viewer take heed of what is contained in the work. The image appers in Bidloo's Ontleding des menschelyken lichaams (or Anatomia Humani Corporis) and was printed in Amsterdam (at what may have been the pinnacle decade of Dutch book publishing) in 1690; the book was illustrated by Gerard de Lairesse (1640-1711), a leading light in the Golden Age of Dutch painting, and perhaps one of the most famous painters alive there after the death of Rembrandt. There's all manner of symbolism going on here, but what I like the most is the little crutch under the cadaver's hand's thumb. 

Jacques Gamelin's Nouveau reueil d'osteologie et de myologie, dessine d'apres nature (1779)  places skeleton and books togehter again, though this time their can be little doubt about the overall message that the designer and author tried to send to their readers. 

Int he long run, and I guess in the short run as well, neither the bridge in Impressionism nor the book in anatomies is quite so much out-of-place as they are simply unexpected.

Note:

Van Gogh's bridge at Arles--not an essential image whatsoever for this post--I just like the bridge. Van Gogh painted the bridge four times in oil and once in watercolor, all in a very short time.  (His stay at Arles was about 444 days, during which he made about 200 paintings, being some of his greatest work.

 

Ultra Realism in Anatomical Illustration, 18th Century.

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[In case there are younger readers here, this is a notice that some may consider the following images disturbing.]

In the antiquarian world of anatomy books dissection and presentation take place on many different levels--there are very straightforward, unadorned displays of various body parts on blank backgrounds and with no attention paid whatsoever to anything beyond the dissection; there are others that place the dissections and cadavers and whatever the subject of dissection might be in prosaic fields, or against a distant cityscape, or in a well-appointed room, or against a generic table, or within some sort of Baroque ornamentation, and so on.  (We'll be seeing more of these presentations in the next few posts.)  In general though the work of the anatomist is presented in  a basically "finished" state--that is, the dissection is presented in an artistic manner, with a sense of design for the subject material. (Here's one example of hundreds of possibilities: John Browne's A Compleat Treatise of the Muscles, as they appear in the Human Body...1681.)

There are not many examples (before, say 1850) in the history of anatomical display that show the specimens in the stage of display that was almost entirely unadorned, as though we are looking directly at the anatomist's table.  Such is the case in the extraordinary work of the anatomist Govard Bidloo (1649-1713) and (artist) Gerard de Lairesse (1640-1711) called Ontleding des menschelyken lichaams..., published in Amsterdam in 1690, which is an unremitting attack on realism in the art of anatomy.  There is absolutely no favoritism paid to anything in these images except for truthful display, right down to the nails and pins used to give messy stuff a more-recognizable (to the layman) form. 

Another, later, uncommon example of this realism is found in the 1804 work of John Bell's Engravings of the Bones, Muscles, and Joints, Illustrating the First Volume of the Anatomy of the Human Body

These images are a world away from the overwhelming majority of works of anatomy produced from the 16th to the 19th centuries; and that Bidloo's work was so early makes it that much more remarkable. 

Source note:  all images courtesy of the National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine, here.

Blank and Missing Things Series--Antiquarian Anatomical Skin (Appended)

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1476  -part of the Blank, Missing and Empty Things series.

Carl Ernst Bock (1809-1874) was a physician and anatomist (and son of the anatomist August Carl Bock of Leipzig, 1782-1833), whose many publications include the very popular  Hand-Atlas der Anatomie des Menschen  nebst einem tabellarischen Handbuche der Anatomie.(first printed in 1841).  This is a good example of his reaching out across the social strata to publish something that was accessible to the public-at-large, making him a pioneer in the distribution of medical information.

I'm sorry to say that in all of this man's beautiful work I  focused on this superior full-body anatomical--the odd thing here is that the only skin remaining on the body is on the head, where we see a  face and full head of hair.  To my experience this is a very highly unusual visualization.

In an almost-the-opposite approach (which is much more common) Albert Adamkiewwicz (in his Taflen zir Orientierung an der Gehirnoberflaeche des lebenden Menschen...(printed in 1894, in Vienna) offers the following:

As with the other image above I only have a second generation image of this, and only in black and white--the color original is truly remarkable. 

Another excellent example of an anatomical dissection leaving the face intact occurs several times in the massively interesting work of Jacques Gauthier Dagoty, whose work I remembered but whose name I forgot, making it fairly difficult to find the illustrations.  But here they are, from Anatomie des parties de la generation de l'homme et de le femme, published in Paris, in 1773, with Dagoty (1717-1785)  acting in multiple roles of author/designer/anatomist/painter, who produced these magnificent painterly dissection studies of great detail and warmth.

And this:

There are many other studies in the volume, but few retain the face.

Then there's this, the other end of the spectrum, where we see the flayed anatomical specimen and its skin though not in contact with one another, which is a special category indeedy:

This copperplate engraving comes from Juan Valverde de Amusco (Valverde) (1525-1588 or thereabouts), Anatomia del corpo humano... (printed in Rome in 1559), and stands quite apart (though not alone) from the rest of the anatomical oeuvre of the 1550-1750 period.  

 And let's not forget Thomas Bartholin's frontspiece for his Anatomoa, published by F. Hackis in Leyden in 1651, which is similar to the Valverde:

 

Architecture of Insanity

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I was browsing an 1878 issue of The Scientific American, looking for an article on torpedoes, when I came across this stunning architectural plan of the Morristown (New Jersey) State Asylum for the Insane--I recognized its design as something I had seen before, several times, at least.  This design required a lot of land and a lot of bricks--the building was a few stories high and laid out far and wide, built to accommodate 2,000 patients.  The design was intended to allow patients comfortable living space, room for privacy as need be, exercise area and plenty of open yards around the structure for sun and fresh air.  Of course building like this were quickly filled and filled some more, requiring the space for rehabilitation to be used for stockpiling other patients until more appropriate situations arose, which they mostly seemed not to.

And so I went looking around the web for other examples of mental/insane asylums, places constructed for the good of the society and partially to aid people who were suffering from some sort of yet-to-be-defined mental illness.  From what I have found so far, there is a definite them to a good many of them, resembling in some fair manner the Morristown design (above). 

(An interesting and lush/ruinous photo essay on Morristown can be found here.)

I suppose that in some ways these architectural plans are maps, outlines to an elusive wellness; given the (generally) small staffs, the abilities of the time to diagnosis mental illnesses, the limited capacities for treatment, and general overcrowding, that the "wellness" part of the desired ends of these plans/maps was almost entirely allegorical. I suspect that if for some reason you found yourself in an extended stay in a place like this and weren't insane, then you would be after a while.

The Glasgow Lunatic Asylum, designed by the  architect William Stark (1770 – 1814):

[From:  Thompson, John D. & Grace Goldin. The Hospital. A Social and Architectural History. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. 1975.]

 

Maryland State Hospital for the Insane (here)--in this plan, the further away you get from the main entrance, the more deeply "disturbed' the patients.  It must have been a long walk from the "violent" ward to freedom. 

Cane Hill, the Third Surrey County Pauper Lunatic Asylum, built 1882 (details here)

 

Claybury Lunatic Asylum, Woodford, Essex:

 The Byron House, constructed 1915, at the Ipswich Lunatic Asylum (Byron house was to become the infamous Karrala House.)

Buffalo lunatic asylum, a spectacular structure designed by H.H. Richardson, with grounds and landscaping by none other than Frederiick Law Olmstead and Charles Vaux  The image above (and below) are the Kansas State Lunatic Asylum constructed 1880.  Information on these two institutions and the man who brought them about is located at the Kirkbride Buildings blog, here.

 

Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane, built by Gordon W. Lloyd in 1888:

Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, New Zealand:

 

HArrisburg (PA) State Lunatic Asylum, the first to be built according to the Kirkbride Plan:

 Eastern Asylum for the Insane, Pontiac, Michigan, constructed 1882:

 

Norfolk, England, Lunatic Asylum, 1814

 Eastern Kentucky Asylum for the Insane:

 

Norristown Hospital for the Insane:

A High Achievement in Obstetric Art, 1781

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One of the great thinkers in the history of gynecology was Jean Louis Baudeloque, whose 1781 book L'Art des Accouchemens was perhaps one of the most significant works in the history of obstetrics. This work was important not only for its great clarity and ease of explantion and control of its subject, but also for the exceptional illustrations.  I find them incredible not only for their spectacular detail but also for their control of blank space, a feat not easily accomplished...and I think a somewhat courageous approach to illustration during this era.

 

For example, in the accompanying engravings (all of which are second generation and so are not nearly as sharp as the originals), we are left with a detailed image of only what was necessary for the explanation in the text, a terribly modern approach to illustration and clarity, so much so that it seems almost impossible that the image was made more than 230 years ago. 

Obviously the representation and the subject matter give away the age of the image, but certainly not the design or placement.

Note:  It should also be pointed out that chief among Baudeloque's contributions was his teaching career, during which he would instruct upwards of 150 pupils per year (mainly at the Ecole de Sante) in clear and precise terms on his approach to obstetrics, not the least of which was in the use of instruments such as the foreceps and pelvimeter, a distribution of a very useful information base which seemed to have spread exponentially as his students went out into the midwifery field. 

History of Normalcy Series: Warehousing Epileptic "Defectives", 1912

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This series is meant to illustrate the very transitory, shadowy and basically non-existent nature of "normal".

"It is thus with regard to the disease called Sacred: it appears to me to be nowise more divine nor more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause like other affections. . ."--Hippocrates on epilepsy and recognizing it as just another brain disorder devoid of mysticism, about 2400 years ago.

One stop in the history of normalcy is the perception of brain disorders, which is a long and complex history--very long in the case of epilepsy, its epidemiology stretching back thousands of years before Hippocrates.  It particular normalcy for the vast majority of that time was that people who exhibited the results of the disorder were cursed, or touched by the gods as holders of some possible divine inspiration, or touched by the gods as accursed and punished people, or bewitched (I wonder about the number of epileptics put to the flame during the Witch Hunt crazes), and so on.  The first pharmaceutical treatments for the disorder really didn't come about until Emil Fischer and Bayer introduced phenobarbitol in 1902/04, which was able to calm the seizures of some people with epilepsy.  Until that point, most treatments were generally topical, plus the quack ingestives and various sorts of incantations, spells and prayers. 

In Dr. William T. Shanahan's Colonies for Epiletpics, (the original available for purchase through our blog bookstore) written in 1912, the treatment of epileptics was seculsion, warehousing them in state asylums in the countryside.  Shananhan felt that the epileptic needed "its" own environment, "apart from the the defectives"--and by that he meant apart from the wide classification of people who did not fit the scheme of 1912 normalcy, like "morons, imbeciles, the insane, the sexual addict, the recurring syphlitic [and] the criminally insane...".  Actually this as a good move in some cases--apart from the vocabulary--as epileptics were stored away in almshouses and prisons along with the criminal element and the hopelessly insane, and at least removed the epileptic from a different sort of horror and disgrace. 

Dr. Shanahan's aim was to remove the epileptic from society because they "couldn't adjust to a life in the ordered community" and that holding a job for them was "impossible"--that plus what he saw as the need to protect society from the epileptic's "progressive mental deterioration".   He felt that "the great majority should be committed[to the epileptic colonies] as are the insane", and also to remove them to these places "from a young age", to an "institution for defectives", there separated according to "sex and mental grade". 

Overall, though, it was Shanahan's other aim to provide as "normal" a life for epileptics as could be arrived at, and outside of his trying to save society from them--at a time when the eugenics people were out castrating epileptics--, he was arguing that this method was the best of all possible worlds for people with this disorder.  He does however seem to be totally ignorant of any medical approach to dealing with epilepsy.

By the way, there's a very curious imprint on the back cover of this pamphlet showing who printed it and where.  I cannot recll ever having seen such a small thign, placed so centrally, in such an obvious place. Its obvious and present, yet tiny.  Here it is, before magnification:

And here is what the slug says:

Its just a very curious thing.

 

The Old is New Department: Refuting Darwin with Commas, Adjectives, and the Creator (1873)

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1423

I wasn't going to write anything at all about this pamphlet, but the vocabulary was so strong and vehement, and reminded me so much of what we can read in today's daily press, that I thought to at least pick out some of the choice morsels. 

Darwinism Reproved and Refuted, published in Washington D.C. in 1873, is left without any attribution to the author, the writer not caring to sign his/her name, not even to use as the wood into which some shingle with a weak social sciences/psych/religious Ph.D. could be nailed.  It is just left to the imagination or indignation that the writer didn't or couldn't feel confident enough to actually sign their work.  It is also one of hundreds if not thousnads of anti-Darwin vehemence--there is a chance I guess that there were more of these things written than there are visible-to-the-naked-eye stars in the night sky.  (The original pamphlet is available at our blog bookstore.)

The author has little room for Mr. Darwin's work¹, clearly on a super-rant over The Descent... and on the theory of evolution, using such colorful words in runny purple prose like "\repugnant, revolting, unsophisticated, outrage, deadening influence, peculiar, fallacious, cunning"--and this coming from the first two paragraphs.  Needless to say, even though  the writer was too weak to sign their name, they did have some strong opinions. 

"Utterly false, radically and fundamentally wrong, futile in the extreme, unreliable, ungrounded, false, short-sighted (in relation to god), ridiculous..." continues the author. The endowments of the Creator stuff doesn't work its way in until the third page, when the adjectival and adverbial assault was already on it way, all without the assistance of any scientific counterexamples--but then the rest of the work is dedicated to proving the godless nature of Darwin's work and its escape from scientific reality.

We find this:  "Evolution is founded on materialism, which is another term for atheism"...."let this doctrine be compared with the Mosaic account of creation, and then the student of nature determine if he will choose for his progenitors Darwin's pair of ring-tailled [sic] monkeys, or 'Adam...' "

And so that's what we get to in the refutation:  the Creator.  Old version of a contemporary complaint to get Darwin tossed out of classrooms to protect the youth of America, replacing it with divination.  The author writes:  "In the investigation of nature which is the proper province of the scientist, the most effectual method of studying it, in order to render this subject clearly intelligible to the human mind, is to regard the economy of nature as a form of government, having God for its founder, its Supreme Ruler, and Law-giver."

There's not too much one can do with that, and even though it sounds antique, isn't necessarily so, because the philosophy exists today, only with fewer commas. 

Notes:

1.  By 1873 Darwin already had produced an epochal body of work, including but not limited to On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859),  On the various contrivances by which British and foreign orchids are fertilised by insects (1862), On the Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants  (1865), The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and  The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1873)

An Uncomfortable Caricature: Darwin, the Descent, and the ASPCA (1871)

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1422

Poor Mr. Bergh.

I wonder what his reaction was to appearing in this 1871 Harper's Weekly cartoon by the great and indomitable Thomas Nast, linking him in a terrible and probably inscrutable way with the man of the century? 

Henry Bergh was the founder of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (mainly I think in response to the treatment of work horses and the campaign for anti-sweating rules), and he is grabbing Darwin's shoulder to remind the old man that in the shadow of the publication (earlier that same year) of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (twelve years after the first edition of the Origin, and two years after the appearance of the Origin in its fifth edition) that a great harm was being done to the weeping gorilla.  Weeping because he was upset at being coupled with Darwin, weeping with the insult that someone such as Charles Darwin could be associated with him, with Mr. Bergh gently but firmly pointing out to Darwin that by connecting himself with the gorilla that he was doing a grave injustice to the gorilla.  (The original is available on our blog bookstore.)

Of course Darwin didn't use a gorilla in the Descent, but no matter--it was a quick work by Nast and it contained enough of the stuff of some truth to reach publication.  Nast after all usually produced two of these small sketches plus a full-page work every week, and would do so for decades.  He got his point across--and it was a point shared by many, not the least of which/whom was The Times.

The Times of London gave such an awful review of the book that a review of this review was published in the April edition of the British journal Nature¹.   It was Thomas Stebbing who wrote the response to The Times' inciteful, hateful attack upon the Descent of Man. The Times saw Darwin's work as an attack upon society,  accusing him of undermining authority and principles of morality, opening the way to "the most murderous revolutions".  A "man incurs a grave responsibility when, with the authority of a well-earned reputation, he advances at such a time the disintegrating speculations of this book." Stebbing's review of the review is drippingly sarcastic, pointing out obvious errors in specific and the tone of the article in general in the defense of the book. Darwin's "facile method of observing superficial resemblances" (says The Times) incites Stebbing to issue the following: "they may fancy that truth is worth discovering , even when it seems to involve some contradictions to our pride and some loss of comfort to our finer feelings..." (What a great line!)

And so Thomas Nast piled on, though I'm not sure if he had a personal opinion on the matter--I prefer to think of Nast as rather forward thinking, at least in terms of more-correct thought on Indians/women/Blacks/the KKK/public education/government corruption, though he did have his failures in regards to the Irish, Catholics in general, the Pope, and some other areas².  Nast may have just been reporting on public sentiment, or maybe not.  He at least doesn't depict Darwin in a physically abusive manner like so many others, though Darwin does appear a little on the stubby side. 

But getting back to Bergh--I have my doubts that he would've been entertained by being depicted so.  As I said, he founded the ASPCA, and also founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.  He inherited a fine family fortune, and put it to good use.  He died at home, 429 5th Avenue (around 38th St and 5th, just a couple of blocks from where the NYPL would be) in 1888.  I hope he didn't care; I doubt Charles did. 

NOTES

1. Nature,  1871, volume 3, 20 April 1871.

2. He hated Gen. George McClellan so far as I can tell, which gives him an "A" rating in my book.
 

The Discovery of the "Obvious"--Joseph Lister and J.N.L. Durand and their Major Discoveries

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1400

Sometimes things that we take for granted—the “of course” kinds of things that were seemingly always here because they’re just, well, so obvious—that one needs to take a step back to appreciate their discovery, or invention, and to mind the fact that someone did have to actually bring these things to some sort of birth.

These two (seeing and touching) would make great entries in our fictional encyclopedia--who was the first person to see ("ah, it was Nem Teff in 8211 BCE, in an area very close to the teeming slum of today's Bagdahd; he of course was a disciple of the Shenta-kra philosopher Boot Strap, who only four generations earlier came up with the idea of "touching". What people did to get around before Mr. Strap invented touching and before people could see is a matter for wide conjecture"--Pastor Steng "No Stink" Pallor, writing in the volume "I" of The Great Encyclopedia of Unknown, Non-Existent and Ficticious Things, published in New York City by Phantom Touch Press, 1972.)

But we're dealing with new applications of sight and touch here, although by and large these applications had a huge impact on the rest of civilization on their own merits. 

Take for example the lovely Jean Nicolas Louis Durand.  He was a radical rationalist, an advanced thinker in the field of architecture and one of the most influential instructors and writers on architectural history and theory of first half of the nineteenth century.  Durand also had his wild side, as well, but that took place when he was in his carefree (read: “adventurous”) thirties—this period of enormous and unusually creative work in architectural design also took place during the French Revolution, which was a bad time to be thinking this stuff up, let alone building it.  (Some of the other French visionary architects of this time nearly lost their heads because of their non-revolutionary creativeness, but that’s another story.)

(This is Boullee's design of the megamonumental library for the king, 1784)

Durand came about this intuition naturally and also because he was a draftsman for the great Etienne Boullee, who we mentioned a few posts ago.  (Durand would he execute a series of drawings entitled Rudimenta Operis Magni et Disciplinae, which are probably a pictorial representation of Boullée’s theories.)

What Durand introduced however that was so revolutionary and so much his own was this—he was the very first architect to publish a work of comparative architecture in which all of the buildings were drawn on the same scale. 

That means that previous works—all previous works—of comparative architecture compared one piece of architecture to another on different scales.  That would seem to be a truly bad idea, given the nature of the comparative beast and all, but there you have it.  I really have no explanation for why this was the case, or why it took until Durand’s Recueil et parallele des edifices en tout genre…(1832)  to make it so in the fourth century of the publication of works on architecture, but it did.

Another example of what would seem to be sublimely obvious was the innovation of a Scottish surgeon in 1867 .  People today I think intuit his surname from exposure to television commercials for a certain mouthwash, but this would be like knowing the importance of Isaac Newton from those figgy cookies—and that just isn’t right.  Joseph Lister (1827-1912) figured out—through exposure to ideas by Ignaz Semmelweiss and Louis Pasteur, among others—that the infections in wounds that caused so many surgical deaths was not caused by the miasma in the air, but by something entirely different. 

In his article in The Lancet of 21 September 1867 (and in his subsequent publication in book form later that year called Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery he explained what he thought was the cause—microorganisms that traveled (at least) from the surgeon’s hands onto the wound, and not by something floating around in the air.  He began treating wounds with a solution of carbolic acid (which had been used previously to remove the stinking stench from sewerage), and saw immediate results in the prevention of infection and gangrene.  His next big step was to have surgeons wash their hands with the solution and wear gloves during surgery—because, up until then, surgeons went from dinner to intestines without the necessary benefit of having clean hands or wearing gloves.  This seeming minor change in surgical procedure resulted, I think, in saving more lives than any other procedure ever invented.  And it was mainly, really, from washing your hands before putting them into someone else’s body.