Cites A-M. Bloch, 'Expériences sur la vision', Comptes rendus des séances de la Société de biologie 37 (28) (1885), pp. 493-495.
Description:

'In 1885, Marey's associate Adolph-Moïse Bloch adapted a version of the intermittently-obscured lamps that William Henry Fox Talbot and Simon von Stampfer had developed during the 1830s to physiological investigation. Where Talbot sought to measure light intensity itself, Bloch sought to establish a law regarding the rates at which individual sensation-flashes produced a continuous light-sensation under different conditions (Bloch 1885, 493-495; Schickore 2006, 254-255). Such studies prompted a range of physiological investigations into Stampfer's "stroboscopic" effects during the 1890s (e.g. Charpentier 1890; Schenck 1896; Marbe 1898).' (454)

Cites A. Charpentier, 'Recherches sur la persistence des impressions rétiniennes et sur les excitations lumineuses de courte durée', Archives d'Opthalmologie 10 (1890), pp. 10, 108-135, 212-230, 340-356, 406-429 and 522-537.
Description:

'In 1885, Marey's associate Adolph-Moïse Bloch adapted a version of the intermittently-obscured lamps that William Henry Fox Talbot and Simon von Stampfer had developed during the 1830s to physiological investigation. Where Talbot sought to measure light intensity itself, Bloch sought to establish a law regarding the rates at which individual sensation-flashes produced a continuous light-sensation under different conditions (Bloch 1885, 493-495; Schickore 2006, 254-255). Such studies prompted a range of physiological investigations into Stampfer's "stroboscopic" effects during the 1890s (e.g. Charpentier 1890; Schenck 1896; Marbe 1898).' (454)

Cites A. De Palma and G. Pareti, 'Bernstein's Long Path to Membrane Theory: Radical Change and Conservation in Nineteenth-Century Electrophysiology', Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 20 (4) (2011), pp. 306-337.
Description:

'At the end of the nineteenth century, Bernstein influentially drew on such contentions to develop a mathematical model of electricity transmission that did not require any expenditure of cell-specific energy: his model rather showed that changes in rates of transmission were due to ionic exchange Bernstein influentially drew on such contentions to develop a mathematical model of electricity transmission that did not require any expenditure of cell-specific energy: his model rather showed that changes in rates of transmission were due to ionic exchange (Lenoir 1986, 39-47; Seyfarth 2006; cf. De Palma and Pareti 2011).'

Cites A. Lefebvre and M. White (eds.), Bergson, Politics and Religion (Durham, NC. and London: Duke University Press, 2012)
Description:

'Bergson's philosophy was not, as has been all-too-frequently assumed, simply the product of a great mind operating apart from the material and cultural contexts in which it existed. Rather, it drew on and inspired a range of claims and practices relating to the interrogation and apprehension of nature that have recently begun to be re-appraised by humanities and natural science scholars alike (e.g. Mullarky 1999; Lefebvre and White 2012; Mullarky and de Mille 2013; Normandin and Wolfe 2013).'

Cites A. Winter, 'Screening Selves: Sciences of Memory and Identity on Film', History of Psychology 7 (4) (2004), pp. 367-401.
Description:

'Recent work on the relation between cinematography, physiology, and psychology has highlighted ways in which appeal to the recording and projection of imagery accompanied a re-conceptualization of scientific objects: where pictorial and photographic visualization had fixed and stabilized organisms, cinematographic recording demonstrated their motility and mutability (Cartwright 1995, esp. 20–29; Winter 2004; Landecker 2006; idem 2011; Schmidgen 2012).' (426)

Cites B. Latour, 'Trains of Thought: The Fifth Dimension and its Fabrication: in A.N. Perret-Clermont et. al. (eds.), Thinking Time: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Time (Cambridge, MA: Hogrefe and Hupher, 2005), pp. 173-187.
Description:

'Canales identifies a contentious set of debates between Bergson, his fellow Nobel laureate Albert Einstein, and their respective followers as the immediate cause of the decline in influence of the former. In so doing, her work opens up Bergson's philosophy to historians of science, medicine and technology. Along with that of Bruno Latour (2005) and Robert Brain, (2015, esp. 32-36) it is concerned with it not in relation to the articulation of a normative conception of existence, but rather insofar as it participated in broader intellectual and cultural developments. [note: 'For prior historical consideration of Bergson see e.g. Grogin 1988; Antliff 1993; Gilles 1996.']'

 

Relevant passage from Latour:

 

'We never encounter time and space, but a multiplicity of interactions with actants having their own timing, spacing, goals, means and ends...

But how do we register these many differences in timings and relative resistance? Through the various instruments invented by many scientific disciplines - in the largest sense of the word - to record and document them, and this is where we have to shift from technology studies to science studies. In what may be the most unfair account of science given by any philosopher, Bergson criticised science for being unable to pay attention to duration, to "la durée," because, according to him, scientists always turn it into meaningless and timeless spatial delineations. Bergson would have addressed the theme of this conference - Mind and Time - in a much less polite way than I, since for him there is one thing the mind can never think of, and that is time. Extravagant claim, since scientists are the ones who made it possible to speak of the "longue durée," of the eons of geology and biology out of which the very same Bergson made his "creative evolution." Without Linnaeus, without Cuvier, without Lamarck, without Darwin, there would be no long history of life for Bergson to pit against the obsession with geometry and space. The very idea of evolution unfolding over billions of years emerges out of no other site than the natural history museums and the collections of geologists. What Bergson puts aside when he makes the vain opposition between the warm and rich duration of time and the poor and cold spatialization of mind is the work of registering differences, the work of the clever scientists, another labour which the philosophers have ignored as much as that of the able engineers.' (181)

Cites B. Loerzer, 'William James, the French Tradition, and the Incomplete Transposition of the Spiritual into the Aesthetic', in M. Halliwell and J.D.S. Rasmussen, William James and the Transatlantic Conversation (Oxford: University Press, 2014) pp. 65-80.
Description:

'For James... emotion was the bodily accompaniment of external sensation, and as such constituted an active component of perception itself.

There can be little wonder then that both James and Bergson found the claims made by the other so appealing (e.g. Loerzer 2014).'

Cites B. Sidis, The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society (1898).
Description:

'Adherents of cellularly-distinct conceptions of neuronal connection portrayed such studies as confirmatory of associationist contentions regarding the nature of psychology (Black 1981, 44-45). For example, US physician Francis Xavier Dercum argued that the 'amoeboid' expansion and retraction of individual cells underlay variously: hysteria; hypnotic and dream states; sleep; and trains of thought themselves. These latter, Dercum contended, appeared 'to follow purely mechanical lines' of association and disassociation between the sense impressions that they carried (Dercum 1896, esp. 520-523. Quote on 522. Original emphasis). In 1898, Boris Sidis and Ira van Gieson elaborated this thesis to account for states of sanity and insanity: in Gieson's words, 'unsoundness of mind' was caused by the 'dissociation' of the 'higher and last evolved parts of the brain, in the presence of pathogenic stimuli' (van Gieson 1899, 87; Sidis 1919, 208-215.). For amoeboid theorists, the apparent mechanical capacity of nerve cells to alter their proximity to one another presented physical confirmation of the existence of psychological associations.'

 

Relevant passage from Sidis:

'The Physiology and Pathology of Subconsciousness.

The mental processes of association and aggrega-tion of psychic contents in the synthesis of moment-consciousness and the including of the moments-consciousness in synthesis of higher and higher unities can be expressed in physiological terms of cellular activity. The structure of the cell and its morphological relation to other cells can give us a glimpse into the physiological processes that run parallel to mental synthesis and dissociation.

The nerve-cell, as the reader knows, is a nucleated mass of protoplasm highly complicated in its structure and organization. The nerve-cell possesses many filaments or "processes," all of which, called dendrons, branch repeatedly and terminate in a network of multitudes of fibre-processes representing a greater volume than the cell body itself, with the exception of a single process termed neuraxon, which remains comparatively unchanged in its diameter along its whole course and sends out but a few branches called collaterals. The terminals of collaterals and neuro-axons are in their turn split into a comparatively small number of branches called the terminal arborization. 

If we inquire as to the connection of nerve-cells with one another, we find that no nerve-cell is anatomically connected with other cells. Every nerve-cell with all its processes forms a distinct and isolated morphological individual. Every nerve-cell anatom- ically considered is a complete unit. The processes coming out from different nerve-cells do not fuse with processes coming out from other nerve-cells, but rather interlace and come in contact, like the electrodes of a battery in forming the electric circuit. Thus neurological investigations point to the highly significant fact that the connections among the nerve-cells are not of an anatomical but of a physiological nature. The association of nerve-cells is not organic, but functional.

Nerve-cells with concomitant psychic moments-content come into contact with other nerve-cells accompanied by psychic content by means of their fine terminal processes. This association of cells forms a group whose physiological function has a concomitant mental activityresulting in some form of psychic synthesis. By means of association fibres the groups are organized into systems, the systems into communities, the communities into clusters, the clusters into constellations, and each of the higher, more complex aggregates is more feebly organized by less stable association fibres. The combination of groups into systems and of these systems into clusters and constellations by means of association fibres have as their psychic concomitants higher and higher forms of mental syntheses. [note: 'The difficulties of how a conglomeration of objective units can possibly give rise to a unity in a synthesis are excellently well discussed by Prof. W. James in the first volume of his Psychology. We take it as a postulate that the very nature of mental activity is synthesis.'] Thus moments-content are synthetized in the unity of moments-consciousness, and the latter are synthetized in their turn in higher and higher unities.

The simpler, the less complicated a group of nerve-cells is, and the longer and more frequent their fine processes come in contact, the greater is the tendency of that group to form permanent relations; and the same holds true of systems of cells in communities, clusters, and constellations. We may therefore say that the organization of a system or constellation of cells is in proportion to the duration and frequency of their associative activity.

Groups of nerve-cells with a more or less stable function become gradually organized and form a stable organization. The more complex, however, a system of nerve-cells is, the greater is its instability, and in the very highest systems or constellations of clusters the instability reaches its maximum. The instability of a system is in proportion to its complexity. In the very highest constellations the instability is extreme, and there is going on a continuous process of variation. Under the action of the slightest external or internal stimuli, such unstable systems or constellations lose their equilibrium, dissolve and form new systems, or enter into combination with other constellations. On the psychical side we have the continuous fluctuation of the content of attention. The characteristic trait of the highest type of psycho-physical life under the ordinary stimuli of the environment is a continuous process of association and dissociation of constellations.

As the stimuli increase in their intensity, be they of an external or internal nature be they toxic, such as the influence of a poison, or purely mechanical, such as the action of a blow, or be they of a purely internal psycho-physiological character, such as a strong emotion a process of dissolution sets in, and the highest, the most unstable, the least organized constellations of clusters are the first to dissolve. With the further increase of the intensity of the stimulus the dissolution goes deeper and extends further the simpler, the more stable, the more organized systems become dissolved. The psycho-physical content, however, does not disappear with the dissolution of the system; the content exists in the less complex forms of cell-associations, and psychically in the simpler forms of mental synthesis.

The same result may be effected by stimuli of less intensity but of longer duration. A durable hurtful stimulus is in fact by far the more detrimental to the life of cell-aggregation. The pathological process of dissociation and disaggregation may be regarded as a function of two factors - of duration and intensity.

Such a dissociation is not of an organic but of a functional character. The association fibres that connect groups into systems, communities, clusters, constellations contract. The fine processes of the nerve-cells p , the dendrons, or the terminal arborization, or the collaterals that touch these dendrons, thus forming the elementary group, retract and cease to come in contact. [note: 'The neuraxon is not retracted as a whole; it may remain practically stationary as far as its whole length is concerned, but the fibrillae by contracting withdraw the terminal arborizations for minute distances, and the same holds true of the dendrons.']

Association fibres combining the highest constellations are the first to give way; they are the latest to arise in the course of psycho-physical evolution, they are the most unstable, the least organized, and are also the first to succumb to the process of dissolution. The instability of association fibres is proportionate to the complexity and instability of the joined clusters and constellations.

At the first onslaught of inimical stimuli the cell-communities combined into clusters and constellations by association fibres become dissociated and independent of one another. Cell-communities, being more firmly organized than clusters and constellations, of which they are a part, and acting as a more organized whole, resist longer the action of hurtful stimuli. The association-cells that connect different clustered cell-communities contract or retract their fine terminal processes, and the cluster is dissolved. As the hurtful stimuli become more intense, the systems within the cell-community, though more firmly organized by association-fibres than the clusters, withdraw in their turn from the action of the hurtful stimuli. The association-cells that combine systems into communities retract their terminal processes, and the result is the dissolution of the cell-community into its constituent systems, which have more power of resistance than communities of cells, because systems are far more stable, far better organized. As the stimuli rise in intensity the process of disaggregation reaches the systems and they fall asunder into groups. With the further increase of the intensity of the hurtful stimuli the process of disaggregation aifects the group itself, the fine processes of the nerve-cell, the dendrons or collaterals and the terminal arborization of the neuraxon contract, withdraw from the hurtful stimuli, as the monocellular organism retracts its pseudopodia from the influence of noxious stimuli. Thus the groups themselves become dissociated, and are dissolved into a number of simple and isolated nerve-cells. For plan of the organization of brain-cells, see Plate V.

The following experiment, made at my request by Mr. R. Floyd, at the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals, tends to confirm the theory of retractility of the extensions of the ganglion cell protoplasm.

Fig. A shows the retraction of one of the ganglion cells of the cockroach in the living state (Blatta orientalis) under the influence of a strong toxic reagent, corrosive sublimate. The outer circular zone indicates the normal volume of the cell in the living condition, and the retracted outline of the cell indicates the reduction of the volume after contact with the corrosive sublimate. The protoplasmic network of the cell having become contracted under the influence of this toxic reagent, the inference seems to be presented that the fibrillse of the dendrons, and perhaps of the axon also, which are continuous with the fibrillar network in the cell-body, may become correspondingly retracted. The dendrons are not shown in the preparation, but the root of the axon with its parallel fibrils continuous with the cell-body network is shown at the right-hand side.

This whole process of dissolution is functional, for the disaggregation occurs only in the different forms of cell combinations. The cell itself, however, with all its processes remains intact and organically sound. With the removal, therefore, of the hurtful stimuli, there is once more a tendency, on account of the habit acquired from previous combination, to form old associations, and the old relations and functions are gradually restored. In short, until the process of dissolution reaches the individual cell, the process is not of an organic but of a functional character.

All functional diseases are cases of psycho-physiological disaggregation, and the gravity of the disease is proportional to the amount of dissociation. A functional disease or functional change is a disaggregation of clusters and systems of nerve-cells with their concomitant moments-consciousness and moments-contents. This disaggregation consists in the withdrawal of the simpler and better organized cell-colonies from the more complex systems, and, lastly, in the withdrawal of individual cells from the group or cell-colony. The whole process of dissociation or disaggregation is one of contraction, of shrinkage, from the influence of hurtful stimuli. First, the most unstable association-fibres are loosened, and communication is interrupted in the clusters forming the highest and most complex constellations, and then, as the intensity of the stimuli increases, the more stable association-fibres are loosened from the systems they connect. With the further increase of the stimuli the process of disaggregation descends still lower, to the elementary group formed of individual cells; the cells withdraw the terminal processes by which they come in contact with those of other cells in the same group.

In post-hypnotic states, in cases that go under the name of hysteria, in many forms of aphasia, in many obscure mental diseases, in many psychic states subsequent to great mental shocks, in many mental maladies known as the "psychic equivalent of epilepsy," [note: 'See Dr. Van Gieson and Sidis, Epilepsy and Expert Testimony, New York State Hospitals Bulletin, April, 1897'] we meet with cases of different degrees of cell-disaggregations, accompanied by all shades and forms of mental dissociation or amnesia, forms and types which I shall discuss further on. These forms may be spontaneous, as in cases of diseases, or they may be artificial, as in the case of hypnosis. One psycho-pathological process, however, underlies all the various forms of functional diseases, and that is the process of cell-disaggregation, with its concomitant dissociation of moments-consciousness. [note: 'I wish here to express my acknowledgment and sincere thanks to Dr. Ira Van Gieson, Director of the Pathological Institute of the New York State Hospitals, for his kind assistance afforded me in the preparation of the accompanying plate.']

Cites C. Lawrence, 'Degeneration Under the Microscope at the fin de siècle', Annals of Science 66 (4) (2009), pp. 455-471.
Description:

'Though the phenomenon in which nerves disintegrated following the introduction of a lesion to them had been described by Augustus Volney Waller as early as 1850, it was only during the 1870s and 1880s - when Sherrington was a student at Cambridge - that 'degeneration' studies began to be taken up by British physiologists in any systematic manner (Lawrence 2009, 456-457, 464-466).'

 

Relevant passages from Lawrence:

 

'''In 1850, a British physician, Augustus Volney Waller, published a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the object of which, he said, ‘is to describe certain alterations which take place in the elementary fibres of the nerve after they have been removed from their connection with the brain or spinal marrow’. Waller had received an MD from Paris in 1840, carried out research in Bonn, practised medicine in London and was one of that small cohort of English practitioners promoting the introduction of German science into British medicine. In his paper Waller reported that he had experimentally severed the hypoglossal and glossopharyngeal nerves of frogs and examined the remnants microscopically. He noted that while the proximal portion of the nerves remained normal, the distal portions underwent change. They were ‘disorganized’, showed a ‘kind of coagulation’, and were ‘disjointed’. [note: 'Augustus Volney Waller, ‘Experiments on the Section of the Glossopharyngeal and Hypoglossal Nerves of the Frog, and Observations on the Alterations Produced thereby in the Structure of their Primitive Fibres’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 140 (1850), 423-29, 425, 426.'] This description is now regarded as ‘classic’, and the change in the nerve after section is called ‘Wallerian degeneration’.' (456-457)

 

'Towards the end of the nineteenth century the degenerating nerve was investigated and redefined in the physiology laboratory notably by the use of electrophysiological theory and technology. By this time most of the more exotic cosmological languages used fifty years earlier to connect life and electricity had disappeared from the language of orthodox medicine. [note: 'Iwan Rhys Morus, Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London (Princeton, NJ, 1998).'] As Anson Rabinbach has shown too, by this period metaphors of the motor and the sciences of energy figured large in the understanding of life. [note: 'Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley, CA, 1992).'] But if flagrant assertions of the identity of life and electricity were no longer appropriate, in much deeper ways - notably in the research and pedagogy of laboratory science - electricity had become deeply embedded in the investigation of living things. In the science of everyday physiology, studies of nervous transmission in experimental animals were made concrete in the electrical apparatus of the physiology laboratory. In Shäffer’s textbook nerve phenomena were categorized under the headings of ‘excitability’, ‘conductivity’ and the ‘state of excitation’. Excitability was ‘preeminently the attribute of nervous tissue’ and it was manifested as a nervous response and the ‘direct index of a nerve response is the electrical change, which is the sole physical alteration at present ascertained in active nerve’. [Francis Gotch, ‘Nerve’ in Schäffer, Text-Book, 451, 459. It is noteworthy though, in spite of the supremacy of the nervous system, how the activities of other systems of the body were being transformed into electrical signals, for instance, those of the heart into the electrocardiogram.'] Life, in a physiological sense, was manifested in the laboratory by instrumentation, the bulk of which was electrical. Since, by this time, the nervous system was regarded as the fundamental biological organ of vertebrates - the one that allowed them to adapt to and evolve in the world - measuring electrical change in the nervous system was a way of investigating the deepest processes of life. [note: 'Robert M. Young , Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (New York, 1990).'] It was about this time too that Waller’s name began to be added to accounts of nerve degeneration.

One of the principle British workers whose studies centred on electrophysiology was Augustus Désire Waller, born 1856, the son of Augustus Volney Waller. [note: 'Augustus Désire´ Waller, An Introduction to Human Physiology (London, 1891), 352, 365. All italics in original.'] The younger Waller spent most of his working life as full-time lecturer in physiology at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington and then as Professor in the University of London. Waller’s textbook, An Introduction to Human Physiology appeared in 1891 and was dedicated to his father. The dedication page listed a number of his father’s achievements, the first of which was ‘Degeneration and Regeneration of the Nerve, 1850’. Although the older Waller’s name had already been appended to degeneration, the son’s work seems to have been significant in further promoting the connection (see below). In his book the younger Waller described ‘The consequences of nerve-section’ including ‘paralysis of motion or of sensation or of both’. ‘Wallerian degeneration’, he observed, could be seen histologically. It was coarse and ‘easily recognized’. He also described ‘The reaction of degeneration’. This, he said, was ‘a term used to denote the reaction of diseased nerve and muscle [to electrical stimulation] on man’. In the nerve the reaction consisted in ‘an abolition of excitability to the constant current and to the induced current’ and inmuscle ‘the abolition of excitability to the induced currentwhile the excitability to the constant current is exaggerated’. Waller not only described degeneration in a single nerve under experimental conditions but also degeneration of the large ascending and descending tracts of the spinal cord, either in cases of lesions of the hemispheres or spinal accidents in man or after section of the cord in animals. [note: 'Augustus Désire´ Waller, An Introduction to Human Physiology (London, 1891), 352, 365. All italics in original.']

By the time of the younger Waller’s work, his father’s name had already been appended to degeneration and the ‘reaction of degeneration’ was being elicited in the clinic as a diagnostic sign. In 1887, in his book on Diseases of the Brain, a London physician, C.W. Suckling, noted that ‘Waller many years ago showed the nerve fibres severed from their nerve cells... undergo degeneration’. This appeared in the index as ‘Wallerian nerve degeneration’. The work also had a chapter ‘The Use of Electricity in Diagnosis’ which described the response of normal muscle paralysed by nerve injury. ‘The diminution or loss of Faradic irritability... in a muscle’, the author wrote, ‘indicates... degeneration of its nerve’. In diseases affecting the nerve cell nucleus or nerve trunk, quantitative and qualitative changes in the electrical response constituted the ‘reaction of degeneration’. [note: 'C.W. Suckling, On the Diagnosis of Diseases of the Brain, Spinal Cord and Nerves (London, 1887), 17, 142.']

Wallerian degeneration and the reaction of degeneration were probably given wide currency following William Osler’s use of them in his The Principles and Practice of Medicine of 1892. This text became famous as Osler himself became, probably, the most esteemed physician of his generation. His book was widely used and often republished and reprinted. Discussing the cerebral cortex and ‘Lesions of the Motor System’, Osler gave an account of nerve fibres becoming ‘detached from their ganglion cells’. The result of this, he recorded, was ‘secondary degeneration or Wallerian degeneration, after the physician who first described it’. Such lesions, he noted, led to clinical paralysis or abnormal muscular contractions. Under the heading ‘Multiple Neuritis’, Osler reported electrical studies of ‘the reaction of degeneration’ in which ‘the contraction of the muscle when stimulated with the positive [electrical] pole is greater than when stimulated with the negative pole’. An abnormal reaction might be caused by diseases such fever, alcoholic and arsenical polyneuritis and beri-beri. Osler made no explicit link between the pathology of degeneration that he described and degenerative diseases in a racial or evolutionary sense. He did, however, postulate hereditary links between mild neurological diseases caused by degenerated nerves in one generation and other more severe disorders appearing in subsequent ones. Epilepsy, often described as a typical disease or symptom of degeneracy, he considered had an inherited dimension. He noted that ‘the children of neurotic families in which neuralgia, insanity, and hysteria prevail are more liable to fall victim to the disease’. Alcoholism or syphilis (both were frequently stipulated to be the cause or result of degeneracy) in the parents could also play a part. The influence of masturbation (said by many to be another sign and cause of degeneracy), Osler considered, had been ‘probably overrated’. [note: 'William Osler, The Principles and Practice of Medicine (Edinburgh, 1892), 89293, 780, 94950. On the reaction of degeneration, Osler cites Allen Starr, ‘Lectures on Neuritis’, Medical Record (New York, 1887).'] Thus, although Osler did not marshal the whole degeneracy ideology and spell out its dire conclusions for the future of the race or nation his text did assume a relation between morbid change in the nerves (pathological and physiological degeneration), deviance, nerve poisons (notably alcohol) and heredity.

By the mid 1890s, then, the disorganization of a nerve or a nervous column following a lesion was commonly called a ‘secondary degeneration’. What seems to have occurred here was not a more precise agreement on what constituted pathological degeneration (as opposed to the physiological reaction of degeneration) because of more detailed description (although this was occurring) but the achievement of a consensus to call a degeneration what was previously variously called a disintegration, dissolution, coagulation and so on. Secondary degeneration was a large taxonomic category covering peripheral nerves and spinal tracts and had a vast array of causes: embolic, haemorrhagic, tumours, poisons etc. That is, pathological nervous degeneration was not only found in the clinical diseases characterized by social or moral inadequacy - psychiatric disorders, syphilis, alcoholism, etc.- but in many disorganizations of action following an insult to the nervous system. Alcohol and alcoholism in particular reveal the difficulties of making generalizations about ideas of the causes and effects of degeneration. Alcohol was often invoked as a poison capable of causing degeneration of the nerve, and in turn setting in motion the degeneration of a family. Contrariwise alcoholism could be a late hereditary manifestation of degeneration initiated by some other agent acting on the sufferer’s forebears.' (464-466)

Cites C. Ramalingam, 'Dust Plate, Retina, Photograph: Imaging on Experimental Surfaces in Early Nineteenth-Century Physics', Science in Context 28 (3) (2015), pp. 317-355.
Description:

'Sherrington's initial foray into the study of visual sensations, published in 1897, relied on an illusion-generating device in the shape of a multi-colored disc that could be rotated to produce the sensation of a single color. This suggested a direct parallel between two phenomena that had been current amongst philosophers of optics since the eighteenth century (Wade 2005, 112–116; Mannoni [1994] 2000, 204–212). These were studies relating on the one hand to the shortest time that an eye could be exposed to a flash of light and an associated light-sensation be experienced, and on the other to the production of a sense of continuous experience via repeated exposure to radically different visual stimuli. Regarding the first of these, eighteenth- and especially nineteenth-century natural philosophers had come to concern themselves with a wide range of phenomena that occurred over very short intervals of time. The nature of sparks, bubbles, and vibrations (to give three amongst many possible examples) were interrogated using tools designed for the visual “fixing” of transient phenomena (Ramalingam 2015; Canales 2009, chap. 5; Schaffer 2004, esp. 170–177).' (453-454)

Cites C. Ramalingam, 'The Most Transitory of Things: Talbot and the Science of Instantaneous Vision', in William Henry Fox Talbot: Beyond Photography (Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 245-268.
Description:

'drawing on the optical studies of the 1830s, the physicist Ogden Rood had in 1893 presented what he considered method by which colours might be differentiated according to their 'reflecting power.' Spinning a circular disc on which alternating bands of light and shade had been painted, Rood measured the rate of rotation required to eliminate the sense of intermingling or 'flicker' between them (Rood 1893. For context see Ramalingam 2013, 252-257).'

Cites C. Wassmann, '”Picturesque Incisiveness”: Explaining the Celebrity of James’s Theory of Emotion', Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences 50 (2) (2014), pp. 166-188.
Description:

'The vital body played a critical role in James’s understanding of emotion. In a phrase that had strong parallels with Bergson’s protoplasmic conception of life, James referred to the body as a ‘sounding board’ through which emotions were conveyed and experienced (Wassmann 2014, 173-174. See also Deigh 2014).

 

'James challenged the physiological psychological claim that emotions could be identified with a specific part or region of the body or nervous system. Though Wundt for example accorded a greater role to emotion in the perceptual process that either Spencer or Bain, he had like them contended that it was primarily a property of the brain. Emotion (Gefül) for Wundt was not simply a report of the vital situation of the body, as James claimed, but in fact caused change within it. Emotion in this latter sense could be a means by which the body became passive to the nervous mind, and controlled by it (Wassmann 2014, 169-171). For James in contrast, emotion was the bodily accompaniment of external sensation, and as such constituted an active component of perception itself.'

 

'That Sherrington was during the first decades of the twentieth century recognised as having published one of the most incisive studies to cast doubt on the scientific plausibility of James’s theory (Wassmann 2014, 178-179) should therefore be read as having significance beyond the immediate claims that it made concerning James himself.'

 

'James’s Harvard colleague Walter B. Cannon’s Bodily Changes in Pain Hunger Fear And Rage (1915), a publication that set the tone for subsequent physiological work in the field, relied on kymographic recordings almost to the exclusion of other forms of evidence. This work re-affirmed Sherrington’s contention regarding the continuation of emotional expression following the dissociation of the brain from the body. Further, it compounded objections to James’s theory: quite different emotions, Cannon contended, produce physiologically similar effects; the physiological processes that accompanied emotional experience did not act quickly enough to provide ‘sensory’ information; and even when such visceral changes did in fact take place, the relevant emotion was not according to Cannon necessarily experienced (Wassmann 2014, 179-180; See also Dror 2014).'

Cites C.D. Green, 'Scientific Objectivity and E.B. Tichener’s Experimental Psychology', Isis 101 (4) (2010), pp. 697-721.
Description:

'Sherrington spoke for many physiologists when he noted that in discussion of the results of experiments on emotion involving the manipulation of animals’ nervous systems ‘we are... hopelessly cut off from introspective help’ (Sherrington 1900, 330). Psychologists, and especially psychiatric practitioners, of course experienced a far more ambiguous relation to introspection and indeed intuition as investigative modes. But even here discussion decreasingly focused on the personal experience of those who instigated lines of inquiry, and increasingly appealed to self-reports of experiment participants selected for their observational acuity alongside technical recording or measurement of bodily response (e.g. Engstrom 2004, Ch. 5; Green 2010).'

Cites C.S. Sherrington, 'Break-Shock Reflexes and 'Supramaximal' Contraction-Response of Mammalian Nerve-Muscle to Single Shock Stimuli', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 92 (646) (1921), pp. 245-258.
Description:

' That Sherrington ended his scientific engagement with experimental devices designed to produce sensory effects around 1906 should not be taken as evidence that cinematographs had decreasing significance for physiological practitioners during the first two decades of the twentieth century. As Hannah Landecker and others have shown, it was for their recording and representational rather than their stimulatory capacities that these tools were most prominently adopted. During the first decades of the twentieth century, cinematographs were frequently deployed in attempts to inscribe and represent the motile aspects of life. Such interests were accompanied by further innovations in cinematographic tools themselves. For example, at the Institut Marey, Charles-Émile François-Franck and Lucien Bull developed means of recording and projecting living nature in three dimensions, and adapted celluloid film for the creation of highly sensitive myographic equipment (Bull 1910; Cartwright 1995, 40-46). During the 1920s, Sherrington and the group of his students and colleagues associated with the Oxford laboratory of physiology would adapt these latter tools to their 'optical myograph' studies of minute muscle movements (Sherrington 1921, 245-246). Such studies constituted a re-assertion of the representational over the stimulatory possibilities that cinematographic devices afforded.'

 

Relevant passage from Sherrington:

 

'The registration of the myograph movement has been by optical projection on a travelling photographic plate, time being recorded on the plate by a rotary shadow-marker of the pattern devised by Mr. Bull, of the Institut Marey, Paris.' (245)

Cites C.S. Sherrington, 'Experimentation on Emotion', Nature 62 (1900), pp. 328-331.
Description:

'Sherrington’s emotion studies centred on only a single kymographic recording: that of the changing pressure of the femoral artery of a dog that he had vivisected whilst a visitor to Mosso’s laboratory (Dror 1999a, 215-216).  The single line traced across the page, a comparatively flat set of undulations interrupted by a dramatic increase in magnitude in their centre, showed what Sherrington claimed to be direct evidence that emotions were not psychological representations of bodily conditions at all. Rather, Sherrington contended that emotions (which he defined as ‘feelings... excited not by a simple unelaborated sensation, but by a group or train of ideas’) played an active role in the production of bodily effects (Sherrington 1900b, 328. Cf. Dror 2006, 129-130).'

 

'Sherrington’s study had both normative and epistemic influence on subsequent physiological investigations relating to affect. In presenting his studies, he had related a further set of experiments on ‘spinal’ dogs (ie. dogs which had had the nerves communicating from the body to the brain severed), in which he drew inferences regarding their emotional states from their behaviours in his Liverpool laboratory (Sherrington, 1900a, 396-403). Taken together, he contended, these studies precluded the possibility that ‘higher’ emotions could be associated with anything other than cerebral processes. Whether or not the experience of emotion preceded the cerebral change, or the two were concomitant, it seemed clear to him that they were phenomena that did not proceed from an originally non-cerebral (i.e. visceral) change (Sherrington 1900b, 330; Sherrington [1906] 1947, 256-269).'

 

'Kymographic studies thus contributed to the replacement of the broad-ranging academic discussions of emotions and passions of the nineteenth century with the narrow, highly-focused contributions of a small community of recognised physiological and psychological specialists during the twentieth. Whilst the study of the relations of emotions to bodily processes was in Sherrington’s view one of the ‘points where physiology and psychology touch’ (Sherrington [1906] 1947, 257), the place of introspection in these fields was less certain. Sherrington spoke for many physiologists when he noted that in discussion of the results of experiments on emotion involving the manipulation of animals’ nervous systems ‘we are... hopelessly cut off from introspective help’ (Sherrington 1900b, 330).'

Cites C.S. Sherrington, 'Note on the Spinal portion of some Ascending Degenerations', Journal of Physiology 14 (4-5) (1893), pp. 255-302.
Description:

'the mode in which Sherrington presented his work owed as much to the formulae, tables and calculations of the Cavendish physicists as it did to the anatomic accuracy of his Cambridge mentors. Rather than present lavish illustrations of his nerve investigations, as had Gaskell, Sherrington supplied tables of response measurements, graphs of reaction-intensities, and introduced grids with which he might reduce the complexity of nervous anatomy (fig. 1). His study addressing the pioneering histological work of Angelo Ruffini replaced the latter's all-encompassing hand-drawn delineations with a series of microphotographs (fig. 2) (Sherrington 1893; Sherrington 1894).'

Cites C.S. Sherrington, 'On the Anatomical Constitution of Nerves of Skeletal Muscles; with Remarks on Recurrent Fibres in the Ventral Spinal Nerve-root', Journal of Physiology 17 (3-4) (1894), pp. 210-258.
Description:

'the mode in which Sherrington presented his work owed as much to the formulae, tables and calculations of the Cavendish physicists as it did to the anatomic accuracy of his Cambridge mentors. Rather than present lavish illustrations of his nerve investigations, as had Gaskell, Sherrington supplied tables of response measurements, graphs of reaction-intensities, and introduced grids with which he might reduce the complexity of nervous anatomy (fig. 1). His study addressing the pioneering histological work of Angelo Ruffini replaced the latter's all-encompassing hand-drawn delineations with a series of microphotographs (fig. 2) (Sherrington 1893; Sherrington 1894).'

Cites D. Fitzgerald and F. Callard, 'Social Science and Neuroscience beyond Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements', Theory, Culture & Society 32 (1) (2015), pp. 3-32.
Description:

'On the 26th of May 1911, the philosopher Henri Bergson [note: 'Hyperlinks to a digital writing and database tool ('CSlide': https://cslide.medsci.ox.ac.uk/) have been added throughout this paper. This approach to the organization and presentation of historical material is intended as a contribution to ongoing experimental investigation into the significance of digital technologies for scholarship. For examples relevant to the history of science, technology and medicine see Nawrotski and Dougherty 2013, and 'The Virtual Laboratory: Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life' (Max Planck Institut für Wissengeschaftsgeschichte, c. 2001-), available at http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/index_html (accessed 28/10/2016). For recent discussion of experimentation as an investigative approach in the humanities see e.g. Fitzgerald and Callard 2015. The relation between the present organizational and presentational mode and the topic at hand emerges throughout the discussion. Enquiries regarding editorial access to CSlide are welcome at quick.tr@gmail.com.'] gave a lecture to a packed hall at the University of Oxford.'

Cites D. Rees, 'Down in the Mouth: Faces of Pain', in R.G. Boddice (ed.), Pain and Emotion in Modern History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 164-186.
Description:

'kymographic traces cast space, rather than time, as reducible to an effectively non-existent point. Thus whereas the successive photographic and pictorial representations such as those of Duchenne and Mantegazza appeared (deceptively according to Bergson) to capture outward expressions in their visual entirety (Moruno 2016, esp. 150-154; Rees, 2014), kymographs charted the vibratory fluctuations of single bodily points along extended uninterrupted temporal paths.'