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.

Cited by T. Quick, 'Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1897-1922', Science in Context 30 (4), pp. 423-474.
Description:

 Sherrington's work was well received. As James Mussell highlights, his papers came to be held up as exemplars of effective scientific communication (Mussell 2009, paragraphs 17-22).'

 

Relevant passage from Mussell:

 

'The Journal of Physiology ensured Cambridge became the centre for physiological research in Britain.  No other journal in English was exclusively devoted to physiology and Foster ensured that few other journals were as widely distributed.  However, its production costs, the expense incurred by postage, and the burdensome free list meant that it had little chance of ever gathering a profit.  When Langley assumed the proprietorship of the Journal in 1894 and succeeded Foster as editor, the printers, C.J. Clay and Sons, became the publishers, distributing the Journal from the Cambridge University Press warehouse in London, and Langley courted some more advertisers, including Burroughs, Wellcome and Co., manufacturers of industrial and research chemicals.  In 1892, citing the increased number of submissions, Foster had ended the practice of annual volumes, instead issuing them whenever the journal reached 500 pages. (Anonymous [Michael Foster], unpaginated insert)  This ensured subscriptions came in more frequently, but Langley also regulated distribution by publishing numbers more or less monthly.  By further extending the Journal’s assistant editors from thirteen to twenty, ensuring each was either a professor or held a doctorate, Langley advertised the institutional qualifications of physiologists while connecting individual institutions through textual networks.

Physiology offered standardized, mathematized descriptions of function that rendered the complexity of natural form as variation upon the surface of an underlying, comprehensible order.  The reorientation of such abstraction as truth was accomplished through careful selection and preparation of specimens and the skilled operations of the researcher.  Karen Knorr Cetina (116) suggests the “laboratory is an enhanced environment which improves upon the natural order in relation to the social order”, a space that allows aspects of phenomena to become apparent and so meaningful according to the social codes of the scientists.  Textual accounts of laboratory practice, in an attempt to reproduce the space of the laboratory, did something similar.  Just as laboratory practice elided the interventions of the researcher in order to present the reality of natural function, so the textual accounts of physiological experiments elided the subjectivity of the narrator so that it appeared that the phenomena were narrating their own actions.

The seeming deferral of narrative agency from narrator to phenomena being narrated was itself a narrative effect created by the author and enforced by the editor. Charles Scott Sherrington, who had studied under Foster and Langley at Cambridge from 1881-3, recorded Langley’s editorial work in his entry for the Dictionary of National Biography:

Langley saw to it that every paper issued in his Journal made not only a solid contribution to knowledge, but maintained the standard of form and style desired, saying what it had to say with succinctness, perfect lucidity, and a minimum of speculative discussion. He would, where he judged fit, almost entirely recast a paper, even of a distinguished contributor. (479)

According to Sherrington – a published poet who was very aware of the role of language in science (Smith, 297-304) – this set “a pattern in the presentation of scientific work which soon provided a boon to every reader wherever such material is used.” (479)  Universality, here, was achieved by reducing the contingent aspects of both the experiment and its telling so that both processes revealed something that was always waiting to be found.  Laboratory conditions and practices ensured experiments were repeatable, testifying to the continued presence of the phenomena in the natural world; in their textual representations the agency of the narrative subject was elided so that the presence of the phenomena could appear to transcend the narrative that constituted their revelation.

A paper by Sherrington published in the Journal shortly after Langley’s assumption of the editorship demonstrates how textual accounts of the gendered space of the laboratory elided the narrator as subject in deference to the emergence of physiological functions from the complexity of the natural unknown.  “On the Anatomical Constitution of Nerves of Skeletal Muscles; with Remarks on Recurrent Fibres in the Ventral Spinal Nerve-Root”, published in 1894, was part of Sherrington’s investigation into the nervous action that drives the “knee jerk”: the automatic reflex by the leg when the knee is gently struck.  It opens by outlining its two research questions – 1. in the quadricep and hamstring, which of the nerves are afferent (i.e. lead back to the central nervous system)? 2. is the nerve that is involved in the “knee jerk” constituted differently from those in the quadricep that are not? – before leading to a list of seventeen conclusions.  In setting out his two questions in the initial portion of the paper but not revealing the answers until the end, Sherrington implies that this is knowledge concealed by nature while the reality was of course that he concealed it for his own narrative purposes.  By keeping his conclusions until the end, Sherrington creates the illusion of objectivity, of the nerves revealing themselves over the course of his paper.  Just as aspects of the nerves emerge as objects of physiological discourse in the laboratory – and so paradoxically become part of nonhuman nature – so, in the textual account of this emergence, Sherrington hides his own agency as narrator to allow the nerves to seemingly narrate their own appearance in language.

The bulk of the paper consisted of accounts and discussions of a series of experiments designed to ascertain the properties of various nerve fibres.  These experiments – severing the nerve, recording rates of degeneration, measuring their length and diameter, counting the fibres in each nerve bundle, comparing different nerves in the same and different parts of the body – were all highly artificial scenarios conceived as a stage upon which the nerves could perform unaided by the experimenter.  Even the selection of specimens was part of this.  Sherrington drew his samples from three monkeys and nineteen cats but, even though there are quantifiable differences between the nervous systems of the two species, he disregarded them in favour of what they have in common.  He also ignored the individuality of each animal: they are referred to in the singular as “Cat” or “Monkey” as if they were representative of their entire species. (Sherrington, 223)  By ignoring the differences between individual specimens – and at one point he even compared them to a human foetus with spina bifida preserved in the Museum of St Thomas’s Hospital – Sherrington posited the existence of an essential entity beneath superficial diversity.  His experiments in the laboratory were intended to give this entity the opportunity to manifest itself; in the textual account, this ontological manifestation is represented through a provisional abdication of narrative authority.  For instance, Sherrington at one point seeks to disprove the proposition, suggested by a rival, that certain nerve fibres “may be recurrent and derived from other peripheral nerves”, by providing experimental accounts as evidence:

Cat. Femoral (ant. crural) trunk cut at emergence from psoas muscle.  Central stump 21 days later showed no degenerate fibres; in peripheral stump and branches to quadriceps I could find no myelinate fibres that were sound.

Cat. Sciatic trunk cut above quadratus femoris. 21 days allowed for degeneration. No degenerate fibres detected proximal to trauma, no sound fibres detected distal to it. Similar experiment; union prevented by turning cut ends of trunk up and down. 88 days allowed for degeneration. No sound myelinate fibres in distal trunk and branches. (Sherrington 220)

The hand of the experimenter is here elided so that the nerves can take action:  Sherrington, as experimenter, is indistinguishable from the other conditions that provide the context within which the nerves might act (or not).  As narrative agent, Sherrington represented himself as a neutral witness, simply recording what occurred.  This objectivity, however, was the result of the conferral of narrative authority from the nerves.  As nonhuman agents the nerves, of course, could not narrate their actions and, just as the instruments were designed to record their traces in the laboratory, so Sherrington, as narrating subject, is reduced to another instrument, authorized to narrate on their behalf. (Latour, 132)

Like the photomicrographs or the columns of numerical data that were published as part of his experimental account, these passages appear to bear the direct impressions of phenomena rather than offer mediated accounts of them.  Unlike the usual rhetorical description of scientific practice, in which a male scientist reveals the secrets of a feminine nature, here a much more powerful textual situation is enacted.  By removing himself from the text as narrator, Sherrington granted nature the power to reveal its – not her – own secrets.  However, nature did not speak for itself and the practices that permitted this to happen – both textual and experimental – were complex and required vast resources.  Sherrington had to obtain a laboratory, staff (he credited his laboratory assistant, his colleagues, the museum curator at St Thomas”s, and the technician who produced his images), and specimens in order to undertake his research.  He had to carefully collate his results, create a narrative, and set forth clear experimental detail.  This textual account had then to be submitted to a journal, be refereed, edited and published.  The masculinity that underpinned this discourse was not simply the result of men talking to men within scientific culture.  Although this permitted a substantial elision of difference, in which masculinity became the default gendered subject position and, to some extent, facilitated trust, it was not enough to produce the necessary objectivity that would allow natural phenomena to speak for themselves.  This objectivity, whether achieved in the laboratory or represented in texts, was predicated upon the absence of a gendered body achieved through the use of an extensive repertoire of cultural resources.  For a scientific paper to be successful it had to convince the reader of the autonomous reality of what it described.  This, in turn, was dependent upon the reader’s recognition of resources that made it possible.' (paragraphs 17-22)