Hearing Science in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Hearing, Balance and Communication, 2020

Purpose: To discover the widest collection of anatomo-pathological findings published in the XVII century, Theophile Bonet's Sepulchretum sive Anatomia Practica (1679), the forerunner of Morgagni's De Sedibus et Causis Morborum (1761). Particular attention has been paid to the paragraphs relating to otology and audiology. Method: Section 19 of Book I of the Sepulchretum (entitled De Aurium Affectibus) contains the description of all the ears pathologies found during autopsies performed at that time. Results: The annotations in this section provide an idea of the concepts and the knowledge that physicians had of otological and audiological syndromes in the XVII century. Conclusion: The Sepulchretum was fundamental in the development of modern medicine, as demonstrated by the similar treaties that followed Bonet's work.

Presented at the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting, Milwaukee, November 6, 2014 Few notions have offered as much insight into the diversity of positions regarding the ontology of sound and aurality in the French Enlightenment as the idea of sympathetic resonance. An exemplary version is the one embodied in the metaphor of the human harpsichord, famously explored by Denis Diderot in D'Alembert's Dream. Following cutting-edge eighteenth-century physiology, Diderot invites us to imagine the sensitive organs in human beings as constituted by fibers that resonate like the strings of a harpsichord. For Diderot, we can conceive the relation of bodies to ideas as that of vibrating strings to sound. Not only do the sensitive fibers of our bodies produce ideas as they vibrate, but also, just like the strings of a harpsichord, sympathetic resonance makes adjacent strings vibrate in turn. " If this phenomenon can be observed in musical strings that are separate and inert, why should we not expect to find it wherever living points are connected with each other—why not in sensitive fibers that are continuous? " Diderot thus synthesizes Ancient Greek conceptions of harmony and sympathy with eighteenth-century scientific advances in the physics of sound and the physiology of the body. By comparing resonant strings to organic fibers, Diderot finds matter to be sufficient to account for all sensibility and thought, without needing to presuppose an additional thinking substance, a soul, or a god. In this way, he issues a decidedly materialist challenge to the Cartesian dualism of mind and body and the mechanicist philosophies that followed him. In this crucial moment in the history of aurality, sound and body were figured through each other. This mutual figuration called upon physiology, physics and philosophy in the production of complex entities that effectively redistributed the boundaries between the social and the natural, as well as those between the human and the non-human. I suggest that the current ontological turn, as it is taking place in the fields of anthropology and science and technology studies, STS—and now in musicology—attempts to of 1 7

2013

This article addresses the auditory culture of science and problematizes sonic practices as epistemological practices. In order to deepen our understanding about how scientific knowledge is acquired, represented, and constructed through sound, I discuss case studies from the history of medicine and the life sciences in which sound and listening do not form the objects of scientific observation and reasoning but epistemic tools employed by scientists to produce “sound” scientific facts. First I reassess the question why physicians began to listen to the sounds of the human body in order to diagnose diseases around 1800. After that, I follow late nineteenth-century neurophysiologists who used the electric telephone to study the nervous system by transforming bioelectric currents into sounds. I argue that such acoustemic practices and technologies favorably emerge in the presence of in-visibilities, i.e. situations in which a direct visual observation or representation of the object of study is hindered or impossible. I also show that the success of these practices largely depends on whether or not it is possible to develop the sounds of science into stable frameworks of sonic facts.

Aural surgery is a branch of nineteenth-century medicine and surgery providing specialized treatment for ear diseases. During the 1830s, faced with a “popular prejudice” against the curability of deafness as well as intraprofessional rivalries and continuous accusations of quackery, aurists found their surgical authority questioned and their field’s value threatened. In an attempt to bolster aural surgery’s reputation, in 1841, the aurist John Harrison Curtis (1778–1856) introduced his new diagnostic instrument, the cephaloscope, which could not only improve diagnosis but also provide approaches for regulating aural knowledge, thus strengthening aural surgery’s authority. This article examines the motives underlying Curtis’s introduction of the cephaloscope and the meanings it held for the occupational group at large.

The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

Benjamin Bell is commonly described as 'the father of the Edinburgh school of surgery' 1,2 or 'the first of the Edinburgh scientific surgeons'. 3-5 Are these descriptions justified? His magnum opus, A system of surgery, was heavily criticised by contemporaries for its lack of originality, with one detractor describing him as 'a plagiarist in every thing'. 6 Yet a widely quoted and laudatory review of this work and a flattering biography, both written by Bell's grandson, have together formed the basis of many subsequent historical perspectives. 7 This article examines Bell's background, aims to assess the influence of A system of surgery and reviews his published writings, to establish whether they demonstrate features that would confirm him as a scientific surgeon, and whether the above descriptions are appropriate. Early lIfE and SurgIcal traInIng Benjamin Bell (Figure 1) was born in Dumfries on 6 September 1749, the eldest child of George Bell, who farmed at Woodhouselees, a mile south of the village of Canonbie in Dumfriesshire. In addition to farming, George Bell was involved in a series of business ventures that met with mixed success. This background of modest wealth was to prove important for his son Benjamin in later life, allowing him to visit surgeons in London and Paris and enabling him to take time away from his surgical practice to write a major textbook. The family tradition in agriculture was to re-emerge towards the end of his life. After attending Dumfries Grammar School, Bell was apprenticed to James Hill, a local surgeon. In 1766 he began attending lectures at the Edinburgh Medical School, where his teachers included some of the most innovative and inspiring of their day, such as Alexander Monro secundus (anatomy), John Hope (botany), Joseph Black (chemistry), William Cullen (institutes of medicine) and John Gregory (physic). In November 1767 Bell was appointed dresser in the surgical wards of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. He was clearly ambitious for, the following year, he wrote to his father: 'I am very vexed that I should have omitted letting you know the names Scientific surgeon of the Enlightenment or 'plagiarist in everything': a reappraisal of Benjamin Bell (1749-1806) aBStract The Edinburgh surgeon Benjamin Bell has been regarded as a scientific thinker in the Enlightenment tradition, despite being accused during his lifetime of both plagiarism and a failure to be innovative. Yet subsequent historical accounts regard him much more favourably. A review of his life and work discusses possible explanations for this apparent lack of concordance.

Audiologia&Foniatria - Italian Journal of Audiology and Phoniatrics, 2023

Alfonso Corti was 28 years old when he wrote the first draft of his most famous work (Recherches sur l’organe de l’ouïe des mammifères) while in Paris in 1850, probably at the Sorbonne. His work was published in June of the following year. The human and scientific story of this young medical student is fascinating. He left Pavia, the city of his youth and where he had begun his medical studies, and went to complete them in Vienna, where he graduated. He then continued his studies in several European cities – in Bern, Paris, London, Utrecht, and Würzburg – before completely cutting all his ties with the scientific world to which he had been so dedicated when he was just 32 years of age. The name of Corti quickly became known throughout the world, and synonymous with the organ of hearing, thanks to Joseph Hyrtl and Albert Kölliker, who had been his teachers and mentors. Almost nothing was known about Alfonso Corti as a scholar, however, until the publication of biographical articles by Gottfried Brückner (1913) and Josef Schaffer (1914), and especially the monograph by Bruno Pincherle published in 1932. With this paper coinciding with the bicentenary of Corti’s birth, we wanted to explore this man’s human and scientific history.

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2012

This article examines the importance of sound in medical and musical circles of the French Enlightenment. Sound and listening in medicine were highlighted in 1756 by the Montpellier doctor Théophile de Bordeu, in his work on pulse. Pulse recognition, according to Bordeu, depended not only on the tactile abilities of the doctor but also on his skills in auditory perception. Doctors were required to memorise various acoustical patterns, then match them to the 'live' pulse pattern of the patient perceived during observation. The Enlightened medical physician, like the musician, relied on his ear to communicate knowledge and understanding.

Soundeffects an Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience, 2012

Sound affects and pervades our body in a physical as well as a phenomenological sense: a notion that may sound fairly trivial today. But for a long time in Western history 'sound' was no scientific entity. It was looked upon merely as the lower, material appearance of truly higher forces: of more ephemeral, angel-, spirit-or godlike structures -and later of compositional knowledge. To be interested in sound was to be defamed as being unscientific, noncompositional, unmanly. Which steps were taken historically that gradually gave sound the character of a scientific entity? This article moves along recent science history: since the nineteenth century when the physicality of sound and later the corporeality of sonic experiences were first discovered and tentatively described. Exemplary studies from the science history of acoustics, musicology and anthropology of the senses are analysed and restudied -from Hermann von Helmholtz to Michel Serres.

Music and Letters, 2012

Music and Letters, 93/2 (May 2012), 276-280