Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science by Peter Pesic (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science by Peter Pesic
• Myles W. Jackson

Peter Pesic. Sounding Bodies: Music and the Making of Biomedical Science. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2022. 408 pp. Ill. $55.00 ( 978-0-262-04635-0).

There have been a number of works over the years in the history of science that detail the importance of music to the development of physical theory and experimentation. The same has not been true of the role of music in the biological and medical sciences. Peter Pesic's work goes a long way in filling that substantial void. By tracing the development of biology and medicine over two and a half millennia, Pesic convincingly demonstrates that while the influences of music and sound were certainly substantial, they were rather different from those that shaped the physical sciences.

Pesic's tome is divided into four parts based on themes, which are organized chronologically. Part I takes us to the ancient origins of the quadrivium. Pythagorean thought, for example, shaped the rational medicine of the Hippocrates and his followers, who insisted that numbers regulated critical moments in the development of diseases in the body. Plato considered medicine as a paradigm for the practice of philosophy as it could heal the souls suffering from ignorance and delusion. Herophilus linked musical ratios with the health and illness of the pulse. And subsequent scholars, such as Galen, elucidated upon the connection between musical ratios and pulses. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, music was seen as a treatment of melancholia. In addition to this important medical practice, the theoretical link between astronomy and music was forged by Robert Grosseteste, Marsilio Ficino, and of course Johannes Kepler, who famously argued that musical harmony was the essence of "the soul," which animated humans, animals, the earth, and even the cosmos.

Part II details what Pesic refers to as "the sonic turn." This section details how the human body was no longer seen as being composed of the four humors but rather was viewed as comprising fibers and organs that could respond to sonic vibrations. In short, sound became for scholars a powerful resource in reconceptualizing how living organisms respond to stimuli. By the eighteenth century, sound became an important diagnostic tool for a number of physicians. For example, Austrian physician Leopold Auenbrugger invented the technique of percussion, and the nineteenth-century French physician René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec, who was a skilled flautist and carved his own wooden flutes, invented the stethoscope and the technique of clinical auscultation.

Part III addresses the ways in which sounds were employed in understanding and treating mental illness. On the one hand, Gaetano Brunetti wonderfully captured the musical fascination with mania, as depicted in his Il Maniático symphony of 1781. On the other hand, the German physician Franz Mesmer, who invented a regime of therapeutics known as animal magnetism—and later mesmerism—used [End Page 512] music to bring about fluctuations in his patients' mental and physical states. The French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot—whose students included Sigmund Freud, Alfred Binet, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, and Joseph Babinski—used a tam-tam, which caused his patients to fall into a deep, hypnotic sleep.

Part IV delves into how sounds were used beyond the limited range of human hearing in order to investigate natural phenomena, such as the nocturnal flight of bats and the importance of ultrasound for clinical diagnoses. Pesic investigates the renowned studies of Luigi Galvani on the relationship between electricity and muscle activity, Emil Du Bois-Reymond's work on muscle contraction and electricity, and Hermann von Helmholtz's measurement of the velocity of electric current through frog muscles by using tuning forks. Twentieth-century sonic technologies, as Pesic informs us, were employed to investigate nerve functions, and sonic devices rendered nerve action audible and played a critical role in isolating and locating a single neuron by amplifying its output initially through a telephone and later through a loudspeaker. There are a number of music and sound examples found throughout the text that link to a website so that the reader can hear the sounds while reading.

While some scholars will miss...