人文科学最新文献

In this article, I gloss and bring together two narratives from the cultural history of neuropsychology. First, I explore the theatrical aspects of the practice of the founder of French neurology, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), characterizing his lecture style and diagnostic practice as a dramaturgical or choreological method. Charcot and his peers depicted the neuropathological body as a sensorial assemblage whose expressions and inputs could be charted across the dimensions of time and space, each body acting within an often determinative mise en scène, as in a theater. This echoed Richard Wagner's influential concept of a musico-dramatic Gesamtkunstwerk, or a totalizing combination of diverse actions, sensory inputs, sounds, and responses. I then trace reverberations from Charcot's practice within the theater of his own time and beyond, isolating the main trends. Charcot's lectures, and particularly his famous work on hysteroepilepsy and hypnosis, meant that although he and his peers championed neoclassical performances, their influence was most pronounced upon grotesque cabaretic mime and dance; the semihypnotized performance style of expressionism; the balance of automatism versus conscious reflection promoted by Konstantin Stanislavski; and, above all, the fraught depiction of modern nervous character types and women by Émile Zola and Henrik Ibsen.

This essay proposes that the only publication of the Accademia del Cimento, referred to as Saggi, had as one of its main goals the celebration of the House of Medici's paternity of cutting-edge experiments and instruments during the reign of Grand Duke Ferdinando II. These included Ferdinando II's thermometers and hygrometers, Torricelli's experiment and barometer, and Galileo's pendulum as a clock-regulator. It seems that this agenda went unnoticed, not at the time of its initial circulation, but rather in modern historiography. Christiaan Huygens's challenged invention of the pendulum clock provides a case study to explore the agenda of this publication and the problem of defining an invention in seventeenth-century Europe. This paper presents for the first time the document that attests to when the first specimen of Huygens's clock arrived in Florence, disproving the previously believed date of September 1657. The paper argues that over the last two centuries, this error has made the Medici narratives of this dispute appear inconsistent and marginalized them. In light of this new find, they must be reconsidered.

The 50-degree thermometer currently exhibited at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge (Wh.1116), was originally crafted by skilled Italian glassmakers for the Florentine Accademia del Cimento's activities in the 1650s. Used for early meteorological observations, it remained forgotten for over a century and a half, until Vincenzo Antinori's 1829 rediscovery. Donated by Henry Babbage to the University of Cambridge in 1872, the instrument reflects the wide-ranging approach of James Clerk Maxwell, the first director of the Cavendish Laboratory, who sought to build a collection integrating historical artifacts with experimental apparatus. This paper contextualizes the journey of the artifact, exploring its cultural value across centuries and portraying it as a tangible link between past and present scientific practices.