The spectacle of vision: eye and eyesight in the nineteenth-century scientific press

ABSTRACT This article analyses how nineteenth-century medical science apprehended the eye and its functions. It disputes Jonathan Crary’s claim of the alleged mistrust towards human vision as a source of reliable information from the 1830s onwards. It is based on the analysis of scholarly and popular scientific publications from the early 1850s to the first decades of the twentieth century, a typology of sources overlooked by Crary as well as by most of the works in the field of Visual Studies. It focuses on French documents because of the progress undertaken by medical research on the eyesight in the country at the time and the number and scope of both scientific and popular publications. In the first part, I analyse the new set of knowledge about the anatomy and physiology of the eye that physicians developed at the time – notably through the use of newly introduced instruments such as the ophthalmoscope and the ophthalmometer. In the second part, I describe how contemporary medical research led to the acknowledgment of the subjectivity of visual perceptions and the fragile nature of human visual capacities. In the last section, I show how, through a process of classification and rationalisation of the newly acquired knowledge, physicians managed to reinstate the objective character of visual perceptions on the basis of their research.