On flinching : theatricality and scientific looking from Darwin to shell-shock
The end of the nineteenth century is often associated with the rise of objectivity and its ideal in aloof observe. Yet scientific experiments continued to demand emotional, even theatrical, relationships between scientist and his subject. On Flinching explores moments when scientific observers recoiled in disgust, winced at the sight of an animal's pain or were started by sudden noises shedding new light on how late Victorians though about looking as itself an emotional performance. Each chapter takes a single experiments as its starting point Charles Darwin's recoil from a lunging puff-adder in 1872 physiology David Ferrier, efforts to make monkeys finch 1881 neurology Henry Head's wince during his self experiment in nerve regeneration 1903-7 and psychologist Arthur Hurst's exploratory treatment of shell shock in 1918. Moving back and forth between the worlds of science and theatre, Tiffany Watt Smith argues that even as science was hardening into its modern disciplines techniques of laboratory looking remained deeply embroiled in the practices-and and problems-of the late Victorian stage. Book jacket
History
xii, 245 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
9780198700937, 9780191004353, 0198700938, 0191004359
898325864
Introduction : playing at looking, playing at being seen
Darwin's flinch
Monkey F startled
Henry Head's wince
A convalescent recoils
Afterword : a report to the academy
Appendix : transcription of Ferrier's notebooks regarding experiment F