In this project, I reconstruct an expository illustration reprinted from Psychiatry, a Clinical Treatise on Disease of the Fore-Brain, based upon a Study of its Structure, Functions, and Nutrition (1884) written by Austrian- German psychiatrist Theodor Meynert (1833-1892). The illustration aims to show the mechanism behind conscious movement of the arm based on anatomical structure of a “normal” brain that belongs to an a- historical nameless kid; more specifically it aims to show the medical public the neurohistological basis of how a kid could consciously withdraw their hand or put it beyond the reach of the flame after memorising the sensation of pain. Underlying the image is the assumption that human body movement is reducible to physiology and neurohistology and the separation of body and “soul” is not only possible but also necessary since the “treatment of the soul” is an ideal beyond medical capacity.
I choose pen, pencil, colour pens, a student ID used as ruler, and tracing paper to replicate the visual effects of the original illustration which was possibly made with engraving but I’m not sure about that. The final product looks similar to the original, with slight differences in terms of the details of the brain interior and of the candle. I do not find the technological condition of the medium of the original illustration influencing my understanding of the image due to the simplicity of the particular image I choose, yet in case its medium was an extremely rare one back then, it would prompt me to rethink of its audience.
FIELD NOTE 1 OF 3
Date: 2/13
People Involved: myself
Location: home
Reconstruction conditions: I started to re-construct the image after I hanged out with a friend and came back home from Chinatown. It was a peaceful night.
Time and duration of reconstruction:
1-1:30am
Equipment and tools used:
Tracing paper, pen, pencil, and a lamp for lighting.
Subjective factors, e.g., how things smelled/looked/felt:
Overall the tracing process is quite therapeutic, which reminds of those coloring books that provide shapes of images and allow you to do the coloring. The head I traced looks a bit eccentric and I like how irregular it is, almost delivering a sense ofcult. Interestingly, cultish images usually express the resistance against the normal and mundane and reach for the exotic, the polemic, and the eccentric, while this image is originally a scientific illustration that shows the mechanism behind how a normal kid moves his arm.
Prior knowledge that you have:
Not much but the image reminds me of my middle school science class where I was taught the reflexes (反射). I studied science in Chinese back then so it is a bit hard for me to quickly grasp what is going on in English. Here’s a definition I find online that corresponds to my vague memory
of what I was taught back then: 反射是指在神经系统的参与下，人体对内外环境刺激所作出的有规律性的反 应.神经调节的基本方式是反射，反射活动的结构基础称为反射弧，包括感受器、传入神经、神经中枢、传出神经和效 应器.反射必须通过反射弧来完成，缺少任何一个环节反射活动都不能完成，如传出神经受损，即使有适宜的刺激人体 也不会作出反应，因为效应器接收不到神经传来的神经冲动.缩手反射的反射弧是感受器→传入神经→脊髓内的神经中 枢→传出神经→效应器，反射的路径较短;痛觉的形成是感受器产生的神经冲动通过传入神经传到神经中枢，在经过脊 髓的白质上行传到大脑皮层，才能形成感觉，反射的路径较长。”
The examples given by textbook/in class were knee jerk reflex and the candle heat one, i.e. how one first withdraws one’s hands to avoid a burning candle’s heat and then has the sensation of pain formed in brain and such reaction is due to the mechanism of reflexes.
Reflection on your practice:
While doing the tracing, I was wondering if I was trying to restrain my own expression and tracing the original lines as accurately as possible and was recalling the epistemic virtue of mechanic objectivity that Daston and Galison summarize in Objectivity. Yet I’m not exactly sure if I
should identify the historical diagram as a product ofmechanical objectivity, since while the image is not so much about the creativity and subtle observation of the artist-author as about diagram showing a presumably scientific and objective mechanism with complex mapping, the image seems to serve the self-conscious purpose of illustrating the mechanism behind the conscious movement of the arm applying to “normally functioning” brain; that is to say, given reliability of this kind of identification/pathway mapping and mechanism explanation, medical practitioners would be able to find out which part is malfunctioning if a patient is unable to move her arm to avoid burning heat and thus encounters health issues. In other words, if this illustration could pragmatically serve medical purposes, then how much does it really matter how we locate the epistemic virtue behind its construction in the history of epistemology? (so yes this is a question arisen from the process: how should one weigh the practical and the theoretical when thinking about the interpretation of a scientific illustration? While I’m supposed to be cautious about the normative implication of the illustration and whose embodied cognition the illustrated mechanism represents, I find myself more curious about the social-medical impact of Meynert’s theory, and I assume that the politics of representation should reveal itself in the social-medical impact too; differently put, the theoretical and the practical are not necessarily in antagonism.)
Photos/video documenting process:
Before you start, provide answers to the following:
• What is this image for?
It serves as an illustration explaining the mechanism of a conscious movement of the arm and this illustrated explanation sort of reduces body movement to anatomical structure of the brain and its pathways and topography. More, it implies that the illustrated mechanism belongs to a “normal” body that is oblivious to historical-cultural context.
Where is the image coming from? What do we know of its source? Its audience?
It is reprinted from Psychiatry, a Clinical Treatise on Disease of the Fore-Brain, based upon a Study of its Structure, Functions, and Nutrition (1884) written by Austrian- German psychiatrist Theodor Meynert (1833-1892). Meynert aims to establish psychiatry as an exact science based on anatomy and defines his work as parting from the unrealistic ambition to treat human soul but instead delineating the bounds of accurate scientific investigation. His work was most likely intended for trained researchers in and around brain science in his time.
Materials & measurements
Can we identify all the materials needed to make it?
Honestly I don’t know how to identify the materials. I don’t think it would require engraving, woodcut, photography, etc. to make this image back then; I would guess that it was made with ink.
Are there multiple varieties of tools used to make it? What is the stability of a material over time?
The material seems to be stable and the image does not aim to show much subtlety in terms of texture, which makes it extra suitable to be reprinted.
Tools & equipment
What tools are necessary?
Pen, pencil. (Later I realize that color pens are necessary too.)
What are the best ways to replicate the effects of inaccessible tools?
I find pen relatively sufficient to replicate the visual effects of ink; in terms of cultural/semiotic implications of the materiality of the original image, I’m not sure visual similarity could do any justice.
How do technological changes impact our interpretation/expectation of the image? (e.g., engraving, woodcut, silver chromate)
I would not be surprised if I see such a image in my middle school science textbook (indeed I might have seen a lot), so I would cautiously say that the interpretation of the image I choose to re-construct may not be very susceptible to technological changes, but if the image was made with a material/technology that has a ostentatious historical imprint, then it would draw my attention to the medium and its cultural implication.
FIELD NOTE 2 OF 3
Date: 2/15
People Involved: myself
Location: home
Reconstruction conditions: I started to re-construct the image after I came back home from the joint house church with Manado HC and an adult house church named Far East. This is a very special valentine’s day, without a date but hanging out with many friends and meeting new people. I was feeling blessed when I stared at my yet to finish reconstruction.
Time and duration of reconstruction:
1-1:20am
Equipment and tools used:
Tracing paper, pen, pencil, color pens (red, green and blue), eraser and a lamp for lighting.
Subjective factors, e.g., how things smelled/looked/felt:
When I applied colors to trace the lines that are in color in the original print, the whole process of tracing and re-constructing the image feels official. Last time I was more like aesthetically tracing the kid in abstract lines and trying to be accurate with the shapes; this time, paying attention to the arrows, symbols and numbers, I feel myself more in the position of a cartographer of the body. Nothing gives offa smell but the colors (red, blue and green) make me happy, weirdly and simply, and maybe that’s just because the colors delivers a sense of vivaciousness even if the image is to show something mechanical behind an organic movement. Now that I’m doing the tracing allover again, I feel familiar with the drawn kid, even if this is a nameless a-historical kid. And I’m also generally happy that I’m not doing typical schoolwork that mostly demands my intellect but actually exercising my hand to trace and draw.
Prior knowledge that you have:
I looked into the English translation of the Meynert’s original text and also referred to Marx, Otto M. “Nineteenth-Century Medical Psychology: Theoretical Problems in the Work of Griesinger, Meynert, and Wernicke.” Isis 61, no. 3 (1970): 355-70.
Meynert hopes to show:
1. How the unconscious movement of withdrawing the hand from the flame works: a) The movement is conducted through an impulse conveyed from the injured part by the centripetal tract 1 (the blue one), and transmitted through a spinal-cord centre along the path 2 that withdraws the hand from the flame.
2. How the brain memorizes the situation so that the kid could avoid burning the hand in the future by putting the arm beyond the reach of the flame: a) The records of the withdrawal act will be transmitted to the cortex through the agency of the projection-systems. The transmission can be broken down into:
i. The visual image of the flame from the eye along the tract 3A.
ii. A painful sensation from the injured part along the track 4B.
iii. As a result of the reflex movement, the innervation-sensation C. acts through the centrifugally-conducting tract 5 (the red line) upon the central origin of those anterior roots which, through reflex excitation, protected the arm against the flame. The central origin of the anterior roots is controlled first by primary motor impulses carried to it by the posterior spinal roots, and secondly by secondary motor impulses emanating from the cerebral cortex. Since the centre C. is connected with the association-bundles CB., CA., and the latter with one another by the bundle BA., the child need not burn the hand again before guarding against the flame since the memory of the flame and its effect (through association with the centre C. in which the painful sensation has been stored) will suffice to initiate a movement that will put the arm beyond the reach of the flame.
(P.S. I’m confused what to make of the green line. I saw a picture online that shows certain lines in green but Meynert does not make any expository remark on it. )
Reflection on your practice:
After I realized that I’m feeling happy because I’m not doing the typical school work, say reading a paper or writing one, I thought, actually, maybe reconstructing an image is not that different from reconstructing an argument. If I’m to read a paper, then, presumably the paper must have a thesis and with some variances (which depends on the academic discipline) presents itself with an argument, and to make sure that I do have a good grasp what the problematic the author deals with is, I can’t just indulge in my intuition, free association and, in general, aesthetic pleasure (if any) or take episode/quote out of its context; rather, I have to reconstruct the argument and trace what kind of evidence the author uses to support her points and detect the assumption from which the argument shoots off. Now that my task is to reconstruct an image, I still cannot simply get aesthetic pleasure out ofit and imagine what the visual form could represent; rather, I have to find out the historical context of the image and understand how and why the image was created and whom the intended audience was. Indeed, that is also what the field note template indicates. Thinking along this line, I find the assignment making more sense than it initially did and I feel more motivated to detect the assumptions underlying the image. Also, quite similar to artwork visual analysis, this assignment requires one’s close looking/observing, contemplating about the relationship between “artistic” practice and what is being represented and finding the right language to describe what does the image do. Actually, if one takes a look at western modern art history, one will see how minimalist sculpture with its geometric form, in a similar manner to the epistemic virtue of “mechanical objectivity”, tries to repress the idiosyncratic of the self-expressions of the artist (e.g. the autobiographical mark, the gestural brushstroke, abstract-expressionism in general) and instead elevates neutrality and objectivity. It seems that the epistemic history of the public discourse of art parallels that of the public discourse of science, not in terms of exact historical period but the rationale behind the evolvement of analytical type.
Photos/video documenting process:
Questions that arise:
I wonder if there is any way to make the context of illustration more visually obvious or make it clear why I should care about the problematic the illustration deals with. For instance, can the visual illustration tell me why I should care about how comes that a kid withdraws his hand when near a burning candle? What is the necessity of learning the intricate mapping of the anatomical structure of the brain? Who is the kid being illustrated (age, sex, ethnicity, character, etc.)?
FIELD NOTE 3 OF 3
Date: 2/17
People Involved: myself
Location: Brochstein and Fondren
Reconstruction conditions: The re-constructed image was almost finished last time but I postponed finishing this field note because of some health issues (mostly sleeping disorder and depression).
Time and duration of reconstruction:
2/15 1:20-1:30 am
Equipment and tools used:
Tracing paper, pen, pencil, color pens (red, green and blue), eraser and a lamp for lighting.
Subjective factors, e.g., how things smelled/looked/felt:
I’m still confused what the green line is for (Did I mistake a grey line for a green one? Possibly so, since it doesn’t make sense the fact that Meynert says nothing about the green line). Here’s the image I found online with color; unfortunately it is not clear enough.
Reflection on your practice:
First, briefly on drawing and tracing: I felt certain when drawing the exterior body but way more hesitant when drawing the interior of the brain: even if I was merely tracing, I was still using a lot of imagination and at the same time with truthfulness as my goal.
At the same time, I was thinking: why am I drawing this image? And then I recalled ok Meynert’s being very modest in terms of “curing the soul;” he just wants to show how our brain works in regard to mental diseases by revealing the anatomical structure of brain. And this image has nothing to do with the social-historical background of the person who has some mental disease, and it doesn’t really have much to do with mental disease per se but simply shows why one would move one’s arm beyond the reach of flame on the basis of physiology and anatomy. But that’s just one perspective regarding why one moves one’s body. I can easily imagine someone who feels despair and intentionally puts her finger on top of the flame to feel the sensation of pain. For example, here’s a link to Chinese artist Chen Zhe’s photographic series The Bearable and Bees in which she documents her own dark and according to herself “occasionally euphoric” history of self-inflicted harm in four years and later others’ self harm stories, through which she explores the relations between the disquieted souls and the wounded bodies. So what to make of those people who intentionally harm themselves and gain euphoria as well as pain out of the process?
Meynert would again argue: “treatment of the soul” implies more than what we can accomplish, so let’s just describe psychological functions in terms of a brain mechanics deduced from cerebral structure. More, Meynert believes that there is no gap between reflex and conscious activity for both are initiated by outside source of energy as opposed to instinct or innate mental energy.1 But Meynert is wrong! How could his theory explain people who intentionally harm themselves to gain euphoria as well as pain out of the process? How can we expect to treat these people by doing some brain surgery or shock therapy? How can Meynert’s theory solve the body-mind problem when it reinforces a dualism by reducing psychological problems to anatomical issues? Also, how does Meynert define “treatment of the soul”? Even if such treatment is a mythical ideal, why should we give up trying normative solutions?
This line of reflection also makes me think of akrasia (acting against one’s best judgment, i.e. doing exactly what one know one shouldn’t do). Is Meynert’s theory denying the possibility of akrasia? Differently put, akrasia seems to be not represented at all in Meynert’s theory.
Now if we recall Davis’s article, in which MacKenzie asserts that it is not so much that Sir Francis Galton’s statistics made possible eugenics but rather that the need of eugenics drives the content of Galton’s statistical theory (Davis, 17), and then think about Meynert’s theory again: could it be the need to ignore social-historical factors in regard to mental diseases drives Meynert’s reductionism?
I then set off finding evidence to test my hypothesis and here’s what I find:
1. Meynert was a small melancholic man who was brusque and sometimes dismissive when interacting with his colleagues.2 Regardless, he was renowned for his solid neurohistological work.
2. According to Meynert, the psychical malaise of melancholia is to be regarded as the subjective consciousness of the deranged nutrition due to the interceptions in the brain-processes, that is to put it differently, an expression ofan exhausted cerebration. Meynert’s definition of melancholia would be this: “the melancholic state is an affection of the central organ, in which the impaired development of vital power are realized as psychical malaise, most frequently with engendered illusions limited in character, and often with the accompaniment of irritant phenomena, particularly that of the feeling of anxiety.”3 (Also, according to this source, Meynert’s conception makes completely intelligible the agency of the causal forces of melancholia and explains the effects of intellectual strain, of intense emotion and of exhausting excesses.)
Bearing the risk of psychologizing the author, I can’t help but wonder: why does Meynert ignore social-historical factors pertaining to mental diseases (e.g. what a person has experienced in his/her personal-social past; how the person was brought up)? Is it because Meynert finds treatment of the soul impossible that he reduces mental diseases to impairment of brain?
(Note that there’s also the romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau imagining an ideal bringing up for a child like Emile in 1762, so the urge for ideal does not necessarily connect to the neglect of social- historical factor, ifwe see education as social-historical influence. But still, is a perfect bringing up possible? If it’s impossible, does it mean that we should forget about education and reduce everything to physiology and cerebral structure?)
And how come that in 1872 The Lancet acknowledged Meynert’s theory as making completely intelligible the agency of the causal forces of melancholia? What was the general medical consciousness like back then? Did there exist any competing theory? How exactly was Meynert’s theory received (more research is needed)?
Also, did the rise of the conception of the “normal” in 1840-60s (Davies, 16) foreground Meynert’s theory of how a normal brain works? What was the conceptual standard of a “normal” brain according to Meynert and how did empirical finding support it? Was it a unanimous standard?
Finally, please excuse me for a digression: here’s an article (2019) on how SLC6A4, a gene formerly associated with depression, in later research turns out to be, along with some other genes, showing no obvious influences on depression risk in any environment. If decades of early research on genetics of depression were built on non-existent foundations, what do we make of the biological approach to “melancholia”? Of course the research is not to be taken to mean that genes do not affect depression, and perhaps the non-existent foundation would only imply that more rigorous procedure of scientific research is needed, but maybe one should also be more aware of the assumptions underlying the ready association between depression and genes.
Another anachronistic digression: how would Meynert respond to the thesis of this exhibition (2019): Psyche and Politics, namely that the psyche is becoming more and more an arena of the political?
1 See Otto M. Marx, “Nineteenth-Century Medical Psychology: Theoretical Problems in the Work of Griesinger, Meynert, and Wernicke” in Isis, Vol.61, No.3 (Autumn, 1970), p 363. Originally, T. Meynert, Psychiatrie, Klinik der Erkran- kungen des Vorderhirns (Wien: Braumiuller, 1884), p126, 146, 157.
2 See Gomes, Marleide da Mota, & Engelhardt, Eliasz. (2012). “Meynert and the biological German psychiatry,” Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria, 70(11), 894-895. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0004-282X2012001100013
3 See The Lancet, London: J. Onwhyn (1872, vol. 102), 441-442.