After a round of introductions (and a welcome to new attendees), Charissa began our second meeting of term by detailing the long history of frogs and experiments. She guided us through everything from early modern ponderings over how frogs reproduced, to testing with taffeta trousers, twitching when connected to electrical circuitry, and their more recent role as a model organism. Turning to the reading, she discussed how Sedgwick's piece went through the history of this (gruesome?) experiment, before adding its own findings: the insight this gave into experimental physiology in the 1880s, how it related to other research ongoing in homes and laboratories in Europe and North America, and how it should be written about.
The rest of the evening's conversation ranged from materialism to metamorphosis: we looked, amongst other things, at the article's tone of voice (almost Jane Austen-ish at times? at other times especially evocative words break through the overall dispassionate approach) and literary style of the journal article, which gave insights into its historical positioning between something written for a generalised periodical audience, and a more specific piece of scientific literature for a community of experts; we thought about model organisms more generally as analogies; we considered the contemporary vivsection debates and how considerations of the ethics and emotions of animal experimentation were brought into play (or not) in reports such as this; indeed, we wondered whether it mattered whether this was a frog at all: it was, rather, part of the apparatus, an experimental organism which was an abstracted reflex mechanism, brainless or brained; we considered the lack of information about what type of frog it was, and how the varied natural history (or availability - where did these frogs come from?) was not considered important in the experimental description; how the frog was used to connect up different levels of research into temperature, from cellular to seasonal effects; and the consequences of both evolutionary and philosophical considerations of the status of animals as to the relationships between spirit and matter. And, in a glimpse of what we're going to be talking about next time, we talked briefly about other ways in which frogs appeared in scientific literature in the nineteenth century, including natural history books for children which encouraged actual encounters with frogs, and stories in which the frogs, in a different way to their use as model organisms or parts of experimental apparatus, appeared as analogies.
Links to other pieces of writing mentioned in the discussion:
No comments:
Post a Comment