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The Science of Walking: Investigations into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century by Andreas Mayer

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bhm.2021.0037

1086-3176

Melissa Dickson,

History of Medicine Studies

Reviewed by: The Science of Walking: Investigations into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century by Andreas Mayer Melissa Dickson Andreas Mayer. The Science of Walking: Investigations into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century. Chicago: Chicago University Presss, 2020. 222 pp. $50.00 (978-0-226-32835-5). Despite its title, The Science of Walking does not interrogate the question of what, exactly, comprises human locomotion, nor how it might become the object of a clearly delineated field of scientific research. Rather, it asks how this mundane yet mysterious activity, historically "located at the border of the physiological and the psychological" (p. 4), operated as a source of scientific, medical, and cultural observation and experimentation in Europe in the long nineteenth century. With the burgeoning human sciences during the late Enlightenment, and the emergence in Paris of the so-called Science de l'homme around 1800, a renewed interest in the mechanics and characteristics of the human gait gave rise to a growing body of literature on locomotion in this period, the concerns of which fanned out across medical, scientific, political, moral, aesthetic, and cultural domains. Artists, athletes, dancers, anatomists, physiologists, neurologists, and educational and military institutions, all became stakeholders to varying degrees in the observation, measurement, control, and representation of the human body in motion. The Science of Walking explores some of these avenues of concern, in a series of deeply researched case studies that Mayer regards as the "most exemplary manifestations" (p. 142) of locomotion research of their time. The criteria used [End Page 418] for this selection are not made explicit by the author, nor is any attention given to the relationship between the materials chosen for interrogation and any modern conceptualization of a science of walking. Nonetheless, the study's careful attention to "the progressive unfolding of the problem" (p. 4) is deftly interdisciplinary. It draws scientific hypotheses and experiments together with aestheticism, philosophy, cultural critique, and social history to demonstrate the diverse forms of knowledge that have informed our understanding of how, and why, human beings move as they do. Taking Rousseau's educational philosophies as its point of departure, Chapter 1 explores late eighteenth-century attitudes to walking as an ideal, natural mode of travel, frequently cast in opposition to more mechanized and regulated forms of movement. These concerns were a rejection of earlier, artificial methods of manipulating the body, and they intersected with questions of class and morality, as the final section of this chapter demonstrates very forcefully in its deployment of physiognomic readings of the character of individual gaits. The following chapter turns to the Science de l'homme, and the growing separation of a semiotic approach to walking, driven forward by the work of physiognomist Louis Jacque Moreau de la Sarthe, from research into the mechanics of human movement, spearheaded by experimental physiologist François Magendie. The chapter concludes with an excellent extended reading of Balzac's Théorie de la demarche as an elaborately staged dramatization of this epistemological dilemma. Chapter 3 moves to Germany, and the new experimentalism of Wilhelm and Eduard Weber in the 1830s, which was dedicated to precise calculation of the physiological mechanics of walking, to the exclusion of any psychological, environmental, or cultural factors. This work, too, however, extended beyond the laboratory to resonate with such fields as military science, gymnastics, and depictions of locomotion in the fine arts. The development of alternative methods to measure human walking, such as Hermann von Meyer's footprint analysis, actively informed the new forensic science. The final chapter continues to explore scientific instruments and apparatuses dedicated to the study of locomotion in the late century, most especially the recording devices of Étienne-Jules Marey. A brief conclusion gestures toward divergent early twentieth-century observations on walking by Freud, Wilhelm Braune and Otto Fischer, and Marcel Mauss. The Science of Walking is highly readable and often entertaining, as the author's wit and sense of joy in his research are everywhere apparent. The book is also beautifully illustrated, the many images serving as further testament to the different ways in which human bodies have been captured in motion. It is, for the most part, a history of men, as the...