Marey, Muybridge, and Londe

Abstract

Throughout the nineteenth century, the search for a physical base for neurological disorder equated mind with brain and suggested that all mental operations would ultimately be revealed as combinations of physical processes rather than the lack of ‘will’ or weakened ‘moral fibre’.¹ In language resonant with moral associations, clinical neurologists increasingly described nervous disease as a ‘disequilibration’ or ‘disinhibition’ of the nervous system which left its traces of destabilization on the surface of the body. Visual transcription of these traces was important, and much has been written on the wide use of photography to record the faces and bodies of the insane in an attempt to collect and categorize their behavioural and emotional abnormalities.² Less studied are sequential photographs of the locomotive pathologies associated with neurological disorder, ³ although these images are part of the record of the intense concern with one of the major medical, political and social preoccupations at the end of the century, venereal disease, and its perceived threat to the degeneration and decline of the race. And while the commonality and spectacularity of pathological locomotion made it an obvious object for photographic study, photographs of pathological locomotion do more than represent the signs of neurological disorder. They also throw into relief the differences in the nineteenth century between experimental physiology and clinical medicine, and illustrate how the limitations of photography as an instrument of clinical observation were overcome by the photography of physiological experimentation.