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M. du Bois-Reymond goes to Paris

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2003

GABRIEL FINKELSTEIN
GABRIEL FINKELSTEIN
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Colorado at Denver, PO Box 173364, Denver, Colorado 80217-3364, USA.
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Abstract

This article examines the science of electrophysiology developed by Emil du Bois-Reymond in Berlin in the 1840s. In it I recount his major findings, the most significant being his proof of the electrical nature of nerve signals. Du Bois-Reymond also went on to detect this same ‘negative variation’, or action current, in live human subjects. In 1850 he travelled to Paris to defend this startling claim. The essay concludes with a discussion of why his demonstration failed to convince his hosts at the French Academy of Sciences.

La science ne consiste pas en faits, mais dans les conséquences que l'on en tire.Claude Bernard, Introduction à l'étude de la médicine expérimentale

Good talkers are only found in Paris.François Villon, Des Femmes de Paris

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 36 , Issue 3 , September 2003 , pp. 261 - 300
Copyright
© 2003 British Society for the History of Science

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Footnotes

Versions of this paper were presented in 1997 to the Center for Cultural Studies of Science, Technology, and Medicine at UCLA and in 1998 to the Department of History of Science at Harvard University, and I am glad of suggestions offered there. I am obliged to the librarians and archivists at the Staatsbibliothek Preußischer Kulturbesitz zu Berlin, the Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, the New York Public Library, the Firestone Library at Princeton University and the Crear Library at the University of Chicago for allowing me access to their holdings. I would also like to thank David Barrett for helping me reformat my notes and Bill MacCallum and Brom Kim for scanning illustrations. I would also like to thank David Cahan, Nicolaas Rupke, Kathy Olesko, Andre Wakefield and Margaret Rossiter for their encouragement. Finally, I wish to dedicate this essay to the memory of my advisor, Gerald L. Geison, a great scholar and a sensitive man.