This introduction argues that, together, conceptions of automata and automatism provided an expansive framework for expressing diverse, sometimes contradictory, ideas and values in Victorian culture. Introducing the contributions to the volume, this chapter considers the specific sites, uses, and meanings of automata and automatism in the nineteenth century. It examines human automatism in psychology, law, aesthetics, occultism, and science, and considers mechanical automata as entertainment, as commodity, and as racist objects. The introduction also looks at connections to factory and labor automata, and the beginnings of artificial intelligence and robotics. It additionally discusses the depiction of automata in and the influences of discourses of automatism on nineteenth-century literary works.

The invention of the stethoscope by the French physician René Laennec in 1816 was a pivotal moment in the burgeoning field of modern clinical diagnosis. It brought the inner soundscape of the human body – an invisible realm which largely existed beyond the range of the human ear – into not only medical but also more general cultural awareness. This chapter considers the stethoscope as the subject not of ongoing scientific debate and experimentation, but of poetry and fiction, as tales of its use and abuse, as well as its supposed powers, spread among those who first encountered it and sowed a more general sense of confusion, mistrust, and corporeal anxiety in relation to the medical consultation. Drawing on interactions with the stethoscope in works by Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Sheridan Le Fanu, as well as short stories and poetry from popular periodicals, I demonstrate that, as medical institutions accepted new technologies and became increasingly specialized throughout the century, the stethoscope became for many patients an object of anxious contemplation, serving as a palpable interface between doctor and patient, between hope and fear, and between the visible and the invisible.