The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression by G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne; R. Andrew Cuthbertson Review by: Maria Trumpler Isis, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 159-160 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/235596 . Accessed: 08/05/2014 23:38 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 23:38:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=hss http://www.jstor.org/stable/235596?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 84: 1 (1993) 159 Addinall devotes full chapters to William Paley and Thomas Chalmers and rather catalogue- like accounts of the writings of other conser- vative and liberal religious writers. He finds all of the British responses to Hume's skep- ticism inadequate. He then argues that had Immanuel Kant exercised a broader influence over British thought, the corrosiveness of Hume's effort would have been neither so effective nor so long lasting. He includes very little criticism of the shortcomings of Kant's thought, nor does he explore or account for the religious skepticism that characterized much German thought after Kant. Addinall provides no sense that ideas exist in society. He is concerned almost entirely with an abstract refutation of Hume's philos- ophy, without asking why particular individ- uals wanted to refute it or what were the im- mediate consequences, for their personal and professional lives, of not refuting it. Addinall's volume has a number of unfor- tunate shortcomings. First, and most serious, he quite simply ignores the role of Thomas Reid and the Scottish school of Common Sense as the major response to Hume throughout the English-speaking world. Many readers and other philosophers regarded Reid and his fol- lowers as having successfully refuted Hume. In a similar vein, when discussing Paley and the Bridgewater authors, Addinall downplays their assertions that natural religion must serve and sustain revelation. In his discussion of Kant there is no indication of the important work of British Kantians such as Edward Caird or the indirect impact of Kant and German thought in Britain realized through the teach- ing and classical translations and commen- taries of Benjamin Jowett. Second, Addinall's reading of recent his- tory in regard to the conflict of science and religion and agnosticism is rather dated. For example, there is no indication of any famil- iarity with the important work of Bernard Lightman. Third, Addinall pays virtually no attention to the manner in which scientists and clergy throughout the nineteenth century frequently sought to avoid conflict. For the first three decades in the life of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, its leaders repeatedly asserted that there was no neces- sary conflict. Even in the more difficult pe- riod of the 1860s and 1870s there were writ- ers who wished to escape the attitude and reality of conflict. There were also orthodox religious writers who found themselves able to embrace significant aspects of Darwinian theory. Here there is no indication of famil- iarity with the extensive studies of Peter Bowler. An in-depth study of Victorian British bib- lical criticism is much desired: the actual re- lationship between scientific thought in its broadest sense and biblical scholarship will be found to be much more complicated than many twentieth-century scholars have as- sumed and than many of the Victorian com- batants claimed. This volume does not supply that need. FRANK M. TURNER G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne. The Mech- anism of Human Facial Expression. Edited and translated by R. Andrew Cuthbertson. (Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction.) xvi + 288 pp., frontis., illus., figs., tables, index. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1990. $54.50. In one of the earliest applications of photog- raphy to physiology, the French physician Guillaume Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne (1806-1875) published a series of eighty-four haunting photographs of faces intended to elucidate the role of individual facial muscles in producing expressions of emotions. Du- chenne-a founder of French neurology, dis- coverer of the muscular dystrophy that bears his name, and teacher of J.-M. Charcot-had developed a technique in the 1840s of apply- ing electrical current to the body without making incisions. This advance enabled him to adjust the placement of the electrodes to stimulate single facial muscles and to per- form repeated experiments on the same in- dividual. He then correlated the stimulation of each facial muscle with the expression of an emotion such as overt joy, disdain, or vi- olent feelings. The resulting study would be of interest, he hoped, to sculptors as well as anatomists and psychologists. In the "Artistic Section," Duchenne boldly criticized three well-known classical sculptures for their in- accuracy in portraying facial lines and in- cluded pictures of the originals alongside his "corrected" copies. The resulting work, Mecanisme de la phys- ionomie humaine, is offered here for the first time in an English translation of the 1862 first This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 23:38:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp 160 BOOK REVIEWS-ISIS, 84: 1 (1993) edition, of which only three copies are noted in the National Union Catalogue. The trans- lation is not annotated, but R. Andrew Cuth- bertson provides a biographical essay on Duchenne and the significance of this work. Other chapters of commentary are provided by Jean-Francois Debord on the collection of Duchenne's photographs and plaster busts in the Ecole des Beaux Arts, John T. Hueston on the debt of cosmetic surgery to Du- chenne's insights and practices, and Paul Ek- man on Duchenne's results in comparison with his own recent studies of facial expression. Ekman's essay also discusses some of Charles Darwin's annotations to his personal copy of this work, which he cited in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). The index is small and most useful for its ref- erences to specific emotions and facial mus- cles, whose names have been modernized. The most intriguing part of the volume is the photographs, presented in eighty-four full- page plates and nine synoptic plates, crisply reproduced on glossy paper. The subject of the majority of the experiments was a tooth- less old man, chosen for the coarseness of his features and because of a partial permanent anesthesia of his face that spared him the Artificially induced expression of terror from a man whose facial muscles are being electrically stimulated by G.-B. Duchenne de Boulogne (reproduced from Duchenne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression). painful sensation from the electrical currents. The series of images of his face expressing ecstasy, astonishment, and fear creates a cap- tivating tension in the viewer between the stark reality of the photographs and the knowledge that the strong emotions portrayed are artifi- cially induced. I would recommend this book most highly for its illustrations, especially to those inter- ested in the interface of science and art, early photography, or the use of images in medi- cine. MARIA TRUMPLER Ian R. Dowbiggin. Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowl- edge in Nineteenth-Centurv France. (Medi- cine and Society, 4.) x + 217 pp., index. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1991. $34.95. Ian Dowbiggin's study is the latest in the se- ries, Medicine and Society, devoted to the in- terrelations between medical knowledge and psychiatric practice. Stimulated by Michel Foucault's work on madness and civilization, institutionalization and social control, and more recently by the contributions of Roy Porter, Andrew Scull, and others, the history of psychiatry has attracted much attention from historians in the last few years. This work complements Jan Goldstein's Console and Classify: The French Psvchiat- ric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1987). In both accounts the competing ideologies and rivalry of physi- cians, clerics, and philosophers figured prominently in the development of medical knowledge and therapies and in profession- alization. And both place great emphasis on the political, intellectual, academic, and medical context in which psychiatry devel- oped. Although Dowbiggin and Goldstein cover much of the same territory, they em- phasize different aspects of French psychia- try. Goldstein told the story by focusing on the dominant therapeutic approach of the early nineteenth century, moral treatment, and by using two principal disease categorizations, monomania and hysteria, as a way of ana- lyzing the professionalization of psychiatry. By contrast, Dowbiggin's main theme is the centrality of degeneracy theory and heredi- tarianism in French psychiatric thought and practice and how this doctrine came to oc- This content downloaded from 169.229.32.137 on Thu, 8 May 2014 23:38:52 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Article Contents p. 159 p. 160 Issue Table of Contents Isis, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Mar., 1993), pp. 1-210 Front Matter Common Problems and Cooperative Solutions: Organizational Activity in Evolutionary Studies, 1936-1947 [pp. 1-25] The Dilemmas of Science in the United States: Alexander Dallas Bache and the U.S. Coast Survey [pp. 26-49] Currents from the Underworld: Electricity and the Technology of Display in Early Victorian England [pp. 50-69] Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc and the Patronage of the New Science in the Seventeenth Century [pp. 70-90] Critiques & Contentions Science and Imperialism [pp. 91-102] Cultural Imperialism and Exact Sciences Revisited [pp. 103-108] Letters to the Editor [pp. 109-112] Essay Reviews Review: untitled [pp. 113-124] Review: untitled [pp. 124-127] Book Reviews General Review: untitled [p. 128] Review: untitled [pp. 128-129] Review: untitled [pp. 129-130] Review: untitled [pp. 130-131] Review: untitled [pp. 131-132] Antiquity Review: untitled [pp. 132-133] Review: untitled [p. 133] Review: untitled [pp. 134-135] Review: untitled [pp. 135-136] Review: untitled [pp. 136-137] Middle Ages & Renaissance Review: untitled [p. 137] Review: untitled [pp. 137-138] Review: untitled [pp. 138-139] Review: untitled [pp. 139-141] Review: untitled [p. 141] Review: untitled [pp. 141-142] Review: untitled [pp. 142-143] Early Modern Period Review: untitled [pp. 143-144] Review: untitled [pp. 144-145] Review: untitled [p. 145] Review: untitled [pp. 145-146] Review: untitled [pp. 146-148] Review: untitled [pp. 148-149] Review: untitled [pp. 149-150] Review: untitled [pp. 150-151] Review: untitled [pp. 151-152] Eighteenth Century Review: untitled [p. 152] Review: untitled [pp. 152-153] Review: untitled [p. 153] Review: untitled [pp. 153-154] Review: untitled [pp. 154-155] Nineteenth Century Review: untitled [pp. 155-156] Review: untitled [p. 156] Review: untitled [p. 157] Review: untitled [pp. 157-158] Review: untitled [pp. 158-159] Review: untitled [pp. 159-160] Review: untitled [pp. 160-161] Review: untitled [pp. 161-162] Review: untitled [pp. 162-163] Review: untitled [pp. 163-164] Review: untitled [pp. 164-165] Twentieth Century Review: untitled [pp. 165-166] Review: untitled [pp. 166-167] Review: untitled [pp. 167-168] Review: untitled [p. 169] Review: untitled [pp. 169-170] Review: untitled [pp. 170-171] Review: untitled [pp. 171-172] Review: untitled [pp. 172-173] Review: untitled [pp. 173-174] Review: untitled [p. 174] Review: untitled [pp. 174-175] Review: untitled [pp. 175-176] Review: untitled [pp. 176-177] Review: untitled [p. 177] Review: untitled [pp. 177-179] Review: untitled [p. 179] Review: untitled [pp. 179-181] Review: untitled [p. 181] Review: untitled [pp. 181-182] Review: untitled [pp. 182-183] Review: untitled [pp. 183-184] Review: untitled [pp. 184-185] Review: untitled [pp. 185-186] Sociology & Philosophy of Science Review: untitled [pp. 186-187] Review: untitled [pp. 187-188] Review: untitled [p. 189] Review: untitled [pp. 189-190] Review: untitled [pp. 190-191] Review: untitled [pp. 191-193] Review: untitled [p. 193] Review: untitled [pp. 193-194] Review: untitled [pp. 194-195] Review: untitled [pp. 195-196] Reference Tools Review: untitled [pp. 196-197] Review: untitled [p. 197] Review: untitled [pp. 197-198] Review: untitled [p. 198] Collections [pp. 198-205] Back Matter [pp. 206-210]