Normal and the abnormal

I will explore whether challenges to cultural norms can reach as far as the norms of logic. In particular, shall seek to determine the influence of pluralism in formal logic on this debate.

The pre-eminent system in twentieth century formal logic is the so-called 'classical logic' of truth-functional sentential constants representing 'and' (&), 'or' (v), 'not' (~) and 'if' (->) and first-order quantifiers representing 'some' (E) and 'all' (A). Although classical logic is of comparatively recent origin, it is widely endorsed throughout the formal sciences, and its study is a compulsory component of most philosophy and computer science degree programmes. However, it is not unique. Many competing systems have been developed over the last century. These systems, which contain norms of inference conflicting with those of classical logic, include intuitionistic logic, paraconsistent logic, relevance logic, quantum logic, fuzzy logic, non-monotonic logic and many lesser known systems. While some of these systems remain mere technical exercises, many have proved their worth as sources of innovative responses to philosophical or scientific problems.

Nevertheless, deviation from classical logic remains a controversial topic. These systems were dubbed 'deviant logic' in one influential and scathing treatment (Quine), a sobriquet which has sometimes been adopted with defiance by apologists for such systems (Haack), although 'non-classical logic' is now more usual. Yet despite their daring challenge to the norms of classical logic, the inspiration behind non-classical logic is characteristically more down-to-earth. Most such systems were devised to improve the formalization of argumentation in natural language (e.g. relevance logic) or in mathematics (e.g. intuitionistic logic) or as treatments of perennial philosophical problems such as vagueness (fuzzy logic), self-contradictory paradoxes (paraconsistent logic) or the understanding of quantum mechanics (quantum logic). Thus the debate over the legitimacy of these systems is typically confined to their applications within philosophy and the formal sciences. However, some bolder critics of classical logic have sought to link their challenge to broader conflicts between cultural norms.

I shall discuss three notable examples of discourses in which attempts have been made to link deviant logic with social deviancy:

* Ethnography. Attempts to attribute deviant patterns of reasoning to non-western societies can be found in many influential early anthropologists (e.g. Evans-Pritchard, Lévy-Bruhl, Whorf). More recent studies have attempted to cash out these claims by the attribution of systems of non-classical logic to the 'natives' (Cooper, Lokhorst).

* Psychoanalysis. Some twentieth-century psychoanalysts have made significant use of formal logic in the articulation of their theories (Matte Blanco, Bion). This step makes a link from deviant behaviour to deviant logic easy to draw.

* Feminism. Feminist critics of formal logic have sought to argue that the norms of (classical) logic are implicitly gendered, betraying a masculine bias which should be transgressed. Some of them wish to overthrow formal logic entirely (Nye), but others have argued that the adoption of a suitable non-classical logic would provide a progressive resolution (Plumwood).

These different appeals to (non-classical) logic can be productively be treated collectively, since there are a number of general criticisms from which they need to be defended. Firstly, most of these arguments suffer from too narrow a diet of logics: an understanding of the diversity of systems on offer permits such critiques of classical logic to be presented to their best advantage. Secondly, all such approaches are susceptible to an accusation of psychologism: they appear to presume that the norms of logic can be grounded in psychology, contrary to important and influential arguments in the philosophy of logic (Frege, Carnap). Thirdly, a much stronger criticism, akin to that made of Lacan's appeals to topology (Sokal & Bricmont), is that such deployment of non-classical logic trades on simple equivocation between different senses of 'norm'. Finally, a fundamental point is that the controversial strength of these arguments against classical logic presumes the incommensurability of logical systems. Pluralist accounts of logic permit the integration of superficially rival systems. On such a reading these claims may be seen as less extreme and dramatic--and perhaps more attractive and credible as a result.

Sources

COOPER, D. 1975 'Alternative logic in 'primitive thought'' Man 10.

HAACK, S. 1974 Deviant logic: Some philosophical issues (Cambridge: C.U.P.) [reprinted with corrections in her Deviant logic, fuzzy logic: Beyond the formalism (Chicago, IL: Chicago U.P., 1996)].

KOERTGE, N. 1998 'A critique of the feminist repudiation of logic' The skeptical intelligencer 3.

LOKHORST, G. J. C. 1998 'The logic of logical relativism' Logique et analyse 41.

NYE, A. 1990 Words of power: A feminist reading of the history of logic (London: Routledge).

PLUMWOOD, V. 1993 'The politics of reason: Towards a feminist logic' Australasian journal of philosophy 71.

QUINE, W. V. 1970 Philosophy of logic (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall).

RAYNER, E. 1995 Unconscious logic: An introduction to Matte Blanco's bi-logic and its uses (London: Routledge).

SKELTON, R. 1995 'Bion's use of modern logic' International journal of psychoanalysis 76.

SOKAL, A & J. BRICMONT 1998 Intellectual impostures: Postmodern philosophers' abuse of science (London: Profile).

Andrew ABERDEIN, Department of Logic and Metaphysics, Liverpool

aja@st-andrews.ac.uk andrew.aberdein@dunelm.org.uk

Volker BARTH, Displaying normality - The Paris World's Fair of 1867

The Paris World’s fair of 1867 was a prototype of an imagined idealized normative society. In my paper, I would like to explore how this event put techniques of normalization on display for a large European audience. I am particularly interested in how spectators consumed these idealized visions of normality and I will argue that the viewing of the exhibition contributed to the disciplining of the spectator himself.

In Les Anormaux the edition of Michel Foucault’s 1974-75 seminary at the College de France Foucault describes the "technique de normalization" (p. 24) as a "technique positive d’intervention et de transformation" (p. 46). According to the French philosopher these techniques allow a treatment of the three classical types of abnormal individuals which are the monster, the masturbator and person who cannot be corrected. In this sense the aim of normalization is to classify individuals in a scientific manner, analyze them and finally discipline them through normative institutions such as the prison, the mental asylum, the hospital and the school. Normalization therefore intended to discipline the abnormal individual in order to reintegrate him into society.

The Paris World’s fair of 1867 displayed some of these normalizing institutions. Elementary schools buildings occupied large parts of the exposition grounds exhibiting methods of disciplined learning in a standardized space. Pedagogic theories were manifested in a strict division of space that represented the different stages in the educational process. The tools of learning were also shown to the public. As optimized, standardized and therefore uniform utensils those objects were meant to serve every individual pupil in the same way. Textbooks, dictionaries and maps gave a concrete image of what the member of a normalized society had to know.

On the exhibition grounds the pavilion of the society of deaf and dumb people was also to be found. Inside the public could experience the scientific methods of correcting a disabled person. Sign language and speech training of the disabled were displayed as methods of normalizing these individuals. From the spectator’s perspective these "abnormals" were already reintegrated into society and could be again a productive part of this society by the end of the process. Medical instruments and methods to correct all kinds of other illnesses were also displayed at the Exposition Universelle de 1867.

Normalizing was in the first place about reintroducing an abnormal individual into society. In the French concept of progress this meant reintegrating him or her into the production process. Therefore it is not surprising that a large part of the exposition was dedicated to the display of the normalized worker as a productive contributor to society. Model housings for the working class were constructed for the normal family consisting of a man, a women and two or three children. On the first floor the visitor could find a space division in two dormitories separating the adults from their sons and daughters. On the ground floor was the living room as the normalized space of family life. The exhibition text stated that this was the ideal space for the development of a normal and healthy family life.

Therefore it is not surprising that much attention was given to the bathroom of such a housing. After all normalization was very much based on the proclamation of the healthy body in order to sanitize society. Normal people could only live in a sane environment. Logically the exhibition stressed that these facilities were constructed according to the latest scientific research on hygiene. Here the worker could take the optimal care of his body. The same was true for the kitchen of the workers ideal housing. In an ideal constructed space the mother of the family could provide good and balanced food for her husband so that his body would be in perfect shape. Another part of the exhibition was devoted to the display of this food itself. Moreover, this working class housing was meant to keep the worker from spending his wages in pubs and bars.

The Exposition Universelle as display of the normal was also a great means of promoting this normality. With a total attendance of ca. 11 million spectators and large commentaries in almost every newspaper of the world it was successful in passing a very powerful message. To assure themselves of this "transfer of normalization" the organizers of the World’s fair even invited thousands of workers from all over Europe to visit the exposition. They benefited from reduced train ticket prices and cheap hotel rooms constructed for them at the exposition. The Paris World’s fair of 1867 contributed to the process of normalization throughout the nineteenth century that according to Foucault lay the cornerstone to our modern society.

Volker BARTH, University of Munich, Germany and École des Hautes Études on Sciences Sociales, Paris, France

Barth@sensomatic.net

Sara BERGSTRESSER, Deviant roles, normal lives: why every piazza needs its own 'madman'

Once upon a time, there was the manicomio (madhouse) of Bergamo,

today there is no more.

Because we, the last crazies, have left.

Finally a normal life…

Today let’s have a party: another story has begun…

--Advertisement for a festival sponsored by a cooperative of ex-psychiatric patients, Bergamo, June, 2000

It is a beautiful, hot sunny day, and when I pass under the Sentierone, I see a young man alone on the wooden walkway underneath the Quatriportico. He sleeps peacefully; he is dirty and in rags. In the city, everyone knows who he is... I think that this person represents the total marginalization, more are less voluntary, of a man who could (should) be reintroduced into society...

--Letter to the editor, L’Eco di Bergamo, June 27, 2000

I will address a particular paradox: the existence of deviant social roles that are so widespread and culturally salient as to be normal. In particular, this paper will address the significance of a particular Italian social role - that of the local "madman". It will argue that, far from being outside of society, any individual who enacts this role actually plays an essential part in the performance of expected social interaction. In fact, if the familiar "madman" were to fail to appear one day, local residents would notice his absence, and the piazza would take on a sense of unfamiliarity.

This paper will draw on the theoretical work of Erving Goffman (1963) and his discussion of the "normal deviant." Goffman states that any role that is stigmatized or considered deviant is actually part of a complex and complementary system of norms and counterparts. In other words, the concept of deviance not only allows the norm to exist, but it also allows individuals to manage identities by switching between stigmatized and normalized roles depending on the social context. The deviant role is in fact normative, resulting in stigma management as a "general feature of society" (130). This paper will apply this idea to the role of local "madman" as an emerging social role. In particular, it will show how changes in mental health policy in the past twenty years have made it necessary for deinstitutionalized individuals to invent new social roles for themselves.

Following psychiatric reform in the 1970’s, severe restrictions were also placed on involuntary commitment, limiting the practice of clearing the mentally ill from public view. Among the mentally ill themselves, this reform opened the possibility of choosing between social roles, rather than being constrained to the single role of mental hospital resident. Many individuals aspired to mainstream social roles, and community mental health centers were set up as tools of social reintegration. On the other hand, other individuals, perhaps experiencing the concept of personal choice for the first time, opted for another path: "marginal" life as lived literally in the center of society.

The central role of the piazza both in physical performance of the role of "madman" and in Italian social life is particularly illustrative of the ways in which deviant roles actually exemplify cultural norms. Localism, a strong attachment to home, and a heightened "sense of place" are key components of Italian culture. In the same way, because particular individuals are associated with a single area or piazza, the role of "madman" is localist in a particularly Italian way. As Basso states, "The experience of sensing places, then, is thus both roundly reciprocal and incorrigibly dynamic" (1996:55); individuals need the locality to set the stage for the social performance just as the locality itself depends on inhabitants in order to retain its distinctive character. The post-deinstitutionalization role of the piazza "madman" was able to emerge as a recognizable role because of its fundamental compatibility with Italian history, cultural expectations, and practices.

Basso, Keith H. 1996 Wisdom Sits in Places. In Senses of Place. S. Field and K.H. Basso, eds. Pp. 53-90. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.

Goffman, Erving 1963 Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc.

This paper will be based on over a year of anthropological fieldwork in Northern Italy. It is an aspect of my doctoral dissertation in anthropology on the topic of community mental health and perceptions of "madness" in Italy.

Sara BERGSTRESSER, Department of Anthropology, Brown University, USA

Sara_Bergstresser@brown.edu

Susan BOETTCHER, Norms of faith: drawing and communicating the lines between Lutherans and Calvinists in later sixteenth-century Germany

In the late Reformation era (1555-1618), Protestant theologians and pastors in Germany frequently felt themselves confronted with the necessity of determining and codifying the norms for their respective confessions, one of the activities now commonly described by the concept of "confessionalization." Much attention has been devoted to the Lutheran-Catholic boundary as a site of constant friction that resulted in the redefinition of Catholic theological norms (the Tridentine Decretals), which distracts from the function of inner-Protestant boundaries as sources of tension around which differing Protestant norms (and corresponding notions of deviancy) developed. The successful communication and reception of religious norms was crucial to the Reformation in that these norms ultimately contributed to the development of confessional identity on the part of early modern congregants. This paper will outline briefly some of the methods of norm development among the Protestant confessions, such as the intellectual development of the content of these norms through disputation, colloquy, polemical and controversial theology, and the demarcation of lines between the confessions by means of the semiotic aspects of religious ritual, which communicated the religious boundaries in a way that parishioners reacted to viscerally. As a main focus, however, the paper will be concerned with the development and articulation of these tension-filled inner-Protestant boundaries in sermon literature of the later sixteenth century.

Sermons were the most important means of communicating any sort of information to the widest possible parish community in an age with low literacy rates. From 1546-1581, Lutheran theologians were busy hashing out theological controversies on the way to the normative statement of Lutheran doctrine, the Book of Concord. Despite the importance of sermons for communicating confessional content, however, the level of high theology did not make its way directly and unmediated into sermons. The theological message of confessional differentiation had to be adapted for the respective sermon audience. Sermon authors made assumptions about the ability of their audience to absorb the details of the confessional message and adjusted it accordingly. The most definitive and least subtle messages of confessional differentiation were provided in court sermons (for the most literate audiences); in contrast, confessional differentiation was a much less pronounced concern of the weekly sermons preached in local communities, since preachers in this setting were still not completely assured that their audiences understood the basic Christian message. In an age before the difference between Lutheran and Calvinist teachings, preachers on both sides of the emerging split marked behaviors and beliefs they considered deviant in the attempt to establish norms. This confessional marking ultimately had a reciprocating effect on the high theology that it originally stemmed from as pastors used their sermons to urge university theologians to come to a position that would be coherent and comprehensible from the standpoint of their local parishioners. Confessional preaching experienced differing levels of success; in areas like Brandenburg, violence resulted from the confessional message as parishioners attacked pastors who they perceived as having transgressed the confessional norms; in areas like East Frisia, in contrast, preaching and related polemics did not have the power to break a de facto confessional tolerance on the parish level that persisted throughout the later sixteenth century despite the continuing agitation of preachers and theologians.

Sources: a sample of 137 Protestant German-language sermons that display explicit attempts (polemical and non-polemical, positive and negative) to transmit confessional content in the form of norms distinguishing the desired behavior and beliefs of the audience member from the undesirable teachings of the constructed deviant. These sermons were collected at the Herzog-August-Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel and may be understood as roughly representative of the central and northern German Reformation. They include, court, catechismal, funeral and pericopic sermons.

Susan R. BOETTCHER, Departments of History, and Religious Studies, University of Texas at Austin, USA

susan.boettcher@mail.utexas.edu

Dennis BRYSON, The construction of the normal and the pathological according to the Rockefeller Philanthropies, 1923-1936

I will examine how important programs of the philanthropic foundations have contributed to the construction of concepts of the "normal" and the "pathological" in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. More specifically, I will look at the manner in which several major Rockefeller foundations sponsored a series of programs directed at the "modernization" of child-care, familial and marital, and educational practices during the ‘20s and ‘30s. The goal of these programs was the production and dissemination of norms that would foster healthy, friendly, and fulfilling human relationships and personalities. Ultimately, hoped the administrators and social scientists involved in these programs, such efforts would advance the healthy functioning of the social body by alleviating the perceived causes of social conflict and disorder.

Programs sponsored by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM) and the General Education Board (GEB) will be especially instructive to examine. In the 1920s, the LSRM launched the child study and parent education program, which funded research in child development at several major North American universities and attempted to channel the findings of this research to parents via organizations such as the Child Study Association of America and the American Association of University Women, publications of various kinds (including Parents’ Magazine), radio broadcasts, and so on. The point of the program was to develop "scientific" norms of child rearing through observation and experiment and then to persuade parents to replace obsolete, traditional methods of child care with the methods based on the modern, scientific norms. During the 1930s, the GEB sponsored programs, conferences, and other projects in child development and the study of culture and personality. These endeavors were organized within the context of an ambitious program to re-organize secondary education—which was directed at the fostering of healthy, "sane," and cooperative (i.e., conflict-aversive) values, aspirations, and personality traits among children and youth. The construction of healthy superegos and ego-ideals among adolescents during the depression-era was seen as an especially important goal. As Lawrence K. Frank, a key administrator of the GEB, put it, "it should be emphasized that modification of our social life must involve a re-direction of the ego-ideals and the superego of individuals, since our competitive, aggressive and chaotic economic-political life is in large measure a reflection of the ambitions and aspirations that have become a set pattern of individuals during the adolescent years."

I will examine in some detail the processes by which norms of healthy child development and personality formation were produced by the Rockefeller programs. Interdisciplinary approaches were promoted by these programs. Thus, pediatricians, nutritionists, physiologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists were encouraged to collaborate in order to formulate knowledge in such fields as child development, culture and personality, human relations, and pedagogy. From such knowledge, concepts of the normal and the pathological were to be derived. Most instructively, the social scientists involved in these efforts often relied, consciously or unconsciously, on the vision of society as an organism, which could function in an orderly and healthy fashion or be rent by pathological conflict and disorder. Thus, the condition of social life came to be envisioned as normal, healthy, and relatively free of conflict and disorder or as "ill," as plagued by class and racial conflict, gender disorder, neuroses, deviancy, cultural disintegration, and so on.

The knowledge and social technologies developed by the Rockefeller programs during the ‘20s and ‘30s have had some rather dubious implications. We have often been told that an important way in which a society becomes "modern" is by its members moving away from the uncritical acceptance of the values proffered by religious and cultural tradition—and by their coming to reflect critically on their values and formulating these values in accordance with reason. The various Rockefeller programs concerned with elaborating knowledge on child development, culture and personality, and so on, seem to have been aimed at advancing the "modern" in the U.S. Rejecting traditional cultural practices and values, these programs promoted the formation of healthy and enlightened norms in such areas as child-care practices, the education of adolescents, marital and family relations, sexuality, etc. The new norms were to be based on scientific techniques of observation and the knowledge thereby formulated.

However, as Georges Canguilhem, the French philosopher of science has warned us, the normal implies and is intimately coupled with the pathological. Thus, projects in social science and fields such as child development such as those sponsored by the Rockefeller boards, have, in the course of the twentieth century, tended to valorize "positive," healthy, "normal" modes of subjectivity, while devalorizing pathological, deviant, and anti-social modes of subjectivity. That is, while healthy, "normal" emotions such as love and friendliness were valorized, unhealthy, anti-social emotions such as anger, jealousy, anxiety, and guilt were devalued and even "suppressed" (according to the cultural historian Peter N. Stearns). And while the normal, "wholesome," sociable personality—along with the child-rearing practices thought to lead to the formation of such a personality—was fostered, a whole cast of deviant personalities—delinquents, criminals, prostitutes, maladjusted personalities, homosexuals, etc., became subject to expert scrutiny and intervention. Most importantly, social and political problems tended to become "psychologized" as the result of the new emphasis on the integration of the individual personality within the social. Accordingly, issues concerning class conflict and poverty, gender and sexuality, and racial and ethnic oppression were deflected onto the realm of the psychological and personal life, becoming matters of adjustment and development as opposed to foci for public debate and action.

My presentation will be based on extensive archival research conducted at the Rockefeller Archive Center in North Tarrytown, NY, and the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, MD. I have also extensively examined the pertinent literature in child development, culture and personality, the history of the human sciences, and related fields. I did my doctoral work in history at the University of California at Irvine. A book of mine, entitled Socializing the Young: The Role of the Foundations, 1923-1941, is slated to be published next year by Bergin and Garvey (Greenwood Publishing Group).

Dennis BRYSON, Department of American Culture and Literature, Bilkent University, Turkey

dennis@bilkent.edu.tr

John CARSON, The elusivity of the normal: abnormal minds in the science of intelligence

The normal, this paper will argue, began in American psychology as a quintessentially modernist concept, by which I mean that psychologists turned to it as a means of writing a kind of master narrative of order, hierarchy, and unity over a diverse phenomenal realm. "Normal" served American psychologists during most of the twentieth century simultaneously as a point of orientation, means of imposing order on variation, and way of demarcating the boundary between the socially acceptable and the frowned upon. Especially within the field of mental measurement, as historian Kurt Danziger has pointed out, determinations of the capability of the normal intellect became a prime goal of psychological practice, and constituted the touchstone for investigations into various kinds of mental abnormalities. If the ways in which mental philosophers at the beginning of the nineteenth century conceived of human mentality are contrasted with psychologists’ understandings of mind by the end of the century, a transformation in notions of the normal similar to that sketched out by two of the most prominent theorists of the normal—Georges Canguilhem and Ian Hacking—seems readily apparent. Canguilhem has argued that it was the normal, at least in French physiology, that colonized the abnormal, gave it order, and, in a sense made it into a comprehensible whole. Hacking concurred, seeing the particular mathematical techniques associated with Quetelet and Galton, especially the application of the normal curve to social phenomena, as critical to the definition of the normal.

Certainly it was possible that the same approach might have dominated in American studies of the intellect. The actual relations between the normal and abnormal, however, were more complicated than this story of the normal bringing clarity to the pathological might suggest. As I will argue in this essay, even within the field of mental measurement, psychologists’ understanding of the abnormal was at least as important to their ability to comprehend the normal as vice versa. Indeed, in many respects the pathological helped to make the normal meaningful within American psychology and to also contribute, much earlier than recent celebrations of post-modern multiplicity might suggest, to the normal’s fragmentation.

In so arguing, I will suggest that the importance of the contributions of Francis Galton and his key English disciple Charles Spearman to the project of creating a standard measure of the intellect has been overstated. Efforts to investigate mental ability on the basis of in-depth case studies of selected individuals or large-scale analyses of "normal" populations were not the avenues that produced a stabilized notion of metric intelligence. Instead, it was through work with two populations marginal to mainstream psychology—children and the feebleminded—that differential intelligence was rendered visible in a way that allowed it to be transformed into trustworthy and transportable knowledge about the human mind. The resort to pathology and ontogeny—evidenced in the work of the creators of the first successful intelligence test, Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon, and of Henry Goddard and other early pioneers of intelligence testing in the United States—was occasioned because such areas constituted not only places in which a metric of intelligence could be practically applied, but also sites in which the mind was already loosely conceptualized in terms of a notion of differential ability that the tests could capture and standardize. It was this combination of what Nikolas Rose and Leila Zenderland have insisted were the real institutional confusions over diagnosis plus the power of pathology to produce particular forms of visibility that was critical to the development of the IQ version of intelligence. With the application of the new tests to entire populations, the normal would not so much define the abnormal as it would itself be defined by the abnormal, and by the complex of instruments, practitioners, practices, and institutions through which differential intelligence became an entity able to live both within the scientific world and without.

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Rose, Nikolas, 1990. Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self , London: Routledge.

Samelson, Franz, 1979. "Putting Psychology on the Map: Ideology and Intelligence Testing." In Psychology in Social Context, ed. Allan R. Buss. New York: Irvington Publishers.

Sokal, Michael M., 1987. "James McKeen Cattell and Mental Anthropometry: Nineteenth-Century Science and Reform and the Origins of Psychological Testing." In Psychological Testing and American Society, 1890-1930, ed. Michael M. Sokal. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Pp. 21-45.

Sutherland, Gillian, 1984. Ability, Merit and Measurement, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Trent, James W., 1994. Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolf, Theta H., 1973. Alfred Binet, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wooldridge, Adrian, 1994. Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England, c. 1860-1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Zenderland, Leila, 1998. Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Mental Testing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

John CARSON, Department of History, University of Michigan, USA

jscarson@umich.edu

Otniel E. DROR, The normal, emotional, and pathological: clinical knowledge and the affect of encounters

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a cohort of Anglo-American physiologists and clinicians (e.g., G. W. Crile, W. B. Cannon, W. C. Alvarez, etc.) challenged the standards, knowledge, and norms of clinical medicine. They argued that the routine practices of the clinic (e.g., physical examination, anamnesis, diagnostic tests, etc.) evoked emotions in patients and examinees, and that these emotions were expressed in the bodies of their patients--as sudden physiological changes. Thus, the physiological state of the patient's body depended significantly on his/her momentary emotional state during the encounter in the physician's office.

Asserting that their predecessors had been ignorant of these physiological manifestations of the organism's emotional experiences during routine experimental and clinical encounters, this emerging cohort called for a re-evaluation of previous knowledge and practice. They framed their critique in three major arguments: 1- the values that previous experimenters/clinicians had given for the normal levels of various physiological variables and tests were not the true normal values, but were the values of emotionally excited organisms/humans; 2- numerous discrepancies between the observations of different laboratories and the inconsistencies between the findings of various clinicians resulted not from the lack of following routine, but from the absence of a standard for the emotional experiences of investigated organisms/humans; 3- various cases defined in the past as pathological were normal and simply reflected the transient, emotionally-excited organism/human.

I begin the paper by demonstrating how, during emotion, the body was (or seemed) pathological. During emotion the body assumed a pathological configuration and gave pathological readings--elevated blood pressure, abnormal bowel movements, accelerated heart rate, pathological blood sugar levels, etc. The emotional body/patient was an object that seemed pathological (to an observer), but was really normal--only emotionally excited. Physicians positioned the emotionally excited body outside of the realm of the clinically relevant normal or pathological.

Then, I study a number of solutions that were proposed by clinicians for coping with the emotional-qua-"pseudopathological" body: prescribing emotional self-control during the clinical encounter, re-measuring the patient several times, talking the patient out of his/her excitement, and more. I focus on the integration of the emotional state of the patient into the routine of the clinical encounter. Physicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began to observe, record, and collect "emotional data" about their patients--not in order to study emotion per se, but in order to interpret their clinical (somatic) observations in light of emotions.

They explicitly coupled the available affective data with somatic facts. Every clinical observation was interpreted and controlled by a simultaneous emotional recording. Two records were thus kept: one of clinical signs; the other of the flow of emotional excitement. This was not an exercise in psychobiology or mind-body interaction, but a routine clinical observation.

Conclusion: These developments illustrate that a substantial cohort of physicians implicitly chose as its new standard the de-emotionalized subject-patient. Once de-emotionalized, the patient-subject was normal and replicable through time and space. I conclude by referring to recent literature in three different historiographical domains: the "history of objectivity," the history of medicine, and the history of emotions. These three literatures argue for an important transition and tensions in knowledge, emotions, and in ways of knowledge-making during the period under study. Together they explain the development of a unique form of knowledge-making that fused the ideological and instrumental approach of the new laboratory sciences with local knowledge, personal interactions and individual experience.

Note on Sources:

Primary sources: archival materials from the U.S. and from the U.K., as well as published monographs and journal articles from the relevant period.

Secondary sources: literature in history of emotions, history of science/medicine, and history of objectivity.

Otniel E. DROR, History of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

otniel@md.huji.ac.il

Lucy HARTLEY, When is a science not a science?: Physiognomy and the idea of a (pseudo) science in the nineteenth century

The emergence of physiognomy in the nineteenth century as a popular phenomenon was due in large part to the moral framework it provided for everyday life. Despite, or more probably because of this, physiognomy seems to have aroused considerable attention amongst the philosophical and scientific communities of the time due to the claims that were being made for expression. What, for instance, is the purpose of expressions? Is an understanding of expressions innate or learned? Does an explanation of the expression of the emotions tell us anything about human nature, character, and behaviour? And perhaps most importantly, what is the status of physiognomy in the context of scientific thought?

This paper uses the example of physiognomy, and its teachings about man and mind and nature, as a case study through which the idea of science in the period will be examined; not only in terms of how science was established and defined as a ‘proper’ form of knowledge but also how it played a part in the construction of what is seen as ‘normal’ activity. My purpose is to show how physiognomy raises important questions about the cultural and epistemological status of nineteenth-century science and the related activity that is termed scientific. If physiognomy was seen by the scientific establishment as an unorthodox, one might even say abnormal, science then how should we understand its popularity amongst the general public as a science? My aim is not to prove that physiognomy was a science but instead to examine the claims that were made for its practice as a scientific activity.

There will be two parts to the paper. In the first part I shall provide a brief history of physiognomy and its teachings before exploring the reasons for its classification as a pseudo-science (along with phrenology and mesmerism to cite two other prominent examples). As my brief history will demonstrate, physiognomy presents us with a problem of categorisation that addresses directly the question of how we define and demarcate forms of knowledge. In this context, the notion of a pseudo-science is interesting because it works on the assumption that there is a boundary line which demarcates what is from what is not science. Where the realm of science proper appears to have clearly demarcated bounds, that which is called a pseudo-science inhabits a no-mans-land that is neither science nor non-science. So, for instance, physiognomy toed an orthodox religious line, disseminating a theological world view in which the appearance of things were ultimately taken as a sign that the creator was active in the world; and yet theories of expression based on physiology - which emerged in the work of Charles Bell, Alexander Bain and Charles Darwin - presented an unorthodox view of the organic world in so far as they stressed the integration of mind into body.

In the second part of my paper I shall consider this problem of categorisation - of science as proper and improper or normal and abnormal - in more general terms. I will suggest that the way to resolve the problem is not to think of physiognomy (or phrenology or mesmerism for that matter) as a pseudo-science that stands outside the parameters of science proper but instead to look again how we are characterising science in the period.

As recent work in the history of science has shown, we can learn much if we appreciate the fluid and often loose definitions of science and its affiliated communities, especially in the nineteenth century when the disciplines of biology, physiology, and chemistry began to be taught separately. Central to this view is a contextualizing approach which considers the network of institutions and affiliations, theories and practices within which any claims for science (or indeed any epistemological claims) should be discussed. I argue that it is into just this kind of picture of an open and heterogeneous scientific community in the nineteenth century that physiognomy should be placed. The question we should ask of physiognomy, then, is not whether it counts as ‘proper’ science but how it characterises its teachings as contributing to the development of scientific thought and understanding. Hence, I suggest we should think of practices like physiognomy, phrenology and mesmerism not as operating outside the bounds of orthodox science but as participating in the construction of an altogether more heterodox understanding of science.

Sources

This paper examines the physiognomic teachings of Johann Caspar Lavater in the context of contemporary nineteenth-century writings on science as well as recent work on the history and methodology of science. Drawing on a range of sources, both primary and secondary, the first part of the paper details the principles of Lavater’s teachings while the second part provides a historiographical context in which to evaluate these ideas.

Primary sources

Hartley, David, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations: In Two Parts (London: S. Richardson, 1749).

Lavater, Johann Caspar, Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and Love of Mankind, trans. and ed. Thomas Holcroft (London, 1789).

Whewell, William, History of the Inductive Sciences, 3 vols. (London: J.W. Parker, 1837).

Secondary sources

Dupré, John, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

Wallis, Roy (ed.), On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge, Sociological Review Monographs, no. 27 (University of Keele, 1979).

Winter, Alison, ‘The Construction of Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in the Early Victorian Life Sciences’ in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 24-50.

Wolpert, Lewis, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London: Faber and Faber, 1992).

Yeo, Richard, ‘Scientific Method and the Rhetoric of Science in Britain, 1830-1917’ in The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method. Historical Studies, ed. John A. Schuster and Richard R. Yeo (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1986), pp. 259-97.

-----, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Young, Robert M., Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s Place in Victorian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Lucy HARTLEY, Department of English, University of Southampton

LH2@soton.ac.uk

Ilpo HELEN, What makes a woman normal? Normality and the self in the twentieth-century sexual psychology

The subject of my paper is the change in depiction of female sexual abnormalities and in definition of the normal woman in the 20^th century sexual psychology. The special focus of my analysis is the case histories from three periods: first, from the early 20^th century ‘psychology of sex’, second, from medico-psychological counselling of marital sexual disorders in the 1950s, and third, from a sex therapy of the late 1970s.

My purpose is to illuminate a problematic role of the idea of the normal in therapeutic, educational, advisory and other practices embedded in psychology and psychiatry. By studying the lineage of the modern ‘psychology of woman’ I will point out how normality has been introduced in the realm of personal experience and how normal individuality has been made up by ‘psy-technologies’. (cf. Rose 1996.)

The normal as ‘measure’ of human beings emerged along with the expansion of the empirical human sciences (demography, social, psychological and modenrn medical sciences and statistics with the bearing on these disciplines) and the proliferation of the technologies for the government of the living from the 19^th century onwards. In this context, the normal acquired three characteristics. First, the normal was constituted as immanent to the social, psychological and biological phenomena of human life it referred to. Second, the distinction between the normal and the abnormal was not clear-cut but they rather formed a continuum, and normality was articulated as a reflection of pathologies and abnormalities. Finally, the normal was equivocal. (Canguilhem 1989; Foucault 1989; Hacking 1990; Ewald 1990; Helén 1997, 81-88).

Historical studies of the normal have concentrated on the development through which the idea of the normal and pathological in the new clinical medicine and the normal of the statistics were adopted by the empicial social sciences during the 19^th century (Canguilhem 1989; Foucault 1989; Hacking 1990). My inquiry will focus on the third cluster of discourses and practices in which the normal as a concept and a related ‘gaze’ became a constitutive element and took a particular shape, namely the epistemic and practical field of ‘the psychological’ (cf. Rose 1996, 41-66). The main object of sciences and technologies of the psyche was individuality, i.e. the particularity of the mental faculties and states of an individual person and of his or her subjective ‘inner’ experiences. In this context normality was connected with individuality and the idea of (mentally) normal individual emerged.

The implementation of the statistical concept of the normal into ‘the psychological’ through psychological experiments and testing has been accurately analysed in many studies (e.g. Danziger 1994; Rose 1996). Instead, my study will focus on the relationship between normality and individuality in the case histories. Moreover, I will analyse these case histories in psychological discourses that were closely linked with therapeutic practices of understanding and moulding the self. Thus, the subject of my inquiry is the role of the normal in psychotherapeutic ‘reasoning through cases’ (Forrester 1996) and practices of the self (cf. Foucault 1985, 25-32).

The first corpus of historical data under study consists of Sigmund Freud’s female case histories and the use of psychopathological cases as the evidence for the theory of ‘the sexual impulse in women’ by Havelock Ellis. The second corpus is formed by the case histories of ‘marital nonconsummation’ from Michael Balint’s training seminar for GPs working at Family Planning Association’s Marital Welfare Centres (Friedman 1971), and it is related to medico-psychological marriage counselling that was in its prime from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Finally, I will analyse case histories of women’s functional sexual disorders presentd by Helen Singer Kaplan (1979) as illustrations of her sex therapy that combined Masters’s and Johnson’s orgamology with psychoanalytic concepts.

I am particularly interested in the ways deviances and disorders in women’s sexuality are recognised, classified and explained and how the normal is defined in the above research material. The main subject of my analysis is the perception of relationships between bodily, verbal and other symbolical expressions of abnormality, social and moral behaviour and subjective emotions and desires. By concentrating my analysis on these aspects of the case histories, I hope to demonstrate that the norms set through the normal does not stand for definite ideals but are replaced by notions of continuum and multidimensionality. In addition, I will emphasise the inevitable tension between the personal, unique experience and the idea of normal individuality, and a historical tendency towards a kind of idiosyncratic concept of the normal in psychotechnological reasoning. All in all, my inquiry on the sexual psychology of the 20^th century will emphasise the polyvalence of the normal and the essential role of pathological and deviating phenomana in depiction and definition of normality. My purpose is to demonstrate the vacillating nature of this idea that has been so fundamental for understanding human beings and for practices to govern their lives in the modern West.

This ambiquity of normality in psychological knowledge and psychotherapies is particularly evident in the field of sexual psychology. Moreover, the close connection between psychological reasoning and practices and moral controversies, bio-politics and a major mode of modern western subjectivity, called the hermeneutics of the self by Foucault (1993), can be pointed out in an illustrative manner through the issue of sexuality. And since ‘woman’ has been the major enigma for the sexual reason of the 20^th century ambivalences in psychological ideas of the normal individuality are especially manifest in the ‘psychology of women’.

References

Canguilhem, Ceorges (1989) The normal and the pathological, New York: Zone.

Danziger, Kurt (1994) Constructing the subject. Historical origins of psychological research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ewald, François (1990) ‘Norms, Discipline and the Law’. Representations 30: 138 - 160.

Forrester, John (1996) If p, then what? Thinking in cases. History of the Human Sciences 9, 1-26.

Foucault, Michel (1985) The use of pleasure. The history of sexuality, vol. II, New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, Michel (1989) The birth of the clinic. An archaeology of medical perception. London & New York: Routledge.

Foucault, Michel (1993) ‘About the beginnings of the hermeneutics of the self’. Political Theory 21, 198-227.

Friedman, Leonard J. (1971) Virgin wives. A study of unconsummated marriages. London: Tavistock.

Hacking, Ian (1990) The taming of chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Helén, Ilpo (1997) Äidin elämän politiikka, Helsinki: Gaudeamus.

Kaplan, Helen Singer (1979) Disorders of sexual desire. London: Baillière Tindall.

Rose, Nikolas (1996) Inventing our selves. Psychology, power, and personhood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ilpo HELEN, Department of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland

Ehelen@valt.helsinki.fi

Ellen HERMAN, Can kinship be designed and still be normal? The curious case of child adoption

Normality has been a keyword in the history of modern child adoption. Well into the 20^th-century, eugenicsts and choosy parents alike agreed that only Anormal@ children were adoptable. In contrast, their Afeebleminded@ counterparts were unsuited to family life. Social workers have also sought Anormal@ adults to care for other people=s children. Even after 1940, when special needs adoptions expanded the terms of formal eligibility for family belonging, children who were older, disabled, and non-white were often placed with parents whose deviant profiles (poor, single, homosexual) confirmed that kinship norms were more than factual descriptions. They were moral recipes for social acceptability and personal happiness.

Discovering and, when necessary, manufacturing the qualities that constituted normality was the point of numerous rationalizing practices in 20^th-century adoption: detailed data collection and casework recording, mental testing and developmental measuring, home studies, psychological interpretation, supervisory visits, elaborate policies of state-sanctioned information management, and a significant research enterprise that subjected the adoption process and its outcomes to ongoing empirical scrutiny. Such practices distinguished agency adoption, distanced it from earlier forms of child sharing and exchange, and helped to legitimize a welfare state that joined human science to liberalism and help to power. According to advocates of adoption regulation, only adoptions premised on scientific knowledge of norms in human development, motivation, and behavior would reliably produce normal families and normal children. In 1943, Dorothy Hutchinson, an American authority on child placement and faculty member in the Columbia School of Social Work, wrote: AThe selection of foster homes has at best been based on the assumption that although there is no such thing as a perfect home there is such a thing as a normal family.@ Normality was the goal, yet Hutchinson admitted that she could not explain exactly what she meant by Anormal family.@ ANormality is something that is hard to define, yet easy to feel and see.@

I am interested in understanding when normality became a core requirement for making strangers^* into kin and why the rhetoric of normal and abnormal pervaded theories and practices surrounding adoptive family formation by midcentury. Did psychological norms (for intelligence, emotions, and personality) replace material and philanthropic considerations in adoptionBsuch as inheritance of property and charity for the poor? Did they substitute a language of objectivity for one of value and custom? Did participants believe that normalizing practices might compensate for adoption=s second-class status? Did Anormal families@ embody positive ideals? Or were they defined negatively, as families in which specific deviations were absent? How did norms in adoption reinforce or challenge cultural expectations based on class, gender, ethnic, racial, and national identities?

This paper will consider selected examples of adoption normalization by focusing on the American case from roughly World War I through the 1960s. Adoption offers a worthwhile vantage point on the creation and maintenance of norms precisely because adoption has been understood as deviant itself. With Arealness@ in kinship located in the nexus between blood and belonging (Ablood is thicker than water@), no adoptive family could ever be truly real, and normality was closely linked to the Arealness@ of reproductive nature. Identifying and creating normal families through adoption was consequently a paradoxical accomplishment. The very acts of planning and consent that made adoption exemplary also marked it as inauthentic and inferior. Solidarities founded on purposeful social decisions were construed as flimsy and superficial in comparison with fixed and unchosen bonds originating in a realm of natural facts impervious to human agency. This paradox is especially notable in a democratic culture like the United States, whose core values include individualism, freedom, and choice.

Sources: This paper is drawn from a larger research project, AKinship by Design.@ The project considers adoption as a case study of modern social and scientific engineering, and treats adoption=s history as a point of intersection between science, technology, and social welfare. Sources include a range of materials drawn from the professional literatures of social work, psychology, pediatrics, and genetics; the popular Ahow-to@ and narrative genres; archives of major national and governmental organizations involved in adoption regulation (including the U.S. Children=s Bureau and the Child Welfare League of America); personal papers of prominent adoption reformers in law, science, and social welfare; organizational records important to the evolution and critique of the matching paradigm (including the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the National Urban League, and Louise Wise Services). A short list of books that have shaped my thinking includes: Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Harvard, 1999); David A. Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (Basic Books, 1995); E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (Harvard, 1998); Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Harvard, 1999); Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, 1995); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998); Marilyn Strathern, After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1992).

Ellen HERMAN, Department of History, University of Oregon, USA

eherman@darkwing.uoregon.edu

Gudrun HOPF, Norm and deviation: people with mental disabilities in an Austrian rural society, late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The core issues of the symposium – how are norms established and defined; to what extent do historical and cultural contexts play a part in the construction of norms and deviance – are much the same as those of my current research project, entitled "How norms are practised – a historical-anthropological view on norms and lifeworlds", which I have conceptualised together with two colleagues. Our empirical work is done in the form of three case studies, each of them dealing with different periods of time and different aspects of the general subject.

What I propose to present at the symposium is a part of this project: my case study on constructions of norm and deviation in context with mental disability. My analysis is based on the core assumption that disability or handicap is not a natural, but a social phenomenon. The prerequisites of it are (a) the existence of a norm, and (b) the perception of an individual deviation from this norm. As it is put by W. Jantzen (1987: 18), "Disability … becomes visible and thus existent as a handicap when in the context of social interaction and communication traits or sets of traits of an individual are related to minimum concepts of individual and social abilities. In that it is stated that due to personal traits an individual does not meet with these minimum requirements, a handicap becomes evident, and only from this moment on does it exist as a social subject."

Norms – including those of the body and mind – are socially and culturally defined, and so are deviations and disabilities. Moreover, disability, stigmatisation, and handicap do not automatically result from established norms on the one side and an individual’s not complying with them on the other. General norms may apply differently to different people, depending on their positions in society; perceptions of deviation may depend on factors other than "objective" otherness; and finally, for an individual to be defined as disabled may result from various interests of the ones who define.

My research is based in part on a regional case study of a court district in the Austrian Alps (Oberwölz in Styria) and in part on a discourse analysis of contemporary medical, juridical, and other related literature. The main sources for the regional case study are court records of people who were legally incapacitated because of "imbecility" or "feeble-mindedness". The analysis of these records has shown that there are at least two different systems of norms at work: on the one hand, the practical norms of the local population, and on the other hand, the much more abstract norms of the medical experts involved in the incapacitation process.

By "practical norms" I mean that the social environment (family, neighbourhood, employers) defined normalcy primarily according to whether somebody’s mental and physical abilities were in accordance with his or her lifeworld, age, sex, and social position. Their criteria were mainly oriented by rustic labour: for instance, that a grown man had to be able to lead a pair of oxen, or a woman, to feed the cattle and clean the house. The criteria of the physicians, by way of contrast, were strongly oriented by the ability of abstract thinking (aside from the purely medical criteria which almost exclusively geared to physical traits or symptoms). Moreover, they used to judge those whom they examined by their own level of education, and hence tended towards a somewhat absurd circular argument: he or she who is not capable of understanding what is beyond him or her is mentally abnormal.

Beyond the express aim of the symposium to address questions of definition and demarcation of norms, I ask how norms were used, sometimes even contrary to their original purpose, in order to achieve particular ends. I do not maintain that the medical experts did so (nor would it have made much of a difference, since usually they were not called upon as long as someone was not regarded as mentally ill or disabled by the social environment), but the local population of the Alpine region under examination certainly did. Originally, I had chosen the region for its exceedingly high rates of disabled people in late nineteenth century census lists which appeared to require an explanation. The explanation suggesting itself at closer inspection is that this was an extremely restrictive society, very quick at hand with stigmatising people, and employing stigmatisation as a strategy.

As for medical definitions, I also ask not only for their genesis, but for their implications as well. The nineteenth century being a period of definitions, much of its pictures and definitions has survived to this day and age, very often without anyone’s perceiving it. In the case of disability, this relates to both the medical and the societal level, meaning that 19^th century medicine (which was influenced by 19^th century society, of course) has influenced both today’s medical and social views of the normal and pathological body and mind.

Cited literature:

Wolfgang Jantzen, Behinderung und Gesellschaftsstruktur: Perspektiven einer Soziologie der Behinderung [Disability and social structure: perspectives of a sociology of disablement], in: W. Jantzen, Allgemeine Behindertenpädagogik Bd. 1, Weinheim/Basel 1987, 15-45.

Sources:

For the regional case study, my main sources are court records from the local court of Oberwölz (political district of Murau, Styria) which are to be found in the regional archive of Styria (Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv) in Graz. Records concerning people who were legally incapacitated because of "imbecility" or "feeble-mindedness" have been preserved as a part of guardianship files (Pflegschaftsakten) from 1899 to 1908, but they have been cleaned out, such that as a rule only one record per year has been preserved except for the last year, 1908. All in all there are twelve cases to be examined, some of them with ample evidence (up to 200 pages). In addition, I have examined probate inventories connected to the individual cases, which sometimes shed some light on questions that cannot be answered from the main material alone. On a more international level, I use contemporary literature (medical, juridical etc.) for a discourse analysis.

Gudrun HOPF, Historical Anthropology, Interdisciplinary Institute of Austrian Universities, Wien, Austria

gudrun.hopf@univie.ac.at

Sarah MITCHELL, 'The link which unites them' - 'Siamese' twins and medial men in the nineteenth century

In September 1829, two young men from Siam arrived in Boston Harbor, aboard the American ship the Sachem. According to a contemporary newspaper account, they were about five feet tall, "of well proportioned frames, strong and active, good natured, and of a pleasant expression of countenance, and withal intelligent and sensible." They also possessed "a good appetite, appear lively, and run about the deck and the cabin of the ship with the same faculty that any two healthy lads would do, with their arms over each other shoulders." Strangely, in the same article, they are also described as a "very strange freak of nature" and as "one of the greatest living curiosities." How can we account for these apparently contradictory statements? Perhaps it would help to state that the two young men in question are Chang and Eng, the "original" Siamese twins. They appeared to the world as two "normal" individuals who happened to be joined together by a band of flesh. They were brought to the West because of this very "abnormality". Upon arrival, Chang and Eng were both examined extensively by medical men and displayed, for profit, to the general public. One typical statement, signed by a physician, assures the public that Chang and Eng "constitute a most extraordinary Lusus Naturae", are "totally devoid of deception, afford a very interesting spectacle, and are highly deserving of public patronage." This paper explores the cultural context that looked to medical men such as this one to affirm that certain bodies were curiosities; i.e. abnormal and moreover to use them as objects of public display. It examines the role of medical men in determining which bodies were "abnormal", the criteria used in these definitions and the historical circumstances by which doctors came to wield this influence.

Although no culture has ever considered conjoined twinning the norm, however it is defined, I argue that there is nothing inherent in conjoined twinning that makes it a medical, rather than a social, or religious phenomenon. That it is considered solely a medical condition today is largely a result of a historical construction that began in the eighteenth century, when doctors began to be involved with childbirth. Initially, doctors were called upon only in the case of difficult deliveries, as many births of conjoined twins proved to be. This medicalization process continued during the early to mid-nineteenth century with the changing role of the medical profession in society. At roughly the same time that Chang and Eng arrived in the United States, doctors were attempting to broaden their claim to knowledge of the body by, for example, gaining access to more bodies for anatomical study. They were doing this in the midst of public accusations of unethical practices such as grave robbing.

In their examinations of unusual anatomies, medical men were curious about the mechanics of the ways in which Chang and Eng and others like them, were joined. Viewing Chang and Eng as a site of discovery, they believed they could potentially answer a host of questions. What was the nature and extent of the physiological connection between them? When during their development did their union take place? To what extent were their similarities biological and to what extent were they environmental? Some writers could barely contain their enthusiasm when describing the "curious anatomical questions" that "can only be decided at their deaths." Many of the questions raised went beyond the purely physical. Were Chang and Eng two individuals or simply one? What about cases of conjoined twins whose body/ies are not so clearly demarcated? What did doctors hope to learn from "abnormal" bodies that might better explain the processes of "normal" bodies?

Sources for this paper focus on the British and American medical literature dealing with specific cases of conjoined twins, as well as texts dealing with the embryology and anatomy of "normal" individuals. I also look at newspaper articles about conjoined twins and popular materials used to advertise and promote their public appearances.

Sarah MITCHELL, Department of History, Uni