The Greatest Unknown Intellectual of the 19th Century | Science & Technology - The MIT Press Reader

Photo: Emil du Bois-Reymond

Emil du Bois-Reymond proclaimed the mystery of consciousness, championed the theory of natural selection, and revolutionized the study of the nervous system. Today, he is all but forgotten, argues Gabriel Finkelstein, Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado Denver. 

A detail of a page from du Bois-Reymond's notes to his popular lectures.

Photo: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin State Library, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation)

Unlike Charles Darwin and Claude Bernard, who endure as heroes in England and France, Emil du Bois-Reymond is generally forgotten in Germany — no streets bear his name, no stamps portray his image, no celebrations are held in his honor, and no collections of his essays remain in print. Most Germans have never heard of him, and if they have, they generally assume that he was Swiss.
But it wasn’t always this way. Du Bois-Reymond was once lauded as “the foremost naturalist of Europe,” “the last of the encyclopedists,” and “one of the greatest scientists Germany ever produced.” Contemporaries celebrated him for his research in neuroscience and his addresses on science and culture; in fact, the poet Jules Laforgue reported seeing his picture hanging for sale in German shop windows alongside those of the Prussian royal family. 

Those familiar with du Bois-Reymond generally recall his advocacy of understanding biology in terms of chemistry and physics, but during his lifetime he earned recognition for a host of other achievements. He pioneered the use of instruments in neuroscience, discovered the electrical transmission of nerve signals, linked structure to function in neural tissue, and posited the improvement of neural connections with use. He served as a professor, as dean, and as rector at the University of Berlin, directed the first institute of physiology in Prussia, was secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, established the first society of physics in Germany, helped found the Berlin Society of Anthropology, oversaw the Berlin Physiological Society, edited the leading German journal of physiology, supervised dozens of researchers, and trained an army of physicians...

Detecting brain-beats is not yet common practice in barbering, but it is in medicine. In this respect Kierkegaard was right: The march of technology has been steady to the point of routine. Every refinement of du Bois-Reymond’s electrophysiological apparatus, from the vacuum-tube amplifier to the microelectrode to the patch clamp, can be thought of as a footnote to his original technique. Such achievement in instrumentation is anything but small: Two years after Kierkegaard’s taunt, du Bois-Reymond contended that physiology would become a science when it could translate life processes into mathematical pictures. The imaging devices associated with medical progress — the EKG, the EEG, the EMG, and the CT, MRI, and PET scanners — seem to vindicate his prediction. But success is not a category of analysis any more than failure. To make sense of why du Bois-Reymond devoted the whole of his scientific career to one problem, it helps to understand his deepest motivations...

How, then, could someone so famous and so important end up so forgotten? Let me suggest three kinds of answer. The first has to do with the histories that disciplines write about their origins. These usually take the form of the classical Greek myth of the Titanomachy, with a Promethean figure (the disciplinary founder) aligning with the Olympian gods of truth against an older and more barbaric generation (here symbolized by Kronos, or tradition). Psychology provides a perfect case in point. In Russia the discipline’s heroes are the two Ivans, Pavlov and Sechenov, with little discussion of how much they owed to Carl Ludwig’s studies of digestion or Emil du Bois-Reymond’s studies of nerve function. In Austria the hero is Sigmund Freud, and only recently has Andreas Mayer laid out just how much he learned from Jean-Martin Charcot’s use of hypnosis. And in the United States the hero is William James, the center of a veritable industry of scholars, none of whom quite put their finger on why he moved to Berlin in 1867. James never mentioned his debt to du Bois-Reymond, perhaps because he quit his class, or perhaps because so many of his early lectures drew from du Bois-Reymond’s writings. In each case the titanic hero breaks the line of continuity, throws over the all-devouring father, and benefits humanity with his torch of reason.
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Recommended Reading

Emil du Bois-Reymond:
Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

Source: The MIT Press Reader