Brain and Art by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030235802
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

9.2 From Chrono-Photography to Cinematography

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, the first applications of graphic and photographic time-based devices (myography, chronography, pneumography, chronophotography and cinematography) for recording and analysis in the field of human and animal physiology, proved useful in fixing and measuring the movement of various organs. This was done by recording their various activities, such as heart rate in various physiological conditions or the movement of other various parts of the body under the influence of the sense organs. The use of chrono-photography in the physiology of human and animal movement followed its application to observe and study various pathological conditions, in particular in the neuropsychiatric field. While it was at the end of the nineteenth century, cinematography would fulfill this function [23, 24].

During the late nineteenth century, scientists working in both America and in Europe sensed the potential of chronophotographic image for the study of subjects suffering from psychiatric and neurological pathologies. Pioneering this was the research conducted in the United States, in Philadelphia, by the neurologists Francis Xavier Dercum (1856–1931), in collaboration with the Anglo-American photographer Edward Muybridge [25–27] along with Theodore Weisenburg [28] and Walter Greenough Chase in Boston [29].

In 1885, Dercum, in collaboration with Muybridge produced the first applications of motion pictures of neurological disorders ([25–27, 30]). As Lanska states, patients come from Dercum’s own clinical practice and ‘from the practices of colleagues, including Mitchell, Pepper, Wood, James Hendrie Lloyd (1853–1932), and Charles Karsner Mills (1845–1930)’ [27]. Thanks to the apprentice spent beside Muybridge, Dercum reached the aim to record through the chrono-photographic apparatus some of the first neurological disorders ever filmed: ‘[At] my request, [Muybridge] photographed for me quite a large number of patients both from the nervous clinic of the University Hospital, of which I was then the chief, and also quite a number of patients from the Philadelphia Hospital’ [31]. The neurological cases (included in Volume 8 of Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion) comprise collectively 592 separate images on 22 plates of 20 subjects, with 12–47 images per plate [27, 32, 33].

Lanska in his paper on Dercum wrote that the majority of these photographic plates concern various pathologic gaits (18 plates of 18 subjects), usually of men (14 plates of 14 subjects). Three of the subjects with pathologic gaits due to neurological conditions were partially clothed (two females and one male), but the rest were nude. There were also several cases of abnormal gaits related to non-neurological conditions such as amputations, scoliosis and morbid obesity. Dercum was able to graphically represent the trajectories of different body parts during ambulation and then to compare these trajectories with normal and abnormal gaits. He noted that with the normal gait: ‘It is seen at a glance that this curve [of the trajectory of the lateral malleolus as viewed from the side] is made up of a number of elements’ [25, 26]. Among the Dercum-Muybridge sequences of pathologic gaits, ‘the most common diagnosis was locomotor ataxia’. Followed by spastic gaits that includes cases of hemiparesis, quadriparesis and paraparesis [27].

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