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Laboratory Life - continued...


A Physiologist's Everyday I

It is thus surprising, that we find experimental physiologists in one of Europe's foremost laboratories of the time, in Turin, during the 1890s deeply concerned with their everyday life. In 1892, Mariano Patrizi, assistant to the institute's director Angelo Mosso, published an article on Everyday Changes in Muscular Work. The short communication described a series of experiments with the so-called Ergograph, literally work-writer, an instrument designed to both trace muscular performance and fatigue as a curve.

Over a period of several weeks, Patrizi recorded his fatigue curve four times a day: in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening and after midnight, to chart the alternatively stimulating and tiring effects of his day: "the light, the noises, the impressions of the other sense organs, the emotions, the movement." (Patrizi 1892, 46) Since one of his stipulations was that the daily stimuli should explicitly be restricted to the range of the ordinary, Patrizi excluded any extraordinary activity from his life for weeks, following strictly the monotonous course of his academic habits: work in the laboratory and at the desk; breakfast, lunch and dinner at fixed hours; a short stroll in the evening; little wine, and no tobacco. One could have set watches by him. A generation before Husserl diagnosed that the positive sciences had forgotten their everyday, physiology turned it thoroughly into an experiment.

Reference: Felsch, Philipp. 2003. Laboratory Life. How Physiologists Discovered their Everyday.. The Virtual Laboratory (ISSN 1866-4784), https://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/references?id=art12&page=p0004