Laboratory Life - continued...

A Physiologist's Everyday II

Unfortunately, Patrizi's laboratory notebooks have not survived. But his published communications, as well as similar material from the archive of Angelo Mosso's institute, reveal what they most likely would have contained: a sociology of everyday scientific laboratory research. At least, a century later and contrary to their original physiological aim, one might have read Patrizi's notebooks as a sociological study. Well before its theoretical discovery in the work of Edmund Husserl, the everyday had begun to matter in physiology. To endow his faithfully recorded fatigue curves with their actual context, Patrizi had to record his everyday life meticulously, because it was the proper object of study. The monotony, the accidents, and the little occurrences that composed the ordinary life of a physiological experimenter in fin-de-siècle Turin affected his bodily functions and, thus, needed to be included in his experimentation. While Patrizi and his colleagues experimentalized their everyday life to test its effects upon their nerves, future generations of phenomenologists, sociologists, and historians of science began to regard it as the most important key to understand what scientific research was all about. Since Husserl, and his insight that the logic of the sciences can be deciphered in the ordinary practice of scientists, scholars have discovered the everyday. Physiologists had done so before.