Apollo's Laboratory - continued...

The Heroic Experimenter

In the early 1840s, Du Bois-Reymond belonged to a group of Berlin students for whom experimental physics was the unshakeable model for the investigation of life. "Sworn to demonstrate the truth that no forces operate in living organisms except physico-chemical ones," Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke and Hermann v. Helmholtz saw themselves as the avant-garde of experimental physiology and felt obligated to defend it against the 'establishment': the faculty of the Berlin medical school, whom they perceived as hostile to experimentation. The introduction to Thierische Elektricität contains a heated, highly polemical attack on the idea of a Lebenskraft (Life-force). Vitalistic outlooks, storms Du Bois-Reymond, are nothing but "a tissue woven of the most arbitrary claims, ... a murky empire of speculation." The concept of Lebenskraft is an expression about which "reason has been put to sleep in the soft armchair of obscurity." Against this "specter," which must "finally be burned out," the only possible aids were the clear language of physics and the experimental physiology conducted with instruments modeled after those in physics laboratories.

Phoebus and Lyceus, Apollo's epithets, define him as pure, a bringer of light, the enemy of all darkness and the defender against evil. The whole enterprising spirit of young Du Bois-Reymond was directed against the "dark, uncertain" nature of Lebenskraft, and Apollo offered the best classical model for creating an image of a lone male warrior. "The highest concept of ideal, manly youth takes form in the Apollo Belvedere," reads Johann Joachim Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. Apollo is "the most beautiful of the gods," for his form suggests "a youth born to nobility and great intentions." The Winckelmann-enthusiast Herder sounds much the same: Apollo is "the highest symbol of all the young heroes of mankind," and his form is "a heroic thought rendered visible." Invoking the Apollo Belvedere, who is armed with a bow and arrow and in his youth slew the dragon Python to free the Delphic oracle and its knowledge of the future, Du Bois-Reymond presents himself in the introduction to Thierische Elektricität as an experimenter armed with laboratory instruments with which he will attack the Python (vitalism) that is darkening the future of science. Interpreted as an experimenting Apollo, Du Bois-Reymond's illustration of the classical youth becomes a pictorial introduction to Thierische Elektricität, the self-confidence of organic physics conveyed as an image.