Laboratory Life - continued...

Ergography

The origins of Patrizi's attention to the humdrum of daily life can be traced back to a visit of his director, Angelo Mosso, to Carl Ludwig's famous physiological institute in Leipzig in the early 1870s. In Leipzig, Mosso became acquainted with the graphic method and soon developed into one of its most ardent followers. Later, he wrote that the fatigue research Hugo Kronecker was doing in Leipzig with frog muscles, "raised my wish to devote myself to the study of fatigue. The precision of the method, the elegance of the instruments, the accuracy of the results were such as to enthuse any beginner." (Mosso 1892, 83) Kronecker registered the decreasing contractions of electrically stimulated frog muscles and obtained tracings of impressive regularity. The steady drop of the muscular convulsions, which Kronecker called the "fatigue curve", took the form of a straight line and could be expressed in a mathematical manner. (Kronecker 1871, 198) It is striking, while typical of a physiological article of the period, that Kronecker's original publication dealt strongly with disturbances and their prevention. The straight fatigue curve could only be recorded in the ideal laboratory situation, where the frog muscle was "good" and, even more importantly, external irritations of any kind did not occur. Kronecker's research, one could say, aimed at examining pure muscular work in of itself.

In 1884, ten years after his Leipzig stay, Angelo Mosso began to use a newly invented instrument in his Turin laboratory, the ergograph. Eventually, man's muscular movement could be monitored and, since the subjects were told to bend their muscles deliberately, induced by will instead of electricity. Immediately, Mosso observed significant differences between his results and Kronecker's law of fatigue: "What surprised us most in these trials was the fact that each person has its own fatigue curve." (Mosso 1890, 97) Moreover, the curves reacted most sensibly to internal and external influences of any kind: "Even an indigestion or a bad night's rest, or any sort of excess, suffices to alter the curve in character." (Mosso 1892, 95) In general, and after four years of steady ergographic registration, Mosso could state that his instrument was best and, more than any other, suited to record the "accidental changes" of muscular force during any given period of time. (Mosso 1890, 98) Accident, the worst enemy for experimenters like Claude Bernard or Hugo Kronecker, had thus entered the laboratory and, subsequently, led to studies like Mariano Patrizi's afore mentioned. Patrizi called, for the first time, the new object of physiological study the "everyday".