"...with mathematic precision" - continued...

The Office

As a medical intern in 1884/85, Sigmund Freud also made use of dynamometers when he performed experiments on himself using hydrochloric cocaine. Freud not merely wanted to describe the effects of the drug (as prose of a self awareness), but also to render them objective through measurement (Freud 1885a, 1885b). In his accompanying studies he speaks of two dynamometers, but we only know the origin of one of them, namely that designed by the French neurologist Victor B. Burq, who even constructed two different apparatuses:

Two Dynamometers according to Burq, built by Lüer (left) and Charrière (right)

Freud's first series of experiments (taking cocaine twelve times over six weeks in amounts of 0.05–0.10 g.) already provides all the important results, most notably the "wonderfully stimulating effect of coca" (Freud 1884, p. 301 f.). Below are the experimental results from November 9th, 1884:

From: Freud, Sigmund. 1885. Beitrag zur Kenntnis der Cocawirkung, p. 131

Table showing results of Freud's dynamometer trials under the influence of cocaine. The left column gives the times the trials were made each day. The right column adds notes on the subjective state of the test subject ("tired", "euphoric", etc.). The middle columns are giving the read offs from the dynamometer, the maximum and average values.

Accordingly the future psychoanalyst not only transformed his private office into a laboratory, thus uniting the experimenter and the test subject in one person but also carried on a knowledge of the body which is not based primarily on the written word as its constituting medium. Before this knowledge could even appear as a manuscript, it was isolated as a data point on the scale of a dynamometer "with mathematic precision" - just as Carl Ludwig had called for in his 1852 Textbook of Physiology (p. 2). Scientific prose takes a back seat to methods based on measurement, which are accompanied by forms of numerical notation.