From Photography to Cinematography: Recording Movement and Gait in a Neurological Context

The major challenge of photography has been freezing movement, to transform it into a fixed image or series of images. Very soon, photographers became interested in movement itself and tried to use photography as a tool to analyze movement. At the early stages, physicians interested in movement, perhaps surprisingly, made important technical contributions. Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, by Duchenne, the first book with physiological experiments illustrated by photographs, is a landmark in this historical development. At the Salpêtrière, thanks to Charcot, photography officially entered clinical neurology. Medical journals with photographs were actively developed by Bourneville. Londe established a clinical photographic laboratory and published the first book on medical photography. The study of animal and human movement by Muybridge and Marey in the 1880s led to chronophotography and later cinematography. Clinicians such as Dercum and Richer took advantage of these new techniques to study pathological movement and gait in neurological diseases.     

From photography to cinematography: recording movement and gait in a neurological context

The major challenge of photography has been freezing movement, to transform it into a fixed image or series of images. Very soon, photographers became interested in movement itself and tried to use photography as a tool to analyze movement. At the early stages, physicians interested in movement, perhaps surprisingly, made important technical contributions. Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, by Duchenne, the first book with physiological experiments illustrated by photographs, is a landmark in this historical development. At the Salpêtrière, thanks to Charcot, photography officially entered clinical neurology. Medical journals with photographs were actively developed by Bourneville. Londe established a clinical photographic laboratory and published the first book on medical photography. The study of animal and human movement by Muybridge and Marey in the 1880s led to chronophotography and later cinematography. Clinicians such as Dercum and Richer took advantage of these new techniques to study pathological movement and gait in neurological diseases.     

Vincenzo Neri and His Legacy in Paris and Bologna

Italian neurologist Vincenzo Neri was able to discover cinematography at the beginning of his career, when in 1908 he went to Paris to learn and improve his clinical background by following neurological cases at La Pitié with Joseph Babinski, who became his teacher and friend. While in Paris, Neri photographed and filmed several patients of famous neurologists, such as Babinski and Pierre Marie. His stills were published in several important French neurological journals and medical texts. He also collaborated with Georges Mendel, who helped Doyen film the first known surgical operation in the history of cinema. In 1910, when he came back to Bologna, he continued in his clinical activities and, for 50 years, slowly developed a huge archive of films, images, and prints of neurological, psychiatric, and orthopedic cases. This archive was extremely helpful to Neri, who especially needed to analyze neurological disorders and to differentiate them from functional conditions in order to understand clinical signs, rules, and mechanisms.     

In Search of the Absolute: the Nouvelle Revue française,and Uses and Meanings of the Orient (1920–1930)

In the intellectual history of the interwar period, the Nouvelle Revue française (NRF) occupies centre-stage. Valéry's essay La crise de l'esprit (1919), published in the review following the Great War, announced a crisis of faith in Western values and traditions. As elsewhere, intellectuals in France looked to the East for new inspirations. This article traces the interest and attraction of the East for certain key NRF writers, including André Malraux, and the teacher and philosopher, Jean Grenier, whose essay Sur l'Inde was published in the review in 1930. The article is informed partly by the correspondence of Jean Paulhan, the editor of the NRF.     

The Epipaleolithic (Iberomaurusian) from Grotte des Contrebandiers,Morocco

First identified 100 years ago, the Iberomaurusian is an Epipaleolithic industry that was described from a number of sites across western North Africa. One of these is Grotte des Contrebandiers (Smugglers’ Cave) in Morocco, where Abbé Jean Roche recovered Iberomaurusian materials in excavations in the late 1950s. Although the lithics were published in the early 1960s, subsequent changes in methods and in assessing the interpretive potential of lithic assemblages necessitated a restudy of these collections from Contrebandiers. This study led to a better understanding of the lithic types present and of the use of particular stone raw materials. Iberomaurusians emphasized lithic strategies that maximized use of fine-grained stone to the extent that pièces esquillées should be, among others, a defining criterion for this lithic industry.     

Jean Norton Cru and combatants' literature of the First World War

Using the unpublished archives of Jean Norton Cru, held at the University of Aix-en-Provence, this article provides a new interpretation of Cru's famous book on First World War literature, Témoins, first published in 1929. This work severely criticised a large number of books of soldiers' experiences of combat. Here a new reading of Cru's motives is offered, looking in particular at the author's Protestant background as well as at the links between reading and writing strategies.     

The Originality of Descartes Theory about the Pineal Gland

René Descartes thought that the pineal gland is the part of the body with which the soul is most immediately associated. Several prominent historians (such as Soury, Thorndike and Sherrington) have claimed that this idea was not very original. We re-examine the evidence and conclude that their assessment was wrong. We pay special attention to the thesis about the pineal gland which Jean Cousin defended in January, 1641.     

MINERO‐PETROGRAPHIC STUDY OF COOKING WARE AND POMPEIAN RED WARE (ROSSO POMPEIANO) FROM CUMA (SOUTHERN ITALY)

Excavations carried out in Cuma by the Centre Jean Bérard archaeologists have uncovered a large quantity of pottery. This study is focused on cooking ware and on internal red‐slip cookware, also known as Pompeian Red Ware (Rosso Pompeiano), dated from the first century bc to the first century ad . A comparison with the minero‐petrographic composition of beach sands collected along the Bay of Naples coastline highlights the provenance of the temper from the Somma‐Vesuvius area, marked by leucite‐bearing scoriae and garnet. Petrochemical analyses allow us to distinguish two main groups of pottery characterized by different technological options based on the amount of temper and on the type of clay. X‐ray diffraction and scanning electron microscope data demonstrate improved accuracy in the production of Rosso Pompeiano, especially with regard to firing control, which was in a prevailing oxidizing atmosphere and in a narrow thermal range, between about 800 and 900°C.     

The (Jean) Nouvel Other: Primitivism and the Musée du Quai Branly

The Musée du Quai Branly, located beside the Eiffel Tower in Paris, opened in June 2006. Constructed to house France's important collection of non-western art, the museum has been promoted as ‘decidedly post-colonial’ and a place of ‘reconciliation and sharing’. Historians have situated the creation of the museum within political debates over the restructuring of several of France's museums and, more broadly, the country's position in a post-colonial world, while focusing little critical attention on the building itself. The author argues that Jean Nouvel's architectural program for the Musée du Quai Branly—a ‘primitive shelter’ surrounded by a ‘sacred wood’—gives physical form to a primitivist aesthetic. The unproblematised binaries of self versus other and culture versus nature evident in Nouvel's design reveal a surprisingly unsophisticated theoretical standpoint. As a frame in which to view and understand the objects on display, the Musée du Quai Branly invites a primitivist—and colonial—reading of its collection.     

Nationalism and patriotism in nineteenth century French socialist thought

A little dose of internationalism may estrange a man from patriotism, but a strong dose brings him back. Jean Jaurès, L'Armée Nouvelle     

Jean Améry's Concept of Resentment at the Crossroads of Ethics and Politics

The questions of forgiveness and political justice have recently become intertwined with the “transitional justice” project, the aim of which is the coming to terms with past human rights violations. This article demonstrates that “transitional justice” is less concerned with providing justice than with achieving historical closure, moral redemption, and a “new beginning.” It proposes that justice requires a profound reflection of a political nature by introducing and discussing Jean Améry's concept of resentment. Central to Améry's view of resentment is the restoration of the victim's social status and dignity, the validation of the experience of victimhood; his view therefore contrasts with the Nietzschean derogative view of ressentiment. On the basis of Améry's conceptualizations and with reference to Derrida's notions of “hiatus” and “forgiveness as impossibility,” the article problematizes the relation of ethics and politics—which the “transitional justice” project takes as given. It suggests that to theorize on justice, one needs to parenthesize the moral imagery of forgiveness and bring thirdness (or plurality) to the fore as the space where the identities of “victims” and “perpetrators” are established and played out.     

La République, l’affaire Dreyfus et la raison d’État

It is often said that the Dreyfus Affair was a key moment in the history of french republicanism. But the philosophical sens of this turning point remains to be elucidated. Indeed it is not certain that the republican discourse can then be reduced to the apology of the individual and of justice against the reason of State. The aim of this article is to analyse the arguments mobilised in the Dreyfus camp by certain figures of republican socialism, like Jean Jaurès, or of republicanism like Alfred Fouillée, Emile Durkheim and others. The examination of the positions of Célestin Bouglé, a young sociologist close to Durkheim, is here privileged: it is situated, through his biography and his work, at the crossroads of diverse tendencies, from positivism to neo-criticism.     

Jean-Jacques: The early life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1754

The paper presents important new information about the life of Jean Barbeyrac, the famous Huguenot translator of Grotius, Pufendorf, and Cumberland. Based on extensive research in the Secret State Archives (Geheimes Staatsarchiv) and the archive of the French Church (Französicher Dom) in Berlin, it discusses two previously unknown letters of Barbeyrac to court officials, and the role of this interaction in his departure, in 1710, to the University of Lausanne. It also reintroduces a relatively unknown work by Barbeyrac on gambling, the Traité du Jeu (1709), and clarifies the role of various personages in the French Colony of Berlin in the early eighteenth century. The investigation articulates various family relationships of Barbeyrac and follows him to the University of Groningen (in 1717)—a relatively unexplored period of his life—whose archives have recently yielded a comprehensive inventory of his possessions. Also, by analyzing documents dealing with the life of Barbeyrac's brother, Jacques, the paper contributes to our understanding of the early modern pastorate in Brandenburg (Prussia). A prelude to a larger study of Barbeyrac and the Huguenot diaspora in Berlin, it focuses on essential texts, both old and new, which are needed for an adequate understanding of this formative period of the early German Enlightenment and its main figures.     

Archaeology of a 17th‐century Naval Battle: the first two seasons of the Rockley Bay Research Project in Tobago

On 3 March 1677, French Vice‐Admiral Jean d'Estrées launched an assault on an inferior Dutch squadron, commanded by Jacob Binckes, anchored in Rockley Bay, Tobago. The French attack was defeated, but a total of 12 warships on both sides were sunk. The Rockley Bay Research Project, supported by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology and the University of Connecticut began an archaeological investigation of the battle in 2012. At least one of the Dutch men‐of‐war lost in the battle has been found, TRB‐5. The article is a preliminary report on the work that has been carried out so far.     

Witchcraft,Human Nature,and Political Theology in Jean Bodin’s de la Démonomanie des sorciers

ABSTRACT

Jean Bodin (1530–1596) is most well-known as the thinker Carl Schmitt credits for modern absolutist sovereignty and political theology. Contemporary critics of sovereignty, following Schmitt, ascribe to Bodin a theological politics of obedience and the negation of individual and collective human freedom through authoritarian discipline (Cocks, Joan. On Sovereignty and Other Political Delusions. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Yet, a dedicated study of Bodin’s own political theology remains wanting. His most extensive discussion of theology and law is in his more obscure work on the jurisprudence of witchcraft. In de la Démonomanie des sorciers (1580), Bodin provides a theological account of a divinely created rational order where benevolence and evil are at work in the world. Humans must exercise the free will to choose between them. Bodin’s theological anthropology anchors his political theology with important implications for the proper exercise of human political power within the natural and divine order.     

Reviews/Comptes rendus

Book reviewed in this article: Le Saint-Laurent, grande porte de l'Amérique, par Jean -Claude Lasserre , Hurtubise HMH, Montréal The Geography of Laws and Justice: Spatial Perspectives on the Criminal Justice System, by Keith D. Harries and Stanley D. Brunn Geographical Perspectives on Juvenile Delinquency, by David J. Evans The Criminal's Image of the City, by Ronald L. Carter and Kim Q. Hill Crime: A Spatial Perspective, edited by Daniel E. Georges -Abeyie and Keith D. Harries     

The Legacy of Planter Jean My: Analysis of Two Private Colonial Homes in Southern Melanesia

This paper discusses two private houses built by New Hebrides planter Jean Marot dit My, one on Santo Island, northern Vanuatu, and another in Nouméa, New Caledonia. The former is relatively well known in Vanuatu, as it is assumed to be the inspiration behind the octagonally shaped mansion of the character Emile de Becque, a French planter in James A. Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. Mr My’s houses are linked to French Art Deco style and are here compared to one another. Through the study of their similarities and differences, and of their interiors, the integration of Art Deco style and design can be demonstrated. While they represent two very different ways of life, they show the inspiration, aspirations and trajectory of a colonial French family in southern Melanesia. Hopefully, this research will help promote the protection of both houses, through emphasising the importance of their historical and literary connections.     

Eugenics ideals,racial hygiene,and the emigration process of German-American neurogeneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965)

ABSTRACT

Biological psychiatry in the early twentieth century was based on interrelated disciplines, such as neurology and experimental biology. Neuropsychiatrist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965) was a product of this interdisciplinary background who showed an ability to adapt to different scientific contexts, first in the field of neuromorphology in Berlin, and later in New York. Nonetheless, having innovative ideas, as Kallmann did, could be an ambiguous advantage, since they could lead to incommensurable scientific views and marginalization in existing research programs. Kallmann followed his Dr. Med. degree (1919) with training periods at the Charité Medical School in Berlin under psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer (1868–1948). Subsequently, he collaborated with Ernst Ruedin (1874–1952), investigating sibling inheritance of schizophrenia and becoming a protagonist of genetic research on psychiatric conditions. In 1936, Kallmann was forced to immigrate to the USA where he published The Genetics of Schizophrenia (1938), based on data he had gathered from the district pathological institutes of Berlin’s public health department. Kallmann resumed his role as an international player in biological psychiatry and genetics, becoming president (1952) of the American Society of Human Genetics and Director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in 1955. While his work was well received by geneticists, the idea of genetic differences barely took hold in American psychiatry, largely because of émigré psychoanalysts who dominated American clinical psychiatry until the 1960s and established a philosophical direction in which genetics played no significant role, being regarded as dangerous in light of Nazi medical atrocities. After all, medical scientists in Nazi Germany had been among the social protagonists of racial hygiene which, under the aegis of Nazi philosophies, replaced medical genetics as the basis for the ideals and application of eugenics.     

Progress in the human geography of the Maghreb

Sutton and Lawless review a selection of the prolific literature on the Maghreb's human geography published from the late 1970s onward. The pedigree of the discipline in Maghreb was established by several notable geographers who lived, researched, and wrote there. Augustin Bernard's writings on rural settlement, his atlas, and study of Algeria are still cited. Jean Despois's regional study with Raynal and his work on Tunisia, together with the detailed rural research of Jean Poncet, provides a particularly rich coverage for that country. Jean Dresch's early work on Morocco exemplified an early critique of the contemporaneous uncritical colonial human geography. The Sahara's fascination also inspired pioneering studies by Robert Capot-Rey. The work of these notables and others provided a solid background of geographical literature on the Maghreb to be supplemented, criticized, and challenged by more recent researchers, sometimes pupils of the above individuals, and increasingly North African by birth. The tradition of general texts on the Maghreb has continued, though increasingly with systematic approaches replacing regional appraisals. The geography of the decolonization of the Maghreb by Isnard has been replaced by a study summarizing recent collaborative work by a team of French geographers. The Saharan extensions of the Maghreb states have often been linked in general works, sometimes being juxtaposed against the Maghreb as in the essays offered to Jean Despois. Lawless and Findlay's collaborative study juxtaposes geographical studies of each country's economic development with political scientists' evaluations of their sociopolitical development. This review limits itself largely to geographers and geographical journals, only occasionally including significant works from other subject areas, and to 1977-1978 publications, with a few notable exceptions. The spatial juxtaposition of contrasting approaches to economic development, liberal market economy approaches by Tunisia and Morocco arguably leading to dependency, and centrally-planned strategies by Algeria and Libya resulting in bureaucratic constraints serves to offer the Maghreb as a pertinent case-study region for the applied geographer of developing countries.