Janina Wellmann

en

Janina Wellmann is a historian of science. She has worked on the history of embryology and is currently writing a book on biological motion. She held fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, at Tel Aviv University and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. At present she is Associate Director at MECS / Media Cultures of Computer Simulation. Her publications include “Folding into Being: Early Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm.“ History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 37/1 (2015), 17-33; ; Cinematography, Seriality, and the Sciences. Guest Editor, Science in Context 24/3 (2011) The Form of Becoming. Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760-1830. Zone Books 2017.

research

research expositions

  • Listening to the Body Moving: Auscultation, Sound, and Music in the Early Nineteenth Century (2017) author(s): Janina Wellmann published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    This paper explores the sounds of the body in an era before sound could be recorded as sound, the first half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on the French physician René Théophile Laennec’s study of cardiac disease and in particular his use of auscultation, it asks how the early nineteenth century conceived of a sounding living body, specifically how auscultation and body sounds produced new knowledge about the body, health, and disease. I show that Laennec thought of the body and the heart in terms of a musical instrument, and argue that the limits to auscultation’s diagnostic power lay not so much in its inability fully to explain disease as in Laennec’s analogy of body and musical instrument, medical understanding and musical skill. This soon gave way to a new understanding and soundscape of the body, as nineteenth-century physiologists investigated the body with instruments that could penetrate the body ever more deeply.
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