Sounding Bodies Music and the Making of Biomedical Science

The unfolding influence of music and sound on the fundamental structure of the biomedical sciences, from ancient times to the present.

Beginning in ancient Greece, Peter Pesic writes, music and sound significantly affected the development of the biomedical sciences. Physicians used rhythmical ratios to interpret the pulse, which inspired later efforts to record the pulse in musical notation. After 1700, biology and medicine took a “sonic turn,” viewing the body as a musical instrument, the rhythms and vibrations of which could guide therapeutic insight. In Sounding Bodies, Pesic traces the unfolding influence of music and sound on the fundamental structure of the biomedical sciences.
 
Pesic explains that music and sound provided the life sciences important tools for hearing, understanding, and influencing the rhythms of life. As medicine sought to go beyond the visible manifestations of illness, sound offered ways to access the hidden interiority of body and mind. Sonic interventions addressed the search for a new typology of mental illness, and practitioners used musical instruments to induce hypnotic states meant to cure both psychic and physical ailments. The study of bat echolocation led to the manifold clinical applications of ultrasound; such sonic devices as telephones and tuning forks were used to explore the functioning of the nerves. 
 
Sounding Bodies follows Pesic’s Music and the Making of Modern Science and Polyphonic Minds to complete a trilogy on the influence of music on the sciences. Enhanced digital editions of Sounding Bodies offer playable music and sound examples.
 

Peter Pesic, writer, pianist, and scholar, is Director of the Science Institute, Musician-in-Residence, and Tutor Emeritus at St. John’s College, Santa Fe. He is the author of Labyrinth, Seeing Double, Abel’s Proof, Sky in a Bottle, Music and the Making of Modern Science, and Polyphonic Minds, all published by the MIT Press.
 

Introduction 1
Part I: Musical Origins 13
1 Pythagorean Medicine 15
2 The Controversial Project 29
3 Musica Humana 37
4 Homage to Herophilus 53
5 Kepler's Harmonic Physiology 71
6 The Musical Disease 89
Part II: Sonic Turns 107
7 Vibrating Fibers 109
8 Rhythms of the Heart 133
9 Songs of the Blood 151
Part III: Sounding Minds 169
10 Music, Melancholia, and Mania 171
11 Composing the Crisis 189
12 Catalepsy and Catharsis 205
Part IV: Sounding Bodies 217
13 Flying in the Dark 219
14 Ultrasounding Bodies 233
15 Tuning the Nerves 247
16 Telephonic Connections 269
17 Listening to Neurons 279
18 Sonic and Rhythmic Knowledge 299
19 Echoes and Envoi 311
Appendix: Two Papers on Muscle Sound by Hermann von Helmholtz 325
Notes 329
References 361
Source and Illustration Credits 387
Acknowledgements 389
Index 391