If you ever wondered just how entertaining Victorians found microscopy,
think Nintendo and you will have hit the mark. Middle-class men, women and
children, drawn by the allure of the brass tube, whiled away long hours
educating and amusing themselves in their drawing rooms, attending public
demonstrations and gadding about the countryside, pocket microscope in hand
– each and every one of them an aspiring naturalist. Only in the context
of a craze can we understand the quaint absurdity of melding microscopy
and photography – the two most popular technologies of the era – to produce
novelty microphotographs.

J. B. Dancer is credited with the invention of microphotography, and
produced hundreds of microphotographs using the wet collodion process, each
of which needed to be magnified fifty-fold to become visible. This lavish
volume reproduces over 500 microphotographs that serve as a remarkable record.

There are surprisingly few scientific subjects in the visual library.
Instead, the minuscule delights are principally portraits of eminent persons,
European royalty, scientific luminaries, military heroes and assorted literati,
biblical tracts, famous paintings, historic buildings, feats of engineering
and archaeological wonders.

Quite why microphotography so intrigued the Victorian mind is difficult
to grasp. But there is a clue or two to be found in the disproportionate
weight given to the process of looking as part of the acquisition of knowledge.
Much has been written of late about the gaze, ways of looking. Learning
how and what to see formed the basis of scientific methodology. Visual evidence
could be trusted. It might not share the watertight logical credentials
of mathematics, but it was considered to be objective nonetheless. What
existed in the world was there to be seen, and it was primarily the job
of the biologist, geologist, anthropologist and naturalist to reveal it.

The wonderful con of microphotography is that it offered nonscientists
the illusion of being scientific, because the process of making the invisible
visible by magnifying, focusing and bringing to light, mimicked the process
of scientific discovery and the thrill that came with it. As such, microphotographs
are a fine example of a new consumer culture, specialising in scientific
DIY.

Marina Benjamin is the editor of Science and Sensibility, second edition
recently published by Blackwell.

* Available in Britain from Burston Distribution Services, Bristol.
Fax: 0272 711056

How could Freud be both a medical scientist and a Jew? This question
has absorbed Sander Gilman’s attention for a decade. In the context of fin
de siecle Viennese culture, the two categories were mutually exclusive.
‘ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s’ and ‘Jews’ were assigned to opposite ends of the spectrum of
masculinity; the Jew, like the homosexual, was construed as the ‘third sex’
– a feminised man who carried his marks of difference from his Aryan counterparts
on his body and in his psyche. The powerful association between Jews and
disease designated the Jewish male scientist as a living paradox, at once
a neutral investigator and a pathological victim.

To complicate matters further, the ideology of race was perceived as
part of the ‘truth’ of science, so it was never questioned directly, even
by Jewish scientists. Everyone bought the myth of Jewish difference – enthusiastically
expounded by the biologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin – which
embraced their ‘cold, scanning gaze’, their hooked noses, their whiney voices,
their primitive sexual practices, bad smell and neurotic disposition. Gilman’s
goal of assessing the impact of racial science on Freud’s sense of himself
as a Jew, a man and a scientist, therefore involves a complex process of
reading between the lines of the man who invented reading between the
lines. At times, the reader is liable to get lost in the web of argument
and counterargument, but on the whole, the book is rigorous and clear.

Honing in on debates about the body, the psyche and the diseases of
the Jew, which were live issues between 1850 and 1938, Gilman argues that
Freud countered racial science by utilising the concept of gender in the
rhetoric of psychoanalysis. Thus, for example, the stigma of being less
of a man assigned to the circumcised Jewish male became a symptom of castration
fears that plagued all men, regardless of race. Thus, the fear of becoming
Jewish was transmuted into the fear of becoming female. The idea of the
Jew as ‘feminised’ was entrenched and widely internalised by Jewish medical
scientists. While Freud managed to break the association, many of his Jewish
contemporaries, notably Otto Weininger, actually promulgated it.

Almost half of the book (and it is the best half) is devoted to the
subject of Jewish madness. Again it is the Jewish male, rather than female,
that serves as the prototype for the neurotic Jew, a notion which Gilman
discusses in terms of degrees of exclusion – women being the ‘included Other’
while the Jewish man is the ‘excluded Other’.

Racial science identified a predisposition among Jews to depression,
hysteria and neurasthenia, blaming inbreeding, but implying incest. Freud
manoeuvered the argument about madness away from the question of race and
universalised it by treating madness as a disease of civilisation: the stresses
and strain of city life, modernity, and the sexual repressions of the city-dwellers
were held to blame. That his argument was not couched in terms of the racial
debate made it vulnerable and allowed antisemitic physicians to dismiss
psychoanalysis itself as mass hysteria, a ‘psychic epidemic among physicians’
– an interesting twist, given that most of Freud’s early disciples were
Jewish.

A wonderful illustration of how Gilman argues his case lies in his discussion
of Freud’s aversion to train travel. The idea that hysteria was triggered
by trauma was widespread, and Jean Martin Charcot had coined the term ‘railway
spine’ to describe the hysterical trauma of male patients who had suffered
railway accidents. Railways came to symbolise the nervousness of modern
life, and therefore, via racial argument, the Jew, the epitome of nervousness.
Gilman interprets Freud’s lifelong anxiety about missing a train as being
central to his sense of identity, for, if he had missed the westbound train
to Vienna, he would have remained an Eastern Jew, the most despised group
in the racist chain of being.

Fin-de-siecle Viennese medicine emerges as a minefield over which Jewish
physicians hopped as best they could without being discredited, vilified
or otherwise blown up, all the while trying to explode the antisemitic attitudes
of the medical establishment. The medical onslaught on the Jew was so all-embracing
– he was mentally unstable, physically inferior, vocally impaired, predisposed
to syphilis, diabetes, haemorrhoids, constipation, even cancer – that it
is a won- der that any coherent comprehensive scientific cosmology could
sidestep it. Freudian psychoanalysis went one better, expertly steering
between the Scylla of anti-semitic medicine and the Charybdis of Jewish
science.

Gilman’s study is so detailed that he has produced not one but two books
on the subject: The Case of Sigmund Freud (Johns Hopkins University Press,
pp 304, £26.50) covers much the same ground, but repetition is avoided.
Among the delights of this book are its accounts of the sociomedical debates
around conversion, the history of the Jewish foot and the prevalence of
criminal activity among Jews. It is also written with the general reader
in mind. I find Gilman’s work particularly interesting in the context of
the multicultural salad bowl that Europe has become. Jewish difference,
and any other ethnic difference, has become something to be cherished rather
than despised.

Marina Benjamin is a writer and editor.

Sara Maitland has no time for trifles: she is concerned with what it
is to be human, and how we make sense of that predicament. In her novel
Home Truths, Clare Kerslaka suffers post-traumatic amnesia after climbing
Mount Nyangani in Zimbabwe with her lover David, who vanishes. The locals
offer three reasons for the disappearance of walkers – the dangerous terrain
and unpredictable climate, terrorists and angry spirits – but Clare can
think of another; that she killed him.

Exhausted by her inability to answer the crucial question, and trying
to come to terms with the loss of her hand in the accident, Clare is brought
home to Scotland, where her large, loving family members are exposed, allowing
Maitland to evaluate the belief systems that afford us comfort in the absence
of hard evidence. Anni’s fascination with mathematics raises the issue of
whether proof equals truth, while Hester’s and Ceci’s faith in God challenges
the need for proof as a necessary condition of belief.

The wild nature that claims lives is contrasted with nature tamed through
science: Joseph’s mathematical puzzle offers cosy logical reasoning, Anni’s
fractals reduce chaos to order, Hester’s aga-cat – a fibre-glass all-terrain
vehicle – helps her to negotiate the rough Highlands, while Clare makes
a determined attempt to assimilate her awe on seeing the Victoria Falls
by mugging up on statistics. But nature remains unruly, and above all dangerous.
The lesson to be learnt is that danger must be embraced, and risks taken.

Clare comes to understand that human nature is equally unwilling to
submit to authority. When she first compared her myoelectric hand with
Alice’s hearing aid, she forces a celebratory note: ‘Alice and I carry scientific
magic around with us. We’re modern witches. Electronic witches.’ But in
the end being human, even if this means being ‘hearing impaired’ or being
an amputee, is presented as preferable to being a cyborg. Alice’s hearing
aid only brings noise into her tranquil world, while Clare’s hand seems
to have an unwelcome will of its own.

Ultimately what Maitland is questioning is the value of having faith
in any cosmology. At one point Anni remarks that losing faith is not about
growing disillusioned but ‘dis-visioned’ – such is the power of a credo.
As Clare learns that no belief system can adequately account for life’s
unexpected twists, it gradually dawns on her that what she needs is not
understanding but confession, not so that a safe God will restore her peace
of mind, but so that she can make a pact to live under a God that is as
wild and dangerous as nature.

Marina Benjamin is an editor and critic.

The exhibition takes the form of six case studies: the preservation
of Greek medical literature in the Islamic Empire; the development of European
interest in Islamic medicine; Western adoption of indigenous Indian medical
knowledge and the history of colonial medicine in India; the case of smallpox;
Western exposure to the Far Eastern techniques of acupuncture, moxa and
feeling the pulse; and the adoption of Western medicine in the Far East.
Together the case studies uncover the dynamic nature of medical practice
and acknowledge that the East/West traffic in medicines flowed two ways.

I found the display on smallpox especially interesting. The practice
of inoculation was originally imported to Britain from Turkey in 1718 by
Lady Mary Wortley Montage, repackaged – effectively Westernised – by Edward
Jenner, and in turn exported to India (1802) and Macoa (1815). But I was
disappointed that the exhibition failed to distinguish between the complete
assimilation of practices – for example, inoculation – and the persistent
designation of others, such as acupuncture, as ‘alternative’, and in doing
so neglects to address hierarchies of medical systems.

In addition to delighting the bibliophile, the exhibition boasts some
scarification knives belonging to Jenner, and a pair of Goa Stones, imitations
of stones found in animal intestines believed to ward off the effects of
poison.

AIDS has inverted the traditional power relationship between doctors
and patients. In the absence of a ‘cure’, a more human form of medical treatment
has been born – one that involves dialogue between doctors and patients,
mutual respect and sometimes disagreement.

‘Positive Lives: The Response to HIV’ is a photo-documentary exhibition
that portrays the private lives and personal relationships of people living
with HIV. The exhibition is the culmination of a three-year collaboration
between the Terrence Higgins Trust and Network Photographers to mark the
tenth anniversary of the trust.

The more polemical part of the exhibition includes Denis Doran’s black-and-white
portraits. Pictures of different faces, male and female, black and white,
are accompanied by text: ‘Ian’ holding a finger to his closed lips is captioned
‘Silence=Death’, the byword for AIDS activism.

Doran’s series exploring attitudes to sexuality confronts the assumptions
people make about each other when they judge by appearance alone. The highly
individual people in his portraits, some into leather, some into nose rings
and some of indeterminate gender, have one thing in common – they all practise
safe sex. Next to them hangs a portrait of an ordinary suburban heterosexual
couple: they don’t use condoms, they take risks.

But focusing on people living with rather than dying from AIDS is as
full of pitfalls as opportunities. The most glaring is the danger of sentimentalising
suffering, familiar to us from the romantic imagery, both verbal and visuals
that grew up around consumption in the 19th century.

As the AIDS epidemic enters its second decade, the emphasis on the death,
isolation and stigmatisation of people with AIDS, has given way to one of
survival – however curtailed. This view is manifest most forcefully in Barry
Lewis’s series of photos featuring the colourful life of Winston, a drag
artist working at a London night club. As Winston says: ‘What’s the point
of dying if you haven’t lived.’

Positive Lives is at the Photographers’ Gallery, Great Newport Street,
London WC₂ (Tel: 071-831 1772) until 18 September. The exhibition
will then go on tour.

In contemporary Western art and literature, there seems to be a longing to
embrace science, almost lovingly; to make it speak to us in dulcet tones
rather than dictatorial fiat; to appreciate its aesthetic and metaphoric
content over its explanatory power; and to celebrate its subjectivity.
Michael Wenyon and Susan Gamble are two artists committed to such a reading
of science, and Volumes – a major exhibition of their holographic work – can
be seen at the Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Using glass plates, projections, easels and stage lighting, Wenyon and
Gamble have produced complex installations that explore not merely light and
optical phenomena, but the ways in which science has shaped our
understanding of them. A pair of installations inspired by Isaac Newton’s
Opticks are the most straightforward. In Newton’s Rings, a spectacular
hologram of fiery ripples of light is mounted on an easel in front of a
photographic projection of library shelves crammed with books. In The
Fringes of the Shadows of the Knives an easel-mounted hologram depicts the
vertical bands of the spectrum seen through a spectroscope. Wenyon and
Gamble are deaf to John Keats’s accusation that Newton destroyed the
rainbow; they applaud the artistic merit of theory, the authored character
of science, and the beauty of artifice.

Viewing Radii, in which large Airy’s discs appear through tubes like stars
sighted through telescopes, one experiences a sense of discovery, relishing
the feeling of existing at the frontiers or margins of culture – the very
places where meanings are made. The sense that science boldly negotiates
the unknown is confirmed by Stella Maris. Here the image consists of
optical caustics – a phenomenon inherent in light that is made manifest when
light passes through water. This hologram of chaotic luminous pathways
leading to nebulous clusters conjures up notions of alien geographies,
quasi-stellar and quasi-aquatic. Its warm orangey-yellow hues suggest
glowing embers, lulling the viewer into a state of fireside reverie in which
visual experience takes precedence over the mechanisms of comprehension.

In their most recent works Wenyon and Gamble have developed further the
visual language that theorises vision and aestheticises knowledge. The key
symbol of this new language is the book – but the book deprived of its
textuality and rendered an optical artefact. Bibliography presents us with
a library of holographic books, some Japanese, suspended intangibly in
space. The books are icons and whether or not we understand them becomes
immaterial. Scroll apes those displays of rare books found in the British
Museum in which selected pages are laid open under glass. Using similar
display cases, Wenyon and Gamble unfold scrolls in which patterns of
computer gibberish pose as text.

Scroll and Bibliography hint at the redundancy of book-learning in the age
of the computer where knowledge can be instantly and visually assimilated.
But they also confirm the book as a worthy object of our veneration,
because books are the repository of ideas and ideas are literally beautiful.
Indeed, judging by The Book by Its Cover – a series of computer pictures of
books that once again deal only with surfaces – the artists seem to suggest
that books are virtually organic. The book-jackets in the pictures appear
to have lichen-like lifeforms clinging to them.

Wenyon and Gamble have so skilfully broached the complex nexus of ideas that
deal with science, fission, knowledge and text, with light and
enlightenment, that they have allowed themselves a joke at the expense of
holography’s tacky commercial image. Zone One (From the Heavens) – the title
recalls 1960s SF B-movies – consists of a spattering of red globular forms
seen through a black strip of glass reminiscent of wrapround glasses or
X-ray specs. Aware that they have rescued the hologram from its association
with cheap gimmickry and visual trickery, Wenyon and Gamble poke gentle fun
at the way popular culture has used holography to feed adolescent fantasies
of alien life forms, strange intergalactic constellations and Star
Trek-style exploration. Wenyon and Gamble are helping holography to grow up.

Marina Benjamin is a writer and critic.

*The Photographers’ Gallery, 5+8 Great Newport Street, London WC₂. Until 24
July, then on tour.

You can read Between Sun and Earth, an exhibition at the Photographer’s
Gallery featuring the work of British artists Susan Derges and Garry Fabian
Miller, as a meditation on scientific method. The experimental process serves
as a central metaphor and marks the affinity between the laboratory and
the artist’s studio as creative environments. The artists are informed by
contemporary intellectual trends, including chaos theory, post modernism
and the sociology of knowledge, that unite in attempting to erode traditional
scientific distinctions between subject and object. This awareness comes
across in the process the artists have chosen for their work: photograms,
which dispense with the interventionist mediation of the camera to produce
pictures. Instead light falls directly through or around objects to form
an image on a film.

Derges’s Full Circle is a series of 36 prints following the metamorphosis
of frogspawn into frogs. There is a grainy, organic feel to the visual quality
of the prints, and a sense of dynamism effected by the translation of tadpole
motion into ripple-like traces. As the sequence unfolds and the black forms
multiply and scatter their meaning diffuses – they could represent calligraphic
or musical notations. The overwhelming impression is of life’s inscrutability,
unpredictability and disarray. Yet the cycle of life is simultaneously reassuring;
nature will continue her unruly ways, bringing sense and being where none
existed before.

Fabian Miller’s work is more distilled, rarefied. Each of the 11 prints
that make up Illumine feature a circular form, the colour of which intensifies
as the series progresses. Illumine manages to hold in satisfying equilibrium
a simplicity of conception with a multiplicity of resonances. Notions of
time, heat, light and enlightenment, good and evil are variously evoked
as the circular ‘sun’ proceeds through a ‘dawn/midday/sunset’ cycle. There
are no frills to Illumine, only bare essentials are under scrutiny – light
and circles. The contemplation of the circle’s primary perfection, and the
vital, transformative nature of light conjures up an almost spiritual atmosphere
for the sensual experience of viewing Illumine.

Marina Benjamin is a freelance writer.

*Halina House, 5 Great Newport Street, London WC₂H 7HY.