Hearing Science in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Hearing Science in Mid-Eighteenth-

Century Britain and France

PENELOPE GOUK * AND INGRID SYKES **

*4 Chandos Rd., Chorlton, Manchester M21 0ST, UK. Email: [email protected].

**Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick Coventry, Humanities

Building, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. Email: [email protected].

ABSTRACT. Benjamin Martin, the English natural philosopher, andClaude-Nicolas Le Cat, the French surgeon, both published importantwork on auditory physiology and function in the mid-eighteenth century.Despite their different backgrounds, there was consensus between the twoscholars on key principles of hearing research, most notably the importanceof the inner ear in relation to auditory perception. Martin’s work (1755

[1763?]) drew directly on the surgical work of Le Cat (1741) to demonstratethe importance of the auditory mechanism in listening processes. Le Cat’sinterest in the ear, however, came in turn from his interest in surgicalanatomy. Martin used Le Cat’s elegant designs as a tool for the vividcommunication of auditory function to a popular, fee-paying audience. Themeeting of two very different minds through intellectual agreement andmaterial transfer demonstrates the way in which principles of hearing sciencewere established in the Enlightenment period. KEYWORDS: hearing science,auditory physiology, ear, eighteenth century, Britain, France.

THOUGH discourses of “light” are crucial to Enlightenmentscientific culture, those of the other senses are no less funda-mental.1 Scholars have demonstrated that the Enlightenment

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE AND ALLIED SCIENCES, Volume 66, Number 4

# The Author 2010. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Access publication on July 15, 2010 doi:10.1093/jhmas/jrq045

1. Recent literature has demonstrated the importance of examining all five senses inmedical, scientific, and cultural history. See, for example, Medicine and the Five Senses,ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),122–23; and Mark M. Smith, Sensory History (Oxford: Berg, 2007). Literature which

[ 507 ]

was a period of rich acoustical invention as well as time of signifi-cant “advancement” in musical theoretical thinking.2 Interest inhearing science, the human locus of such disciplines, however, hasbeen strangely neglected.3 This is despite significant interestin hearing and listening by major Enlightenment figures acrossEurope—a trend that can be connected to the growing awarenessamong natural philosophers of the multi-sensory self. Our studyintends to open up the historical field by comparing and contrastingtwo studies on hearing from around the middle of the century: “Del’ouıe” by the French surgeon, Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, in Traite dessens (Rouen, 1741),4 and “On the Ear” by the English mathematicalpractitioner and “showman,” Benjamin Martin, in his The GeneralMagazine of Arts and Sciences, also titled as the Young Gentleman andLady’s Philosophy (London, 1763?).5 Though the texts might appearrandomly chosen, they were selected only after a detailed survey ofmaterial published on “hearing” in eighteenth-century Britain and

addresses hearing in particular includes Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004); Michael Bull and Les Back, eds., The AuditoryCulture Reader (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Veit Erlmann, Hearing Cultures, Essays on Sound,Listening and Modernity (Oxford, Berg, 2004); Charles Burnett, Michael Fend, andPenelope Gouk, eds., The Second Sense: Studies in Hearing and Musical Judgement fromAntiquity to the Seventeenth Century (London: The Warburg Institute, 1991).

2. See the widespread scholarship available in the area of music theory and aesthetics in theeighteenth century. One outstanding example is Thomas Christensen, Rameau and MusicalThought in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). DowningA. Thomas, Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002), includes an examination of certain eighteenth-century French hearing texts (includingLe Cat) in his study. Other notable works that do address hearing include Leigh EricSchmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 2000), and Jamie C. Kassler, The Science of Music in Britain: ACatalogue of Writings, Lectures and Inventions 1705–1830, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1979).

3. Adam Politzer, Geschichte der Ohrenheilkunde, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1913)(translated as the History of Otology by Stanley Milstein, Collice Portnoff, and Antje Coleman[Phoenix, Arizona: Columella Press, 1981]) contains an overview of eighteenth-centuryhearing texts. A briefer overview of theories of hearing is found in Chapter 8 of StanleyFinger, Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1994). Other exceptions are short articles by hearing scientists whichinclude a discussion of Enlightenment approaches to hearing such as Alain de Cheveigne,“Pitch-perception Models from Origins to Today” (2004), International Conference onAcoustics, Kyoto, Japan, 2004.

4. The edition we have consulted is Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, “De l’ouıe,” in his Traitedes sens (Amsterdam: Wetstein, 1744), 38–77.

5. Benjamin Martin, General Magazine, II, Dialogues XX–XXIV (London, 1755–[1763]), 351–412. (The date on the title page of this section of the second volume is1763, although it is not clear exactly when the material was first published.)

Journal of the History of Medicine : Vol. 66, October 2011508

France had been undertaken. This survey concentrated on naturalphilosophical and surgical texts which address the mechanism of theear, but also included another group of philosophical works found inBritain that focus rather on an internal faculty most often called a“musical ear,” an attribute not necessarily grounded in anatomy.Mapping the relationship between what we might call “scientific”texts on the one hand, and primarily “aesthetic” works on the other,is an enterprise that lies beyond the scope of this article; suffice tosay that both Le Cat and Martin recognized, but said little about, theexistence of this inner faculty.

Our primary reason for choosing two texts from two differentknowledge centers is the result of our joint desire to situate “hearing”in a broader European discourse of Enlightenment science rather thanto identify significant advances in this particular specialty field. Ouraim is not simply to present individual theories of what we identify as“hearing science,” but rather to begin to explore the way in which thediscipline was beginning to emerge as a whole from different social,political, and cultural contexts. Both texts provide fertile material forcomparing and contrasting the language of hearing science research inBritain and France, and for identifying the discipline’s particularprocess of knowledge transfer in the mid-century period. The twotexts contain very different formats and languages from very differentscientific worlds. Indeed, our study highlights clear national and pro-fessional differences in the eighteenth-century “hearing sciences.”

Both texts address the anatomical and physiological capabilities ofthe ear, although only Le Cat’s provided original engravings of theear’s anatomy. Benjamin Martin used the ear as part of scientific dem-onstration in a popular marketplace and Le Cat for surgical dissectionin the elite intellectual world of the corporative mid-eighteenth-century French surgical establishment. In France, however, thediscipline was affected by a mechanist/vitalist divide relating to theinstitutional networks. Le Cat’s treatise comes directly from hisanatomical work as a surgeon at the prestigious Hotel-Dieu inRouen from the 1730s.6 He was a pure Cartesian at a time of vitalistacoustical expansion in the French context (as well as vehemently

6. For a biography of Le Cat, see Antoine Louis, Eloges lus sur les seances publiques del’Academie Royale de Chirurgie, de 1750 a 1792, ed. E. F. Dubois (Paris: J.-B. Balliere, et Fils,1859), 129–50.

Gouk and Sykes : Hearing Science 509

anti-Newtonian). Martin’s work, though similarly dense in informa-tion, is much more commercially packaged. It is presented in theform of an educational dialogue between a young “Gentleman”(Cleonicus, the tutor) and a young “Lady” (Euphrosyne, the student).Despite his respectable background, Newtonian bent and assiduousstudy, Martin remained outside the hallowed halls of the RoyalSociety since he was dubbed an electrical showman. Simon Schafferhas explained that Martin “harped on the virtue and propriety of thecommercial place” and was subsequently “tarred with the brush ofDuncehood”—a far cry from the accolades given to Le Cat by theFrench Royal Academy of Surgery.7 However, Martin received tre-mendous fame through his highly successful business in eyeglassesestablished around 1755. He set up a London shop, “Visual Glassesand a Globe” near the Royal Society and his designs were highlysought after by “reputable” opticians.8 Hearing science was, for him,an exciting addition to this commercial and inventive image.

In his study, Le Cat introduced hearing as a pure sensory sciencelinking man to the world around him. Like sight, he explained, soundhad depended on the discovery of “the grosser and the more subtleParts of most Bodies, that are within our Reach and Contact.”9 Thenotion of hearing science as a discipline of time and space contrastsmarkedly with Martin’s introduction of the subject as mainly related tothe “science of music.”10 Though both acknowledged the relationshipbetween sound and the creation of music (and of human sentiment),Martin presented music as the lynchpin of rational hearing sciencerather than a mathematical by-product of man’s sensory nature:

But what inclines me most to discourse to you on this subject is, theexquisite Taste and Relish, you have for the Pleasure of this Sciencein every Respect, and consequently a Rationale of those Instruments,

7. Simon Schaffer, “The Consuming Flame: Electrical Showmen and Tory Mystics inthe World of Goods,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and RoyPorter (London: Routledge, 1993), 489–526.

8. The catalogue for Martin’s “philosophical, optical and mathematical instruments” isprinted in Benjamin Martin, An Essay on Visual Glasses, 3rd ed. (London, 1758).

9. [Claude-Nicolas Le Cat], A Physical Essay on the Senses. Translated from the French ofM. Le Cat. Illustrated with Copper Plates, trans. anon. (London, 1750), 34. In the original, itreads: “du grossier et du subtil de la plupart des corps, qui nous touchent, ou qui sont trespres de nous,” Le Cat, Traite des sens, 38.

10. Benjamin Martin, “III. The Philosophy of Sounds, Music, and the Organization ofthe Ear,” General Magazine II, 351.


with which you so frequently delight yourself and Acquaintance, willbe very grateful to you.11

The centrality of the rational musical instrument in the introductionof Martin’s work contrasts markedly with the absence of such dis-cussion in Le Cat’s treatise. Yet Le Cat’s work is, however, impor-tant for another reason: its anatomical clarity and precision.

Significantly, Le Cat’s work on the ear found currency in Englishnatural philosophy circles. Such was the popular nature of knowl-edge consumption in England that Le Cat was recognized across thereligious and commercial divides separating different scholarlygroups. His treatise on hearing was presented as a separate study atthe Royal Society in London.12 But it was also available as rawmaterial for use by popular scholars such as Martin. It was one of agroup of European texts on hearing translated into English andmade available to the wider public in bookshops across England.This process of appropriation through translation continued atrend already established in seventeenth-century England. All theoriginal plates appear in an English translation (though in a slightlymixed-up form). Martin chose to use Le Cat’s drawing of “TheOrgan of Hearing on the Right Side” (albeit without acknowledg-ment) in his treatise in large format. Le Cat’s designs emerge inthe new context as powerful material for communication with apopular readership. Le Cat’s main drawing of the ear is a startlinglyrealistic three-dimensional cross-sectional depiction of the entire earmechanism (Figure 1A and B). The outer ear is like the rubberymouth of a cave reaching into a deep cavernous space. Unlike therepresentation of sight, which involves a dense, uniform networkof nerves, hearing is a daunting journey of discovery from theouter ear to the end of the Eustachian tube. Along the way occurmarkers of natural curiosity for the viewer: the Membrane of theTympanum, the first Cavity with its Membranes and little bones,and most importantly the inner ear, with its labyrinth and cochlea,the ultimate mechanical piece resembling an ocean shell.

As we will see, there are differences in Martin and Le Cat’s inter-pretation of hearing function. However, their common assertion

11. Ibid.12. See the review by James Parsons, Phil. Trans., 1742, 42, 464–69.


that the cochlea was the most distinctive element in the mechanicalear was significant. Its role in refined listening had only just begunto be acknowledged. This, alongside both natural philosophers’combined emphasis on the aurally trained musician (an individual

Fig. 1. (A) Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, “Planche I: Esquisse et Explication,” in “Del’ouıe,” Traite des sens (Amsterdam: Wetstein, 1744), 54. Reprinted with the per-mission of the Wellcome Library.


who can detect the upper partials of a sound) cuts against theemerging Enlightenment theory that musical intelligence can becultivated through abstract mathematical study alone. In these trea-tises, hearing is considered central to the sensation of tasteful music.

Fig. 1. (B) Claude-Nicolas Le Cat, “Planche I: L’Organe de l’Ouıe du cote droit,”in “De l’ouıe,” Traite des sens (Amsterdam: Wetstein, 1744), 54. Reprinted with thepermission of the Wellcome Library.


Despite his love of musical instruments, Martin ultimately concededthat the human ear was better than any instrument created by man:

Euphos. I observe it with a great deal of pleasure; and, as theWinding Passage grows narrower towards the Summit, I apprehendthe Fibres of the Auditory Nerve, displayed through the same, maybe supposed to have some Resemblance to the System of Strings ina Harpsichord, and that in this Part we may expect to find the trueSeat or Cause of Consonances and Dischords, or of the Harmonyand Dissonances of Sounds?

Cleon. Your conjectures coincide perfectly with the best and mostexperienced Naturalist, who have always Conceived of this being theCase, but in an infinitely Superior Degree to any Thing that we canfind in the Human Construction of any Instrument.13

Eighteenth-century hearing scientists were confronted with anastounding array of different avenues of research. Such topics as thebizarre nature of acoustical echo in an open environment, thestrangeness of perceiving the harmonic series, and the shockingeffect of music on the nerves all contributed to the realization thatthis was one of the most complex sensory systems in the naturalworld. Both men understood the power of sound, both real andimagined, as a mode of popular knowledge transmission. Reflectedin the texts are the “live” sonic experiments used by the authors atpublic presentations to popular audiences, Le Cat at his own surgi-cal art-theatre in Rouen and Martin in his public lectures acrossrural and urban England.14 Both authors were able to capitalize onwhat Barbara Maria Stafford has described as “the privatisation ofbeholding” through the science of hearing.15 Both realized that

13. Martin, General Magazine, II, 411. It was Duverney who first suggested that theosseous spiral lamina responded to different tones based on its diminishing width like amusical instrument, so that low notes are received at the basal end and those of high pitchat the apical end of the cochlea (in fact, it happens the other way around).

14. For a description of Le Cat’s amphitheatre, see Dr. [unknown given name] Feltgen,“Introduction sur Claude Nicolas Le Cat,” Groupe Histoire des Hopitaux de Rouen, seancedu 22 Septembre 1994, available online at http://www3.chu-rouen.fr/NR/rdonlyres/6B2D3C14-EB13-4402-8471-F4511CDD24A7/0/1994_feltgen.pdf (accessed 6 June 2010).On Martin’s shows see John Millburn, Benjamin Martin: Author, Instrument-Maker, and CountryShowman (Leyden: Noordhoff International Pub., 1976); see also Millburn’s Supplement to thiswork (London: Vade-Mecum Press, 1986).

15. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Presuming Images and Consuming Words: TheVisualisation of Knowledge from the Enlightenment to Post-modernism,” in World ofGoods, ed. Brewer and Porter, 462–77.


listening can be one of the most private awe-inspiring experiencesof humankind, and that through design and description it couldbecome the subject of human-centered scientific research, accessibleto a wider public.

It is not yet clear, however, how hearing science emerged as adiscipline in England and France. Was it connected to music or tothe study of acoustics? Were there fundamental differences in philo-sophical approaches toward hearing perception or a universallyaccepted theory? Neither Le Cat nor Martin was simply a “hearingscientist.” Rather, they operated within broader cultures of medicineand natural philosophy, dependent on different economic, social,and cultural practices. Hearing was not a neglected subject,however. On the contrary, such was the enthusiasm for the subjectin the European Enlightenment that there was a multitude of inter-pretations and presentations on display.

In the seventeenth century, the study of sound in both Englandand France had been pursued chiefly within the context of harmon-ics, a branch of mathematics, even though Francis Bacon had advo-cated a new discipline of acoustics at the beginning of the century.16

The ear itself did not receive much attention in England beyond thediscussion in the surgeon Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia(London, 1615), the content of which was taken from Continentalsources.17 Even those natural philosophers most interested in the ear(Marin Mersenne, for example) were more concerned with abstractharmonic laws than with the physiological presence of the earitself.18 In the eighteenth century, it is possible to see a recognizableshift in England and France toward the ear as the site of sonic possi-bilities. From a modern-day perspective, both Martin and Le Catcan be viewed as ambassadors for the complex mechanical system ofauditory processing when the issue was only just beginning to bemade comprehensible to the reading public. As we will demonstrate,however, this transformation occurred in very different national and

16. On Bacon’s proposal for a new discipline of acoustics, see Penelope Gouk, Music,Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 1999), 157–70.

17. Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia, A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615);Penelope Gouk, “Some English Theories of Hearing in the Seventeenth Century,” in TheSecond Sense, ed. Burnett, Fend, and Gouk, 95–113.

18. On Mersenne, see Gouk, Music, Science and Natural Magic, 170–78.


professional contexts in England and France. The emergence of theanatomical ear depended on the painstaking work of two very differ-ent individuals from two very different worlds.

HEARING TEXTS AVAILABLE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN

By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a range of sources inEnglish available to consult about the nature of hearing, even if only afew of them specifically addressed music. Rather than constituting asingle category devoted to hearing, these sources represent a varietyof genres. They include treatises on the ear; textbooks on anatomy;works on physiology in general and on the senses in particular, notforgetting the mental faculties and the passions; more specializedbooks addressing music’s effects on the mind and body; and textsdealing with acoustics and natural philosophy, often in lecture form.The fact that these were vernacular works directed at the educated laypublic rather than Latin tomes intended for the international medicalcommunity did not necessarily imply a dumbing-down process. Infact, the educated public actually had access to several important con-tinental treatises on the ear that were translated into English duringthis period.19 In order of their appearance in England these were:Antonio Valsalva, A Treatise of the Ear (1712) from his De aure humanaTractatus (Bologna, 1704); Joseph Duverney, A Treatise of the Organ ofHearing (London, 1737), translated by John Marshall from Duverney’sTraite de l’organe de l’ouıe contenant la structure, les usages, et les maladies detoutes les parties de l’Oreille (Paris, 1683); and part of the more general-ized work of Le Cat, A Physical Essay on the Senses (London, 1750)translated from the French edition of his Traite des Sens (Rouen,1741), which we will be considering in more detail below.20

19. For a recently published more general discussion of print culture in England, seeJames Raven, The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850 (NewHaven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

20. Antonio Maria Valsalva, A Treatise on the Ear [extracts from his De Aure HumanaTractatus (Bologna, 1704)], reproduced in Bibliotheca Anatomica, Medica, Chirurgica, ed.Daniel Clericus and Jacob Mangetus; trans. anon. (London, 1711–14), Vol. II.Joseph-Guichard Duverney, A Treatise of the Organ of Hearing, trans. John Marshall(London, 1737); original text Joseph Duverney, Traite de l’organe de l’ouıe contenant la struc-ture, les usages, et les maladies de toutes les parties de l’Oreille (Paris, 1683). Later English edi-tions were published in 1741 and 1748. See also Le Cat, Physical Essay. We have not foundany translations of German works on the ear apart from Albrecht von Haller’s Primae lineaephysiologiae (Gottingen, 1749); translated anonymously as Dr. Albert Haller’s Physiology(London, 1754).


Suggesting a lively interest in their subject matter, all theseworks were not only translated into English (thereby ensuring awider circulation in Britain than they might otherwise have received),but also attracted the attention of the Royal Society, beingreviewed in the Philosophical Transactions soon after their originalappearance.21 This internationally respected journal was also where amore negative opinion of Valsalva’s research first appeared: RaymondVieussens’s letter to the Society was first published in Latin in 1699

but was later translated in the abridged 5th edition of the PhilosophicalTransactions of 1749.22 Two other Continental sources touching onhearing that certainly had currency in mid-eighteenth-centuryBritain were Herman Boerhaave’s Institutiones medicae (Leiden,1708, translated into English in 1715) and Albrecht von Haller’sPrimae lineae physiologiae (Gottingen, 1749; translated into Englishin 1754). These texts are significant in that they seem to haveconstituted at least an informal part of the Edinburgh medicalcurriculum which to a large extent was based on Boerhaavianprinciples.23 Thus, for example, we find Boerhaave’s and Haller’steaching on the tympanic membrane disputed in Joseph FennSleigh’s Tentamen physico-medicum inaugurale, de auditu (Med. Diss.,University of Edinburgh, 1753), a thesis that as far as we canascertain seems to be one of five Latin texts on hearing pub-lished in eighteenth-century Britain, the other four also beingEdinburgh medical dissertations. These include Isaac Brown’s Desonorum modulatorum vi in corpora humana (1751), Edmund Somers’sDissertatio physico-medica, inauguralis, de sonis et auditu (1783), andWilliam Welch’s similarly entitled Dissertatio medica inauguralis, de

21. Review of Duverney by anon. in Phil. Trans. 1683, 13, no. 49, 259–64; review ofValsalva by James Douglas in Phil. Trans. 1704, 24, no. 299, 1978–88; review of Le Cat byJames Parsons in Phil. Trans. 1742, 42, no. 466, 264–69.

22. Vieussens, “Epistola. . . de Organo auditus,” Phil. Trans. 1699, 21, no. 258; idem,“Letter on the Organ of Hearing,” Phil. Trans. abridged 5th edition (1749), III, 43–57.For the broader context in which these various reviews appeared, see Albert Cohen andLeta Miller, Music in the Royal Society of London 1660–1806 (Detroit: InformationCoordinators, 1987).

23. Herman Boerhaave’s Institutiones medicae (Leiden, 1708), translated into English byJ. Browne as Institutions in Physick (London, 1715); on Haller’s text, see Dr. Albert Haller’sPhysiology (cited above). Andrew Cunningham, “Medicine to Calm the Mind: Boerhaave’sMedical System, and Why It Was Adopted in Edinburgh,” in The Medical Enlightenment of theEighteenth Century, ed. Andrew Cunningham and Roger French (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990), 40–66.


auditu (1799). The fifth dissertation which discussed the ear, but alsofocused more specifically on music perception, was the GenevanLudovic Odier’s Epistola physiologica inauguralis de elementaris musicaesensationibus (1770).24 Collectively, this cluster of texts cited a widerange of sources on sound and hearing which suggests that thestudents who wrote them at least were well up on the literature onthis subject.

Although there seems to be scarcely any original English textsdedicated solely to the ear and hearing, there are a number ofsources which locate the subject within a broader discussion ofanatomy and/or physiology.25 In fact, two of these which werepublished in the early part of the century fall more into the cate-gory of physico-theology, their explicit goal being to demonstratethe role of God in the creation and workings of nature. This was aproject not only designed to refute charges of atheism againstfollowers of the new philosophy, but also to criticize Descartes.26

The first of these is the physician George Cheyne’s Newtonian-inspired work entitled the Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion;Containing the Elements of Natural Philosophy, and the Proofs for Natural

24. Joseph Fenn Sleigh’s Tentamen physico-medicum inaugurale, de auditu (Med. Diss.,University of Edinburgh, 1753); Isaac Brown’s De sonorum modulatorum vi in corpora humana(Med. Diss., University of Edinburgh, 1751); Edmund Somers’s Dissertatio physico-medica,inauguralis, de sonis et auditu (Med. Diss., University of Edinburgh, 1783); William Welch’ssimilarly entitled Dissertatio medica inauguralis, de auditu (Med. Diss., University ofEdinburgh, 1799), and Ludovic Odier’s Epistola physiologica inauguralis de elementaris musicaesensationibus (Med. Diss., University of Edinburgh, 1770). These dissertations are listed inthe List of the Graduates in Medicine in the University of Edinburgh from MDCCV toMDCCCLXVI (Edinburgh: Neill and Co., 1867). This source also reveals that during thecentury approximately twice as many dissertations (i.e., around ten, from a total of over athousand) were published on vision, the eye, and its diseases, a proportion that reflects itstraditional position at the apex of the hierarchy of the senses. These are available at theSpecial Collections, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh,Edinburgh, Scotland, and in other repositories.

25. So far we have found two late-eighteenth-century English treatises on the ear, oneby the Edinburgh medical professor Alexander Monro as one of his Three Treatises: On theBrain, the Eye and the Ear (London, 1797) and the other by the Anglican minister JohnTrusler, On the Sense of Hearing (London, 1796). This paucity of English texts was rem-edied in the early nineteenth century, when there were at least seven treatises on the earpublished before 1850. For further details of these, see Schmidt, Hearing Things, especiallypages 179–89.

26. John Hedley Brooke, “Science and Theology in the Enlightenment,” in Religionand Science: History, Method, Dialogue, ed. W. Mark Richardson and Wesley J. Wildman(New York: Routledge, 1996), 7–27. For another example of this theologically inclinedgenre, see Matthew Beare, The Sensorium, A Philosophical Discourse of the Senses (London,1710).


Religion, Arising from Them (London, 1705).27 Cheyne’s concisediscussion of the ear appears in the third chapter, “On the Existenceof a Deity” in the context of the “Animal Economy” and the natureof animal sensation. As we will see later, Cheyne’s brief summary ofthe process of hearing was followed by at least one later author whocited it in his work about music’s effects on the body.28 The mainthrust of Cheyne’s account is that undulations of the ambient air arecarried through the meatus auditorius (ear canal) to the tympanum,the beating of which moves the four little bones (actually only three)in the “barrel” (tympanic cavity). This motion is then transmitted tothe “internal air” in the labyrinth which then makes an impressionon the auditory nerves located in the cochlea. The idea that therewas a fourth ossicle, the os orbiculare, was held by most theorists atthis time, just as the notion of the implanted air continued to havecurrency into the eighteenth century, even though GuntherChristoph Schelhammer had already rejected it in his De auditu(Leiden, 1684).29 The focus on anatomical detail is significant. It rep-resents an increasing general awareness in Britain of the complexityof the human hearing process.

A second text from this early period is the Anglican clergymanand Royal Society Fellow William Derham’s enormously popularPhysico-Theology: Or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes ofGod from His Works of Creation (London, 1713).30 Here the fourthbook was devoted to “Animals in General” and took a comparativestance about each of the senses, so that the structure and functionof the human ear was discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to that of amole, for example. In contrast to Cheyne’s, Derham’s work wasextensively footnoted, and commended the work of anatomistsincluding Duverney and Valsalva for more detailed descriptions of

27. George Cheyne, Philosophical Principles of Natural Religion; Containing the Elements ofNatural Philosophy, and the Proofs for Natural Religion, Arising from Them (London, 1705). OnCheyne, see Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Timesof George Cheyne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000).

28. This was Richard Browne; see discussion of Browne later in the text.29. Gunther Christoph Schelhammer, De auditu (Leiden, 1684). On this belief, see

Neil Asherson, “The Fourth Auditory Ossicle: Fact or Fantasy?” J. Laryngol. Otol., 1978,92, 453–65.

30. William Derham’s book, Physico-Theology: Or, A Demonstration of the Being andAttributes of God from His Works of Creation (London, 1713, and around sixteen more edi-tions published up to 1799), was based on sixteen Boyle lectures he gave during 1711 and1712.


the human ear. For example, he followed them in comprehendingthe semicircular canals and the cochlea under the labyrinth,together with the intermediate cavity which he said they call thevestibule. However, even though Derham explicitly followedSchelhammer in rejecting the internal air as the principal organ ofhearing, like Cheyne he still identified four ossicles in man(although not in the mole). Another authority that Derham quotedextensively was Thomas Willis’s Cerebri anatome (1664), one of themost influential English works to address hearing in the seventeenthcentury.31 Indeed it is notable that in his discussion on sound as theobject of hearing, Derham used Willis to support his comments onthe power of music to allay the spirits and quieten perturbations ofthe mind, as a final example of the Creator’s “admirable work.”32

Another popular, more secular work that described the humanear was William Cheselden’s Anatomy of the Human Body (London,1713).33 Here the ear made its appearance after a chapter on the eyeand preceded one dealing with the remaining three senses (thenerves and muscles of the ear being treated separately along withthose of the rest of the body). In the first edition of the Anatomy,the description of the ear was very brief, being confined to listingsome of its principal parts, but in later editions Cheselden adopteda more discursive style which may have been due to the influenceof the “most excellent anatomist Mr. St. Andre” to whom headmitted he was “greatly obliged in this chapter.”34 The absence ofreferences to any other source and emphasis on personal anecdotesuggest that Cheselden may have relied almost entirely on this anat-omist for his account of the ear. This is in striking contrast toMalcolm Flemyng in the “Lecture of Hearing” contained in hisIntroduction to Physiology (London, 1759), where he happily recom-mended specialist works to his readers.35 Those listed prove to be

31. Thomas Willis, Cerebri anatome (London, 1664); Gouk, “Some English Theories ofHearing,” 108–9.

32. Derham, Physico-Theology, 192.33. William Cheselden, Anatomy of the Human Body (London, 1713, and twelve more

editions up to 1792). This was only one of a number of anatomical textbooks; others, forexample, include James Keill, The Anatomy of the Human Body Abridged (London, 1698,with up to fifteen editions by 1771), and William Northcote, The Anatomy of the HumanBody (London, 1772, new edition 1776).

34. Cheselden, Anatomy, 2nd ed., 330.35. Malcolm Flemyng, Introduction to Physiology (London, 1759).


by Duverney (“much the best, and indeed the classic author uponthe ear”),36 Valsalva, and Johann Cassebohm, a German authorwhose work Tractatus quatuor anatomici de aure humana (Halle, 1734),seems to have escaped the attention of the Royal Society at thetime of its publication.37

Although Flemyng’s Introduction was published in 1759, the sub-stance of this work derived from a public lecture series on physiol-ogy which he gave in London during 1750 and 1751. Ideas aboutthe nature of sound and hearing were also disseminated in thecontext of philosophical lectures that mathematical practitioners likeBenjamin Martin and other would-be philosophers delivered to aninterested public in London and other urban centers aroundBritain.38 In Martin’s case works containing material similar tothese lectures also appeared in published form, most notably in hisGeneral Magazine of Arts and Sciences to be discussed in more detailbelow, in which acoustics, including the organ of hearing, was dealtwith in some depth. Adapted from its lecture format and nowcouched in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and his preco-cious female student, Martin’s account represents one of the mostextended discussions of the ear in the British context. Jamie Kasslerhas also found references to other lectures on the science of musicpresented around the country as well as in the metropolis, mostlyfrom the late eighteenth century.39 For example, around 1795 theblind physician Henry Moyes presented a course of lectures on thephilosophy of natural history at the Newcastle Literary andPhilosophical Society, the third lecture apparently being devoted tosound, echo, melody, and harmony, including the mechanism ofthe ear, musical sounds, music and the mind, and the influence ofmusic on the human system.40

So far this survey has concentrated on the anatomy and mechan-ics of hearing, up to the point where the auditory nerves receivethe impressions of sound. The authors so far mentioned have com-paratively little to say on how the auditory nerves transmit sensoryimpressions to the brain, nor do they dwell on the special nature of

36. Flemyng, Introduction, 311.37. Johann Cassebohm, Tractatus Quatuor Anatomici de Aure Humana (Halle, 1734).38. See Millburn, Benjamin Martin.39. Kassler, Science of Music I, 92, 275, 372–77, 416–21, 498–99, 503–5, 533.40. Ibid., II, 789–90.


musical sounds and their effects on the mind and body. In fact thesetopics were first yoked together in the late seventeenth century byThomas Willis, who attempted to understand perception andresponse to musical sound as a process from the initial propagationof sound, to its reception and interpretation by the brain. Indeed,Willis first came up with the concept of “musical ears,” an aptitudeor faculty for memorizing music that had its basis in the physiologyof the brain.41 According to Willis, an extremely subtle spirit (or“animal spirits” as Galen taught) flowed through the nerves, a mate-rial substance that was the instrument of the rational soul or mindand was what he called the sensible soul. This spirit was producedfrom the blood and stored in the brain, flowing inwards as theapprehension of sensible things was performed, or flowing outwardsto instigate locomotion in the body. The ability to memorize musicwell was explained by Willis in terms of a soft cerebellum in whichthe animal spirits could impress themselves easily, maintaining theharmony which had moved them in the first place.42

During the eighteenth century, there was increasing attentionpaid to the nerves and their constitution, with weak nerves beingthought of as the root of most maladies. Although it was generallyagreed that sensation was caused by external motions touching thenerves, there was controversy over whether the nerves were hollowtubes filled with spirits that transmitted these external sense impres-sions, or whether they were solid fibers whose finer parts were set inmotion by this action. One important contribution to this debate isfound in Isaac Newton’s Opticks. In the first edition of 1704,Newton suggested that both the sensations of color and of musicalharmony are caused by vibrations of different wavelengths strikingtheir respective organs, a harmonious mix of colors or sounds beingdue to the proportion between their vibrations.43 In the second

41. These topics were discussed in Chapter 17 of Willis’s De cerebri anatome (London,1664) and also De anima brutorum (London, 1672). Both books were translated into Englishduring the 1680s.

42. Thomas Willis, “The Anatomy of the Brain and Nerves,” in The Remaining MedicalWorks of the Famed and Renowned Dr. Willis, trans. S[amuel] P[ordage] (London, 1683),117–20.

43. This conjecture stemmed from the so-called coincidence theory of consonance(first popularized by Galileo) which stated that the more frequently the vibrations of twomusical notes coincide with each other, the more harmonious the sound; thus the octavewith a frequency ratio of 2:1 was the first consonant interval after the unison, the secondbeing the fifth with a ratio of 3:2. For further details, see H. Floris Cohen, Quantifying


edition of 1717, he suggested that both vision and sound might beproduced by the vibration of an incredibly fine, elastic, and subtlemedium that fills the universe, motions that were propagatedthrough the “solid, pellucid and uniform capillamenta of thosenerves into the place of sensation.”44 Furthermore, he went on toconjecture that this or a similar medium might serve to perform theactions of the will (comparable to Willis’s sensitive soul), first havingbeen excited in the brain and then propagated from thence in thenerves or muscles which then contract or dilate accordingly. Thisidentification of a universal ether with the animal spirits was fol-lowed up by George Cheyne in his Essay on Health and Long Life(London, 1724), where he suggested that the nerves were to bethought of as “bundles of solid, springy and elastic Threads orFilaments” that depend on the action of the spirits for their respon-siveness, the healthy body being like a musical instrument that prop-erly responds to the touch of the player (i.e., the soul).45

The relevance of these ideas to theories of hearing is demon-strated in the physician Nicholas Robinson’s A New System of theSpleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy (London, 1729).Rather than the ear as such, Robinson’s chief focus of attention wasthe subtle, fine, and elastic ether that resides in the nervous systemand acts as the instrument of the reasonable soul or “intellectualprinciple” by transmitting vibrations to and from the brain’s fibersvia the nerves. The different organs of sense responded to differentmotions according to their structure and “modulation” of theirfibers.46 Robinson argued for music having both an intellectual andsensory effect. In his chapter “Of Hearing, Sounds and Harmony,”he ascribed fine taste in music to the quality of the brain’s fibers(rather than anything to do with the ear’s anatomy), with the abilityto judge exquisite fineness of musical airs “only given to a few.”47

Music: The Science of Music at the First Stage of the Scientific Revolution (Dordrecht: D. Reidel,1984).

44. Isaac Newton, Opticks (2nd ed., London, 1717), 328.45. George Cheyne, An Essay of Health and Long Life (London, 1724), 158.46. Nicholas Robinson, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack

Melancholy; Wherein All the Decays of the Nerves, and Lownesses of the Spirits, Are MechanicallyAccounted For (London, 1729), 106.

47. Ibid., 141–42. In fact, Robinson argues in A New System that the Italians were nat-urally endowed with this faculty, although he gave no explanation for this phenomenon.


In a later chapter “Of the Powers of Music in Soothing thePassions,” he explained that there was a direct correlation betweenalterations in the mind and changes in the fibers of the brain.Music’s power to alter mood—specifically its ability to soothtumultuous passions—appeared to be due to variations in the forceof its motions striking the tympanum, which in turn affected theauditory nerve and brain fibers by means of the elastic aether.48

Thus Robinson had almost nothing to say about the structure ofthe ear itself, but he did think there was a special quality to musicalsound that made it particularly affective.

Another Newtonian-influenced work which adopted a mechani-cal explanation for music’s effects was the originally anonymousMechanical Essay on the Effects of Singing, Music and Dancing onHuman Bodies (London, 1727).49 In brief, the book argued that theeffect of all three activities is to stimulate the secretion and flow ofanimal spirits (the first parts of matter actuated by the soul orimmaterial principle) which in turn replenish the solid parts of ourbodies. It is in the chapter on music that the author quotedCheyne’s account of hearing, which is to say that the undulations ofsound move the drum, which then beats, causing the four littlebones in the barrel move the internal air, which then makes animpression on the auditory nerves in the labyrinth and cochlea.50 Amore developed account of why we are differently affected bymusic is found in the second, enlarged edition of this work whichappeared in the same year as Robinson’s treatise. This time theauthor was identified as the apothecary Richard Browne, who nowcalled his book Medicina Musica: A Mechanical Essay on the Effects ofSinging, Music and Dancing on Human Bodies (London, 1729).51 Inthis work, Browne explained that a clear perception of music in themind required a “more exquisite Configuration of the Ear, than isnecessary for the Conveyance of simple Sounds.” (Compare thiswith Robinson’s idea that it was the fibers of the brain which affect

48. Ibid., 343–49 on music and the passions.49. [Richard Browne], Mechanical Essay on the Effects of Singing, Music and Dancing on

Human Bodies (London, 1727).50. Ibid., 21–22.51. Richard Browne, Medicina Musica: A Mechanical Essay on the Effects of Singing, Music

and Dancing on Human Bodies, to Which Is Annexed a New Essay on the Nature and Cure ofthe Spleen (London, 1729).


music perception.) Those who lack a “fine displaying of theAuditory Nerves” cannot form an idea of harmony, in the sameway that a blind man cannot conceive of colors. However, it is pos-sible for those who can perceive harmony to improve this facultyby “frequenting the School of Musick.”52 The organ of hearingcould be tuned and its distinguishing faculty refined, thus givingthe soul a better perception of harmony.

The concept of a good ear as an internal sense, partly endowed bynature but also capable of improvement, is found in a number ofeighteenth-century philosophical works devoted to the humanmind and its faculties. For the most part, these did not address thetransmission of sound nor did they consider the anatomy of the ear.Thus, for example, Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original ofOur Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London, 1725) bypassed the ear andnervous system altogether but erected his system of moral philoso-phy on the principle that ideas were generated from external senseimpressions discerned by the mental faculties. Hutcheson defined a“good ear” as the power of perceiving the pleasure arising from thecomposition of sounds, and made this faculty central to his moregeneral study of the capacity to receive perceptions of beauty“commonly called a fine Genius or Taste.”53 A similar distinctionbetween the external sense of hearing and a “good ear” was drawnby Thomas Reid in his Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principlesof Common Sense (Edinburgh, 1764), a book which became a foun-dation for the so-called common sense school of philosophy thatflourished in late-eighteenth-century Scotland.54

While these and similar works seem to disassociate the physicalfrom the psychological, in fact the interconnection of these realmswas always presumed. One influential text which deliberatelystraddled the division between body and mind was the physicianDavid Hartley’s Observations on Man (London, 1749). Hartley basedhis system on Newton’s hypothesis that a subtle ether resided in the(solid) nerves, the spinal marrow, and brain, and it was throughthe vibrations of this substance that impressions were made upon

52. Ibid., 33–34.53. Francis Hutcheson, Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue

(London, 1725), 8.54. Thomas Reid, Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense

(Edinburgh, 1764), 101.


the mind, a process which followed Locke’s doctrine of associationas complex ideas were built up from initially simple sensations. Thisled him not only to describe the workings of the ear (he identifiedthe organ of hearing as “the soft portion of the seventh pair ofnerves, distributed in the cochlea, and semicircular canals”) but alsoto explain “how agreeable and disagreeable sounds contribute, inthe way of association, to the formation of our intellectual pleasuresand pains.”55 Hartley’s argument proceeded from single musicalsounds to concords (produced by their vibrations being in simpleratios to each other) before suggesting that even discords (where thevibrations do not coincide) can become pleasurable due to theirassociation with concords, a phenomenon that explained why thejudgments and tastes of different persons could be quite differentfrom each other in fact.56

An analysis of hearing texts in eighteenth-century Britain revealsa rich culture of both foreign and local literature. This literature wasmade available to a broad spectrum of the public through theprocess of translation and new methods of production. Martin’s texton hearing was part of a widespread interest in popular science, partentertainment, part knowledge, occurring in the commercial mar-ketplace. Such a marketplace accommodated a wide variety of phil-osophical opinion. Local texts incorporated anatomical diagrams,mathematical explanations, and physico-theological arguments relat-ing to hearing. There was no single authoritative author or philo-sophical viewpoint. Rather, multiple presentations and explanationsof hearing could be accommodated as part of the general culture ofknowledge consumption. In France, despite breakthrough findingsin auditory anatomy, hearing science was in a markedly differentdisciplinary state. In the mid-century, Le Cat ultimately found mostenthusiasm for his work on the ear in England, from institutionssuch as the Royal Society, but also individuals, such as BenjaminMartin, who saw the popular potential of his material.

HEARING IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE

At the end of the seventeenth century, the study of hearing inFrance became closely associated with the medical culture of

55. David Hartley, Observations on Man (London, 1749), 223.56. Ibid., 426.


surgery. This was distinct from the situation in England wherehearing remained a central component of the study of experimentalphysics. In one sense, this was a positive context for understandinghearing. Through detailed dissection of the ear, the human hearingmechanism could be emphasized as distinctive. Yet in anothersense, the situation posed a problem. While surgical tracts couldexplain the unique and detailed mechanical processes of auditoryperception, they were not able to address more complex mathemat-ical problems of acoustical physics. During the period of the eight-eenth century, the study of hearing became dominated by theabstract study of music as sound, and music as craft. These academi-cians were the closest heirs to Marin Mersenne’s work viewing themechanical process of hearing as a secondary consideration to theo-ries of harmony, resonance, and propagation. At the same time, thediscipline was heavily influenced by the shift in medical thinkingtoward vitalism. In France, the effects of music on the nervousbody became of utmost importance to a new politicized form ofmusical thinking. Le Cat’s surgical work on the senses appeared in1741. Though it connected closely to the early surgical tradition ofthe ear, it remained somewhat separated from these more recenttrends. Yet it provided important details on hearing that werecrucial to the evolution of the discipline.

The most important treatise on hearing from the early FrenchEnlightenment is Joseph-Guichard Duverney’s Traite de l’organe del’ouıe, presented to the French Academy of Sciences in 1683.57 Thetreatise is not only significant for its contribution to otology. It alsoaptly demonstrates the importance of mechanical description andrepresentation in the medical discourse of the early FrenchEnlightenment. In his preface, Duverney recognized the mechanicalcomplexity of the ear which, he explained, contributed to its“obscurity” as a sensory mechanism:

The smallness and the delicateness of the parts enclosed in someareas, with a severity which is almost impenetrable, make theirresearch full of difficulties, and their structure is something so

57. Duverney, Traite de l’organe de l’ouıe. (This text was also reprinted in Leyden in1731.) Claude Perrault was another important French physician and anatomist working onthe ear at this time. Duverney describes his work as important though incomplete. Seeibid., 5–6.


awkward that there are neither ways of explaining nor ways of dis-covering it.58

Duverney described every component of the ear and its connectiveparts in exhaustive detail. Equally important were the sixteen platesof the ear’s anatomy. Most were presented life size though somewere enlarged (sometimes twofold) or presented from a reverse aswell as a front perspective. Among the designs was the outer earwith its varying anatomical attachments and arterial systems, theskull and ear attached, the tiny bones, the canal system and attach-ments from the apophyse mastoide, and the labyrinth and cochlea.There was also an unusual illustration of a cross-section of the baseof the head exposing the arteries and nervous system (whichDuverney believed was superior to that presented by Willis), apicture of the ear of a fetus, and the auditory nervous system and itsconnections to different parts of the face.

In Part I of the treatise, Duverney described all the mechanicalfeatures of the ear covering even the smallest parts. No attempt wasmade to simplify the ear structure (into three sections, for example).Rather, the ear was presented as a series of equally important con-necting parts. Along with the illustrations, Duverney aimed toconvey the complex spatial organization of the anatomy. Part II ofthe treatise dealt with function. Duverney focused on the ear drumand the ability of the muscles around it to be agitated throughvibration, along with a detailed description of the rest of the earstructure including the labyrinth and cochlea. This section appearsless important than the first. In Part III, Duverney dealt with prob-lems of the ear. Significantly, he connected bodily illnesses such asmelancholia to ear disorders though he also made clear that thebody cannot impact on the mechanism of the ear. He explainedthe close relationship between the auditory nervous system and thatof the heart, covering a multitude of problems such as inflammationand foreign bodies in the ear and tinnitus. Tinnitus, he believed,was caused not by excess air in the ear but by a distortion of per-ception occurring within the auditory mechanical system.

58. Ibid., 5. “La petitesse et la delicatesse des parties, qui le composent, renfermees,comme elles sont, dans d’autres parties, dont la durete est presque impenetrable, rend leurrecherche pleine de beaucoup de difficultes, et leur structure a quelque chose de si embar-rasse, qu’il n’y a pas moins de peine a l’expliquer, qu’il y en a a la decouvrir.”


At the same time, another surgeon from the Academy, JeanMery, was also working on the ear in collaboration with GuillaumeLamy, a Paris physician. Mery provided Lamy with a detaileddescription of auditory function who then attached it to his treatise,Explication mecanique et physique des fonctions de l’ame sensitive pub-lished in 1681.59 Though Mery’s description of the ear was rela-tively brief, his work was significant. The nervous relationshipbetween the labyrinth and the cochlea emerged as the most impor-tant part of the analysis and was discussed in much greater detailthan in earlier texts. In a later edition of Lamy’s publication, Lamyfurther emphasized the importance of the relationship between thetwo components, combining them both in a single overarchingdiagram of a “labyrinth” in the plates. Lamy also defended chargesof charlatanism by explaining his close collaboration with theesteemed academician, Mery, and the importance of their combinedwork. Lamy described their findings on the labyrinth in detailincluding the relationship between the split nervous system of thelabyrinth and the air agitated through the entire labyrinth/cochleasystem. Though the work derived from a mechanist perspective, itwas very different from that of Duverney. While Duverney pre-sented the ear as an astonishing example of the functioning humanbody, Lamy saw it as one of the five “senses” which were closelyconnected to the passions. Nevertheless, he chose to present hiswork on the senses with his own complex anatomical diagrams andMery’s description.60

In 1715, the Montpellier surgeon Raymond Vieussens publishedhis Traite nouveau de la structure de l’oreille.61 Significantly, it appearedalongside a groundbreaking work by the same author on the heart,Traite nouveaux de la structure de la Cœur.62 Though these were com-pletely separate treatises, Vieussens explained that he followed thesame model of investigation in each work. This involved exploringphysical–mechanical processes of “natural movement” surrounding

59. See Guillaume Lamy, Explication mecanique et physique des functions de l’ame sensitiveetc., 2nd ed. (Paris, 1681); also nouvelle edition augmentee (Paris, 1687).

60. Ibid.61. Raymond Vieussens, Traite nouveau de la structure de l’oreille divise en deux parties

(Toulouse: Jean Guillemette, 1714).62. Raymond Vieussens, Traite nouveau de la structure et des causes du mouvement naturel du

Cœur (Toulouse: Jean Guillemette, 1715).


both the heart and ear. Of all the senses, the ear most resembledthe heart because it was a solid mechanism whose movementdepended on the “esprit animal,” the life force of the body enteringinside the mechanism via an external anatomical part (the externalear). In his support of the “esprit animal,” Vieussens followedthe work of Thomas Willis. However, Vieussens’ emphasis onbodily fluids and solids (arteries, air from breathing and receivedthrough the skin), rather than the nervous system of the brain,anticipated the later work by Theophile de Bordeu, another famousMontpellier doctor, on the pulse.63 For Bordeu, the pulse con-structed its own rational trajectory throughout the human bodyaccording to bodily illness. In his treatise on the ear, Vieussensexplained that since he found Duverney’s treatise too difficult tounderstand, he aimed in his own work to give a clearer idea of thedifferent parts, how they were constructed, and also to recognizethe particular tissue in each part and their “marvellous” shape. Healso sought to demonstrate in a much clearer fashion how each partcommunicated with each other. This has only been possible, heexplained, after looking at the structure over a thousand times.

Vieussens intended his description of the ear to be easy to memo-rize. It has the quality of a medical textbook. The centerpiece was themuscles of the inner ear which were mechanically interconnected.He was eager to explain that tinnitus and deafness were caused by theviolent movement of these muscles, not by unwanted air caught inthe cavities. He placed the components surrounding the eardrumtogether (malleus, incus, stapes, os orbiculaire) which formed a space of“natural equilibrium.” The auditory nerves in the different cavities ofthe labyrinth formed a different section. The labyrinth and cochleawere coupled together into a third section. Finally, Vieussens con-nected l’esprit animal with the sensation of hearing. This was done bydescribing the way in which the mechanical parts were “shocked”into action. Like the movement of the heart, their movements oper-ated exactly in proportion to that level of force provided by the fluid.Sensory mechanisms were far from passive reflex movements. Theywere intimately connected to a constantly circulating internal andexternally channelled fluid force. The brain was far too soft to be

63. Theophile de Bordeu, Recherches sur le pouls par rapport des crises, I (Paris, 1768).


involved, since it collapsed at the impact of the shock. According toVieussens, hearing was considered pivotal to the understanding of lifeforces. It encapsulated the essence of the living body in motion.64

Le Cat’s 1741 “De l’ouıe” followed Vieussens’ thoroughly Cartesianappraisal of the ear. It formed part of an essay on all the externalsenses, beginning with the sense of touch, the basis of all other sensa-tions, and culminating in the sight. In keeping with this hierarchy, thesenses of touch, taste, and smell (which was really part of, and supple-mentary to, taste) were each treated in a chapter of around ten pages,and although most attention was given to light and vision in morethan two hundred pages and fourteen chapters, the matter of hearingcame in at second place, being dealt with in three chapters totalingthirty-nine pages. Most illustrations (there were eleven in all) in histreatise were devoted to optical phenomena, but in addition to onedevoted to the nerves’ connections to the brain (“The Basis of theBrain with its Appurtenances”) there was a striking set of double platesof the ear, one with the anatomical ear in outline with the differentparts labeled (“Esquisse et Explication”) and the other, with the ear infull detail (Figure 1A and B). Though Le Cat cites Duverney andCassebohm on the first plate, the designs themselves were originallyconceived. There was also an illustration of a unique ear trumpetdesign, “ouıe dure.” This was not just a volume device, but an artificialextension of the inner ear, a kind of external ear shaped like a cochleaimplanted on the outside of the human face.

The Structure I have been Observing in the Ear, leads me to theInvention of an Instrument, formed for supplying that sort of defectcalled Hardness of Hearing. My machine consists of Two Parts. Thefirst is a Horn Shell that retains a good deal of Air, and is exactlyfitted to the Tube of the Ear; and the Other Part is a TunnelInserted at the Centre of the Shell. The Tunnel receives a Good dealof exterior Air, put in motion by those that are speaking.65

64. Vieussens, Traite nouveau de la structure de l’oreille.65. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 66–67. “La structure que je viens d’observer dans l’oreille,

m’a conduit a l’invention d’un instrument propre a supleer a cette espece de defaut qu’onapelle l’Ouie dure. Ma machine est faite de deux parties. La premiere est une coquille encornet qui retient beaucoup d’air, et qui s’adapte exactement au conduit de l’oreille. Laseconde piece est un entonnoir qui s’insinue au centre de la coquille et fait rentrer sesvoutes au cul-de-lampe.; cet entonnoir recoit beaucoup de l’air exterieur remue par ceuxqui parlent”; Le Cat, Traite des sens, 72.


Le Cat’s chapter on the ear is, overall, concise and clear. He did notapologize for positioning the mechanical issue of auditory process-ing at the center of his work. He divided sound and hearing intotwo separate sections, both of which depended throughout onsimple visual models or diagrams for comprehension. The principlesof the harmonic series could be demonstrated by a simple experi-ment using a ball on a string, for example. The ear was best dem-onstrated by illustration.

As we will see, Le Cat drew on much previous research from theFrench Academy of Sciences, most notably work on the relationshipbetween sound and light, but also on sound propagation. After thepublication of Duverney’s work, the discipline underwent a majorshift at the Academy away from the anatomical ear toward musicalscience. This was partly due to the increasing interest in utility at theinstitution and the perceived finality of Duverney’s work (repub-lished with its original plates in 1731) on the anatomical ear.66 But itwas also symptomatic of the emergence of an elite group ofpure acousticians. Activities at the Academy relating to music assound, in particular light–sound relationships (Mariotte, La Hire,Mallebranche, de Mairan), and the voice (Dodart), were combinedwith work on tuning, music theoretical systems, and musical instru-ments.67 Between 1700 and 1720, the Academy’s output in the fieldwas dominated by the work on musical acoustics by Joseph Sauveur.His work created enormous interest in the techniques of instrumentsound propagation (Vaucanson), and theoretical systems (Rameau).Though the work of these academicians can be described aspost-Cartesian, it also contributed to the emerging field of musicalvitalism. German philosophers (Meier and Mattheson) soon realizedthat metaphors of musical sound (as opposed to hearing) could mostclearly demonstrate the vitalist theories of Haller.68 The body was amirror of a musical instrument, wondrous set of “strings” which

66. This occurred in all areas of the sciences, not just in acoustics at the Academie. SeeRobin Briggs, “Academie Royale des Sciences and the Pursuit of Utility,” Past Present,1991, 131, 36–88.

67. See Albert Cohen and Leta A. Miller, Music in the Paris Academy of Sciences 1666–1793 (Detroit Studies in Music Bibliography Number 43, Detroit: InformationCoordinators Inc., 1979); and Albert Cohen, Music in the French Royal Academy of Sciences:A Study in the Evolution of Musical Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).

68. See Martin Kaltenecker, “A propos du contexte philosophique et physiologique duparadigme rhetorique au XVIIIe siecle,” Revue musicologie, 2009, 95, no. 1, 65–96.


agitated in sympathy to external sensory forces. In Montpellier,Joseph Louis Roger demonstrated the vitalist principle by conceptu-alizing the whole body as a series of solids and fluids.69 Music couldmove through the body affecting bodily health. In French musiccircles, vitalism continued well into the nineteenth century. Themathematically constructed musical instrument or musical theoreti-cal systems developed through the French Academy of Sciences, andlater the Conservatoire des arts et metiers, were not only mechanicalconstructions but powerful metaphors for the vitalist musical rhet-oric. For Le Cat, the body could never resemble a reflexive musicalinstrument.70 This was an unusual position to take in the context ofthe emerging dominant culture of French vitalist musical aesthetics.

Yet Le Cat’s straightforward surgical approach made his workideal for knowledge transfer. It was highly accessible to natural phi-losophers like Martin who relied on worthy medical and scientificpublications which could be shaped into spectacles of knowledge-able entertainment. As we will see, despite their differences ofopinion and background, Le Cat’s ideas were absorbed intoMartin’s work through almost straightforward repetition. Le Cat’streatise was the perfected product of four major anatomical studies onthe ear published by members of the French surgical establishment.Each of these was a more intelligible version of the previous one.Le Cat’s work was the most clear, concise, and elegant description(and refined illustration) of the ear in French public circulation. And itwas available in England in direct translation. Such presentableinformation could be easily re-framed as scientific educational mate-rial for a popular English marketplace. Le Cat’s relatively isolated posi-tion in France as a single auditory mechanist in a crowd of musicalvitalists was of secondary importance in this new context. There,Le Cat’s work simply became quality material for use in the Englishcompetitive marketplace.

69. Joseph Louis Roger, Tentamen de vi soni et musices in corpore humano (Montpellier,1758), and Joseph Louis Roger, Traite des effets de la musique sur le corps humain, trans.Etienne Sainte-Marie (Paris: Brunot, 1803).

70. “Quels fait anatomiques ont pu vous autoriser a transporter dans le systeme desnerfs le mecanisme reserve a l’art des Lully et des Rameaux [?].” Claude-Nicolas Le Cat,Traite de l’existance de la nature et des proprietes du fluide des nerfs et principalement de son actiondans le mouvement musculaire (Berlin, 1755), 19.


THE “SANCTUARY OF SOUND”: FINDING AGREEMENT

IN AUDITORY RESEARCH

While Le Cat’s discourse on hearing buttressed his mechanisticscheme of the world, Martin’s account of sound and hearing—themost expansive treatment we have found in eighteenth-centuryEngland—was embedded within an ambitious and encyclopedicpublication of a kind that was still new to the paying public. Thiswas his fourteen-volume General Magazine of the Arts and Sciencesthat originally came out in monthly installments, a cumulative workwhich essentially followed the Baconian experimental method byrelying on sense experiences mediated through instruments as abasis for scientific explanation. The second volume of the GeneralMagazine was mostly devoted to globes, optical instruments, andthe structure of the eye, but in Part V, specifically in Dialogues XXto XXIV, a tutor and his eager female student are portrayed as dis-cussing in turn the nature of sound, its musical properties, differentmusical instruments, the organ of speech, and the faculty ofhearing, totaling some sixty pages in all. Again implicitly followingthe example of Francis Bacon, Martin explained that all these topicscame under the general category of acoustics,

which treats of the philosophy, or doctrine of sounds, and of theconstitution of the organ of hearing, which is placed in the ear, bywhich those sounds are rendered audible, or sensible to us, under alltheir different affections and circumstances.71

Additionally, Martin cross-referenced a section of his first volume(Part III on pneumatics) because it included an explanation of thenature and properties of air, which as far as Martin was concernedwas the principal medium of sounds.

This brings us to one of the major differences between Martinand Le Cat, which lies in their understanding of the nature of(musical) sounds and their transmission. This latter topic was stillthe focus of much controversy among eighteenth-century naturalphilosophers. Having identified sound as “Noise, which renders theVibrations of the Air fuller, more regular, and, consequently, morepleasing to the Ear,” Le Cat asserted that the gross part of the air

71. Martin, General Magazine, II, 351.


was not capable of transmitting different vibrations at the sametime.72 Instead he argued for the existence of different parts of theair, with each subtle fluid only vibrating to one frequency. Le Cat’stheory was in keeping with Cartesian principles in that he visual-ized air and matter in general being made up of a mixture of differ-ently sized particles, his own contribution being to postulate theexistence of many gradations of these, each of which correspondedto a specific pitch.73 In notable contrast, Martin explained the trans-mission of musical sound in terms of the spring or elastic vibrationof the gross air, which transmitted its pulses successively to the ear.He noted that the nature of the air, under the category of pneu-matics, had already been covered in his first volume, but he dealtwith it again in his discourse on sound. The essential thing was thatthe parts of a sounding body move elastically and isochronically.They “move forward through a small space . . . then return againwith a velocity equal to that by which they were displaced.” Thisvibrative motion was communicated to the air, an elastic fluidwhich was set into isochronous motion by every sound, even thosemade at the same time. Although he did not state it explicitly,Martin seemed to be following Newton’s concept of a longitudinalpressure wave where the particles act like a set of tiny springssubject to compressions and extensions. However he did say that itwas very difficult to describe the action of an elastic fluid, and that“even Newton found it so.”74

Paradoxically, although Le Cat rejected multiple modes of vibra-tion in the air, he claimed that a single string could agitate all thefluids because it was not just producing a fundamental tone but wasalso sounding (what we now call) overtones.75 At this point, he fol-lowed a comparison between sound and color originally found inNewton’s Opticks (1704) that was later developed by the French

72. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 35. “Le bruit dans lequel les vibrations de l’air sont plusamples, plus regulieres, et par-la plus agreables a l’Oreille, s’apelle le Son,” Le Cat, Traitedes sens, 39.

73. The idea that the gross air contains more subtle media responsible for the transmis-sion of sound as well as light was still current in the eighteenth century. A strikinglysimilar explanation to Le Cat’s was given by the French natural philosopher Jean-JacquesDortous de Mairan (1678–1771) in a paper read to the Paris Academie in 1737 and pub-lished in 1740, the same year as Le Cat’s treatise. See Christensen, Rameau, 139–41.

74. Martin, General Magazine, II, 353.75. This was a phenomenon first properly described by Joseph Sauveur in 1701. See

Christensen, Rameau, 135–37.


composer and music theorist Jean Philippe Rameau in his Nouveausysteme de musique theorique of 1726.76 Just as each color was pro-duced by a different ray, and just as these colors combined toproduce white light, so different harmonious sounds produced byparticular frequencies were combined to make a single compositenote.77 Indeed, Le Cat argued that the ear of the musician was “aSort of Prism”78 in that it is able to discern the different soundscontained in a fundamental tone, a skill which showed that the earwas more perfect than the eye because it reduced all the gradationsof sound to calculation and “actually forms them into an Art”which the eye cannot do.79 However, this skill was not present inthe generality of mankind, who for the most part only heard asingle note when a string was played. A similar distinction betweenthe ordinary and “harmonical” ear was made by Martin, who saidthat although the mind was “naturally formed” to receive pleasurefrom a certain succession of sounds (he does not specify how),for some people the first principles of natural music “have verylittle distinction, or meaning” (again he offers no grounds for thisassertion).80

Despite their pessimism about most people’s lack of musicalability, our authors were agreed on music’s power to “affect thehuman fabric” (Martin) and to cause sentiments (Le Cat) to amuch greater degree than the other senses.81 Martin’s account ofthis phenomenon focused on the body’s system of nervous fibersand muscular filaments that made a person

subject to all the motions and vibrations of air; and consequently, bythose occasioned by musical sounds in a very high degree: and as thepassions of the mind are affected, and variously excited by the pulsesof the nervous system, it is no wonder that we oftentimes see the

76. Newton, Opticks (1704); Jean Philippe Rameau, Nouveau systeme de musique theorique(Paris, 1726); Christensen, Rameau, 142–45.

77. In fact, Newton himself did not compare the compound nature of musical pitchwith white light. Rather, he found that the sines of the colors refracted through a prismparalleled the ratios of those found between the seven notes of the musical scale, and sug-gested that the pleasing effect of harmony found between two colors may be equivalent tomusical consonance, with both perceptions being due to proportionate vibrations of differ-ent wavelengths striking the eye or the ear.

78. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 42; “une espece de prisme,” Le Cat, Traite des sens, 47.79. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 43; “elle en fait un Art,” Le Cat, Traite des sens, 47.80. Martin, General Magazine, II, 367.81. Ibid., 398; Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 60.


power of music affecting the passions of men, in respect to joy,mirth, devotion etc. in a very extraordinary manner: Nor are we towonder, if we find a set of people ready to extend the power ofmusic beyond the force of nature, and ascribing to it many effectswhich it was never capable of producing.82

Martin’s explanation said scarcely anything about the linkagebetween the ear and nervous system, and did not reveal whether hethought the nerves were hollow or solid (nor was there anymention of what type of music might elicit particular passions).Indeed, in the above passage he almost seemed to indicate a directlinkage between nervous “pulses” and the various passions thatcould be excited by music, with scant reference to the mind thatmediated this process. By contrast, Le Cat began with the power ofmusic to move the soul, observing that it was “by her Means thewhole Machine, renders it very conducive to the Recovery ofHealth.”83 He followed this with a standard account of the animalspirits functioning as the link between the two parts of the humansystem (i.e., body and soul), a fluid that was

the Soul of Sensations and Passions; and it is owing to the Organsthat it receives the Impressions of Objects, and takes the greatest Partof its Characters and Modifications. . . . Now of all the Senses theHearing is that which gives Man a preheminence [sic] above all otherAnimals with respect to Harmony: There is no Sense which causesin him such Emotions as this.84

To clinch his argument Le Cat referred to two oft-cited articlesthat appeared in the 1707 and 1708 volumes of the Histoire del’Academie Royale des Sciences, both of which described the cure offever by means of music. The first article reported on the successof a musical concert used to help cure a musician ill with a delir-ium of fever. The second article contained a similar report

82. Martin, General Magazine, II, 398.83. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 60; “Ce pouvoir qu’a la Musique de remuer l’ame, et par

elle toute la machine, la rend tres-propre a la sante. . . ,” Le Cat, Traite des sens, 65.84. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 60; “est l’ame des sensations, des passions, et c’est dans

l’organes qu’il recoit les impressions des objets, qu’il prend la plus grande partie de ses car-acteres, de ses modifications;. . . Or de tous les sens, l’Ouie est celui dans lequel l’hommeexcelle par-dessus tous les animaux, par rapport a l’harmonie, il n’y a point de sens qui leremue comme celui-la,” Le Cat, Traite des sens, 65–66.


concerning a dancer with fever cured by familiar airs played on aviolin.85

Martin would probably have accepted these cases as examples ofmusic’s natural powers, but he would definitely have accused Le Catof “ascribing to [music] many effects which it was never capable ofproducing” in the latter’s discussion of music’s power to cure thebite of the tarantula. While Le Cat was clearly in the camp thatregarded this phenomenon as medically interesting (he went intothe symptoms and treatment of tarantism in some detail), Martinsimply dismissed the entire topic as “a mere fiction, founded in tra-dition and vulgar error only.”86 This comment may have implicitlyreferred to a recent letter in The Gentleman’s Magazine (1753) by anItalian musician Stefano Storace, a document that included a pieceof music which Storace had played himself to someone who hadbeen bitten by a tarantula.87 With hindsight it is tempting to seeMartin in advance of medical opinion regarding the tarantula, atopic that (in England at least) had fallen into disrepute by the endof the eighteenth century.88 For the first part of the century,however, tarantism was taken quite seriously, most notably by thephysician Richard Mead, whose Mechanical Account of Poisons (firstpublished in 1702, with many later editions) contained an essay ontarantism that sought to explain why the nerves were first affectedby the bite and afterwards by music.89

In contrast to their major divergence of opinion over the taran-tula, Martin and Le Cat offered fairly compatible accounts of thefaculty of hearing, although differing over some points of detail. (It

85. Although Le Cat gives the reference to the Histoire for 1717, in fact the twoaccounts are found in the Histoire 1707, 7–8, and Histoire 1708, 22–23. For the broadercontext of these articles, see Cohen, Music in the French Royal Academy, 20–21.

86. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 61–62; Martin, General Magazine, II, 398–99.87. Stefano Storace, “A Genuine Letter from an Italian Gentleman, Concerning the

Bite of the Tarantula,” letter to the editor, Gentleman’s Magazine 1753, 22, 433–34. For theclassic introduction to this subject, see Henry Sigerist, “The Story of Tarantism,” in Musicand Medicine, ed. Dorothy M. Schullian and Max Schoen (New York: Henry Schuman,1948), 96–116.

88. Interest in tarantism certainly continued in southern Europe in this period; see PilarLeon Sanz, “Medical Theories of Tarantism in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” in Music asMedicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity, ed. Peregrine Horden (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2000), 273–92.

89. An abstract and critique of Richard Mead’s Mechanical Account of Poisons: In SeveralEssays (London, 1702, with many later editions) by Samuel Morland appeared in the Phil.Trans. 1702–3, 23, 1320–28.


is quite likely that Martin had drawn on Le Cat’s text just as he hadused the latter’s illustrations.) However, a distinctive feature ofMartin’s offering was his insistence that any gentleman or ladywishing to understand the properties of sound must actually seehow the parts of the ear, especially those of the inner ear, fittogether. This requirement was partially supplied in the text itselfby a copperplate divided into several figures copied from Le Cat’sEssay, although the figure numbers and description of the variousparts seem to have been added, probably by Martin himself(Figure 2A and B). At the same time, a virtual demonstration wasachieved by the teacher portrayed in the dialogue having in his pos-session two little boxes, the first containing a dissected ear to showall its parts, and the second displaying “the organ of the ear entire,”anatomical preparations that he showed his student as he explainedhow the ear was organized.

As might be expected, there is a broad similarity in their approachto the external ear, which Le Cat said was adapted to collect a greatquantity of air, while Martin remarked on its ability to collect thesound which come from every part, after which point the sound wasaugmented in the meatus auditorius (auditory canal) before reachingthe membrana tympani (tympanic membrane, or eardrum) which wasstretched over the first “auditory sinus” (the tympanic cavity, whichMartin called the vestibule and which contained the inner air).90

Having noted the eardrum’s role in transmitting vibrations to theinner air, both authors argued that its primary function was to protectthe organ from sounds which were too strong and to augment soundswhich were too weak, in the same way that the pupil functions inresponse to light. This relaxing and tensing of the drum was achievedby some “little springs” (the auditory ossicles) attached to the tym-panic membrane at one end and to the opening of the second “audi-tory sinus” (i.e., the oval window, leading to the labyrinth) at theother, their movement being effected by the attached muscles.91 Bothauthors went on to explain that the first “little spring” comprised themalleus and incus, while the second was made of the stapes and incus,

90. The use of the term vestibule by Martin for the tympanic cavity is confusing, sinceLe Cat uses the same term for the first part of the labyrinth to which the semicircularcanals are attached.

91. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 49–52; Martin, General Magazine, II, 409–10.


Fig. 2. (A) Benjamin Martin, “A Description of the Several Parts of the Ear” in“III. The Philosophy of Sounds, Music, and the Organization of the Ear,” GeneralMagazine, II, Dialogues XX–XXIV (London, 1755–[1763]), 412.


Fig. 2. (B) Benjamin Martin, “Plate LII: A Dissection of the Ear” in “III. ThePhilosophy of Sounds, Music, and the Organization of the Ear,” GeneralMagazine, II, Dialogues XX–XXIV (London, 1755–[1763]). British LibraryBoard. Shelfmark: 250.k.8-21.


plus another (in fact non-existent) little bone that joins them togethercalled the os orbiculare.92 Le Cat mentioned the “little bones”93 only tosuggest that the “justness of the ear in music” depended partly on theregularity of the motion of their muscles.94 Another piece of anatomi-cal detail he mentioned here was the “chink” in the tympanic mem-brane known as the notch of Rivinus since it was first detected by theGerman physician Augustus Quirinus Rivinus (1652–1723).

At this point, Le Cat turned his attention to the “first cavity” ofthe ear that was filled by a “subtle” or “inner” air received from theEustachian tube (we have seen that Martin identified this cavity asthe vestibulum). There was some ambiguity about the manner inwhich this inner air was put into motion in that Le Cat first sug-gested that the tympanic membrane communicated the sound tothe inner part of the ear, thereby putting emphasis on the transmis-sion of vibrations through the ear’s bony structure. However, healso privileged the role of the air in hearing, explaining that theinward air was agitated by the external air, and communicated itsvibrations to the “immediate organ of hearing,” which was con-tained in the labyrinth and the cochlea. Indeed, “Every thingconcurs to facilitate the Entrance, and to establish the Retention ofthe Impression of sonorous Vibrations.”95

Martin also identified the labyrinth containing the semicircularcanals and the cochlea as the organ of hearing, and it is interestingto note that both authors assigned similar functions to each of theseparts. Thus for Le Cat, the vibrations of the inner air were transmit-ted to the semicircular canals in which they traveled around andmade an impression on the nervous membrane that lined them,which resulted in the sensation of hearing. Likewise Martindescribed the labyrinth’s role as being to increase the agitations ofthe internal air, “or to make them more sensibly affect the fibers ofthe auditory nerve.”96 However, both of them were keen to pointout that while the labyrinth might be the general organ of hearing,

92. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 49; Martin, General Magazine, II, 409. We have alreadynoted the persistence of this spurious ossicle well into the eighteenth century.

93. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 52; “ces osselets,” Le Cat, Traite des sens, 57.94. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 52; “la justesse de l’Oreille en Musique,” Le Cat, Traite des

sens, 57.95. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 64; “Tout concourt a y faire entrer, et a y retenir l’impres-

sion des vibrations sonores,” Le Cat, Traite des sens, 70.96. Martin, General Magazine, II, 411.


it was the cochlea that was designed, as Martin put it, “for themore delicate and refined uses of hearing, such as the forming andmodulating of musical or harmonical sounds.”97 Le Cat similarlyobserves that it was due to its structure that the cochlea had theability to perceive almost infinitely small gradations of sound.98 AsMartin explained, the cavity of the cochlea contained two spiralwindings or canals, separated by a thin membrane and supported bybony laminae through which the fibers of the auditory nerve weredisplayed. The windings became narrower toward the summit, sothat the nerve fibers “may be supposed to have some resemblanceto the system of strings in a harpsichord, and that in this part wemay expect to find the true seat or cause of concords and discords,or of the harmony and dissonance of sounds.” However, Martin wasquick to point out that this “system” was of “an infinitely superiordegree to anything that we can find in the human construction of amusical instrument.”99

Le Cat seemed to go even further than Martin in his celebrationof the “sanctuary of hearing” as he called the cochlea, an organ thathe asserted was missing in (for example) birds and fish, which wereconsequently stupid. Indeed, he saw a direct relationship betweenthe human cochlea and man’s refined sentiments, which distin-guished him from other animals. In other words, the capacity toperceive “good music” was an attribute of specifically humannature, this kind of music being that which “expresses Sentiments,or excites them.”100 At this point, Le Cat turns to the example ofthe ancients, whom he believes excelled in this kind of music, anotable instance being Timotheus’s ability to move Alexander todifferent sentiments by means of his music. Also Le Cat remindedhis readers that the ancients not only used music for diversion, butemployed it in the most serious public affairs, “and made it part oftheir politics.”101 Looking back to an earlier generation of Frenchmusic, he noted that Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–87) aimed to revive

97. Ibid.98. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 55.99. Martin, General Magazine, II, 411. We have already noted that Duverney discussed

the function of the osseus spiral lamina and compared it with a musical instrument.100. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 58; “la bonne Musique. . . exprime les Sentimens, ou qui

les excite,” Le Cat, Traite des sens, 63.101. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 59; “en faisaient une partie de leur politique,” Le Cat,

Traite des sens, 64.


this “pathetic Musick,” and suggested that later French mastersmight have got further in this objective if they had not run after“Italian cascades, music that rather surprises, than touches thepassions.”102

There are many differences between these two treatises. Most,however, can be accounted for by the different cultural backgroundsof the authors. Le Cat’s interest in sound and light, the tarantula“cure” (a medical theory which continued to be validated byFrench doctors well into the nineteenth century), and the mechani-cal nature of air arose partly from his highly politicized position as aFrench Cartesian surgeon who maintained strong alliances with theAcademy of Sciences. Martin’s interest in sound as elastic fluidcomes from the English natural philosopher’s interest in the powerof nature. Yet what is more striking is their agreement about whatare now considered fundamental principles of physiological descrip-tion and function. A clear consensus emerged over how the differ-ent parts of the ear were to be laid out, and significantly, a sense ofthe hierarchy of auditory function. Both authors agreed that theinner ear was the most crucial part, and that air entering the earwas regulated by solid aspects of auditory mechanism before itreached this important space. And for both authors, this mechanicalsystem was central for understanding the relationship betweensound and its human reception.

It is possible to see how the work of Martin and Le Cat has beenneglected. In England, science was dominated by multiple interpre-tations of hearing. Martin’s approach was one of many that weredriven primarily by the accumulation of information for a commer-cial marketplace. Le Cat’s work was subject to the restrictions ofFrench medical fashion. It was considered out of touch with con-temporary accounts of the meaning of music and associated currentsin musical acoustics. In their respective national contexts, therefore,the work of Martin and Le Cat may at first appear unremarkable.Together, however, they emerge as significant figures in the devel-opment of hearing science for a lay audience. This is difficult toappreciate from the perspective of the present-day focus on hearingresearch. Their descriptions of hearing incorporate detailed

102. Le Cat, A Physical Essay, 59; “cette Musique pathetique. . . les cascades Italiennes,musique plus etonnante que touchante,” Le Cat, Traite des sens, 64.I.


physiological description of the ear. These extend far beyond suchraw and basic explanations of auditory function such as “soundsstriking the ear drum” as used by earlier acousticians such as RobertHooke and Francis Bacon.103 Both expound key principles uponwhich the modern discipline of hearing science has subsequentlybeen based, most notably the function and importance of the innerear, and they promoted a clear and concise model of auditory func-tion. Their shared project, seen through the prism of Martin’s text,was built upon similar concern with revealing the hitherto mysteri-ous processes of auditory perception to a wider audience. Bothwere fascinated by the ear as a mechanical object, and both urgentlywanted to communicate their findings in print to a reading public.Though it is always dangerous to ascribe overly evolutionary modelsof development to histories of medical science, in the case ofMartin and Le Cat, it is hard to escape a sense that their sharedconcern with the basic functions of the inner ear, above andbeyond the diversity of their respective national scientific contexts,was a pivotal moment in the emergence of the modern disciplineof hearing science.

FUNDING

This work was supported by The Wellcome Trust (075002).

103. For details on the work of these earlier natural philosophers, see Gouk, Music,Science and Natural Magic, 157–70, 207–13.


Hearing Science in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France

Documents

Transcript of Hearing Science in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain and France