The internal environment: Claude Bernard's concept and its representation in Fantastic Voyage (R. Fleisher) - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2012

The internal environment: Claude Bernard's concept and its representation in Fantastic Voyage (R. Fleisher)

Résumé

For centuries the common and scholarly visions of the interior of the human body were dominated by humoral and anatomical representations. At the end of the nineteenth century two innovations modified these representations: Röntgen's X-rays (1895) and Claude Bernard's theory of the internal environment (milieu intérieur, 1867). This latter model became a central paradigm for thinking about the living body at the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper shows how Bernard's theory provided a new scientific, microscopic, physiological, aquatic and homeostatic vision of the interior of the body. The paper then discusses the well known film Fantastic Voyage (1966) by Richard Fleisher, arguing that it marks a similar watershed in popular representations of the human body. Combining scientific transposition and various effects of mise-en-scène that mobilize classic forms of the imaginary, Fleisher's film (and the books and TV series that followed), contributed to changing the vision of the interior of the body. This image was no longer that of the cadaver cut into pieces on the dissection table. The vision was of living processes, embodied in warm functioning flesh, permitting a physiological vision of the integral body to emerge alongside the classic anatomical one.
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-00842676 , version 1 (09-07-2013)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-00842676 , version 1

Citer

Jérôme Goffette, Jonathan Simon. The internal environment: Claude Bernard's concept and its representation in Fantastic Voyage (R. Fleisher). Matthew Landers; Brian Munoz. Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge, 1500-1850, Pickering & Chatto, pp.187-205, 2012. ⟨hal-00842676⟩
138 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More