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Barbara
Duden
Biography/Bibliography/Contact
As
a student of social
history Barbara Duden
was among the handful
of Berlin women who
in 1976 started COURAGE,
a journal that despite
the learned character
of some of its contents
sold from newspaper
stands. Since then her
writing and research
have focused on the
need to recognize the
historical nature of
the experienced body.
At the time when "woman's
body" finally emerged
as a legitimate public
issue, Duden called
attention to the danger
that this seeming liberation
through science?based
self-diagnosis, would
further the dis-embodiment
of women, rather than
support their courage
to affirm their own
self-perceptions. She
argued that only the
rediscovery of the mode
in which long-dead women
felt their milk, blood,
flushes, flows and lumpings
could provide modern
women with the necessary
distance to distinguish
between the functioning
attributed to them by
the physician, and their
intuitive, self-reliant
sense of flesh and blood.
In
a first, major study,
Duden tried to establish
the legitimacy of "body"
as a subject of professional
history. From a large
number of 18th century
reports on medical visits
two certainties emerged:
the patients complained
about a disorder in
their humors and their
directional fluxes,
about emptiness, fullness
or stoppages. It took
time and courage to
recognize this liquid,
pulsating referent as
that which today is
called "my body".
And it was also more
surprising to recognize
that the baroque physician,
even when he had graduated
from a university, identified
mimetically with the
patients narration,
and that his prescription
or dietetic counsel
was meant to equilibrate,
re-balance or re-orient
humors. Empirically
Duden had stumbled onto
a blind spot of medical
history: the transformation
of the physician from
a trained listener to
an observer, the transformation
of diagnosis from understanding
to imputation.
The
next major step of this
"historical somatics"
led further: An exhaustive
collection and analysis
of all printed anatomical
texts that depict the
content of the pregnant
womb gave her the evidence,
that - until the start
of the 19th century
- anatomists saw and
drew what women told
them: their woodcuts
and etchings show the
"coming child"
that women expected,
never something that
resembles the entity
that today is called
"a foetus".
The very fact that an
aborted embryo was "out
of human proportion"
sufficed to judge it
a "false fruit",
a mole, an aberration
of nature.
The
documentation of the
need to recognize only
objects of appropriate
proportions led her
to a third step in the
history of the body:
the contrast between
the senses in successive
epochs: The history
of the gaze, rather
than the history of
the eye's anatomy, the
history of the quality
that touch (hapsis)
revealed or the ear
heard allowed her to
understand contemporary
vision and hearing in
a distanced way. Touch,
hearing, sight or smell
of the past appeared
as "faculties"
that relate the whole
person to reality rather
than as instruments
that register it. This
history of the senses
is now culminating in
the history of common
sense, a "sense"
that recognizes and
judges the fit among
perceptions. During
the coming years Duden,
the longest collaborator
of Illich on the history
of proportionality,
proposes to verify as
a historian his thesis
that "the body"
of the past ought to
be entirely reconceptualized
as the supreme and most
concrete instance of
relatedness.
Contact
b.duden@ish.uni-hannover.de
Bibliograhy
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