The Elasticity of the Animal Fibre: Movement and Life in Enlightenment Medicine

Cheyne George , An essay on gout (London, 1720), 79.

“The manuscript lecture notes of Alexander Monro primus” (c. early 1750s), 97, cited in Taylor D. W. , “Discourses on the human physiology by Alexander Monro Primus (1697–1767)”, Medical history, xxxii (1988), 65–81, p. 72.

Moravia Sergio , “From homme machine to homme sensible: Changing eighteenth-century models of man”, Journal of the history ideas, xxxix (1975), 45–60, p. 58.

Stafford Barbara Maria , The body criticism: Imagining the unseen in Enlightenment art and medicine (Cambridge, 1991), 417.

See Brown Theodore M. , “From mechanism to vitalism in eighteenth-century English physiology”, Journal of the history of biology, vii (1974), 179–216; Lawrence Christopher , “The nervous system and society in the Scottish Enlightenment”, in Barnes Barry Shapin Steven (eds), Natural order: Historical studies of scientific culture (London, 1979), 19–40.

Doig A. Ferguson J. P. S. Milne I. A. Passmore R. , (eds), William Cullen and the eighteenth century medical world (Edinburgh, 1993), 31; Lawrence Christopher , “Ornate physicians and learned artisans: Edinburgh medical men, 1726–1776”, in Bynum W. F. Porter Roy (eds), William Hunter and the eighteenth-century medical world (Cambridge, 1985), 153–76; Cunningham Andrew , “Medicine to calm the mind; Boerhaave's medical system, and why it was adopted in Edinburgh”, in Cunningham Andrew French Roger (eds), The Medical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (Cambridge, 1990), 40–66.

On the clock metaphor, see Mayr Otto , Authority, liberty, and automatic machinery in early modern Europe (Baltimore, 1986).

Keill James , An account of animal secretion (London, 1708), 109.

Cheyne George , Philosophical principles of natural religion (London, 1705), 24. Numerous other examples of this idea are given in my unpublished manuscript, “Fibre theory in eighteenth-century medicine”.

Addison Joseph , The spectator, ed. by Bond Donald F. (Oxford, 1965), 471 (#115).

The works of Alexander Monro, MD (Edinburgh, 1781; first publ. 1732), 327. See also Jacyna L. S. , “Animal spirits and eighteenth-century British medicine”, in Kawakita Yosio Sakai Shizu Otsuka Yasuo (eds), The comparison between concepts of life-breath in East and West (Tokyo, 1995), 139–61, p. 146: “this notion of the living body as a ‘hydraulic Machine’ was the only model of organism then available.”.

Grosvenor B. , Health, an essay on its nature, value, uncertainty, preservation, and best improvement (London, 1716), 4.

Ibid., 4.

The secondary studies on seventeenth-century microscopists are numerous; among others, see Fournier Marian , The fabric of life: Microscopy in the seventeenth century (Baltimore, 1996); Ruestow Edward , “The rise of the doctrine of vascular secretion in the Netherlands”, Journal of the history of medicine, xxxv (1980), 265–87. They are also discussed in my unpublished manuscript, “The emergence of fibre theory in the late seventeenth century”, especially the section “The body as vessels”.

Wellman Kathleen , La Mettrie: Medicine, philosophy, and Enlightenment (Durham, 1992), 63.

Cited in Wellman , La Mettrie (ref. 15), 119–20.

See Wright John P. , “Metaphysics and physiology: Mind, body, and the animal economy in eighteenth-century Scotland”, in Steward M. (ed.), Studies in philosophy and Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 1990), 251–301, p. 262.

Cheyne , Gout (ref. 1), 79–80.

Langrish Browne , A new essay on muscular motion (London, 1733), 49.

Idem, The modern theory and practice of physic, 2nd edn (London, 1738), 38.

Buchanan James , Linguae Britannicae vera pronunciato, or a new English dictionary (London, 1757), s.v. ‘elasticity’; Cheyne , Gout (ref. 1), 80; idem, Philosophical principles (ref. 9), 224–5; Langrish , The modern theory (ref. 20), 58; Robinson Nichols , A new system of the spleen, vapours, and hypochondriack melancholy (London, 1729), 16.

Morgan Thomas , The mechanical practice of physick (London, 1735), 145; see also idem, Philosophical principles of medicine (London, 1725).

Ibid., 145.

Morgan , Philosophical principles (ref. 22), 125.

Morgan , The mechanical practice (ref. 22), 145.

Morgan , Philosophical principles (ref. 22), 127.

Robinson Nicholas , A new theory of physick and diseases, founded on the principles of the Newtonian philosophy (London 1725), 23.

Cheyne , Gout (ref. 1), 223.

Ibid., 226; see also Douglas James , A description of the peritonaeum, and of the parts of the membrana cellularis (London, 1730), 26; Robinson , A new theory (ref. 27), 23.

Morgan , Philosophical principles (ref. 22), 139.

Cheyne , Philosophical principles (ref. 9), 224.

Keill , Animal secretion (ref. 8), 107.

On Quincy , see Howard-Jones N. , “John Quincy, M.D. [d. 1722], apothecary and iatrophysical writer”, Journal of the history of medicine, vi (1951), 149–75.

Quincy John , Medicina statica: Being the aphorism of Santorius, translated into English, with large explanations , 4th edn (London, 1728), 409–11. Quincy included “Nerves” in the last instruments of digestion; these nerves were probably the conductors of the nervous (nutritious) juices (Succus Nervosus) (p. 431). Quincy also supposed the “minutest fibres” as the seat of operation of medicines; all the vascular parts of the human body were those seats for medicinal particles to be further attenuated and passed into the smaller canals. See Howard-Jones , “John Quincy” (ref. 33), 173.

Quincy , Medicine statica (ref. 34), 411. Quincy also thought that the dura mater acted as a pump, transmitting pulsations to the succus nervosus and bringing about a tonic motion of the nervous system; see Howard-Jones , “John Quincy” (ref. 33), 156; Quincy , Medicina statica (ref. 34), 207.

Keill , Animal secretion (ref. 8), 109.

Morgan , Philosophical principles (ref. 22), 142; 172–3. Cf. Langrish , A new essay (ref. 19), 52; he regards the fluids as the antagonist, so the solids and the fluids as a whole act like a muscular movement.

For an illuminating explanation of the old system of concoction in three stages, see Schoenfeldt Michael , “Fables of the belly in early modern England”, in Hillman David Mazzio Carla (eds), The body in parts: Fantasies of corporeality in early modern Europe (London, 1997), 243–62.

See Kemp Martin Wallace Marina , Spectacular bodies: The art and science of the human body from Leonardo to now (Berkeley, 2000), 78ff.

See Webster Charles , “The discovery of Boyle's law, and the concept of the elasticity of air in the seventeenth century”, Archive for history of exact sciences, ii (1965), 441–502.

Keill , Animal secretion (ref. 8), 30–31; Mead Richard , A treatise concerning the influence of the Sun and Moon upon human bodies, and the diseases thereby produced, 2nd edn (London, 1748); also see Mettrie La , “fluids contain elastic globules”, cited in Wellman, La Mettrie (ref. 15), 120.

See Kuriyama Shigehisa , The expressiveness of the body and the divergence of Greek and Chinese medicine (New York, 1999), chap. 3, “Muscularity and identity”. I owe much of my argument here to Kuriyama's excellent study on muscularity. On Galen's theory of muscle physiology, see Bastholm E. , The history of muscle physiology (Copenhagen, 1950), 74–96; Galen , De motu musculorum, transl. by Goss Charles Mayo as “On the movement of muscles by Galen of Pergamon”, American journal of anatomy, cxxiii (1968), 1–25.

Kuriyama , The expressiveness of the body (ref. 42), 129–30; 144.

Ibid., 144.

Bulwer John , Pathonyotomia (London, 1649), 4.

Boulton Richard , A treatise of the reason of muscular motion (London, 1697), 5.

Ibid., 5–6.

Kuriyama , The expressiveness of the body (ref. 42), 149–50. Fernel also thought of the heart as not composed of muscles; see Bastholm , The history of muscle physiology (ref. 42), 116; Canguilhem Georges , La formation du concept de reflexe (Paris, 1977) [Japanese translation, 31–32].

On Lower, see Frank Robert G. Jr , Harvey and the Oxford physiologists: A study of scientific ideas (Berkeley, 1980), 210 (“In demonstrating this unique action of the heart, Lower in a very real sense completed the work Harvey had begun”).

Paxton Peter , A directory physico-medical (London, 1707), 52–53.

Harvey William , De motu locali animalium (1627), ed., transl. and introduced by Whitteridge Gweneth (Cambridge, 1959).

Ibid., chap. 9 and notes 69–73.

Ibid. , 69. Again in his famous The anatomical exercise, Harvey exalted Aristotle as an adept in the anatomical knowledge of muscles: “Aristotle was acquainted with the muscles, and did not unadvisedly refer all motion in animals to the nerves, or to the contractile element, and therefore called these little bands in the heart nerves”. The works of William Harvey, MD , transl. by Willis Robert (London, 1847), On the motion of the heart, chap. 17, 81; the first English text of 1653 reads: “Aristotle did know the muscles when he did refer all the pains and motion in creatures to the nerves, or that which is contractable, and therefore call'd those tendons in the heart, nerves”, The anatomical exercises in English translation, ed. by Keynes Geoffrey (New York, 1995), 111; also see p. 107.

Harvey , De motu (ref. 51), 69.

Ibid., 3. See also p. 117.

Verduc J. Baptiste , Traité de l'usage des parties, dans lequel on explique les fonctions du corps (Paris, 1696); Verduc John Baptist , A treatise of the parts of a humane body, now made English by Davis J. , MD (London, 1704), 328.

Ibid., part 2, chap. 11.

Stuart Alexander , Three lectures on muscular motion (London, 1739), p. xlii.

Ibid., p. xliv. To be more precise, the muscle was supposed to be composed of the nerves and the vessels, but as the nerves lacked the property of elasticity, Stuart attributed to the vessels the property and agency of motion (i.e. elasticity); Stuart reasoned that these vessels should be composed of further smaller and, ultimately, smallest muscular fibres.

Ibid., p. xliv.

Fallopio Gabriele (1523–62) was among the most important muscle anatomists, and a contemporary of Vesalius. William Croone cited Fallopio as an authority in his On the reason of the movement of muscles (1664). Croone also lays particular emphasis on the fibres of muscles in explaining muscular motion; see Nayler's Margaret introduction to Croone William , On the reason of the movement of the muscles , with a translation by Maquet Paul (Philadelphia, 2000), 27, and Croone's text, 87, where Fallopio was cited as showing that the fibres served as the orderly arranged channels of the spirits, the voluntary agents of movement.

See Jaynes Julian , “The problem of animate motion in the seventeenth century”, Journal of the history of ideas, xxxi (1970), 219–34, p. 219.

Bulwer , Pathonyotomia (ref. 45), 2.

See also Boulton , A treatise of the reason (ref. 46), 6; Harvey , De motu (ref. 51), 15.

Bulwer , Pathonyotomia (ref. 45), 3.

Jaynes , “The problem of animate motion” (ref. 62), 219; Harvey , De motu (ref. 51), 15; Lonie Ian M. , “Hippocrates the iatromechanist”, Medical history, xxv (1981), 113–50, p. 115.

Lonie , “Hippocrates” (ref. 66), 116.

Colman William , “Mechanical philosophy and hypothetical physiology”, in Palter Robert (ed.), The annus mirabilis of Sir I. Newton (Cambridge, 1970), 322–32, p. 329.

Paxton , A directory physico-medical (ref. 50), 147.

Ibid., 160.

Ibid., 147.

Apperley Tho , Observations in physick, both rational and practical (London, 1731), 29; Quincy , Medicina statica (ref. 34), 401; Morgan , Philosophical principles (ref. 22), 140–1; Cheyne , Gout (ref. 1), 92.

Beale Barth , An essay attempting a more certain and satisfactory discovery both of the true cause of all diseases (London, 1706), 53–56; Cheyne , Gout (ref. 1), 97ff; Cheyne , An essay of health and long life (London, 1725), 20, 117, 179–80; Robinson , A new theory (ref. 27), 81–86.

Barry Edward , A treatise on a consumption of the lungs (London, 1727), 274; see also Quincy John , Medico-physical essays (London, 1720), 40.

Quincy , Medico-physical essays (ref. 74); Langrish , The modern theory (ref. 20), 43–50; Robinson , A new system (ref. 21), 112; Robinson , A new theory (ref. 27), 16.

Drake James , Anthropologia nova; or, a new system of anatomy, i (London, 1707), 466.

Although the iatromechanists of Britain did not use this term, I prefer it because it aptly expresses the nuance of an insensible, vibratory motion, with its overtone and implication. 78. Medical historians tend to lay an emphasis on the workings of ‘animal spirits’, ‘nervous fluids’, ‘subtle fluids (aether)’, ‘nerves’, and the mechanism of the muscular structure (tendons, flesh, fibres, arteries, etc.) in describing the history of muscular motion; but these things seem to be rather trivial and negligible, compared to the more fundamental shift in the idea of motion.

Langrish , A new essay (ref. 19), 47 (contraction), 50 (tension); Cheyne , Gout (ref. 1), 96; Fuller Francis , Medicina gymnastica: Or, every man his own physician, 9th edn (London, 1777), 50–54 (stiffness, strength, tension).

Langrish , A new essay (ref. 19), 50 (“all … Fibres are, during Life, in a State of Tension; that is, every Fibre seems to be stretched out beyond its natural State of Rest”).

Robinson , A new theory (ref. 27), 17.

Cheyne , Gout (ref. 1), 80.

Morgan , Philosophical principles (ref. 22), 127.

This is discussed further in my paper “Fibre theory” (ref. 9).

The concept of ‘tonus’ seems to come originally from the Stoics, and Galen inherited it from the Stoics; for the Stoic concept of tonus, see Long A. A. , Stoic studies (Cambridge, 1996), 52–53, 212–13; Rist J. M. , Stoic philosophy (Cambridge, 1969), 86–88. In Stoic physics, ‘tonus’ is the physical property of pneuma (logos), the divine fire, which pervades and maintains the universe by the cohesive force of ‘tonus’. The Stoics think of ‘tensional movement’ as ‘vibrating’ and define it as ‘simultaneous movement in opposite directions’ and distinguish it from local movement.

Sherrington C. S. , “Note on the history of the word ‘tonus’ as a physiological term”, in Contribution to medical and biological research (New York, 1919), i, 261–8.

Harvey , De motu (ref. 51), 15.

Ibid., 115, 117.

Ibid., 119–21.

Ibid., 120, note 1.

Cheyne , Gout (ref. 1), 79.

Fuller , Medicina gymnastica (ref. 79), 28.

Cheyne , An essay of health (ref. 73), 94ff; Fuller , Medicina gymnastica (ref. 79), 164ff; Quincy , Medicina statica (ref. 34), 328, 426.

Fuller , Medicina gymnastica (ref. 79); see also Quincy , Medico-physical essays (ref. 74), 43.

Ibid., 35.

Ibid., 58; see also Quincy , Medico-physical essays (ref. 74), 45.

Imagination was also regarded as a form of exercise; see Addison's Joseph Spectator (ref. 10), #411, “Imagination like a gentle Exercise to the Faculties” (399).

On the revival of music therapy, see Rousseau G. S. , “Medicine and the muses: An approach to literature and medicine”, in Roberts Marie Mulvey Porter Roy (eds), Literature and medicine during the eighteenth century (London, 1993), 23–57, pp. 38–39.

Quincy , Medico-physical essays (ref. 74), 46. Cf. Ficino's theory of musical effects of the body; he thought the effect was on the animal spirits rather than the solids. The spirits are like the air, so have much in common with sounds transmitted by the air. The action of the spirits was analogous to musical strings and their vibration. See Walker Daniel , Spiritual and demonic magic from Ficino to Campanella (London, 1958), chap.1. According to Penelope Gouk, Ficino's music-spirits theory was widely disseminated in the early modern era, absorbed by Burton Robert , Athanasius Kircher, and Robert Fludd: Gouk Penelope , “Music, melancholy, and medical spirits in early modern thought”, in Horden Peregrine (ed.), Music as medicine: The history of music therapy since Antiquity (Aldershot, 2000), 173–94. R. Browne's Medicina musica (London, 1729) was the first English book wholly devoted to this subject: Gouk, 178.

In fact, the body analogized as musical instruments has a long history; for an illuminating study on how Hobbes, Hooke and Robert North used resonating system as controlling metaphor for inner character, see Kassler Jamie C. , Inner music: Hobbes, Hooke, and North on internal character (London, 1995). The relation between the elastic body and music is an extensive subject for investigation.

von Haller Albrecht , First lines of physiology, to which are added all the notes and illustrations of Prof. Wrisberg (Edinburgh, 1786), i, Wrisberg's note 110, p. 231.

Ibid., Wrisberg's note; Haller's text, 226–32.

von Haller Albrecht , A treatise on the sensible and irritable parts of animals (1755), reprinted in Bulletin of the history of medicine, iv (1936), 657–99.

Henry Thomas , Memoirs of Albert de Haller, M.D. (London, 1783), 75–76.

Whytt Robert , An essay on the vital and other involuntary motions of animals, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1763), 2.

On Whytt and his controversy with Haller, see French Roger , Robert Whytt, the soul and medicine (London, 1969).

Whytt , An essay (ref. 105), 256–7.

Ibid., 274–5.

Ibid., 407–8.

Cullen , the most influential medical theorist after Haller and Whytt, also furthered this tendency in his famous systematic division of the solids into “the simple solids” and “the vital solids”; elasticity was only in the domain of the simple or inanimate solids, as he stated on the “contractility” (that is, Hallerian irritability) of the muscular fibres, which Cullen asserted was “different from that of the simple solids, or any inanimate elastics”: Cullen William , The works of William Cullen, ed. by Thomason John , i (Edinburgh, 1827), 10, 63.

Haller , First lines (ref. 101), 231.

Ibid., 231. But sensibility is not proper to muscular fibres since nervous force comes from outside, and not within the fibre themselves (p. 235).

Whytt , An essay (ref. 105), 385–99.

Haller , A treatise on the sensible and irritable (ref. 103), 691.

Whytt , An essay (ref. 105), 399.

I do not intend to discuss further how vitalists solved the dilemma; it is sufficient to say that both Whytt and Haller deviated from the ordinary view of vitalism — Going either in the animistic direction (Whytt) or in the materialistic one (Haller).

Cf. Harvey's reiteration of Aristotle's view of muscles as “a separate living creature”, which “pulsate” when in action (see Harvey , De motu (ref. 51)), 111. Also relevant here is the deconstruction of the animate and the inanimate in French Enlightenment science revealed by Riskin Jessica ; she shows that empiricism, supposedly the science of the hard data, was intimately bound up with emotional sentiment (sensibility), and argues that sensibility operated even in the areas of the inanimate: Riskin Jessica , Science in the age of sensibility: The sentimental empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002).

On electric therapy of the eighteenth century, see for instance Cavallo Tiberius , An essay on the theory and practice of medical electricity , 5th edn (London, 1799); Wesley John , The desideratum; or, electricity made plain and useful (1759; London, 1871).

Lowndess Francis , Observations on medical electricity (London, 1784), 13, 17; idem, The utility of medical electricity (London, 1791), 6.

For the continuity of musical therapy as such, see, for example, Hardman's John view of the operation of sound upon the animal body: “It operates directly upon the animal fibre” ( Hardman , An essay on the causes and phenomena of animal life (London, 1795), 165).

[ Applegarth Robert ], Theological survey of the human understanding (Salisbury, 1776), 273. Sims compared the mental powers with the projectile power of a bow, and “the fit condition of the brain” with “the fit string of the bow”: Sims R. C. , An essay on the nature and constitution of man (London, 1793), 44. Also see de Mainauduc's John Boniot animal magnetism, in which the nerves are understood as the all-embracing vessels whose role includes motile and nutritional functions as well as sensory function. See my essay on de Mainauduc: “London no Mesmer — De Mainauduc to taikino sinkeigaku” [“A Mesmer in London: De Mainauduc and the neurology of the atmosphere”], in Dentou to kakushin [Tradition and renovation] (Tokyo, 2002), 141–63.

In fact, we can find an enduring and critical existence of the fibres in medico-vitalistic discourses; muscular fibres are renamed ‘moving fibres’, and their existence and role for life were regarded as paramount. See Elliot John , Philosophical observations on the senses of vision and hearing (London, 1780), 2: “life depends on the actions of the fibres…. [T]he great number of moving fibres in the body [are] in continual action”. Also see his Elements of the branches of natural philosophy connected with medicine, 2nd edn (London, 1786), chap. 2, “Of the moving fibres”.

Newton Isaac , Opticks, 4th edn (London, 1730), 353–4.

Cheyne George , A new theory of acute and slow continu'd fevers … to which is prefix'd an essay concerning the improvements of the theory of medicine (London, 1702; 4th edn, 1724), 26–28; idem, Philosophical principles (ref. 9), 223–5.

Guerrini Anita , “James Keil, George Cheyne, and Newtonian physiology, 1690–1740”, Journal of the history of biology, xviii (1985), 247–66; idem, “Isaac Newton, George Cheyne and the ‘Principia Medicinae’”, in French Roger Wear Andrew (eds), The medical revolution of the seventeenth century (Cambridge, 1989), 222–45, p. 238; idem, “Ether madness: Newtonianism, religion, and insanity in eighteenth-century England”, in Theerman Paul Seeff Adele F. (eds), Action and reaction: Proceedings of a symposium to commemorate the tercentenary of Newton's ‘Principia’ (London, 1993), 232–54. For a similar argument, see Schofield Robert E. , Mechanism and materialism: British natural philosophy in an age of reason (Princeton, 1970), 103.

Robinson , A new theory (ref. 27).

Langrish , A new essay on muscular motion (ref. 19), 63–65.

Cheyne George , The natural method of cureing the diseases of the body, and the disorders of the mind depending on the body (London, 1742), 31–32. Seen in this light, Cheyne's appropriation of Newtonian theory grappled with tension since his later “quasi-vitalistic” works were said to be based on the aether hypothesis of Newton; on Cheyne's shift to “quasi-vitalistic” philosophy based on Newtonian theory of aether see Guerrini , “James Keill, George Cheyne” (ref. 125), 262ff.

Schofield , Mechanism and materialism (ref. 125), esp. part II, “Aether and materialism, 1740–1789”. Refuting a Newtonian aether as a plausible factor is also relevant for the inchoate nature of ‘elastic’ iatromechanism. For, although many medical men here were Newtonian followers, and some of them were Scots, they formed no recognizable school or specific circle (like the Pitcairn circle).

For instance, Beale , drawing on Baglivi's doctrine of the solids, made an urgent call for their study: Beale , An essay (ref. 73), 52–57. Attributing the active inherent power to the ‘solid’ matter rather than the ‘spirituous’ fluid (e.g., animal spirits) had always contained a dangerous tendency to materialism, and by extension, to atheism. In the eighteenth century, the fear of materialism revived with Locke's dangerous suggestion of thinking matter. See Yolton John W. , Thinking matter: Materialism in eighteenth-century Britain (Minnesota, 1983); on the seventeenth-century context for this issue, see Henry John , “The matter of souls: Medical theory and theology in seventeenth-century England”, in French Wear (eds), The medical revolution (ref. 125), 87–113. It seems that those who subscribed to the idea of ‘elastic’ solid-fibre had to find a safe way through the charge of atheism; Thomas Morgan, an ardent advocate of solidism, however, seemed to be extreme, for he was dismissed from a ministry for his freethinking. On Morgan see Schofield , Mechanism and materialism (ref. 125), 128.

Part of the work has been done in my unpublished manuscripts, “Fibre theory” (ref. 9) and “The emergence of fibre theory” (ref. 14).

Jaynes , “The problem of animate motion” (ref. 62), 234.

Barker-Benfield G. J. , The culture of sensibility: Sex and society in eighteenth-century Britain (Chicago, 1992); Lawrence , “The nervous system” (ref. 5); Porter Roy , The creation of the modern world: The untold story of the British Enlightenment (New York, 2000), chap. 12; Rousseau G. S. , “Discourse of the nerve”, in Amrine Frederick (ed.), Literature and science as modes of expression (Boston, 1989), 29–60; idem, “Nerves, spirits, and fibres: Towards an anthropology of sensibility”, in idem. Enlightenment crossings: Pre- and post-modern discourses, anthropological (Manchester, 1991), 122–41; idem, “Towards a semiotics of the nerves: The social history of language in a new key”, in Burke Peter Porter Roy (eds), Language, self and society: A social history of language (London, 1991), 213–75; and Vila Anne C. , Enlightenment and pathology: Sensibility in the literature and medicine of eighteenth-century France (Baltimore, 1998).

Rousseau , op. cit. (ref. 133).

There remains a major issue concerning the body image, which I cannot fully address — A gender issue. The classical view of muscularity (and the muscular body) naturally involved the masculine body. What about the elastic body? It seems to me that there is an ambiguity in the gendered body image that iatromechanists embraced. While they seemed to idealize the male, masculine body for its brawny, tense and elastic property in contrast to the feminine, slack, un-elastic body, the subtle ‘frisson’ of fibres' non-voluntary motion would suggest and anticipate the later feminization of the body through the working knowledge of ‘sensibility’. In this sense, the fibre-elastic body also embraces an opportunity to unite and deconstruct the masculine and the feminized body images.