„Schwellenwerte und Normwerte“: Untersuchungen zur psychophysiologischen Schmerzforschung zwischen Johannes Müller und Max von Frey aus den Neurowissenschaften des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1840 bis 1890)

Abstract

Since the middle of the Nineteenth Century, neurophysiological researchers such as Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), or Maximilian Ruppert Franz von Frey (1852-1932) started to analyze the causes, propagation, and perception of in the nervous system through the systematic use of experimental laboratory investigations. Particularly, Theodor Fechner's groundbreaking works made the contemporary neurophysiologists aware of the potential inclusion of psychological and subjective perceptions as a respectable object for the experimental study in mid-nineteenth century laboratories and clinical wards. Wilhelm Wundt frequently crossed the intersections between animal and human subject research and opened up many theoretical discussions, which also incorporated pluridisciplinary perspectives. On the research side, Wundt worked with many experimental physiological methods, developed theoretical psychophysiological considerations, and provided a detailed philosophical analysis of the new experimental findings and the subjective accounts of pain perceptions in his test persons--among many other experimental and investigative approaches. While each one of these neurophysiologists' research programs have been extensively studied in their own right, their mutual contributions to modern pain research and impact on this emerging interdisciplinary field of biomedical, psychophysiological and philosophical studies have so far not sufficiently been analyzed from a historiographical perspective. This even regards their highly sophisticated instruments and apparatuses that they applied to the study of pain, which Maximilian von Frey used further in the medical wards at the Fin de Siecle. These instruments became applied to many patients with acute or chronic pain disorders. In a way, the substantial time lag between early laboratory research and the application of these findings in the medical clinics of the time could also be explained as a process of newly defining the boundaries of the experimental instrumentation by situating the physiological apparatuses and experiments alongside the spectrum from threshold values to normal values. This hence led to the recalibration of the new field of investigations of pain phenomena. Until today, the elements of phenomenological identification, evaluation and physical reduction, which these pioneers had started and importantly put on the scientific map of nineteenth-century medicine and neuroscience, accompany the scientific endeavour of modern pain research.