Gregoire Chamayou’s historical–conceptual study of experimentation on human beings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries focuses on the category of ‘vile bodies’, as in the expression experimentum in corpore vili. Vile bodies are categories of experimental subjects who have been judged to be ‘beyond the pale’ and thus can be used at the experimenter’s will. Chief amongst these are criminals condemned to capital punishment: we learn of the raft of Enlightenment arguments justifying the worst forms of experimentation on such prisoners, because they owe a moral debt to society, or because of variations on a utilitarian calculus. Maupertuis devoted an entire section of his Lettre sur le progres des sciences to the ‘usefulness’ of experiments on criminals. He had the decency to suggest that if the criminal survives the experiments, he should be pardoned, since he has by a basic calculus done his part of the bargain. The criminal has to consent to this of his own free will. This kind of calculation – which even Diderot subscribed to, as can be seen in the article ‘Anatomie’ of the Encyclopedie – is still less chilling than Fichte’s entirely formal definition by which a criminal who has been condemned to capital punishment is already a non-person. Chamayou quotes Fichte explaining that once a death sentence has been pronounced on a criminal, he is burgerlich tot, ‘dead from a civil standpoint’, hence anything that is done to the physical body of the individual does not concern his civil status any longer, including his rights (p. 89). Yet Maupertuis, too, recommends we ‘not be moved by the air of cruelty we might think to find here: a man is nothing compared to the human species; a criminal is even less than nothing’ (p. 81). Other categories of people who were considered legitimate for experimentation, moving into the second half of the nineteenth century, were the mentally ill and severely retarded, and prostitutes (particularly for inoculation experiments with syphilis). Chamayou quotes one disturbing – and disturbingly illogical – response by a prominent syphilis researcher in Paris, Dr Auzias-Turenne, to an official inquiry in 1853 into whether he could be allowed to inoculate syphilis to a group of prostitutes held at the St Lazare prison. Partly anticipating the notion of consent and treading on it at the same time, Auzias-Turenne explains that the prostitutes must agree to the experiments ‘of their own free will and be subjected to mine [ie. his own will ]’ (p. 287). This is a heavily Foucaldian work, filled with both the familiar jargon of that school and some of its own, such as the ‘cognitive surplus value’ (p. 179) which is extracted from the bodies of the prisoners. This sounds more Marxist, and indeed Chamayou often refers approvingly to Marx, who himself called attention to the expression corpore vili. Perhaps this marks the difference between Chamayou’s treatment of human experimentation and other, more scholarly treatments, such as those by Anita Guerrini or Andreas-Holger Maehle – his more explicitly political approach. Indeed, Chamayou suggests that the problem does not reduce to a duality of the ‘purely scientific’ versus ‘ethical’ considerations: as is clear in the cases of colonial, racialised medicine (discussed in the last chapters), or the use of prisoners and prostitutes, there is a dimension of power and subjection which is unavoidable in this story. At the same time, as he moves away from the Enlightenment and its aporias toward nineteenth-century experimental subjects, such as soldiers or individuals with wounds which have revealed an organ enabling exceptional in vivo experiments, Chamayou loses some of his theoretical momentum. Rather than extending the analysis all the way until the early twentieth century, it might have been useful to have included even a brief discussion of human experimentation before the early modern period, so we would have a better sense of whether or not the Enlightenment constitutes a ‘break’. Les corps vils is nicely illustrated (I recommend the reproduction of Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty), elegantly written, if sometimes too enamoured of its own phraseology, and clearly and consistently argued, especially in the political sense mentioned above. It contains numerous vivid quotations from primary sources, often unknown. We can learn a lot about human experimentation in Enlightenment philosophy and medicine (chiefly French, but also German) from this book.
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Apr 1, 2012
Aimo Winkelmann + 5
