Article ID: CBB000932759

Mountains of Sublimity, Mountains of Fatigue: Towards a History of Speechlessness in the Alps (2009)

unapi

Felsch, Philipp (Author)


Science in Context
Volume: 22
Pages: 341--364


Publication Date: 2009
Edition Details: Part of Special Issue: The Laboratory of Nature---Science in the Mountains
Language: English

The discovery of the Alps in the second half of the eighteenth century spawned an aesthetics of sublimity that enabled overwhelmed beholders of mountains to overcome their confusion symbolically by transforming initial speechlessness into pictures and words. When travelers ceased to be content with beholding mountains, however, and began climbing them, the sublime shudder turned into something else. In the snowy heights, all attempts to master symbolically the challenging landscape was thwarted by vertigo, somnolence, and fatigue. After 1850, physiologists intervened, using the Alpine terrain as a laboratory landscape that was ideally suited to examine one of the most threatening concerns of fin de siècle industrial societies: fatigue. This essay examines how the picturesque voyage turned into an experimental physiology of fatigue, and how the wordless subjectivity of romantic travelers turned into the wordless objectivity of life scientists.

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Description On the study of fatigue of mountain travelers by 18th-century physiologists.


Included in

Article Bigg, Charlotte; Aubin, David; Felsch, Philipp (2009) Introduction: The Laboratory of Nature---Science in the Mountains. Science in Context (p. 311). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000932759/

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Authors & Contributors
Barton, Michael D.
Corbett, Ken
Wübben, Yvonne
Welsh, Caroline
Speitz, Michele
Simon, Julia
Concepts
Human physiology
Mountaineering
Sublime (philosophy)
Psychology
Mountains
Science and literature
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
20th century, early
17th century
Renaissance
20th century
Places
Alps (Europe)
British Isles
Everest, Mount (China and Nepal)
Caucasus Mountains (Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia)
London (England)
Pyrenees (France and Spain)
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