This essay focuses on the history of psychometry, the science of soul measuring. For its founder, Dr Joseph Rodes Buchanan, the soul was simultaneously an object for anthropological research and a measuring instrument capable of revealing human character, interpreting natural history, and demonstrating the reality of an immortal soul. Psychometry taught that human souls, especially those of women, were capable of acting as instruments because they could feel the mysterious energies that people and objects radiated. Although orthodox male scientists rejected the visions of sensitive women as the antithesis of reliable data, psychometric researchers believed that the feelings of women were both the instruments and information that made their science possible. Psychometry promised to revolutionize science by insisting that sympathy and subjectivity, not detachment and objectivity, ought to undergird research. Yet as male experimenters worked to prove psychometry’s effectiveness, they almost invariably cast themselves as detached observers accurately recording the data provided by their female instruments. Thus, despite pushing for scientific reform, the methods and discourse of male psychometric experimenters eroded their field’s core arguments about connectedness and subjectivity and, instead, reinforced the notion that detachment and objectivity were essential to legitimate science. Challenges to objectivity could prove just how thoroughly it dominated scientific discourse and practice. Still, some psychometers, particularly women who practiced at home, were untroubled by the fact that their research was predicated on subjective feelings, and psychometry remained a viable pursuit among spiritualists even as it faded from the realm of science. Psychometry emerged and, ultimately, fractured amid tensions between widespread enthusiasm for sciences that emphasized spiritual connectedness and the mounting pressure to legitimize scientific knowledge through the language and practices of objectivity.
...More
Book
Pohl, Gerhard;
(2005)
Links oder Rechts? Wie Naturstoffe die Polarisationsebene des Lichtes drehen: Polarimetrie in der Zuckerindustrie: Geschichte einer Messmethode
(/isis/citation/CBB000773895/)
Article
Douglas J. Lanska;
(2019)
The Development and Evolution of “Cerebral Thermometry”: The Physiology Underlying a Nineteenth-Century Approach to Cerebral Localization and Neurological Diagnosis
(/isis/citation/CBB416833074/)
Thesis
Madsen-Brooks, Leslie;
(2006)
To Study, to Control, and to Love: Women Scientists in American Natural History Institutions, 1880--1950
(/isis/citation/CBB001561454/)
Book
Norton, Leonie;
(2009)
Women of Flowers: Botanical Art in Australia from the 1830s to the 1960s
(/isis/citation/CBB001033611/)
Book
Corrêa, Mariza;
(2003)
Antropólogas e antropologia
(/isis/citation/CBB000640236/)
Book
Miller, Darlis A.;
(2007)
Matilda Coxe Stevenson: Pioneering Anthropologist
(/isis/citation/CBB000741882/)
Article
Cianfanelli, Simone;
Manganelli, Giuseppe;
(2002)
A Bibliography of Marianna Paulucci (1835--1919)
(/isis/citation/CBB000740299/)
Book
James Parry;
Jeremy J. D. Greenwood;
(2020)
Emma Turner: A Life Looking at Birds
(/isis/citation/CBB167381701/)
Book
Christine Morton-Evans;
(2020)
Ellis Rowan: A Life in Pictures
(/isis/citation/CBB163034437/)
Book
Shea, William R.;
(2000)
Science and the Visual Image in the Enlightenment
(/isis/citation/CBB000110579/)
Article
Matthew Goodman;
(2016)
Proving Instruments Credible in the Early Nineteenth Century: The British Magnetic Survey and Site-Specific Experimentation
(/isis/citation/CBB694083778/)
Article
Leo, Angela de;
(2006)
The Origin of Graphic Recording of Psycho-Physiological Phenomena in Germany
(/isis/citation/CBB001023631/)
Article
Rentetzi, Maria;
(2004)
From Cambridge to Vienna: The Scintillation Counter in Female Hands
(/isis/citation/CBB000770310/)
Article
Matthew Goodman;
(2016)
Scientific Instruments on the Move in the North American Magnetic Survey, 1843-1844
(/isis/citation/CBB240797009/)
Article
Nicola H. Williams;
(2022)
Polar weighing — An Oertling balance in Antarctica
(/isis/citation/CBB168894142/)
Article
Schmidgen, Henning;
(2005)
The Donders Machine: Matter, Signs, and Time in a Physiological Experiment, ca. 1865
(/isis/citation/CBB000850142/)
Article
Goodrum, Matthew R.;
Olson, Cora;
(2009)
The Quest for an Absolute Chronology in Human Prehistory: Anthropologists, Chemists and the Fluorine Dating Method in Palaeoanthropology
(/isis/citation/CBB000931911/)
Article
Driver, Felix;
(2004)
Distance and Disturbance: Travel, Exploration and Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001030804/)
Article
Junghans, Miriam;
(2008)
Emilia Snethlage (1868--1929): uma naturalista alemã na Amazônia
(/isis/citation/CBB000932932/)
Chapter
Sheffield, Suzanne Le-May;
(2006)
Gendered Collaborations: Marrying Art and Science
(/isis/citation/CBB000772478/)
Be the first to comment!