Harvard University Press Blog

The End of the Luzin Affair

One of the hopes of any book publisher, especially a University Press, is that its books will have an impact out in the world. And there’s no single metric for that. Sometimes books find a wide audience, sometimes they revolutionize a discipline, sometimes they win awards, or sometimes they become mainstays of college courses. At HUP we’re fortunate to have grown familiar with our books having these kinds of impact, but we recently learned of a real-world effect that’s almost certainly the first of its kind for an HUP publication: a large Russian bureaucracy has officially changed its position in large part because of an HUP book.

The presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences has passed a resolution clearing the name of the mathematician Nikolai Luzin, whom it had condemned in the 1930s because of his ideological views. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor, authors of Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, have received word from the Academy that their book played a large part in the discussions that led to the passing of this resolution.

Naming Infinity, which we described on publication in 2009 as “an exciting mathematical mystery tour,” is about the founding of set theory, and a conflict between French and Russian mathematicians over the nature of infinity. The debate centered on the relation between math and mysticism, and we’ll take a stab at an explanation, though surely an oversimplified one.

Mathematicians deal in geometric perfection (like perfectly round circles and perfectly straight lines), but such things can’t actually be found in the natural, physical world. The same is also true of numbers, in that they must consist of perfectly equal units (speaking purely in mathematical terms, you cannot count two oranges if the two oranges you count are not exactly, perfectly similar). Okay, so if the objects studied by mathematicians don’t exist in this world then they must exist in another transcendent realm, one where perfection is possible. Or so said mathematicians.

The problem, though, was the question of how mathematicians gained knowledge of the objects in this other transcendent realm, or how anyone’s physical brain could grasp a non-physical reality. Now, you can basically get around this problem by using your imagination and a little common sense (you’ve experienced an orange, and you can pretend that the two you’re counting are identical). But the concept of infinity throws a roadblock on that shortcut, because we have no physical experience of the infinite. We cannot encounter a full infinity in the natural world. And, given the trouble conceptualizing a single infinity, wrapping one’s mind around the thought of an infinity of infinities, which calculus logically required, was nearly impossible. It presented such a complication that Aristotle actually banned infinity from Greek thought, but modern applied mathematics really couldn’t do without.

For French mathematicians, who were as advanced as any but still very much Descartes’ intellectual descendants, a phenomenon couldn’t be understood if it couldn’t be stated clearly. They resisted fuzziness, shunned metaphysics as theology. Not so for a group of Russian mathematicians who happened to be influenced by a heretical religious sect that practiced “Name Worshipping.” They believed that they could achieve union with the divine by chanting the name of God over and over; they believed, in other words, that Name Worshipping could connect them to another, transcendent realm. Just the sort of portal the concept of infinity seemingly required. So this sect of Russian mathematicians, Nikolai Luzin among them, “named” infinity. And this is one of the central arguments of Graham and Kantor’s book: that a religious heresy in the eyes of the Russian Orthodox Church (Name Worshipping), was actually instrumental in helping the birth of a new field of modern mathematics.

The Rise and Fall of American Madness

Richard Noll’s American Madness describes the electric rise and fall of the psychiatric diagnosis of the mysterious disorder known as “dementia praecox.” As the first specified disease of psychiatry, dementia praecox’s curious history has a great deal to teach us about the nature of the field. As the American Psychiatric Association engages in the vexed process of revising its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, American Madness is a more timely study than many in the discipline would probably like to admit. We invited Noll to answer a few questions about what we can learn from the story.

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Q: Prior to your work, the last time “dementia praecox” appeared in the title of a book published in English was 1950. Clearly it has slipped into our cultural unconscious. Briefly, what is the narrative of the rise and fall of dementia praecox?

Ah, yes . . . dementia praecox is indeed a vanished kingdom of suffering and despair. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who received this diagnosis between 1896 and 1952 were stigmatized by both physicians and everyday people as incurably insane. One only has to remember how frequently it was invoked in the culture of that era (such as in the Tennessee Williams play Suddenly, Last Summer) to get a sense of how terrifying those two words once were.

As the influential psychiatrist Adolf Meyer once said, the history of dementia praecox is the history of psychiatry. American Madness is, at one level, the biography of a disease, but most importantly I regard it as the story of how, in the late 1890s, American alienists (as they called themselves) strove to rejoin an American medical profession that was moving toward a science-based, laboratory-driven moral economy founded on a new (circa 1860) European concept of diseases as separate, biologically-specifiable entities with specific biological mechanisms and typical courses and outcomes. For American psychiatry to survive as an accepted branch of medicine, and not remain as a queer survival of a nineteenth-century therapeutic sect, its legitimacy and authority depended upon adopting this doctrine. In an era where one was either sane, nervous, or insane, most alienists and neurologists assumed insanity was a hydra, a single monster with many faces, not separate creatures.

In 1896 German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin proposed a classification of mental diseases based on this new fundamental medical principle, and described dementia praecox as a psychotic process that began in the decade after puberty with a distinctive course and outcome. Mental deterioration, weakness and defect worsened and became permanent. It was a hopeless diagnosis. But Kraepelin argued that dementia praecox, as well as other major mental diseases that he created, would one day be found to be rooted in natural, biological disease processes. This claim, in part, made Kraepelinian classification attractive to American alienists who desired to retain their status as physicians. There is a co-dependency of the psychiatric profession and a biological disease concept that persists today.

Beginning in 1896, as one American asylum after another slowly introduced dementia praecox as a diagnostic box, it became the most frequently diagnosed condition, labeling a quarter to a half of all patients in each institution. How American psychiatrists were making this diagnosis is anyone’s guess—they were probably just snap decisions based on whether someone was suffering from a “good prognosis madness” (such as manic depression) or a “bad prognosis madness” (dementia praecox). What we do know is that being young and male made it more likely someone would receive this diagnosis.

As dementia praecox and its successor (a uniquely American re-interpretation of the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler’s concept of schizophrenia) became the natural focus of biological research for much of the twentieth century, American Madness also provides the heretofore untold story of the rise of biological psychiatry and laboratory research in the United States. By 1927 schizophrenia became the preferred term for inexplicable madness, but the Americans reframed Bleuler’s disease concept as a primarily functional or psychogenic condition that was caused by mothers or maladjustments to social reality. When Bleuler visited the United States in 1929 he was horrified to see what the Americans were calling schizophrenia. He insisted it was a physical disease with a chronic course characterized by exacerbations and remissions of hallucinations, delusions and bizarre behaviors.

Q: Is it possible to speak of a “typical” case of dementia praecox?

No. The label was so frequently used in an inchoate medical environment absent of consensual agreement on classification and nomenclature that we have little historical evidence as to how, on a daily basis, an individual physician applied these social constructions in his or her practice. Historian Gerald Grob termed this problem for historians of psychiatry as that of the “Invisible Patient.” Knowing the diagnosis of a person of the past tells us next to nothing about their history, signs or symptoms. Alienists and neurologists operated on a gut-feeling level. Diagnosis was not based on an explicit cognitive exercise, like running down a checklist of signs and symptoms, but was more like the experience of recognizing a melody or a scent. A “precox” patient evoked an uncanny feeling of remoteness or of the “bizarre” in a physician, and that was the most important basis of a diagnosis.

Q: How should American Madness help us to understand the sort of epistemic crisis currently confronting American psychiatry?

As everyone knows, the American Psychiatric Association is involved in a highly controversial effort to revise its diagnostic manual. DSM-5 (as it will be called when it appears in 2013) reflects the fact that scientific medicine has not yet solved the problem identified by American alienists a century ago: the linkage of clusters of signs, symptoms, and clinical history to biologically specified disease concepts. The proposed diagnostic criteria in DSM-5 requires a “bottom-up” differentiation of patients, which can be achieved only through an objective biological test (or tests). Until such a tool is developed for schizophrenia, a heuristic associated with an unimaginable assortment of confusing biological findings, we can neither validate nor invalidate our era’s schizophrenia concept. Genetic tests will almost certainly not be the answer, nor will the exclusive emphasis on the brain. As Sabine Bahn and her associates at the University of Cambridge are demonstrating with their new biomarker-based blood test for schizophrenia, severe psychotic disorders might be due to a life-long smoldering systemic or “whole body” disease process that involves glucose metabolism and immune system dysfunction. This is what Kraepelin proposed for dementia praecox, and it might be true for our era’s schizophrenia as well.

Three Operations

On January 22nd, 1913, a Mary Agnes Turner was the first patient admitted to the newly completed Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston. After the birth of her first child the veins in her legs had begun to swell, and long hours on her feet as a maid only made things worse. By 1913, at age 45, her varicose veins had become so bothersome that she sought help. Her doctors at the Brigham planned an operation to strip her varicose veins, still a new procedure at the time. Medical personnel attending to the operation were clad in the newly conceived cotton face mask. In a brand new wooden operating room Turner was rendered unconscious through the use of ether, dripped onto gauze across her face. Using the newly introduced razor-blade scalpel and techniques developed just a few years earlier, doctors stripped segments of the veins by running a cable down their lengths and removing them forcefully. Turner was stitched up with catgut and silk, and discharged after ten days of postoperative care.

By 1965 the Brigham had grown to 300 beds. A stocky, muscular, 68-year-old Joseph Costello was admitted to treat a dangerously widened aorta. Relatively few procedures had been performed in the new field of vascular reconstruction, but the risks of operating on Costello were considered overshadowed by the consequences of inaction. Radio-opaque dye was injected into his aorta and an X-ray taken at the exact right moment to produce an image of the arterial tree. Costello’s aorta was seen to contain an aneurysm the width of a fist. Costello was sedated and wheeled to the very room where Turner’s operation had occurred, now with tiled walls and linoleum floor. A catheter was run to his bladder, a tube to his nose, and various intravenous lines were set. An electric knife opened Costello’s abdomen, and the aneurysm was isolated, clamped, removed, and replaced by a synthetic woven tube graft. His abdominal wall was closed in layers, the five-hour procedure ended successfully, and Costello was discharged ten days later.

At the same hospital in 2007, Shirley Laverne sought treatment for morbid obesity, an emerging and rather unexpected health problem. At 37 Laverne weighed nearly 350 pounds. An obvious candidate for gastric bypass surgery, in which the size of the stomach is drastically reduced, she went through an extensive series of information sessions and consultations before the course was set. She then was evaluated by a psychiatrist, dietitian, cardiologist, and radiologist, along with her physician and surgeon. On operating day, in a pristine room on a stainless steel table custom-built for morbidly obese patients, Laverne was fitted with pneumatic boots that could be pulsed to prevent blood clotting. She was rendered unconscious nearly instantly, catheterized, tubed, intravenously lined, and connected to an automatic respiratory unit. The procedure was conducted via laparoscopy, the training-intensive, minimally invasive technique of inserting instruments through relatively small incisions rather than opening the entire operating field. Five incisions were made for implements and a camera, and the surgeon watched a feed from the camera on a television monitor. He used stapling devices to isolate a small gastric pouch, restored intestinal continuity, and closed the incisions. Blood loss was minimal, the postoperative course was smooth, and three years later Laverne weighed 140 pounds.

The Mechanical Turk

Last week our favorite tweeting curator, John Overholt, noted that Harvard’s Houghton Library holds one of ten known copies (in English) of Karl Gottlieb von Windisch’s Brife über den Schachspieler des von Kempelen, or Inanimate Reason, as it’s titled in English. The book, or pamphlet, really, was published in 1784 and is Windisch’s account of the infamous mechanical Turk, a chess-playing false automaton presented by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770. Overholt, Assistant Curator of Early Modern Books and Manuscripts at Houghton, tells us that Houghton’s copy (call number SG 3675.34.10) came from a significant collection of books on chess bequeathed to Harvard in 1938 by Silas W. Howland. You can see Howland’s great bookplate here. 

But what’s it to us?

Earlier this year we published Minsoo Kang’s Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination. Kang explained his argument in a post here this past winter:

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines looks at how intellectuals have utilized the self-moving, life-imitating machine as a symbol and a conceptual object from the time of ancient civilizations to the twentieth century. I look at the Enlightenment—when various notions of the human-being-as-machine and the machine-as-representation-of-the-human became ubiquitous in Western discourse—as the crucial period in the history of the automaton idea. For almost a century before the automaton craze, philosophers, scientists, and writers described the universe, the state, and the human body as machines, contributing to what the historian E. J. Dijksterhuis famously called the mechanization of the world picture. When later mechanics began to build and display actual automata with astoundingly complex mechanisms, they were seen as beautiful, wondrous, and rational representations of the entire worldview of the Enlightenment.

The mechanical Turk marks a significant turning point in the story that Kang tells. He notes two distinct historical eras for the automaton’s standing in the late Enlightenment. The first is the “golden age of the automaton,” the time of the object’s intellectual primacy, when the concept of the automaton signified much more than an ingenious piece of mechanical craft. It was, Kang writes, “used as a heuristic device to illustrate the nature of the body, the state, and even the entire universe constructed by an engineer-God, functioning as the central emblem of the mechanistic cosmos of the classical Enlightenment.”

Next came the period of “the automaton craze,” a time when the object’s primacy in intellectual consideration had passed but when public interest was rising to its climax. This period of heightened public interest ended, Kang argues, with the chess-playing Turk.

A New Perspective on Florence and Baghdad

We’ve just released Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, a new book from the German art historian Hans Belting. The book’s title stresses conjunction, but it also clearly highlights things we’re perhaps more accustomed to seeing considered in opposition. Art and science; the Renaissance and the Middle Ages; Christianity and Islam. Much of the implied contrast is conveyed by Jill Breitbarth’s jacket design for the book. The geometrically ornate arabesque, reproduced from the tile decoration of an Egyptian mosque, set against the lush realism of the 16th century oil painting beneath it.

The juxtaposition of the images obviously highlights the flatness of the tiling against the painting’s use of perspective. In traditional Arab art the viewer isn’t meant to look through the surface – the surface is the art. In the painting underneath, though, our eyes are clearly directed past the surface, into the distance, the background. Belting shows that the relationship between these two styles and also between the cultures that they represent is far more complex than opposition. Florence and Baghdad, then, is about perspective, and about the gaze, but not just in the artistic or theoretical senses of the words. What Belting gives us is also a study of these two cultures gazing at one another.

Belting reveals the sensational fact that the “invention” of perspective in the West is actually due to a discovery that had already been made in the Arabic World centuries before the Renaissance. The Arab mathematician Alhazen developed an optical theory—in the middle of a culture largely devoid of images—which later formed the basis for Western perspective painting. Belting explains why Islamic art wasn’t influenced by the discovery, due to its religious, cultural and scientific contexts. He also explains why the effects on European art didn’t appear until later:

The rationalism dominant in the era when Arab science reached its peak could not bear fruit in the West until the modern period, since it was based on scientific experiments liberated from every kind of theological baggage. During the epoch that we in the West call the Middle Ages, the subjects of mathematics and astronomy were popular in the Arab world, which had not yet come under the kind of dogmatic constraints so prevalent later.

As Belting puts it elsewhere: “The Arab theory of optics was known at European universities by the thirteenth century, but it did not become a theory of pictures until the fifteenth century. The grounds for its transformation were not scientific but cultural.”

There’s much to digest here. Work like Alhazen’s came from a period when Arab societies were open to scientific inquiry that was remarkably free of theology in a way that Christian science and society were not. At the time of Alhazen’s development of the theory of perspective, there was simply too much “theological baggage” for the concept to yet begin to influence Western art. What should also be clear from Belting’s study is the inaccuracy of the notion of Arab writers as just preservers of Greek knowledge during the “Dark Ages.” They were actually making serious advancements.

So, while virtually rewriting this chapter of art history, Belting also offers a discerning comparison between Arabic and Western culture, opening our eyes to the images that have surrounded us since the beginning of the Modem Age and essentially pioneering a new area of cultural studies: the comparison of the visual perceptions of Western and Islamic culture. Or, more generally, the cultural comparison of the gaze. The differences between the pictures developed in these two cultures, between Renaissance art and Arabic science, reflect their different practices with regard to visuality. The differences involve, as Belting notes, “not just art but also a mind-set and relationship to the world.”

Belting’s study of those differences is an important new work of scholarship that’s also an intellectual and historical adventure. And, if we can add modestly, the book is a simply stunning object, heavily illustrated, full color throughout, and sure to give us a new perspective on art and the world.

Rediscovering Symbiogenesis

Last month, we published Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution by Soviet-era Russian botanist Boris Kozo-Polyansky. Part scientific treatise, part historical detective work, the book resurrects a lost classic of evolutionary theory along with its fascinating backstory. The volume’s co-editors, Victor Fet and Lynn Margulis, argue that Kozo-Polyansky’s theories—now recognized as true by almost all biologists after decades of neglect—were far ahead of their time. Here, editor and translator Fet tells the story of Kozo-Polyansky’s discovery.

In the 1920s, a brilliant young Russian botanist synthesized the experimental work of evolutionary biologists across the world in order to theorize that symbiogenesis—the merging of separate organisms to form a single organism—played a leading role in evolution.  Working from this fundamental idea, the botanist, Boris Mikhailovich Kozo-Polyansky, went on to broad-sweeping speculations, collecting examples of symbiogenetic systems from all groups of living organisms, and reconciling his new theory of symbiogenesis with the Darwinian evolutionary ideas of the early 1920s, well before the development of the neo-Darwinist New Synthesis theory that emerged in the 1930s and ’40s.

Below: Kozo-Polyansky as a young man

Many years before any evidence for horizontal transfer of genes and genomes entered the mainstream of biological thought, Kozo-Polyansky suggested that cells are in fact not just elementary units of life but cooperative systems (he in fact used the word “system”).The original Russian book was published in 1924, and its little-known author died in 1957. Kozo-Polyansky’s evolutionary ideas were ridiculed and forgotten. Only decades later, similar concepts proposed in 1970s-1980s de novo by Lynn Margulis, the co-editor of this edition, eventually found their way into scientific establishment, being spectacularly confirmed by the advances of cell and molecular biology in the 1980s-1990s.

Kozo-Polyansky's book is to some extent a “prescient” text, and many pages from it read as contemporary literature, for example (on the origin of cell’s organelles): “It was not the drive toward the division of labor that led to the formation of these organoids, but the fact that certain partners joined the system that made a specific scheme of labor division possible.” Kozo-Polyansky's stunning contribution, the one that distinguishes him from his great Russian predecessors at the "school of symbiogeneticists" such as K.S. Mereshkovsky, A.S. Famintzyn, et al. who wrote and/or were translated into other languages, was his Darwinist attitude. Kozo-Polyansky insisted that the Russians were correct: Symbiogenesis is the source of evolutionary (heritable) novelty—but, he posited, Charles Darwin's "natural selection" is responsible for the maintenance and perpetration of this heritable change.

First edition of The Origin of Species auctioned in England

Via MobyLives, one of the best publishing house blogs out there, we learn that a first-edition copy of On the Origin of Species has sold at auction for £35,000. Not just first-edition, either, but first print-run (there were 1,250, of which the publisher, John Murray, sold out immediately).

If you can't cough up the $52,000 or so (by our calculation) that such a treasure will run you, be aware that we've just published The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species, which is the edition used in Harvard's Darwin Summer Course at Oxford. The book carries line-by-line annotations by James T. Costa, who developed what we think is the first modern university course specifically geared to teach Darwin with Darwin, that is, with the original text of Origin. Legend has it that Costa had the idea after hearing Stephen Jay Gould complain that everyone had an opinion on Darwin, but no one had actually read him.

||| The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species

A thrilling story about math

Not an oxymoron. As the Seminary Co-op's Front Table blog explains, to explore the development of set theory is to learn not only about "the set of integers N" and "the set of real numbers R" (also known by the disturbingly singular name "the Continuum"), but to learn of the men who made these abstract symbols mean something. Important also, they point out, to remember that not even mathematicians live in a vacuum -- people, politics, religion, they all come home to roost, even if you try to restrict yourself to the little matter of attempting to name and define a little thing called INFINITY.

The occasion for such musings is a review of Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor's Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity, over the course of which you'll be taken on a tour of the political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas inherent in the search for a satisfactory answer to one of the biggest math mysteries of the twentieth century.

The Birds

No need to run shrieking in terror from the New York Times' fabulous slide show of images from Audubon: Early Drawings and Egg & Nest, our dual (but not dueling, we hope) bird books out this season. Previous coverage of Audubon on the blog here, and don't miss Rosamond Purcell, author/photographer of Egg & Nest, TONIGHT at the Harvard Museum of Natural History (6pm, directions). Purcell should be on your radar; check out these bona fides from none other than Jonathan Safran Foer: "What kind of genius is Rosamond Purcell? Is she an artist? A scholar? A documentarian? A living cabinet of wonders? Her originality defies category, as does her newest triumph, Egg & Nest. Crack its shell."

Image: Tippi Hedren & Co. make a run for it in a still from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963). 

On humans, dinosaurs, and Sarah Palin

When we read this LA Times story on Sarah Palin's apparent belief that humans and dinosaurs walked the earth together a mere 6,000 years ago, we wondered, despite acknowledging how patently awesome it would be to pet a dinosaur, where exactly such a belief comes from (hint: it's not from modern science). To that end, we asked our friend Ronald Numbers, who has made a calling out of tracking the origins and development of modern creationist thought, to fill us in on Young Earth creationism, where the idea came from, and whether or not, as its proponents claim, it can truly be called "science." Numbers is the author of the near-canonical The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, released in an expanded edition last year, and is editor of the forthcoming Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. So, a pretty good person to ask! Below is what he had to say.

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According to a recent article by Stephen Braun in the Los Angeles Times (September 28, 2008), Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States, believes that the earth was created about 6,000 years ago and that humans and dinosaurs once lived together, a belief supported, she has claimed, by evidence of human footprints inside of dinosaur tracks. A conservative Christian with strong Pentecostal and Fundamentalist leanings, Palin favors teaching creationism along with evolution. "Teach both," she once urged during her race for governor of Alaska. "You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both."

I don’t much care, and I don’t think other voters should care, about the religious peculiarities of candidates for public office—so long as their views don’t impinge on public policy. It makes little difference to me whether Joe Biden, a Catholic, subscribes to the doctrines of transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception, or whether Mitt Romney affirms the divine inspiration of the Book of Mormon, if these doctrinal idiosyncrasies remain privately held convictions. But we have every right as voters to express concern about a Pentecostal being in charge of protecting the environment (think James Watt, President Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior) who believes that we are living in the Last Days before the total destruction of that environment; or, say, a Christian Scientist, who denies the efficacy of modern medicine, being appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services. In such instances, examining the religious beliefs of political candidates is not bigotry.