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Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 46.3 (2003) 452-454



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Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. By Laura Otis. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. viii + 268. $49.50.

"In the first days of the third millennium, we live as ganglia in a network of organic and technological communications devices." With that observation, Laura Otis concludes Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century, her historical study of the concept of the network or web and its particular evolution in relation to ideas about communication in the 19th century.The breadth ofOtis's research and expertise makes her claims persuasive, and her facility as a storyteller makes it a compelling read. But Networking does its most significant work in its historical exploration of human interactions with machines. It is at once an important reminder that, however innovative the technology, computers do not represent a radical conceptual shift in those interactions, and that the concept of "human being" is intrinsically unstable and characteristically undergoes revision in relation to social, scientific, and technological developments.

Impressively, Otis captures the complexity and beauty of conceptual change. Ideas about the human nervous system circulating in the medical profession, for example, at once informed and were influenced by communications systems, such as the telegraph, in the 19th century. Arguing that the way [End Page 452] scientists "acquired knowledge shaped their understanding of what knowledge was" (p. 104), Otis explores a range of scientific or pseudo-scientific fields—from neuroanatomy to mesmerism, physics to cell biology—and chronicles their (perceived) relationship not only to the development of those communications systems, but also to the railway. Metaphors mediated these connections, but metaphors themselves function as technologies for Otis, arising from the developments she chronicles and actively shaping what scientists believed they saw under a microscope or cultural observers thought they were witnessing with the growth of railways or the telegraph. "Metaphors are catchy," writes Otis, "among the most infectious associations language offers" (p. 4).

Otis is much too good an analyst of language not to have intended her own use of the especially potent metaphor of infection. For Networking is a book about the spread of ideas, and no metaphor has more commonly evoked that process than contagion (or infection). Here Otis illustrates precisely the process that she describes: how concepts circulate in, through, and about language that shape the discoveries and our experience of what it means to be human. From the outset of this book, Otis asks her readers to reflect on our own metaphors and ideas about such things as we read a history of their emergence and evolution. If the 19th-century technologies about which Otis writes were believed, by such cultural observers as theVictorian novelist George Eliot, to promote the bonds of sympathy among increasingly connected strangers, so Otis offers her own literary and historical study of those technologies as ties of sympathy between the readers and subjects of her book. Understanding those connections and historicizing the conceptual changes in the notion of human being that many of her readers may have come to associate with the internet enables us more productively to profit from the lessons of the past.

If Networking were only a study of how literature and science come out of the same cultural tropes and assumptions, it would be a fine study of how those tropes and assumptions shape all facets of the world we experience. It is more than that, however. In her discussion of Eliot's Middlemarch, for example, Otis shows how that work not only registered but actually reconceptualized the metaphors that helped to shape the experience of communications systems and, therefore, (implicitly) helped to stimulate further technological development. Networking is not just a comparative study of media and disciplines, in other words, but a study of mutual influences of how cultures develop and evolve.

Otis elegantly demonstrates the inextricable relationship of language and science and shows how literature can materially mediate that relationship—and, conversely, how language mediates the relationship between literature and...

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