The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760–1830

by Janina Wellmann, Kate Sturge (Translator)

The Form of Becoming offers an innovative understanding of the emergence around 1800 of the science of embryology and a new notion of development, one based on the epistemology of rhythm. It argues that between 1760 and 1830, the concept of rhythm became crucial to many fields of knowledge, including the study of life and living processes.

The book juxtaposes the history of rhythm in music theory, literary theory, and philosophy with the concurrent turn in biology to understanding the living world in terms of rhythmic patterns, rhythmic movement, and rhythmic representations. Common to all these fields was their view of rhythm as a means of organizing time ― and of ordering the development of organisms.

Janina Wellmann, a historian of science, has written the first systematic study of visualization in embryology. Embryological development circa 1800 was imagined through the pictorial technique of the series, still prevalent in the field today. Tracing the origins of the developmental series back to seventeenth-century instructional graphics for military maneuvers, dance, and craft work, The Form of Becoming reveals the constitutive role of rhythm and movement in the visualization of developing life.

Genres: Nonfiction

424 pages, Hardcover

Published April 4, 2017

Reviews

[Campbell Rider]

very interesting hypothesis: biology emerged in a period where european thought was preoccupied with the temporality of 'rhythm' in music, poetry, and dance. This epistemology impacted early accounts of the growth of the embryo, and enabled a theorisation of embryological development as a process giving rise to novelty and variation while obeying an overall structuring theme. One prevailing view, which Wellmann counters, argues that Kant's philosophy laid the groundwork for a scientific outlook that allowed early biologists to bracket the metaphysical question of 'preformation' versus 'epigenesis' and set about doing descriptive experimental work. the thesis here seems to be that actually the 'epistemology of rhythm' created the conditions for a synthesis of these two approaches

[Lara Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the most intellectually creative book I’ve read in years, maybe ever!! Supremely dense, and translated from German which didn’t help in that regard. Wellmann convincingly argues that the philosophical and artistic turn toward rhythm as an ordering principle across disciplines in the late 1700s/early 1800s served to structure the budding field of embryology in its contemporary form. The first section of the book, which lays the foundation for Wellman’s arguments on rhythm, was particularly challenging for me. Section two, a sort of disciplinary history of embryology, felt a little closer to my comfort zone. But Wellmann truly shined in the third and final section of her book, where she traced the popularization of serial iconography as an instructional visual mode first through military history and, ultimately, through to its use in embryology in the early nineteenth century.

Absolutely incredible work weaving together a range of disciplines. Made more mind blowing each time I remembered that cell theory was not even crystallized at the time that most of the embryologists profiled were developing their understandings and depictions of early development. Provided great food for thought in reflecting on my own prior research methods in developmental biology. Wellmann successfully defamiliarized the framing of embryology as a process-oriented field. Her writing also made me reflect on the popularity of pictorial series both in the field and throughout other process-oriented domains in everyday life — a representational form that I take as a given but that, Wellmann shows, emerged out of a very particular cultural context.