The Science of Walking by Andreas Mayer
The Science of Walking recounts the story of the growing interest and investment of Western scholars, physicians, and writers in the scientific study of an activity that seems utterly trivial in its everyday performance yet essential to our human nature: walking. Most people see walking as a natural and unremarkable activity of daily life, yet the mechanism has long puzzled scientists and doctors, who considered it an elusive, recalcitrant, and even mysterious act. In The Science of Walking, Andreas Mayer provides a history of investigations of the human gait that emerged at the intersection of a variety of disciplines, including physiology, neurology, orthopedic surgery, anthropology, and psychiatry. Looking back at more than a century of locomotion research, Mayer charts, for the first time, the rise of scientific endeavors to control and codify locomotion and analyzes their social, political, and aesthetic ramifications throughout the long nineteenth century. In an engaging narrative that weaves together science and history, Mayer sets the work of the most important representatives of the physiology of locomotion—including Wilhelm and Eduard Weber and Étienne-Jules Marey—in their proper medical, political, and artistic contexts. In tracing the effects of locomotion studies across other cultural domains, Mayer reframes the history of the science of walking and gives us a deeper understanding of human movement.
Dr. Lydia Marinelli Lydia Marinelli (1965-2008) was one of the most brilliant Austrian historians of her generation. After studies at the University of Vienna where she took her PhD in 1999, she became curator at the Sigmund Freud Museum and served later as a director of scientific research. Her exhibitions, all realized at the Freud museum Vienna, were major contributions to a renewal of the image of Freud and psychoanalysis. In her publications, she was the first one to study in closer detail the role of the media and of material culture in the making of psychoanalytic knowledge in a deep epistemological sense. Both her dissertation on the International Psychoanalytic publishing house and her collected papers (under the title Tricks der Evidenz, edited by Andreas Mayer, Vienna, Turia + Kant, 2009) were published posthumously. Andreas Mayer Andreas Mayer is a historian and sociologist of science, who has published extensively on the history of the human sciences, notably on the history of psychoanalysis and its related discourses and practices. He was a lecturer and research fellow at the University of Cambridge and, for many years, a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science in Berlin. Since 2014 he is affiliated as a researcher to the Centre A Koyr� for the History of Science in Paris (CNRS) and teaching at the �cole des Hautes �tudes en Sciences Sociales. His most recent publications are Sites of the Unconscious. Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting (Chicago UP, 2013) and Sciences of Walking (published in German 2013 by Fischer, Frankfurt, English translation forthcoming, Chicago UP). Susan Fairfield Susan Fairfield is an editor, translator, and poet. She is also the author of papers on literary criticism, a psychoanalyst, and co-editor of Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis. She lives in the Bay Area of California.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780226328355 |
| ISBN 10 | 022632835X |
| Title | The Science of Walking |
| Author | Andreas Mayer |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago Press |
| Year published | 2020-05-22 |
| Number of pages | 232 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |