Sabine ArnaudCNRS · Centre Alexandre Koyré Histoire des Sciences et des Techniques
Sabine Arnaud
MA, MA, Ph.D., HDR
Directrice de recherche au CNRS
About
43
Publications
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Introduction
My current research focuses on deafness in eighteenth- to late-nineteenth-century France. I investigate the ways in which conceptions of being human and the development of linguistic abilities have been articulated, especially in pedagogy, early forms of sign language linguistics, psychiatry, and law. I completed a monograph on the invention of the category of hysteria (1670–1820) (UCP, 2015). Before joining the CNRS, I was a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPIWG in Berlin.
Additional affiliations
February 2017 - October 2023
September 2016 - June 2022
College International de Philosophie
Position
- Directrice de Programme
November 2010 - January 2017
Education
September 2012 - December 2015
University of Strasbourg UMR 7363 SAGE
Field of study
- Epistemology and History of Science
Publications
Publications (43)
Résumé
Dès le XVII e siècle, les médecins affirment la difficulté de rendre compte des affections hystériques. Cet article étudie deux types de pratiques scripturaires développées pour rendre compte de ces troubles, l’usage de métaphores et l’insertion de narrations. Dans un premier temps abondent les métaphores (Protée, caméléon, hydre) et il s’ag...
In the late eighteenth century, medicine was not part of the institutional approach to ‘deaf-mutes’ in the Western world:
it was teachers rather than doctors who could claim competence for their care. Yet by the second half of the nineteenth century,
doctors had supplanted teachers in this role, despite having made no major therapeutic contribution...
While current debates oppose the cochlear implant’s privileging of speech acquisition to the teaching of sign language, nineteenth-century debates, in contrast, opposed those who saw sign language as a tool for learning to read and write, and those who saw in it an autonomous language in which thought itself could be organized. Should the order of...
The last fifty years have seen the accelerated compilation of sign language dictionaries in many countries, but France is the only country in which early, repeated attempts were made, with nine dictionaries published in the nineteenth century. The challenges were many: creating signs, establishing a national sign language, inventing a format for a...
Examining the work of Georges Paul-Boncour and Jean Philippe, two now almost forgotten physicians active from the turn of the twentieth century on in the medical and educational field of ‘school hygiene’ for so-called abnormal children, this article exemplifies a specific current in psychiatry whose terms first kept oscillating between medico-pedag...
If cochlear implants continue to meet with much resistance from parts of the Deaf community and beyond, this reflects constructions of speech that have been at the core of conceptions of humankind for over three centuries. Starting in the 1750s, Julien Offray de La Mettrie advocated for deaf people's potential for speech. This was also the time of...
Dans le sillage de la Révolution française, on assiste, d’un côté, à l’émergence du modèle de l’école normale, de l’autre, à la création de modèles pédagogiques différents pour les enfants auxquels ce type d’éducation ne peut s’adresser. Roch-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard, premier directeur de l’Institut national des sourds-muets, et Jean-Marc Gaspard I...
While retracing the scope of the French Republican project promoting speech in Deaf education, this article will analyze how the spread of oralism coincided with the development of new categories to classify children, especially “backward” and “abnormal.” It will examine the responses by Deaf people, who, far from being mere spectators of the chang...
Long before Jacques Derrida undertook a critique of phonocentrism as a form of ethnocentrism, a few teachers of deaf pupils rose to the challenge of working on a sign language independent of the structures of speech. For Derrida, this critique encompassed a reappraisal of Western limitations, while reflecting upon the boundaries and linearity of al...
Recent studies have proven the specificity and advantages of fingerspelling from a linguistic point of view. But although widespread, the use of fingerspelling today is limited to sign-language interactions. The appreciation for both sign language and fingerspelling, however, is recent; in fact, the two systems were often opposed to each other in t...
Das Buch rekonstruiert erstmals Genese und Veränderungen des diagnostischen Begriffs "Hysterie". Die Karriere dieser Kategorie beginnt weit früher als bisher angenommen – im 18. und nicht erst im 19. Jahrhundert – und wurde auch schon früh in einen medizinischen Kontext gestellt. Die mit dem religiösen Erleben einhergehenden Konvulsionen sind nur s...
To compensate for the stated inadequacy of any definition, physicians agreed on how to characterize the pathology through their selection of metaphors. Images such as Proteus, the chameleon, and the Hydra bound those texts around a similar diagnosis. In providing a figure for readers to interpret, the physician compelled them to be active and led t...
This chapter’s analysis of forms of writing focuses on various literary genres adopted by physicians to present the pathology to a lettered and aristocratic audience. Dialogue, autobiography, epistolary treatises, consultation by correspondence, and anecdotes articulated medical knowledge from the beginning of the eighteenth century up to the Frenc...
The fifth chapter examines the increasing role, from the 1750s, of literary and medical narratives in inscribing physiological disorders into a coherent progression. In novels by Lennox, Godwin, and Diderot, the body’s manifestations appear as a code, a truth, or a manipulation, depending on the author’s specific narrative demands. They are present...
The first chapter addresses the dissemination of diagnoses later associated with hysteria. Rather than reading the new use of “hysteria” as a sign of changing perceptions, it measures the rupture that the appearance of the term introduced in the enunciation of knowledge, analyzing how specific meanings were created and to which ends. It follows thr...
Men and women of letters used the description of vaporous fits to exemplify the relationship between body and mind irrespective of medical concerns. This chapter examines how the Republic of Letters itself adopted and challenged the theme of vapors. In works by Diderot, La Mettrie, C.J. de B. de Paumerelle, Le Camus, and Chassaignon, vapors and hys...
When Forms of Life Meet : Sign Language and Citizenship in France at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
This article uses the notion of forms of life to examine the role assigned to language – spoken or signed – in the legal rights and empowerment of “deaf-mute” people in France at the turn of the nineteenth century. It sets out three case studies...
The chapter examines the dynamics of four types of traps in writings on the vapours. Doctors cast the malady itself as a trap, due to the great difficulty of affirming the diagnosis and the deceptions that befall patients ensnared by the vapours. To explain the condition’s causes and determine proper treatment, physicians find it necessary to pursu...
Around 1750, there was a great increase in the publication of treatises on the hysteric and hypochondriac vapours. Texts use these different terms to distinguish between a feminine and masculine version of the same malady, and the limited variations between them are thought to be due to a difference in degrees of sensibility. Sixty years later, hys...
Paumerelle's La Philosophie des vapeurs is composed of letters written by a Marquise on the art and use of the vapours, presenting them as an essential tool for
any aristocrat worthy of her rank. Although the text begins under the guise of banter, it quickly moves on to overturn common
conceptions of the malady. The fragility, sensitiveness, and ne...
Barroux Gilles . Philosophie, maladie et médecine au XVIIIe siècle. Paris, Honoré Champion, 2008, 456 p. - Volume 65 Issue 1 - Sabine Arnaud
This article discusses the function of autobiographical narrative in the writing of pathology by the eighteenth-century doctors George Cheyne, Francis Fuller, Claude Révillon, and the Viscount de Puysegur. It studies how their rhetorical strategies stir tensions in readers through the narration of periods of infirmity and the search for a remedy. T...
In the eighteenth century, doctors insisted on the need to persuade patients to retrace their education, their story, their habits. It might appear that everything must be said, yet the analysis of correspondence and consultation reports reveals a reserve that takes shape at the level of the description of symptoms and the naming of the pathology....
In his Questions sur l’Encyclopédie Voltaire casts Doctor Pierre Pomme as an exorcist for modern times. For the philosopher, Pomme’s treatment of hysteric and hypochondriac affections exemplifies the struggle against fanaticism and ignorance. In subsequent private correspondence Pomme and Voltaire exchange letters built around Christian metaphors....
C. J. de Bethmont de Paumerelle’s La Philosophie des vapeurs ou lettres raisonnées d’une jolie femme, sur l’usage des symptômes vaporeux (1774)
Paumerelle’s treatise is set out as a series of twenty-five letters from an aristocrat instructing her newly married friend in the art of the vapours. The symptoms are cast as tools indispensable for any a...
In his Questions sur l'Encyclopédie Voltaire casts Doctor Pierre Pomme as an exorcist for modern times. For the philosopher, Pomme's treatment of hysteric and hypochondriac affections exemplifies the struggle against fanaticism and ignorance. In subsequent private correspondence Pomme and Voltaire exchange letters built around Christian metaphors....
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Pierre Hunauld’s Dissertation sur les vapeurs, first published in 1756, recounts a dialogue at the bedside of a cataleptic countess between a physician and a marchioness. This article investigates how Hunauld legitimates the pathology of the vapours throughout his treatise. The characters present the malady as an expression of sensibility. Rather t...