Born in France in 1830, Marey trained to be a doctor, but
found the new science of physiology more suited to his taste for
pure research and to his talents - Marey was a mechanical genius.
A positivist, drawn to the intellectual world of the German
organic physicists, Marey believed he could make physiology a
more exact science - the equal of physics and chemistry, the
most advanced sciences of his day - by using machines to measure
the functions of the body, so as to determine the laws that
governed them. At the root of Marey's idea was a radical
perception of the human body - he saw it as a machine, an
animate machine, whose workings could be explained by the laws
of theoretical mechanics. More radically, he defined the life
which animated this animal machine as a complex motor which,
like inanimate motors, consumed fuel and supplied energy - a
motor, in fact, whose functions could be reduced to the newly
discovered laws of thermodynamics.
Ultimately Marey confined himself to a single subject: the
body's most manifest form of energy - movement; or, as he put it,
the language of life itself. But it was a language that no one
had yet deciphered. Marey had chosen to explore a domain in
which the unaided senses were powerless.
Marey's great achievement was to adapt the graphing machines
used in physics to record motion within and of the body without
recourse to the hand or eye. He began by graphing the internal
dynamics of the body and then he charted the body’s external
kinetics. At the end of his life he studied the media through
which these moving beings moved, the eddies and ripples in air
and water. In every case he had the movement make its own
tracings through instruments he created.
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The first instrument Marey constructed, the
sphygmograph illustrates the principles to be
found in all those that followed, including his
photographing instruments.
The sphygmograph, transcribed the manifest
sign of circulation, the pulse, and it was
Marey's great contribution to cardiology. It was
both light, so as not to interfere with what it
was describing, and simple. Its lever and stylus
converted the heartbeat into a permanent, fluid
inscription on a piece of smoke-blackened paper.
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