Science+and+Culture+in+Realism

Karen Chou Science and Culture in the Age of Realism

1850-1870

Art: focus on the outer material world, shift from Romanticism Science Pasteur-germ theory of disease: microorganisms as the agents causing disease, fermentation, pasteurization: heating a product to destroy the organism causing spoilage, vaccination against rabies Lister- antiseptic principle: antiseptics to prevent disease and infections, carbolic acid, “hospital gangrene”, improve cleanliness of hospitals Blackwell- first woman in medical school and to receive a MD, Geneva College of Medicine in New York, established a clinic in NYC
 * Visual Art: depict everyday life of ordinary people, French
 * Courbet- //The Stonebreakers//: representation of human misery, everyday life
 * Millet- //The Gleaners//: symbiotic relationship between human and nature, rural life
 * Authors: rejection of Romanticism, ordinary characters from actual life, French preeminent
 * Thackary- //VanityFair A Novel without a Hero//,
 * Dickens- lower and middle classes in industrial age, urban poor, brutalization of human life
 * Flaubert- //Madame Bovary//: offended middle-class sensibilities, book was banned, offensive to morality and religion
 * Music: New German School, emotional content, express literary of pictorial ideas
 * Liszt-Hungarian, child prodigy, introduce concept of modern piano recital, symphonic poem
 * Wagner-truly national opera, propagandist, music drama, //Gesamtkunstwerk//(total art work), //Ring of the Nibelung//
 * Medical
 * Physics and Biology
 * Mendeleyev- periodic law: organized chemical elements
 * Faraday-electromagnetic induction, generator/ electric motor invention
 * Lamarck-first theory of evolution
 * Charles Darwin-theory of organic evolution 1859: populations evolve over time, H.M.S. Beagle, //On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection//, //The Descent of Man:// humans descended from animals, highly controversial because conflicted with religious views, made humans products of nature, natural selection: more organisms born than can survive, survival of the fittest
 * Comte-positive philosophy, hierarchy of sciences, mathematics is the foundation