Karen Chou
Science and Culture in the Age of Realism

1850-1870

Art: focus on the outer material world, shift from Romanticism
  • Visual Art: depict everyday life of ordinary people, French
    • Courbet- The Stonebreakers: representation of human misery, everyday life
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    • Millet- The Gleaners: symbiotic relationship between human and nature, rural life
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  • 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
Science
  • Medical
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
  • 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