01/31/2025
In his “On the Natural Faculties” (179 CE), physician and philosopher Claudius Galen explains the growth of animal organisms by using the image of a balloon—or rather the balloon of antiquity, an inflated animal bladder. “Children [in the district of Ionia] take the bladders of pigs, fill them with air, and then rub them on ashes near the fire, so as to warm, but not to injure them. … As they rub, they sing songs, to a certain measure, time, and rhythm, and all their words are an exhortation to the bladder to increase in size. When it appears to them fairly well distended, they again blow air into it and expand it further; then they rub it again. This they do several times, until the bladder seems to them to have become large enough.” Large enough to play with, that is. Galen’s focus, however, is on the increasing thinness of the bladder’s membrane. Were human bodies to grow in the same way, they might be “torn through,” and to prevent this, Nature provides “nourishment to this thin part.” Through nutrition, Nature alone possesses “the power to expand the body in all directions so that it remains un-ruptured and preserves completely its previous form.” Without nutrition, Galen’s image suggests, human bodies would pop, like over-distended balloons.
Galen’s balloon metaphor for bodily growth reflected antiquity’s conception of the “pneuma,” a breath-borne soul-like entity assumed to circulate and affect the body through what is now understood as the arterial system. The church fathers Christianized the pneuma, infusing it with monotheistic import, and indeed the word pneumatology is still used today to describe the study of the Holy Spirit. … By the mid-nineteenth century, however, respiration was understood primarily in mechanistic terms. An 1869 lithograph in London’s Wellcome Collection, documenting the work of anatomist Francis Sibson, shows the lungs of a dissected cadaver ballooning outwards beneath an exposed ribcage as the result of air supplied through a tapped pump inserted into its trachea...
Jonathan Allen’s “Pop Art: Inflationary Aesthetics” is now unlocked.
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/37/allen.php
