The Muscle of Pain

In this uncanny double portrait, the physiologist Dr. Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne de Boulogne holds a mechanical device to the face of a 52-year-old, Italian-born woman believed to have been institutionalized in a Parisian asylum. Duchenne asserted that localized electric shock could force facial muscles to “contract to speak the language of the emotions and the sentiments.” “Armed with electrodes,” he wrote, “one would be able, like nature herself, to paint the expressive lines of the emotions of the soul on the face of man.”