jnnp-2012-303300 1..1


Beauty versus the beast
Clare Elizabeth Caldwell

Suspend belief for the next two minutes
and imagine that you own a Ferrari
Testarossada gleaming red marvel; the
marriage of art and engineering. You and
this breathtaking morsel of mechanistic
beauty have been together for so long
that you can’t remember a time when
you were not as one. You know each
other intimately. Or do you?

One Sunday afternoon as you snake
along the chicanes of a high mountainous
road, the Testarossa emits a sickening
bang. You pull the wheezing ball of
exhaust fumes to the side of the road and
pop the bonnet. When you lift the shining
scarlet cranium and peer into the smoking
beast, there is not a scintilla of recogni-
tion. You realise that you’re looking at an
entirely foreign being.

Now imagine that being is you.
For more than 2000 years, human

beings have been peering under the bonnet
of that metaphorical Testarossa. The
ancient Greeks had a very good crack at
unravelling the mysteries of the human
mind and body well before the modern
era. The Grecian physician Herophilus can
take much of the credit, distinguishing the
difference between motor and sensory
nerves in around 280BC. But it is only
within the last 200 years or so that
significant leaps have been made in
understanding the functions of the human
body and the nuances and implications of
those functions.

In this issue, Geoffrey Schott1 examines
how French neurologist Guillaume
Duchenne looked under that bonnet and
made scientific and aesthetic discoveries
that changed the world of neuroscience
forever and continue to do so some
150 years later.

As Schott discovered, Duchenne’s
Mécanisme2 received a cool reception when
it was first published in 1862. However,
the monograph went on to become a bible
of facial anatomy, and in particular facial
expression. In it, Duchenne claimed that
each mental function correlated with
a single particular muscle and its move-
ment. Immersed in the minutiae of this
study, the Frenchman focused his atten-
tions on the corrugator superciliida small
eyebrow muscle (figure 1).
Having introduced localised faradisation

as a method of studying facial muscles in
the 1850s, Duchenne employed his new
techniques to illustrate how ancient Greek
artists had used the humble corrugator
supercilii to convey the emotion of pain. It
seemed that the pre-Christian sculptors
had made a valiant effort to capture the
power of this tricky little muscle, but had
not quite nailed it in their depiction of the
Trojan priest, Laocoön, in about 100BC.
And it was not Duchenne alone who

opined that the Greeks might have got it
wrong. On revisiting the 19th Century
Mécanisme, Schott confirms that other
notable luminaries, including naturalist
Charles Darwin and eminent surgeon Sir
Charles Bell, concurred.
Duchenne concluded that, just as the

Hellenistic sculptors before them had
done, the Greco-Romans had erred in the
name of beauty. And who could blame
them?
So, as we return to our Testarossa,

smouldering by the side of the road, we
are again reminded of how often humans
err in the pursuit of the sublime. Perhaps
Duchenne would have gazed under the
bonnet at the labyrinthine network of
pumps and pistons and declared that the
car’s design was its Achilles’ heel; that its
elegance had impeded its performance.
However, I suspect Schott may have
assessed the same enigma and drawn
a very different conclusiondthat the
inner workings had allowed for the
supreme beauty of the outer shell,
however flawed it may have been.

Competing interests None.

Provenance and peer review Commissioned;
internally peer reviewed.

Received 28 June 2012
Accepted 30 June 2012

REFERENCES
1. Schott GD. Duchenne superciliously ‘Corrects’ the

Laocoön: sculptural considerations in the Mécanisme
de la Physionomie Humaine. J Neurol Neurosurg
Psychiatry

2. Duchenne GB. Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine,
ou analyse électro-physiologique de ses différents
modes de l’expression. Paris: archives générales de
médecine, P Asselin. 1862.

Figure 1 Faradisation Du Muscle Frontal e
Dr Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne
demonstrates his new neurophysiological
methods in the 1850s.

Correspondence to Clare Elizabeth Caldwell, Web
Editor, JNNP, BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, BMA House,
Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9JR, UK;
clarecaldwell@yahoo.com

Editorial commentary

▸ http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jnnp-2012-302933

doi:10.1136/jnnp-2012-303300
J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2013;84:3.

Open Access This is an Open Access article
distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons
Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 3.0) license,
which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build
upon this work non-commercially, and license their
derivative works on different terms, provided the original
work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial.
See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Published Online First 31 July 2012

3 J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry January 2013 Vol 84 No 1

2013;84:10– .13

 o
n
 A

p
ril 5

, 2
0
2

1
 b

y g
u

e
st. P

ro
te

cte
d

 b
y co

p
yrig

h
t.

h
ttp

://jn
n
p
.b

m
j.co

m
/

J N
e

u
ro

l N
e

u
ro

su
rg

 P
sych

ia
try: first p

u
b

lish
e

d
 a

s 1
0

.1
1

3
6

/jn
n

p
-2

0
1

2
-3

0
3
3
0
0
 o

n
 3

1
 Ju

ly 2
0
1
2
. D

o
w

n
lo

a
d
e
d
 fro

m
 

http://jnnp.bmj.com/