Ambrosio Chiara
Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL, London, United Kingdom.
Prog Brain Res. 2018;243:139-180. doi: 10.1016/bs.pbr.2018.10.005. Epub 2018 Nov 28.
The modernist writer Gertrude Stein is well known for her innovative approach to literary prose. Far less known is the fact that Stein's career started in the emergent field of the brain sciences, first at Radcliffe College, then at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. In this contribution, I trace Stein's scientific trajectory and examine the reasons that compelled her to abandon a career in science, turning to literature instead. Stein's career as a scientist was initially very promising, and began to decline only in her last two years at Johns Hopkins. With her degree in jeopardy, she was offered one last chance: she would be allowed to graduate if she completed a last piece of assessment, consisting of a model of a young human brain. Alas, Stein's model was a disaster-and possibly a deliberate one. In the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, written over thirty years after the sour end of her scientific career, Stein attributed her failure to "being frankly openly bored" by medicine. In reconstructing the circumstances that culminated in Stein undermining her own performance by reimagining a "modernist" model of the brain, I show that Stein's rebranding of her failure as "boredom" was itself part of a broader act of disobedience toward the authority of neuroanatomy, whose status was far more uncertain than how its practitioners-Stein's own teachers-viewed it.
现代主义作家格特鲁德·斯泰因以其创新的文学散文创作方法而闻名。鲜为人知的是，斯泰因的职业生涯始于新兴的脑科学领域，先是在拉德克利夫学院，然后是在约翰·霍普金斯医学院。在本文中，我追溯了斯泰因的科学轨迹，并探究了迫使她放弃科学事业转而投身文学的原因。斯泰因作为科学家的职业生涯起初非常有前途，只是在她在约翰·霍普金斯的最后两年才开始走下坡路。由于她的学位面临风险，她得到了最后一次机会：如果她完成最后一项评估，即制作一个年轻人类大脑的模型，她将被允许毕业。可惜的是，斯泰因的模型是一场灾难——甚至可能是故意的。在她科学事业惨淡收场三十多年后所写的《爱丽丝·B·托克拉斯自传》中，斯泰因将自己的失败归因于对医学“坦率地公开感到厌烦”。在重构最终导致斯泰因通过重新构想一个“现代主义”大脑模型而破坏自己表现的种种情形时，我表明斯泰因将自己的失败重新定义为“厌烦”本身，是对神经解剖学权威更广泛的违抗行为的一部分，而神经解剖学的地位远比其从业者——斯泰因自己的老师——所认为的更加不确定。
