Duchenne de Boulogne was an eccentric man with a passion for order. Disregarding his conventional professional training, he systematically catalogued the myriad manifestations of human neurological disease, using novel techniques such as electrical stimulation and photography to perform and document his experiments. When Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine was published by Renouard in Paris in 1862, Duchenne was already renowned for his work in neurology, experimental physiology, and medicine. This book extends his earlier investigation of skeletal muscle action into the study of the facial muscles and the mechanism of human expression. He also departs from his earlier descriptive science and enters an important contemporary debate on aesthetics: the nature of what he calls “idealized naturalism” in art. Most of what we know of Duchenne's life has been gleaned from obituaries and tributes. His publications and membership in national and international societies provide evidence of a professional success, but his private ambitions were aesthetic. Published records fail to explain his personality, his eccentricity, and his drive. It is the uneasy coexistence of the professional scientist with the amateur aesthetician that will be explored in this chapter.

A family doctor turned experimental physiologist

Duchenne's early life was conventional. Born in 1806, the son of a corsair, he attended medical school in Paris and then returned to marriage and a provincial practice on the English Channel coast in Boulogne-sur-Mer.