Listen Laennec · The Medicine Chest

Title

Listen Laennec

Is Part Of

SA College of Music See all items with this value

Fine Art See all items with this value

Centre for Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Research See all items with this value

Centre for Curating the Archive See all items with this value

Description

"In this work, the temperature graphs of individuals suffering from malaria, yellow fever, trypanosomiasis and tickborne-relapse fever – all viewed as ‘tropical’ and treatable by the contents of the medicine chest – were converted into a musical score. I punched the strips of paper of a hand-cranked musical box mechanism with holes that corresponded to the graphs – the vertical axis representing temperature variations and the horizontal axis representing the approximate number of days the fever is said to last. The translation of these graphs into notes seems nonsensical, as we do not listen for a temperature; we measure it by feeling a forehead or taking a reading with a thermometer. The practice of listening has, however, been part of the history of medicine since the days of Hippocrates (c.460–c.370 BC), when physicians performed auscultations of the lung and heart by placing their ear directly on the patient’s chest' (Liebenberg 2021: 265).

Creator

Nina Liebenberg See all items with this value

Date Created

2018

Source

Chest: a botanical ecology

Resonances

medicine chest See all items with this value

cabinet See all items with this value

Chest: a botanical ecology See all items with this value

South African Museum See all items with this value

music See all items with this value

listening See all items with this value

René Laennec See all items with this value

fever See all items with this value

yellow fever See all items with this value

malaria See all items with this value

trypanosomiasis See all items with this value

tick See all items with this value

host See all items with this value

carrier See all items with this value

Hippocrates See all items with this value

Edirne See all items with this value

Islam See all items with this value

graph See all items with this value

translation See all items with this value

machine See all items with this value

temperature See all items with this value

measure See all items with this value

paper See all items with this value

hole See all items with this value

forehead See all items with this value

instrument See all items with this value

ear See all items with this value

thermometer See all items with this value

Type

Artwork

Contributor

Nina Liebenberg

Item sets

99_LBNNIN001