The Listening Patient. Music in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Medicine
The project approaches the question as to whether the hospitalized patient (i.e. the patient in his/her treatment environment) is acknowledged as a listening subject, and if so, which aspects of listening are included in medical documentations focused more specifically on effects and the different therapeutic uses of music in the general health care system. In the second half of the nineteenth century, magazines on medicine, physiology, psychiatry and the aesthetics of music featured articles that underlined the universal power of music. Also, individual case studies were presented that told singular stories of healing success or temporary health improvement in relation to music. In studies that focus on the different effects of music, patients suffering from mental problems in particular were increasingly seen as unique, individual listeners. Their listening habits and subsequent reactions to the sounds – sometimes but very rarely performed and even more rarely composed by the patients themselves – were observed with increasing frequency by the doctors who listed, described, and interpreted their observations according to the diagnosis, the patient’s gender, and the the nature of the musical input. Even though the mental and physiological effects of music were emphasized, articles based on medical studies in Germany, England and France mainly dealt with different listening situations either in routine medical situations or in the laboratory, and consequently with the mainly receptive function of music in a clinical context. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however (this is the current hypothesis in the present study) a differentiated nomenclature and characterization of different kinds of listeners, a typology of “listening patients” was developed. Cultural, intellectual, gendered, and even pathological differences among the patients were named. The documents that now need to be analyzed further include Eduard Hanslick’s “pathological” listener as well as Aleks Pontvik’s essays that focus on the listening patient in the Swedish music therapy practice of the mid-twentieth century. They enable us to write an audial and cultural history of the healing and hearing environment, beyond the overall mechanisms of the effects of music.
