1900—The Spectator!urn:On Biology's Audiowisual Archlwe

摘要

"In order to give a sense of the viewability of this surprising demonstration, I only mention that the diameter of the silhouette of the still-beating heart appearing on the wall was about two meters."1 Johann Nepomuk Czermak was satisfied, probably even proud. On December 21,1872, the physiologist had inaugurated his Private Laboratory at the University of Leipzig. The visual climax of the ceremony was the extremely enlarged projection of an isolated, still-contracting frog heart in the darkened lecture hall. As Czermak underlined in his opening speech, more than 400 spectators were enabled, by means of this "surprising demonstration," to observe minute details in the contraction of the frog heart "that escape or are hardly visible to the unassisted gaze."