Duchenne's Electrifying Smile Experiments

Even though Duchenne became a great neurologist by the end of his life, his beginnings were pretty humble and nondescript.

Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne was born in 1806 in the northern French town of Boulogne. While his family had been sailors for generations, Duchenne wanted to buck tradition and study medicine in Paris.

His father was incensed that he wanted to become a doctor. At that time, the late 1820's, modern medicine was in its infancy. Having a son go off to university to become a doctor seemed ridiculous to Duchenne's father, especially when he had a ready-made career there in Boulogne. Instead, he demanded that Duchenne become a sailor, just like the other men in the family.

In the end, though, Duchenne's love of science was greater than his family ties. He traveled to Paris and enrolled in the medical university and graduated a few years later in 1831.

Through his medical training, and later his own practice, Duchenne became interested in one the relatively new branches of science called "electropuncture".

Even the word sounds painful.

In treating patients who had facial palsy, he observed that when electricity was applied to certain parts of the face, it would make a specific part of the tissue jump and move. He was fascinated how muscles and nerves seemed to be connected.

In particular, he became interested with the facial muscles and their relationship to emotions. At the time, there was a belief that one's outward appearance reflected what was truly in the heart of a person. Duchenne wanted to see if he could replicate "true emotion" in a subject.

Call it an emotional lie detector test if you will.

In the late 1850's, Duchenne began his experiments to prove that the human face could, indeed, mirror what was in one's soul.

It was not uncommon at that time in history that experiments would be carried out on cadavers. However, studying how a body's nerves and muscles react when electricity is applied proved to be problematic on a stiff.

He was able to obtain a few fresh cadavers and conducted some of his experiments on them. He wasn't happy with the results, though, because, really, it's kind of hard to make a dead man smile.

Let my soul smile through my heart and my heart smile through my eyes, that I may scatter rich smiles in sad hearts ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

This happy gentleman below is Duchenne's favorite and most used subject displaying what would come to be known as a "Duchenne smile;" that is, an honest, sincere smile.

This man - unluckily so for his part - was a favorite of the doctor's because he suffered from a facial neuralgia. Luckily for Duchenne, this meant that he could submit the poor old man to as much electricity as he wanted during his tests and his subject could never feel it.

Duchenne wasn't all about inflicting pain on others in an attempt to prove his theories. He was a serious medical doctor who helped pave the way for physicians today.

If you've ever had a biopsy, you can thank Duchenne. He was the first doctor to do biopsies on patients. He even invented the tool that physicians still use to perform biopsies today, which is called Duchenne's trocar.

Duchenne's experiment began with his patients who suffered from neurological disorders. Through his practice, he observed a particular muscle weakness in 13 young boys, which he recorded in his medical writings. In later years, it was learned that the boys suffered from a form of muscular dystrophy. The disease is now called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy in his honor.

Facial Expressions Electrified

Duchenne De Boulogne, Wikipedia

Mad Scientist Blog

Encyclopedia Britannica