Cycles and circulation: a theme in the history of biology and medicine

Abstract

We invite systematic consideration of the metaphors of cycles and circulation as a long-term theme in the history of the life and environmental sciences and medicine. Ubiquitous in ancient religious and philosophical traditions, especially in representing the seasons and the motions of celestial bodies, circles once symbolized perfection. Over the centuries cyclic images in western medicine, natural philosophy, natural history and eventually biology gained independence from cosmology and theology and came to depend less on strictly circular forms. As potent ‘canonical icons’, cycles also interacted with representations of linear and irreversible change, including arrows, arcs, scales, series and trees, as in theories of the Earth and of evolution. In modern times life cycles and reproductive cycles have often been held to characterize life, in some cases especially female life, while human efforts selectively to foster and disrupt these cycles have harnessed their productivity in medicine and agriculture. But strong cyclic metaphors have continued to link physiology and climatology, medicine and economics, and biology and manufacturing, notably through the relations between land, food and population. From the grand nineteenth-century transformations of matter to systems ecology, the circulation of molecules through organic and inorganic compartments has posed the problem of maintaining identity in the face of flux and highlights the seductive ability of cyclic schemes to imply closure where no original state was in fact restored. More concerted attention to cycles and circulation will enrich analyses of the power of metaphors to naturalize understandings of life and their shaping by practical interests and political imaginations.

Timeless spaces: Field experiments in the physiological study of circadian rhythms, 1938–1963

“…Similar to Hannah Landecker's work (2017) historicizing the closely related concept of metabolism, thinking about biological time highlights rhythmicity as undermining the boundary between organism and environment. An analysis of scientific conceptions of human circadian rhythms in specific spatial contexts provides a much needed addition to scholarship on the subject of biological timing -which thus far has tended to focus on broader timescales like that of evolution and reproduction (Rheinberger, 2002;Wellmann, 2017;Hopwood et al, 2018;Hopwood et al, 2021). Attending to biological time on the level of daily embodied experience requires tool that help us think with bodies as well as their milieus -and the temporally and spatially specific ways that scientists viewed these interactions.…”

“…What exactly these time cues are and which are more important in terms of regulating what has been colloquially called the 'body clock', was (and remains) a point of scientific contention. Looking more closely at these natural spaces and the actual work of designing and carrying out such experiments within them has much to tell us about mid-twentieth century scientific ideas about biological time (Rheinberger, 2002;Wellmann, 2017;Hopwood et al, 2021;Shackleford, 2022aShackleford, , 2022b. This paper will consider a series of field experiments in human circadian rhythms that occurred in cave and Arctic spaces between 1938 and 1963.…”

Biocircularities: New Formations of Embodied Time

“…This abandonment of a point of return is also how we differentiate our approach from scholarship on cycles. Cycles are crucial to the natural sciences, they are directional and finite; they may oscillate between poles, or they may be open-ended systemic processes, but they are characterised by 'an ideal of return to an original state' (Hopwood et al, 2021). While cycles thus often refer to larger finite systems whose reproduction they serve, circles do not necessarily relate to a pre-determined broader systemic apparatus that determines their meaning.…”

“…We argue that biocircularities offer a new possibility of understanding, systematising and comparing the multiple and uneven temporalities the body enfolds. In this introduction, we draw attention to how these new forms of embodied temporality are emerging at a moment when the reengineering of bodily time offers a standard means of intervention into societal, economic and ecological concerns; a process that is particularly salient to reproductive and ‘female life’ (Hopwood et al, 2021). Biocircularity, we argue, is a timely concept; it helps us to theorise the new non-linear narrative frames that are increasingly employed to understand urgent contemporary phenomena, such as epigenetics, regenerative medicine, cryobanking, chronic disease and ecological crises.…”