From the Vaults of the Unhinged: The Screaming Experiments of Dr. Duchenne
“Terror Mixed With Pain, Torture” (1854–1856, printed 1862) — Guillaume-Benjamin-Amant Duchenne (de Boulogne)
Welcome back to Vaults of the Unhinged, where the ghosts of scientific enthusiasm past come to rattle their medical instruments at us. Today’s artifact comes from the ever-illustrious Dr. Guillaume-Benjamin-Amant Duchenne de Boulogne—physician, scientist, pioneer of neurology, and apparently the world’s most cheerful electrician.
This photo is part of Duchenne’s extensive project exploring human emotion through electrodes, forced expressions, and a volunteer with the patience of a saint or the debt of a sinner. Duchenne believed that every emotion had a correct, anatomically perfect facial configuration, and the best way to reveal these “authentic expressions” was by stimulating individual facial muscles using electrical currents.
This particular image, charmingly titled “Terror Mixed With Pain, Torture,” gives us the exact emotional cocktail you expect from someone who has just been wired up like a Victorian Christmas tree. The man’s expression is a frozen scream: eyes wide, mouth collapsing into horror, forehead stretching into an existential telegram reading: “Sir, please stop this.”
Duchenne, entirely unfazed, stands nearby like a proud puppeteer, needle in hand, guiding facial muscles as if sculpting terror itself. It’s not that he wanted to torture anyone — he was simply confident in the pursuit of Truth, Anatomy, and Pure Emotional Science. But you can only say “it’s for science” so many times before everyone else starts backing slowly out of the room.
The final images: haunting, clinical, and bizarrely theatrical, became foundational to early neurology, influenced later art movements, and incidentally gifted us some of the most unintentionally hilarious nightmare fuel of the 19th century. They also predate our modern understanding of consent culture by … quite a bit.
To view these works is to watch a moment where science, curiosity, and Victorian enthusiasm collided with a crackle of electricity, producing something uncanny and unforgettable.
And honestly? That’s exactly why we love it.
