ABSTRACT
This chapter interrogates the fundamental paradox of a human body that is the confident subject of the project of social and technological modernity and, at the same time, the hazardous biological object to be shaped and controlled in the service of a larger social collectivity. Even as the scope of the human sensorium was technologically augmented, naked human perception was surpassed and the body's epistemological authority contested by the accuracy of these technologies. The nineteenth century was famously one of massive scientific and technological innovation. Scientific discoveries across a variety of fields delivered increasing knowledge of the world and the material self as they contested prior concepts of a stable, mechanistic and impenetrable human body. The embodied experience of modernity becomes central in discourses concerning the metropolis as it was in the urban centre that the full extent of the extensive technological innovation was most immediately felt on the human body.
