Science Quote by Robert Barany

There is a quiet brutality in Barany's calm little "of course". He’s describing a body being turned into a checklist: prove the reflex, confirm the "normal" pointing responses in every other joint, then stop. The line reads like lab protocol, but its real work is rhetorical self-justification. By stressing completeness and normalcy, Barany signals control: nothing aberrant is happening beyond what he is deliberately testing. It’s the scientist’s version of a legal alibi.

The subtext is that the experiment is invasive enough to require an exit line. "I stopped the experiment" lands like a moral brake, implying a point where curiosity has to yield to limits - pain, risk, or the mere fact of having extracted sufficient evidence. Barany doesn’t describe the subject’s experience (his own, a patient’s, an assistant’s); the voice stays on the side of measurement. That omission is the tell. In early 20th-century physiology and neurology, especially in work on balance and the vestibular system (Barany’s domain), the body was both instrument and battleground, and the ethical vocabulary lagged behind the technical one.

The sentence also shows how scientific authority is constructed through procedural confidence. "As soon as I had proved this" frames knowledge as something you can close the file on. The experiment ends not when the body says stop, but when the investigator decides the claim is secured. That’s not villainy so much as a snapshot of the era’s faith: if you can demonstrate a reflex cleanly, you’ve earned the right to move on - and to write history in the passive, polished language of results.