Science Quote by Robert Barany

Barany’s sentence has the polished calm of laboratory prose, and that’s exactly what makes it unsettling. “Quite ready to co-operate” is presented as a neutral observation, but it quietly turns injury into opportunity: wounded bodies become available bodies. The phrase “safe and painless” works like a rhetorical sedative, pre-empting moral objections by insisting the ethics are already settled. It’s persuasion disguised as reassurance.

The subtext is a bargain that doesn’t read like a bargain. People “with such wounds” are framed as natural volunteers, as if suffering automatically produces consent. That move matters because it shifts agency away from the subject and toward the investigator: Barany isn’t asking whether participation is justified; he’s forecasting compliance. Even “experiment” is softened by “in the interests of humanity as a whole,” the classic alibi of modern science, where the imagined benefits to an abstract future public can eclipse the immediate vulnerability of the person in front of you.

Context sharpens the edge. Barany worked in an era when medicine was professionalizing fast, especially in neurology and physiology, and when war injuries and hospital wards created enormous, convenient cohorts for study. The First World War, in particular, forced clinicians into triage-thinking: bodies as cases, trauma as data. Barany’s language reflects that clinical mindset at its most efficient and its most ethically slippery. It’s not villainy so much as a worldview: progress as a straight line, and the wounded as the easiest place to draw it.