SOURCE: Roberts, Mark S. “Wired: Schreber as Machine, Technophobe, and Virtualist.” The Drama Review 40 (fall 1996): 31-46.

In the following essay, Roberts traces the influence of nineteenth-century scientific advancements and emerging technology on Schreber's paranoia as revealed in Memoirs.

Becoming Machine

In consequence of the many flights of rays, etc., there had appeared in my skull a deep cleft or rent along the middle, which probably was not visible from outside but was from inside. The “little devils” stood on both sides of the cleft and compressed my head temporarily to assume an elongated almost pear shaped form. The screws were loosened temporarily but only very gradually, so that the compressed state usually continued for some time.

—Daniel Paul Schreber ([1903] 1988:138)¹

Daniel Paul Schreber, perhaps more fatefully than any 19th-century figure, was immersed—sometimes against his will—in a world of appliances, quasi-machines, devices, and mechanistic technology. He was, in...