MARKETS AND CULTURES: MEDICAL SPECIFICS AND THE RECONFIGURATION OF THE BODY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

2011 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 123-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Cook
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
Body Perceptions ◽  
Do So

ABSTRACTThe history of the body is of course contested territory. Postmodern interpretations in particular have moved it from a history of scientific knowledge of its structure and function toward histories of the various meanings, identities and experiences constructed about it. Underlying such interpretations have been large and important claims about the unfortunate consequences of the rise of a political economy associated with capitalism and medicalisation. In contradistinction, this paper offers a view of that historical process in a manner in keeping with materialism rather than in opposition to it. To do so, it examines a general change in body perceptions common to most of the literature: a shift from the body as a highly individualistic and variable subject to a more universal object, so that alterations in one person's body could be understood to represent how alterations in other human bodies occurred. It then suggests that one of the chief causes of that change was the growing vigour of the market for remedies that could be given to anyone, without discrimination according to temperament, gender, ethnicity, social status or other variables in the belief that they would cure quietly and effectively. One of the most visible remedies of this kind was a ‘specific’, the Peruvian, or Jesuits’ bark. While views about specific drugs were contested, the development of a market for medicinals that worked universally helped to promote the view that human bodies are physiologically alike.

Bodies in Evidence: Perspectives on the History of the Body in Early Modern Europe.

1998 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 304
Author(s):  
Michael T. Walton ◽  
Marjo Kaartinen ◽  
Anu Korhonen
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe

scholarly journals Soul searching: a brief history of the mind/body debate in the neurosciences

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Dolan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
The Self ◽  
History Of Neuroscience ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Brain ◽  
The Way

✓Anatomical and physiological understandings of the structure and function of the brain have worked to establish it as the “seat of the soul.” As an organ of reflection, meditation, and memory, the brain becomes synonymous with what defines the “self” through the existence of consciousness—of mind. Thus, the brain has been associated with a range of transcendent concepts—the soul, spirit, mind, and consciousness—that all relate in fundamental ways to each other both in terms of their perceived location within the brain and because of the way each works ultimately to define the person to whom the brain belongs. In this article, the author provides a brief exploration of how interrelated these categories have been when seen in the context of ancient, Renaissance, early modern, and modern philosophical and medical concerns; how the brain has variously been perceived as home to these intimate states of being; and how practitioners from the neurosciences have reflected on these questions. The author provides novel insights into the interrelationships of philosophy, theology, and medicine by examining these issues through the lens of the history of neuroscience.

The history of the capillary wall: doctors, discoveries, and debates

2007 ◽  
Vol 293 (5) ◽  
pp. H2667-H2679 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Hwa ◽  
William C. Aird
Keyword(s):  
Basic Structure ◽  
Structure And Function ◽  
The Body ◽  
Capillary Wall ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Definitive Evidence ◽  
Arterial Blood ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Function

In 1628, William Harvey provided definitive evidence that blood circulates. The notion that blood travels around the body in a circle raised the important question of how nutrients pass between blood and underlying tissue. Perhaps, Harvey posited, arterial blood pours into the flesh as into a sponge, only then to find its way into the veins. Far from solving this problem, Marcello Malpighi's discovery of the capillaries in 1661 only added to the dilemma: surely, some argued, these entities are little more than channels drilled into tissues around them. As we discuss in this review, it would take over 200 years to arrive at a consensus on the basic structure and function of the capillary wall. A consideration of the history of this period provides interesting insights into not only the central importance of the capillary as a focus of investigation, but also the enormous challenges associated with studying these elusive structures.

CHARLES TAYLOR'SA SECULAR AGEAND SECULARIZATION IN EARLY MODERN GERMANY

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 621-646 ◽  
Author(s):  
IAN HUNTER
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Modern Germany ◽  
Early Modern Germany ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Community Church ◽  
Do So

In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor's philosophical history of secularization, as presented in hisA Secular Age. I do so by situating it in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire. Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion by entertaining the possibility that modern philosophical and historiographic conceptions of secularization might themselves be outcrops of this unfinished competition. Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylor's philosophical history of secularization is a Catholic one, and that this is bound up with a specific (neo-Thomist) view of secularization as a theological and ecclesiological “disembedding” of rational subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacral body, community (church), and cosmos. Taylor delivers this history in his “reform master narrative”: that certain fundamental religious and cultural reforms or changes in early modern Europe wrought the secularization responsible for a modern epoch of “unbelief”.

Digging the Dirt in the Pursuit of Cleanliness

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Susan North
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of

The introduction outlines the historiography on cleanliness and the influence of Georges Vigarello on early modern social history and history of the body. It reviews both the philosophical and the practical aspects that make researching cleanliness so challenging. On one hand, the prejudices of contemporary observers and commentators are acknowledged and, on the other, the practice of cleanliness is so habitual it goes unnoticed and unrecorded. The methodology for the book is described, first to use traditional documentary sources from a variety of media to elucidate what advice was given about cleanliness in early modern England. In order to determine whether such advice was followed, a study of the material culture of cleanliness is proposed and outlined, acknowledging that it may be more successful for linen than for bodies. Finally the drawing together of these various strands of research is emphasized.

scholarly journals Psychoanalysis, science fiction and cyborgianism

Literator ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Sey
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Hybrid Form ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Psychoanalytic Thought ◽  
Do So

Central to this paper is the understanding that much of crucial importance to psychoanalytic thought rests on a conception of the subject as inseparable from a history of the body a history in turn inseparable from the central tenets of Oedipus, in its turn a concept which originates in and is illustrated by literature. The paper will suggest that when recent cultural theorists, drawing on the implications of cybernetics and infoculture theory, contest the psychoanalytic notion of the subject, it is not surprising that they do so in terms of the possibility of an alternative body - a hybrid form of subjectivity between human and machine. Nor, the paper suggests, is it surprising that it should be science fiction, a genre with a long-standing concern with the possibility of such an amalgam, which supplies the key evidence for a post-oedipal theory of this "cyborg" subject. The paper concludes by speculating on the productivity of the conjunction between literature and thinking about the body, inasmuch as this conjunction attempts to establish a new anthropology of the self.

Renaissance Mass Murder

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Bowd
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Social History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Mass Murder ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Italian Wars ◽  
Human Tragedy

Renaissance Mass Murder explores the devastating impact of war on the men and women of the Renaissance. In contrast to the picture of balance and harmony usually associated with the Renaissance, it uncovers in forensic detail a world in which sacks of Italian cities and massacres of civilians at the hands of French, German, Spanish, Swiss, and Italian troops were regular occurrences. The arguments presented are based on a wealth of evidence—histories and chronicles, poetry and paintings, sculpture and other objects—which together provide a new and startling history of sixteenth-century Italy and a social history of the Italian Wars. It outlines how massacres happened, how princes, soldiers, lawyers, and writers, justified and explained such events, and how they were represented in contemporary culture. On this basis the book reconstructs the terrifying individual experiences of civilians in the face of war and in doing so offers a story of human tragedy which redresses the balance of the history of the Italian Wars, and of Renaissance warfare, in favour of the civilian and away from the din of the battlefield. This book also places mass murder in a broader historical context and challenges claims that such violence was unusual or in decline in early modern Europe. Finally, it shows that women often suffered disproportionately from this violence and that immunity for them, as for their children, was often partially developed or poorly respected.

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