Metrological Awakenings: Rationalising the Body Electric in Nineteenth Century Medicine

2002 ◽  
pp. 77-93 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Nineteenth Century Medicine

“The Blackness of Darkness”

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 2-22
Author(s):  
Lara Langer Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Tourist Attraction ◽  
White Writers ◽  
The World ◽  
Newspaper Articles ◽  
Travel Accounts

Abstract This article considers Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave as an unexpected site for nineteenth-century theorizations of racialized Blackness. Mammoth Cave became a major tourist attraction in the 1840s, generating a host of guidebooks, travel accounts, magazine illustrations, panoramas, newspaper articles, and fiction. Crucial to its fame was the fact that the guides who led visitors through the cave were enslaved men. This article argues that white writers responded to the guides’ knowledge of the cave by reframing it as affinity. In doing so, they transformed Mammoth Cave’s subterranean darkness into a manifestation of racialized Blackness. But the writers’ racialization of Mammoth Cave also had a tendency to slip out of their control. As they associated its spatial darkness with racialized Blackness, the literal underground of Mammoth Cave flickered into an underground that was more than literal—a mysterious Black formation, of unguessed dimensions and certain danger, beneath the world as they knew it. Finally, the article asks what we can glean from the literature of Mammoth Cave about the body of Black thought it sought to disavow: the alternative relations between race and the underground that the guides theorized through their own subterranean explorations.

scholarly journals Keats, Myth, and the Science of Sympathy

Romanticism ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Tate
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Training ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Positivist Science ◽  
Nineteenth Century Medicine ◽  
The Way

This essay considers the connections between myth and sympathy in Keats's poetic theory and practice. It argues that the ‘Ode to Psyche’ exemplifies the way in which Keats uses mythological narrative, and the related trope of apostrophe, to promote a restrained form of sympathy, which preserves an objectifying distance between the poet and the feelings that his poetry examines. This model of sympathy is informed by Keats's medical training: the influential surgeon Astley Cooper and The Hospital Pupil's Guide (1816) both identify a sensitive but restrained sympathy for patients' suffering as an essential part of the scientific and professional methods of nineteenth-century medicine. However, while The Hospital Pupil's Guide claims that mythological superstition has been superseded in medicine by positivist science, Keats's ode suggests that myth retains a central role in poetry, as the foundation of a poetic method that mediates between imaginative sympathy and objective impartiality.

scholarly journals Shaping Toronto: female economy and agency in the corset industry, 1871-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanna M. M. McKnight
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fashion History ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
Female Consumers ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Relationship

In amplifying the contours of the body, the corset is an historical site that fashions femininity even as it constricts women’s bodies. This study sits at the intersection of three histories: of commodity consumption, of labour, and of embodiment and subjectivity, arguing that women were active participants in the making, selling, purchasing and wearing of corsets in Toronto, a city that has largely been ignored in fashion history. Between 1871 and 1914 many women worked in large urban factories, and in small, independent manufacturing shops. Toronto’s corset manufacturers were instrumental in the urbanization of Canadian industry, and created employment in which women earned a wage. The women who bought their wares were consumers making informed purchases, enacting agency in consumption and aesthetics; by choosing the style or size of a corset, female consumers were able to control to varying degrees, the shape of their bodies. As a staple in the wardrobe of most nineteenth-century women, the corset complicates the study of conspicuous consumption, as it was a garment that was not meant to be seen, but created a highly visible shape, blurring the lines between private and public viewing of the female body. Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish informs this study, and by acknowledging the ways in which the corset became a fetishized object itself, both signaling the shapeliness of femininity while in fact augmenting and diminishing female bodies. This study will address critical theory regarding the gaze and subjectivity, fashion, and modernity, exploring the relationship women had with corsets through media and advertising. A material culture analysis of extant corsets helps understand how corsets were constructed in Toronto, how the women of Toronto wore them, and to what extent they actually shaped their bodies. Ultimately, it is the aim of this dissertation to eschew common misconceptions about the practice of corsetry and showcase the hidden manner in which women produced goods, labour, and their own bodies in the nineteenth century, within the Canadian context.

Genealogy of the Cerebral Subject

Being Brains ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Vidal ◽  
Francisco Ortega
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Functional Neuroimaging ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Brain Structure And Function ◽  
Cerebral Subject ◽  
The Individual ◽  
And Function ◽  
Cerebral Self ◽  
The Brain

The first chapter proposes to trace the distant roots of the cerebral subject to the late seventeenth century, and particularly to debates about the seat of the soul, the corpuscularian theory of matter, and John Locke’s philosophy of personal identity. In the wake of Locke, eighteenth century authors began to assert that the brain is the only part of the body we need to be ourselves. In the nineteenth century, this form of deterministic essentialism contributed to motivate research into brain structure and function, and in turn confirmed the brain-personhood nexus. Since then, from phrenology to functional neuroimaging, neuroscientific knowledge and representations have constituted a powerful support for prescriptive outlooks on the individual and society. “Neuroascesis,” as we call the business that sells programs of cerebral self-discipline, is a case in point, which this chapter also examines. It appeals to the brain and neuroscience as bases for its self-help recipes to enhance memory and reasoning, fight depression, anxiety and compulsions, improve sexual performance, achieve happiness, and even establish a direct contact with God. Yet underneath the neuro surface lie beliefs and even concrete instructions that can be traced to nineteenth-century hygiene manuals.

Thoughts to Consider While Reading Barker’s Manuscript: Presentism, Whiggish History, and the Post Hoc Fallacy

2020 ◽  
pp. 118-132
Author(s):  
Richard J. Kahn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physician Patient Relationship ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Nineteenth Century Medicine ◽  
Cellular Pathology ◽  
Post Hoc ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Physician Patient

The holistic tradition of Hippocrates and Galen ended in the nineteenth century with the arrival of disease specificity. Thus, the correction of imbalances provoked by noxious air, inappropriate behavior, the environment, air, water, food, emotions, exercise, rest, and evacuations gave way to the biomedical model, reductionist medicine, and positive scientific authority. By the late nineteenth century, medicine had incorporated Rudolf Virchow’s cellular pathology (1858), Joseph Lister’s surgical antisepsis (1865), Louis Pasteur’s bacteriology (1860s), and Robert Koch’s discovery of the tuberculosis germ (1880s). But John Harley Warner maintains that in Barker’s era, therapeutic action was an essential part of professional identity, as physicians struggled with skepticism regarding medical therapy and the relative merits of nature healing versus the need for therapeutics such as bleeding, purging, and mercurials. Charles Rosenberg emphasizes the importance to the physician–patient relationship of “exhibiting” a drug. To evaluate the validity of Barker’s knowledge and treatments, the twenty-first-century reader must avoid presentism, whiggish history, and the post hoc fallacy, and must consider confirmation bias. Was Barker using the best available evidence in 1820? Were his decisions evidence-based?

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