scholarly journals Epilepsy in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot - Language, Stigma, and Mythology

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anupama Shukla
Keyword(s):  
Major Part ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Moon ◽  
Personal View ◽  
The People ◽  
The World ◽  
Medical Discourses ◽  
Medical Narratives ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Insight Into

Around 400 BC, Areatus -- one of Hippocrates’ pupils, proclaimed ‘epilepsy is an illness of various shapes and horrible’. Later, Areatus was also one of the people who called the disease ‘sacred’; according to them, a deity had sent a demon to possess the patient, or the patient had been cursed by the moon. The Hippocratic physicians were among the first to attempt to separate the scientific and the cultural/fictional discourses. However, even till the late nineteenth century, medical narratives were intertwined with the fictional narratives that surrounded epilepsy, and these narratives contributed significantly towards the stigma that has historically been associated with the disease. This paper will examine how medical and non-medical discourses shaped the representation of epilepsy and contributed to the cultural mythology surrounding epilepsy. In the course of this paper, the author will specifically focus on Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, in which the reader sees the author’s personal view of epilepsy, cleverly accommodated into the character of Prince Myshkin, who is surrounded by social stigmatisation. Dostoevsky suffered from epilepsy for a major part of his life, and he maintained detailed accounts of his seizures. His epilepsy had a huge influence on his writings and his perception of the world. Dostoevsky’s epilepsy has been seen as particularly relevant, since being an epileptic himself, his works provide the reader with an insight into the disease which is hard to find elsewhere.

The Steel Heard ‘Round the World: Exposing the Global Reach of Indigenous Musical Journeys with the Hawaiian Steel Guitar

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-274
Author(s):  
John W. Troutman
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
International Markets ◽  
Native Hawaiians ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Commercial Music ◽  
Kanaka Maoli ◽  
Music Making ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
A New Technique

In the late nineteenth century, Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) physically modified guitars and created a new technique for playing them. In the years that followed, hundreds of Hawaiian troupes, engaging new entertainment circuits that crisscrossed the globe, introduced the world to their “Hawaiian steel guitar,” from Shanghai to London, Kolkata to New Orleans. While performing Hawaiianmele, or songs, with their instrument, they demonstrated new virtues for the guitar’s potential in vernacular and commercial music making in these international markets. Based upon archival research, this essay considers the careers of several Hawaiian guitarists who travelled the world in the early twentieth century, connecting local soundscapes through the proliferation of an indigenous technology.

scholarly journals Leprosy and the elusive M. leprae: colonial and imperial medical exchanges in the nineteenth century

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (suppl 1) ◽  
pp. 13-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jo Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Disease Models ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Model ◽  
The World ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Morbid Anatomy ◽  
Models Of Disease

In the 1800s, humoral understandings of leprosy successively give way to disease models based on morbid anatomy, physiopathology, and bacteriology. Linkages between these disease models were reinforced by the ubiquitous seed/soil metaphor deployed both before and after the identification of M. leprae. While this metaphor provided a continuous link between medical descriptions, Henry Vandyke Carter's On leprosy (1874) marks a convergence of different models of disease. Simultaneously, this metaphor can be traced in popular and medical debates in the late nineteenth century, accompanying fears of a resurgence of leprosy in Europe. Later the mapping of the genome ushers in a new model of disease but, ironically, while leprosy research draws its logic from a view of the world in which a seed and soil metaphor expresses many different aspects of the activity of the disease, the bacillus itself continues to be unreceptive to cultivation.

scholarly journals Identity considerations for a psychology based on a complex epistemology

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Carlos Jaramillo Estrada
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Active Part ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Way

Born in the late nineteenth century, within the positivist paradigm, psychology has made important developments that have allowed its recognition in academia and labor. However, contextual issues have transformed the way we conceptualize reality, the world and man, perhaps in response to the poor capacity of the inherited paradigm to ensure quality of life and welfare of human beings. This has led to the birth and recognition of new paradigms, including complex epistemology, in various fields of the sphere of knowledge, which include the subjectivity, uncertainty, relativity of knowledge, conflict, the inclusion of "the observed" as an active part of the interventions and the relativity of a single knowable reality to move to co-constructed realities. It is proposed an approach to the identity consequences for a psychology based on complex epistemology, and the possible differences and relations with psychology, traditionally considered.

The End of the Niche Economy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Invasive Species ◽  
Competitive Advantage ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cotton Industry ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anti Jewish

Chapter 6 explores the end of the niche economy. By the late nineteenth century, changes to the cotton industry meant that merchants in the Gulf South were no longer as important as they once were. Structural changes to global capitalism, including the rise of investment banking, changed the nature of credit and lending, as networks of trust, which once provided a competitive advantage for Jews and other minorities, began to lose their importance. Additional global forces also mitigated the Gulf South’s centrality in the cotton industry, as the world’s thirst for cotton pushed European powers to find cheaper places in the world to produce cotton. Localized factors were also marginalizing the Gulf South and its Jewish merchants, as floods and invasive species ravaged cotton crops and a spate of anti-Jewish violence took direct aim at the Jewish niche economy. All of this meant that, in much the same manner that Jewish merchants had once marginalized cotton factors, Jewish merchants themselves became marginalized, and their niche economy came to an end.

Female Onanism: Condemned Pleasures, Medical Probes, and Late-Victorian Pornography

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-164
Author(s):  
Stefano Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Norms ◽  
Sexual Desire ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Self ◽  
Erotic Literature ◽  
Medical Discourses ◽  
Late Nineteenth

The more Victorian physicians deepened their research into female sexuality, the more a culture of lust infected the hypocritical façade of a nation strictly attached to social norms of order, formality, and bigotry. Lascivious sexual desire and carnal appetite – here embodied in female masturbation – were taboos that had to be forcibly silenced. Yet, late-Victorian pornography mocked medical discourses on female onanism, as well as fears related to female sexuality, and revealed ‘unspeakable’ secret domestic settings marred by ‘dangerous’ practices, scandalous carnality and deviant desires. Furthermore, contemptuous of literary censorship and strict morality, the plenteous erotic literature, represented here by William Lazenby's pornographic magazine The Pearl, not only dared to taunt physicians’ concerns about female ‘self-pollution’ circulating at that time, but also found a great inspiration in the huge domestic success of some innovative medical tools – specifically patented to assuage women's nerves – being produced in those years: electric vibrators. Those ‘engines’ rapidly invaded pornographic literature of the late nineteenth century and became central to a great number of erotic stories, titillating fables and poems, as clearly demonstrated by the contents of The Pearl.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lila Caimari
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Buenos Aires ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Neighborhood Associations ◽  
Grassroots Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Many

This introductory chapter begins with the author's account of the origins of the present volume, which can be traced back to her interest in a late nineteenth-century set of concepts, images, and metaphors that grew up around the figure of the modern criminal. It then discusses the population growth in Buenos Aires, which jumped from about 1.5 to 2.5 million in the two decades between the world wars and the corresponding urban expansion. This sets the stage for a description of the book's purpose, namely to explore the many dimensions of porteño life in the early decades of the twentieth century: its vital network of neighborhood associations, its literacy campaigns, its grassroots politics, its many reformist projects, and so forth.

Anglospheres: Empire Redivivus?

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Duncan Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
American Union

This chapter will explore the similarities and differences between late nineteenth-century debates on the British settler Empire and more recent visions of the Anglosphere. It suggests that the idea of the Anglosphere has deep roots in British political thought. In particular, it traces the debates over both imperial federation and Anglo-American union from the late nineteenth century onwards into the post-Brexit world. I examine three recurrent issues that have shaped arguments about the unity and potential of the ‘English-speaking peoples’: the ideal constitutional structure of the community; the economic model that it should adopt; and the role of the United States within it. I conclude by arguing that the legacy of settler colonialism, and an idealised vision of the ‘English-speaking peoples’, played a pivotal role in shaping Tory Euroscepticism from the late 1990s onwards, furnishing an influential group of politicians and public intellectuals, from Thatcher and Robert Conquest to Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, with an alternative non-European vision of Britain’s place in the world.

The Red Flag of Emancipation

2021 ◽  
pp. 95-118
Author(s):  
Matthew E. Stanley
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Industrial Workers ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Civil War Memory ◽  
The World ◽  
Red Flag ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Socialist Party Of America

This chapter considers the production of Civil War memory among Gilded Age socialists and anarchists. These radicals and revolutionaries built on the redistributionist claims of abolitionists and freedpeople, and exceeded those of trade unionists, by challenging not only the legitimacy of slave property or plantations but also the mechanisms of production and property rights. Late nineteenth-century socialists came to see themselves as a postscript to abolitionism, and their “red memory” operated through anarchist networks, militias, and workers’ parties. Most sought an end to partisan debates over loyalty and section, which hindered working-class organization, and used Civil War memory to espouse internationalism, prefiguring the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World.

The German and Japanese Empires

2021 ◽  
pp. 1123-1160
Author(s):  
Daniel Hedinger ◽  
Moritz von Brescius
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World Order ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Shared History ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Second World

This chapter provides an analytical overview of the German and Japanese imperial projects from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II. It shows how Germany and Japan—two imperial latecomers in the late nineteenth century—redefined imperialism and colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. In order to realize their dreams of a new imperial world order, both countries broke with what had come before, and their violent imperial projects turned out to be radically new and different. While Europe had never seen an empire like Hitler’s, the same is true of East Asia and the so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere during the Second World War. In the end, it was their wars for empire and brutal legacies that not only profoundly shaped their respective national histories, but also undermined the legitimacy of imperialism after 1945. The chapter, which focuses on a series of important moments from a trans-imperial perspective, highlights two points. First, it stresses that the German and Japanese empires had a shared history. Second, it shows that by their emergence as colonial powers, Japan and Germany first fundamentally challenged and later changed the very rules of the “imperial game” and the existing global order. Their histories are central to understand great power competition in the first half of the 20th century as well as the imperial nature of the World Wars.

Soil and Biodiversity

Earth Matters ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bardgett
Keyword(s):  
Soil Fertility ◽  
Nitrogen Supply ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Agricultural Field ◽  
Soil P ◽  
Naked Eye ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Diversity Of Life

One of the most striking things about soil is that it harbours a remarkable diversity of life. A handful of soil from any well-kept garden, forest, or agricultural field, can contain literally billions of individual organisms and thousands of species. In some cases, as much as 10 per cent of the soil’s total weight could be alive, although in most cases it will be 1–5 per cent. The bulk of these organisms are microorganisms, which aren’t visible to the naked eye: the bacteria, fungi, and algae. But the soil is also home to many animals, including microscopic nematodes and protozoa, and large faunas such as springtails, earthworms, spiders, and even moles. The diversity of all these organisms is vast, with some scientists estimating that soils probably contain as much as one-quarter of the living diversity on Earth. The importance of soil organisms for soil fertility has long been known. The philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC) referred to earthworms as ‘the intestines of the earth’, and Cleopatra (69–30 BC), the last pharaoh of Egypt, declared them to be sacred because of their contribution to Egyptian agriculture. Darwin detailed the importance of earthworms for soil fertility in his last book, published in 1881. He commented: . . . It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world as have these lowly organized creatures. . . . Also, the benefits of leguminous plants for soil fertility and crop growth have been known since Roman times. But it wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that it was discovered that nitrogen fixation is down to microscopic bacteria (Rhizobium) that live in small modules in roots. Around the same time, it was also discovered that bacteria that live freely in soil, outside plant roots, also fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and boost nitrogen supply to soil.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document