Enlightenment and Pathology

Enlightenment and Pathology PDF Author: Anne C. Vila
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801858093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
If moods are as contagious as colds, and wickedness as debilitating as a bad diet, inquiries into assorted discourses in 18th-century France still have much to tell. Author Anne Vila shows that multiple junctures between the body and the mind promoted a steady commerce of speculation and discussion between science and the social salons of the time. 9 illustrations.

Enlightenment and Pathology

Enlightenment and Pathology PDF Author: Anne C. Vila
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801858093
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book

Book Description
If moods are as contagious as colds, and wickedness as debilitating as a bad diet, inquiries into assorted discourses in 18th-century France still have much to tell. Author Anne Vila shows that multiple junctures between the body and the mind promoted a steady commerce of speculation and discussion between science and the social salons of the time. 9 illustrations.

Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond

Anatomical Dissection in Enlightenment England and Beyond PDF Author: Piers Mitchell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131718145X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
Excavations of medical school and workhouse cemeteries undertaken in Britain in the last decade have unearthed fascinating new evidence for the way that bodies were dissected or autopsied in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This book brings together the latest discoveries by these biological anthropologists, alongside experts in the early history of pathology museums in British medical schools and the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and medical historians studying the social context of dissection and autopsy in the Georgian and Victorian periods. Together they reveal a previously unknown view of the practice of anatomical dissection and the role of museums in this period, in parallel with the attitudes of the general population to the study of human anatomy in the Enlightenment.

Medicine in the Enlightenment

Medicine in the Enlightenment PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 940120019X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
The interpretation of eighteenth-century medicine has been much contested. Some have view it as a wilderness of rationalism and arid theories between the Scientific Revolution and the astonishing changes of the nineteenth-century. Other scholars have emphasized the close and fruitful links between medicine and the Enlightenment, suggesting that medical advance was the very embodiment of the philosphes’ ideal of a practical science that would improve mankind’s lot and foster human happiness. In a series of essays covering Great Britain, France, Germany and other parts of Europe, noted historians debate these issues through detailed examinations of major aspects of eighteenth-century medicine and medical controversy, including such topics as the introduction of smallpox inoculation, the transformation of medical education, and the treatment of the insane. The essays as a whole suggest a positive reading of the transformations in eighteenth-century medicine, while stressing local diversity and uneven development.

Suffering Scholars

Suffering Scholars PDF Author: Anne C. Vila
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812249925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of the concept that answers the question "Who, or what, am I?" Gerald Izenberg contends that our most important identities, while historically conditioned, are rooted in permanent categories of human existence, such as sexuality, sociality, and labor. Book jacket.

Suffering Scholars

Suffering Scholars PDF Author: Anne C. Vila
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812294807
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon known as the "suffering scholar" reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon illustrated by the popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres, first published in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor and physical disorder was embraced with particular vigor there, as was the tendency to imbue intellectuals with an aura of otherness and detachment from the world. Intellectuals and artists were portrayed as peculiarly susceptible to altered states of health as well as psyche—the combination of mental intensity and somatic frailty proved both the privileges and the perils of knowledge-seeking and creative endeavor. In Suffering Scholars, Anne C. Vila focuses on the medical and literary dimensions of the cult of celebrity that developed around great intellectuals during the French Enlightenment. Beginning with Tissot's work, which launched a subgenre of health advice aimed specifically at scholars, she demonstrates how writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mme de Staël, responded to the "suffering scholar" syndrome and helped to shape it. She traces the ways in which this syndrome influenced the cultural perceptions of iconic personae such as the philosophe, the solitary genius, and the learned lady. By showing how crucial the so-called suffering scholar was to debates about the mind-body relation as well as to sex and sensibility, Vila sheds light on the consequences book-learning was thought to have on both the individual body and the body politic, not only in the eighteenth century but also into the decades following the Revolution.

The Scottish Enlightenment Abroad

The Scottish Enlightenment Abroad PDF Author: Janet Starkey
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004362134
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
In The Scottish Enlightenment Abroad, Janet Starkey examines the careers of Alexander and Patrick Russell and family in Aleppo and India. By re-examining recent interpretations, Starkey argues that the Scottish Enlightenment was a cultural revolution not just a philosophy.

Plasticity and Pathology

Plasticity and Pathology PDF Author: David Bates
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082326615X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
Two leading neuroscientists examine the current paradigm of the “neural subject” and what we can learn from neurological trauma, pathology, and adaption. With the rise of cognitive science and the revolution in neuroscience, the study of human subjects—thinking, feeling, acting individuals—ultimately focuses on the human brain. In both Europe and the United States, massive state-funded research is focused on mapping the brain in all its remarkable complexity. The metaphors employed are largely technological, using a diagram of synaptic connectivity as a path to understanding human behavior. But alongside this technologized discourse, we find another perspective, one that emphasizes the brain’s essential plasticity, both in development and as a response to traumas such as strokes, tumors, or gunshot wounds. This collection of essays brings together a diverse range of scholars to investigate how the “neural subject” of the twenty-first century came to be. Taking approaches both historical and theoretical, they probe the possibilities and limits of neuroscientific understandings of human experience. Topics include landmark studies in the history of neuroscience, the relationship between neural and technological “pathologies,” and analyses of contemporary concepts of plasticity and pathology in cognitive neuroscience. Central to the volume is a critical examination of the relationship between pathology and plasticity. Because pathology is often the occasion for neural reorganization and adaptation, it exists not in opposition to the brain’s “normal” operation but instead as something intimately connected to our ways of being and understanding.

A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity

A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity PDF Author: Jerry Toner
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474232981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The ancient world used the senses to express an enormous range of cultural meanings. Indeed the senses were functionally significant in all aspects of ancient life, often in ways that were complex and interconnected. Antiquity was also a period where the senses were experienced vividly: cities stank, statues were brightly painted and literature made full use of sensory imagery to create its effects. In a steeply hierarchical world, with vast differences between the landed wealthy, the poor and the slaves, the senses played a key role in establishing and maintaining boundaries between social groups; but the use of the senses in the ancient world was not static. New religions, such as Christianity, developed their own way of using the senses, acquiring unique forms of sensory-related symbolism in processes which were slow and often contested. The aim of this volume is to provide an overview of these structures and developments and to show how their study can yield a more nuanced understanding of the ancient world. A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

The Enlightenment

The Enlightenment PDF Author: John Robertson
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199591784
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
This introduction explores the history of the 18th-century Enlightenment movement. Considering its intellectual commitments, Robertson then turns to their impact on society, and the ways in which Enlightenment thinkers sought to further the goal of human betterment, by promoting economic improvement and civil and political justice.

The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century

The Medical Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century PDF Author: Andrew Cunningham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521382359
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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Book Description
A series of essays on the development of medicine in the century of the Enlightenment, illustrating the decline in the role of religion in medical thinking, and the increased use of reason.