Progress and Pathology - (Social Histories of Medicine) by Sally Shuttleworth & Melissa Dickson & Emilie Taylor-Brown (Hardcover)
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This book examines the correlations being drawn between notions of progress and pathology across a range of socio-economic cultures in the long nineteenth century.Book Synopsis
This volume explores changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the nineteenth century. With case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China and the South Pacific, it demonstrates how popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were reframed by the social, cultural and political structures of 'modern life'.
Chapters in the collection examine ways in which cancer, suicide and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of 'new' ways of living. Others explore the legal, institutional and intellectual changes that contributed to modern medical practice. The volume traces how physiological and psychological problems were constituted in relation to each other and to their social contexts, offering new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century. This book is relevant to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3, 'Good health and well-being'.From the Back Cover
Conditions such as stress, burnout, overwork, and fatigue are central preoccupations of our era; however, they have a longer history that give depth to contemporary debates. Similar problems were diagnosed in the nineteenth century, as popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were challenged and reframed by the politics and structures of 'modern life'. Engaging with current scholarship on childhood, consumer culture, disability studies, and the history of medicine, science, and technology, this collaborative volume explores how emotional and physical ailments of the nineteenth century were often understood as uniquely 'modern'.
Sally Shuttleworth, Melissa Dickson, and Emilie Taylor-Brown gather work by leading international scholars to explore changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the nineteenth century. Case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China, and the South Pacific demonstrate that a multiplicity of medical practices were organised around new and evolving definitions of the modern self. Essays within the collection examine the ways in which cancer, suicide, and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of 'new' ways of living. Others explore the legal, institutional, and intellectual changes that contributed to both positive and negative understandings of modern medical practice. Ultimately, the volume's integrative and holistic approach to notions of disease disrupts the frequent compartmentalisation of psychiatric, environmental, and literary histories in present practice to offer new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.About the Author
Melissa Dickson is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham, and was formerly a Postdoctoral researcher on the Diseases of Modern Life project at St Anne's College, Oxford
Emilie Taylor-Brown is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the Diseases of Modern Life project at St Anne's College, Oxford Sally Shuttleworth is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford
