FRAMING AND IMAGINING DISEASE IN CULTURAL HISTORY; ED. BY GEORGE SEBASTIAN ROUSSEAU

Throughout human history illness has been socially interpreted before its range of meanings could be understood and disseminated. Writers of diverse types have been as active in constructing these meanings as doctors, yet it is only recently that literary traditions have been recognized as a rich archive for these interpretations. These essays focus on the methodological hurdles encountered in retrieving these interpretations, called 'framing' by the authors. Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History aims to explain what has been said about these interpretations and to compare their value. Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction....Pages 1-48 Front Matter....Pages 49-49 Within the Frame: Self-Starvation and the Making of Culture....Pages 51-67 A Culture of Disfigurement: Imagining Smallpox in the Long Eighteenth Century....Pages 68-91 ‘This Pestilence Which Walketh in Darkness’: Reconceptualizing the 1832 New York Cholera Epidemic....Pages 92-110 Mapping Colonial Disease: Victorian Medical Cartography in British India....Pages 111-128 Framing the ‘Magic Mountain Malady’: the Reception of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in the Medical Community, 1924–2000....Pages 129-150 Front Matter....Pages 151-151 A Little Bit Mad/Almost Mad/Not Quite Mad? Eccentricity and the Framing of Mental Illness in Nineteenth-Century French Culture....Pages 153-172 Retrospective Medicine, Hypnosis, Hysteria and French Literature, 1875–1895....Pages 173-189 From Private Asylum to University Clinic: Hungarian Psychiatry, 1850–1908....Pages 190-211 Front Matter....Pages 213-213 Patients and Words: a Lay Medical Culture?....Pages 215-230 Framing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Gut: Genius, Digestion, Hypochondria....Pages 231-265 Front Matter....Pages 267-267 Paradoxical Diseases in the Late Renaissance: the Cases of Syphilis and Plague....Pages 269-284 ‘Proved on the Pulses’: Heart Disease in Victorian Culture, 1830–1860....Pages 285-302 Tropenkoller: the Interdiscursive Career of a German Colonial Syndrome....Pages 303-320 Back Matter....Pages 321-329 Sooner or later most of us enter the kingdom of illness. Yet few understand how we translate ourselves into patients and what stories we tell ourselves about our body's maladies. Even if we knew, we harbour little sense of how we compare to the patients of the past, our doctors with theirs. In this book fourteen eminent cultural historians explore this hinterland between health and sickness, reality and fiction. Building on the work of Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault, Sander Gilman, and Roy Porter, they roam over five centuries and many countries to understand how doctors and patients constructed themselves. Included are such canonical figures as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Mann, great English novelists, as well as dozens of minor figures - including patients and doctors - whose experiences and contributions to the debate have not yet been explored. Figures bordering on madness are probed, the hypnotized and drugged scrutinized, often in relation to their fantasy life, dreams and mesmeric states. And epidemics like cholera and tuberculosis are treated as living - almost breathing - cultural organisms. The authors conclude that the human understanding of illness always requires framing. That is, setting it within boundaries and borders: in the context of society's pressures, politic's demands, around the perimeter of language, narrative, and literary form "Throughout human history illness has been socially interpreted before its range of meanings could be understood and disseminated. Writers of diverse types have been as active in constructing these meanings as doctors, yet it is only recently that literary traditions have been recognized as a rich archive for these interpretations. These essays focus on the methodological hurdles encountered in retrieving these interpretations, called "framing" by the authors. Framing and Imagining Disease aims to explain what has been said about these interpretations and to compare their value."--pub. desc 1. Introduction / George Sebastian Rousseau -- 2. Within The Frame: Self-starvation And The Making Of Culture / Caterina Albano -- 3. A Culture Of Disfigurement: Imagining Smallpox In The Long Eighteenth Century / David Shuttleton -- 4. 'this Pestilence Which Walketh In Darkness': Reconceptualizing The 1832 New York Cholera Epidemic / Jane Weiss. Edited By George Sebastian Rousseau, With Miranda Gill, David Haycock, Malte Herwig. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.