Electronic reproduction. Basingstoke, England : Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Mode of access:World Wide Web. System requirements: Web browser. Title from title screen (viewed on July 14, 2010). Access may be restricted to users at subscribing institutions
Citizens of the modern era found themselves singularly prone to nervous disorders, while at the same historical moment the nervous system became a privileged model for describing the organization of political and social spheres. Neurology and Modernity describes and explores this intriguing coincidence, uncovering the centrality of neurological ideasof health, disease, and experience withinthe medical treatises, popular advice manuals, science fiction, literary fiction, spiritualist tracts, philosophy, government reports and military tribunals of the period1800-1950. This volume tracesand illuminates the cultural ideas and anxieties that informed representations of the nervous body,whilst showing how many of the most distinctive features of the period known as modernity seem to vibrate in sympathy with neurology's central concerns. The thirteen new studies in this volume untangle the significant mutualdependencies between scientific neurology and the cultural attitudes of theperiod, exploring how and why modernity remained such a fundamentally nervous state
Beyond the Brain: Sceptical and Satirical Responses to Gall's Organology / M.K.House -- Neurology and the Invention of Menstruation / A.Shail -- Carlyle's Nervous Dyspepsia: Nervousness, Indigestion and the Experience of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain / H.Ishizuka -- Railway Spine, Nervous Excess, and the Forensic Self / J.F.Thrailkill -- 'The Conviction of its Existence:' Silas Weir Mitchell, Phantom Limbs andPhantom Bodies in Neurology and Spiritualism / A.Satz -- Modernism andthe Two Paranoias: The Neurology of Persecution / G.Rousseau -- 'Nerve-Vibration': Therapeutic Technologies in the 1880s and 1890s / S.Trower-- From Daniel Paul Schreber through the Dr. Phil Family: Modernity, Neurology and the Cult of the Case Study Superstar / M.A.Tata -- 'I guess I'm just nervous, then': Neuropathology and Edith Wharton's Exploration of Interior Geographies / V.Plock -- Sounds of Silence: Aphasiology and the Subject of Modernity / L.Salisbury -- Shell Shock as a Self-Inflicted Wound, 1915-1921 / J.Meyer -- Modernity and the Peristaltic Subject / J.Walton -- Matter for Thought: The Psychon in Neurology, Psychology and American Culture, 1927-1943 / M.Littlefield
Includes bibliographical references and index
"An exploration of the habits of the modern era beside cultural notions discovering brain function and the nervous system to be central to health and illness. It looks at debates within neurology and culture through neurological works, popular advice, and the appearance of neurological disorders within the aesthetic artefacts of modernity"--Provided by publisher
