This article outlines a number of new approaches in the history of medicine and medical humanities to the study of medical case histories from a genre-theoretical vantage point. Differentiating between morphological and structuralist concepts of genre, the essay proposes the investigation of similarities and differences among specific series of case histories in order to recover evolving, changing, or decaying patterns and practices in texts and communicative acts about human health during different historical epochs, including antiquity, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic and Victorian age. The article highlights the importance of narrative, and thinking in cases, supports the notion of “epistemic genres” and pays special attention to the distinction between example and exemplar. It discerns three interrelated functions of case histories: propaedeutic, instantiative, and singular. The study of case histories as genre helps to overcome disjunctions in the history of literature and medicine and enhances multidisciplinary research
Coleridge's Responses to German Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2012) by Monika Class ___________________________________________________________________________________________ And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, But, like a hawk encumber'd with his hood, Explaining metaphysics to the nation-I wish he would explain his Explanation. YRON'S JIBE AT COLERIDGE in the 'Dedication' to Don Juan doesn't explicitly mention the elder poet's debt to foreign thinking, but the fact that Coleridge attempts to explain metaphysics 'to the nation' certainly suggests
George Eliot predicates the two principal characters of her second novel, The Mill on the Floss (1860), not on fixed traits but on gendered differences in styles of body movement. This chapter approaches the interplay of medicine and mobility through the lens of the feminist phenomenology of perception, situating Eliot’s configuration of the gendered scripts of posture in the proto-orthopaedic discourse of Victorian disciplinary power. The comparison of the characters’ growth into manhood and womanhood showcases Tom Tulliver’s increasing compliance with correct masculine posture and his sister Maggie’s persistent tomboyism in adulthood. Monika Class contends that Eliot’s realist novel engages critically with Victorian postural standards and thus conveys the link of medical and moral norms in a vision towards variable, and even untamed, gender identities. Above all, the configuration of the heroine expands the Victorian repertoire of feminine body movement.
The article introduces "the visceral novel reader" as a diachronic, context-sensitive mode of novelistic reception, in which fact and fiction overlap cognitively: the mental rehearsal of the activity of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching while reading novels and, vice versa, the mental rehearsal of novels in the act of perceiving the real world. Located at the intersection of literature, medicine and science, "the visceral novel reader" enhances our understanding of the role that novels played in the dialectic construction of erudition in English. In Georgian Britain, reading practices became a testing ground for the professionalization of physicians, natural philosophers, and men of letters. While it was in the professionals' common interest to implement protocols that taught readers to separate body from mind, and fact from fiction, novels came to stand for "debased" (visceral) reading. Novels inverted these notions by means of medicalization (regimentation, somatization, and individuation) and contributed to the professional stratification of medicine and literature.
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