Medicine And Modernism

An in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and the relationship between language and the brain broke new ground.

This vanguard collection of original and in-depth essays explores the intricate interplay of the aesthetic and psychological domains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers the reasons why a common Modernist project took shape when and in the circumstances that it did. These changes occurred precisely when the distinctively modern disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis established their "scientific” foundations and achieved the forms in which we largely know them today. This volume examines the dense web of connections joining the aesthetic and psychological realms in the modern era, charting historically the emergence of the ongoing modern discussion surrounding such issues as identity-formation, sexuality, and the unconscious. The contributors form a distinguished and diversified group of scholars, who write about a wide range of cultural fields, including philosophy, the novel and poetry, drama, dance, film and photography, as well as medicine, psychology, and the occult sciences.

An opportunity for medical sociology to establish a voice in the key debates in social science today: modernity, postmodernity, structuralism and poststructuralism. Essential reading for students of the sociology of medicine, health and illness.

"Crawford's book, which is richly informative & unfailingly interesting & readable, makes a substantial & theoretically sophisticated contribution to scholarship."--AMERICAN LITERATURE.

T. S. Eliot memorably said that separation of the man who suffers from the mind that creates is the root of good poetry. This book argues that this is wrong. Beginning from Virginia Woolf's 'On Being Ill', it demonstrates that modernism is, on the contrary, invested in physical illness as a subject, method, and stylizing force. Experience of physical ailments, from the fleeting to the fatal, the familiar to the unusual, structures the writing of the modernists, both as sufferers and onlookers. Illness reorients the relation to, and appearance of, the world, making it appear newly strange; it determines the character of human interactions and models of behaviour. As a topic, illness requires new ways of writing and thinking, altered ideas of the subject, and a re-examination of the roles of invalids and carers. This book reads the work five authors, who are also known for their illness, hypochondria, or medical work: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby. It overturns the assumption that illness is a simple obstacle to creativity and instead argues that it is a subject of careful thought and cultural significance.

This volume presents the first scholarly assessment of the interconnections between war, medicine, society and modernity. Covering the period 1870 to 1945, this work emphasises the effects of warfare on the development of the modern world.

"Of all the modernist poets, William Carlos Williams is unique in that his training as a physician and his lifetime of medical practice made him especially conversant in the language of medical science, at a time when medical education was being reformed along more scientific lines and the physician's everyday experience was being transformed by technological innovations." "Using Williams's poetry as a focal point, T. Hugh Crawford examines the relations between the rise of modernism and the history of medical science, medical education in America, and the cultural authority of scientific discourse. The main argument of Modernism, Medicine, and William Carlos Williams is that clarity and cleanliness function as organizing concepts in Williams's writing, in medical texts, and in the discourse of modernism in general. By examining Williams's poems, fiction, and essays, Crawford shows how the poet's ideas were imbued with the perspectives of early twentieth-century science and how he was able to gain authority to speak as a poet by appealing to powerful technoscientific discursive practices." "As science and technology came to occupy different positions of power in the middle twentieth century than they had earlier, so too did Williams's writings shift. Williams came increasingly to question the assumptions of modernist medicine and science, to the point where he participated in (and in some ways anticipated) today's critique of Enlightenment science. In other words, he made the leap from modernism to postmodernism, a change seen most clearly in his epic poem Paterson." "Crawford's thought-provoking study reveals the conflicts inherent in Williams's ideas and poetic practice, finding parallels between those conflicts and developing problems in American medical education as well as the changing role of scientific authority in American culture. Fifteen illustrations accompany the text."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A collection of essays on fundamental issues in the history of medicine in modern Germany.