Charles Leslie and Allan Young (eds)
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520073173
- eISBN:
- 9780520910935
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520073173.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Medical Anthropology
Like its classic predecessor, Asian Medical Systems, this book expands the study of Asian medicine. These chapters ask how patients and practitioners know what they know—what evidence of disease or ...
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Like its classic predecessor, Asian Medical Systems, this book expands the study of Asian medicine. These chapters ask how patients and practitioners know what they know—what evidence of disease or health they consider convincing and what cultural traditions and symbols guide their thinking. Whether discussing Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, Ayurvedic clinical practice, or a variety of other subjects, the chapters offer a range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology. This book covers a variety of topics including Asian medicine, patients, practitioners, evidence of disease, medical anthropology, cultural traditions, Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, and Ayurvedic clinical practice.Less
Like its classic predecessor, Asian Medical Systems, this book expands the study of Asian medicine. These chapters ask how patients and practitioners know what they know—what evidence of disease or health they consider convincing and what cultural traditions and symbols guide their thinking. Whether discussing Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, Ayurvedic clinical practice, or a variety of other subjects, the chapters offer a range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology. This book covers a variety of topics including Asian medicine, patients, practitioners, evidence of disease, medical anthropology, cultural traditions, Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, and Ayurvedic clinical practice.
NEIL VICKERS
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199271177
- eISBN:
- 9780191709647
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199271177.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter offers a historical sketch of the state of practical and theoretical medicine in the 1790s. It starts by considering the range of practitioners offering medical treatments during the ...
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This chapter offers a historical sketch of the state of practical and theoretical medicine in the 1790s. It starts by considering the range of practitioners offering medical treatments during the eighteenth century and goes on to describe some important but often overlooked differences between our medicine and the medicine of Coleridge's time. It also discusses some of the ramifications of the main theoretical controversies in eighteenth-century medicine: the slow decline of the humoral pathology and rise of the view that disease – possibly all disease – is caused by disturbances in the nervous system; the materialist challenge to vitalism; and the attempt to refound medicine along essentialist philosophical lines.Less
This chapter offers a historical sketch of the state of practical and theoretical medicine in the 1790s. It starts by considering the range of practitioners offering medical treatments during the eighteenth century and goes on to describe some important but often overlooked differences between our medicine and the medicine of Coleridge's time. It also discusses some of the ramifications of the main theoretical controversies in eighteenth-century medicine: the slow decline of the humoral pathology and rise of the view that disease – possibly all disease – is caused by disturbances in the nervous system; the materialist challenge to vitalism; and the attempt to refound medicine along essentialist philosophical lines.
Stefan Ecks
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814724767
- eISBN:
- 9780814760307
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814724767.003.0002
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Medical Anthropology
This chapter discusses popular notions of health, with a focus on perceptions of how different drugs are digested and on the humoral balance between the “hot” belly and the “cool” mind. The first ...
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This chapter discusses popular notions of health, with a focus on perceptions of how different drugs are digested and on the humoral balance between the “hot” belly and the “cool” mind. The first principle of Bengali body concepts is that the belly is the somatic center of good health. For Bengalis, health depends on the proper alignment between the belly and the mind. In this alignment, the belly is a “hot” source of energy that needs to be controlled by the “cool” sovereignty of the mind. The opposition between “cool” mind and “hot” belly is based on a humoral worldview. Indian Ayurvedic humoralism is based not on four but on three humors (tridosha) called vata, pitta, and kapha. Pitta tends to be hot and kapha to be cold, while vata is in-between.Less
This chapter discusses popular notions of health, with a focus on perceptions of how different drugs are digested and on the humoral balance between the “hot” belly and the “cool” mind. The first principle of Bengali body concepts is that the belly is the somatic center of good health. For Bengalis, health depends on the proper alignment between the belly and the mind. In this alignment, the belly is a “hot” source of energy that needs to be controlled by the “cool” sovereignty of the mind. The opposition between “cool” mind and “hot” belly is based on a humoral worldview. Indian Ayurvedic humoralism is based not on four but on three humors (tridosha) called vata, pitta, and kapha. Pitta tends to be hot and kapha to be cold, while vata is in-between.
Charles Leslie and Allan Young
- Published in print:
- 1992
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520073173
- eISBN:
- 9780520910935
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520073173.003.0013
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Medical Anthropology
This chapter explores Islamic humoralism on the Malay Peninsula. Although Islam was successfully implanted in Malaya, and Islamic concepts are used by Malays to interpret and reinterpret empirical ...
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This chapter explores Islamic humoralism on the Malay Peninsula. Although Islam was successfully implanted in Malaya, and Islamic concepts are used by Malays to interpret and reinterpret empirical realities, the pre-Islamic aboriginal view of the workings of the cosmos, and the positive valence of coolness in the universe and its human microcosm, still fundamental to Malay thought, have radically altered the received theories of Islamic humoralism. Malaya proved a remarkably receptive soil for Islamic religion and medical theories. Their humoral theory provided Islamicized Malays with a new grammar with which to organize ideas about humanity and the universe. Medieval Greek-Arabic humoral theories concerning foods, medicines, and diseases whose etiology stems from the natural world appear in simplified but otherwise virtually unchanged form in contemporary rural Malaysia.Less
This chapter explores Islamic humoralism on the Malay Peninsula. Although Islam was successfully implanted in Malaya, and Islamic concepts are used by Malays to interpret and reinterpret empirical realities, the pre-Islamic aboriginal view of the workings of the cosmos, and the positive valence of coolness in the universe and its human microcosm, still fundamental to Malay thought, have radically altered the received theories of Islamic humoralism. Malaya proved a remarkably receptive soil for Islamic religion and medical theories. Their humoral theory provided Islamicized Malays with a new grammar with which to organize ideas about humanity and the universe. Medieval Greek-Arabic humoral theories concerning foods, medicines, and diseases whose etiology stems from the natural world appear in simplified but otherwise virtually unchanged form in contemporary rural Malaysia.
Sophie Chiari
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474442527
- eISBN:
- 9781474459709
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442527.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph ...
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While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.Less
While ecocritical approaches to literary texts receive more and more attention, climate-related issues remain fairly neglected, particularly in the field of Shakespeare studies. This monograph explores the importance of weather and changing skies in early modern England while acknowledging the fact that traditional representations and religious beliefs still fashioned people’s relations to meteorological phenomena. At the same time, a growing number of literati stood against determinism and defended free will, thereby insisting on man’s ability to act upon celestial forces. Yet, in doing so, they began to give precedence to a counter-intuitive approach to Nature. Sophie Chiari argues that Shakespeare reconciles the scholarly views of his time with more popular ideas rooted in superstition and that he promotes a sensitive, pragmatic understanding of climatic events. She pays particular attention to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Othello, King Lear, Anthony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest. Taking into account the influence of classical thought, each of the book’s seven chapters emphasises specific issues (e.g. cataclysmic disorders, the dog days’ influence, freezing temperatures, threatening storms) and considers the way climatic events were presented on stage and how they came to shape the production and reception of Shakespeare’s drama.
Mark S. Dawson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781526134486
- eISBN:
- 9781526146656
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7765/9781526134493
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
This book examines early modern English notions of bodily difference. Tracing how the English valued somatic contrasts, both amongst themselves and, as they ventured into and through the Atlantic, ...
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This book examines early modern English notions of bodily difference. Tracing how the English valued somatic contrasts, both amongst themselves and, as they ventured into and through the Atlantic, among non-Europeans, this book demonstrates that individuals’ distinctive features were thought to be innate, even as discrete populations were also believed to have fleshly characteristics in common – whether similarities in skin-tone, facial profile, hair colour, or demeanour. According to much scholarship, bodies thought to be constituted from the same four elemental fluids as Adam and Eve’s – the phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, and melancholic humours – were not the stuff of visceral inequality. On the contrary, this book finds that people routinely judged and were judged on sight; according to the ostensible balance, or complexion, of their humours. Belief in monogenesis and Christian universalism notwithstanding, people could be sorted on the basis of their looks, and assumptions made about their ancestry, present condition, and future behaviour. Complexions vouched for distinctions in social status, physical cum moral fitness, national allegiance, and religious affiliation. Humoralism inflected both social politics and international relations. If looking at people racially is to group them according to perceived physical contrasts – in the belief these contrasts mark innate, inherited variations in physical ability, mental agility, or moral aptitude – which simultaneously justify their prejudicial treatment relative to one’s own group, then this book demonstrates how and why racism was fitfully part of early modern English culture.Less
This book examines early modern English notions of bodily difference. Tracing how the English valued somatic contrasts, both amongst themselves and, as they ventured into and through the Atlantic, among non-Europeans, this book demonstrates that individuals’ distinctive features were thought to be innate, even as discrete populations were also believed to have fleshly characteristics in common – whether similarities in skin-tone, facial profile, hair colour, or demeanour. According to much scholarship, bodies thought to be constituted from the same four elemental fluids as Adam and Eve’s – the phlegmatic, sanguine, choleric, and melancholic humours – were not the stuff of visceral inequality. On the contrary, this book finds that people routinely judged and were judged on sight; according to the ostensible balance, or complexion, of their humours. Belief in monogenesis and Christian universalism notwithstanding, people could be sorted on the basis of their looks, and assumptions made about their ancestry, present condition, and future behaviour. Complexions vouched for distinctions in social status, physical cum moral fitness, national allegiance, and religious affiliation. Humoralism inflected both social politics and international relations. If looking at people racially is to group them according to perceived physical contrasts – in the belief these contrasts mark innate, inherited variations in physical ability, mental agility, or moral aptitude – which simultaneously justify their prejudicial treatment relative to one’s own group, then this book demonstrates how and why racism was fitfully part of early modern English culture.
Christine Jeanneret
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199654888
- eISBN:
- 9780191762871
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199654888.003.0007
- Subject:
- Psychology, Music Psychology, Social Psychology
Solo singing is associated with the expression of passions. During the first half of the 17th century, Rome saw an unparalleled production of cantatas, performed for exclusive audiences. This article ...
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Solo singing is associated with the expression of passions. During the first half of the 17th century, Rome saw an unparalleled production of cantatas, performed for exclusive audiences. This article focuses on the ambivalent play on gender and eroticism, when cantatas were sung by women as well as castrati, both perceived as highly erotic and also at times, threatening. A juxtaposition of contemporary testimonies of these performances with the medical theory of the humors shows that both are based on the idea of a perfect male body, a less perfect and womanish body of the castrato, and an even worse female body. Poems were written mostly by men and reflect the conventional tropes of the male gaze: the lover oscillates between hot and cold; he is consumed by the fire of passion and frozen by the unwavering and icy cruelty of his beloved. While we rightly read such changes of temperature as standardized extravagances of poetics, they are also deeply rooted in Early Modern scientific theories of the gendered body. Thus, the performance of cantatas toys with an ambivalent game of erotic expression of the affects, where the audience does not want to expose women publicly and yet wants to see them singing; where a woman might embody a male lover singing his lovesickness, and a castrato might embody a wretched female lamenting her fate. Performance was one part of sophisticated entertainments along with readings or improvisation of poetry, discourses on love, games of eloquence, and music.Less
Solo singing is associated with the expression of passions. During the first half of the 17th century, Rome saw an unparalleled production of cantatas, performed for exclusive audiences. This article focuses on the ambivalent play on gender and eroticism, when cantatas were sung by women as well as castrati, both perceived as highly erotic and also at times, threatening. A juxtaposition of contemporary testimonies of these performances with the medical theory of the humors shows that both are based on the idea of a perfect male body, a less perfect and womanish body of the castrato, and an even worse female body. Poems were written mostly by men and reflect the conventional tropes of the male gaze: the lover oscillates between hot and cold; he is consumed by the fire of passion and frozen by the unwavering and icy cruelty of his beloved. While we rightly read such changes of temperature as standardized extravagances of poetics, they are also deeply rooted in Early Modern scientific theories of the gendered body. Thus, the performance of cantatas toys with an ambivalent game of erotic expression of the affects, where the audience does not want to expose women publicly and yet wants to see them singing; where a woman might embody a male lover singing his lovesickness, and a castrato might embody a wretched female lamenting her fate. Performance was one part of sophisticated entertainments along with readings or improvisation of poetry, discourses on love, games of eloquence, and music.
Daniel Juan Gil
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823270286
- eISBN:
- 9780823270323
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823270286.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Gil argues that the classical discourse of the humors is a mistaken starting point for scholars who want to understand how early modern people experienced and understood their own emotional life, and ...
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Gil argues that the classical discourse of the humors is a mistaken starting point for scholars who want to understand how early modern people experienced and understood their own emotional life, and that religious beliefs, and especially beliefs about post-death resurrection, provide a better starting point for historical phenomenology. Beliefs about resurrection provided a context for how people experienced their emotions by endowing them with sociological meaningfulness. Belief in resurrection led people to theorize how (and to what extent) their embodied self is embedded in a contingent social world that affects and conditions all corporeal experiences (even seemingly spontaneous or ‘natural’ experience) and how (and to what extent) the embodied self could be imagined as separable from the contingent social world that it inhabits.Less
Gil argues that the classical discourse of the humors is a mistaken starting point for scholars who want to understand how early modern people experienced and understood their own emotional life, and that religious beliefs, and especially beliefs about post-death resurrection, provide a better starting point for historical phenomenology. Beliefs about resurrection provided a context for how people experienced their emotions by endowing them with sociological meaningfulness. Belief in resurrection led people to theorize how (and to what extent) their embodied self is embedded in a contingent social world that affects and conditions all corporeal experiences (even seemingly spontaneous or ‘natural’ experience) and how (and to what extent) the embodied self could be imagined as separable from the contingent social world that it inhabits.
Richard Meek and Erin Sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719090783
- eISBN:
- 9781781708866
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719090783.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary proliferation of theoretical ideas about the nature and meaning of emotion, and this introduction offers a survey of the ...
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Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary proliferation of theoretical ideas about the nature and meaning of emotion, and this introduction offers a survey of the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, intellectual and aesthetic traditions that helped shape this debate. It responds to previous work in the field that has focused primarily on medical humoralism and makes a case for a more pluralistic view of emotion in the period. Renaissance literary texts provide compelling evidence that emotions were not a passive phenomenon, acting upon people’s bodies, but an active, imaginative and philosophical process. Characters in early modern texts often express dissatisfaction with a purely medical understanding of emotion, looking instead to other complex systems of knowledge – including religion and philosophy, rhetorical and language theory, and drama and performance – to articulate and reflect upon their emotional experiences. The introduction thus proposes a rereading of emotional texts from this period with a more pluralistic model of affective experience in mind, paying greater attention to how individuals in this period interrogated, cultivated and performed emotional experience in active and often self-defining ways.Less
Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary proliferation of theoretical ideas about the nature and meaning of emotion, and this introduction offers a survey of the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, intellectual and aesthetic traditions that helped shape this debate. It responds to previous work in the field that has focused primarily on medical humoralism and makes a case for a more pluralistic view of emotion in the period. Renaissance literary texts provide compelling evidence that emotions were not a passive phenomenon, acting upon people’s bodies, but an active, imaginative and philosophical process. Characters in early modern texts often express dissatisfaction with a purely medical understanding of emotion, looking instead to other complex systems of knowledge – including religion and philosophy, rhetorical and language theory, and drama and performance – to articulate and reflect upon their emotional experiences. The introduction thus proposes a rereading of emotional texts from this period with a more pluralistic model of affective experience in mind, paying greater attention to how individuals in this period interrogated, cultivated and performed emotional experience in active and often self-defining ways.
Peter Holbrook
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719090783
- eISBN:
- 9781781708866
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719090783.003.0013
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
A potential danger with the humoral psychology of the Renaissance, which bears a rough analogy to physical-reductionist pictures of humanity today, is that it downplays the role of agency in human ...
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A potential danger with the humoral psychology of the Renaissance, which bears a rough analogy to physical-reductionist pictures of humanity today, is that it downplays the role of agency in human life, since one no more chooses one’s basic humour than one does one’s neurophysiology. The formidable influence and explanatory and rhetorical power of such physical accounts of humanity is not to be doubted. But we must hope to find other ways of talking about ourselves perhaps in religion, art, philosophy, perhaps in writers like Shakespeare? These would be ways of talking that enabled us to believe in and act upon our own collective and individual sense of agency.Less
A potential danger with the humoral psychology of the Renaissance, which bears a rough analogy to physical-reductionist pictures of humanity today, is that it downplays the role of agency in human life, since one no more chooses one’s basic humour than one does one’s neurophysiology. The formidable influence and explanatory and rhetorical power of such physical accounts of humanity is not to be doubted. But we must hope to find other ways of talking about ourselves perhaps in religion, art, philosophy, perhaps in writers like Shakespeare? These would be ways of talking that enabled us to believe in and act upon our own collective and individual sense of agency.
Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199678136
- eISBN:
- 9780191757686
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199678136.003.0010
- Subject:
- History, Social History
The book demonstrates that health maintenance occupied a neglected but important place in late Renaissance domestic culture. Contrary to ingrained assumptions this was also a highly dynamic set of ...
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The book demonstrates that health maintenance occupied a neglected but important place in late Renaissance domestic culture. Contrary to ingrained assumptions this was also a highly dynamic set of ideas: the hierarchy of the key six spheres of life (Non-Naturals) was redefined over the period and so were the recommendations concerning their management; moreover, the increasingly differentiated advice was articulated through a language that largely transcended the basic principles of humoral physiology. The study also moves away from a dyadic representation of the power relationship between patients and practitioners: change in health advice was largely socially driven and its dissemination provided patients with a sense of enhanced control over their health but reinforced at the same time the authority of physicians. The latter not only extended their advisory role from therapies to health management, but by introducing a plethora of increasingly complex distinctions in their recommendations they became the final arbiters of ‘healthiness’.Less
The book demonstrates that health maintenance occupied a neglected but important place in late Renaissance domestic culture. Contrary to ingrained assumptions this was also a highly dynamic set of ideas: the hierarchy of the key six spheres of life (Non-Naturals) was redefined over the period and so were the recommendations concerning their management; moreover, the increasingly differentiated advice was articulated through a language that largely transcended the basic principles of humoral physiology. The study also moves away from a dyadic representation of the power relationship between patients and practitioners: change in health advice was largely socially driven and its dissemination provided patients with a sense of enhanced control over their health but reinforced at the same time the authority of physicians. The latter not only extended their advisory role from therapies to health management, but by introducing a plethora of increasingly complex distinctions in their recommendations they became the final arbiters of ‘healthiness’.
Stefan Ecks
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814724767
- eISBN:
- 9780814760307
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814724767.003.0006
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Medical Anthropology
This concluding chapter returns to “mind food,” showing how psychiatrists are both trying to counter nonbiomedical notions of drug effects and the biomedical model of short-term targeted action ...
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This concluding chapter returns to “mind food,” showing how psychiatrists are both trying to counter nonbiomedical notions of drug effects and the biomedical model of short-term targeted action itself. “Mind food” after all echoes the popular centrality of digestion, so likening psychopharmaceuticals to food makes these drugs seem innocuous. These biomedical prescribers explain the action of psychopharmaceuticals as “mind food” and that they compare ill moods to a nutritional imbalance is deeply ironical if the paradigmatic opposition between specific etiology and humoralism in the history of medicine is considered. Calcutta doctors tend to evade explaining diagnoses and therapies when this causes resistance from patients, and there is no regulation that stands in their way. The chapter goes on to elaborate on the medical and ethical implications of these issues, highlighting the ongoing public anxieties regarding mind medications.Less
This concluding chapter returns to “mind food,” showing how psychiatrists are both trying to counter nonbiomedical notions of drug effects and the biomedical model of short-term targeted action itself. “Mind food” after all echoes the popular centrality of digestion, so likening psychopharmaceuticals to food makes these drugs seem innocuous. These biomedical prescribers explain the action of psychopharmaceuticals as “mind food” and that they compare ill moods to a nutritional imbalance is deeply ironical if the paradigmatic opposition between specific etiology and humoralism in the history of medicine is considered. Calcutta doctors tend to evade explaining diagnoses and therapies when this causes resistance from patients, and there is no regulation that stands in their way. The chapter goes on to elaborate on the medical and ethical implications of these issues, highlighting the ongoing public anxieties regarding mind medications.
Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226556451
- eISBN:
- 9780226556628
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226556628.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, History of Ideas
Chapter 9 opens with the triumph of this generation of medical intellectuals in setting some of the key terms and promises of integrationist medicine, then follows a complicated line of thinking that ...
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Chapter 9 opens with the triumph of this generation of medical intellectuals in setting some of the key terms and promises of integrationist medicine, then follows a complicated line of thinking that emerged in medical individualism which led to radical reappraisals of the doctor-patient relationship restated in socio-political and social-moral terms. Whereas a turn in the conceptualization of the human body as an integrated whole, able to respond to threats and sources of disequilibrium, might otherwise suggest a positive medical humanism, one variant was to treat medicine and the welfare state designed to support it as threats to the healing power of nature and “natural” ways of life. Thus some physicians and psychiatrists—often in conversation with other varieties of holism—pursued this rethinking of norms and the normal by attending to the doctor-patient relationship at the expense of broader forms of care, setting unreachable goals, or resorting to antipsychiatric, antimedical approaches to demonstrate the ostensible failure of medicine tout court. We explore the contest of therapeutics, medical systems, both allopathic and new age (as in Georg Groddeck, René Dubos, or Ivan Illich’s work), and the popularization of the concept of homeostasis as “stress” in the endocrinology of Hans Selye.Less
Chapter 9 opens with the triumph of this generation of medical intellectuals in setting some of the key terms and promises of integrationist medicine, then follows a complicated line of thinking that emerged in medical individualism which led to radical reappraisals of the doctor-patient relationship restated in socio-political and social-moral terms. Whereas a turn in the conceptualization of the human body as an integrated whole, able to respond to threats and sources of disequilibrium, might otherwise suggest a positive medical humanism, one variant was to treat medicine and the welfare state designed to support it as threats to the healing power of nature and “natural” ways of life. Thus some physicians and psychiatrists—often in conversation with other varieties of holism—pursued this rethinking of norms and the normal by attending to the doctor-patient relationship at the expense of broader forms of care, setting unreachable goals, or resorting to antipsychiatric, antimedical approaches to demonstrate the ostensible failure of medicine tout court. We explore the contest of therapeutics, medical systems, both allopathic and new age (as in Georg Groddeck, René Dubos, or Ivan Illich’s work), and the popularization of the concept of homeostasis as “stress” in the endocrinology of Hans Selye.
Olivia Weisser
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780300200706
- eISBN:
- 9780300213478
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Yale University Press
- DOI:
- 10.12987/yale/9780300200706.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History
This chapter opens with an overview of how ordinary sufferers understood their bodies, explained illness onset, and approached treatment in early modern England. The remainder of the chapter links ...
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This chapter opens with an overview of how ordinary sufferers understood their bodies, explained illness onset, and approached treatment in early modern England. The remainder of the chapter links patients and practitioners in an exploration of medical cases. While seventeenth-century medical writing provides abundant information about diagnoses, symptoms, and cures, it offers few insights into the social practices of treatment. Using over 40 medical texts, the discussion eases open the door to the sickroom to recover the exchanges between patients and practitioners and the extent to which gender shaped those interactions. The chapter offers two ways to recover this information. First, a close study of healers’ intentions and writing practices reveals how patients’ words could be critical to defining treatment and yet concealed and distorted by healers’ own concerns about authority. Second, patients’ bodily behaviors could communicate important information, thereby offering another path to recovering the influences of gender on patient-healer interactions. Such behavioral exchanges exist in the negative spaces of healers’ writings, in the background to aspects of the encounter that practitioners were eager to highlight.Less
This chapter opens with an overview of how ordinary sufferers understood their bodies, explained illness onset, and approached treatment in early modern England. The remainder of the chapter links patients and practitioners in an exploration of medical cases. While seventeenth-century medical writing provides abundant information about diagnoses, symptoms, and cures, it offers few insights into the social practices of treatment. Using over 40 medical texts, the discussion eases open the door to the sickroom to recover the exchanges between patients and practitioners and the extent to which gender shaped those interactions. The chapter offers two ways to recover this information. First, a close study of healers’ intentions and writing practices reveals how patients’ words could be critical to defining treatment and yet concealed and distorted by healers’ own concerns about authority. Second, patients’ bodily behaviors could communicate important information, thereby offering another path to recovering the influences of gender on patient-healer interactions. Such behavioral exchanges exist in the negative spaces of healers’ writings, in the background to aspects of the encounter that practitioners were eager to highlight.
Gail Kern Paster
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226648477
- eISBN:
- 9780226648484
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226648484.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Extremes of emotion correlate with extremes of temperature. And within these extremes, the doctrine of female coldness imposes itself as a behavioral norm—an ostensible natural limit—governing the ...
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Extremes of emotion correlate with extremes of temperature. And within these extremes, the doctrine of female coldness imposes itself as a behavioral norm—an ostensible natural limit—governing the appropriateness of affectivity in female characters not only under a given set of dramatic or social circumstances but as a matter of overall obedience to the thermal paradigms of nature. Thus, the social intention deeply, if obscurely, imbricated in the thermal economy not only grants affective privilege to men over women, but it also works to dampen the emotional expressiveness and claim to individuality theoretically granted to women as a whole. This chapter explores how such bodily phenomena as humor, spirit, and temper become performative of versions of femaleness even in contexts where, to us, discourses of sexual difference and the body itself seem barely to be in play. This chapter shows the discourse of female humoralism at work by contrasting selected representations of female melancholy and female rage, mostly, but not exclusively, in three of William Shakespeare's plays: As You Like It, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew.Less
Extremes of emotion correlate with extremes of temperature. And within these extremes, the doctrine of female coldness imposes itself as a behavioral norm—an ostensible natural limit—governing the appropriateness of affectivity in female characters not only under a given set of dramatic or social circumstances but as a matter of overall obedience to the thermal paradigms of nature. Thus, the social intention deeply, if obscurely, imbricated in the thermal economy not only grants affective privilege to men over women, but it also works to dampen the emotional expressiveness and claim to individuality theoretically granted to women as a whole. This chapter explores how such bodily phenomena as humor, spirit, and temper become performative of versions of femaleness even in contexts where, to us, discourses of sexual difference and the body itself seem barely to be in play. This chapter shows the discourse of female humoralism at work by contrasting selected representations of female melancholy and female rage, mostly, but not exclusively, in three of William Shakespeare's plays: As You Like It, Othello, and The Taming of the Shrew.
Erin Sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198739654
- eISBN:
- 9780191802614
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198739654.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History, Social History
This chapter focuses on grief and sorrow arising from worldly misfortunes and the deeply negative effects many writers believed it could have on a person’s health—a conviction reflected most ...
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This chapter focuses on grief and sorrow arising from worldly misfortunes and the deeply negative effects many writers believed it could have on a person’s health—a conviction reflected most powerfully in the London Bills of Mortality. While much of the work in the field has read such passion within the context of deeply embodied Galenic humoralism, the chapter argues for a more pluralistic view, highlighting the interplay of holism and dualism in the period. It examines how several Renaissance plays, including Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, Ford’s The Broken Heart, and Shakespeare’s Richard II, King John, and King Lear, questioned the wisdom of restraining ‘beastly’ passion and even suggested that grief might not always be as deeply connected to involuntary physiology as often thought. Instead, they positioned it as a form of wilful and rational desire in the intellective soul, and a powerful agent of self-knowledge and change.Less
This chapter focuses on grief and sorrow arising from worldly misfortunes and the deeply negative effects many writers believed it could have on a person’s health—a conviction reflected most powerfully in the London Bills of Mortality. While much of the work in the field has read such passion within the context of deeply embodied Galenic humoralism, the chapter argues for a more pluralistic view, highlighting the interplay of holism and dualism in the period. It examines how several Renaissance plays, including Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, Ford’s The Broken Heart, and Shakespeare’s Richard II, King John, and King Lear, questioned the wisdom of restraining ‘beastly’ passion and even suggested that grief might not always be as deeply connected to involuntary physiology as often thought. Instead, they positioned it as a form of wilful and rational desire in the intellective soul, and a powerful agent of self-knowledge and change.
Erin Sullivan
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198739654
- eISBN:
- 9780191802614
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198739654.003.0007
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History, Social History
The book concludes with a consideration of how deeply embedded sadness was in Renaissance medical, philosophical, and theological conceptions of selfhood, and also points to the relevance of such ...
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The book concludes with a consideration of how deeply embedded sadness was in Renaissance medical, philosophical, and theological conceptions of selfhood, and also points to the relevance of such issues today. Reflecting on the trend in early modern literary studies to read most representations of passion as articulations of humoral materialism, it argues for greater emotional pluralism in the period and for an understanding of Renaissance sadness that stretches beyond melancholy. While all affective experience offered opportunities for self-definition, it suggests that sadness was especially and even exceptionally generative of self-identity given its intensely contradictory valuation in medico-philosophical and religious writings. In this sense it was among the most powerfully self-revelatory emotions of the period, enabling forms of emotive improvisation that recognized, reconfigured, and also refuted cultural expectations about the nature of passion and its place in human life.Less
The book concludes with a consideration of how deeply embedded sadness was in Renaissance medical, philosophical, and theological conceptions of selfhood, and also points to the relevance of such issues today. Reflecting on the trend in early modern literary studies to read most representations of passion as articulations of humoral materialism, it argues for greater emotional pluralism in the period and for an understanding of Renaissance sadness that stretches beyond melancholy. While all affective experience offered opportunities for self-definition, it suggests that sadness was especially and even exceptionally generative of self-identity given its intensely contradictory valuation in medico-philosophical and religious writings. In this sense it was among the most powerfully self-revelatory emotions of the period, enabling forms of emotive improvisation that recognized, reconfigured, and also refuted cultural expectations about the nature of passion and its place in human life.
Benjamin Kahan
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226607818
- eISBN:
- 9780226608006
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226608006.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter argues that in spite of the dominance of the dynamic, humoral theory of the body for thousands of years scholars still have little understanding of what role humoralism plays in the ...
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This chapter argues that in spite of the dominance of the dynamic, humoral theory of the body for thousands of years scholars still have little understanding of what role humoralism plays in the invention of the homo/hetero binary. To this end, this chapter reads across a range of sexological writing encompassing Richard Burton’s climate-based Sotadic Zone, Havelock Ellis’s observation of a “special proclivity” for homosexuality in the “hotter regions of the globe,” and Victor Segalen’s claim that there is “not much Arctic Eroticism” to explore climate as the aspect of the permeable, humoral body with the longest afterlife. It argues that an examination of what Iwan Bloch calls “Anthropologia Sexualis” will highlight the meanings of the shift from the humoral body to a germ theory of the body for the construction of sexuality. Reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) as a text that roots homosexuality in the competing epidemiological regimes of anthropologia sexualis’s humoralism and scientia sexualis’s germ theory, this chapter reads Mann’s novella as providing a key switch point for understanding the divestment of sexuality in humoralism. Moreover, this chapter suggests that Mann's text provides rich models for theorizing sexuality as simultaneously climatic and microbial.Less
This chapter argues that in spite of the dominance of the dynamic, humoral theory of the body for thousands of years scholars still have little understanding of what role humoralism plays in the invention of the homo/hetero binary. To this end, this chapter reads across a range of sexological writing encompassing Richard Burton’s climate-based Sotadic Zone, Havelock Ellis’s observation of a “special proclivity” for homosexuality in the “hotter regions of the globe,” and Victor Segalen’s claim that there is “not much Arctic Eroticism” to explore climate as the aspect of the permeable, humoral body with the longest afterlife. It argues that an examination of what Iwan Bloch calls “Anthropologia Sexualis” will highlight the meanings of the shift from the humoral body to a germ theory of the body for the construction of sexuality. Reading Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) as a text that roots homosexuality in the competing epidemiological regimes of anthropologia sexualis’s humoralism and scientia sexualis’s germ theory, this chapter reads Mann’s novella as providing a key switch point for understanding the divestment of sexuality in humoralism. Moreover, this chapter suggests that Mann's text provides rich models for theorizing sexuality as simultaneously climatic and microbial.
Sophie Chiari
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474442527
- eISBN:
- 9781474459709
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442527.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
Torn as they were between trying to control their own destinies and letting God shape their actions, the Elizabethan and Jacobean subjects still looked for answers in the skies while they were also ...
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Torn as they were between trying to control their own destinies and letting God shape their actions, the Elizabethan and Jacobean subjects still looked for answers in the skies while they were also anxious to fashion their own lives in more coherent or rational ways than before. This Introduction gives clear definitions of the concepts used in the book (‘climate’, ‘weather’, ‘environment’) and presents the various approaches to weather and climate that prevailed at the turn of the seventeenth century. It also explains how early modern writers capitalised on both traditional and innovative views of the sky and emphasises both the influence of classical thought and the harsh realities of what is now known as the ‘Little Ice Age’. It finally introduces weather issues in connection with early modern drama and shows that the Shakespearean skies, in particular, are much more than a mere reservoir of metaphors.Less
Torn as they were between trying to control their own destinies and letting God shape their actions, the Elizabethan and Jacobean subjects still looked for answers in the skies while they were also anxious to fashion their own lives in more coherent or rational ways than before. This Introduction gives clear definitions of the concepts used in the book (‘climate’, ‘weather’, ‘environment’) and presents the various approaches to weather and climate that prevailed at the turn of the seventeenth century. It also explains how early modern writers capitalised on both traditional and innovative views of the sky and emphasises both the influence of classical thought and the harsh realities of what is now known as the ‘Little Ice Age’. It finally introduces weather issues in connection with early modern drama and shows that the Shakespearean skies, in particular, are much more than a mere reservoir of metaphors.
