Kirstie Blair
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199273942
- eISBN:
- 9780191706592
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199273942.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this ...
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This book considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to create affect. In the course of the nineteenth century, new medical investigations into the heart, along with the development of instruments such as the stethoscope, gave the pathological heart a strong presence in popular culture. As poets feared for their own hearts, their poetry embodied concerns about heartsickness in form as well as content. Concerns about the heart's status and its actions fed into the broader discourses of religion, gender, and nationalism, as well as medicine. These discourses are examined through close readings of works by Arnold, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and others.Less
This book considers why and how the heart became a vital image in Victorian poetry, and argues that the intense focus on heart imagery in many major Victorian poems highlights anxieties in this period about the ability of poetry to create affect. In the course of the nineteenth century, new medical investigations into the heart, along with the development of instruments such as the stethoscope, gave the pathological heart a strong presence in popular culture. As poets feared for their own hearts, their poetry embodied concerns about heartsickness in form as well as content. Concerns about the heart's status and its actions fed into the broader discourses of religion, gender, and nationalism, as well as medicine. These discourses are examined through close readings of works by Arnold, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and others.
Brittany Pladek
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942210
- eISBN:
- 9781789629972
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942210.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This introduction gives an overview of recent scholarship in Romanticism and the medical humanities. It argues that medical humanists are indebted to a Romantic belief that literature cures by making ...
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This introduction gives an overview of recent scholarship in Romanticism and the medical humanities. It argues that medical humanists are indebted to a Romantic belief that literature cures by making people whole again—what this book calls therapeutic holism. After critiquing therapeutic holism for its limiting assumptions about selfhood and literature’s powers, the introduction offers an alternative in palliative poetics, a model for literary therapy grounded in Romantic writers’ affinity to Georgian medical ethics. It shows how this focus on ethics reorients Romantic scholarship on literature and medicine, which has mostly restricted its definition of medicine to medical science. Finally, this introduction outlines the book’s six chapters: two introductory chapters on the intellectual history of therapeutic holism and four single-author illustrations of palliative poetics.Less
This introduction gives an overview of recent scholarship in Romanticism and the medical humanities. It argues that medical humanists are indebted to a Romantic belief that literature cures by making people whole again—what this book calls therapeutic holism. After critiquing therapeutic holism for its limiting assumptions about selfhood and literature’s powers, the introduction offers an alternative in palliative poetics, a model for literary therapy grounded in Romantic writers’ affinity to Georgian medical ethics. It shows how this focus on ethics reorients Romantic scholarship on literature and medicine, which has mostly restricted its definition of medicine to medical science. Finally, this introduction outlines the book’s six chapters: two introductory chapters on the intellectual history of therapeutic holism and four single-author illustrations of palliative poetics.
Nicole M. Piemonte
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780262037396
- eISBN:
- 9780262344968
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262037396.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Moral Philosophy
Chapter five includes a discussion of specific curricular interventions that can work toward getting students to think critically and to reflect deeply and broadly on what it means to be human. It ...
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Chapter five includes a discussion of specific curricular interventions that can work toward getting students to think critically and to reflect deeply and broadly on what it means to be human. It highlights pedagogical approaches that allow students to see that the “real” scientific facts of biological disease cannot be separated from the existential reality of illness and that human beings always already dwell within their lived experiences, even before science and medicine inscribe their particular, abstract truths onto the body. Through exposure to patients’ stories—whether through narratives or face-to-face encounters—reflective writing, dialogue, and quality mentorship, students might come to appreciate the lived experience of illness, to expand their moral imaginations, and to develop a more capacious sense of care that is grounded within a recognition of our shared humanness and potential for suffering. This kind of pedagogy does not result in a “professionalism” that can be measured, quantified, and assessed, but rather a way of being in the world—a posture of openness toward others, an ability to face uncertainty, and the capacity to extend care to all patients even when “nothing else can be done.”Less
Chapter five includes a discussion of specific curricular interventions that can work toward getting students to think critically and to reflect deeply and broadly on what it means to be human. It highlights pedagogical approaches that allow students to see that the “real” scientific facts of biological disease cannot be separated from the existential reality of illness and that human beings always already dwell within their lived experiences, even before science and medicine inscribe their particular, abstract truths onto the body. Through exposure to patients’ stories—whether through narratives or face-to-face encounters—reflective writing, dialogue, and quality mentorship, students might come to appreciate the lived experience of illness, to expand their moral imaginations, and to develop a more capacious sense of care that is grounded within a recognition of our shared humanness and potential for suffering. This kind of pedagogy does not result in a “professionalism” that can be measured, quantified, and assessed, but rather a way of being in the world—a posture of openness toward others, an ability to face uncertainty, and the capacity to extend care to all patients even when “nothing else can be done.”
Megan Coyer
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781474405607
- eISBN:
- 9781474405621
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474405607.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the ...
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In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim these previously neglected medico-literary figures. Situating their work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, the book advances our understanding of how the nineteenth-century periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas. In the case of Blackwood’s, it is argued that the magazine’s distinctive Romantic ideology and experimental form enabled the development of an overtly ‘literary’ and humanistic popular medical culture, which participated in a wider critique of liberal Whig ideology in post-Enlightenment Scotland.Less
In the early nineteenth century, Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical education and research in Britain. It also laid claim to a thriving periodical culture. Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press investigates how Romantic periodicals cultivated innovative literary forms, ideologies and discourses that reflected and shaped medical culture in the nineteenth century. It examines several medically-trained contributors to Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the most influential literary periodical of the time, and draws upon extensive archival and bibliographical research to reclaim these previously neglected medico-literary figures. Situating their work in relation to developments in medical and periodical culture, the book advances our understanding of how the nineteenth-century periodical press cross-fertilised medical and literary ideas. In the case of Blackwood’s, it is argued that the magazine’s distinctive Romantic ideology and experimental form enabled the development of an overtly ‘literary’ and humanistic popular medical culture, which participated in a wider critique of liberal Whig ideology in post-Enlightenment Scotland.
Birttany Pladek
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9781786942210
- eISBN:
- 9781789629972
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781786942210.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature can cure spiritual ills by making sufferers feel whole again. ...
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In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature can cure spiritual ills by making sufferers feel whole again. But this model oversimplifies the relationship between literature and pain, perpetuating a distorted picture of how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. The Poetics of Palliation documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley developed more complex, palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.Less
In the past twenty years, health humanists and scholars of literature and medicine have drawn on Romantic ideas to argue that literature can cure spiritual ills by making sufferers feel whole again. But this model oversimplifies the relationship between literature and pain, perpetuating a distorted picture of how Romantic writers thought literature addressed suffering. The Poetics of Palliation documents how writers like William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley developed more complex, palliative forms of literary medicine: therapies that stressed literature’s manifold relationship to pain and its power to sustain, comfort, and challenge even when cure was not possible. The book charts how Romantic writers developed these palliative poetics in conversation with their medical milieu. British medical ethics was first codified during the Romantic period. Its major writers, John Gregory and Thomas Percival, endorsed a palliative mandate to compensate for doctors’ limited curative powers. Similarly, Romantic writers sought palliative approaches when their work failed to achieve starker curative goals. The startling diversity of their results illustrates how palliation offers a more comprehensive metric for literary therapy than the curative traditions we have inherited from Romanticism.
Danielle Spencer
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- December 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197510766
- eISBN:
- 9780197510797
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780197510766.003.0010
- Subject:
- Psychology, Cognitive Psychology
This chapter returns to the narrative medicine methodology discussed in Chapter 2, elaborating upon the relationship between literature and medicine and proposing that metagnosis is the key to making ...
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This chapter returns to the narrative medicine methodology discussed in Chapter 2, elaborating upon the relationship between literature and medicine and proposing that metagnosis is the key to making a readerly/writerly diagnosis. As literary movements such as metafiction expose the fallacies and limitations of literary realism, metagnosis constructively exposes the representational practices of biomedicine. The confluence of metagnosis and metareferentiality is explored in the work of contemporary comedian Hannah Gadsby. In addition, the implications of metagnosis are shown to extend beyond the context of health and medicine to revelations concerning identity (e.g., Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance) and to the cultural discourse of identity writ large (e.g., Appiah, Haider, Zadie Smith). Understanding metagnosis as a revelation effecting a change in knowledge—and employing our blindsight to address the apparent binaries structuring our understanding—is integral to our understanding of ourselves and of identity itself as we move into an increasingly dynamic future.Less
This chapter returns to the narrative medicine methodology discussed in Chapter 2, elaborating upon the relationship between literature and medicine and proposing that metagnosis is the key to making a readerly/writerly diagnosis. As literary movements such as metafiction expose the fallacies and limitations of literary realism, metagnosis constructively exposes the representational practices of biomedicine. The confluence of metagnosis and metareferentiality is explored in the work of contemporary comedian Hannah Gadsby. In addition, the implications of metagnosis are shown to extend beyond the context of health and medicine to revelations concerning identity (e.g., Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance) and to the cultural discourse of identity writ large (e.g., Appiah, Haider, Zadie Smith). Understanding metagnosis as a revelation effecting a change in knowledge—and employing our blindsight to address the apparent binaries structuring our understanding—is integral to our understanding of ourselves and of identity itself as we move into an increasingly dynamic future.
Lucy Collins
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748696000
- eISBN:
- 9781474422284
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748696000.003.0017
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
In an essay entitled ‘Pathologies’ Jamie reflects on the role of the microscopic other in endangering human wellbeing and continuing life. This ‘inner natural world’ is both complex and contingent ...
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In an essay entitled ‘Pathologies’ Jamie reflects on the role of the microscopic other in endangering human wellbeing and continuing life. This ‘inner natural world’ is both complex and contingent however; developments at the interface between creativity and technology have for some time problematized the concept of the body as singularly ‘human’ in character. Jamie’s engagement with the intricacy of bodily experience and representation, in particular with notions of the ‘other within’, is explored in a new way in a short sequence of poems published as This Weird Estate in 2007. These poems were written in response to anatomical representations of the early 19th century, several of which relate specifically to reproductive disease; they consider this most proximate of encounters—that of the child in the womb with the body of the mother—as a site within which other forms of nature exert an invisible yet powerful force. This chapter situates these poems at the interface of the poet’s engagement with generational change and ecological responsibility.Less
In an essay entitled ‘Pathologies’ Jamie reflects on the role of the microscopic other in endangering human wellbeing and continuing life. This ‘inner natural world’ is both complex and contingent however; developments at the interface between creativity and technology have for some time problematized the concept of the body as singularly ‘human’ in character. Jamie’s engagement with the intricacy of bodily experience and representation, in particular with notions of the ‘other within’, is explored in a new way in a short sequence of poems published as This Weird Estate in 2007. These poems were written in response to anatomical representations of the early 19th century, several of which relate specifically to reproductive disease; they consider this most proximate of encounters—that of the child in the womb with the body of the mother—as a site within which other forms of nature exert an invisible yet powerful force. This chapter situates these poems at the interface of the poet’s engagement with generational change and ecological responsibility.