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This chapter talks about another great cultural fashion that hit Paris, one deeply steeped in the biomedical science of the day: a vogue for picturesque and satirical books called “physiologies.” It analyzes physiologies' cultural, social, and, above all, scientific settings — focusing on the journalistic or formal aesthetic qualities of the texts. The early physiological craze shows how conventions of medical writing had begun to influence general approaches to literary form and content. The chapter then examines the emergence of the physiological literary genre in the 1820s and 1830s, focusing upon four of the genre's defining works: Dr. Jean-Louis Alibert's La Physiologie des passions (1825), Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's La Physiologie du goût (1825–1826), Honoré de Balzac's La Physiologie du mariage (drafted in the 1820s, but published in 1830), and Dr. Morel de Rubempré's La Physiologie de la liberté (1830) — the last which appeared in the aftermath of the July Revolution. It focuses upon how these works emerged from techniques of analysis and narration found in physiological medicine, as authors and editors capitalized upon the successes (and scandals) associated with the new physiological science, as it emerged in the early 1800s, but also how these texts engaged particular political and ideological realities of the post-revolutionary decades.

This section briefly discusses the place of sixteenth century print medical texts written by authors who resided in colonial Mexico within the larger context of the study of Latin American letters. It stresses the need to maintain a distinction between presence and influence when assessing the significance of their texts within larger cultural traditions, both in the context of colonial writing and as outputs conditioned by the logic of scientific progress moving into the seventeenth century, which saw some of the most widely disseminated sources of the previous era slip into obscurity as new medical findings superseded earlier formulations. The conclusion remarks on the important role played by this group of radicado figures who authored the print medical books of early modern Mexico, considering how they articulated intellectual positions that both anticipated and differed from later criollo responses to colonial mechanisms for marginalisation and exclusion.

This chapter begins with discussing the Marquis de Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir. It argues that Sade used medicine for specific political and ideological reasons rooted in the revolutionary experience. While drawing upon several of Sade's pornographic works, the chapter focuses primarily upon his La Philosophie dans le boudoir. La Philosophie dans le boudoir belonged to his corpus of “clandestine” or pornographic works. Within the book, Sade expressed his moral, philosophical, and even political opinions with a clarity and conciseness rarely encountered in his other writings. The chapter then examines how the La Philosophie dans le boudoir helped usher in a new world of medical writing and subcultures following the Reign of Terror, connecting medicine and culture in the post-revolutionary moment. The chapter analyses how he took medical ideas about individual health and hygiene and used them to defend libertinism, as a form of philosophic freethinking and sexual free-living, in a project that bordered upon a medical apologia.

This chapter elaborates one of the first true medical fads to sweep the literary scene of post-revolutionary France: physiognomy, or as its practitioners called it, the art and science of seeing. With this term, the chapter shows how one could divine a person's thoughts, intentions, and inner character by studying comportment, gestures, and other physical ticks, especially those made by the human face. The chapter explains how historians have identified physiognomy as a critical link in the story of European racism. It captures ongoing concerns within physiognomic discourse, then describes why physiognomic writings swept such a wide breadth of French intellectual life after the Reign of Terror. The chapter explores the factors why physiognomy appealed to many different political, social, and intellectual figures in the post-revolutionary period. It highlights physiognomy's defining features: its ideological and philosophical malleability, then argues that physiognomy fit into the growing world of medical writing, genres, and subcultures in the post-revolutionary years.

On 26 April 1986, in the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl, reactor number four in an aging and poorly designed nuclear power plant blew up. Fire in the graphite moderators produced radioactive gases and aerosols that over the next ten days contaminated thirty-five hundred square miles. Illness today is often environmental illness. In recognizing the connections between illness and the environment reshaped by human enterprise, people can begin to recover something of the biocultural heritage that modernist medicine has mostly rejected or ignored in pursuing a science focused on the interior of the body. Medicine is still slow to recognize and to address the complicated environmental sources of contemporary illness. The wider, even global contexts of environmental damage and its links to public health have not found a place within biomedical curricula that focus attention on internal organs and on bodily systems.