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On Hysteria
Hysteria formed a medical category during the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries. By tracing its transformations, Sabine Arnaud reveals what was at stake in writing the diagnosis and adds to our understanding of how the role and status of medicine became established in society. In the process she uncovers new insights in the history of medicine. Focusing on a period largely ignored by scholarship, she shows that hysteria was not, in fact, first seen as female malady and that discussions of convulsions in a religious context made up only a very small part of writings on hysteria. Widely treated in medical contexts, hysteria was also a common reference in literature, public political debates, and even philosophy. With careful attention to genres and writing strategies, webs of citation, and circulation, Arnaud provides a history of medicine as a history of knowledge in the making, knowledge that did not build linearly but through misinterpretation, creative citation, and strategic deployment.
The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing
Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doctors' professional identities in postrevolutionary biomedicine. Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses. However, menopause owed much of its conceptual weft to earlier th...
Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy
A unique account of a peasant girl's mental illness in nineteenth-century France Hysteria Complicated by Ecstasy offers a rare window into the inner life of a person ordinarily inaccessible to historians: a semiliterate peasant girl who lived almost two centuries ago, in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Eighteen-year-old Nanette Leroux fell ill in 1822 with a variety of incapacitating nervous symptoms. Living near the spa at Aix-les-Bains, she became the charity patient of its medical director, Antoine Despine, who treated her with hydrotherapy and animal magnetism, as hypnosis was then called. Jan Goldstein translates, and provides a substantial introduction to, the previously unpubl...
Thinking About Tears
A crucial period for the birth of the modern subject, France's 'long eighteenth century' (approximately 1650-1820) was an era marked by the formulation of a new aesthetic and ethical code revolving around the intensification of emotions and the hyperbolic use of weeping. Precisely because tears are not a simple biological fact but rather hang suspended between natural immediacy, on one side, and cultural artifice, on the other, the analysis of crying came to represent an exemplary testing ground for investigations into the enigmatic relations binding the realm of physiology to that of psychology. Thinking About Tears explores how the link between tears and sensibility in France's long eighte...
The Hysteric
Examining historical, clinical and artistic material, in both written and visual form, this book traces the figure of the contemporary hysteric as she rebels against the impossible demands made upon her. Exploring five traits that commonly characterise the hysteric as an archetype – a specific body, mimetic abilities, a shroud of mystery, a propensity to disappear and a particular relationship to voice – the authors shed light on what it means to be hysterical, as a form of rebellion and resistance. This is important reading for scholars of sociology, gender studies, cultural studies and visual studies with interests in psychoanalysis, art and the characterisation of mental illness.
Natural Philosophy
Recovering the forgotten discipline of Natural Philosophy for the modern world This book argues for the retrieval of 'natural philosophy', a concept that faded into comparative obscurity as individual scientific disciplines became established and institutionalized. Natural philosophy was understood in the early modern period as a way of exploring the human relationship with the natural world, encompassing what would now be seen as the distinct disciplines of the natural sciences, mathematics, music, philosophy, and theology. The first part of the work represents a critical conversation with the tradition, identifying the essential characteristics of natural philosophy, particularly its empha...
Normality
Most of us think we know what is meant when we hear the term "normal," but Cryle and Stephens upend taken-for-granted attitudes about the term. They offer a history of the intellectual and cultural issues that have been at stake in the use of the term since it appeared around 1820. What is taken at one time or any one culture to be "aberrant" or "deviant" clearly depends on assumed meanings for norm and normality. The authors of this book explore this history--peppered with a fascinating series of case studies--to make sense of variations on the theme of identity (disability, gender, race, sexuality) in fields organized around identity. They locate the concept in the scientific spheres where...
The Labor of the Mind
How did educated and cultivated men in early modern France and Britain perceive and value their own and women's cognitive capacities, and how did women in their circles challenge those perceptions, if only by revaluing the kinds of intelligence attributed to them? What was thought to distinguish the "manly mind" from the feminine mind? How did awareness of these questions inform various kinds of published and unpublished texts, including the philosophical treatise, the dialogue, the polite essay, and the essay in literary criticism? The Labor of the Mind plumbs the social and cultural logic of the Enlightenment's trope of the manly mind; offers new readings of the textual representations of ...
Suffering Scholars
As early as Aristotle's Problem XXX, intellectual superiority has been linked to melancholy. The association between sickness and genius continued to be a topic for discussion in the work of early modern writers, most recognizably in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the phenomenon known as the "suffering scholar" reached its apotheosis, a phenomenon illustrated by the popularity of works such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's De la santé des gens de lettres, first published in 1768. Though hardly limited to French-speaking Europe, the link between mental endeavor and physical disorder was embraced with particular vigor there, as was the te...
Civilizing Emotions
Traces the history of the concepts of civility and civilization in nineteenth-century Europe and Asia and explores why and how emotions were an asset in civilizing peoples and societies - their control and management, but also their creation and their ascription to different societies and social groups.
