A Cultural History Of Medical Vitalism In Enlightenment Montpellier

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A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier

Elizabeth A. Williams
A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier Book PDF

Author : Elizabeth A. Williams
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 329 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2017-03-02
Category : History
ISBN : 9781351962568

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A Cultural History of Medical Vitalism in Enlightenment Montpellier by Elizabeth A. Williams Pdf

One of the key themes of the Enlightenment was the search for universal laws and truths that would help illuminate the workings of the universe. It is in such attitudes that we trace the origins of modern science and medicine. However, not all eighteenth century scientists and physicians believed that such universal laws could be found, particularly in relation to the differences between living and inanimate matter. From the 1740s physicians working in the University of Medicine of Montpellier began to contest Descartes's dualist concept of the body-machine that was being championed by leading Parisian medical 'mechanists'. In place of the body-machine perspective that sought laws universally valid for all phenomena, the vitalists postulated a distinction being living and other matter, offering a holistic understanding of the physical-moral relation in place of mind-body dualism. Their medicine was not based on mathematics and the unity of the sciences, but on observation of the individual patient and the harmonious activities of the 'body-economy'. Vitalists believed that Illness was a result of disharmony in this 'body-economy' which could only be remedied on an individual level depending on the patient's own 'natural' limitations. The limitations were established by a myriad of factors such as sex, class, age, temperament, region, and race, which negated the use of a single universal treatment for a particular ailment. Ultimately Montpelier medicine was eclipsed by that of Paris, a development linked to the dynamics of the Enlightenment as a movement bent on cultural centralisation, acquiring a reputation as a kind of anti-science of the exotic and the mad. Given the long-standing Paris-centrism of French cultural history, Montpellier vitalism has never been accorded the attention it deserves by historians. This study repairs that neglect.

Fiber, Medicine, and Culture in the British Enlightenment

Hisao Ishizuka
Fiber Medicine and Culture in the British Enlightenment Book PDF

Author : Hisao Ishizuka
Publisher : Springer
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2016-11-17
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781349932689

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Fiber, Medicine, and Culture in the British Enlightenment by Hisao Ishizuka Pdf

This book provides a full account of the concept of fiber and fiber theory in eighteenth-century British medicine. It explores the pivotal role fiber played as a defining, underlying concept in anatomy, physiology, pathology, therapeutics, psychology, and the life sciences. With the gradual demise of ancient humoralism, the solid fibers appeared on the medical scene both as the basic building unit of the body and as a dynamic agent of life. As such, fiber stands at the heart of eighteenth-century medicine, both iatromechanism and iatro-vitalism. Touching on the cultural aspects of fiber, the Baroque, and the culture of sensibility, this book also challenges the widely held assumption that the eighteenth century was the age of the nerve and instead offers an alternative model of fiber.

Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France

Mary McAlpin
Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France Book PDF

Author : Mary McAlpin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 229 pages
File Size : 41,5 Mb
Release : 2016-04-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781317135906

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Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France by Mary McAlpin Pdf

In her study of eighteenth-century literature and medical treatises, Mary McAlpin takes up the widespread belief among cultural philosophers of the French Enlightenment that society was gravely endangered by the effects of hyper-civilization. McAlpin's study explores a strong thread in this rhetoric of decline: the belief that premature puberty in young urban girls, supposedly brought on by their exposure to lascivious images, titillating novels, and lewd conversations, was the source of an increasing moral and physical degeneration. In how-to hygiene books intended for parents, the medical community declared that the only cure for this obviously involuntary departure from the "natural" path of sexual development was the increased surveillance of young girls. As these treatises by vitalist and vitalist-inspired physiologists became increasingly common in the 1760s, McAlpin shows, so, too, did the presence of young, vulnerable, and virginal heroines in the era's novels. Analyzing novels by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, and Choderlos de Laclos, she offers physiologically based readings of many of the period's most famous heroines within the context of an eighteenth-century discourse on women and heterosexual desire that broke with earlier periods in recasting female and male desire as qualitatively distinct. Her study persuasively argues that the Western view of women's sexuality as a mysterious, nebulous force-Freud's "dark continent"-has its secular origins in the mid-eighteenth century.

The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture

Ronnie Young,Ralph McLean,Kenneth Simpson
The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture Book PDF

Author : Ronnie Young,Ralph McLean,Kenneth Simpson
Publisher : Bucknell University Press
Page : 314 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2016-11-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781611488012

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The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture by Ronnie Young,Ralph McLean,Kenneth Simpson Pdf

This volume takes a fresh look at the literary culture of the Scottish Enlightenment and the wider impact of imaginative literature on Enlightenment culture in general. Covering key authors and work in areas as varied as philosophy, medicine, travel writing, religion, drama, history, publishing, and the periodical press, it provides scholars and students with a timely re-evaluation of the links between imaginative literature and the larger project of Enlightenment in Scotland and beyond.

Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind

George Makari
Soul Machine The Invention of the Modern Mind Book PDF

Author : George Makari
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 608 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2015-11-02
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 9780393248692

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Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind by George Makari Pdf

A brilliant and comprehensive history of the creation of the modern Western mind. Soul Machine takes us back to the origins of modernity, a time when a crisis in religious authority and the scientific revolution led to searching questions about the nature of human inner life. This is the story of how a new concept—the mind—emerged as a potential solution, one that was part soul and part machine, but fully neither. In this groundbreaking work, award-winning historian George Makari shows how writers, philosophers, physicians, and anatomists worked to construct notions of the mind as not an ethereal thing, but a natural one. From the ascent of Oliver Cromwell to the fall of Napoleon, seminal thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, and Kant worked alongside often-forgotten brain specialists, physiologists, and alienists in the hopes of mapping the inner world. Conducted in a cauldron of political turmoil, these frequently shocking, always embattled efforts would give rise to psychiatry, mind sciences such as phrenology, and radically new visions of the self. Further, they would be crucial to the establishment of secular ethics and political liberalism. Boldly original, wide-ranging, and brilliantly synthetic, Soul Machine gives us a masterful, new account of the making of the modern Western mind.

Provincializing Global History

James Livesey
Provincializing Global History Book PDF

Author : James Livesey
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 42,5 Mb
Release : 2020-01-07
Category : Languedoc (France)
ISBN : 9780300237160

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Provincializing Global History by James Livesey Pdf

A microhistory of eighteenth-century systemic change that places ordinary French lives alongside global advances Provincializing Global History explores the subtle transformation of the coastal province of the Languedoc in the eighteenth century. Mining a wealth of archival sources, James Livesey unveils how provincial elites and peasant households unwittingly created new practices. Managing local political institutions, establishing new credit systems, building networks of natural historians, and introducing new plants and farm machinery to the region opened up the inhabitants of the province to new norms and standards. The practices were gradually embedded in daily life and allowed the province to negotiate the new worlds of industrial society and capitalism.

A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment

Anne C. Vila
A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment Book PDF

Author : Anne C. Vila
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2014-10-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9781474233101

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A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment by Anne C. Vila Pdf

This volume examines the varied ways in which the senses were perceived afresh during the Enlightenment. In addition to introducing new philosophical and scientific models which sometimes upended the classic hierarchy of the senses, this period witnessed major changes in living and working habits, including urbanization, travel and exploration, the invention of new sonic and visual media, and the rise of comfort and pleasure as values that cut across a range of social classes. As this volume shows, those developments inspired a wealth of sensorially stimulating styles of design, art, music, poetry, foodstuffs, material goods and modes of worship and entertainment. The volume also demonstrates the period's countervailing concern with managing the senses, evident in fields like natural philosophy, medicine, education, religion, and public hygiene. Finally, it explores some of the Enlightenment's desensualizing tendencies, like the separation of sensuous body from discerning mind in certain arenas of science and manufacturing, and the late 18th-century shift away from a politics of publicity, or intense visual and aural scrutiny, toward the secret ballot. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment presents essays on the following topics: the social life of the senses; urban sensations; the senses in the marketplace; the senses in religion; the senses in philosophy and science; medicine and the senses; the senses in literature; art and the senses; and sensory media.

The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France

Mary McAlpin
The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France Book PDF

Author : Mary McAlpin
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2023-11-08
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781000842166

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The New Logic of Sexual Violence in Enlightenment France by Mary McAlpin Pdf

This book argues that rape as we know it was invented in the eighteenth century, examining texts as diverse as medical treatises, socio-political essays, and popular novels to demonstrate how cultural assumptions of gendered sexual desire erased rape by making a woman’s non-consent a logical impossibility. The Enlightenment promotion of human sexuality as natural and desirable required a secularized narrative for how sexual violence against women functioned. Novel biomedical and historical theories about the "natural" sex act worked to erase the concept of heterosexual rape. McAlpin intervenes in a far-ranging assortment of scholarly disciplines to survey and demonstrate how rape was rationalized: the history of medicine, the history of sexuality, the development of the modern self, the social contractarian tradition, the global eighteenth century, and the libertine tradition in the eighteenth-century novel. This intervention will be essential reading to students and scholars in gender studies, literature, cultural studies, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.

Bodily Fluids, Chemistry and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Boerhaave School

Ruben E. Verwaal
Bodily Fluids Chemistry and Medicine in the Eighteenth Century Boerhaave School Book PDF

Author : Ruben E. Verwaal
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 305 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2020-10-27
Category : Science
ISBN : 9783030515416

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Bodily Fluids, Chemistry and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Boerhaave School by Ruben E. Verwaal Pdf

This book explores the importance of bodily fluids to the development of medical knowledge in the eighteenth century. While the historiography has focused on the role of anatomy, this study shows that the chemical analyses of bodily fluids in the Dutch Republic radically altered perceptions of the body, propelling forwards a new system of medicine. It examines the new research methods and scientific instruments available at the turn of the eighteenth century that allowed for these developments, taken forward by Herman Boerhaave and his students. Each chapter focuses on a different bodily fluid – saliva, blood, urine, milk, sweat, semen – to investigate how doctors gained new insights into physiological processes through chemical experimentation on these bodily fluids. The book reveals how physicians moved from a humoral theory of medicine to new chemical and mechanical models for understanding the body in the early modern period. In doing so, it uncovers the lives and works of an important group of scientists which grew to become a European-wide community of physicians and chemists.

Sublime Dreams of Living Machines

Minsoo Kang
Sublime Dreams of Living Machines Book PDF

Author : Minsoo Kang
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 46,5 Mb
Release : 2011-02-28
Category : Science
ISBN : 9780674264908

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Sublime Dreams of Living Machines by Minsoo Kang Pdf

From the dawn of European civilization to the twentieth century, the automaton—better known today as the robot—has captured the Western imagination and provided a vital lens into the nature of humanity. Historian Minsoo Kang argues that to properly understand the human-as-machine and the human-as-fundamentally-different-from-machine, we must trace the origins of these ideas and examine how they were transformed by intellectual, cultural, and artistic appearances of the automaton throughout the history of the West. Kang tracks the first appearance of the automaton in ancient myths through the medieval and Renaissance periods, marks the proliferation of the automaton as a central intellectual concept in the Scientific Revolution and the subsequent backlash during the Enlightenment, and details appearances in Romantic literature and the introduction of the living machine in the Industrial Age. He concludes with a reflection on the destructive confrontation between humanity and machinery in the modern era and the reverberations of the humanity-machinery theme today. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines is an ambitious historical exploration and, at heart, an attempt to fully elucidate the rich and varied ways we have utilized our most uncanny creations to explore essential questions about ourselves.

Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture

Manon Mathias,Alison M. Moore
Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth Century Literature History and Culture Book PDF

Author : Manon Mathias,Alison M. Moore
Publisher : Springer
Page : 283 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2018-11-17
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783030018573

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Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth-Century Literature, History and Culture by Manon Mathias,Alison M. Moore Pdf

This book considers the historical and cultural origins of the gut-brain relationship now evidenced in numerous scientific research fields. Bringing together eleven scholars with wide interdisciplinary expertise, the volume examines literal and metaphorical digestion in different spheres of nineteenth-century life. Digestive health is examined in three sections in relation to science, politics and literature during the period, focusing on Northern America, Europe and Australia. Using diverse methodologies, the essays demonstrate that the long nineteenth century was an important moment in the Western understanding and perception of the gastroenterological system and its relation to the mind in the sense of cognition, mental wellbeing, and the emotions. This collection explores how medical breakthroughs are often historically preceded by intuitive models imagined throughout a range of cultural productions.

The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing

Alison M. Downham Moore
The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women s Ageing Book PDF

Author : Alison M. Downham Moore
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 501 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2022-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9780192654526

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The French Invention of Menopause and the Medicalisation of Women's Ageing by Alison M. Downham Moore Pdf

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 themes of women as the sicker sex, of vitalist crisis, of the vapours, and of astrological climacteric years. This is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the medical concept of menopause, richly contextualising its role in nineteenth-century French medicine and revealing the complex threads of meaning that informed its invention. It tells a complex story of how women's ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry. It reveals the nineteenth-century French origins of the still-current medical and alternative-health approaches to women's ageing as something to be managed through gynaecological surgery, hormonal replacement, and lifestyle intervention.

American Freethinker

Kirsten Fischer
American Freethinker Book PDF

Author : Kirsten Fischer
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2020-12-18
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812252712

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American Freethinker by Kirsten Fischer Pdf

The first comprehensive biography of Elihu Palmer tells the life story of a freethinker who was at the heart of the early United States' protracted contest over religious freedom and free speech. When the United States was new, a lapsed minister named Elihu Palmer shared with his fellow Americans the radical idea that virtue required no religious foundation. A better source for morality, he said, could be found in the natural world: the interconnected web of life that inspired compassion for all living things. Religions that deny these universal connections should be discarded, he insisted. For this, his Christian critics denounced him as a heretic whose ideas endangered the country. Although his publications and speaking tours made him one of the most infamous American freethinkers in his day, Elihu Palmer has been largely forgotten. No cache of his personal papers exists and his book has been long out of print. Yet his story merits telling, Kirsten Fischer argues, and not only for the dramatic account of a man who lost his eyesight before the age of thirty and still became a book author, newspaper editor, and itinerant public speaker. Even more intriguing is his encounter with a cosmology that envisioned the universe as interconnected, alive with sensation, and everywhere infused with a divine life force. Palmer's "heresy" tested the nation's recently proclaimed commitment to freedom of religion and of speech. In this he was not alone. Fischer reveals that Palmer engaged in person and in print with an array of freethinkers—some famous, others now obscure. The flourishing of diverse religious opinion struck some of his contemporaries as foundational to a healthy democracy while others believed that only a strong Christian faith could support democratic self-governance. This first comprehensive biography of Palmer draws on extensive archival research to tell the life story of a freethinker who was at the heart of the new nation's protracted contest over religious freedom and free speech—a debate that continues to resonate today.

Suffering Scholars

Anne C. Vila
Suffering Scholars Book PDF

Author : Anne C. Vila
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2018-03-15
Category : History
ISBN : 9780812249927

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Suffering Scholars by Anne C. Vila Pdf

Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea is the first comprehensive history of the concept that answers the question "Who, or what, am I?" Gerald Izenberg contends that our most important identities, while historically conditioned, are rooted in permanent categories of human existence, such as sexuality, sociality, and labor. Book jacket.

Vitalist Modernism

Fae Brauer
Vitalist Modernism Book PDF

Author : Fae Brauer
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 387 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2023-02-28
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781000826913

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Vitalist Modernism by Fae Brauer Pdf

This book reveals how, when, where, and why vitalism and its relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts of energy became seminal from the fin de siècle until the Second World War for such Modernists as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hugo Ball, Juliette Bisson, Eva Carrière, Salvador Dalì, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and John Cage. For them, Vitalism entailed the conception of life as a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution. Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de siècle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports, particularly rugby, water sports, the Olympic Games and physical culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force. This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second part illuminates how simultaneously Vitalism became aligned with anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology, spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states", alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson, Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carrière, John Gerrard Keulemans, László Moholy-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism, particularly Bergson’s theory of becoming, became associated with Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality, atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion, negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin alongside Cage’s concept of Nothing. After investigating the widespread engagement with Bergson’s philosophies and Vitalism and art by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum curators and visitors, plus readers and scholars working in art history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies, museum studies and curatorship.