Diseases and Diagnoses: The Second Age of Biology

by Gilman; Sander L.

• ISBN13: 9781412810494
• ISBN10: 1412810493
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-01-15
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Diseases and Diagnoses discusses why such social problemsas addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, racialpredisposition for illness, surgery and beauty, and electrotherapy,all of which concerned thinkers a hundredyears ago, are reappearing at a staggering rate and indiverse national contexts. In the twentieth century suchproblems were viewed as only historical concerns. Yetin the twenty-first century, we once again find ourselvesconfronting their implications.In this fascinating volume, Gilman looks at historicaland contemporary debates about the stigma associatedwith biologically transmitted diseases. He shows thatthere is no indisputable way to measure when a diseaseor therapy will reappear, or how it may be perceived atany given moment in time. Consequently, Gilman focuseson the socio-cultural and political implications that thereappearance of such diseases has had on contemporarysociety. His approach is to show how culture (embeddedin cultural objects) both feeds and is fed by the claimsof medical science-as for example, the reappearance of"race" as a cultural as well as a medical category.If the twentieth century was the "age of physics," inthe latter part of the past century and certainly in thetwenty-first century biological concerns are recapturingcentral stage. Achievements of the biological sciences arechanging the public’s sense of what constitutes cutting-edgescience and medicine. None has captured the publicimagination more effectively than the mapping of thehuman genome and the promise of genetic manipulation,which fuel what Gilman calls a "second age of biology."Although not without controversy, the role of geneticsappears to be key. Gilman puts contemporary debatesin historical context, showing how they feed social andcultural concerns as well as medical possibilities.

Table of Contents

Introduction: On "Race," Sex, and Beauty in Historical Perspective	p. 1
Race (Again) and Medicine (Again): The Jews and Alcoholism	p. 19
What is the Color of the Gonorrhea Ribbon? Stigma, Sexual Diseases, and Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century	p. 49
Nietzsche, Bizet, and Wagner-Illness, Health, and Race in the Nineteenth Century	p. 83
Are You Just What You Eat? Ritual Slaughter and the Politics of National Identity	p. 105
Imagining Glamour in the Age of Aesthetic Surgery	p. 127
Sigmund Freud, Electrotherapy, and the Voice	p. 159
Psychoanalysis, Medicine, and the Body in the Time of Freud and Brill	p. 197
The Practical Aspect of Culture in Illness-Bilingualism in the World of Health and Illness	p. 209
Index	p. 223
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.