Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History

by Rousseau, George S.; Gill, Miranda; Haycock, David B.; Herwig, Malte

• ISBN13: 9781403912923
• ISBN10: 1403912920
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-10-03
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Throughout human history illness has been socially interpreted before its range of meanings could be understood and disseminated. Writers of diverse types have been as active in constructing these meanings as doctors, yet it is only recently that literary traditions have been recognized as a rich archive for these interpretations. These essays focus on the methodological hurdles encountered in retrieving these interpretations, called "framing" by the authors. Framing and Imagining Disease aims to explain what has been said about these interpretations and to compare their value.

Author Biography

George S. Rousseau is Research Professor of Humanities, De Montfort University.

Miranda Gill is with Christ Church College, Oxford.

David B. Haycock and Malte Herwig are at Merton College, Oxford.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Note on Contributors

Introduction

Framing the Frame: the Imagining and Framing of Disease in Cultural History--G. S. Rousseau

Part I: Framing and Imagining Disease

Within the Frame: Self-Starvation and the Making of Culture--C. Albano

Imagining Smallpox in the Long Eighteenth Century: Inscription and Interpretation--D. E. Shuttleton

"This Pestilence Which Walketh in Darkness": New York City Reads the 1832 Cholera Epidemic--J. Weiss

Mapping Colonial Disease: Victorian Medical Cartography in British India--P. K. Gilbert

Framing the "Magic Mountain Malady". The Reception of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in the Medical Community, 19242000--M. Herwig

Part II: Framing and Imagining Madness

"A Little Bit Mad/Almost Mad/Not Quite Mad": Eccentricity and the Framing of Madness in NineteenthCentury French Culture--M. Gill

Retrospective Medicine, Hypnosis, Hysteria and French Literature, 1875-1895--M. R. Finn

Shifting Conceptions of Mental Illness and Psychiatric Therapies in Hungary, 1858-1908--E. Lafferton

Part III: The Patient's Narratives and Images

Name Disease or Voice Sickness? The Patient's Contribution--P. Rieder

Framing Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Gut: Genius, Digestion, Hypochondria--G. S. Rousseau & D. B. Haycock

Part IV: Towards a Poetics and Metaphorics of Disease

Paradoxical Diseases in the Late Renaissance: The Cases of Syphilis and Plague--A. Steczowicz

Proved on the Pulses: Heart Disease in Victorian Culture--K. Blair

Tropenkoller: The Interdiscursive Poetics of a German Colonial Syndrome--S. Besser

Index