{"title":"Transatlantic Irritability: Brunonian sociology, America and mass culture in the nineteenth century.","authors":"Gavin Budge","doi":"10.1163/9789401211734_013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401211734_013","url":null,"abstract":"The widespread influence exerted by the medical theories of Scottish doctor, John Brown, whose eponymously named Brunonianism radically simplified the ideas of his mentor, William Cullen, has not been generally recognised. However, the very simplicity of the Brunonian medical model played a key role in ensuring the dissemination of medical ideas about nervous irritability and the harmful effects of overstimulation in the literary culture of the nineteenth century and shaped early sociological thinking. This chapter suggests the centrality of these medical ideas, as mediated by Brunonianism, to the understanding of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, and argues that Brunonian ideas shaped nineteenth-century thinking about the effects of mass print culture in ways which continue to influence contemporary thinking about the effects of media.","PeriodicalId":75720,"journal":{"name":"Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","volume":"94 1","pages":"267-92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64579615","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Demise of the Preformed Embryo: Edinburgh, Leiden, and the Physician-Poet Mark Akenside's Contribution to Re-Establishing Epigenetic Embryology.","authors":"R. Dix","doi":"10.1163/9789401211734_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401211734_005","url":null,"abstract":"Seventeenth-century advances in microscopy prompted a shift in the dominant theory of human reproduction from one of epigenesis, derived from such ancient authorities as Aristotle, which posited that the mixing of male and female reproductive material generated a being which had not existed before, to one of preformation, whereby embryologists argued that the offspring of an animal already existed in miniature in the reproductive material. This chapter reveals that the poet, Mark Akenside, anticipated the Enlightenment's challenge to the prevailing preformationist orthodoxy when a medical student at Edinburgh in the late 1730s, as evident in his May 1744 thesis entitled De ortu et incremento foetus humani ('On the Origin and Growth of the Human Foetus'). What prompted Akenside to take such a bold step? Faced with a scarcity of biographical sources, Akenside's major poem on The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) suggests how the poet had been thinking about reproductive processes in innovative contexts and that his medical research informed his concept of poetic creation.","PeriodicalId":75720,"journal":{"name":"Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","volume":"94 1","pages":"74-96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64579823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Demise of the Preformed Embryo: Edinburgh, Leiden, and the Physician-Poet Mark Akenside's Contribution to Re-Establishing Epigenetic Embryology.","authors":"Robin Dix","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Seventeenth-century advances in microscopy prompted a shift in the dominant theory of human reproduction from one of epigenesis, derived from such ancient authorities as Aristotle, which posited that the mixing of male and female reproductive material generated a being which had not existed before, to one of preformation, whereby embryologists argued that the offspring of an animal already existed in miniature in the reproductive material. This chapter reveals that the poet, Mark Akenside, anticipated the Enlightenment's challenge to the prevailing preformationist orthodoxy when a medical student at Edinburgh in the late 1730s, as evident in his May 1744 thesis entitled De ortu et incremento foetus humani ('On the Origin and Growth of the Human Foetus'). What prompted Akenside to take such a bold step? Faced with a scarcity of biographical sources, Akenside's major poem on The Pleasures of Imagination (1744) suggests how the poet had been thinking about reproductive processes in innovative contexts and that his medical research informed his concept of poetic creation.</p>","PeriodicalId":75720,"journal":{"name":"Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","volume":"94 ","pages":"74-96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34359993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blood and the Revenant in Walter Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth.","authors":"Katherine Inglis","doi":"10.1163/9789401211734_010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401211734_010","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In Sir Walter Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth; or St Valentine's Day (1828), the resuscitated subject is referred to as a revenant, a term that Scott borrowed from Henry Thomson's Blackwoodian tale 'Le Revenant' (1827), meaning 'dead-alive'. Taking its cue from the sanguinary subtext of The Fair Maid of Perth, which is fascinated with the shedding of blood and transfusion of fluids, this chapter reads the Scottish revenant as a literary reflection on the extraordinary promise of blood transfusion in the 1820s: that death could be understood as a process, rather than an absolute state, and that medical intervention could restore life to those on the brink of death and even to the recently deceased.</p>","PeriodicalId":75720,"journal":{"name":"Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","volume":"94 ","pages":"196-215"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34360000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"An Account of ... William Cullen: John Thomson and the Making of a Medical Biography.","authors":"David E Shuttleton","doi":"10.1163/9789401211734_012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401211734_012","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>John Thomson's An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen (1832; 1859) remains a primary source for the career of the most influential academic physician in eighteenth-century Scotland and is also a significant work of medical history. But this multi-authored text, begun around 1810 by the academic surgeon, John Thomson, but only completed in 1859 by Dr David Craigie, has its own complex history. This chapter addresses what this history can reveal about the development of medical biography as a literary genre. It argues that the Account is a hybrid work shaped by a complex array of practical, domestic, intellectual, and professional pressures, as Thomson, in seeking to bolster his own career, was caught between the demands of Cullen's children for a traditional \"Life\" and his own more theoretical and socio-cultural interests.</p>","PeriodicalId":75720,"journal":{"name":"Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","volume":"94 ","pages":"240-66"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34507589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Construction of Robert Fergusson's Illness and Death.","authors":"Rhona Brown","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This chapter charts the biographical, fictional and medical constructions of Robert Fergusson's (1750-74) illness and death from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Fergusson died at the age of 24 in Edinburgh's Asylum for Pauper Lunatics. Thanks to this fact, commentators have become preoccupied with the legend of his illness and death. This chapter analyses the changing attitudes towards Fergusson's illness throughout the centuries by interrogating biographical constructions, fictional imaginings and modern diagnoses of his condition, in order to reflect on changing attitudes towards mental illness and artistic creativity.</p>","PeriodicalId":75720,"journal":{"name":"Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","volume":"94 ","pages":"123-44"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34359996","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction. Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture. 1726-1832.","authors":"Megan J. Coyer, D. Shuttleton","doi":"10.1163/9789401211734_002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401211734_002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":75720,"journal":{"name":"Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","volume":"94 1","pages":"1-22"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64579093","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Magic, Mind Control, and the Body Electric: \"Materia Medica\" in Sir Walter Scott's Library at Abbotsford.","authors":"L. Levy","doi":"10.1163/9789401211734_011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401211734_011","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter examines the medical texts, or \"Materia Medica\", held by Sir Walter Scott in his library at Abbotsford. While the vast majority of Scott's medical texts are antiquarian, his library also contains rare tracts and ephemera relating to the medical practice of the infamous quack, Dr James Graham (1745-94), and the Burke and Hare controversy of 1828 and its aftermath. Examining Scott's holdings of medical texts in relation to his own health and that of his family and friends, it is argued that the lack of contemporary medical self-help texts in his library is striking and indicative of his stoical attitude towards health, despite his clear interest in medical culture.","PeriodicalId":75720,"journal":{"name":"Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","volume":"94 1","pages":"216-39"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"64579549","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'Nothing is so soon forgot as pain': Reading Agony in Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments.","authors":"Craig Franson","doi":"","DOIUrl":"","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Giving a rigorous philosophical explanation to the imagination's role in sympathy, Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments became a central text in Romantic aesthetics. It not only justified the age's vogue for making suffering an object of artistic pleasure, it treated suffering's affectivity as the very foundation of society. Depicting agony as a spectacle to be read by others, Smith transformed morality into rhetoric, making human subjects into readers of a sentimentalised, textual world. Yet Smith's work restricted the bonds of sympathy, too, following established distinctions between mind and body that helped him to exclude physical pain from sympathetic response. This essay looks to Smith's context in the overlapping philosophical and medical discourses of the Scottish Enlightenment, exploring his moral theory's resonance with the nerve theories of Robert Whytt and William Cullen, then the leading figures in Scotland's rising medical community. Deepening our understanding of Smith's probable sources, it reframes Smith's intellectual and ideological legacy, foregrounding some of the ambivalent cultural and political implications of Smith's troubling censure of physical pain.</p>","PeriodicalId":75720,"journal":{"name":"Clio medica (Amsterdam, Netherlands)","volume":"94 ","pages":"23-47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"34359989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}