Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England PDF Download

Author: Alanna Skuse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108911501
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Offering an innovative perspective on early modern debates concerning embodiment, Alanna Skuse examines diverse kinds of surgical alteration, from mastectomy to castration, and amputation to facial reconstruction. Body-altering surgeries had profound socio-economic and philosophical consequences. They reached beyond the physical self, and prompted early modern authors to develop searching questions about the nature of body integrity and its relationship to the soul: was the body a part of one's identity, or a mere 'prison' for the mind? How was the body connected to personal morality? What happened to the altered body after death? Drawing on a wide variety of texts including medical treatises, plays, poems, newspaper reports and travel writings, this volume will argue the answers to these questions were flexible, divergent and often surprising, and helped to shape early modern thoughts on philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Author: Alanna Skuse
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108843611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
Implements stories of surgical alteration to consider how early modern individuals conceived the relationship between body, mind, and self.

Author: Elizabeth L. Swann
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487653
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Pioneering investigation into relationship between physical sense of taste, and taste as a term denoting judgement, in early modern England.

Author: Brian P. Levack
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191648833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 646

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Book Description
The essays in this Handbook, written by leading scholars working in the rapidly developing field of witchcraft studies, explore the historical literature regarding witch beliefs and witch trials in Europe and colonial America between the early fifteenth and early eighteenth centuries. During these years witches were thought to be evil people who used magical power to inflict physical harm or misfortune on their neighbours. Witches were also believed to have made pacts with the devil and sometimes to have worshipped him at nocturnal assemblies known as sabbaths. These beliefs provided the basis for defining witchcraft as a secular and ecclesiastical crime and prosecuting tens of thousands of women and men for this offence. The trials resulted in as many as fifty thousand executions. These essays study the rise and fall of witchcraft prosecutions in the various kingdoms and territories of Europe and in English, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies in the Americas. They also relate these prosecutions to the Catholic and Protestant reformations, the introduction of new forms of criminal procedure, medical and scientific thought, the process of state-building, profound social and economic change, early modern patterns of gender relations, and the wave of demonic possessions that occurred in Europe at the same time. The essays survey the current state of knowledge in the field, explore the academic controversies that have arisen regarding witch beliefs and witch trials, propose new ways of studying the subject, and identify areas for future research.

Author: Katharine A. Craik
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107028000
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Shakespearean Sensations explores the ways Shakespeare and his contemporaries imagined literature affecting audiences' bodies, minds and emotions.

Author: Lynda Payne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134770022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The practice of medicine in the days before the development of anaesthetics could often be a brutal and painful experience. Many procedures, especially those involving surgery, must have proved almost as distressing to the doctor as to the patient. Yet in order to cure, the medical practitioner was often required to inflict pain and the patient to endure it. Some level of detachment has always been required of the doctor and especially, of the surgeon. It is the construction of this detachment, or dispassion, in early modern England, with which this work is concerned. The book explores the idea of medical dispassion and shows how practitioners developed the intellectual, verbal and manual skill of being able to replace passion with equanimity and distance. As the skill of 'dispassion' became more widespread it was both enthusiastically promoted and vehemently attacked by scientific and literary writers throughout the early modern period. To explain why the practice was so controversial and aroused such furor, this study takes into account not only patterns of medical education and clinical practice but wider debates concerning social, philosophical and religious ideas.

Author: Fran Martin
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 1478022221
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.

Author: Alanna Skuse
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137487534
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
This book is open access under a CC-BY licence. Cancer is perhaps the modern world's most feared disease. Yet, we know relatively little about this malady's history before the nineteenth century. This book provides the first in-depth examination of perceptions of cancerous disease in early modern England. Looking to drama, poetry and polemic as well as medical texts and personal accounts, it contends that early modern people possessed an understanding of cancer which remains recognizable to us today. Many of the ways in which medical practitioners and lay people imagined cancer – as a 'woman's disease' or a 'beast' inside the body – remain strikingly familiar, and they helped to make this disease a byword for treachery and cruelty in discussions of religion, culture and politics. Equally, cancer treatments were among the era's most radical medical and surgical procedures. From buttered frog ointments to agonizing and dangerous surgeries, they raised abiding questions about the nature of disease and the proper role of the medical practitioner.

Author: E. Decamp
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137471550
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Through its rich foray into popular literary culture and medical history, this book investigates representations of regular and irregular medical practice in early modern England. Focusing on the prolific figures of the barber, surgeon and barber-surgeon, the author explores what it meant to the early modern population for a group of practitioners to be associated with both the trade guilds and an emerging professional medical world. The book uncovers the differences and cross-pollinations between barbers and surgeons' practices which play out across the literature: we learn not only about their cultural, civic, medical and occupational histories but also about how we should interpret patterns in language, name choice, performance, materiality, acoustics and semiology in the period. The investigations prompt new readings of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Beaumont, among others. And with chapters delving into early modern representations of medical instruments, hairiness, bloodletting procedures, waxy or infected ears, wart removals and skeletons, readers will find much of the contribution of this book is in its detail, which brings its subject to life.

Author: Erin Sullivan (Cultural historian)
Publisher: Emotions in History
ISBN: 9780198739654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From Shakespeare's Hamlet to Burton's Anatomy to Hilliard's miniatures, melancholy has long been associated with the emotional life of Renaissance England. But what other forms of sadness existed alongside, or even beyond, melancholy, and what kinds of selfhood did they help create? Beyond Melancholy explores the vital distinctions Renaissance writers made between grief, godly sorrow, despair, and melancholy, and the unique interactions these emotions were thought to produce in the mind, body, and soul. While most medical and philosophical writings emphasized the physiological and moral dangers of the "dis-ease" of sadness, warning that in its most extreme form it could damage the body and even cause death, new Protestant teachings about the nature of devotion and salvation suggested that sadness could in fact be a positive, even transformative, experience, helping to humble believers' souls and bring them closer to God. The result of such dramatically conflicting paradigms was a widespread ambiguity about the value of sadness and a need to clarify its significance through active and wilful interpretation--something this book calls "emotive improvisation." Drawing on a wide range of Renaissance medical, philosophical, religious, and literary texts--including, but not limited to, moral treatises on the passions, medical text books, mortality records, doctors' case notes, sermons, theological tracts, devotional and elegiac poetry, letters, life-writings, ballads, and stage-plays--Beyond Melancholy explores the emotional codes surrounding the experience of sadness and the way writers responded to and reinterpreted them. In doing so it demonstrates the value of working across source materials too often divided along disciplinary lines, and the special importance of literary texts to the study of the emotional past.