Table Of ContentFraming and Imagining
Disease in Cultural History
Edited by
George Sebastian Rousseau
with
Miranda Gill, David Haycock and
Malte Herwig
Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History
Also by G.S. Rousseau
THIS LONG DISEASE MY LIFE: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (with Marjorie
Hope Nicolson)
ENGLISH POETIC SATIRE (with N. Rudenstine)
THE AUGUSTAN MILIEU (with others)
TOBIAS SMOLLETT (with P.-G. Boucé)
ORGANIC FORM: The Life of an Idea
GOLDSMITH: The Critical Heritage
THE FERMENT OF KNOWLEDGE: Studies in the Historiography of Science
(with Roy Porter)
THE LETTERS AND PRIVATE PAPERS OF SIR JOHN HILL
TOBIAS SMOLLETT: Essays of Two Decades
SCIENCE AND THE IMAGINATION: Thr Berkeley Conference
SEXUAL UNDERWORLDS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT (with Roy Porter)
THE ENDURING LEGACY: ALEXANDER POPE TERCENTENARY ESSAYS (with
Pat Rogers)
EXOTICISM IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT (with Roy Porter)
THE LANGUAGES OF PSYCHE: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought
PERILOUS ENLIGHTENMENT: Pre-and Post-Modern Discourses – Sexual,
Historical
ENLIGHTENMENT CROSSINGS: Pre-and Post-Modern Discourses –
Anthropological
ENLIGHTENMENT BORDERS: Pre-and Post-Modern Discourses – Medical,
Scientific
MEDICINE AND THE MUSES (translated into Italian)
HYSTERIA BEYOND FREUD (with Sander Gilman, Roy Porter, Helen King and
Elaine Showalter)
GOUT: The Patrican Malady (with Roy Porter)
Framing and Imagining
Disease in Cultural History
Edited by
George Sebastian Rousseau
with
Miranda Gill
David Haycock
Malte Herwig
© Copyright George Rousseau, Miranda Gill, David B. Haycock and Malte
Herwig 2003
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2003 978-1-4039-1292-3
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First published 2003 by
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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ISBN 978-1-349-51155-6 ISBN 978-0-230-52432-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230524323
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Framing and imagining disease in cultural history / edited by George
Sebastian Rousseau, with Miranda Gill, David Haycock, Malte Herwig.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4039-1292-0
1.Medicine–Philosophy–History. 2. Health–Philosophy–History.
3. Diseases–Social aspects–History. I. Rousseau, G. S. (George Sebastian)
II. Gill, Miranda. III. Haycock, David Boyd, 1968-
R723.F725 2003
610’.1–dc21 2003040537
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03
Contents
List of Illustrations viii
Acknowledgements x
Notes on the Contributors xi
1 Introduction 1
George Sebastian Rousseau
Frames and framing 1
Imagining disease 5
A context for frames 7
Framing disease 10
Organization of the volume 19
Approaches to framing and imagining disease 22
Framing and imagining madness 27
The patient’s narratives and illnesses 31
Towards a poetics and metaphorics of disease 34
Genesis of the volume 38
Part I: Framing and Imagining Disease 49
2 Within the Frame: Self-Starvation and the Making
of Culture 51
Caterina Albano
A case study: the prolonged fasting of Martha Taylor, the
Derbyshire Damosell 52
The case of Martha Taylor and competing readings
of prolonged fasting 60
3 A Culture of Disfigurement: Imagining Smallpox
in the Long Eighteenth Century 68
David Shuttleton
Introduction 68
Smallpox and cultural framing 70
Smallpox as metamorphosis: physicians, patients, and
poets 72
Female disfigurement and ‘menstruosity’ 76
Contagion by conceit 80
v
vi Contents
4 ‘This Pestilence Which Walketh in Darkness’:
Reconceptualizing the 1832 New York
Cholera Epidemic 92
Jane Weiss
Identity and rhetoric 93
Flashpoints: foreignness, elimination, intemperance 96
Denial, emotion and evangelism: the Morning Courier and
New-York Enquirer 98
Federalist rationalism: the New-York Whig 101
Social justice: the Truth Teller 104
Conclusion 106
5 Mapping Colonial Disease: Victorian Medical
Cartography in British India 111
Pamela K. Gilbert
6 Framing the ‘Magic Mountain Malady’: the
Reception of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
in the Medical Community, 1924–2000 129
Malte Herwig
Negotiating disease: the German sanatorium of Dr Mann 131
Blaming disease: the doctor’s or the patient’s fault? 135
Naming disease: the ‘Magic Mountain Malady’ 138
Showcasing disease: Thomas Mann and the canon of the
Medical Humanities 140
Appendix A: Chronology of selected medical responses to
Mann’s The Magic Mountain(published 1924) 144
Part II: Framing and Imagining Madness 151
7 A Little Bit Mad/Almost Mad/Not Quite Mad:
Eccentricity and the Framing of Mental Illness
in Nineteenth-Century French Culture 153
Miranda Gill
Epidemics of peculiarity 154
‘An equivocal, fluid, uncertain quality’: the psychiatric
net tightens 160
8 Retrospective Medicine, Hypnosis, Hysteria
and French Literature, 1875–1895 173
Michael R. Finn
Magnetism and hypnotism 179
Contents vii
9 From Private Asylum to University Clinic:
Hungarian Psychiatry, 1850–1908 190
Emese Lafferton
The first madhouse and a comprehensive theory of
mental illness 191
University teaching and academic research: the
department and the clinic 197
Framing the disease hysteria 200
The dissected, headless frog, or the hypnotized body 201
Great hopes in vain? 203
From private asylum to university clinic 205
Part III: The Patient’s Narratives and Images 213
10 Patients and Words: a Lay Medical Culture? 215
Philip Rieder
Labels and patients 217
Lay interpretations 219
Patients and words 221
Singular ills 223
11 Framing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Gut:
Genius, Digestion, Hypochondria 231
George Sebastian Rousseau and David Boyd Haycock
Part IV: Towards a Poetics and Metaphorics of Disease 267
12 Paradoxical Diseases in the Late Renaissance:
the Cases of Syphilis and Plague 269
Agnieszka Steczowicz
Imagining disease: the notion of disease as paradoxical 270
Framing disease: the genre of paradox dealing with
disease 274
13 ‘Proved on the Pulses’: Heart Disease in
Victorian Culture, 1830–1860 285
Kirstie Blair
14 Tropenkoller: the Interdiscursive Career
of a German Colonial Syndrome 303
Stephan Besser
Index 321
List of Illustrations
3.1 Typical facial scars of smallpox; photograph of specimen
in Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons.
(reproduced by kind permission of the Wellcome Library
for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London) 70
3.2 ‘The Cow-Pock, – the wonderful effects of the new
inoculation’, Edward Jenner among patients in the
Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital at St Pancras.
Coloured etching by James Gillray, 1802. (reproduced
by kind permission of the Wellcome Library for the
History and Understanding of Medicine, London) 75
3.3 ‘Ann Davis, the Cow-poxed, cornuted Old Woman’,
stipple engraving by T. Wolnoth, 1806. (Wellcome
Library London) 78
3.4 ‘Gare La Vaccine: Triomphe de la Petite Verole’: a
diseased woman metamorphoses into a grotesque
mermaid, drawn by a physician riding a cow, and
an apothecary with a syringe. Children flee in fear.
Etching with watercolour, France, c. 1800 (Wellcome
Library London) 86
5.1 ‘Corrected Map’ by the General Board, showing
supposed and actual location of plague pit: detail 114
5.2 Water Content Mapping, Example from General
Board Report: detail 115
5.3 Cornish’s reprint of Bryden’s map with added
material: detail 122
6.1 Death mask of Thomas Mann (reproduced by kind
permission of the Thomas Mann Archiv, Zürich,
Switzerland) 143
11.1 Etching by H. J. Townsend of ‘A monster, representing
indigestion, torturing a man trying to sleep’. Undated,
approximately 1820 (reproduced by kind permission
of the Wellcome Library for the History and
Understanding of Medicine, London) 241
11.2 Etching by Thomas Atkinson of a seated
hypochondriac shivering in front of a fire
surrounded by pills and, not so fortuitously,
viii
List of Illustrations ix
picture frames. Coloured aquatint, 1819 (reproduced by kind
permission of the Wellcome Library for the History and
Understanding of Medicine, London) 243
12.1 Title page of Claude Fabri, Paradoxes de la Cure de Peste, 1568
(reproduced by kind permission of the Wellcome
Library for the History and Understanding of
Medicine, London) 277
12.2 Title page of Silvestro Facio, Paradossi della Pestilenza,
1584 (reproduced by kind permission of the Wellcome
Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine,
London) 278
