Progress and Pathology: Social Histories of Medicine

Conditions such as stress, burnout, overwork, and fatigue are central preoccupations of our era; however, they have a longer history that give depth to contemporary debates. Similar problems were diagnosed in the nineteenth century, as popular and medical understandings of the mind and body were challenged and reframed by the politics and structures of 'modern life'. Engaging with current scholarship on childhood, consumer culture, disability studies, and the history of medicine, science, and technology, this collaborative volume explores how emotional and physical ailments of the nineteenth century were often understood as uniquely 'modern'.

Sally Shuttleworth, Melissa Dickson, and Emilie Taylor-Brown gather work by leading international scholars to explore changing perceptions of health and disease in the context of the burgeoning global modernities of the nineteenth century. Case studies from Britain, America, France, Germany, Finland, Bengal, China, and the South Pacific demonstrate that a multiplicity of medical practices were organised around new and evolving definitions of the modern self. Essays within the collection examine the ways in which cancer, suicide, and social degeneration were seen as products of the stresses and strains of 'new' ways of living. Others explore the legal, institutional, and intellectual changes that contributed to both positive and negative understandings of modern medical practice. Ultimately, the volume's integrative and holistic approach to notions of disease disrupts the frequent compartmentalisation of psychiatric, environmental, and literary histories in present practice to offer new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.