“Triumphant Health”: Joseph Conrad and Tropical Medicine (original) (raw)
Related papers
JOSEPH CONRAD'S ILLNESS NARRATIVES: EVIDENCE FROM THE COLLECTED LETTERS AND A NEW DIAGNOSIS
Over 840 letters in the nine-volume 'Collected Letters' series refer to Joseph Conrad's health worries and symptoms. Conrad attributed his symptoms to gout. However, the letters suggest a recurring complex illness, probably Systemic Lupus Erythematosis (SLE). Later degenerative symptoms suggest Osteoarthritis rather than the destructive infl ammatory arthritis typically associated with gout.
The Horror: Disease as a Metaphor for Colonialism in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness has drawn mixed reactions through the ages. While early critics hailed it as a damning critique of colonialism and imperialism, later ones found it extremely problematic with Chinua Achebe even labeling Conrad as a liberal and a "bloody imperialist". Like many other stories of colonial encounters, an important feature of the novella is the motif of illness, disease, and rot which permeates throughout the text, most notably Kurtz's "madness". Much has been written on the possible causes of disease in the novella, with reasons ranging from the unsuitable climate and the conditions in which the Europeans operated in the colonised land to power and material greed. Through a close reading of the text, this paper however seeks to explore the idea that what Conrad wants his reader to think about, through the motif of disease, is not so much the possible causes of illness but the fact that colonialism itself is the disease --- one which affects the native African peoples, the white Europeans engaged in the enterprise, and in a broader context, the continent of Africa itself.
'Getting' the Pox: Reflections by an Historian on How to Write the History of Early Modern Disease
This article reflects upon the recent return to linear history writing in medical history. It takes as its starting point a critique of the current return to constructivist ideas, suggesting the use of other methodological choices and interpretations to the surviving archival and textural sources of the sixteenth century pox. My investigation analyses the diagnostic act as an effort to bring together a study of medical semiotics. Medical semiotics considers how signs speak through the physical body, coached within a particular epistemology. There are no hidden meanings behind the visible sign or symptom-it is tranparent to the calculative and authoritative gaze and language of the doctor. It concerns how diseases came into being, the relationships they have constituted, the power they have secured and the actual knowledge/power they have eclipsed or are eclipsing. From such a perspective, " getting the pox " is not a bad thing. A methodological turn to medical semiotics reminds us that the history of disease should be an inquiry both into the grounds of our current knowledge and beliefs about disease and how they inspire our writing, as well as the analytical categories that establish their inevitability.
Amerikastudien/American Studies
In a 2016 article in The Guardian, Phil Whitaker explains why a substantial number of well-known writers are also medical doctors. Whitaker, who belongs in this group himself, lists Anton Chekhov, Michael Crichton, Khaled Hosseini, and a few others, to state his point: "Their ability to feel what others feel, and simultaneously to view it with detachment, gives us perhaps our greatest strength as writers." Importantly, it is the physician's skills that pave the way towards writing as a profession, and not literary excellence that helps make a professional healer: doctors virtually read "[e]ach patient's illness" as "a narrative-symptoms as the beginning, diagnosis as the ending-and a middle that weaves a coherent and irresistible path between the two." Such explanations sound logical and comprehensible, yet they evoke new questions as well: why does it seem to be, almost exclusively, men, who translate their interaction with patients into poetry and prose? What motivates them to do so? Does their creative engagement inform their work as medical doctors? And, most importantly, perhaps: what do we learn about the medical profession, about writing, about an era, when we replace the hierarchical concept of the doctor-becoming-awriter by the idea of a mutually inspiring relationship between two systems of knowledge acquisition? Sari Altschuler's The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States builds on this idea of reciprocity. The book approaches "the practice of writing" as a "valuable training of the medical mind" (5) and discusses a number of well-known American physician-writers who wrote poetry or prose between the American Revolution and the Civil War. As public intellectuals, they relied on what Altschuler calls "imaginative experimentation" (8-11) to study and discuss health-related topics, test medical theories, fill research gaps, and solve medical and philosophical contradictions. Unlike Joan Burbick's Healing the Republic (1994) and other path-breaking publications in the field of medical humanities, The Medical Imagination does not reference physicians' writings to make a general statement about national health or American culture: carefully researched and very readable, the book sketches out an intellectually agile and dynamic community of early American physician-writers. It sheds light on individual biographies and friendships, emphasizes generational and cross-generational connections and conversations, and carves out the political concerns of individual participants who steered the relationship between health and literature in new directions. These medical men believed in the power of narrative to either cure or cause harm, but instead of resorting to narratives of healing, they preferred to outline and discuss the relationship between art and science, "imaginative experimentation," and "reductive, mechanistic paradigms" (102). Building on a variety of contexts, and rich in detail, The Medical Imagination offers an in-depth analysis of the life and oeuvre of key figures in American medical and literary history, including Benjamin Rush,
In the prefatory note to his definitive edition of the Fable of the bees, 1 Frederick Kaye claimed that he had 'not passed these last years in Mandeville's company without an ever-deepening certainty of his literary greatness', leaving future generations of scholars the opportunity to expound on this aspect of Mandeville's work. Notwithstanding the intricate composition of the Fable of the bees itself, published in three successive phases and featuring a long poem, a set of philosophical remarks and a dialogue, the best example of the literary qualities mentioned by Kaye is certainly -and perhaps surprisingly -Mandeville's Treatise of the hypochondriack and hysterick diseases, the only medical work ever written in English by the Dutch physician. When, in 1711, the first version of what was then entitled A Treatise on the hypochondriack and hysterick passions appeared, 2 Bernard Mandeville had already published a translation of La Fontaine (Some fables after the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine), Typhon, or the Wars between the gods and giants: a burlesque poem in imitation of the comical Mons. Scarron (1704), The Grumbling hive -the first version of the text which was reissued in 1714 with a set of philosophical remarks as The Fable of the bees -and The Virgin unmask'd, a dialogue upon love and marriage between an old woman and her niece. 3 The initial version of the Treatise was reprinted in 161 1. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the bees, ed. Frederick B. Kaye, 2 vols (Oxford, 1924). 2. B. Mandeville, A Treatise on the hypochondriack and hysterick passions, vulgarly call'd the hypo in men and vapours in women, in which the symptoms, causes, and cure of those diseases are set forth after a method entirely new, the whole interspers'd, with instructive discourses on the real art of physic itself, and entertaining remarks on the modern practice of physicians and apothecaries, very useful to all, that have the misfortune to stand in need of either, in three dialogues (London, Dryden Leach, 1711). 3. Some fables after the easie and familiar method of Monsieur de La Fontaine (London, 1703) followed by an enlarged version (AEsop dress'd, London, R. Wellington, 1704), this edition contains Mandeville's translation of La Fontaine's 'Les membres et l'estomac', which heralds the passages on the supremacy of digestion included in the Treatise and hints at the body as a metaphor of government used in The Fable of the bees (see vol.1, p.3). Typhon, or the Wars between the gods and giants (London, J. Pero, 1704); The Grumbling hive, or Knaves turn'd honest (London, S. Ballard, 1705); The Virgin unmask'd (London, J. Morphew, 1709). 1715 with no changes by the same publisher. 4 Fifteen years later, a second edition 'corrected and enlarged by the author' was printed; Mandeville altered the title, added about a hundred new pages and took out certain parts. 5 With the Treatise, Mandeville returned to medical literature, which he had somewhat neglected since his university years in Leyden, where he matriculated in philosophy in 1685 and graduated in 1691 with a doctoral degree in medicine. Indeed, apart from this larger work, his only forays into medical writing had hitherto been limited to his production as a student. He wrote his inaugural thesis in 1685 (Bernardi à Mandeville de medicina oratio scholastica), followed by another philosophical dissertation on animal functions in 1689 (Disputatio philosophica de brutorum operationibus). Finally, in 1691, he defended his medical thesis on the subject of digestion (Disputatio medica inauguralis de chylosi vitiata) and substantial portions of this text were later incorporated in the Treatise.
Editorial "Illness, Narrated" - special issue of On_Culture, vol. 11
Illness, Narrated, 2021
is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Justus Liebig University Giessen. In her dissertation thesis she explores geographical references in alternate histories and future scenarios in contemporary fiction. Further academic interests include (Critical) Medical Humanities, Narrative Medicine and academic approaches to teaching writing. She is also a staff member of JLU's International Office. Silvia got her MA in Comparative Literature and Art from Potsdam University and spent time abroad in Italy and Ukraine studying and teaching.
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2023
This introduction to the special issue 'Writing Doctors and Writing Health in the Long Eighteenth Century' explores the various types of literary and visual creativity enacted by medical practitioners as they sought new ways of communicating and engaging with the public. Focusing on the shift from Latin to vernacular publishing in elite medical circles, we examine the proliferation of new opportunities open to physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, medical artists, midwives, and other women practitioners to express themselves. Novels, drama, poetry, artworks, almanacs, and letters, to name but a few creative products of the period, allowed new ideas and underrepresented voices to be heard for the first time, changing forever the way creative and empirical cultures would intertwine. Stemming from the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Writing Doctors: Medical Representation and Personality, ca. 1660-1832 (2018-22), this research has undoubtedly been impacted by the rapidly changing nature of public healthcare in the wake of the novel coronavirus pandemic that was still ongoing when this issue went to print. We value and celebrate connections made between the past and present that continue to assist us in understanding and caring for our bodies.