Mark Twain and Medicine: Any Mummery Will Cure (original) (raw)
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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,
Unsettling Medicine: The Social Dimension of Nineteenth-Century American Medical Practice
C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Fourth Biennial Conference Penn State University, 2016 Saturday, March 19, 2016. Chair: Sari Altschuler, Emory University Rebecca Rosen, Princeton University, “The Bodies of Others: Slavery and Anatomy in the Early Republic” Patrick Prominski, Michigan State University, “Seasoning and Snakebites: Popular Authors and the Professionalization of the Physician on the American Frontier, 1815-1830” Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut, “Tending to ‘the Little Bushman’: Uplifting Medicine at the New York Colored Orphan’s Asylum” Emily Waples, University of Michigan, “Sick Time: Toward a Temporal Poetics of American Medicine”
Mark Twain, the Talking Cure, and Literary Form
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The significance of Mark Twain’s Autobiography for the story of mental health in America has as much to do with its form as with its content—an innovative autobiographical form that Twain crafted not only out of personal upheavals but also with acute insight into the depth psychology of his time.
Edgar Allan Poe, MD: Medical Fiction and the Birth of Modern Medicine
Edgar Allan Poe’s knowledge gathered from mesmerists and pseudoscientists of his time finds a reflection in his short stories in the form of organic decomposition and electrical theories. One can also observe in Poe’s texts an attempt to satirize, criticize and leave record of his ambitious interest in the nineteenth-century medicine and medical practices. America was witnessing the rise of a scientific era where most of the scientific theories as known today were being developed. On the other hand, America was under the influence of sensationalism: pseudoscience and the pseudoscientific theories, which were in the borders of hoax and truth. The growing popularity of scientific sensationalism by physics in the American prewar period, professional medical publications, treaties such as Klecksographien by Justinus Kerner (which was source of inspiration, also, to the well-known Hermann Rorschach), magazines, English periodicals of the 1830s and theatre, influenced Poe and his creations significantly. This is reflected in some of Poe’s stories: dyspnea, anxiety, paroxysm, coma, suspended animation, use of prosthetics, bio-augmentation, bio-modification and epilepsia in “Loss of Breath;” monomania, catatonia, catalepsia, narcolepsia and inbreed in “Eleanora” and “The Fall of the House of Usher;” cataplexy in “Berenice;” miasmatic theories, Spanish influenza, and yellow fever in “The Masque of the Read Death;” hallucinogens, hypnotics, sedatives and ancient anesthesia in “The Man that was Used Up,” proboscis and cyclopia in “Bon-Bon;” analgesia in “The Business Man;” and tuberculosis in “Ligeia.” This article will delve deeper in the medical aspect of these scientific narrations in Edgar Allan Poe’s work. Keywords: pseudoscience, Edgar Allan Poe, nineteenth-century, literature, medicine