Médecine et modernité au 19e siècle

Medicine and Modernity in the Long Nineteenth Century

Conference

St Anne’s College, University of Oxford

Saturday 10 – Sunday 11 September 2016

In this two day interdisciplinary conference, hosted by the ERC project Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth Century Perspectives, we will explore the phenomena of stress and overload, and other disorders associated with the problems of modernity in the long nineteenth century, as expressed in the literature, science, and medicine of the period. By tracing the connections drawn between physiological, psychological and social health, or disease in the era, we aim to offer new ways of contextualising the problems of modernity facing us in the twenty-first century.

Saturday 10 September

9.00       Arrivals and registration

9.30       Welcome and Introduction

9.45       Keynote lecture: Christopher Hamlin, What is your Complaint?  Health as Moral Economy in the Long Nineteenth Century

11.00     Coffee break

11.30     Panel sessions

Session A: The Making of Psychological Identities

Mikko Myllykangas, Suicide as a Sign of Modernity and its Criticism in Finnish Suicide Discourse in the 19th Century

Bernhard Leitner, The Mirror Stage of Pathology: Trajectories of Psychiatric Concepts in the Making of Modern Japan

Katariina Parhi, Dangerous Age of Nervousness: Modernity, Crime, and Legal Responsibility

Session B: Medical Marketing

Alice Tsay, Pills for Our Ills: Patent Medicine Marketing and the Formation of Global Modernity

Lesley Steinitz, Swallowing Modernity: Advertising a Nerve-Strengthening Food

Sophie Ratcliffe, “Giovanni's got some splendid pills!” Daisy Miller and the ‘Virus of Suggestion’

Session C: Disseminating Scientific Knowledge

Andrew Mangham, William Gaskell, Sanitary Reform and the Diseases of Modern Manchester

Jeffrey Zalar, Strain: Catholic Reactions to Science in Germany, 1840–1914

Jens Lohfert Jørgensen, Bacteriological Modernism

1.00       Lunch

2.00       Panel sessions

Session A: Illness and Politics

Laurens Schlicht, The Revolutionary Shock: The French Revolution and the Medical Construction of the Modern Subject (France, 1800–1830s)

Alex Chase-Levenson, Sanitation and Civilization: The Eastern Question and the Plague

Daphne Rozenblatt, Political Origins of the Modern Psychopath

Session B: Maintaining Health Abroad

Jennifer Kain, ‘Few can benefit more than the over-taxed and over-worried brain worker’: 19^th-Century Voyages for Health

Daniel Simpson, Poison Arrows and Unsound Minds: Medical Encounters in the Victorian South Pacific

Angharad Fletcher, Sex, Drugs and Suicide: Nursing Encounters on the ‘Frontiers’ of Empire, 1880–1914

Session C: Masculinity, Modernity, and Mental Health

Amy Milne-Smith, “I have Overworked my Brain”: Men’s Relationship to Work in Modern Britain

Philippa Lewis, An Outdated Emotion? Feeling Shy in fin-de-siècle France

Matthew Klugman, Football Fever – A Disease of Modern Life?

3.30       Coffee break

4.00       Panel sessions

Session A: Sick Landscapes

Erin Lafford, ‘Your vile fenny atmosphere’: Clare’s Fenlands and Climatic Susceptibility

Manon Mathias, Excrement and Infectious Disease in the Late 19th-Century French Novel

Keir Waddington, Drought, Disease, and Modernity in Rural Wales, c.1880–1914

Session B: Health, Disease, and Technology

David Trotter, Digital Disease: Communication in the Telegraph Era

Projit Mukharji, Metaphoric Modernity: Railways, Telegraphs and the New Ayurvedic Body in Victorian Bengal

Galina Kichigina, Electrical Therapy for the Heart: German Scientific Medicine and British Physiology. The Cases of Hugo von Ziemssen and John MacWilliam

Session C: Fatigue

Laura Mainwaring, Deficiency of the Vital Forces: The Rhetoric of Overwork in the 19^th-Century Medical Marketplace

Susan Matt and Luke Fernandez, Focus and Fatigue: Cerebral Hyperaemia and the Perils of Specialized Knowledge in 19th-Century America

Steffan Blayney, ‘Drooping with the century’: Fatigue and the fin-de-siècle

5.30       Break

6.00       Drinks reception

7.00       Dinner in St Anne’s Dining Hall

Sunday 11 September

9.30       Panel sessions

Session A: Children’s Health and Disease

Mallory Cohn, Modern Complaints: Victorian Precocity and the Regulation of the Child

Steven Taylor, Imperfect Bodies: The Waifs and Strays Society, Childhood Disability, and Improvement

Jutta Ahlbeck, The Nervous Child and the Disease of Modernity

Session B: Illness, Identity, and Migration

Brad Campbell, Neurasthenia and the New Negro: The 19th-Century Psychiatric Origins of a Modern American Type

Sally Swartz, Migration, Dislocation and Trauma: The Case of Jewish Immigrants to Cape Colony during the 19th Century

Jessica Howell, Enervated India: Tropical Neurasthenia and the Fictions of Empire

Session C: The Body and Modernity

Agnes Arnold-Foster, Pathology of Progress: Cancer in 19th-Century Britain

Helen Goodman, Symptoms of Stress and the Modern Man of Science

F.E. Thurston, The (Re-) Discovery of Noise-Induced Hearing Loss in the 19th Century

11.00     Coffee break

11.30     Panel sessions

Session A: Physical Culture and the Regulation of the Body

Zachary Turpin, “Manly Health and Training”: Whitman’s Long-Lost Guide to Fitness and 19th-Century Anxieties about Physiological Purity and Perfectibility

Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Anorexia Nervosa: Modernity and Appetite

Alexander Pyrges, Corpulence as an Affliction of the Modern World. Medical and Popular Views in 19th-Century Germany

Session B: Nervousness

Sonsoles Hernández Barbosa, Diversification or Sensory Unification? Ideas around the Evolution of the Senses in fin-de-siècle Culture

Michael Guida, Sonic Therapy: Harmony for Disordered Nerves

David Freis, Preventing Mental Illness in One’s Sleep: Nervousness, Psychiatric Prophylaxis and the Invention of Mental Hygiene in fin-de-siècle Germany

Session C: Medical Practitioners

Sam Nesamony, Medical Philanthropy: ‘Medical Chest’ and ‘Touring Clinics’ of Missionaries in Colonial India

Torsten Riotte, Science, Technology and Individual Responsibility: The Professional, Judicial and Public Debate about Medical Negligence during the 19th Century

Carol-Ann Farkas, The Woman Doctor as Medical and Moral Authority: Nervous Disorders, Purity Campaigns, and Gender Relations in Helen Brent, MD

1.00       Lunch

2.00       Panel sessions

Session A: Rhythmic and Non-Rhythmic Bodies

Laura Marcus, Rhythm and Adaptation in the Machine Age

Karen Chase, Wynken, Blynken, and Nod

Josephine Hoegaerts, Victims of Civilization: Recording, Counting and Curing Stammerers in 19th-Century Western Europe

Session B: Addiction

Alessia Pannese, Sense and Sensibility in 19th-Century Addiction

Thembisa Waetjen, Habit-Forming Substances and Medicinal Modernities in Colonial South Africa, 1885–1910

Douglas Small, Cocaine, Technology, and Modernity, 1884–1914

Session C: Understanding and Managing Psychiatric Disorder

Kristine Swenson, Phrenology as Neurodiversity: The Fowlers and Modern Brain Disorders

Alfons Zarzoso, A New Medicine for the Insane in a Modern and Industrial Barcelona

Susan Sidlauskas, Picturing/Narrating the ‘Voluntary Boarder’ at Holloway Sanatorium c.1890

3.30       Coffee break

4.00       Keynote lecture: Laura Otis, What’s at Stake in Judging the Health and Pathology of Emotions?

5.00       Conference close