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Abstract
Despite the fact that Charles Darwin spent several months in Australia in the final year of his Beagle voyage that circumnavigated the globe, most studies that deal with Darwin's life or his discovery of evolution spend little time discussing his Australian period, if it is mentioned at all. His time there is largely deemed to have produced little of significance in comparison to his visits to other places such as the Galápagos Islands, which has long been mythologized as providing the key sources of observable data that ultimately led Darwin to develop his evolutionary speculations. In recent years, however, Darwin's period in Australia has received more attention, most notably a series of studies detailing the observations and connections Darwin made while in New South Wales, Tasmania, and King George Sound. While much of this literature has provided an important corrective to previous Darwin scholarship that had largely ignored Darwin's period in Australia, it has also worked to perpetuate a romantic and heroic view of scientific discovery by suggesting that Darwin's key "evolutionary revelation" was made not in the Galápagos Islands but in the Blue Mountains, a claim that has been recently made in print and online. This paper therefore examines the historical literature on Darwin Down Under, focussing in particular on this recent romantic turn that seeks to situate Australia as the key site of inspiration for Darwin's theory of evolution.
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Affiliation(s)
- Ian Hesketh
- Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia.
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2
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Abstract
BACKGROUND Medical records manufacture a representational model of a person. Yet, little has been done to analyze the historical construction of patient charts, the deliberations in the process of their creation, and how early patient charts displaced patients' narratives. OBJECTIVES To retrospectively study the structure and production of old patient charts. METHODS Anchored by the Archives of Ontario's medical records from three 19th century psychiatric asylums-Hamilton, London, and Kingston, Canada-the paper tools are reproduced on the basis of their original manufacturing processes using cast-iron presses and relevant typesetting. This includes mirroring the process of assembly, recontextualizing the form's limitations as a function of its construction, making historical the diagnostic considerations relevant at the time, and noting the continuum of practical and operational choices that have stretched into current records. RESULTS An explication of the advance of physicians' objective records and the decline of the subjective patient view is given from index-card inception through design, accreditation, standardization, forms, and quantity, to analysis replacing narration. CONCLUSION Through this artistic work, medical paradigms become realized through paper borders. With ink, lead, and historical manufacturing, a world view is re-created. Such a marriage of medicine and art challenges the static interpretations of paper tools as only ends to the objectification of patients; instead, a tradition of reconfiguring the medical body as a thing dissolving into objectification becomes apparent. This trend continues now through the lack of narrative balancing a person's health care experience and his/her medical record.
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Affiliation(s)
- Kacper Niburski
- McGill University, Montreal, Ontario, Canada
- McGill Faculty of Medicine, Montreal, Ontario, Canada
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3
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Di Matteo G. history, art, humanity in surgery. G Chir 2017; 37:236-238. [PMID: 28098062 PMCID: PMC5256908] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [MESH Headings] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/06/2023]
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4
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Meek H. Frances Burney's Mastectomy Narrative and Discourses of Breast Cancer in the Long Eighteenth Century. Lit Med 2017; 35:27-45. [PMID: 28529229 DOI: 10.1353/lm.2017.0001] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/07/2023]
Abstract
This paper examines Frances Burney's 1812 mastectomy letter alongside contemporaneous medical treatises on the subject of breast cancer. Burney's letter offers a critique of a medical community that misconstrues her experience and can be viewed as pathography, or disability memoir. Examining the letter and the treatises in this way illuminates the brutality of some medical practices and the frequent incongruity between the patients' and the physicians' understandings of pain. However, the letter and the treatises also share much in common; both at times emphasize the patient's words and experiences, and both reveal the impressive and contradictory range of ideas surrounding breast cancer in the long eighteenth century. The paper ends by suggesting that the complex rapport between the letter and the treatises holds particular interest for the field of disability studies in its confrontations with socio-medical tendencies to normalize the body and downplay the harsh realities of breast cancer.
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Abstract
This essay examines constructions of deafness in medieval culture, exploring how deaf experience disrupts authoritative discourses in three textual genres: medical treatise, literary fiction, and autobiographical writing. Medical manuals often present deafness as a physical defect, yet they also suggest how social conditions for deaf people can be transformed in lieu of treatment protocols. Fictional narratives tend to associate deafness with sin or social stigma, but they can also imagine deaf experience with a remarkable degree of sympathy and nuance. Autobiographical writing by deaf authors most vividly challenges diagnostic models of disability, exploring generative forms of perception that deafness can foster. In tracing the disruptive force that deaf experience exerts on perceived notions of textual authority, this essay reveals how medieval culture critiqued the diagnostic power of medical practitioners. Deafness does not simply function as a symptom of an individual problem or a metaphor for a spiritual or social condition; rather, deafness is a transformative capacity affording new modes of knowing self and other.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jonathan Hsy
- The George Washington University, 801 22nd Street NW, Phillips 624B, Washington, DC, 20052, USA.
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6
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Abstract
Narratives may be easy to come by, but not everything is worth narrating. What merits a narrative? Here, I follow the lead of narratologists and literary theorists, and focus on one particular proposal concerning the elements of a story that make it narrative-worthy. These elements correspond to features of the natural world addressed by the historical sciences, where narratives figure so prominently. What matters is contingency. Narratives are especially good for representing contingency and accounting for contingent outcomes. This will be squared with a common view that narratives leave no room for chance. On the contrary, I will argue, tracing one path through a maze of alternative possibilities, and alluding to those possibilities along the way, is what a narrative does particularly well.
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Affiliation(s)
- John Beatty
- Department of Philosophy, University of British Columbia, Canada.
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Affiliation(s)
- Gary Kenyon
- Gerontology Department, St. Thomas University, Fredericton, NB, Canada.
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8
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Abstract
Using a narrative approach, this study explores the role of the Holocaust in the life stories of Survivors, contrasted with two comparison groups (one Jewish and one non-Jewish) whose direct experiences did not include surviving the Holocaust. Using the technique of the life line and measures such as number and type of life events identified, as well as the events marking the beginning and ending of the life story, several differences were found between the three groups. Survivors identified an average of 10 life events, fewer than the non-Jewish comparison group (18) but more than the Jewish comparison group (7). Most of these events were positive, although less so for the Jewish comparison group, with very few future events identified by any of the groups.
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Affiliation(s)
- Brian de Vries
- San Francisco State University, Gerontology Programs, CA 94132, USA.
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9
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Abstract
In this article, I inquire into the life of a single Holocaust survivor in order to give a “thick description” of the dynamics of talking about the past over time. David K., born in 1928 in Gheorgheni Hungary, was deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where he spent one month before entering slave labor camps in Mühldorf and Mittergars. My reading of David's life is based upon two interviews, the first from 1982 (at age 54) and the second from 1995 (at age 67). I employ a method of structural interpretation, “narrative mapping,” which is based upon the work of Labov and Waletzky (1967), in order to visualize the amount of overall consistency between the two interviews. I also carefully study individual narratives that are repeated over time. My reading of David's interviews suggests strong consistency along with significant changes. There is enormous consistency in the structure and content of narratives but differences in the point or evaluations of narratives. I also argue that David's later interview is more fully developed; David's later interview contains several new narratives and integrates historical insights into his account of the past. I discuss the merits of two explanations for this change, culture and time in development. Finally, I suggest possible strategies for researchers interested in working with the vast archives of survivor interviews.
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Affiliation(s)
- Brian Schiff
- Saint Martin's College, Department of Psychology, Lacey, WA 98503, USA.
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10
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Kelly BD. Searching for the patient's voice in the Irish asylums. Med Humanit 2016; 42:87-91. [PMID: 26733425 DOI: 10.1136/medhum-2015-010825] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 12/04/2015] [Indexed: 06/05/2023]
Abstract
The history of mental healthcare in Ireland ends to focus on the histories of institutions and development of mental health legislation. Attention has also been devoted to clinical records, with all of their interpretative and narrative complexities. In both the historiography and archives, however, patients themselves remain remarkably elusive, their voices astonishingly distant. In countries other than Ireland, there have been more extensive analyses of patients' letters, journals and first-person accounts of hospitalisation and treatment. In Ireland, there is real difficulty accessing such accounts, if they exist, especially from the 1800s. Asylum and hospital records offer some assistance in understanding patients' concerns and, arguably, the symptoms recorded in asylum records (eg, delusions) provide further windows into patients' minds. Methodological challenges abound, but while patients' voices may remain largely unknown at present, they are certainly not unknowable. This paper posits that we just need to listen harder and, perhaps, listen better.
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Breathnach C. Professional patienthood and mortality: Seán Ó Ríordáin's diaries 1974-1977. Med Humanit 2016; 42:92-96. [PMID: 26733424 DOI: 10.1136/medhum-2015-010828] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Accepted: 12/07/2015] [Indexed: 06/05/2023]
Abstract
Unwieldy by nature, unsolicited diaries and their study, this article contends, have the potential to offer deeper insights into the experience of illness but only if they receive due consideration from scholars. This article uses a series of historic diaries to examine the concept of 'professional patienthood' or being a full-time patient, and, while it found the narrative medicine approach to be very useful, it also found it limiting. The recent methodological trends in biomedicine and social sciences towards structured mechanisms like questionnaires-surveying and evaluating performance, satisfaction and experience-can only go so far. This article makes a case for the unsolicited, the unorthodox and the unstructured.
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Mitteilungen der Viktor von Weizsäcker Gesellschaft. Fortschr Neurol Psychiatr 2015; 83:713-8. [PMID: 26714253 DOI: 10.1055/s-0041-111136] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/05/2023]
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13
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Bock S. "Grappling to think clearly": vernacular theorizing in Robbie McCauley's Sugar. J Med Humanit 2015; 36:127-139. [PMID: 25605651 DOI: 10.1007/s10912-015-9326-8] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/04/2023]
Abstract
This article examines Robbie McCauley's Sugar, focusing on how this solo performance work opens up discursive spaces for a range of voices and perspectives. I argue that the ideas expressed in Sugar work as a type of vernacular theorizing, questioning the means by which certain perspectives and ways of knowing are valued over others. In the conclusion, I suggest how Sugar could serve as a model for health professionals involved in the fight again diabetes, as it opens up opportunities for dialogue and makes visible the processual nature of people's attempts to make sense of the disease.
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Affiliation(s)
- Sheila Bock
- Interdisciplinary Degree Programs, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 4505 S. Maryland Parkway, Box 455027, Las Vegas, NV, 89154, USA,
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14
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Abstract
This article focuses on the micro-narratives of two individuals whose responses to AIDS were mediated by their sexual identity, AIDS activism and the political context of South Africa during a time of transition. Their experiences were also mediated by well-established metanarratives about AIDS and 'homosexuality' created in the USA and the UK which were transplanted and reinforced (with local variations) into South Africa by medico-scientific and political leaders.The nascent process of writing South African AIDS histories provides the opportunity to record responses to AIDS at institutional level, reveal the connections between narratives about AIDS and those responses, and draw on the personal stories of those who were at the nexus of impersonal official responses and the personal politics of AIDS. This article records the experiences of Dennis Sifris, a physician who helped establish one of the first AIDS clinics in South Africa and emptied the dance floors, and Pierre Brouard, a clinical psychologist who was involved in early counselling, support and education initiatives for HIV-positive people, and counselled people about dying, and then about living. Their stories show how, even within government-aligned health care spaces hostile to gay men, they were able to provide support and treatment to people; benefited from international connections with other gay communities; and engaged in socially subversive activities. These oral histories thus provide otherwise hidden insights into the experiences of some gay men at the start of an epidemic that was initially almost exclusively constructed on, and about, gay men's bodies.
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16
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Abstract
In 2007, the letters of The Blessed Mother Teresa to her confessors were published for the public in a book entitled Come Be My Light. What surprised many readers was that Mother Teresa felt very distant from God and described feeling great "darkness" for many years. This paper draws parallels between the writings of Mother Teresa and those of writers' illness narratives describing the psychiatric condition of Depression. The author provides this textual analysis to explore Mother Teresa's experience within a psychiatric paradigm (Major Depressive Disorder), in comparison with and contrast to the spiritual paradigm of a "Dark Night of the Soul."
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Affiliation(s)
- S Taylor Williams
- Department of Psychiatry, College of Medicine, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, 920 Madison Avenue, 2nd Floor, Memphis, TN, 38105, USA,
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17
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Abstract
This paper is a revalidation of Oliver Sacks's role in the development of medicine's narrative turn and, as such, a reinterpretation of the history of narrative in medicine. It suggests that, from the late 1960s, Sacks pioneered in his 'Romantic Science' a new medical mode that reunited the seemingly incommensurable art and science of medicine while also offering a way for medical humanities to shape clinical reasoning more effectively.
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Frisch S. Sharing our stories: an oral history project preserves the voices of some who influenced health sciences education in minnesota. Minn Med 2013; 96:10-11. [PMID: 24597188] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [MESH Headings] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/03/2023]
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19
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Levitsky H. "Their numbers have been recorded": choiceless choice and the ethics of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. Med Law 2013; 32:191-203. [PMID: 23967793] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/02/2023]
Abstract
In this paper, I will examine several stories written by Holocaust survivor Sara Nomberg-Przytyk. Taken from her autobiographical collection, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (1967),"The Price of Life", "The Dance of the Rabbis," and "The Verdict" are three of forty short narratives the Polish Jewish writer compiled as literary testimony of her experience. During her time in Auschwitz, Nomberg-Przytyk held the comparatively fortunate position of infirmary worker, a position she earned by her pre-War leadership in the underground Polish Communist party. In these stories and others in the collection, she examines the daily ethical dilemmas faced by those working on the front lines of the Auchswitz death-and duplicity machine. As witnesses, they saw death in all forms, including mass piles of corpses, and in places that were devised to be duplicitous, such as the infamous "showers" that were actually gas chambers. They felt death in the human ashes that rose up from the crematoria and floated over their bodies as they navigated through their days and nights in the camp. As a witness to this landscape of death, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk offers us an opportunity to examine the nearly impossible notion of choice and human dignity within the concentrationary universe of Auschwitz. Through these stories, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk teaches us about Jewish ethics in the face of Auschwitz.
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Bezio K. The nineteenth-century quarantine narrative. Lit Med 2013; 31:63-90. [PMID: 24266275 DOI: 10.1353/lm.2013.0007] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/02/2023]
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21
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Garden R. Confined to bed: illness, narrative, and female authority in Charlotte Temple. Lit Med 2013; 31:40-62. [PMID: 24266274 DOI: 10.1353/lm.2013.0006] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/02/2023]
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22
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Affiliation(s)
- Viv Lucas
- Garden House Hospice, Letchworth Garden City, UK.
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23
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Telford JC, Long TL. Gendered spaces, gendered pages: Union women in Civil War nurse narratives. Med Humanit 2012; 38:97-105. [PMID: 22851701 DOI: 10.1136/medhum-2012-010195] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/01/2023]
Abstract
This interdisciplinary analysis joins literary and culture studies with history using Daphne Spain's theory of gendered spaces. Specifically, we examine the reconfiguration of the spaces of military medical work and of book publishing that produced popular literary representations of those medical spaces. As a social historian of nursing and a scholar of American literature and culture, we argue that the examination of Civil War narratives by or about Northern female nurses surveys a landscape in which women penetrated the masculine spaces of the military hospital and the literary spaces of the wartime narrative. In so doing, these women transformed these spaces into places acknowledging and even relying upon what had been traditionally considered male domains. Like many historiographical papers written about nurses and the impact of their practice over time, this work is relevant to those practicing nursing today, specifically those issues related to professional authority and professional autonomy.
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Kennedy M. Modernist autobiography, hysterical narrative, and the unnavigable river: the case of Freud and H.D. Lit Med 2012; 30:241-275. [PMID: 23795486 DOI: 10.1353/lm.2012.0028] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/02/2023]
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25
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Acton C, Potter J. "These frightful sights would work havoc with one's brain": subjective experience, trauma, and resilience in first world war writings by medical personnel. Lit Med 2012; 30:61-85. [PMID: 22870609 DOI: 10.1353/lm.2012.0010] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/01/2023]
Affiliation(s)
- Carol Acton
- St. Jerome's University, University of Waterloo
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Klaver E. Erectile dysfunction and the post war novel: The Sun Also Rises and In Country. Lit Med 2012; 30:86-102. [PMID: 22870610 DOI: 10.1353/lm.2012.0012] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/01/2023]
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Abstract
The focus of this article is a single personal narrative – a Shetland woman's telling of a story about two girls on a journey to fetch a cure for a sick relative from a wise woman. The story is treated as a cultural document which offers the historian a conduit to a past that is respectful of indigenous woman-centred interpretations of how that past was experienced and understood. The "story of the bottle of medicine" is more than a skilful telling of a local tale; it is a memory practice that provides a path to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of a culture. Applying perspectives from anthropology, oral history and narrative analysis, three sets of questions are addressed: the issue of authenticity; the significance of the narrative structure and storytelling strategies employed; and the nature of the female performance. Ultimately the article asks what this story can tell us about women's interpretation of their own history.
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Hansen R. War, suffering and modern German history. Ger Hist 2011; 29:365-379. [PMID: 22141173 DOI: 10.1093/gerhis/ghr044] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/31/2023]
Abstract
This introduction proceeds in five steps. First, it briefly considers the etymology of the term "suffering," as well as the way in which scholars from different disciplines have approached it conceptually and empirically. Second, drawing on the contributions to this issue, it raises general themes emerging from the study of the Thirty Years, Franco-Prussian and First World Wars, with particular attention to gender, the disabled, and Jewish-German veterans. Finally, it considers the most politically contested field of German suffering - the Second World War - and reflects on how that suffering can be narrated and understood without running into the intellectual dead ends of either self-pity or collective guilt.
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Goldmann S. [Doctor and poet as rivals. Sigmund Freud, Alfred von Berger and the narrative of female homosexuality]. Luzif Amor 2011; 24:29-39. [PMID: 21598589] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/30/2023]
Abstract
Starting from a passage in the Dora case history where Freud suggests some differences between a literary and a clinical narrative of female homosexuality, this paper presents examples which he might have had in mind. Besides Balzac's "La fille aux yeux d'or" (1834/35) it is in particular Alfred v. Berger's novella "Die Italienerin [The Italian woman]" (1904) which may have served as a model and counterpoint to the literary strategies used in Freud's case history. Freud had a relationship of long standing with Berger. This newly discovered source may provide a clue for the date at which Freud finalized the Dora manscript which he had held back for years.
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Affiliation(s)
- Stefan Goldmann
- Karl-Philipp-Moritz-Ausgabe bei der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
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31
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Jackson JH. Envisioning disaster in the 1910 Paris flood. J Urban Hist 2011; 37:176-201. [PMID: 21299021 DOI: 10.1177/0096144210391608] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/30/2023]
Abstract
This article uncovers the visual narratives embedded within the photography of the 1910 Paris flood. Images offered Parisians multiple ways to understand and construe the significance of the flood and provided interpretive frameworks to decide the meaning of this event. Investigating three interlocking narratives of ruin, beauty, and fraternité, the article shows how photographs of Paris under water allowed residents to make sense of the destruction but also to imagine the city’s reconstruction. The article concludes with a discussion of the role of visual culture in recovering from urban disasters.
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Archambeau N. Healing options during the plague: survivor stories from a fourteenth-century canonization inquest. Bull Hist Med 2011; 85:531-559. [PMID: 22506432 DOI: 10.1353/bhm.2011.0081] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/31/2023]
Abstract
Witness testimonies in the 1363 canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimchel help us explore differing reactions to the first two waves of plague in 1348 and 1361, the diverse social and healing networks available to the sick, and the importance of affect in the healing process. Every witness in the inquest had lived through both the 1348 and 1361 epidemics. Their testimonies show that sufferers actively sought out healing even when they feared that none existed, healing practitioners continued to care for the sick through both waves of epidemic, and emotion played an important role in sufferers' healing. Their language allows us to look at the interaction between miracle and medicine, the interaction of healing practitioners, and the expectations of sufferers during severe epidemics in the later Middle Ages.
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Tebben K. [Solferino. On the literary reception of the battle in the 19th century]. Neuere Med Wiss Quellen Stud 2011; 20:153-174. [PMID: 21999011] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/31/2023]
Affiliation(s)
- Karin Tebben
- Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg.
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Clark J. More than a photo: Germans from Russia remember their familial relationships. J Fam Hist 2011; 36:333-349. [PMID: 21898966 DOI: 10.1177/0363199011407028] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/31/2023]
Abstract
Most narrators of the Dakota Memories Oral History Project (DMOHP), the children and grandchildren of ethnic German immigrants from Russia, reminisce a great deal about their family relationships -- grandparent-grandchild relationships, parent-child relationships, and sibling-sibling relationships. They share memories of their grandmothers baking them delicious dough dishes, of their fathers making them labor endlessly in the fields, and of their siblings coaxing them into mischief. Through these relationships, Germans from Russia not only learned about their ethnic group's identity, but they also reshaped it into a new identity, blending their past with their present. Within the context of family relationships, these German Russian descendants forged a new identity rooted in their ethnic heritage and history, but serviceable to new, American-born generations.
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Safai P. A healthy anniversary? Exploring narratives of health in media coverage of the 1968 and 2008 Olympic Games. Can Bull Med Hist 2011; 28:367-382. [PMID: 22164601 DOI: 10.3138/cbmh.28.2.367] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/31/2023]
Abstract
Researchers are increasingly examining the tenuous relationship between participation in high performance sport and health, and yet IOC-sanctioned and popular discourse around the Olympics remains replete with references to the supposed healthfulness of the Games. Using the 1968 Mexico City Games and the 2008 Bejing Games as bookends, this paper explores national and international media coverage of athletic performance in relation to health and well-being. Three central narratives emerged: (1) pain, perseverance, and the pervasiveness of the "culture of risk" in high performance sport; (2) the performance imperative in the face of the challenges and anxieties of the environment; and (3) the presence and emerging sophistication of sports sciences/scientists in determining health.
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Affiliation(s)
- Parissa Safai
- School of Kinesiology and Health Science, York University
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Masterton M, Hansson MG, Höglund AT. In search of the missing subject: narrative identity and posthumous wronging. Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 2010; 41:340-346. [PMID: 21112008 DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2010.10.010] [Citation(s) in RCA: 2] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/14/2009] [Revised: 08/23/2010] [Indexed: 05/30/2023]
Abstract
With the advanced methods of analysing old biological material, it is pressing to discuss what should be allowed to be done with human remains, particularly for well documented historical individuals. We argue that Queen Christina of Sweden, who challenged the traditional gender roles, has an interest in maintaining her privacy when there are continued attempts to reveal her 'true' gender. In the long-running philosophical debate on posthumous wronging, the fundamental question is: Who is wronged? Our aim is to find this 'missing subject' using narrative theory. Narrative identity emphasises the fact that no person is alone in knowing or telling their life story. People's lives are entangled and parts of the life story of a deceased person can remain in the living realm. Since the narrative identity of a person does not necessarily end upon their death, and this narrative continues to relate directly to the person who once existed, it is the narrative subject that can continue to be posthumously wronged. Queen Christina can no longer maintain her own identity, but we maintain it by our research into her life. We propose three duties relevant for posthumous wronging: the duty of truthfulness, the duty of recognition and the duty to respect privacy.
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Affiliation(s)
- Malin Masterton
- Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics, Uppsala University, Department for Public Health and Caring Sciences, Box 564, SE-751 22 Uppsala, Sweden.
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Danforth S, Slocum L, Dunkle J. Turning the educability narrative: Samuel A. Kirk at the intersection of learning disability and "mental retardation". Intellect Dev Disabil 2010; 48:180-194. [PMID: 20597729 DOI: 10.1352/1944-7558-48.3.180] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/29/2023]
Abstract
It is often assumed that current disability constructs exist in conceptual isolation from one another. This article explores the tangled historical relationship between "mental retardation" and learning disability in the writings and speeches of special education pioneer Samuel A. Kirk. Beginning in the 1950s, Kirk repeatedly told an educability narrative that described children with low IQ scores as capable students worthy of instruction. However, when he tried to clearly distinguish between the new learning disability construct and the older mental retardation, Kirk altered his standard tale. True intellectual potential then shifted to the learning disability, leaving mental retardation doubly stigmatized as the disorder of educational infertility.
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Affiliation(s)
- Scot Danforth
- 250 Arps Hall, School of Teaching and Learning, The Ohio State University, 1945 N. High St., Columbus, OH 43210, USA.
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Abstract
Relatively few scholars have made use of the Slave Narrative Collection, a collection of more than 2,300 autobiographical narratives detailing the lives of people who had been born into slavery. Housed at the Library of Congress, the Collection was gathered during the 1930s under the direction of the Federal Writers Project. Research derived from the Collection thus far has dealt primarily with the experience of slavery as a whole. The present study focuses on loss as it was experienced by former slaves. This qualitative study used a grounded theory approach to analyze 48 narratives. Results culminated in a core category or central theme that for former slaves loss was both a cause and a consequence of dehumanization. Findings also suggested that people experienced loss as a result of witnessing or experiencing violence and of living in deprivation and fear. Other losses included losses of hope and identity. Losses associated with the pain and suffering of family members were hardest to bear.
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Affiliation(s)
- Anna Laurie
- Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA.
| | - Robert A Neimeyer
- Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN 38152, USA
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Mukherjee S. Two accounts of the colonised "other" in South Asia re-exploring alterity. South Asia Res 2010; 30:165-184. [PMID: 20684083 DOI: 10.1177/026272801003000204] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/29/2023]
Abstract
Taking examples from South Asia, this article shows how British colonial knowledge about the non-European "other" hinged substantially on the participation of sections of that other, especially in the context of liminal groups, for whom no ready standardised formula of identification was available. Development of a colonial episteme often involved active intervention from the colonised body, thereby dispelling any strict notion of coloniser-colonised alterity and mere top-down governance. This process of identity construction took place in several arenas and also involved negotiations in courts of law, where rival sections of the amorphous colonised body fought for competing ideals of selfhood. Complementing this legal construction were ethnographic formulations, internally diverse, and often relating to broader politico-intellectual concerns and debates of the Empire, at different planes in different ways. The article explicates their theoretical bases and practical modalities.
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Affiliation(s)
- Soumen Mukherjee
- Department of History, South Asia Institute, Heidelberg, Germany
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Corporaal M. From golden hills to sycamore trees: pastoral homelands and ethnic identity in Irish immigrant fiction, 1860-75. Ir Stud Rev 2010; 18:331-346. [PMID: 20726133 DOI: 10.1080/09670882.2010.493026] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/29/2023]
Abstract
The prose fiction that remembers the trials of starvation and eviction of the Great Famine (1845-50) often juxtaposes representations of blasted, infertile land with images of a green, idyllic Erin. Through a discussion of Mary Anne Sadlier's Bessy Conway (1861), Elizabeth Hely Walshe's Golden Hills: A Tale of the Irish Famine (1865) and John McElgun's Annie Reilly (1873), this article reveals that immigrant writers of the Famine generation often negotiate depictions of Famine-stricken wasteland with evocations of a pastoral homeland. In the case of the two Catholic novels, Bessy Conway and Annie Reilly, the pastoral becomes a point of ethnic identification through which the immigrants can recollect and reconstruct a sense of Irishness in exile. By contrast, Golden Hills, which focuses on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, does not lament the mass exodus of afflicted Irish: the novel rather envisions emigration as a way to regenerate Ireland as locus amoenus.
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Abstract
Although there has long been a division in studies of consciousness between a focus on neuronal processes or conversely an emphasis on the ruminations of a conscious self, the long-standing split between mechanism and meaning within the brain was mirrored by a split without, between information as a technical term and the meanings that messages are commonly thought to convey. How to heal this breach has posed formidable problems to researchers. Working through the history of cybernetics, one of the historical sites where Claude Shannon's information theory quickly became received doctrine, we argue that the cybernetic program as it developed through second-order cybernetics and autopoietic theory remains incomplete. In this article, we return to fundamental questions about pattern and noise, context and meaning, to forge connections between consciousness, narrative and media. The thrust of our project is to reintroduce context and narrative as crucial factors in the processes of meaning-making. The project proceeds along two fronts: advancing a theoretical framework within which context plays its property central role; and demonstrating the importance of context by analyzing two fictions, Stanislaw Lem's "His Master's Voice" and Joseph McElroy's "Plus," in which context has been deformed by being wrenched away from normal human environments, with radical consequences for processes of meaning-making.
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Budryté D. Experiences of collective trauma and political activism: a study of women "agents of memory" in post-Soviet Lithuania. J Balt Stud 2010; 41:331-350. [PMID: 20857606 DOI: 10.1080/01629778.2010.498191] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/29/2023]
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Corkin S. Sex and the city in decline: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971). J Urban Hist 2010; 36:617-633. [PMID: 20715318 DOI: 10.1177/0096144210365458] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/29/2023]
Abstract
This essay looks at two popular and influential films of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which were both shot in New York City: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Klute (1971). It places them in film history, New York City history, and U.S. urban history more generally, finding that they offer an update on earlier century narratives of the connections between urban areas and deviant sexuality. In this modern version, it is not just a moral tale but also an economic one, where, because of the historical decline of the U.S. city and of New York in particular, sex work becomes a plausible, if unsettling means of support. These films find both narrative and spatial terms for advancing the contemporary antiurban narrative, envisioning New York as an impinging vertical space and seeing possible redemption only in the protagonists leaving the city.
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Dickerson VC. Introduction to the special section--continuing narrative ideas and practices: drawing inspiration from the legacy of Michael White. Fam Process 2009; 48:315-318. [PMID: 19702919 DOI: 10.1111/j.1545-5300.2009.01284.x] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.1] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/28/2023]
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Abstract
Written to honor the immense contribution of Michael White as a leader in the development of narrative therapy, this historical essay contrasts the origins of psychoanalysis, family therapy and narrative therapy. Changes in the understanding of therapeutic strategies, methods of training and supervision, styles of leadership, the involvement of audiences in the therapeutic and training processes, and conceptions of the nature of the mind are described. A style of direct demonstration of methods, especially of the formulation of questions, is important in narrative work. The central master-role of the therapist in analysis and family therapy is replaced in narrative work by eliciting local knowledge, and the recruitment of audiences to the work. This is consistent with narrative therapy's "de-centered" image of the therapist.
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Abstract
The philosophical groundwork of Gilles Deleuze is examined for its relevance for narrative practice in therapy and conflict resolution. Deleuze builds particularly on Foucault's analytics of power as "actions upon actions" and represents power relations diagrammatically in terms of lines of power. He also conceptualizes lines of flight through which people become other. These concepts are explored in relation to a conversation with a couple about a crisis in their relationship. Tracing lines of power and lines of flight are promoted as fresh descriptions of professional practice that fit well with the goals of narrative practice.
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Affiliation(s)
- John Winslade
- Educational Psychology & Counseling, California State University, San Bernardino, CA 92374, USA.
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Churchill DS. The queer histories of a crime: representations and narratives of Leopold and Loeb. J Hist Sex 2009; 18:287-324. [PMID: 19768857 DOI: 10.1353/sex.0.0046] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/28/2023]
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Jensen JM. Telling stories: keeping secrets. Agric Hist 2009; 83:437-445. [PMID: 19860022 DOI: 10.3098/ah.2009.83.4.437] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/28/2023]
Abstract
This article addresses the reticence of some farm women to share their experiences with historians and how that desire to keep secrets collides with the desire by scholars to tell the stories of these women. It argues that scholars must continue to struggle with the issue of which stories to tell publicly and which to keep private. The author discusses her own experience telling stories about rural women in the 1970s and the need to give voice to the heritage of rural women, especially of groups that have feared revealing their experiences. She offers examples of historians of rural women who have successfully worked with formerly silenced populations and urges historians to continue to tell stories about these lives, to reevaluate what has been already learned, to ask new questions, and to discuss which secrets need to be shared.
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DeShazer MK. Cancer narratives and an ethics of commemoration: Susan Sontag, Annie Leibovitz, and David Rieff. Lit Med 2009; 28:215-236. [PMID: 21141795] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [MESH Headings] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/30/2023]
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Choi TY. Natural history's hypothetical moments: narratives of contingency in Victorian culture. Vic Stud 2009; 51:275-297. [PMID: 19824198 DOI: 10.2979/vic.2009.51.2.275] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 05/28/2023]
Abstract
This essay focuses on the ways in which works by Robert Chambers, Charles Darwin, and George Eliot encouraged readers to imagine the future as contingent. But where Chambers alludes to Charles Babbage's computational engine and the period's life insurance industry to hint at the role of contingency in natural history, Darwin insists on the importance of contingently determined outcomes to speciation. The "Origin" consistently exercises the reader's speculative energies by generating conditional statements, causal hypotheses, adn diverging alternatives. "Adam Bede" constitutes its characters' interior lives around the proliferation of such contingent narratives. To reflect on the future or on the past, these works suggest, demands a temporal, moral, and narrative complexity in one's thinking.
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