Feeling Dis-ease in Modern History: Experiencing Medicine and Illness

by Rob Boddice (Editor), Peter N. Stearns (Editor), Bettina Hitzer (Editor), Susan J. Matt (Editor)

Overview

This book explores experiences of illness, broadly construed. It encompasses the emotional and sensory disruptions that attend disease, injury, mental illness or trauma, and gives an account of how medical practitioners, experts, lay authorities and the public have felt about such disruptions.

Considering all sides of the medical encounter and highlighting the intersection of intellectual history and medical knowledge, of institutional atmospheres, built environments and technological practicalities, and of emotional and sensory experience, Feeling Dis-ease in Modern History presents a wide-ranging affective account of feeling well and of feeling ill. Especially occupied with the ways in which dynamics of power and authority have either validated or discounted dis-eased feelings, the book's contributors probe at the intersectional politics of medical expertise and patient experience to better understand situated expressions of illness, their reception, and their social, cultural and moral valuation. Drawing on methodologies from the histories of emotions, senses, science and the medical humanities, this book gives an account of the complexity of undergoing illness: of feeling dis-ease.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350228405
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	12/28/2023
Series:	History of Emotions
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Rob Boddice is Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences, Tampere University, Finland, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University, Canada. He is the author or editor of eleven books, most recently Humane Professions (2021), Emotion, Sense, Experience, with Mark Smith (2020), A History of Feelings (2019), and The History of Emotions (2018).

Peter N. Stearns is Professor Emeritus in the Dept of History at George Mason University. His most recent publications include, as author, Cultural Change in Modern World History (Bloomsbury, 2018), Peacebuilding Through Dialogue (Virginia, 2018), Shame: A Brief History (Illinois, 2017), Sexuality in World History, Ed.II (Routledge, 2017), The Industrial Revolution in World History Ed.IV (Westview, 2016), Globalization in World History, Ed.II (Routledge, 2016), Childhood in World History, Ed.III (Routledge, 2016), The Industrial Turn in World History (Routledge, 2016), Gender in World History (Routledge, 2015), Debating the Industrial Revolution (Bloomsbury, 2015); and as editor, The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World: 1750 to the Present (Oxford, 2008).

Peter N. Stearns is Provost of George Mason University, and teaches courses in world history and social history. Stearns is a past vice president of the American Historical Association, in charge of the Teaching Division. He currently serves as chair of the Advanced Placement World History committee, founded and continues to serve as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Social History. Stearns is the author or editor of over 85 books.

Bettina Hitzer is Heisenberg Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Technical Universiry Dresden, Germany as well as Privatdozentin at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. From 2014-2020, she was Leader of the Minerva Research Group “Emotions and Illness: Histories of an Intricate Relation” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. She was awarded the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for her most recent book, Krebs fühlen (2020). She is the author or (co-)editor of nine books and four special issues including “History of Science and the Emotions” (2016).

Susan J. Matt is Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University, USA. She is author of Keeping Up with the Joneses: Envy in American Consumer Society, 1890-1930 and Homesickness: An American History, and co-author with Luke Fernandez of Bored, Lonely, Angry, Stupid: Changing Feelings about Technology from the Telegraph to Twitter. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Journal of American History.

Table of Contents

Illustrations
Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction
Emotion and Experience in the History of Medicine: Elaborating A Theory and Seeking A Method, Rob Boddice and Bettina Hitzer

Lived Epidemic
Commentary

1. Feeling the Dis-Ease of Ebola: An Invisible War, Emmanuel King Urey-Yarkpawolo
2. Ebola Wahala: Breaching Experiments in a Sierra Leonean Border Town, Luisa Enria and Angus Fayia Tengbeh
3. History before Corona: Memory, Experience, and Emotions, Bettina Hitzer

Datafication and Knowledge Production
Commentary

4. The Binary Logic of Emotion in the Sensorium of Virtual Health: The Case of Happify, Kirsten Ostherr
5. Third Person: Narrating Dis-Ease and Knowledge in Psychiatric Case Histories, Marietta Meier

Dis-ease Narratives: Making and Listening
Commentary

6. Feeling (and Falling) Ill: Finding a Language of Illness, Franziska Gygax
7. Beyond Symptomology: Listening to How Palestinians Conceive of their own Suffering and Well-being, Heidi Morrison

Expertise, Authority, Emotion
Commentary

8. Forensic Sense: Sexual Violence, Medical Professionals, and the Senses, Joanna Bourke
9. The Concept of Leidensdruck in West-German Criminal Therapy, 1960-85, Marcel Streng

Construction and Contingency of Experience
Commentary

10. The Efficacy of Arcadia: Constructing Emotions of Nature in the Pained Body through Landscape Imagery, c.1945-Present, Brenda Lynn Edgar
11. 'Fashionable' Diseases in Georgian Britain: Medical Theory, Cultural Meanings and Lived Experience, James Kennaway

Material, Objects, Feelings
Commentary

12. From a Patient's Point of View: A Sensual-Perceptual Approach to Bed Treatment, Monika Ankele
13. Feeling Penfield, Annmarie Adams

Select Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

[This] book would be of value to diverse scholars across disciplinary boundaries. ... The history of emotions has achieved a kind of theoretical and methodological sophistication and maturity that allow us to explore how emotions change and why. Feeling Dis-ease is the evidence.” —H-Net Reviews

“Many disciplines are represented across the volume, such that interested readers will likely be found in history and psychology departments, as well as in schools of medicine ... Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates. Graduate students and faculty.” —CHOICE

“This is an innovative and ambitious volume that brings together a range of themes, disciplinary approaches, time-periods, and places to examine the affective dimensions of health and ill-health. This book is about being both well and sick, and considers the experiences of practitioners, patients, and the public.” —Agnes Arnold-Forster, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK

“If there is a handbook on how to write the affective into the history of medicine and health, this is it. Writing during a pandemic, the authors are attuned to the uproars and silences that comprise the emotionally-charged responses to personal and collective suffering from a rich array of perspectives.” —Jonathan Reinarz, Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Birmingham, UK

From the Publisher