Lesley Thulin // The conversation surrounding biosecurity following the recent outbreak of coronavirus has prompted scholars to suggest the urgency of the medical humanities, a multi-disciplinary field that seeks to bring humanistic thinking to the clinical encounter. With the uptick in reported incidents of anti-Asian racism, a spate of violent protests related to epidemiological misinformation,…
Author: lmthulin
Bentham’s Auto-Icon
Lesley Thulin // Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, has an old saw about pushpin. In The Rationale of Reward (1825), a treatise on the legislation of discipline, Bentham invokes the nineteenth-century tavern game to weigh the relative virtues of recreational activities and art. Framing the issue in the terms of…
(Un)fashionable Illness
Lesley Thulin // When VICE Magazine published a fashion spread that depicted reenactments of famous women writers’ suicides in its 2013 Women in Fiction issue, it was met with outrage. Some critics described “Last Words” as “almost breathtakingly tasteless,” while others chalked it up to “slouching indifference and sloppiness.” VICE’s own last words on the…
Byron’s Pharmacopoeia
Lesley Thulin // In his 17-canto opus Don Juan (1819-24), Lord Byron adapts the epic form to modernity. The Horatian epigraph, “Difficile est proprie communia dicere,” announces that he will speak of common things, presaging the poem’s engagement with the ordinary. Byron takes up family conflict, courtship, and ritualized reading, for instance, and rejects the…
Aging Romanticism
Lesley Thulin // William Wordsworth’s pronouncement that the child is the “father of the Man” is perhaps the clearest articulation of British Romanticism’s revaluation of childhood (Wordsworth “My Heart Leaps Up” 7). For Wordsworth, childhood holds critical purchase over adulthood, priming the mind’s receptivity to nature as well as the creative faculty. Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic…
Wordsworth and ‘The Companionable Leech’
Lesley Thulin // John Stuart Mill famously suggested literature’s therapeutic potential when he declared William Wordsworth’s poetry “a medicine for my state of mind” (Mill 85). According to his Autobiography (1874), Mill read Wordsworth during a bout of “habitual depression” and was immediately cured (86). For Mill, Wordsworth’s poetry expressed “states of feeling, and of…
‘Get Out,’ or ‘The Modern Frankenstein’
Lesley Thulin // In the director’s commentary for Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele evokes the literary tradition of British Romanticism to describe what it’s like to be Black in America. “This movie is sort of meant to be my take on Frankenstein,” he explains. As an updated Gothic captivity narrative that incorporates a version of…
Reimagining Mary Toft’s Rabbit Births
Lesley Thulin // Centuries before “fake news” became a hashtag, a servant in Surrey, England emerged as a household name for convincing doctors that she had given birth to a litter of rabbits. Three months after the news broke in September of 1726, Mary Toft confessed to fabricating the story. Although Toft gained notoriety for devising…