Timothy Kent Holliday // In recent years some scholars have argued that the gut microbiome, perhaps as much as the brain, defines the condition of humanness (Moore, Mathias, & Valeur 1). Communication between the gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system is referred to as the gut-brain axis. Gut flora sometimes figure in how scientists…
Author: tkholliday
Death Wish: Caring for the Dead and Dying in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
Timothy Kent Holliday // “Dying is an art, like everything else” (Plath 245). With these words twentieth-century poet Sylvia Plath alluded to her own suicidal ideation. Death wishes of a different kind entwined in cities like Philadelphia in the 1830s, a century before Plath’s birth: the dying dreams of a patient, and the nineteenth-century anatomist’s…
“That Most Dreadful of All Human Calamities”: Bipolar Bodyminds in the Early United States
Timothy Kent Holliday // In the scant historiography of bipolar disorder, David Healy’s Mania stands out almost by default. The central premise of Healy’s book is one that most historians and medical humanities scholars would probably agree with: that disease is made, and that disease-making is a historical process. Healy explains in his conclusion: “Whatever view we…
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