As I walked to the library one morning this week, I could tell that the campus was beginning to fill with the inevitable buzz of students returning for the fall semester. I felt a rush of expectation and excitement, and I was reminded of the powerful and subtle feelings that academic rituals can evoke. And…
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In the Silent Land of Pain
“All I ask is not to have to change cell, not to have to descend into an in pace, down there where everything’s black, and thought no longer exists.”[1] These words, at once suffering and troubling, are these of the French writer Alphonse Daudet, who died of syphilis in 1897. La Doulou, a collection of fragments…
The Complicated History of the Visual Analog Scale: Part 2
Gabi Schaffzin // Last month, I introduced the Visual Analog Scale and began to trace its history back through the 20th century. I ended with the suggestion that use of the VAS was made necessary by the ways in which pain trials changed in a post-Beecherian world. Pain researchers adopted the VAS from the world of…
Materializing James Barry’s Archive
Jessica Kirwan // Stories about Victorian surgeon James Barry encourage a re-examination of our own limitations in understanding gender and sex. In fiction and non-fiction, Barry’s transgender body has prompted discussions about the ideologies thought necessary for societal acceptance of non-traditional bodies practicing medicine.
Upcoming Conference: Neurodiversities
A CHCI Medical Humanities Network / Duke Health Humanities Lab@FHI Symposium: NEURODIVERSITIES // Oct. 26-27, 2018, Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University // The term “neurodiversity,” first popularized by the autism community, challenges the pathologization of neurological deviation from a conventional social spectrum of “neurotypicality.” Another branch of “neurodiversity” discourse challenges the abstraction of the ideas…
Colonizing Gender: Medical Understandings of Women and Reproduction in the Early Modern Period
Molly Nebiolo // This is the second post of a four-post series on science and medicine in early American history. The aim of these posts is to discuss some of the larger themes I find while reading for my history of science and medicine comprehensive exam. This post will not only be a textual review…
The Theater of Medicine: Inchbald’s Animal Magnetism
Travis Lau // After graduating in May, I had the unexpected opportunity to contribute to an ongoing digital humanities initiative at the University of Pennsylvania. Headed by my former dissertation advisor, Michael Gamer, and Digital Humanities Specialist, Scott Enderle, the Penn Playbills Project makes use of the understudied archive of over 6,000 playbills housed in…
Vampire Dearest: Maternal Bodies and the Female Vampire
Livia Arndal Woods // Consider Bram Stoker’s Lucy in her vampiric form: she holds a small child “strenuously to her breast.” Once the virginal victim of nocturnal bedroom attacks, Lucy is now a sexualized threat striking a monstrously maternal pose. The child is not Lucy’s baby but her meal. Nonetheless, this gothic scene is suggestive…
Review—Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds by Lauren Slater
John Carranza // “I wrote this book because I have been taking psychotropic drugs for thirty-five years, with different drugs or drug combinations during different decades of my life.”[1]Lauren Slater’s frank disclosure of taking psychiatric medications and the effect they had, and continue to have, on her body opens her new book Blue Dreams:…
Postsocialist Fictions and Imaginations of Health: Affinity and Ongoingness after Revolution
Kathryn Cai // Apocalypse and speculative fiction have been central to modern imaginings of biomedical and scientific developments in the U.S. While these narratives have speculated on a hypothetical global apocalypse to come, literary and nonfiction narratives from other parts of the world continue to grapple with apocalypses that have already come to pass. Rather…
