Neurology and Modernity

A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–1950

Laura Salisbury, Andrew Shail

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN:
  9780230233133
• eBook ISBN:
  9780230278004
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

As people of the modern era were singularly prone to nervous disorders, the nervous system became a model for describing political and social organization. This volume untangles the mutual dependencies of scientific neurology and the cultural attitudes of the period 1800-1950, exploring how and why modernity was a fundamentally nervous state.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Beyond the Brain: Sceptical and Satirical Responses to Gall’s Organology
• 2 Neurology and the Invention of Menstruation
• 3 Carlyle’s Nervous Dyspepsia: Nervousness, Indigestion and the Experience of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain
• 4 Railway Spine, Nervous Excess and the Forensic Self
• 5 “The Conviction of its Existence”: Silas Weir Mitchell, Phantom Limbs and Phantom Bodies in Neurology and Spiritualism
• 6 Modernism and the Two Paranoias: The Neurology of Persecution
• 7 “Nerve-Vibration”: Therapeutic Technologies in the 1880s and 1890s
• 8 From Daniel Paul Schreber through the Dr. Phil Family: Modernity, Neurology and the Cult of the Case Study Superstar
• 9 “I guess I’m just nervous, then”: Neuropathology and Edith Wharton’s Exploration of Interior Geographies
• 10 Sounds of Silence: Aphasiology and the Subject of Modernity
• 11 Shell Shock as a Self-Inflicted Wound, 1915–1921
• 12 Modernity and the Peristaltic Subject
• 13 Matter for Thought: The Psychon in Neurology, Psychology and American Culture, 1927–1943
• Index