City of Health, Fields of Disease: Revolutions in the Poetry, Medicine, and Philosophy of Romanticism

Description

The Romantic Era witnessed a series of conflicts concerning definitions of health and disease. In this book, Martin Wallen discusses those conflicts and the cultural values that drove them. The six chapters progress from the mainstream rejuvenation of the Socratic values by Wordsworth and Coleridge to the radical alternatives offered by the Scottish theorist, John Brown, and the speculative German philosopher, F. W. J. Schelling. Wallen shows how actual definitions of health and disease changed at the turn of the nineteenth century, and provides an analysis of the metaphorical uses to which romantic thinkers put these different definitions in their attempts to value or devalue competing concepts of individuality, poetic expression, and history. Key to the redefinition of these concepts was the use of the rhetoric of medicine to add value to those statements considered desirable and to undermine those targeted for elimination from public discourse. By juxtaposing the well-known critical works of Wordsworth and Coleridge with lesser-known works such as Schelling's Yearbooks of Medicine and Thomas Beddoes' medical treatises, Wallen illuminates the central role medicine played in redefining the human being's relationship to society and nature - part of the cultural revolution that began in the nineteenth century. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Contents The Nineteenth Century Series Editors' Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations and Symbols Introduction 1 Lyrical Health in Wordsworth and Coleridge 2 Coleridge's Scrofulous Dejection 3 The Medical Frame of Character and the Enforcement of Normative Health in Thomas Beddoes' 'Observations on the Character and Writings of John Brown, M.D.' 4 A Secret Excitement: Coleridge, John Brown, and the Chance for a Physical Imagination 5 Schelling's Medical Singing School in the Yearbooks of Medicine as Science 6 The Electromagnetic Orgasm and History Outside the City Notes Works Cited Index