Brandy Schillace

Curing “Moral Disability”: Brain Trauma and Self-Control in Victorian Science and Fiction

While, historically, the disabled body has appeared in literature as “monstrous,” burgeoning psychological theories of the Victorian period predicated an unusual shift. In a culture of sexual anxiety and fears of devolution and moral decay, the physically disabled and “weak” are portrayed as strangely free from moral corruption. Unlike the cultural link between deviance and disability witnessed in the medical literature and eugenic approach to generation, authors of narrative fiction—particularly Charles Dickens, but Wilkie Collins, Charlotte Yonge, and others as well—portray disabled characters as “purified,” and trauma itself as potentially sanitizing. This present paper argues that such constructions were made possible by developments in the treatment of insanity. “Curing ‘Moral Disability’: Brain Trauma and Self-Control in Victorian Fiction,” examines the concept of trauma-as-cure. Throughout the Victorian period, case studies on brain trauma appeared in widely circulated journals like the Lancet, concurrently with burgeoning theories about psychological disturbance and “moral insanity.” While not widely practiced until the early twentieth century, attempts at surgical “cures” aroused curiosity and speculation—the traumatic event that could free sufferers from deviance. This work provides a unique perspective on representations of disability as cure in the nineteenth century as a means of giving voice to the marginalized, disabled, and disempowered.

Border crossings: joining a multidisciplinary conversation about medical humanities

This March’s issue offers us a chance to think critically about dialogue across boundaries. While not a themed issue, the articles featured here do represent a trend—and in many ways, this trend offers a promising future. I’ll begin with the shortest piece, our last brief report (the category has been subsumed under commentaries for the future): ‘The Cultural Crossings of Care. An Appeal to the Medical Humanities’ ( see page 55 ). In this account, we have a call to action from Julia Kristeva, Marie Rose Moro, John Odemark and Eivind Engebretsen. Kristeva has long problematised the biomedical concept of health, and in this report the authors reflect on consequences of too stringently drawing the line of demarcation between biomedicine and nature and culture. Medical humanities can, in these considerations, end up ‘reduced’ to a kind of repair job, ‘fixing’ biomedical enterprise. That necessarily limited perspective does not capture the full possibility of a dynamic field. As is reflected in the new mission of MH journal, …

Editor’s note: pain and paradoxes

One of the most enduring lessons of the humanities and social sciences—and one that I continue to rediscover in new ways—regards the absolute centrality of connections, relationships, even entanglements to our shared human experience and so also toour health. Changes to our well-being become story events, and stories are told . Every narrative imagines a speaker and …

New way of seeing

The cover of our September issue features a detail from Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty’s Mylologie complette . I have had the good fortune to see many of Gautier’s works at the Dittrick Museum of Medical History, and the even better luck of teaching courses through their use. The students might read Frankenstein (a work preparing to celebrate its 200th birthday), and they might see anatomies of the body online, or listen to me speak at length about the value of early anatomists to the medical future. But it wasn’t until our hands-on class, where white-gloved students could see the highly coloured Gautier in person, that the message became clear. One of the anatomies displays the body in full, high colour, still deeply penetrating—and seven feet in length. The hushed whisper around the room: it’s a person, isn’t it? The body, only yet in two-dimensions, became real . This is a colourful example of something we, from both sides of medical humanities, tend to take for granted. How do we see the body? A simple question on the surface but endlessly complex. What do we mean by the body ? Whose body is it? Or to turn it around—who gets to see it? And do we trust their vision? In ‘‘Deal with It. Name It’:the diagnostic moment in film’, Thierry Jutel and Annemarie Jutel discuss the ‘crisis’ of diagnosis using film, a literal and figurative lens. What we call something makes it real to us. On the reverse, though related side, ‘The Ghost of Pandemics Past: Revisiting Two Centuries of Influenza in Sweden’ by Martin Holmberg (and open access in this issue) describes the way people connect with the concept of ‘pandemic’ by either contrasting it to the ‘novelty of the coming plague’ or recast it as fear of a ‘ghost-like …

Seeing is Believing: New York Academy of Medicine's Vesalius 500th Year Celebrations

This year marks the 500 year anniversary of Andreas Vesalius’ birth (ne Andries van Wesel, 1514–1564), and celebrations in his honor are taking place across the globe. Vesalius’ groundbreaking De humani corporis fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body) appeared first in 1543. Departing from more stylized and metaphorical observations of the body and, most importantly, challenging the work of Galen, Fabrica profoundly changed medical and anatomical knowledge. Unlike the second-century Greek physician Claudius Galenus, who based many of his anatomical observations on dissections of dogs, pigs, and monkeys, Vesalius had the benefit of opening human bodies and, with the help of artists, rendering them as he saw them. In the process, he ushered in a new emphasis on artistic realism that has persisted through the ages. And yet, this relationship between art and anatomy is not without problems; what counts as art? Who has the right to speak for the body? What, in fact, is realism—or truth—when it comes to anatomical representation? These were the queries of the recent Festival of Medical History and the Arts at the New York Academy of Medicine, Vesalius 500: Art, Anatomy, and the Body (Oct 18, 2014). Engaging a group of scholars, physicians, artists, and performers, this one-day conference explored the legacy of Vesalius’ work and it is continued influence on medicine—and even upon embodied identity. Guest-curated by artist and anatomist Riva Lehrer and hosted/co-curated by Lisa O’Sullivan (Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health, NYAM) and Paul Theerman (Associate Director), the one-day conference included sessions on everything from wearable anatomy art to medical 3-D printing demonstrations. Heidi Latsky presented the ‘‘GIMP’’ dance project, Alice Dreger discussed the invention of medical photography, and others focused their attention on the Fabrica itself—from the metaphors of the Frontispiece to the issues of translation, duplications, and even plagiarism.

Lives of a Journal

In July, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry developed two new ‘lives’. As with most journals, CMP began as a print only entity, distributed by means of the traditional post. Over time, the journal entered the digital age and developed a non-print life. Now the vast majority of CMP’s subscriptions are digital and downloads of the Journal articles surpass 60,000 per year. With our September issue, Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry announces other ‘digital lives’ of the Journal that have recently appeared online and are accompanied by a new website: culturemedicinepsychiatry.com. Increasingly, we rely on the interconnectivity that digital platforms provide. The real-time dissemination through Twitter, Facebook, and the blogosphere are now facts of life and are the new more rapid means of communication and contact. The CMP blog and its linked social media platforms (@CMPjournal and FaceBook) will provide insights from a millennial medical anthropology that synthesizes medical anthropology and other medical social sciences, medical history, bioethics, and medical humanities. Additionally, the website facilitates easier and more direct access to submission requirements, news, and updates (and links to our issues on SpringerLink). The present issue, which features a special section, demonstrates another way CMP seeks flexibility, and offers specific guidelines for the various categories of submissions with each appearing as pages on the site. Due to the success of the Journal over the last 7 years, we now welcome some three to four times the submissions that CMP received at the start of the tenure of the present Editor-in-Chief (mid 2007). As a consequence, CMP has been moved to streamline our double-blind peer-reviewed submission process by migrating to an online tracking system. At the same time, however, we are interested in preserving personal contact with our authors and recognize the impersonality and other problems with the vagaries of digital interaction. Thus, the Managing Editor, (Dr)

Meaning and Medicine in a New Key: Trauma, Disability, and Embodied Discourse Through Cross-Cultural Narrative Modes

In volume 34 of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, the featured Quote of the Volume (v 34, 2010) came from Sigmund Freud. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes, ‘‘creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly, for they are apt to know of a whole host of things between heaven and earth of which our philosophy has not yet let us dream. In their knowledge of the mind, they are far in advance of us everyday people’’ (1962, p. 8). The Journal has, since the Editorin-Chief took the reins, striven for greater inclusivity, and a greater understanding of the power of cultural construction and narrative. We emphasize that, as EE EvansPritchard noted in another of CMP’s Quote of the Volume (CMP Volume 33, 2009), social systems are moral, not natural systems. That is, we study ‘‘societies as moral, or symbolic systems and not as natural systems, ... (we) are less interested in process than in design, and that (anthropology) therefore seeks patterns and not laws, demonstrates consistency and not necessary relations between social activities, and interprets rather than explains’’ (1962, p. 62). This is precisely the point Geertz made 25 years later in his seminal work, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973). Our expanded categories for the Journal began in 2007 and include that of the Illness Narrative (with two types—patient and healer narratives), which makes room for those ‘‘valuable allies’’ noted by Freud. Thus, in this, the final issue of volume 37, we are pleased to present our first medical humanities collection: Trauma, Disability, and Embodied Discourse through Cross-cultural Narrative Modes. The quote that begins Brandy Schillace’s article sets the tone for this collection: