Revels in madness: insanity in medicine and literature
نویسنده
چکیده
orientation in the late 1860s and 1870s, prior to the ascendancy of bacteriology; this helps account for the fact that four of his seven chapters focus on these early years, which other scholars have found less dramatic than the golden etiological age of the eighties and nineties. If the quest for knowability and demonstrability was crucial to the new understanding of disease, however (and it was), then surely nothing changed the meaning of demonstrability as thoroughly as did the successive iterations of Koch's postulates for etiological proof. Misleadingly attributed to Koch alone, and never fully articulated by him in a single paper or speech, these criteria in their mature form nevertheless emerged from bacteriological laboratories in the 1880s and 1890s and forever changed the nature of medical knowledge. To downplay this part of the story obscures the extent to which, epistemologically, this change was in fact revolutionary and transcended the discovery of any single bacterium, even if its impact on disease treatment and prevention was initially underwhelming. Koch and his fellow bacteriologists, however, have claimed more than their fair share of the historical spotlight, and it is high time we listened to some other voices. It is Michael Worboys' signal achievement to have in a single concise, straightforward, and readable volume recaptured the fundamental indeterminacy of nineteenthcentury etiology, refocused our attention on hitherto neglected areas of medical practice, and substituted a subtle and complex narrative of ambivalence for a stale, twodimensional tale of marble statues triumphing over ignorance.
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متن کاملAcknowledgements 4 Declaration 5
6 INTRODUCTION 7 o Towards a historiography of colonial psychiatry in the Caribbean 8 o Literature and madness 14 o Outline of the thesis 17 Chapter 1: Historical background 23 o A brief history of the lunatic asylum in Trinidad and British Guiana 23 Trinidad 24 British Guiana 29 o Robert Grieve: The Asylum Journal 1881 (-1886) 31 Humanitarian treatment of the insane 33 Insane bodies .....
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عنوان ژورنال:
- Medical History
دوره 47 شماره
صفحات -
تاریخ انتشار 2003