The Medical Imagination

The Medical Imagination is a thorough, deeply researched investigation into the role of literature in medical knowledge from Benjamin Rush at the end of the eighteenth century to Oliver Wendell Holmes and S. Weir Mitchell before the Civil War. Sari Altschuler is interested in epistemic crises generated, she argues, by such events as yellow fever and cholera epidemics and the discovery of anesthesia. In a chapter titled “Difference,” for example, Altschuler suggests that the cholera epidemic, along with the monogenesis-polygenesis debate and demographic and geographic expansion, created an epistemic crisis about somatic universality versus difference. In this chapter, the depths of her research and insights are evident as she focuses on the physician and novelist Robert Montgomery Bird, his training by Nathaniel Chapman, and his break from Chapman's theory of sympathy through what Altschuler terms “imaginative experiments” in Bird's efforts to understand human difference, the pressing issue—medically and politically—of his day (p. 8). Altschuler moves deftly and convincingly from Bird's medical writings and links the craniologist Samuel George Morton to Bird's 1836 novel Sheppard Lee

Archaeology · Art history · George (robot · Germ theory of disease · Medical knowledge · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Sympathy · Classics · Empathy and Medical Education · History · Medicine · Psychology · Social Psychology

• I must calculate over again

  Thomas Constantinesco•Textual Practice•2021

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