National Physiology: Literature, Medicine, and the Invention of the American Body, 1789--1860 (2012)
Altschuler, Sari B. (Author)
New York, City University of
Reynolds, David S.
Edition Details: Advisor: Reynolds, David S.
Physical Details: 228 pp.
Language: English
"National Physiology" investigates the intertwined discourses of literature and medicine in the proto-disciplinary early American world. It makes three interventions. First, in contrast to existing scholarship that has actively neglected it, I bring to light an important history of early American medicine. Second, I show how American writers produced medical models of their own. Literary figures did not simply reflect medicine in their texts, but used fiction to craft medical philosophies, which they believed directly promoted the health of the nation. Finally, I argue these histories were not separate, but intimately connected: doctors and writers worked together to craft an American body that was metonymically linked to the healthy nation. In mining the relationship between medicine and literature in the early republic, my project is the first to offer a genealogy of the Medical Humanities in America; it also suggests that by looking at this history, we will find promising new models for interdisciplinary scholarship. The writings of prominent doctors and writers who were friends, teachers, and colleagues in the early U.S. political and medical capital anchor this study. My dissertation traces the development of a "national physiology" that understood the body and nation always to be, in founding father Benjamin Rush's words "tremendous, oscillatory mass[es] of matter," systems defined by motion and flux. National physiology was based in the connected mechanisms of circulation and sympathy that were always simultaneously physiological, philosophical, and political. I demonstrate how American medical philosophy broke with European models and developed dynamic notions that offered non-hierarchical alternatives. There was an American school of medicine, and this school used literary forms as central rhetorical tools to promote health. Rather than be surprised by the prevalence of doctor-writers, I suggest such figures reveal the generic fluidity of early American discourse. Tracing a literary history from Charles Brockden Brown to Weir Mitchell, my project illuminates the medical and political work of early American fiction. Turning to periods when disciplinary boundaries were not fully formed offers exciting possibilities both for future Medical Humanities, with its investments in unraveling disciplinary distinctions, and for providing insight into (inter)disciplinary work more broadly.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. . ProQuest Doc. ID 1018099115.
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