Quinlan, Sean M. (Author)
Cornell University Press
Physical Details: 336
Language: English
In Morbid Undercurrents, Sean M. Quinlan follows how medical ideas, stemming from the so-called birth of the clinic, zigzagged across the intellectual landscape of the French Revolution and its aftermath. It was a remarkable "hotspot" in the historical timeline, when doctors and scientists pioneered a staggering number of fields—from forensic investigation to evolutionary biology—and their innovations captivated the public imagination. During the 1790s and beyond, medicine left the somber halls of universities, hospitals, and learned societies and became profoundly politicized, inspiring a whole panoply of different—often bizarre and shocking—subcultures. Quinlan reconstructs the ethos of the time and its labyrinthine underworld, traversing the intersection between medicine and pornography in the works of the Marquis de Sade, efforts to create a "natural history of women," the proliferation of sex manuals and books on family hygiene, anatomical projects to sculpt antique bodies, the rage for physiognomic self-help books that taught readers to identify social and political "types" in post-revolutionary Paris, the use of physiological medicine as a literary genre, and the "mesmerist renaissance" with its charged debates over animal magnetism and somnambulism. In creating this reconstruction, Quinlan argues that the place and authority of medicine evolved, at least in part, out of an attempt to redress the acute sense of dislocation produced by the Revolution. Morbid Undercurrents exposes how medicine then became a subversive, radical, and ideologically charged force in French society.
...MoreReview Alison Downham Moore (2022) Review of "Morbid Undercurrents: Medical Subcultures in Postrevolutionary France". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 661-662).
Similar Citations
Article
Quinlan, Sean;
(2010)
Heredity, Reproduction, and Perfectibility in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789--1815
(/isis/citation/CBB001210113/)
Book
Matteo Loconsole;
(2019)
Educazione e sessualità: Gli almanacchi di Paolo Mantegazza (1866-1905)
(/isis/citation/CBB513542250/)
Book
Lise Dumasy-Queffélec;
Hélène Spengler;
(2014)
Médecine, sciences de la vie et littérature en France et en Europe de la révolution à nos jours
(/isis/citation/CBB263680135/)
Chapter
Giovanni Silvano;
(2020)
Ospedali e ospizi a Parigi dopo la Rivoluzione. Verso una più accurata diagnosi della patologia mentale
(/isis/citation/CBB613232523/)
Chapter
Giovanni Silvano;
(2020)
La macchina del soccorso nella Francia rivoluzionaria. Verso la laicizzazione della cura
(/isis/citation/CBB233265226/)
Chapter
Giovanni Silvano;
(2020)
Una sfida per l’amministrazione di ospedali e ospizi a Parigi dopo l’89
(/isis/citation/CBB142493911/)
Book
Finn, Michael R.;
(2009)
Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-siècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde
(/isis/citation/CBB001212914/)
Article
Adkins, G. Matthew;
(2008)
The Renaissance of Peiresc: Aubin-Louis Millin and the Postrevolutionary Republic of Letters
(/isis/citation/CBB000950505/)
Book
Chappey, Jean-Luc;
(2009)
Des naturalistes en Révolution: Les procès-verbaux de la Société d'histoire naturelle de Paris (1790--1798)
(/isis/citation/CBB001023302/)
Book
Geoffrey Wall;
(2013)
The Enlightened Physician: Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, 1784-1846
(/isis/citation/CBB798765409/)
Article
Pablo Souza;
Diego Hurtado;
(2018)
El uso político del teatro. Sociabilidad científica y médica en la ciudad de Buenos Aires (1870-1920)
(/isis/citation/CBB924890585/)
Article
Meer, Theo van der;
(2008)
Eugenic and Sexual Folklores and the Castration of Sex Offenders in theNetherlands (1938--1968)
(/isis/citation/CBB000831699/)
Book
Healey, Dan;
(2009)
Bolshevik Sexual Forensics: Diagnosing Disorder in the Clinic and Courtroom, 1917--1939
(/isis/citation/CBB001034256/)
Article
Ehrlich, Shoshanna;
(2013)
From Birth Control to Sex Control: Unruly Young Women and the Origins of the National Abstinence-Only Mandate
(/isis/citation/CBB001213536/)
Book
McAlpin, Mary;
(2012)
Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France: Medicine and Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB001550879/)
Article
Warman, Caroline;
(2009)
From Lamarck to Aberration: Nature, Hierarchies, and Gender
(/isis/citation/CBB001030575/)
Book
Guereña, Jean-Louis;
(2013)
Les Espagnols et le sexe: XIXe-XXe siècles
(/isis/citation/CBB001450500/)
Book
Dawson, Gowan;
(2007)
Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability
(/isis/citation/CBB000774026/)
Article
Shannon Draucker;
(2022)
Music Physiology, Erotic Encounters, and Queer Reading Practices in Teleny
(/isis/citation/CBB672329835/)
Article
Alison M. Moore;
(2019)
L’amour Morbide: How a Transient Mental Illness Became Defunct
(/isis/citation/CBB173973622/)
Canadian Bulletin of Medical History/Bulletin Canadienne d'Histoire de la Medecine
Endeavour: Review of the Progress of Science
Intellectual History Review
Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Journal of the History of Sexuality
Be the first to comment!