Article
ID: CBB630581480

Strange Cases: Jekyll & Hyde Narratives as Rhetorical Strategy in Sir Alexander Morison’s Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (2020)

unapi
Psychiatry Mental disorders and diseases Physiognomy 19th century Morison, Alexander

Sir Alexander Morison’s Physiognomy of Mental Diseases (1838) was created as a didactic tool for physicians, depicting lunatics in both the active and dormant states of disease. Through the act of juxtaposition, Morison constituted his subjects as their own Jekylls and Hydes, capable of radical transformation. In doing so, he marshaled artistic and clinical, visual and textual approaches in order to pose a particular argument about madness as a temporally manifested, visually distinguishable state defined by its contrast with reason. This argument served a crucial function in legitimizing the emergent discipline of psychiatry by applying biomedical methodologies to the observation and classification of distinctly physical symptoms. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “quintessentially Victorian parable” serves as a metaphor for the way 19th-century alienists conceptualized insanity, while the theme of duality at the core of Stevenson’s story serves as a framework for conceptualizing both psychiatry and the subjects it generates. It was (and is) a discipline formulated around narrative as the primary organizing structure for its particular set of paradoxes, and specifically, narratives of the self as a fluid, dynamic, and contradictory entity.

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Authors & Contributors
Jansson, Åsa
Appelquist, Malin
Mooney, Katherine C.
Brådvik, Louise
Simon, Kristi M.
Huddleston, Samuel
Journals
History of Psychiatry
Sudhoffs Archiv: Zeitschrift fuer Wissenschaftsgeschichte
Osmanli Bilimi Arastirmalari: Studies in Ottoman Science
Journal of the History of the Neurosciences
Journal of Social History
História, Ciências, Saúde---Manguinhos
Publishers
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
University of Chicago Press
Routledge
Florida State University
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Concepts
Mental disorders and diseases
Psychiatry
Psychiatric hospitals
Patients
Medicine and society
Nosology; classification of diseases
People
Dadd, Richard
Morison, Alexander
Lavater, Johann Caspar
Griesinger, Wilhelm
Castro, Avram de
Bell, Charles
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
20th century
21st century
18th century
Places
England
United States
Istanbul (Turkey)
Southern states (U.S.)
Romania
Americas
Institutions
Académie des Sciences, Paris
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