Flack, Andrew (Author)
Focusing on Kentucky’s immense and world-famous Mammoth Cave, this essay considers contexts from across the nineteenth century in which subterranean darkness was envisaged as a driving force in the transformation of living things. In fact, the cave was the stage for several allied discourses of “dark degeneracy” that conjured images of both generative and destructive mutability, from the generation of animals without eyes to the apparent disintegration of some kinds of human bodies and minds through exposure to the darkness. In elucidating several parallel discourses of dark degeneracy, the essay offers a distinct contribution to several bodies of scholarship by highlighting an important and hitherto neglected manifestation of an intensifying nineteenth-century focus on the how of natural processes and a growing sense of the transformative significance of the apparent cohesion of malleable bodies with their wider environments. At the same time, it evidences the influence of Mammoth Cave in forging and contributing to late nineteenth-century debates about degeneration and shows how dominant sensory hierarchies framed both popular and scientific understandings of life in the deep darkness.
...More
Book
Elisabetta De Minicis;
Giancarlo Pastura;
(2020)
Il rupestre e l’acqua nel Medioevo. Religiosità, quotidianità, produttività
(/isis/citation/CBB390033088/)
Thesis
Wood, James Anthony;
(cited 2012)
Natural Guardians of the Race: Heredity, Hygiene, Alcohol, and Degeneration in Scottish Psychiatry, c. 1860--1920
(/isis/citation/CBB001567411/)
Article
Almeida, Maria Antónia Pires de;
(2013)
Epidemics in the News: Health and Hygiene in the Press in Periods of Crisis
(/isis/citation/CBB001320417/)
Article
Mattes, Johannes;
(2015)
Disciplinary Identities and Crossing Boundaries: The Academization of Speleology in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
(/isis/citation/CBB001553544/)
Book
Jonathan M. Berman;
(2020)
Anti-vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement
(/isis/citation/CBB269088658/)
Book
Goulet Denis;
(2020)
Brève histoire des épidémies au Québec: Du choléra à la COVID-19
(/isis/citation/CBB318570787/)
Book
Eugenia Tognotti;
(2020)
Vaccinare i bambini tra obbligo e persuasione: Tre secoli di controversie. Il caso dell'Italia
(/isis/citation/CBB142911314/)
Chapter
Carla Galeazzi;
Roberto Bixio;
Carlo Germani;
Mario Parise;
(2020)
Indagini speleologiche su opere idrauliche correlate a strutture rupestri
(/isis/citation/CBB685915468/)
Book
Quinlan, Sean M.;
(2007)
The Great Nation in Decline: Sex, Modernity and Health Crises in Revolutionary France c. 1750--1850
(/isis/citation/CBB000774598/)
Article
Alessandro Demichelis;
(2018)
Understanding vaccine hesitancy: Cognitive biases and the role of trust
(/isis/citation/CBB568141355/)
Thesis
McLeod, Kari Suzanne;
(2007)
Health Matters: Public Understandings of Health in 1950s America
(/isis/citation/CBB001561516/)
Article
Jill Campbell-Miller;
(2021)
The Proving Ground: Colombo Plan Fellowships and the Changing Landscape of Health Education in Canada, 1951–69
(/isis/citation/CBB181155364/)
Book
Alex Mold;
Peder Clark;
Hannah J. Elizabeth;
(2023)
Publics and their health: Historical problems and perspectives
(/isis/citation/CBB338646865/)
Article
Johannes Mattes;
(2015)
Underground Fieldwork – A Cultural and Social History of Cave Cartography and Surveying Instruments in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th Century
(/isis/citation/CBB709987923/)
Article
Massimo Aliverti;
(2021)
A letter by Nicolaus Steno about a cavern near Como
(/isis/citation/CBB479698684/)
Chapter
Giancarlo Pastura;
(2020)
Archeologia, speleologia e moderne tecnologie. Un dialogo metodologico
(/isis/citation/CBB287212569/)
Article
Cohn, Samuel K., Jr.;
(2012)
Pandemics: Waves of Disease, Waves of Hate from the Plague of Athens to A.I.D.S.
(/isis/citation/CBB001213108/)
Chapter
Legg, Stephen;
(2013)
Planning Social Hygiene: From Contamination to Contagion in Interwar India
(/isis/citation/CBB001214656/)
Article
Poliana Maia;
Rosária Justi;
Monique Santos;
(2021)
Aspects About Science in the Context of Production and Communication of Knowledge of COVID-19
(/isis/citation/CBB033270554/)
Article
Fantini, Bernardino;
(2012)
Polio in Italy
(/isis/citation/CBB001211097/)
Be the first to comment!