An in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and the relationship between language and the brain broke new ground.

This is the first in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and the relationship between language and the brain broke new ground. L. S. Jacyna argues that these advances must be contextualized within wider Modernist debates about perception and language. In his time, Head was best known for his research into the human nervous system. He did a series of experiments in collaboration with W. H. R. Rivers in which cutaneous nerves were surgically severed in Head's arm and the stages by which sensation returned were chartered over several years. Head's friend, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, drew out the epistemological implications of how, in this new conception, the nervous system furthered the knowledge of the world.

This vanguard collection of original and in-depth essays explores the intricate interplay of the aesthetic and psychological domains during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and considers the reasons why a common Modernist project took shape when and in the circumstances that it did. These changes occurred precisely when the distinctively modern disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis established their "scientific” foundations and achieved the forms in which we largely know them today. This volume examines the dense web of connections joining the aesthetic and psychological realms in the modern era, charting historically the emergence of the ongoing modern discussion surrounding such issues as identity-formation, sexuality, and the unconscious. The contributors form a distinguished and diversified group of scholars, who write about a wide range of cultural fields, including philosophy, the novel and poetry, drama, dance, film and photography, as well as medicine, psychology, and the occult sciences.

An opportunity for medical sociology to establish a voice in the key debates in social science today: modernity, postmodernity, structuralism and poststructuralism. Essential reading for students of the sociology of medicine, health and illness.

T. S. Eliot memorably said that separation of the man who suffers from the mind that creates is the root of good poetry. This book argues that this is wrong. Beginning from Virginia Woolf's 'On Being Ill', it demonstrates that modernism is, on the contrary, invested in physical illness as a subject, method, and stylizing force. Experience of physical ailments, from the fleeting to the fatal, the familiar to the unusual, structures the writing of the modernists, both as sufferers and onlookers. Illness reorients the relation to, and appearance of, the world, making it appear newly strange; it determines the character of human interactions and models of behaviour. As a topic, illness requires new ways of writing and thinking, altered ideas of the subject, and a re-examination of the roles of invalids and carers. This book reads the work five authors, who are also known for their illness, hypochondria, or medical work: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy Richardson, and Winifred Holtby. It overturns the assumption that illness is a simple obstacle to creativity and instead argues that it is a subject of careful thought and cultural significance.

"Crawford's book, which is richly informative & unfailingly interesting & readable, makes a substantial & theoretically sophisticated contribution to scholarship."--AMERICAN LITERATURE.

In three sections, the Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine celebrates the richness and variety of medical history around the world. It explore medical developments and trends in writing history according to period, place, and theme.

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to appreciate beauty and art, changed the way poets, artists, and musicians worked and brought a dramatic transformation to the idea of art itself.

This book is a study of the relations between the body and its technologies in modernism. Tim Armstrong traces the links between modernist literary texts and medical, psychological and social theory across a range of writers, including Yeats, Henry James, Eliot, Stein, and Pound. Armstrong shows how modernist texts enact experimental procedures which have their origins in nineteenth-century psychophysics, biology, and bodily reform techniques, but within a context in which the body is reconceived and subjected to new modes of production, representation and commodification. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, Armstrong challenges the received oppositions between technology and literature, the instrumental and the aesthetic, by demonstrating the leaky boundaries and complex interconnections between these domains. This book offers a cultural history of modernism as it negotiated the enduring fact of the human body in a period of rapid technological change.

Modernism and Eugenics comprehensively explores modern Europe's fixation with eugenic programmes of racial and national purification. It convincingly demonstrates that between 1870 and 1940 eugenicists were not only preoccupied with rescuing the individual from the anomie of modernity but equally championed a glorious racial destiny for the nation.