2000, Gift of the South Carolina State Hospital.

Paper edition of a 1991 study. The subject is "a cultural complex--a disease called neurasthenia" (from the preface), examined at a specific historical "moment"--1903. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This work is designed as a supplement to the author's work on Neurasthenia (Nervous Exhaustion). In the preface to Nervous Exhaustion it was stated that the chapter on the causes was designedly omitted, inasmuch as a thorough elucidation of that side of the subject, in all its relations and dependencies, would be of so complex a character as to require a special volume of itself. The present work is, therefore, to be regarded as a chapter on causes for the treatise on Nervous Exhaustion, with these qualifications--that it embraces the whole domain of nerve sensitiveness and nerve susceptibility, that lead to the more definite condition of nervous exhaustion, and that it is of a more distinctly philosophical and popular character than that treatise, which was specially addressed to the professional and scientific reader. To those who are beginning the study of this interesting theme the following epitome of the philosophy of this work may be of assistance, as a preliminary to a detailed examination. (1) Nervousness is strictly deficiency or lack of nerve-force. This condition, together with all the symptoms of diseases that are evolved from it, has developed mainly within the nineteenth century, and is especially frequent and severe in the Northern and Eastern portions of the United States. (2) The chief and primary cause of this development and very rapid increase of nervousness is modern civilization, which is distinguished from the ancient by these five characteristics : steampower, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women. (3) Secondary and tertiary causes (i.e., climate, institutions--civil, political, and religious, social and business--personal habits, indulgence of appetites and passions) are of themselves without power to induce nervousness, save when they supplement and are interwoven with the modern forms of civilization. (4) The sign and type of functional nervous diseases that are evolved out of this general nerve sensitiveness is neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion). (5) The greater prevalence of nervousness in America is a complex resultant of a number of influences, the chief of which are dryness of the air, extremes of heat and cold, civil and religious liberty, and the great mental activity made necessary and possible in a new and productive country under such climatic conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

Describes how late Victorian culture encouraged the evolution of art as a career, discussing such "inventions" as art therapy and bohemianism, and exploring artists' complicated and confused gender roles

Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that "musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history of medicine, music and the body.

July 1918-1943 include reports of various neurological and psychiatric societies.

In 1901, the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens proclaimed in a letter to Will Low, “Health-is the thing!” Though recently diagnosed with intestinal cancer, Saint-Gaudens was revitalized by recreational sports, having realized midcareer “there is something else in life besides the four walls of an ill-ventilated studio.” The Medicine of Art puts such moments center stage in order to consider the role of health and illness in the way art was produced and consumed. Not merely beautiful or entertaining objects, works by Gilded-Age artists such as John Singer Sargent, Abbott Thayer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are shown to function as balm for the ill, providing relief from physical suffering and pain. Art did so by blunting the edges of contagious disease through a process of visual translation. In painting, for instance, hacking coughs, bloody sputum, and bodily enervation were recast as signs of spiritual elevation and refinement for the tuberculous, who were shown with a pale, chalky pallor that signalled rarefied beauty rather than an alarming indication of death. Works of art thus redirected the experience of illness in an era prior to the life-saving discoveries that would soon become hallmarks of modern medical science to offer an alternate therapy. The first study to address the place of organic disease-cancer, tuberculosis, syphilis-in the life and work of Gilded-Age artists, this book looks at how well-known works of art were marked by disease and argues that art itself functioned in medicinal terms for artists and viewers in the late 19th century.

This fascinating interdisciplinary study examines the relationship between literary interest in visionary kinds of experience and medical ideas about hallucination and the nerves in the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on canonical Romantic authors, the work of women writers influenced by Romanticism, and visual culture.