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.

Originally published in 1948 the blurb read: 'Dr Berg has an extraordinary flair for presenting a difficult subject in a most realistic and attractive manner, without sacrifice of scientific essentials. The patients are made to speak for themselves, with the result that we feel actually present at the analytical sessions, sharing the most intimate details of each individual’s life and feelings. Throughout it is alive with real, vivid clinical material. The reader is led through a panorama of troubled minds and disturbed emotions – from the simplest worries and anxieties, through increasing severity of stresses, to incipient major disorders. The whole subject of treatment is reviewed and expounded in compendious detail, concluding with a critical review and revolutionary suggestions for the future. In spite of its novel and entertaining method of exposition, the book covers a surprisingly wide field – the whole field of clinical psychology up to date – and more.' Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context. This book is a re-issue originally published in 1948. The language used is a reflection of its era and no offence is meant by the Publishers to any reader by this re-publication.

When themes of historical and cultural identity appear and repeat in popular film, it is possible to see the real pulse of a nation and comprehend a people, their culture and their history. National Identity in Global Cinema describes how national cultures as reflected in popular cinema can truly explain the world, one country at a time.

This exploration in the history of ideas examines the groundbreaking notion of the embodied mind in its analysis by the French philosopher and politician Maine de Biran (1766–1824) and in its afterlife: consciousness is generated through frequent interaction between the voluntary and the spiritual. The conscious, active self is constituted in its sovereign autonomy, as free and undivided, by an inner act of willful resistance, a physical effort towards its own body and the world. For the first time, a multidisciplinary group of senior and junior researchers from Japan, USA and Europe investigate origins and discursive cross-fertilization of this concept around 1800, an intermediary stage between 1870 and 1945, and its influence upon existentialism, phenomenology, and deconstructivism during the postwar-period and beyond, from 1943 to 2010.

Doctors writing about menopause in France vastly outnumbered those in other cultures throughout the entire nineteenth century. The concept of menopause was invented by French male medical students in the aftermath of the French Revolution, becoming an important pedagogic topic and a common theme of doctors' professional identities in postrevolutionary biomedicine. Older women were identified as an important patient cohort for the expanding medicalisation of French society and were advised to entrust themselves to the hygienic care of doctors in managing the whole era of life from around and after the final cessation of menses. However, menopause owed much of its conceptual weft to earlier themes of women as the sicker sex, of vitalist crisis, of the vapours, and of astrological climacteric years. This is the first comprehensive study of the origins of the medical concept of menopause, richly contextualising its role in nineteenth-century French medicine and revealing the complex threads of meaning that informed its invention. It tells a complex story of how women's ageing featured in the demographic revolution in modern science, in the denigration of folk medicine, in the unique French field of hygiène, and in the fixation on women in the emergence of modern psychiatry. It reveals the nineteenth-century French origins of the still-current medical and alternative-health approaches to women's ageing as something to be managed through gynaecological surgery, hormonal replacement, and lifestyle intervention.

When a birthday party for one of their Hampstead neighbors turns deadly, Antonia Darcy and Major Hugh Payne end up investigating the murder of one of Melisande Chevret's other guests. The aging actress becomes a natural suspect, as the victim was her love rival. But after the first murder, a second takes place at the Villa Byzantine. The owner of the house is royal biographer Tancred Vane, who swears he is innocent. And surely Catherine Hope, an elderly lady helping him with his research, can have nothing to do with it. A damning piece of evidence points to the victim's daughter—but why would a teenage girl have a dainty silk handkerchief bearing her monogram? And would she drop it so conveniently beside her mother's body? As the questions mount, Antonia Darcy and Major Payne search desperately for answers.

Based on encyclopedias, medical journals, historical, and literary sources, this collection of interdisciplinary essays focuses on the intersection of women, gender, and disease in England and France. Diverse critical perspectives highlight contributions women made to the scientific and medical communities of the eighteenth century. In spite of obstacles encountered in spaces dominated by men, women became midwives, and wrote self-help manuals on women’s health, hygiene, and domestic economy. Excluded from universities, they nevertheless contributed significantly to such fields as anatomy, botany, medicine, and public health. Enlightenment perspectives on the nature of the female body, childbirth, diseases specific to women, “gender,” sex, “masculinity” and “femininity,” adolescence, and sexual differentiation inform close readings of English and French literary texts. Treatises by Montpellier vitalists influenced intellectuals and physicians such as Nicolas Chambon, Pierre Cabanis, Jacques-Louis Moreau de la Sarthe, Jules-Joseph Virey, and Théophile de Bordeu. They impacted the exchange of letters and production of literary works by Julie de Lespinasse, Françoise de Graffigny, Nicolas Chamfort, Mary Astell, Frances Burney, Lawrence Sterne, Eliza Haywood, and Daniel Defoe. In our post-modern era, these essays raise important questions regarding women as subjects, objects, and readers of the philosophical, medical, and historical discourses that framed the project of enlightenment.

Drawing on more than 20 years of interviews, anecdotes and personal experiences, Uninvited: Confessions of a Hollywood Party Crasher recounts the unique journey of a former Los Angeles Times reporter who, struggling with the collapse of his industry and personal tragedies, falls in with a group of intrepid gatecrashers who routinely pierce Tinseltown's celebrity party circuit. Author Adrian Maher is the first to chronicle this unique subterranean culture in La La Land—a group of social strivers, ambitious outliers, compulsive risk-takers and dysfunctional characters seeking access to a famous and exclusive society from which they've been banned. Uninvited uses all the author's skills as a veteran reporter, television producer, private investigator, archivist and humorous storyteller to reveal the unseen capers, snafus and mishaps behind Hollywood's palace gates against a backdrop of America's fascination with celebrity culture. And it exposes the personal struggles of an adrenaline-addicted gatecrasher facing perpetual moral challenges, physical dangers and psychological stressors that culminate in near disaster.

This study explores the subtle and complex significance of food and eating in contemporary women's fiction. Sarah Sceats reveals how preoccupations with food, its consumption and the body are central to the work of writers such as Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Michèle Roberts and Alice Thomas Ellis. Through close analysis of their fiction, Sceats examines the multiple metaphors associated with these themes, making powerful connections between food and love, motherhood, sexual desire, self identity and social behaviour. The activities surrounding food and its consumption (or non-consumption) embrace both the most intimate and the most thoroughly public aspects of our lives. The book draws on psychoanalytical, feminist and sociological theory to engage with a diverse range of issues, including chapters on cannibalism and eating disorders. This lively study demonstrates that feeding and eating are not simply fundamental to life but are inseparable from questions of gender, power and control.

The French Revolution brought momentous political, social, and cultural change. Life in Revolutionary France asks how these changes affected everyday lives, in urban and rural areas, and on an international scale. An international cast of distinguished academics and emerging scholars present new research on how people experienced and survived the revolutionary decade, with a particular focus on individual and collective agency as discovered through the archival record, material culture, and the history of emotions. It combines innovative work with student-friendly essays to offer fresh perspectives on topics such as: * Political identities and activism * Gender, race, and sexuality * Transatlantic responses to war and revolution * Local and workplace surveillance and transparency * Prison communities and culture * Food, health, and radical medicine * Revolutionary childhoods With an easy-to-navigate, three-part structure, illustrations and primary source excerpts, Life in Revolutionary France is the essential text for approaching the experiences of those who lived through one of the most turbulent times in world history.