Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700-1950

Using interdisciplinary techniques and original research findings, this volume explores the shift from humoral to nervous interpretations of emotion; the emotional nature of the medical professional-patient relationship; and the extent to which gender might influence the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of pathological emotional conditions.

Table of Contents:
Foreword Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction Emotions in the Early Modern Medical Tradition; F.Bound Alberti Patients and Passions: Languages of Medicine and Emotion, 1790-1850; T.Dixon Languages and Landscapes of Emotion: Motherhood and Puerperal Insanity in the Nineteenth Century; H.Marland 'Cold Calculation in the Faces of Horrors?': Pity, Compassion and the Making of Humanitarian Protocols; B.Taithe Sympathy Under the Knife: Experimentation and Emotion in Late Victorian Britain; P.White Fear and Loathing in the Laboratory and Clinic; O.E.Dror From Clever Hans to Michael Balint: Emotion, Influence and the Unconscious in British Medical Practice; R.Hayward Diagnosing with Feeling: The Clinical Assessment of Schizophrenia in Early Twentieth-Century European Psychiatry; S.Lanzoni Index

About the Author :
FAY BOUND ALBERTI is Wellcome Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK. She has researched and published on aspects of the history of medicine, emotions and subjectivity between 1600 and 1900.

Review :
'The history of emotion, and its earlier cognate 'the passions', offer rich challenges to cultural analysts, as this volume abundantly shows. The essays take us through intricate articulations with successive medical systems, from humouralism and temperaments to experimental psychology and its laboratory protocols. For the Nineteenth-century, we are introduced to the distress of postpuerperal insanity, the evocation of pity in humanitarian campaigns, and the polemics of creativity and callousness around animal experimentation. We also gain access to the intimacies of medical consultation in the Twentieth-century - for the ways in which patients responded to their doctors, and the uses which psychiatrists made of their own reactions to patients. It is a volume which speaks to medicine, psychology and cultural studies as well as to the histories of science and the clinic, and one that can feed much-needed interactions.' - Professor John V. Pickstone, University of Manchester, UK '[A] tightly edited, well-integrated collection, exploring important and original subject matter from many different, yet complementary angles. Its cumulative impact is much more than the sum of its parts...this is a very valuable collection.' - Malcolm Nicolson, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Glasgow, UK '...the editor should be complimented for bringing together a series of fascinating enquiries into these most vexing of human states.' - Jonathan Sawday, Medical History