1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9911009227303321

Autore

Geroulanos Stefanos

Titolo

The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe : Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War / / Todd Meyers, Stefanos Geroulanos

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago : , : University of Chicago Press, , [2018]

©2018

ISBN

9780226556628

022655662X

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xii, 419 pages) : illustrations

Collana

Chicago scholarship online

Classificazione

XB 3300

Disciplina

610.904

Soggetti

Medicine - History - 20th century

Physiology - History - 20th century

World War, 1914-1918 - Influence

Human body - Symbolic aspects

Europe Intellectual life 20th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Previously issued in print: 2018.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Prologue: "Why Don't We Die Daily?" -- Part One -- 1 The Whole on the Verge of Collapse: Physiology's Test -- 2 The Puzzle of Wounds: Shock and the Body at War -- 3 The Visible and the Invisible: The Rise and Operationalization of Case Studies, 1915−1919 -- Part Two -- 4 Brain Injury, Patienthood, and Nervous Integration in Sherrington, Goldstein, and Head, 1905- 1934 -- 5 Physiology Incorporates the Psyche: Digestion, Emotions, and Homeostasis in Walter Cannon, 1898- 1932 -- 6 The Organism and Its Environment: Integration, Interiority, and Individuality around 1930 -- 7 Psychoanalysis and Disintegration: W. H. R. Rivers's Endangered Self and Sigmund Freud's Death Drive -- Part Three -- The Political Economy in Bodily Metaphor and the Anthropologies of Integrated Communication -- 9 Vis medicatrix, or the Fragmentation of Medical Humanism -- 10 Closure: The Individual -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such



disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover?   In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.   Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.