Synopses & Reviews
Based on thousands of letters written by patients and their relatives and on a wide range of other sources, this book provides the first comprehensive account of how early modern people understood, experienced and dealt with common diseases and how they dealt with them on a day-to-day basis.
Synopsis
There is a cognitive deficit between the holistic vision for human and societal development in Islam and the results achieved by Muslim societies. The authors begin by looking at the Western concept of development, which in recent years has recognized the wider dimensions of human development and the role of institutions. Thus Western thinking has moved toward the Islamic vision and path of development, emphasizing human solidarity, belonging, wellbeing, sharing, concern for others, basic human entitlements, and modest living. The authors illuminate the Quranic vision and the experience of the society organized by the Prophet, which together represent the Islamic paradigm.
About the Author
MICHAEL STOLBERG was trained as both an historian and a physician. He has worked in Germany, Italy and the UK and, since 2004, has been chair of History of Medicine at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He has published widely on the historical anthropology of illness and the body and on the theory and practice of learned medicine in the early modern period.
Table of Contents
Some Thoughts on Theory
Sources
Acknowledgements
Introduction
PART I: ILLNESS IN EVERYDAY LIFE
The Concern for Oneself
Disease and the Self
The Experience of Pain
The Search for Meaning: Religion, Witchcraft and Astrology
The Search for Meaning: Illness, Way of Life and Biography
The Narrative Reconstruction of Personal History
Anxieties
The Physician's Audience: Illness and the Bedside Community
Nursing Care
The Medical Marketplace
The Doctor-Patient Relationship
PART II: PERCEPTIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS
Medical Popularization
From Temperament to Character
Plethora and Apoplexy
Fluxes, Gout and Rheumatism
'Gichter' and Cramps
Acrimonies
Red Murrain (Erysipelas)
Scurvy
The Therapy of Acrimonies
Miasms and Contagia: Plague, French Disease and English Sweat
Indigestion, Winds and Slime
Obstruction and Disrupted Excretion
Stagnation and Deposits
Cancer
Pathological Heat
Vapors
Fever
Consumption and Consumptive Fever
Expenditure and Exhaustion
Dropsy
Seminal Economy
PART III: DOMINANT DISCOURSE AND THE EXPERIENCE OF DISEASE
The Sensible Body
A New Disease: the Vapors
Historical Roots: 'Vapores', Hypochondria and Hysteria
The Rise of the Nerves
Embodiment
Critique of Civilization
The Sensible Woman
The Cult of Sensibility
Illness as Protest
Conclusion: A New Bourgeois Habitus
Manuscript Sources
Printed Sources