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Medical Humanities and the Eighteenth Century
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, Maine, Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, Columbia
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 28
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2021, pp 301-306
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Summary
THE ACADEMIC SEPARATION of the sciences and the humanities makes it difficult to explore the connection between the various aspects of the human condition, not least in the discipline of medicine. Even though medicine is not a hard science per se but an interpretive approach that combines scientific and humanities-based modes of knowledge and therefore also experiences what Catherine Belling has called the “hermeneutic anxiety” that informs humanities research, it is firmly located among other science buildings whose literal and figurative gates are jealously guarded. The current academic focus on evidence-based medicine further increases the distance between medicine and humanities-based approaches to the human body by implying that the humanities do not produce real evidence. At the same time, calls for narrowing this distance are intensifying. Reestablishing the connection between the humanities and the sciences has become more important than ever because of global processes of corporatization that affect both health care institutions and universities. Cost efficiency in medical education has made it increasingly difficult to offer courses that focus on the human aspect of medicine within the medical curriculum itself. At the same time, the perceived crisis in the humanities has encouraged literary scholars to emphasize that their work is not a self-referential field of inquiry but that it engages broad social and political processes. As a result of the convergence of these two trends, the need for interdisciplinary spaces in teaching and research has grown over the past years.
The most forceful calls for bridging disciplinary divides already occurred in the 1970s, when the practice of “literature and medicine” gained ground as a reaction to the transformation of medical schools into high-powered research centers in the previous decade. As Anne Hudson Jones outlines, Edmund Pellegrino called upon medical educators to refocus their attention on the moral dimension of medicine. At the same time, Joanne Trautmann Banks highlighted the necessity of “read[ing], in the fullest sense” in order to increase medical practitioners’ “tolerance for ambiguity” with the goal of improving patient care. With the establishment of the journal Literature and Medicine in 1982, these interdisciplinary endeavors found a home.
Juli Koser. Armed Ambiguity: Women Warriors in German Literature and Culture in the Age of Goethe. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2016. x + 250 pp.
- from Book Reviews
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- By Stephanie M. Hilger, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Edited by Adrian Daub, Elisabeth Krimmer
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 25
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 16 May 2018
- Print publication:
- 30 June 2018, pp 302-303
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Summary
In this elegantly written and well-researched book, Julie Koser explores the representation of the woman warrior in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Engaging critical theory from Roland Barthes to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Koser discusses the popular fascination with the armed woman both in historical documents (such as newspapers and travel reports) and in literature in the wake of the French Revolution. By contextualizing these texts with essentialist gender theories of the time as represented by Pierre Roussel and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Koser explores the “strategic appropriation of gender myths as a form of contestation” (11). In particular she outlines the difference made in these writings between acceptable and non-acceptable forms of female activism. Whereas the woman as the defender of the family and the moral good was a sanctioned form of female agency, women's demands to be equal participants in the political process and to be allowed to bear arms were considered inappropriate. Koser traces the process by which some texts domesticated women warriors with the goal of nullifying their subversive potential. Yet, despite such attempts to negate the challenge to the patriarchal order that the woman warrior represented, this ambivalent figure nevertheless unsettled the gender binarism and beliefs about the separation of the public/male and the private/female spheres.
The authors discussed in the book's five chapters include canonical and noncanonical writers, both male and female: Christine Westphalen, Johann Heinrich Daniel Zschokke, Benedikte Naubert, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Therese Huber, Karoline von Günderrode, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, and Heinrich von Kleist. Of particular merit is Koser's close reading of these authors’ texts. She highlights their ambivalent representation of the woman warrior instead of attempting to solve the interpretive puzzles posed by this figure through a recourse to the authors’ biography and their political affinities. By eschewing this conventional interpretive move, Koser is able to draw parallels between the open-endedness of these texts and the political situation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Of particular note is the fact that she devotes equal amounts of critical attention to canonical and lesser discussed writers, without engaging in the types of discussions of their aesthetic merit that, while outdated in many ways, still inform scholarship on women authors of this period in particular.
Orientation and Supplementation: Locating the “Hermaphrodite” in the Encyclopédie
- Edited by Adrian Daub, Elisabeth Krimmer
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 22
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 27 May 2021
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2015, pp 169-188
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WHEN CALLIOPE STEPHANIDES, the adolescent intersex protagonist of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex (2002), visits the New York Public Library in search of information about her physical condition, she is struck by the sheer size of the dictionary located at the center of the library's reading room:
I had never seen such a big dictionary before. The Webster's at the New York Public Library stood in the same relation to other dictionaries of my acquaintance as the Empire State Building did to other buildings. It was an ancient, medieval-looking thing, bound in brown leather that brought to mind a falconer's gauntlet. The pages were gilded like the Bible’s.
The dictionary's monumental size and its patina mark its authority. Its gilded pages eventually lead Calliope to the entry for “hermaphrodite,” the term used for the intersex condition in medical writing until the mid-twentieth century and still pervasive in popular discourse today. The Webster's entry allows Calliope to make sense of her doctor's medical jargon and his plan to perform surgery on her nonnormative genitals. Calliope's observation that “[h]ere was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past” (431) highlights the central role played by reference works in the curation and dissemination of knowledge. Reference works fully assumed this privileged position during the Enlightenment, with the publication of the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751– 72). The Webster's towering presence in twenty-first-century America mirrors the status of the monumental collection of knowledge spearheaded by Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert in the mid-eighteenth century. Because French was the lingua franca of the intellectual sphere, the Encyclopédie's impact was not limited to France but extended to all of Europe, including German-speaking lands, which provided readers as well as authors. Like the Webster’s, the Encyclopédie and its sequel, the Supplément à l’Encyclopédie (1776–77), both contain an entry on the hermaphrodite. The complexity of the three-page Encyclopédie article and the existence of an even longer follow-up entry in the Supplément exemplify both the Enlightenment ideal to solve all mysteries and the struggle with this same ideal. At the same time that these reference works strive for objectivity and uniformity, they are shaped by the various contributors’ perceptions of the world.