Review: Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination

September 26, 2018 By The Junto Moderator in Book Review Tags: Benjamin Rush, Charles Brockden Brown, Cholera, Edgar Allen Poe, Elihu Hubbard Smith, Flexner Report, Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary, Laurel Daen, literature, Medical humanities, Medicine, Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Sari Altschuler 2 Comments

Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018)

Today Laurel Daen reviews Sari Altschuler’s The Medical Imagination. Laurel Daen is the 2018-2020 NEH Postdoctoral Fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Her current book project is about disability, authority, and the formation of the American nation state. Laurel received her PhD from William & Mary in 2016 and was an NEH Long-term Fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society from 2017-2018.

In the early American republic, physicians wrote poetry to try out their medical theories, writers formulated concepts that made their way into medical texts, and everyday people viewed the disciplines of medicine and literature as fundamentally intertwined. Medicine and literature were mutually constitutive and reinforcing, Sari Altschuler explains in The Medical Imagination, and their relationship was seen as crucial to the production of medical knowledge. For example, medical educators urged their students to read and write fiction with the insistence that these practices would cultivate their “microscopic eye” or ability to detect and decipher disease (4). In addition, many doctors, writers, and doctor-writers used literary forms to conduct medical research, especially about topics that were difficult to test empirically. How, for instance, was one to evaluate the workings of sympathy, the universal force commonly understood to link body part to body part in a functioning human body and person to person in a functioning society? It was through literature that early national physicians and writers engaged with these types of questions, cultivating their skills in “imaginative experimentation”—or use of the imagination to craft and assess models of health (8). Continue reading →

Locating the Literati: Charles Brockden Brown in Philadelphia

September 26, 2013 By Jonathan Wilson in Methodology Tags: Charles Brockden Brown, cultural history, intellectual history, literary scholarship, local history, Philadelphia, Print Culture, printers, Public Sphere, Publishing, reading, William Godwin 5 Comments

It’s hard to write about early American print culture or intellect without thinking a lot about geography. Scholars like Trish Loughran, Richard John, John Fea, John Brooke, and Mary Kelley have suggested, in all sorts of ways, that it’s often wise to understand “the” early American public as a web of fundamentally local reading and writing publics. Intellectual culture meant something different from what it means in an age of mass media. But tricky questions come up when you try to write a local history of ideas or culture. Just how local can we reasonably go? How much detail can we actually use in an intellectual map of the early United States without getting lost in coincidences and irrelevance?

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“The Empire of Romance”: Some Notes on Novels in an Extensive Republic

March 19, 2013 By Jonathan Wilson in Methodology, Recent Scholarship Tags: Andrew Cayton, Charles Brockden Brown, fiction, imagination, James Fenimore Cooper, Maria Edgeworth, novelists, novels, Public Sphere, William Godwin 6 Comments

The current issue of the Journal of the Early Republic includes Andrew Cayton’s SHEAR presidential address on the novel’s place in the postrevolutionary Atlantic world: “The Authority of the Imagination in an Age of Wonder.” The essay makes a case for the usefulness of period novels to early-republic historians. Cayton gives us three reasons novels are useful as historical sources:

“The people we study paid attention to them.” Novels were significant parts of people’s lives, and they illuminate “the shifting structure of discourse and discourse communities” in early-nineteenth-century America.
“They challenge our preoccupation with categories.” Novels were experiments in defining and redefining people.
Novels reveal that many people conceived of liberty socially, “as a voluntary location of one’s self within overlapping social networks” (25-26). [1] Continue reading →

“Anonymous and Cacophonous Pleasures”

December 22, 2012 By Jonathan Wilson in Book Review Tags: Benjamin Franklin, book review, Charles Brockden Brown, Early Republic, Federalism, Jared Gardner, Joseph Dennie, magazines, New-England Magazine, newspapers, novels, periodicals, Port-Folio, Print Culture, Washington Irving 4 Comments

**Jared Gardner, The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture. Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2012.**

jaredgardner-riseandfall Almost by definition, studying communications media means examining the nature of rationality and the meaning of citizenship. So literary historians generally see the novel, which privileges dialogue and individual subjectivity, as helping to constitute a liberal social order, while political historians see newspapers as essential to various expressions of republicanism and democracy. In The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture, Jared Gardner contributes to the history of American citizenship by arguing that early-national American literary intellectuals mostly had their minds on a different print medium – and that they embraced a neglected model of rational public discourse.