Search results
psychoanalytic knowledge and the Freudian legacy in France. Several chapters condemned Dolto in particular. 10 Other critics took issue less with Dolto personally so much as the use made of her ideas, methods and reputation by her successors, imitators and disciples – the sort of people denounced by Élisabeth Roudinesco on Dolto’s centenary in 2008 as the ‘idolaters [who] keep on sanctifying her’. 11 For Dominique Mehl, Dolto’s major legacy was to inaugurate an entire genre of mass media intervention by psychoanalysts, while
‘ ordinaire ’ or, worse, ‘ vulgaire ’. 43 Such terms also served to police gender norms. Simone de Beauvoir recalled that a real ‘lady’ [ une dame ‘comme il faut’ ] ought not to show too much bosom, or wear short skirts, or dye her hair, or have it bobbed, or make up, or sprawl on a divan, or kiss her husband in the underground passages of the metro: if she transgressed these rules, she was ‘not a lady’ [ elle avait mauvais genre ]. 44 The most egregious marker of
Figure 12.1 William Hogarth, frontispiece to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) (detail) 253 Burlesque bellies belief that life – and character – could be faithfully rendered only if they were shown ‘in progress’, the bodies in his pictures are always represented in action,4 physiologically registering and displaying (as in the painting of Schutz) the consequences of the characters’ modes of life. One of the most eloquent exercises in the genre – and also, interestingly, one of Hogarth’s most famous pictures – is A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733), in
self under medical direction, as well as concerns about the detrimental effects of modern living on diet and health. More particularly, a key feature of the self-help genre, in relation to diet at least, was a commitment to providing readers with the knowledge and agency necessary to achieve ideal selfhood, health and well-being themselves through what the authors thought to be balanced diets or lifestyles. Drawing on self-help books that were in the Publishers’ Digest top ten, The New York Times’ bestsellers and books with multiple reprints
Richard Attenborough.7 It became clear that the writings of those who emerged from the trenches of France and Flanders had changed the culture and expectations of western societies irrevocably, such that, in 1967, Stanley Cooperman could write that ‘we are all creatures of the First World War’.8 In the 1970s a new genre emerged – a focus on the cultural history of the war. Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory – a remarkable exploration of the cultural significance of First World War literature – still stands as a guidepost for those approaching the subject.9
Phyllis Hembry's systematic 1990 investigation into English spas remains the referential scholarly work on the subject. Eighteenth-century printed texts on Bath are copious and diverse, ranging from medical treatises and controversies to songs and satirical poems. By contrast, the publications on the remaining 345 spas, springs and watering places vary greatly in quantity, genre and tone. Some small cold-water spas, like St Mungo's Well in Yorkshire, generated a lot of medical literature, medium-sized spa towns like Scarborough had their own yearly publication of
curricula and contemporary medical practice in Italy. Indeed, Linacre’s first medical translation from Greek to Latin was of Galen’s De Sanitate Tuenda, in 1517.4 Thus Elyot’s defensive preface was surely articulating his awareness of the unquestioned superiority of an Italian medical education and Italian medical theory, whilst locating his work in the classical medical tradition.5 English and Italian health advice 211 However, despite having its roots in antiquity, the regimen genre was far from static, and it is with Elyot’s Castel of Helth that the history of
‘forget annoying and grave cares, the mortal enemies of health’.68 Unusually, however, for medical writers, is Panaroli’s apparent promotion of a specific genre of image amongst those arts which he considered to be sources of recreation and preservation. His joint reference to music and ‘beautiful prospettive’ can only denote painted images (not natural ones), given that music and painting were sister arts. Moreover, Mancini, writing in his Considerazioni sulla pittura (c.1619–after 1624) of the recently developed pictorial genre of prospettive, associated it with
of the artist and the hand of the anatomist that made the dissection, and, by coming out of a book, alluded to the entire genre of anatomical publication. And, for our purposes, also alluded to our visitors who made reference to their own hands and bodies as they encountered that illustration and to the genres of anatomical objects and illustrations displayed in the show. And so Bidloo's late seventeenth-century anatomical poetics served as
This book explores whether early modern people cared about their health, and what did it mean to lead a healthy life in Italy and England. According to the Galenic-Hippocratic tradition, 'preservative' medicine was one of the three central pillars of the physician's art. Through a range of textual evidence, images and material artefacts, the book documents the profound impact which ideas about healthy living had on daily practices as well as on intellectual life and the material world in Italy and England. Staying healthy and health conservation was understood as depending on the careful management of the six 'Non-Naturals': the air one breathed, food and drink, excretions, sleep, exercise and repose, and the 'passions of the soul'. The book provides fresh evidence about the centrality of the Non-Naturals in relation to groups whose health has not yet been investigated in works about prevention: babies, women and convalescents. Pregnancy constituted a frequent physical state for many women of the early modern European aristocracy. The emphasis on motion and rest, cleansing the body, and improving the mental and spiritual states made a difference for the aristocratic woman's success in the trade of frequent pregnancy and childbirth. Preventive advice was not undifferentiated, nor simply articulated by individual complexion. Examining the roles of the Non-Naturals, the book provides a more holistic view of convalescent care. It also deals with the paradoxical nature of perceptions about the Neapolitan environment and the way in which its airs were seen to affect human bodies and health.