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Hesyre was a high court official in ancient Egypt and lived about 2650 bc during the reign of King Djoser. He managed to combine religious as well as secular posts, and has the distinction of being the first recorded physician and firstknown dentist in history. Healthcare developed at an early period in ancient Egyptian history as is supported by the evidence from the skeletal and mummified remains, from the artistic record, as well as from inscriptional and textual sources. These textual sources, the medical papyri, provide details of medical procedures undertaken, drugs employed and treatments provided - some of which have influenced modern medical practice. What we know about Hesyre comes from his impressive tomb at Saqqara, the walls of which are brightly decorated with items of daily life. Additionally, the tomb contained six fine wooden panels listing Hesyres titles, among them those relating to his practice of medicine and dentistry.
) Let us suppose the case of a young man, intellectual, talented and perhaps, with great aptitude in surgery, but nevertheless at heart a sexual pervert. He begins practice and soon acquires a reputation as a skilful surgeon. But he feels, stirring within him, sadistic tendencies which he cannot or will not repress. He looks about him for a means of
intellectually and obsessively on death … morbid anatomy and the obsessions of the curiosity cabinet thus pre-empted life and the living’. 8 In the culture of the Enlightenment, Stafford explains that ‘metaphors of decoding … analysing, fathoming, permeated ways of thinking about, and representing, all branches of knowledge from religion to philosophy …, archaeology to surgery’. 9 There are profound implications of Blake
’Key sisters, his successor as the pre-eminent practitioner of induced sleep in Victorian popular consciousness enjoyed a perceptibly more favourable status on account of his scepticism and the relative accessibility of the theory which lay behind his public and clinical demonstrations. James Braid was a Scot, educated at the University of Edinburgh, with experience in surgery and – significantly – ophthalmology
reaffirmation of an enriched self. Each text in this chapter resists the trend in transplant commentary to downplay any sense of the received tissue as alien or to elide recipients’ imaginative work or distress. The texts figure recipient experience variously in terms of mutual enfleshment across shared tissue, possession by multiple non-human forces, and an evacuation of self and agency altogether, in crises both affective and ontological. Ultimately, the works unsettle not only a distinction between self and other but also the idea of transplantation surgery as a time
Perception and analogy explores ways of seeing scientifically in the eighteenth century. It discusses literary, theological, and didactic texts alongside popular works on astronomy, optics, ophthalmology, and the body to demonstrate how readers are prompted to take on a range of perspectives in their acquisition of scientific knowledge. With reference to topics from colour perception to cataract surgery, the book examines how sensory experience was conceptualised during the eighteenth century. It argues that by paying attention to the period’s documentation of perception as an embodied phenomenon we can better understand the creative methods employed by disseminators of diverse natural philosophical ideas. This book argues for the central role of analogy in conceptualising and explaining new scientific ideas. It centres on religious and topographical poetry by writers including James Thomson, Richard Blackmore, Mark Akenside, Henry Brooke, David Mallet, Elizabeth Carter, and Christopher Smart. Together with its readings of popular educational dialogues on scientific topics, the book also addresses how this analogical approach is reflected in material culture through objects – such as orreries, camera obscuras, and Aeolian harps – that facilitate acts of perception and tactile engagement within polite spaces. The book shows how scientific concepts become intertwined with Christian discourse through reinterpretations of origins and signs, the scope of the created universe, and the limits of embodied knowledge.
Chapter 2 investigates the corrupting and corrosive effects of slavery. An association already exists between slavery and the rise of Gothic fiction through the West Indian connections of the major Gothic writers, Horace Walpole, William Beckford and Matthew Lewis. Mary Shelley’s new creation myth in Frankenstein draws not just on Prometheus and Adam but also, it will be argued, on the topical issue of the enslaved and the reluctance of many abolitionists to support the cause of immediate emancipation. Within this reading of Frankenstein as an allegory of slavery, the monster is considered as a demonised version of miscegenation and the fate of his female companion related to fears generated by rebel female slaves. Her resurrection in Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein (1935) demonstrates how surgery can be used for sexual purposes in creating a female creature, as indicated by the film title.
on her unfaithful husband, defies her maker by remaking herself anew, not just psychically but also through plastic surgery. 12 The use of surgery as an instrument of pacification rather than empowerment, demonstrated by the sexual surgery carried out by Isaac Baker Brown, was symptomatic of the war on women waged in the operating theatre. Bogus medical theory and practice underpin this
This book is about science in theatre and performance. It explores how theatre and performance engage with emerging scientific themes from artificial intelligence to genetics and climate change. The book covers a wide range of performance forms from the spectacle of the Paralympics Opening Ceremony to Broadway musicals, from experimental contemporary performance and opera to educational theatre, Somali poetic drama and grime videos. It features work by pioneering companies including Gob Squad, Headlong Theatre and Theatre of Debate as well as offering fresh analysis of global blockbusters such as Wicked and Urinetown. The book offers detailed description and analysis of theatre and performance practices as well as broader commentary on the politics of theatre as public engagement with science. It documents important examples of collaborative practice with extended discussion of the Theatre of Debate process developed by Y Touring theatre company, exploration of bilingual theatre-making in East London and an account of how grime MCs and dermatologists ended up making a film together in Birmingham. The interdisciplinary approach draws on contemporary research in theatre and performance studies in combination with key ideas from science studies. It shows how theatre can offer important perspectives on what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has called ‘cosmopolitics’. The book argues that theatre can flatten knowledge hierarchies and hold together different ways of knowing.
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.