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seem to have believed that deafness proceeded from an inability to speak—that both were caused by an obstruction that impeded the tongue and the ear—and he cites evidence of medical remedies for deafness that involved surgery on the tongue; however, he notes that even in antiquity this belief seems to have been a minority view. He argues that ancient authors referred more directly to speechlessness ‘not because of their ignorance of the hearing impairment’, but because the lack of speech had ‘the more important consequences
phlebotomy outside the authorized lunar period, 25 thus hinting that women also had the authority to perform medical procedures, though their authority at monastic centers here seems to have been subject to men’s approval. Additionally, Bede’s description of a debate at Lindisfarne regarding whether a tumor over an eyelid would be best treated with a poultice or surgery (Book IV.32) implies not only multiple healers in a given location but also a diversity of medical philosophies and practices. 26 Though appearances of
his vocal cords is the trauma of voicelessness that My Luck, in his sign language, equates to death in the section describing the violent surgery the child soldiers undergo at the training camp: ‘Death is two fingers sliding across the throat’ ( SN , 21). The silencing of the organ of speech – that permits ‘voice’ as individual expression and agency within social forms of interaction – is a mutilation also of his sense of time and severs him from temporal organisation and the linear progression of past, present, and future
houses, inns & shops ([belonging to the] blues) smashed to atoms—the 2 front doors of the vicarage broken down—Mr [Christopher] Rawson's carriage (the banker with [whom] Mr Wortley had been staying) completely broken up. One of our servants going to the post yesterday had been knocked down but escaped without much harm—another of our servants escaped with difficulty today having seen a poor blue taken into a surgery, almost trampled & bruised to death. Dinner at 6½. It was, Ben Wilson wrote later, ‘known as the “window
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.
drawing attributed to Rembrandt which shows not the application of the fish-bile balm usually described in scripture, but some kind of eye surgery: ‘This scene of hands, of maneuvering and manipulation, calls to mind a properly surgical operation, which I dare not, or not yet, call graphic’ (Derrida 1993: 26). The cut made with a scalpel or stylus shows the sacrificial inscription of the trait, that is, a mark which cuts in order to make vision possible. In Die Ausgewanderten, the narrator performs a kind of surgery of the blind, but one which treats blindness by a
is quite a step to suggest that either the Dutch organist or Locke’s blind man would know how to interpret visual images. Only in 1728 would a practical test case for the latter be supplied. Cataract surgery and the recovery of sight In these thought experiments, there is scant interest in the blind person as an individual, and therefore very little appears in the way of direct literary responses. The analogical associations with sight and blindness – drawing on the model of the camera obscura that functions
the seventeenth century there were various treatment approaches for the King’s Evil drawing upon both learned and lay sources, with surgery another recourse apart from the use of the Royal Touch. 14 In 1679, Richard Wiseman (?1620–76), royal surgeon, published Several Chirurgical Treatises , which included a treatise on the King’s Evil. This substantial book was dedicated
some plea for either a return to the ‘natural body’ (or on the idea that that is even a possibility), or on a plea to ‘award’ women’s (certainly present) suffering over body hair and its removal an ‘equal’ status with the problems around body weight (or parallel related and relatable issues such as cosmetic surgery). Instead, I am agreeing here with arguments such as that of Judith Butler and Donna Haraway that bodies are not ‘born’ (do not exist as ‘natural’ ‘underneath’ culture), but are created as meaning, including gender. Butler writes
grows, Farah, Ishmael’s wife, who is from an upper-class family in Orap, openly looks down on her husband because of his parents’ foreign origins. East and West have this in common: preconceptions and hatred for the Other. What they also have in common is the perception of the female body and its objectification. In both cultures most women, conforming to a mainly patriarchal model and a narrow definition of beauty, aspire to be one type of woman they are often not: blonde, slim, and with pert noses. Through plastic surgery performed with his brother, Mo is able to