Download or read book The Most Secret Quintessence of Life written by Chandak Sengoopta and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Less than a century ago, physicians, scientists, and cultural commentators became fascinated by the endocrine glands and the effects of their secretions on our bodies and minds. Of all the characteristics supposed to be governed by them, the attributes of sex evoked the wildest interest. The gonads, it was revealed, secreted chemicals that not only influenced the biological expressions of sex, but seemed to generate the vitality and energy that made life worth living. Through a series of case studies drawn from Central Europe, the United States, and Britain, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life explores how the notion of sex hormones enabled scientists to remap the human body, encouraging hopes that glandular interventions could cure ills, malfunctions, and even social deviance in ways inconceivable to previous generations. Many of these dreams failed, but their history, Chandak Sengoopta shows, takes us into the very heart of scientific medicine, revealing how even its most arcane concerns are shaped by cultural preoccupations and anxieties. Offering a painstakingly researched and absorbing account of a century of glandular and hormone research, The Most Secret Quintessence of Life will be heralded as a major achievement by scholars working on the history of medicine and its influence on modern ideas of the body, sexuality, and gender.
Download or read book Quintessence written by David Walton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine an Age of Exploration full of alchemy, human dissection, sea monsters, betrayal, torture, religious controversy, and magic. In Europe, the magic is thin, but at the edge of the world, where the stars reach down close to the Earth, wonders abound. This drives the bravest explorers to the alluring Western Ocean. Christopher Sinclair is an alchemist who cares only about one thing: quintessence, a substance he believes will grant magical powers and immortality. And he has a ship.
Download or read book Man Into Woman written by Lili Elbe and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1930 Danish artist Einar Wegener underwent a series of surgeries to live as Lili Ilse Elvenes (more commonly known as Lili Elbe). Her life story, Fra Mand til Kvinde (From Man to Woman), published in Copenhagen in 1931, is the first popular full-length (auto)biographical narrative of a subject who undergoes genital transformation surgery (Genitalumwandlung). In Man Into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition, Pamela L. Caughie and Sabine Meyer present the full text of the 1933 American edition of Elbe's work with comprehensive notes on textual and paratextual variants across the four published editions in three languages. This edition also includes a substantial scholarly introduction which situates the historical and intellectual context of Elbe's work, as well as new essays on the work by leading scholars in transgender studies and modernist literature, and critical coverage of the 2015 biopic, The Danish Girl. This print edition has a digital companion: the Lili Elbe Digital Archive (www.lilielbe.org). Launched on July 6, 2019, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) where Lili Elbe was initially examined, the Lili Elbe Digital Archive hosts the German typescript and all four editions of this narrative published in Danish, German, and English between 1931 and 1933, with English translations of the Danish edition and the typescript. Many letters from archives and contemporaneous articles noted in this print edition may be found in the digital archive.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-01 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than a century after his death, Walt Whitman remains a fresh phenomenon. Startling discoveries and massive transcription efforts are enabling new insights into his life and achievements. In the past few years new breakthroughs have proliferated, including the publication of a long-lost Whitman novel, Jack Engle, along with a hitherto unknown health guide for urban men and previously undiscovered poems. Myriad other documents have become more readily available, including largely unmined troves of journalism, narrative and documentary prose, and experimental note-keeping. Leaves of Grass and Whitman's literary life as a whole are thus ripe for reconsideration. The Oxford Handbook of Walt Whitman embraces this expanded view of Whitman and charts new pathways in Whitman Studies by bringing in new perspectives, methods, and contexts.
Download or read book Of Human Born written by Caroline Arni and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciences At a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman’s body has, once again, become a fraught issue—from abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk—Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of “life before birth.” Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of “fetal life” by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother’s living conditions; and how they lingered on the question of the beginnings of human subjectivity. Such were the concerns of physiologists, pediatricians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts as they advanced the novel discipline of embryology while, at the same time, grappling with age-old questions about the coming-into-being of a human person. Of Human Born thus draws attention to the fundamental way in which modern approaches to the unborn have been intertwined with the configuration of “the human” in the age of scientific empiricism. Arni revises the narrative that the “modern embryo” is quintessentially an embryo disembedded from the pregnant woman’s body. On the contrary, she argues that the concept of fetal life cannot be separated from its dependency on the maternal organism, countering the rhetorical discourses that have fueled the recent rollback of abortion rights in the United States.
Download or read book Puberty in Crisis written by Celia Roberts and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-07 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Puberty has long been recognised as a difficult and upsetting process for individuals and families, but it is now also being widely described as in crisis. Reportedly occurring earlier and earlier as each decade of the twenty-first century passes, sexual development now heralds new forms of temporal trouble in which sexuality, sex/gender and reproduction are all at stake. Many believe that children are growing up too fast and becoming sexual too early. Clinicians, parents and teachers all demand something must be done. Does this out-of-time development indicate that children's futures are at risk or that we are entering a new era of environmental and social perturbation? Engaging with a diverse range of contemporary feminist and social theories on the body, biology and sex, Celia Roberts urges us to refuse a discourse of crisis and to rethink puberty as a combination of biological, psychological and social forces.
Download or read book A History of Prostate Cancer written by Helen Valier and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comprehensive and inclusive insight into the history of prostate cancer and its sufferers. Until recently, little practical help could be offered for men afflicted with the devastating diseases of the genitourinary organs. This is despite complaints of painful urination from aging men being found in ancient medical manuscripts, despite the anatomical discoveries of the European Renaissance and despite the experimental surgical researches of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries. As diseases of the prostate, including prostate cancer, came to be better understood in the early twentieth century, therapeutic nihilism continued as curative radical surgeries and radiotherapy failed. The therapeutic ‘turn’ came with hormonal therapies, itself a product of the explosive growth of U.S. biomedicine from the 1940s onwards. By the 1990s, prostate cancer screening had become a somewhat ubiquitous but controversial feature of the medical encounter for American men as they aged, which greatly influenced the treatment pathways and identity of the male patient: as victim, as hero, and ultimately, as consumer.
Download or read book Medicine and Modernism written by L. S. Jacyna and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2016-09-12 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and the relationship between language and the brain broke new ground. L. S. Jacyna argues that these advances must be contextualized within wider Modernist debates about perception and language. In his time, Head was best known for his research into the human nervous system. He did a series of experiments in collaboration with W. H. R. Rivers in which cutaneous nerves were surgically severed in Head's arm and the stages by which sensation returned were chartered over several years. Head's friend, the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, drew out the epistemological implications of how, in this new conception, the nervous system furthered the knowledge of the world.
Download or read book Sex Itself written by Sarah S. Richardson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Human genomes are 99.9 percent identical—with one prominent exception. Instead of a matching pair of X chromosomes, men carry a single X, coupled with a tiny chromosome called the Y. Tracking the emergence of a new and distinctive way of thinking about sex represented by the unalterable, simple, and visually compelling binary of the X and Y chromosomes, Sex Itself examines the interaction between cultural gender norms and genetic theories of sex from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, postgenomic age. Using methods from history, philosophy, and gender studies of science, Sarah S. Richardson uncovers how gender has helped to shape the research practices, questions asked, theories and models, and descriptive language used in sex chromosome research. From the earliest theories of chromosomal sex determination, to the mid-century hypothesis of the aggressive XYY supermale, to the debate about Y chromosome degeneration, to the recent claim that male and female genomes are more different than those of humans and chimpanzees, Richardson shows how cultural gender conceptions influence the genetic science of sex. Richardson shows how sexual science of the past continues to resonate, in ways both subtle and explicit, in contemporary research on the genetics of sex and gender. With the completion of the Human Genome Project, genes and chromosomes are moving to the center of the biology of sex. Sex Itself offers a compelling argument for the importance of ongoing critical dialogue on how cultural conceptions of gender operate within the science of sex.
Download or read book Brown Sequard written by Michael J. Aminoff, MD and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the strange career of Brown-Sequard, an eccentric, restless, nineteenth-century physician-scientist whose life was characterized by dramatic reversals of fortune and is said to have been "one of the greatest discovers of facts that the world has ever seen".
Download or read book Substantial Relations written by Sandra Bärnreuther and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-15 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Substantial Relations examines global reproductive medicine in India, focusing on in vitro fertilization. Since the 1970s, India has played a central but shifting role in shaping global reproductive medicine—from a provider of raw material, to a producer of knowledge and technology, to a creator of a thriving medical market that attracts patients from all over the world. Relying on archival material and oral history, Substantial Relations traces the path of this transnational historical trajectory. This book also examines the contemporary making of IVF in Delhi. Drawing on ethnographic research in homes, hospitals, and laboratories, Sandra Bärnreuther provides deep insights into the intricacies of clinical life and everyday experience by depicting IVF users' quest for offspring and their fears of establishing unwanted ties, as well as the minute engagements of clinicians and laboratory staff with reproductive substances. Thinking through substances—metaphorically and materially—Sandra Bärnreuther provides a novel and rich analysis of the various relations that the burgeoning IVF sector in India has relied on and generated. Substantial Relations contributes to a broader understanding of reproductive medicine as a global phenomenon constantly in the making, situating India in the midst of, rather than peripheral to, this process.
Download or read book Doctoring Traditions written by Projit Bihari and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like many of the traditional medicines of South Asia, Ayurvedic practice transformed dramatically in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With Doctoring Tradition, Projit Bihari Mukharji offers a close look at that recasting, upending the widely held yet little-examined belief that it was the result of the introduction of Western anatomical knowledge and cadaveric dissection. Rather, Mukharji reveals, what instigated those changes were a number of small technologies that were introduced in the period by Ayurvedic physicians, men who were simultaneously Victorian gentlemen and members of a particular Bengali caste. The introduction of these devices, including thermometers, watches, and microscopes, Mukharji shows, ultimately led to a dramatic reimagining of the body. By the 1930s, there emerged a new Ayurvedic body that was marked as distinct from a biomedical body. Despite the protestations of difference, this new Ayurvedic body was largely compatible with it. The more irreconcilable elements of the old Ayurvedic body were then rendered therapeutically indefensible and impossible to imagine in practice. The new Ayurvedic medicine was the product not of an embrace of Western approaches, but of a creative attempt to develop a viable alternative to the Western tradition by braiding together elements drawn from internally diverse traditions of the West and the East.
Download or read book Hormones Heredity and Race written by Cheryl A. Logan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-20 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in the twentieth century, arguments about “nature” and “nurture” pitted a rigid genetic determinism against the idea that genes were flexible and open to environmental change. This book tells the story of three Viennese biologists—Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and Eugen Steinach—who sought to show how the environment could shape heredity through the impact of hormones. It also explores the dynamic of failure through both scientific and social lenses. During World War I, the three men were well respected scientists; by 1934, one was dead by his own hand, another was in exile, and the third was subject to ridicule. Paul Kammerer had spent years gathering zoological evidence on whether environmental change could alter heredity, using his research as the scientific foundation for a new kind of eugenics—one that challenged the racism growing in mainstream eugenics. By 1918, he drew on the pioneering research of two colleagues who studied how secretions shaped sexual attributes to argue that hormones could alter genes. After 1920, Julius Tandler employed a similar concept to restore the health and well-being of Vienna's war-weary citizens. Both men rejected the rigidly acting genes of the new genetics and instead crafted a biology of flexible heredity to justify eugenic reforms that respected human rights. But the interplay of science and personality with the social and political rise of fascism and with antisemitism undermined their ideas, leading to their spectacular failure.
Download or read book How the Clinic Made Gender written by Sandra Eder and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This timely history tells the story of how 'gender' was invented in American medicine. The concept of gender shifted from a pragmatic tool in the sex assignment of children with intersex traits in the 1950s to an essential category in clinics for transgender patients in the 1960s, to a feature of feminist debates about the sex/gender binary in the 1970s, to the word we know today. Our current idea of gender might not map exactly onto these earlier formulations, but we still live with the legacy of this genealogy. Sandra Eder reveals that there was-without a doubt- something new, transformative, and enduring about the concept of gender that developed through clinical practices at pediatric endocrinology clinics. The history of gender laid out in this book shows that these ideas held no single, unified meaning-neither within the clinic nor outside it-and that 'gender' was shaped by the behaviors and needs of those who used and adapted it. This is not a neat and tidy story about the introduction of a liberating concept. Nor does this book simply focus on the development of a medical regime that subjected intersex infants to irreversible genital surgery. Rather, How the Clinic Made Gender explores the shifting landscapes of discussion about sex, gender, and sexuality in modern US history. The process by which ideas about gender became medicalized, enforced, and popularized was messy, and how gender came to be understood and applied through the treatment of patients with intersex traits was fraught and contested. This book is about the intricate ways in which the most intimate of ideas were put into practice in medicine and how those clinical practices, in turn, have informed our ideas about gender to this day"--
Download or read book Matters of the Heart written by Fay Bound Alberti and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-14 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heart is the most symbolic organ of the human body. Across cultures it is seen as the site of emotions, as well as the origin of life. This book traces the ways emotions have been understood between the 17th and 19th centuries as both physical entities and spiritual experiences.
Download or read book A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir written by Laura Hengehold and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-07-27 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2018 Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title! The work of Simone de Beauvoir has endured and flowered in the last two decades, thanks primarily to the lasting influence of The Second Sex on the rise of academic discussions of gender, sexuality, and old age. Now, in this new Companion dedicated to her life and writings, an international assembly of prominent scholars, essayists, and leading interpreters reflect upon the range of Beauvoir’s contribution to philosophy as one of the great authors, thinkers, and public intellectuals of the twentieth century. The Companion examines Beauvoir’s rich intellectual life from a variety of angles—including literary, historical, and anthropological perspectives—and situates her in relation to her forbears and contemporaries in the philosophical canon. Essays in each of four thematic sections reveal the breadth and acuity of her insight, from the significance of The Second Sex and her work on the metaphysics of gender to her plentiful contributions in ethics and political philosophy. Later chapters trace the relationship between Beauvoir’s philosophical and literary work and open up her scholarship to global issues, questions of race, and the legacy of colonialism and sexism. The volume concludes by considering her impact on contemporary feminist thought writ large, and features pioneering work from a new generation of Beauvoir scholars. Ambitious and unprecedented in scope, A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir is an accessible and interdisciplinary resource for students, teachers, and researchers across the humanities and social sciences.
Download or read book Shimmering Images written by Eliza Steinbock and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-14 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Shimmering Images Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change. Drawing on Barthes's idea of the “shimmer” and Foucault's notion of sex as a mirage, the author shows how sex and gender can appear mirage-like on film, an effect they label shimmering. Steinbock applies the concept of shimmering—which delineates change in its emergent form as well as the qualities of transforming bodies, images, and affects—to analyses of films that span time and genre. These include examinations of the fantastic and phantasmagorical shimmerings of sex change in Georges Méliès's nineteenth-century trick films and Lili Elbe's 1931 autobiographical writings and photomontage in Man into Woman. Steinbock also explores more recent documentaries, science fiction, and pornographic and experimental films. Presenting a cinematic philosophy of transgender embodiment that demonstrates how shimmering images mediate transitioning, Steinbock not only offers a corrective to the gender binary orientation of feminist film theory; they open up new means to understand trans ontologies and epistemologies as emergent, affective, and processual.
