Understanding Illness & Health

UNDERSTANDING HEALTH & ILLNESS

A HEALTH STUDIES READER

SAMPLE CHAPTER Tuberculosis & Body Image at the Fin-de-siecle Sharon Hirsh, Ph.D., Art History One way to learn more about the understanding of and attitudes towards disease at any given time is through the visual arts. This essay focuses on the work of the Symbolists. The work of this group of artists presents attitudes towards illness in western Europe in the late nineteenth century -- a period when enormous shifts in understanding about health care were changing the way people, especially in the new metropolises, were thinking.
	Tribulations of St. Anthony (James Ensor \| The Museum of Modern Art)

Therapeutic Beauty: Abbott Thayer, Anti-Modernism, & the Fear of Disease Elizabeth Lee, Ph.D., Art History We can learn a great deal about how health and illness were understood at any given time and place by assaying work produced by local artists of that era. This essay focuses on the works of Abbott Thayer, a Gilded Age painter whose life and art were infused with matters of sickness and health in ways that give us important insights about perceptions of illness and health in late-19th century America.
	Abbott Handerson Thayer \| Smithsonian American Art Museum Henry Wolf \| Smithsonian American Art Museum Edmund C. Tarbell \| Smithsonian American Art Museum George de Forest Brush \| Smithsonian American Art Museum Kenyon Cox \| Smithsonian American Art Museum	New Hampshire Division of Parks & Recreation: Monadnock State Park Winged Figure (Abbott Handerson Thayer \|The Art Institute of Chicago) Caritas (Abbott Handerson Thayer \| MFA Boston) Woman in Grecian Gown (Abbott Handerson Thayer \| Addison Gallery Collections) An Autumn Idyll (Francis Davis Millet \| Brooklyn Museum) The Venus de Milo (Musée du Louvre)
	National Institute of Health (NIH), History of Medicine Collection (part of the National Library of Medicine): Sources include extensive visual materials (films, advertisements, illustrations), current and archived exhibitions and information on relevant library holdings, much of which can be searched online. The Wellcome Collection in London: Includes exhibitions on the history of medicine drawn from the Wellcome’s vast material culture collection. Also contains information on the Wellcome Library, with more than 2.5 million items covering anthropology and alternative medicine as well as science policy and surgical practice in a variety of cultures across 3,000 years. Pennsylvania Hospital: Considered the nation’s first hospital, the Pennsylvania Hospital, now part of the University of Pennsylvania, includes nearly 21,000 historical images in its Image Gallery, in addition to its extensive library, useful historic timeline and “stories” profiling Dr. Benjamin Rush, among other notable historical figures.

Context Is Everything: Reading Representations of the Body Josh Kupetz, Ph.D., English Disability studies theorists describe an underlying ableist ideology at work in the literature they analyze. This essay discusses how ableist representations of disability are both products of and producers of disableism: a parallel theory where non-normal physical characteristics are employed by authors as metaphor for impoverished psychological, emotional, and physical health and wellness.

*Doctors, Detectives, and Rape: Narrating the New Masculine Contract* Sharon Stockton, Ph.D., English The past several decades have seen the rise of a new kind of hero – the man of uncommon sympathy for the female rape victim, who makes his lifework either the healing of the injured or the hunting of the perpetrator. In John Irving’s work in particular, the “best counselor” and surgeon of raped women is always the man on the outside, somehow not quite a fit with his cultural surroundings and expectation. This outsider is nonetheless reinvested with heroic potency through his ministrations to the rape victim, whom he alone recognizes as “holy.”