Neurology and Modernity

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. Introduction

   • Laura Salisbury, Andrew Shail

   Pages 1-40

3. Beyond the Brain: Sceptical and Satirical Responses to Gall’s Organology

   • Michael K. House

   Pages 41-58

4. Neurology and the Invention of Menstruation

   • Andrew Shail

   Pages 59-80

5. Carlyle’s Nervous Dyspepsia: Nervousness, Indigestion and the Experience of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain

   • Hisao Ishizuka

   Pages 81-95

6. Railway Spine, Nervous Excess and the Forensic Self

   • Jane F. Thrailkill

   Pages 96-112

7. “The Conviction of its Existence”: Silas Weir Mitchell, Phantom Limbs and Phantom Bodies in Neurology and Spiritualism

   • Aura Satz

   Pages 113-129

8. Modernism and the Two Paranoias: The Neurology of Persecution

   • George Rousseau

   Pages 130-147

9. “Nerve-Vibration”: Therapeutic Technologies in the 1880s and 1890s

   • Shelley Trower

   Pages 148-162

10. From Daniel Paul Schreber through the Dr. Phil Family: Modernity, Neurology and the Cult of the Case Study Superstar

    • Michael Angelo Tata

    Pages 163-183

11. “I guess I’m just nervous, then”: Neuropathology and Edith Wharton’s Exploration of Interior Geographies

    • Vike Martina Plock

    Pages 184-203

12. Sounds of Silence: Aphasiology and the Subject of Modernity

    • Laura Salisbury

    Pages 204-230

13. Shell Shock as a Self-Inflicted Wound, 1915–1921

    • Jessica Meyer

    Pages 231-244

14. Modernity and the Peristaltic Subject

    • Jean Walton

    Pages 245-266

15. Matter for Thought: The Psychon in Neurology, Psychology and American Culture, 1927–1943

    • Melissa M. Littlefield

    Pages 267-286

16. Back Matter

    Pages 287-298

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As people of the modern era were singularly prone to nervous disorders, the nervous system became a model for describing political and social organization. This volume untangles the mutual dependencies of scientific neurology and the cultural attitudes of the period 1800-1950, exploring how and why modernity was a fundamentally nervous state.

• cultural history
• nervous system
• neurology
• neuropathology
• psychology

'This excellent collection opens up a fascinating area of discourse in relation to the modern area, moving the debate away from established thinking on 'nerves' in terms of neurasthenia, shell-shock and neurosis,and investigating a much wider range of issues indeed a whole a culture of nervousness - informed by the new understandings of neurology. The essays range across a variety of fascinating topics (speech disorders, peristalsis, vibration-cures, paranoia), exploring the dethroned modern self, wired from within and without to its physical and social environment. For the student of bodily and mental cultures, this will be a vital text.' - Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London

• Technology and Culture, Birkbeck College, London, UK

  Laura Salisbury

• Newcastle University, UK

  Andrew Shail

LAURA SALISBURY is RCUK Fellow in Science, Technology, and Culture and a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published various articles on Samuel Beckett, including one on his 'aphasic' modernism. She is currently writing a book on Late Modernisms for Edinburgh University Press and researching a study of the relationships between modernism, modernity and neurological conceptions of language.

ANDREW SHAIL  News International Research Fellow in Film at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. He is co-editor of Menstruation: A Cultural History (with Gillian Howie, Palgrave, 2005), and editor of Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896-1912 (University of Exeter Press, 2010), and co-author, with Bob Stoate, of a BFI Film Classic on Back to the Future (2010).

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