Thomas A. Apel, Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds: Science and the Yellow Fever Controversy in the Early American Republic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), pp. x, 191, $60, hardback, ISBN: 9780804797405.
نویسنده
چکیده
manufacturer advised: ‘Insert the Artificial Hymen into your vagina carefully. . . . When your lover penetrates, it will ooze out a liquid that appears like blood, not too much but just the right amount. Add in a few moans and groans and you will pass through undetectable!’ The other major theme in the book is the relationship between the body and metaphor. We have ‘gut instincts’; we tell people to ‘have a heart’; when afraid, we are ‘tongue-tied’. These ways of thinking are reminders that humans are (in Bound Alberti’s words) ‘social beings that communicate with others – not only through tongues as symbols and organs, but through social practices, behaviours and our very materiality’. As philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty put it ‘we don’t own our bodies; we are them’. Bound Alberti is committed to the view that the physiological body has a history. Indeed, she celebrates the potentially liberating view that ‘our bodies are products of the stories we tell’. If this is the case, then ‘by taking the body apart . . .we might even be able to construct it anew’. Not all readers will be convinced, but this book is a good place to start thinking anew about reinvigorating debates deconstructing mind–body dualism.
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risked less than whites would have done, because they were presumed to have superior resistance to yellow fever. The absence of this racialised set of ideas within Apel’s analysis is a significant omission. How enlightened were the early Republic’s medical cognoscenti, after all, if they continued to reinforce racist prejudice that black bodies were unfailingly strong rather than subject, equal...
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