In theory, starting the “rest” cure off with rest sounds good, ideal even, but sleep caused by lack of sustenance is not the same as healthy sleep that replenishes energy.

Maine passed its first abortion statute in 1840, not long after the pardon of Dr. Call. Could there be a connection?

Four years on, a disability-informed reading of “Bartleby” seems to address even more urgently the crises our students face.

This is why you need a plan: to read attentively but efficiently, and sustainably, without surrendering your book-life balance.

For Jones and Allen, the problem was not a lack of information, but stubbornly partial accounts of that information.

Daniel’s preordained path as Republican steward began well enough, but it soon took a tragic detour.

Depending on one’s relationship to the monetary regime, coining could either appear a heinous offense that threatened the ruling order by undermining public trust in its currency, or a creative solution to the shortage of specie across much of the Atlantic world.

While Poe was likely using opium, the efforts to keep him quiet suggest that he was also drinking.

This was how I stumbled upon the extraordinary life of Anandi Gopal Joshee, known more informally as Anandibai (bai, a term of respect for Marathi women), the first Indian woman to have come to the United States to pursue a medical degree in 1883.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“The anatomical museum was not just a transgressor of public morality, it was a notorious, flagrant transgressor, a public institution devoted to the display of things that should not be displayed.”

Reading a 1959 article about a 1639 miscarriage in 2011 reveals how little the discourse about women’s bodies evolves over three hundred and twenty years.

Cholera maps chart the movement of the disease, and the terror that accompanied it.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

That the federal government created this health care system for merchant mariners in the early American republic will surprise many.

It seemed to me that the conditions of cancer and captivity shared physical, emotional, and spiritual correspondences.

The resolve of Philadelphia’s medical elite as well as their patients was quickly tested after the war by the yellow fever epidemic of 1793.

Presented as part of the special Politics Issue

There were far more Democrats in the 1850s who still supported the antiquated honor code that justified dueling than there were Whigs.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Peter Parker’s pickled paintings
Cause of nausea, chills & faintings”

Years before his immersion in the company of injured Union soldiers, Walt Whitman was surrounded by disabled men—or so he […]

“We aim to represent the range of disability history resources by selecting representative artifacts from the genres where disability history is found: veterans’ pension documents, the circus sideshow, moral literature, postcards of institutions, deaf- and polio- and blind-community newspapers and newsletters, service-club ephemera and meeting minutes.”

The letters and diaries contained an abundance of rich material regarding the effects of shot and shell on the human body.

In violation of his own rule “ that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others,” Twain’s writings are full of the walking dead.

Writing from Washington, where he spent the war years as a devoted hospital visitor or nurse, Whitman deployed his considerable skill as a journalist to introduce readers everywhere to the suffering of the hospitalized soldiers, focusing particularly on syndromes that, he claimed, were not well understood: trauma and its intersection with a wide range of disabilities.

This breakthrough addition to Whitman’s corpus refocuses his personal, poetic, and political vision while enriching current debates over masculinity, disability, affect, and the medical-industrial complex.

Wandering too is a technique of not looking, a practice of studied indirection. In that way it’s like revising—whether a poem or an entire collection—which is also a way of denying one’s loss of a past through an attempt to re-experience the sensations that accompany originary composition.

The pathways our contributors seek are divergent and take myriad forms. As Whitman would have preferred, they describe contradictory perspectives and incommensurable ontologies. And yet, they find common ground in the alternative mobilities they take to reach their destinations.

Far from signaling the diminution of interpretive ability or affective capacity, old age here is linked to critical acumen.

In a majority of these letters, we find Whitman integrating a reflection on his uncertain state of health with an expression of his desire to be with Peter again.

I entered the archive in Florence in June 2015 looking for one item, and I walked out with something completely unexpected, yet to which I was deeply and personally connected.

The nervous system, in the nineteenth-century imaginary, was the point of contact between the mind and the world.

Schultz paints a picture of an increasingly divided church in the United States, with miracles being only one of the issues on which the camps disagreed.

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“[G]iven the sorry record of ‘legitimate’ European medicine in the period, a profession that one historian of medicine recently noted was as likely to kill a patient as to cure her, it is no surprise that Mesmerism–which at least did no damage–successfully passed itself off as the cutting edge of Enlightenment science.”

Presented as part of the special issue: “A Cabinet of Curiosities”

“Our authors help us notice that men and women who are curious are themselves sometimes turned into curiosities.”

The growth of the English-Indian slave trade after 1659 laid the groundwork for a series of deadly epidemics at the end of the seventeenth century.

Confounded physicians could but observe the often contradictory genitalia, and consequently their pronouncements depended as much on traditional stereotypical social indicators as on biological markers when they decreed a physically anomalous individual male or female.

Plantation doctors understood that they worked for the slaveholder, not the patient, and elevated their reputations over their patients’ desires.

Presenting a new, themed issue of Common-place on Care and Dependence in Early America.

Presented as part of the Special Literature Issue

What then can the history of the asylum tell us about meanings and forms of liberal culture?

“In the period of initial contacts with Europeans, Native Americans lacked any exposure at all to Variola; when it arrived in a given locality, virtually the entire population was likely to be infected . . . “

“The result is that often promised but rarely achieved object: an interdisciplinary project with contributions from scholars of history, art history, the history of science, and literature.”

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