Health and Illness by Sander L Gilman

Health and Illness by Sander L Gilman

Ours is a culture riddled with preoccupations about health and disease. In this timely study Sander L. Gilman demonstrates how images of beauty and ugliness have constructed a visual history which records the artificial boundaries that continue to divide 'healthy' bodies from ones that are ill. He shows how cultural fantasies of health and illness have come to be identified and defined by means of visual, aesthetic criteria - for the healthy is now seen as beautiful and the ill as ugly. How did these categories acquire medical associations? The history of our perception of the 'beautiful body' is charged with anxieties about contagion and ugliness and, furthermore, entangled with political implications brought about by our all-too-frequent interpretation of 'race' as a medical category. Sander Gilman looks at how nineteenth-century theorists collected medical and racial data from the shapes of noses, and at contemporary fears concerning syphilis, vividly personified in the diseased hero of Leroux's "The Phantom of the Opera". He also scrutinizes Mark Twain's frank account of a visit to the Holy Land for signs of implicit prejudice about the health or illness of the resident Arabs and Jews. These concerns are brought up-to-date when the author turns to pathological case histories and recent AIDS posters issued by governments worldwide. This is more than simply a history of medicine augmented by visual evidence; its true originality lies in reading from the same visual sources an otherwise unnoticed aestheticization of the body. In so doing, Sander Gilman has discovered a new, exciting, alternative reading of the history of health and illness.

Gilman tells an excellent taleJewish Chronicle Gilman offers up the ambiguity of fantasies about health and illness for discursive redemption by his readers, providing insights without judgements ... a stimulating synthetic work which reaches a new level of originality, provokes new questions and points toward further directions. Oxford Art Journal

Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine at the University of Illinois, Chicago, USA. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over sixty books, including Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (Reaktion Books, 2004), and Franz Kafka (Reaktion Books, 2005).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780948462696
ISBN 10	0948462698
Title	Health and Illness
Author	Sander L Gilman
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Reaktion Books
Year published	1995-05-01
Number of pages	200
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable