Overview

This book explores experiences of illness, broadly construed. It encompasses the emotional and sensory disruptions that attend disease, injury, mental illness or trauma, and gives an account of how medical practitioners, experts, lay authorities and the public have felt about such disruptions. Considering all sides of the medical encounter and highlighting the intersection of intellectual history and medical knowledge, of institutional atmospheres, built environments and technological practicalities, and of emotional and sensory experience, Feeling Dis-ease in Modern History presents a wide-ranging affective account of feeling well and of feeling ill. Especially occupied with the ways in which dynamics of power and authority have either validated or discounted dis-eased feelings, the book’s contributors probe at the intersectional politics of medical expertise and patient experience to better understand situated expressions of illness, their reception, and their social, cultural and moral valuation. Drawing on methodologies from the histories of emotions, senses, science and the medical humanities, this book gives an account of the complexity of undergoing illness: of feeling dis-ease.

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9781350228405

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Reviews

This is an innovative and ambitious volume that brings together a range of themes, disciplinary approaches, time-periods, and places to examine the affective dimensions of health and ill-health. This book is about being both well and sick, and considers the experiences of practitioners, patients, and the public. --Agnes Arnold-Forster, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK If there is a handbook on how to write the affective into the history of medicine and health, this is it. Writing during a pandemic, the authors are attuned to the uproars and silences that comprise the emotionally-charged responses to personal and collective suffering from a rich array of perspectives. --Jonathan Reinarz, Professor of the History of Medicine, University of Birmingham, UK

Author Information

Rob Boddice is Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences, Tampere University, Finland, and Adjunct Professor at the Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University, Canada. He is the author or editor of eleven books, most recently Humane Professions (2021), Emotion, Sense, Experience, with Mark Smith (2020), A History of Feelings (2019), and The History of Emotions (2018). Bettina Hitzer is Heisenberg Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Technical University Dresden as well as Privatdozentin at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. From 2014-2020, she was Leader of the Minerva Research Group “Emotions and Illness: Histories of an Intricate Relation” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. She was awarded the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for her most recent book, Krebs fühlen (2020). She is the author or (co-)editor of nine books and four special issues including “History of Science and the Emotions” (Osiris, 2016).

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