Title Telling the flesh : life writing, citizenship, and the body in the letters to Samuel Auguste Tissot / Sonja Boon

Published Montreal ; Kingston : McGill-Queen's University Press, 2015

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Description 1 online resource Series McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services studies in the history of medicine, health, and society ; 44 McGill-Queen's/Associated Medical Services studies in the history of medicine, health, and society ; 44. Contents Introduction : Bodies and stories -- Body logics : letters and lives -- Textual bodies/textual selves : illness, identity, and bodily subjectivity -- Corporeal virtue and embodied citizenship -- Constitutionally autobiographical : performing kinship -- Bodily agency and the politics of pleasure -- Neurographia : writing nervous disorder -- Epilogue : The limits of storytelling Summary "This book is about the stories our bodies tell, the stories we tell about our bodies and the ways that we integrate such stories into broader political narratives about citizenship and belonging. The stories under examination are those of the individuals who wrote letters describing their bodily sufferings to Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728-1797), the most famous doctor in Enlightenment Europe. Consultation by correspondence enabled individuals in far-flung places to maintain contact with leading physicians and was a mainstay of the eighteenth-century medical encounter. And it did something more: it gave individuals the opportunity to conceive their psychic and somatic sufferings in textual form. Through the process of writing letters describing their ailments, the authors of these letters created textual selves, articulating bodily autobiographies and identities shaped by bodily experience. The letters to Samuel Tissot are thus not only articulations of bodily suffering, but are articulations of bodily selves. Experienced within the social, cultural and political contexts of mid-eighteenth-century Europe, they tell us how individuals understood their bodily selves in relation to broader political discourses of belonging and citizenship. What people did with their bodies mattered in a political environment beset by concerns about depopulation, moral depravity, and corporeal excess, and organized around intricate rules of propriety. For many Enlightenment thinkers, the body functioned as a vital stage for the performance of virtue. Embodied virtue (ie. virtue enacted through bodily actions and behaviours), created the conditions of what Boon terms "corporeal citizenship.""-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Subject Tissot, S. A. D. (Samuel Auguste David), 1728-1797. SUBJECT Tissot, S. A. D, 1728-1797 (Samuel Auguste David), Tissot, S. A. D. (Samuel Auguste David), 1728-1797 fast Subject Physician and patient -- Europe -- History -- 18th century Patients' writings -- History and criticism Sick -- Europe -- Psychology -- History -- 18th century Human body -- Social aspects -- Europe -- History -- 18th century Human body -- Europe -- Politicals aspects -- History -- 18th century Citizenship -- Political aspects -- Europe -- History -- 18th century Medicine -- Europe -- History -- 18th century Medicine -- History -- 18th century. Sick -- Europe -- Correspondence Human body in literature. European letters -- 18th century -- History and criticism Physician and Patient Human Body History, 18th Century HEALTH & FITNESS -- Holism. HEALTH & FITNESS -- Reference. MEDICAL -- Alternative Medicine. MEDICAL -- Atlases. MEDICAL -- Essays. MEDICAL -- Family & General Practice. MEDICAL -- Holistic Medicine. MEDICAL -- Osteopathy. LITERARY CRITICISM -- European -- General. Sick Human body in literature Human body -- Social aspects Medicine Patients' writings Physician and patient Sick -- Psychology SUBJECT Europe. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85045631 Europe Subject Europe Genre/Form Electronic books Personal correspondence Criticism, interpretation, etc. History Form Electronic book ISBN 9780773597402 0773597409 9780773597419 0773597417 9780773546394 0773546391 9780773545762 077354576X

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