The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War

by Todd Meyers (Author), Stefanos Geroulanos (Author)

New
Illustrated
2018
$37.11

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover? In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the wildly divergence between patients. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of concepts became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics. Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.

Synopsis

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover? In The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the wildly divergence between patients. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of concepts became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics. Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.

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More Information

Format: Illustrated
Pages: 416
Edition: Illustrated
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 13 Aug 2018
ISBN 10: 022655659X
ISBN 13: 9780226556598

Media Reviews

A shared concept of human individuality lies at the heart of intellectual traditions as varied as psychoanalysis, cybernetics, and medical humanism: an individuality knowable only at the moment of its collapse. This is the remarkable argument of The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe, a provocative and poignant book, and one that will be essential reading for historians of modern science and medicine. By reconstructing modern neuromedicine's confrontation with the violence of industrialized warfare, Geroulanos and Meyers have given us a model for writing intellectual history that is simultaneously materialized, embodied, and transnational. --Deborah Coen, Yale University
Geroulanos and Meyers have written a terrifically original book. In an important sense, it is inventing its own subject--namely, the emergence of the idea that the body is a self-integrating entity--in that there has not to date been a clear articulation of this concept and certainly no comprehensive historical tracking of its development in modern scientific and medical thought. Engaging and clearly written, and with vivid examples, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe will certainly attract an eclectic set of readers, but will have especially strong appeal for specialists in the history of medicine, psychology, and social sciences. --David W. Bates, University of California, Berkeley

Author Bio

Stefanos Geroulanos is associate professor of history at New York University. Todd Meyers is associate professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Society, Health, and Medicine at New York University--Shanghai.