This volume contains the lectures of Dr. Benjamin Rush on physiology, which deal with the mind. Regarded as "the father of American psychiatry," for over 30 years Dr. Rush treated insane patients at the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. He published the first American book on psychiatry, "Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Disease of the Mind," in 1812. Contents of this volume: General Introduction; The Syllabus; The Introductory Lecture; Introduction to the Lectures on Animal Life; Benjamin Rush Lectures on the Mind; Introduction to the Mind; Introduction to Sleep and Dreams; and Epilogue.

Physiologie.

In the wake of American independence, it was clear that the new United States required novel political forms. Less obvious but no less revolutionary was the idea that the American people needed a new understanding of the self. Sensibility was a cultural movement that celebrated the human capacity for sympathy and sensitivity to the world. For individuals, it offered a means of self-transformation. For a nation lacking a monarch, state religion, or standing army, sensibility provided a means of cohesion. National independence and social interdependence facilitated one another. What Sarah Knott calls "the sentimental project" helped a new kind of citizen create a new kind of government. Knott paints sensibility as a political project whose fortunes rose and fell with the broader tides of the Revolutionary Atlantic world. Moving beyond traditional accounts of social unrest, republican and liberal ideology, and the rise of the autonomous individual, she offers an original interpretation of the American Revolution as a transformation of self and society.

What happens if we abandon the assumption that a person is a discrete, world-making agent who acts on and creates place? This, Monique Allewaert contends, is precisely what occurred on eighteenth-century American plantations, where labor practices and ecological particularities threatened the literal and conceptual boundaries that separated persons from the natural world. Integrating political philosophy and ecocriticism with literary analysis, Ariel’s Ecology explores the forms of personhood that developed out of New World plantations, from Georgia and Florida through Jamaica to Haiti and extending into colonial metropoles such as Philadelphia. Allewaert’s examination of the writings of naturalists, novelists, and poets; the oral stories of Africans in the diaspora; and Afro-American fetish artifacts shows that persons in American plantation spaces were pulled into a web of environmental stresses, ranging from humidity to the demand for sugar. This in turn gave rise to modes of personhood explicitly attuned to human beings’ interrelation with nonhuman forces in a process we might call ecological. Certainly the possibility that colonial life revokes human agency haunts works from Shakespeare’s Tempest and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws to Spivak’s theories of subalternity. In Allewaert’s interpretation, the transformation of colonial subjectivity into ecological personhood is not a nightmare; it is, rather, a mode of existence until now only glimmering in Che Guevara’s dictum that postcolonial resistance is synonymous with “perfect knowledge of the ground.”

"This important study explores the medicalization of alcohol abuse in the 19th century US” and its influence on American literature and popular culture (Choice). In Rum Maniacs, Matthew Warner Osborn examines the rise of pathological drinking as a subject of medical interest, social controversy, and lurid fascination in 19th century America. At the heart of that story is the disease that afflicted Edgar Allen Poe: delirium tremens. Poe’s alcohol addiction was so severe that it gave him hallucinations, such as his vivid recollection of standing in a prison cell, fearing for his life, as he watched men mutilate his mother’s body—an event that never happened. First described in 1813, delirium tremens and its characteristic hallucinations inspired sweeping changes in how the medical profession saw and treated the problems of alcohol abuse. Based on new theories of pathological anatomy, human physiology, and mental illness, the new diagnosis established the popular belief that habitual drinking could become a psychological and physiological disease. By midcentury, delirium tremens had inspired a wide range of popular theater, poetry, fiction, and illustration. This romantic fascination endured into the twentieth century, most notably in the classic Disney cartoon Dumbo, in which a pink pachyderm marching band haunts a drunken young elephant. Rum Maniacs reveals just how delirium tremens shaped the modern experience of alcohol addiction as a psychic struggle with inner demons.

Using interdisciplinary techniques and original research findings, this volume explores the shift from humoral to nervous interpretations of emotion; the emotional nature of the medical professional-patient relationship; and the extent to which gender might influence the diagnosis, treatment and prognosis of pathological emotional conditions.

ÒFaith cometh by hearingÓÑso said Saint Paul, and devoted Christians from Augustine to Luther down to the present have placed particular emphasis on spiritual arts of listening. In quiet retreats for prayer, in the noisy exercises of Protestant revivalism, in the mystical pursuit of the voices of angels, Christians have listened for a divine call. But what happened when the ear tuned to GodÕs voice found itself under the inspection of Enlightenment critics? This book takes us into the ensuing debate about Òhearing thingsÓÑan intense, entertaining, even spectacular exchange over the auditory immediacy of popular Christian piety. The struggle was one of encyclopedic range, and Leigh Eric Schmidt conducts us through natural histories of the oracles, anatomies of the diseased ear, psychologies of the unsound mind, acoustic technologies (from speaking trumpets to talking machines), philosophical regimens for educating the senses, and rational recreations elaborated from natural magic, notably ventriloquism and speaking statues. Hearing Things enters this labyrinthÑall the new disciplines and pleasures of the modern earÑto explore the fate of Christian listening during the Enlightenment and its aftermath. In SchmidtÕs analysis the reimagining of hearing was instrumental in constituting religion itself as an object of study and suspicion. The mysticÕs ear was hardly lost, but it was now marked deeply with imposture and illusion.

Did women have an Enlightenment? This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the controversial, innovative role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.

Medical ethics changed dramatically in the past 30 years because physicians and humanists actively engaged each other in discussions that sometimes led to confrontation and controversy, but usually have improved the quality of medical decision-making. Before then, medical ethics had been isolated for almost two centuries from the larger philosophical, social, and religious controversies of the time. Only in the past three decades has the dialogue resumed as physicians turned to humanists for help just when humanists wanted their work to be relevant to real-life social problems. The book tells the critical story of how the breakdown in communication between physicians and humanists occurred and how it was repaired when new developments in medicine together with a social revolution forced the leaders of these two fields to resume their dialogue.

The interdisciplinary mix of sharp commentary and scholarship has the potential to invigorate and reawaken debate on why women aren t advancing faster in academia and the role of theoretical, social, and institutional bias in perpetuating this inequity. . . Undergraduate and graduate students of educational and workplace inequality, women s studies, and neoclassical theory will benefit from engaging in the dialogues raised in this book. Lois Joy, Feminist Economics . . . this book offers a contribution to debates and is a timely reminder that the woman question remains a compelling issue. The critical insights offered by scholars from across the disciplines of history, philosophy, psychology, sociology and economics is a unique aspect of this text. This is a thoughtful and scholarly contribution to the knowledge base. Tanya Fitzgerald, Journal of Educational Administration and History Detractors will find all the supporting data that they might fear to see, as the authors have done their homework/housework and it is spotless. The opening statement of the acknowledgements can stand for the remainder of us that in encouraging our academic interests, as a stimulus to creative energy, in making us laugh and in reminding us to hold on to that which we value most for women (and men) in higher education, there cannot be much improvement on this book. Julia Swindells, Times Higher Education . . . a particularly readable and interesting set of complementary essays. Education Economics These outstanding essays by eminent scholars provide sophisticated and highly readable analyses of the causes of women s exclusion from full participation in knowledge production today. From multiple disciplinary perspectives, the authors examine the roles of biology, institutional impediments, discrimination, and women s choices. A must read for all concerned with the role of women in contemporary higher education. Myra H. Strober, Stanford University, US These fascinating essays by scholars from a wide range of disciplines examine women s struggle since the nineteenth century for inclusion and voice in American higher education and the long, often grimly comic history of the arguments that men with authority to speak have used (and continue to use) to rationalize limiting women s role. Everyone interested in the history of women in American universities should read this book. Robert W. Dimand, Brock University, Canada These essays offer fresh insights on the question of the paucity of women in higher education and together form a thoughtful and contemporary response to Lawrence Summers and the Woman Question in the twenty-first century. This uniquely interdisciplinary study offers a provocative, contemporary look at the Woman Question in relation to higher education at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Leading feminist scholars from a wide variety of perspectives and disciplines including history, philosophy, education, psychology, sociology, and economics evaluate the role of biology, discrimination, and choice in rationalizing women s exclusion from fully participating in the process of knowledge production, as well as examining institutional impediments. Contextualizing arguments against women s inclusion and including contemporary perspectives on gender, this book offers a rich, multi-layered examination and critical insights into understanding the near universal difficulties that women encounter as they seek to participate fully in the process of knowledge production. This book addresses one of the most compelling topics of our time and speaks to our need to understand the long struggle of women to gain an authoritative voice in higher education and the factors that underlie that struggle. Scholars and researchers of women s studies, higher education, and a range of humanities and social sciences will find this book a welcome addition to the literature.