Progressive nineteenth-century Americans believed firmly that human perfection could be achieved with the aid of modern science. To many, the science of that turbulent age appeared to offer bright new answers to life's age-old questions. Such a climate, not surprisingly, fostered the growth of what we now view as "pseudo-sciences"—disciplines delicately balancing a dubious inductive methodology with moral and spiritual concerns, disseminated with a combination of aggressive entrepreneurship and sheer entertainment. Such "sciences" as mesmerism, spiritualism, homoeopathy, hydropathy, and phrenology were warmly received not only by the uninformed and credulous but also by the respectable and educated. Rationalistic, egalitarian, and utilitarian, they struck familiar and reassuring chords in American ears and gave credence to the message of reformers that health and happiness are accessible to all. As the contributors to this volume show, the diffusion and practice of these pseudo-sciences intertwined with all the major medical, cultural, religious, and philosophical revolutions in nineteenth-century America. Hydropathy and particularly homoeopathy, for example, enjoyed sufficient respectability for a time to challenge orthodox medicine. The claims of mesmerists and spiritualists appeared to offer hope for a new moral social order. Daring flights of pseudo-scientific thought even ventured into such areas as art and human sexuality. And all the pseudo-sciences resonated with the communitarian and women's rights movements. This important exploration of the major nineteenth-century pseudo-sciences provides fresh perspectives on the American society of that era and on the history of the orthodox sciences, a number of which grew out of the fertile soil plowed by the pseudo-scientists.

The 19th century was the golden age of many things, and pseudo-science was one of them. Nowhere was this more obviously the case than in America. If he shopped around, a 19th-century American could consult a psychographer or a hydropath or a magnetizer(in 1843, there were supposed to be more than 200 magnetizers - practitioners of mesmerism -in Boston alone). As soon as he had taken off his water girdle, he was free to put on his Heidelberg Electric Belt, and perhaps smoke an electric cigarette. He could read pamphlets explaining why husbands and wives ought to have sex once every two years, on a sunny day in August or September, between 11 A.M. and noon. These are only a few of the topics touched on in ''Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America,'' a new collection of essays edited by Arthur Wrobel, a professor of American literature at the University of Kentucky. Mr. Wrobel and his fellow contributors trace the impact of most of the major pseudo-sciences of the period, and some of the minor ones; they look at them in the light of other 19th-century cultural developments, and try to set them in a specifically American context. Only one of the essays deals with an individual pseudo-scientist - Taylor Stoehr's absorbing account of Robert H. Collyer, a lecturer of the 1830's and 40's whose specialties included phrenology, mesmerism and painless dentistry (fairly painless, thanks to a combination of mesmerism, alcohol and opium). In due course, Collyer concocted a hybrid science of his own called phrenomagnetism, which enabled him to detect a whole host of ''organs'' in the brain that orthodox phrenology had somehow missed - organs of Sarcasm, Love of Pets, Desire for Seeing Ancient Places and other specialized propensities. His final inspiration, which plainly owed something to the advent of photography, was psychography, a system of transferring mental images by bouncing them off a bowl of molasses.

This volume collects the papers presented at a conference on “Science, Pseudo–science and Society,” sponsored by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities and held at the University of Calgary, May 10–12, 1979. More than many such collections, this one preserves some trace of the intellectual excitement which surrounded this gathering of scholars. A primary inspiration for the symposium on “Science, Pseudoscience, and Society” was a growing awareness of the crucial role the study of pseudo–science plays in the areas of contemporary scholarship which are concerned with the nature of science and its relationship to broader social issues. This volume is organized around three major questions concerning the relationships among science, pseudo–science, and society. The papers in the first section address the question of whether it is possible to draw a sharp demarcation between science and pseudo–science and what the criteria of that demarcation might be. The papers in the second section, recognizing the historical importance of various of the pseudo–sciences, consider their impact—positive or negative—on the development of the sciences themselves. The papers in the third section deal with the question of the relationship between the sciences and pseudo–sciences, on the one hand, and social factors on the other.

Over fifty million Americans endure a mysterious environmental illness that renders them allergic to chemicals. Innocuous staples from deodorant to garbage bags wreak havoc on sensitives. No one is born with EI; it often starts with a single toxic exposure. Symptoms include extreme fatigue, brain fog, muscle aches, inability to tolerate certain foods. Broudy investigates this disease, and delves into the intricate, ardent subculture that surrounds it--Adapted from jacket

Examining the history of phrenology and physiognomy, Beauty and the Brain proposes a bold new way of understanding the connection between science, politics, and popular culture in early America. Between the 1770s and the 1860s, people all across the globe relied on physiognomy and phrenology to evaluate human worth. These once-popular but now discredited disciplines were based on a deceptively simple premise: that facial features or skull shape could reveal a person’s intelligence, character, and personality. In the United States, these were culturally ubiquitous sciences that both elite thinkers and ordinary people used to understand human nature. While the modern world dismisses phrenology and physiognomy as silly and debunked disciplines, Beauty and the Brain shows why they must be taken seriously: they were the intellectual tools that a diverse group of Americans used to debate questions of race, gender, and social justice. While prominent intellectuals and political thinkers invoked these sciences to justify hierarchy, marginalized people and progressive activists deployed them for their own political aims, creatively interpreting human minds and bodies as they fought for racial justice and gender equality. Ultimately, though, physiognomy and phrenology were as dangerous as they were popular. In addition to validating the idea that external beauty was a sign of internal worth, these disciplines often appealed to the very people who were damaged by their prejudicial doctrines. In taking physiognomy and phrenology seriously, Beauty and the Brain recovers a vibrant—if largely forgotten—cultural and intellectual universe, showing how popular sciences shaped some of the greatest political debates of the American past.

Through the Victorian and Edwardian eras, various health movements emerged in the transition to the modern age of scientific medicine. Strange medical devices and quack cures were pushed, often using crude remedies based on simplistic beliefs and the placebo effect. Currently, some of these treatments appear absurd, even cruel. Because some were properly used as appropriate therapies, it is difficult to label them altogether as bogus. This book takes a thorough look at unconventional medical gadgets, as well as the strange devices and therapies used by both fringe and legitimate healers, and places them in the perspective of modern medicine. The author argues that quackery should not be defined by the ineffectiveness of a therapy, but rather be based on the fraudulent intent of the people who pushed dishonest and deceptive remedies.

The Handbook of American Romanticism presents a comprehensive survey of the various schools, authors, and works that constituted antebellum literature in the United States. The volume is designed to feature a selection of representative case studies and to assess them within two complementary frameworks: the most relevant historical, political, and institutional contexts of the antebellum decades and the consequent (re-)appropriations of the Romantic period by academic literary criticism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

This volume supplements the acclaimed three volume set published in 1986 and consists of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1984 and 1988. There are more than 6,000 descriptive entries in a wide range of categories: anthropology and folklore, art and architecture, history, literature, music, political science, popular culture, psychology, religion, science and technology, and sociology.

A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels. Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.