Description
Book SynopsisIn Morbid Undercurrents, Sean M. Quinlan follows how medical ideas, stemming from the so-called birth of the clinic, zigzagged across the intellectual landscape of the French Revolution and its aftermath. It was a remarkable hotspot in the historical timeline, when doctors and scientists pioneered a staggering number of fieldsfrom forensic investigation to evolutionary biologyand their innovations captivated the public imagination.
During the 1790s and beyond, medicine left the somber halls of universities, hospitals, and learned societies and became profoundly politicized, inspiring a whole panoply of differentoften bizarre and shockingsubcultures. Quinlan reconstructs the ethos of the time and its labyrinthine underworld, traversing the intersection between medicine and pornography in the works of the Marquis de Sade, efforts to create a natural history of women, the proliferation of sex manuals and books on family hygiene, anatomical projects to
Table of Contents
Introduction: Morbid Undercurrents— Medicine and Culture after the Revolution
1. Settings: The Cultural World of Medical Practice, ca. 1750–1800
2. Medicine in the Boudoir: The Marquis de Sade and Medical Understandingafter the Reign of Terror
3. Writing Sexual Difference: The Natural History of Women and Gendered Visions, ca. 1800
4. Seeing and Knowing: Readers and Physiognomic Science
5. Sex and the Citizen: Reproductive Manuals and Fashionable Readers under the Napoleonic State
6. Sculpting Ideal Bodies: Medicine, Aesthetics, and Desire in the Artist's Studio
7. The Mesmerist Renaissance: Medical Undercurrents and Testing the Limits of Scientific Authority
8. Physiology as Literary Genre: Passions, Taste, and Social Agendas under the Restoration and July Monarchy
Epilogue: Medicine, Writing, and Subculture after the Revolution
