Search results for ""Author Sander L Gilman""

The humanities in higher education are too often labeled as impractical and are not usually valued in today's marketplace. Yet in professional fields, such as the health sciences, interest in what the humanities can offer has increased. Advocates claim the humanities offer health care professionals greater insight into how to work with those who need their help.Illness and Image introduces undergraduates and professionals to the medical humanities, using a series of case studies, beginning with debates about male circumcision from the ancient world to the present, to the meanings of authenticity in the face transplantation arena. The case studies address the interpretation of mental illness as a disability and the "new" category of mental illness, "self-harm." Sander L. Gilman shows how medicine projects such categories' existence into the historical past to show that they are not bound in time and space and, therefore, are "real."Illness and Image provides students and researchers with models and possible questions regarding categories often assumed to be either trans-historical or objective, making it useful as a textbook.

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Why do physicians who’ve taken the Hippocratic Oath willingly cut into seemingly healthy patients? How do you measure the success of surgery aimed at making someone happier by altering his or her body? Sander L. Gilman explores such questions in Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul, a cultural history of the connections between beauty of body and happiness of mind. Following these themes through an impressive range of historical moments and players, Gilman traces how aesthetic alterations of the body have been used to “cure” dissatisfied states of mind. In his exploration of the striking parallels between the development of cosmetic surgery and the field of psychiatry, Gilman entertains an array of philosophical and psychological questions that underlie the more practical decisions rountinely made by doctors and potential patients considering these types of surgery. While surveying and incorporating the relevant theories of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Karl Menninger, Paul Schilder, contemporary feminist critics, and others, Gilman considers the highly unstable nature of cultural notions of health, happiness, and beauty. He reveals how ideas of race and gender structured early understandings of aesthetic surgery in discussions of both the “abnormality” of the Jewish nose and the historical requirement that healthy and virtuous females look “normal,” thereby enabling them to achieve invisibility. Reflecting upon historically widespread prejudices, Gilman describes the persecutions, harrassment, attacks, and even murders that continue to result from bodily difference and he encourages readers to question the cultural assumptions that underlie the increasing acceptability of this surgical form of psychotherapy.Synthesizing a vast body of related literature and containing a comprehensive bibliography, Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul will appeal to a broad audience, including those interested in the histories of medicine and psychiatry, and in philosophy, cultural studies, Jewish cultural studies, and race and ethnicity.

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Given the attacks on the humanities by the right ("Goethe is not taught anymore!") and the left ("Why teach dead white males?") over the past decade, how can we teach and research in the humanities in the years to come? Drawing on thirty years of experience, a distinguished teacher and scholar here presents a series of closely interconnected exercises in understanding the present state and future possibilities of the humanities, especially the teaching of "foreign" languages and culture. Rather than rail at a worldwide conspiracy by universities against the humanities, the author argues that the gradual erosion of the status of the humanities has been due to the muddling of the goals of teachers, students, and administrators: all are at fault. Teachers are at fault because they have lost sight of the goal of their profession—the clear and direct transmission of critical thinking and complex knowledge to those who may not immediately benefit from it. Students are at fault because they want social mobility without the necessary investment of time in an apprenticeship to learning and the generation of knowledge. Administrators are at fault because they want to have an economically viable structure in a world in which value is too often measured by a cost/benefit ratio. All three groups must rethink the university. The underlying theme of the eight essays and addresses, four of them published for the first time, is that teachers in the humanities are the spokespersons of the university's history and future, doing the heavy lifting in teaching the bulk of the students those intellectual skills—critical reading, writing, culture, and thought—that will serve them no matter what their major or future employment. The volume illustrates a series of positions from how a teacher should be able to get tenure to what can be taught in innovative, cross-disciplinary teaching. Other topics address why one should teach European languages, how books and jobs are related in today's academy, and whether scientific research can have a place in the teaching of the humanities.

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Diseases and Diagnoses discusses why such social problems as addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, racial predisposition for illness, surgery and beauty, and electrotherapy, all of which concerned thinkers a hundred years ago, are reappearing at a staggering rate and in diverse national contexts. In the twentieth century such problems were viewed as only historical concerns. Yet in the twenty-first century, we once again find ourselves confronting their implications.In this fascinating volume, Gilman looks at historical and contemporary debates about the stigma associated with biologically transmitted diseases. He shows that there is no indisputable way to measure when a disease or therapy will reappear, or how it may be perceived at any given moment in time. Consequently, Gilman focuses on the socio-cultural and political implications that the reappearance of such diseases has had on contemporary society. His approach is to show how culture (embedded in cultural objects) both feeds and is fed by the claims of medical science-as for example, the reappearance of "race" as a cultural as well as a medical category.If the twentieth century was the "age of physics," in the latter part of the past century and certainly in the twenty-first century biological concerns are recapturing central stage. Achievements of the biological sciences are changing the public's sense of what constitutes cutting-edge science and medicine. None has captured the public imagination more effectively than the mapping of the human genome and the promise of genetic manipulation, which fuel what Gilman calls a "second age of biology." Although not without controversy, the role of genetics appears to be key. Gilman puts contemporary debates in historical context, showing how they feed social and cultural concerns as well as medical possibilities.

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Given the attacks on the humanities by the right ("Goethe is not taught anymore!") and the left ("Why teach dead white males?") over the past decade, how can we teach and research in the humanities in the years to come? Drawing on thirty years of experience, a distinguished teacher and scholar here presents a series of closely interconnected exercises in understanding the present state and future possibilities of the humanities, especially the teaching of "foreign" languages and culture. Rather than rail at a worldwide conspiracy by universities against the humanities, the author argues that the gradual erosion of the status of the humanities has been due to the muddling of the goals of teachers, students, and administrators: all are at fault. Teachers are at fault because they have lost sight of the goal of their profession—the clear and direct transmission of critical thinking and complex knowledge to those who may not immediately benefit from it. Students are at fault because they want social mobility without the necessary investment of time in an apprenticeship to learning and the generation of knowledge. Administrators are at fault because they want to have an economically viable structure in a world in which value is too often measured by a cost/benefit ratio. All three groups must rethink the university. The underlying theme of the eight essays and addresses, four of them published for the first time, is that teachers in the humanities are the spokespersons of the university's history and future, doing the heavy lifting in teaching the bulk of the students those intellectual skills—critical reading, writing, culture, and thought—that will serve them no matter what their major or future employment. The volume illustrates a series of positions from how a teacher should be able to get tenure to what can be taught in innovative, cross-disciplinary teaching. Other topics address why one should teach European languages, how books and jobs are related in today's academy, and whether scientific research can have a place in the teaching of the humanities.

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In The Case of Sigmund Freud, Sander Gilman traces the "medicalization" of Jewishness in the science and medicine of turn-of-the-century Vienna, and the ways in which Jewish physicians responded to the effort to incorporate racist biological literature into medical practice. Focusing on the new science of psychoanalysis, Gilman looks at the strategic devices Sigmund Freud employed to detach himself from the stigma of being Jewish and shows how Freud's work in psychoanalysis evolved in response to the biological discourse of the time.

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Nose reconstructions have been common in India for centuries. South Korea, Brazil, and Israel have become international centers for procedures ranging from eyelid restructuring to buttock lifts and tummy tucks. Argentina has the highest rate of silicone implants in the world. Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture. Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "nose job" as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to "pass," to be seen as a member of a group with which they want to or need to identify. Gilman begins by addressing basic questions about the history of aesthetic surgery. What surgical procedures have been performed? Which are considered aesthetic and why? Who are the patients? What is the place of aesthetic surgery in modern culture? He then turns his attention to that focus of countless human anxieties: the nose. Gilman discusses how people have reshaped their noses to repair the ravages of war and disease (principally syphilis), to match prevailing ideas of beauty, and to avoid association with negative images of the "Jew," the "Irish," the "Oriental," or the "Black." He examines how we have used aesthetic surgery on almost every conceivable part of the body to try to pass as younger, stronger, thinner, and more erotic. Gilman also explores some of the extremes of surgery as personal transformation, discussing transgender surgery, adult circumcision and foreskin restoration, the enhancement of dueling scars, and even a performance artist who had herself altered to resemble the Mona Lisa. The book draws on an extraordinary range of sources. Gilman is as comfortable discussing Nietzsche, Yeats, and Darwin as he is grisly medical details, Michael Jackson, and Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own nose. The book contains dozens of arresting images of people before, during, and after surgery. This is a profound, provocative, and engaging study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies.

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Perhaps nothing is more revealing about a person than what he or she reads. In 1938, when Freud was forced by the Nazis to flee Vienna, he brought with him to London a large portion of his annotated personal library. Reading Freud's Reading is a guided tour of this library, the intellectual tools of the genius of Sigmund Freud. Specialists from a wide range of areas—from the history of medicine, to literary scholarship, to the history of classical scholarship—spent two months working on questions raised by Freud's reading and his library at the Freud Museum in London. These specialists are joined here by internationally renowned scholars including Ned Lukatcher, Harold P. Blum, and Michael Molnar to apply a wide range of critical approaches, from depth psychoanalysis to cultural analysis. Together, they present a detailed look at the implications of how, and what, Freud read, including the major sources he used for his work.

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The modern world is faced with a terrifying new ‘disease’, that of ‘obesity’. As people get fatter, we have come to see excess weight as unhealthy, morally repugnant and socially damaging. Fat it seems has long been a national problem and each age, culture and tradition have all defined a point beyond which excess weight is unacceptable, ugly or corrupting. This fascinating new book by Sander Gilman looks at the interweaving of fact and fiction about obesity, tracing public concern from the mid-nineteenth century to the modern day. He looks critically at the source of our anxieties, covering issues such as childhood obesity, the production of food, media coverage of the subject and the emergence of obesity in modern China. Written as a cultural history, the book is particularly concerned with the cultural meanings that have been attached to obesity over time and to explore the implications of these meanings for wider society. The history of these debates is the history of fat in culture, from nineteenth-century opera to our global dieting obsession. Fat, A Cultural History of Obesity is a vivid and absorbing cultural guide to one of the most important topics in modern society.

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The essays in this collection, written by a pioneering interdisciplinary scholar, deal with the roles of images in the construction of stereotypes and the categories of difference as represented in texts—in high literature, in medical literature, in art—from the last fin-de-siècle to our own. Intensely engaged in the cultural politics of everyday life and conscious of how texts reflect and shape our social practices, they deal primarily with representations and self-representations of “Jews” in the past one hundred years and focus on the question of the constructions of the Jew’s body in art and literature. The title essay, “Love + Marriage = Death: STDs and AIDS in the Modern World,” however, studies the image of sexually transmitted disease from Shakespeare to Martin Amis. It sets the tone for an understanding of this collection as a book about Jews and their representation, but not as a special, isolated case. The first essay, the largely autobiographical “Ethnicities: Why I Write What I Write,” serves as an introduction to the collection. The other essays are: “Max Nordau, Sigmund Freud, and the Question of Conversion”; “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt, and the ‘Modern Jewess’”; “Zwetschkenbaum’s Competence: Madness and the Discourse of the Jews”; “Otto Weininger and Sigmund Freud: Race and Gender in the Shaping of Psychoanalysis”; “Sibling Incest, Madness, and the Jew”; “R. B. Kitaj’s ‘Good Bad’ Diasporism and the Body in American Jewish Postmodern Art”; and “Who Is Jewish?: The Newest Jewish Writing in German and Daniel Goldhagen.”

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A Jew in a violently anti-Semitic world, Sigmund Freud was forced to cope with racism even in the "serious" medical literature of the fin de siecle, which described Jews as inherently pathological and sexually degenerate. In this provocative book, Sander L. Gilman argues that Freud's internalizing of these images of racial difference shaped the questions of psychoanalysis. Examining a variety of scientific writings, Gilman discusses the prevailing belief that male Jews were "feminized," as stated outright by Jung and others, and concludes that Freud dealt with his anxiety about himself as a Jew by projecting it onto other cultural "inferiors"--such as women. Gilman's fresh view of the origins of psychoanalysis challenges those who separate Freud's revolutionary theories from his Jewish identity.

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The connection and science behind race, racism, and mental illness In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that - based on their clinical experiment - the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after the experiment, an article in Time Magazine cited the study, posing the question: Is racism becoming a mental illness? In Are Racists Crazy? Sander Gilman and James Thomas trace the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories., from mid-19th century Europe, to contemporary America, up to the aforementioned clinical experiment at the University of Oxford, and ask a slightly different question than that posed by Time: How did racism become a mental illness? Using historical, archival, and content analysis, the authors provide a rich account of how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’ - including anthropology, medicine, and biology - used race as a means of defining psychopathology and how assertions about race and madness became embedded within disciplines that deal with mental health and illness. An illuminating and riveting history of the discourse on racism, antisemitism, and psychopathology, Are Racists Crazy? connects past and present claims about race and racism, showing the dangerous implications of this specious line of thought for today.

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How can there by a Jewish culture in today's Germany? Since the fall of the Wall, there has been a substantial increase in the visibility of Jews in German culture, not only an increase in the number of Jews living there, but, more importantly, an explosion of cultural activity. Jews are writing and making films about the central question of Jewish life after the Shoah. Given the xenophobia that has marked Germany since reunification, the appearance of a new Jewish is both surprising and normalizing. Even more striking than the reappearance of Jewish culture in England after the expulsion and massacres of the Middle Ages, the presence of a new generation of Jewish writers in Germany is a sign of the complexity and tenacity of modern Jewish life in the Diaspora. Edited by Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler and featuring works by many of the most noted specialists on the subject, including Susan Niemann, Y. Michael Bodemann, Marion Kaplan, Katharina Ochse, Robin Ostow, Rafael Seligmann, Jack Zipes, Jeffrey Peck, Kizer Walker, and Esther Dischereit, this volume explores the questions and doubts surrounding the revitalization of Jewish life in Germany. The writers cover such diverse topics as the social and institutional role that Jews now play, the role of religion in daily life, and gender and culture in post-Wall Jewish writing.

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The connection and science behind race, racism, and mental illness In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that - based on their clinical experiment - the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after the experiment, an article in Time Magazine cited the study, posing the question: Is racism becoming a mental illness? In Are Racists Crazy? Sander Gilman and James Thomas trace the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories., from mid-19th century Europe, to contemporary America, up to the aforementioned clinical experiment at the University of Oxford, and ask a slightly different question than that posed by Time: How did racism become a mental illness? Using historical, archival, and content analysis, the authors provide a rich account of how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’ - including anthropology, medicine, and biology - used race as a means of defining psychopathology and how assertions about race and madness became embedded within disciplines that deal with mental health and illness. An illuminating and riveting history of the discourse on racism, antisemitism, and psychopathology, Are Racists Crazy? connects past and present claims about race and racism, showing the dangerous implications of this specious line of thought for today.

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The work of Richard Wagner is a continuing source of artistic inspiration and ideological controversy in literature, philosophy, and music, as well as cinema. In Wagner and Cinema, a diverse group of established and emerging scholars examines Wagner's influence on cinema from the silent era to the present. The essays in this collection engage in a critical dialogue with existing studies—extending and renovating current theories related to the topic—and propose unexplored topics and new methodological perspectives. The contributors discuss films ranging from the 1913 biopic of Wagner to Ridley Scott's Gladiator, with essays on silent cinema, film scoring, Wagner in Hollywood, German cinema, and Wagner beyond the soundtrack.

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This book explores prejudice towards groups who are thought to have caused and spread the COVID-19 virus. The book examines four cases around the world: the residents of Wuhan, China; Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in the USA, Britain and Israel; African-Americans in the United States and Black/Asian/Mixed Ethnic communities in Britain; and 'White' right-wing groups in American and Europe. The book examines stereotyping and the false attribution of blame towards these groups, as well as what happens when a collective is actually at fault, and how the community deals with these conflicting issues. This is a timely, cogent examination of blame and xenophobia, which have been brought to the surface by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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A groundbreaking history of anti-Semitism, from the Roman Empire to the twentieth century The question of whether anti-Semitism is a transitory phenomenon, appearing randomly in Western history, or whether it reflects a deep seated tradition inherent in Western culture has been often debated. This volume traces the image of the Jew and the attitudes toward the Jew over the past two thousand years, from the Roman Empire to the reunification of Germany, showing the consistent pattern of anti-Semitism in Western societies. With essays on the religious, social, political, and economic origins of European and American anti- Semitism, as well as some Jewish responses, this volume is the most wide-ranging history of anti-Semitism ever compiled. Contributors to this volume include Nicholas de Lange, Cambridge University; Pinchas Hachoen Peli, University of the Negev; David Menashri, Tel Aviv University; Bernard Lewis, Princeton University (retired); Liliane Weissberg, University of Pennsylvania; and Jeremy Cohen, Ohio State University.

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Henryk Broder, one of the most controversial and engaging writers in Germany today, has been a thorn in the side of the Establishment for thirty years. The son of two Polish Holocaust survivors, Broder is not only a trenchant political critic and observant social essayist but an invaluable chronicler of the Jewish experience in late twentieth-century Germany. This volume collects eighteen of Broder's essays, translated for the first time into English. The first was written in 1979 and the most recent deals with the post-9/11 realities of the war on terrorism, and its effects on the countries of Europe. Other essays address the debate over the construction of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, the German response to the 1991 Gulf War, the politics of German reunification, and the rise of the new German nationalism. Broder charts the recent evolution of German Jewish relations, using his own outsider status to hold up a mirror to the German people and point out that things have not changed for German Jews as much as non-Jews might think.

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"I was born a boy, raised as a girl. . . . One may raise a healthy boy in as womanish a manner as one wishes, and a female creature in as mannish; never will this cause their senses to remain forever reversed." So writes the pseudonymous N. O. Body, born in 1884 with ambiguous genitalia and assigned a female identity in early infancy. Brought up as a girl, "she" nevertheless asserted stereotypical male behavior from early on. In the end, it was a passionate love affair with a married woman that brought matters to a head. Desperately confused, suicidally depressed, and in consultation with Magnus Hirschfeld, one of the most eminent and controversial sexologists of the day, "she" decided to become "he." Originally published in 1907 and now available for the first time in English, Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years describes a childhood and youth in Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany that is shaped by bourgeois attitudes and stifled by convention. It is, at the same time, a book startlingly charged with sexuality. Yet, however frank the memoirist may be about matters physical or emotional, Hermann Simon reveals in his afterword the full extent of the lengths to which N. O. Body went to hide not just his true name but a second secret, his Jewish identity. And here, Sander L. Gilman suggests in his brilliant preface, may lie the crucial hint to solving the real riddle of the ambiguously gendered N. O. Body.

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No documentation of National Socialism can be undertaken without the explicit recognition that the "German Renaissance" promised by the Nazis culminated in unprecedented horror - World War II and the genocide of European Jewry. With "The Third Reich Sourcebook", editors Anson Rabinbach and Sander L. Gilman present a comprehensive collection of newly translated documents drawn from wide-ranging primary sources, documenting both the official and unofficial cultures of National Socialist Germany from its inception to its defeat and collapse in 1945. Framed with introductions and annotations by the editors, the documents presented here include official government and party pronouncements, texts produced within Nazi structures, such as the official Jewish Cultural League, as well as documents detailing the impact of the horrors of National Socialism on those who fell prey to the regime, especially Jews and the handicapped. With thirty chapters on ideology, politics, law, society, cultural policy, the fine arts, high and popular culture, science and medicine, sexuality, education, and other topics, "The Third Reich Sourcebook" is the ultimate collection of primary sources on Nazi Germany.

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