Celts under the Knife: Surgical Fortitude, Racial Theory and the British Army, 1800-1914.

The nineteenth century saw an extensive cult of the heroic fortitude of the British soldier in surgery. Tales of men laughing through unanaesthetised operations were endlessly repeated in newspapers, military memoirs, surgical literature and boy's own stories. However, the identity of the "British soldier" was by no means obvious, since the British state itself was multi-ethnic. This paper considers thinking on the 'natural' martial qualities of 'Celtic' Scottish and Irish soldiers and how they were reflected in discussions of what behaviour could be expected in surgery, considering the impact of cultural explanations, racial theory and implicit political agendas.

Military surgery as national romance: the memory of British heroic fortitude at Waterloo.

This paper shows the ways that tales of stoicism during surgery at the Battle of Waterloo came to be a significant part of the ideological framework of Romantic Militarism. Celebrating the killing of enemies clashed with ideals of politeness, but hailing a soldier's powers of endurance in surgery was an acceptable way of extolling courage, framing lived experience of agony into narratives of exalted pain, masculine fortitude and quasi-religious patriotic feeling. In Britain, an extensive discourse emerged about the supposed Britishness of surgical sangfroid at Waterloo, providing a narrative of national superiority in the decades of imperial expansion that followed.

Experiencing, Exploiting, and Evacuating Bile: Framing Fashionable Biliousness from the Sufferer's Perspective.

This article examines how sufferers experienced, understood, and expressed themselves as bilious, focusing on the late Georgian era when the disease became one of the most fashionable and oft diagnosed amongst the elites. We show that responses to bile were more complex, varied, and less credulous than contemporary diatribes and subsequent historiography imply. Nonetheless, we foreground the socioculturally negotiated elements of the malady rather than its "reality." Applying Rosenberg's framing diseases model reveals biliousness as one of the most problematic conditions to frame, but one of the most malleable to self-fashion. We demonstrate how Georgian Britons found functionality in their bile and "performed" being bilious. Articulate, literate sufferers deployed a range of strategies to vent or master their bile, or to render it social and serviceable, deriving various compensatory "secondary gains." We illuminate their variable success in reifying and sublimating bile, and differentiating the boundaries of biliousness vis-à-vis other complaints.

Two Kinds of "Literary Poison": Diseases of the Learned and Overstimulating Novels in Georgian Britain.

This article will analyze the complex relationship between two separate traditions of anxiety about the medical impact of reading. On the one hand there was the older concept of the diseases of the learned (Gelehrtenkrankheiten), associated with crabbed, often impecunious academics. This is a tradition that went back centuries and drew on the six non-naturals of Galenic medicine. On the other hand there was fear that the sentimental novel-reading habits of the leisured elite were overstimulating their nerves, a model that was based primarily on the newer medicine of stimulation associated with physicians such as Cullen, Whytt, Tissot, and Brown. This article will examine how these two models of pathological reading came together during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and what they show about the role of the imagination, luxury, gender, and sexuality.

Historical perspectives on music as a cause of disease.

The relationship between music and medicine is generally understood in the benign context of music therapy, but, as this chapter shows, there is a long parallel history of medical theories that suggest that music can cause real physical and mental illness. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the idea of music as an expression of universal harmony was challenged by a more mechanistic model of nervous stimulation. By the 1790s, there was a substantial discourse on the dangers of musical overstimulation to health in medicine, literature, and etiquette books. During the nineteenth century, the sense of music as a pathogenic stimulant gained in influence. It was often linked to fears about sexuality, female gynecological health, and theories of hypnosis and degeneration. In the twentieth century, the debate on the medical perils of the wrong kinds of music became overtly politicized in Germany and the Soviet Union. Likewise, the opponents of jazz, particularly in the United States, often turned to medicine to fend off its supposed social, moral, and physical consequences. The Cold War saw an extensive discourse on the idea of musical "brainwashing," that rumbled on into the 1990s. Today, regular media panics about pathological music are mirrored by alarming evidence of the deliberate use of music to harm listeners in the context of the so-called War on Terror. Can music make you ill? Music therapy is a common if perhaps rather neglected part of medicine, but its diametric opposite, the notion that music might lead to real mental and physical illness, may seem improbable. In fact, over the last two hundred years, there have been many times when as much was written about the medical dangers of music as about its potential benefits. Since the eighteenth century, fears about music's effects on the nerves and the mind have created a remarkably extensive discourse on pathological music based on a view of both music and the causation of disease as matters of nervous stimulation (Kennaway, 2010, 2012a). From concerns about young ladies fainting from excessive stimulation while playing the keyboard in the Georgian period and Victorian panics about Wagner to the Nazi concept of "degenerate music" and Cold War anxieties about musical brainwashing, the debate on the medical dangers of music has generally combined a theoretical and terminological basis in the medicine of the period concerned with broader agendas about gender, sexuality, race, and social order. Each generation has tended to regard the music it grew up with as the epitome of rationality and healthy mindedness while ascribing hair-raising medical consequences to newer music. This debate has continued right up to the present day, with the depressing difference that, with the systematic use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror, the idea that music can be bad for you has become a much more realistic prospect. Although the debate about music's ill effects has largely been bogus, there are ways in which music can in fact adversely affect health. Most directly of all, there is of course the power of sheer volume to cause psychological strain and hearing damage. It was only really with the advent of the modern age, with its industrial noise, expanded orchestras, and amplified sound systems, that this became a widespread concern. Although the high-decibel sound can include music, it is not its character as music that causes health problems, so it falls rather outside our purview. Medical problems that do relate to specifically to music itself include the rare conditions of arousal-related arrhythmia and musicogenic epilepsy, but in both of these contexts, music is essentially a trigger rather than a fundamental cause of sickness (Sharp, 1997; Viskin, 2008; Wieser et al., 1997). There is a long history of medical accounts of musical hallucinations, which are certainly sometimes associated with serious medical conditions, but they are by no means always experienced as pathological (Berrios, 1990; Evers and Tanja, 2004). It should also be remembered that it is quite possible that many of the accounts of music causing disease refer to real physical symptoms and suffering, albeit generally with a psychosomatic rather than direct physiological explanation. This kind of psychological impact of music has meant it has been linked to a variety of culturally bound syndromes. Having said that, it is also clear that the most of the discourse on pathological music is basically fallacious. Over and over again, fundamentally moral objections to music relating to sexuality, gender, social order, and self-control have been clear beneath a veneer of medical language.

The piano plague: the nineteenth-century medical critique of female musical education.

The role of music in nineteenth-century female education has been seen primarily in the context of the middle class cult of domesticity, and the relationship of music to medicine in the period has generally been viewed in terms of music therapy. Nevertheless, for much of the century there was serious medical discussion about the dangers of excessive music in girls' education. Many of the leading psychiatrists and gynaecologists of the nineteenth century argued that music could over-stimulate the nervous system, playing havoc with vulnerable female nerves and reproductive organs, and warned of the consequences of music lessons on the developing bodies of teenage girls. Two rival models of music's effects competed and were combined. One suggested that music led to illness by provoking sensuality, imagination and sexuality; the other argued that it was a source of neurasthenic fatigue because of intellectual strain.

Stimulating Music: The Pleasures and Dangers of "Electric Music," 1750-1900.

Far from being a purely modern idea, the notion of "electric music" was already common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The shift in thinking about music from cosmic harmony to nervous stimulation made metaphors and speculative theories relating music and electricity irresistible. This essay considers the development of the idea of electric music, looking at its associations with a sexual "body electric." It will then examine how this conception of music went from being the subject of sympathy to becoming part of a medical critique of music as a dangerous stimulant, with echoes in music criticism and beyond.

From sensibility to pathology: the origins of the idea of nervous music around 1800.

Healing powers have been ascribed to music at least since David's lyre, but a systematic discourse of pathological music emerged only at the end of the eighteenth century. At that time, concerns about the moral threat posed by music were partly replaced by the idea that it could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality, and even death. During the Enlightenment, the relationship between the nerves and music was more often put in terms of refinement and sensibility than pathology. However, around 1800, this view was challenged by a medical critique of modern culture based on a model of the etiology of disease that saw stimulation as the principal cause of sickness. Music's belated incorporation into that critique was made possible by a move away from regarding music as an expression of cosmic and social order toward thinking of it as quasi-electrical stimulation, something that was intensified by the political and cultural changes unleashed by the French Revolution. For the next hundred and fifty years, nervousness caused by musical stimulation was often regarded as a fully fledged Zivilisationskrankheit, widely discussed in psychiatry, music criticism, and literature.