I've copied for you a message to the "H-NET List on the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology" (also called H-SCI-MED-TECH) which lays out some of the complexity of our study of the nineteenth century. The author is Prof. Michael Sappol.

Thanks to Harry Marks for prodding the discussion to take up some larger questions: the interrelated social /cultural / economic / political / technoscientific developments which fostered the emergence of phrenology, Thomsonianism, and "Parisian" anatomical-clinical medicine, and other cultural innovations (heterodox or not). As I tried to indicate in my review of Charles Colbert's A Measure of Perfection, what happened in the middle decades of the 19th century in the United States, with an especial "quickening" in the 1830s and '40s, was a proliferating social environment: new cities and towns, new people eager to acquire, invent and perform new social identities and roles, and a new cadre of entrepreneurs who arose to incite and cultivate the demand for materials that would aid in the crafting of such performances. Urbanization, infrastructural/technological improvements (rail, shipping, road, postal service, telegraph, gaslight), an expansion and extension of entrepreneurial practices, national expansion, and innovations in print technology--a "discursive infrastructure" of cheap print and words, especially cheap illustrated print--were all crucial. In other words, the market revolution plus....

The model I have in mind is Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, not so much the discussion over what constitutes public/private (a boundary that was continually drawn, contested, and redrawn), but rather Habermas's description of the new places in which people could act out and audition a variety of meaningful activities linked to social identity and practice. These were inns, railroad stations, parlors, department stores, gardens, taverns, offices, medical schools, factories, hospitals, legislatures, theaters, museums, universities, parks, crossroads, sidewalks, plazas, letters, and the pages of journals, newspapers, books. (See Margaret Jacob's short essay in The Invention of Pornography, which describes the 17th and 18th-century emergence of a sociocultural environment in which new kinds of sexual interactions /transactions could occur and in which pornography was produced, read, discussed, and used; Richard Bushman's Refinement of America (1988); and also David Shields' fine book Uncivil Tongues (1997), which describes the social uses and meanings of different forms of literary communication, including unpublished correspondence, in 17th- and 18th-century Britain and America.)

Such developments, it should be noted, were not limited to America or the English- speaking world. Harry Marks rightly observes that the discussion of self-fashioning in my review of Colbert has a very Americanist flavor, and so it does (the book reviews were solicited for the SHEAR list), and also obviously a history of medicine flavor, but it needn't if we take Norbert Elias's History of Manners as a possible starting point, and maybe Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-fashioning as another. (Obviously, the disciplinary departments, organizations, journals and categories in which we as scholars work, and the places where we live and do research, tend to shape and limit the objects of our scholarship.)

To take it further: On top of this sociocultural ecology, in which actors and audiences exploit and create new spaces, and new spaces provide new places for performances to be enacted, we need to add some version of network theory: the extension of networks of cultural performance was not confined to national spaces. There was much transatlantic and even transpacific traffic, but this traffic was routed according to local customs and demands (which is precisely the point of Warner's In the Spirit of System). The Holy Trinity of phrenology, Gall, Spurzheim, and Combe, were not Americans, and phrenology had a long-lived vogue in both Britain and France (and probably elsewhere, has anyone written on that?): Spurzheim and Combe toured America; the Fowlers toured Great Britain. Books by William A. Alcott, author of The House I Live In (1832) and other widely read selfmaking medical advice manuals and popular anatomical texts, were translated into Italian and Burmese; one of them is still in print in Korea. Calvin Cutter's text book on anatomy and physiology for schools and families (c. 1845 under different titles) was translated into Tamil, Japanese and Swedish. Some of my own research touches on the circulation, reception, and impact of the post-Vesalian anatomical body ("popular anatomy") in 19th-century America and, via missionary societies, Burma and Hawaii.

So there are (too) many questions for scholars. Who out there is working on the circulation and reception of discourses and technologies of self-making (medical, quasi-medical, non-medical) in 19th- and 20th-century Germany, Scandinavia, France, Argentina, Turkey, South Africa, Japan, Trinidad, China, etc.? (We all need to talk.) Who is sketching out the networks, links, markets, careers, audience, and material production and distribution, both within and across national and linguistic boundaries? (and we need to think about what the crossing of such boundaries itself signifies, as a performance in the making, and unmaking, of social class and nation) And for Americanists and non-Americanists alike, who is synthesizing/theorizing the aggregate of all these very particular and local subjects, like Warner's American generation of Parisian-influenced doctors, Haller's faction of Thomsonian healers, and Colbert's artist-phrenologists, and other things that are usually filed away in the history of medicine, pedagogy, aesthetics, fine art, popular culture, ideology, nationalism(s), class(es), and gender(s)? And how should we think about the interaction of networks, markets, and audiences? How do they compete, assimilate, adapt, clash, etc.?

Michael Sappol
National Library of Medicine
Bldg. 38, Rm.1E-21
8600 Rockville Pike
Bethesda, MD 20894
(301) 594-0348 office
(301) 402-0872 fax
(202) 667-7402 home
michael_sappol@nlm.nih.gov

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