The Man Who Crucified Himself: Readings of a Medical Case in Nineteenth-Century Europe by Maria Böhmer

2020 ◽  
Vol 94 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-528
Author(s):  
Alexandra Bamji
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Case

The shifting case of masochism: Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus im Pelz (1870)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Lang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Case ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter investigates the agency of the sexual public, and the indirect power wielded by these readers and patients of sexology in defending the truth of sexological case writings. Through the works and the figure of Sacher-Masoch, the chapter considers how in the late nineteenth century medical case studies functioned as sites of reinterpretation by doctors, and by sexological patients and other members of an emerging sexual public. Sacher-Masoch’s literary case study, his Darwinist novella Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs), constitutes the first fictional account of what became known as masochism. The chapter argues that masochist readers were the first to reinterpret Sacher-Masoch’s literary investigations into Darwinism as a roman-à-clef. In doing so, some of them contributed greatly to the recategorisation of Sacher-Masoch as a masochist—through patient statements and biography, both of which informed sexological discourse.

Techniques of reading and textual layout in ancient Greek texts

2009 ◽  
Vol 55 ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luigi Battezzato
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Recognition ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Severe Stroke ◽  
Medical Case ◽  
Chinese And English ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Different Parts

This proverb, attributed to Menander in a Byzantine collection, points to the simple paradox of reading: readers are able to see both the shape of letters and the meaning conveyed by them. How does mind get from visual recognition to the recognition of meaning? The step sounds incredibly simple when we make it, but becomes exceedingly complex to explain. Strangely enough, the step is not executed in the same way for all languages and scripts.The ability to recognise shapes must be assisted by the interpreting activity of specific parts of the brain. A famous nineteenth-century medical case tells the story of a ‘French Businessman and amateur musician who woke up one day to discover that he could barely read a word’; as a consequence of a stroke, he could ‘no longer read words, name colours, or read musical notes, despite having completely intact vision’ (Wolf (2008) 171). Vision is thus a necessary but not sufficient requisite for reading.Different systems of writing make use of different parts of the brain. Another case tells us yet again about a businessman ‘proficient in Chinese and English’ who ‘suffered a severe stroke in the posterior areas.

‘Writing back’: literary satire and Oskar Panizza’s Psichopatia criminalis (1898)

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Lang
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Case ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Art And Science ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Medical Case ◽  
The Two Cultures ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Central Form

Late nineteenth-century and fin-de-siècle writers first engaged with the case study genre in its psychiatric and psychoanalytic manifestations by means of satire, as recounted in Chapter 3. This chapter contrasts the interpretative powers of modern sexual publics and professional elites with the agency of the writer. It does so through enquiry into Panizza’s satirical and delusional negotiation of the boundaries between the two ‘cultures’ of art and science (pace C. P. Snow). Panizza’s first exposure to the case study genre was in the context of his training as a psychiatrist. More than a decade before Freud’s elaborations on the psychoanalytic case, Panizza made the human case study a central form in his literary oeuvre. Panizza anti-psychiatric dystopian work Psichopatia criminalis, represents the only persiflage of a medical case study compilation in European literature. Yet his engagement with the case study genre remains haunted by his own unruly psyche.

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