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This study addresses the problem critics have faced in identifying contemporary perceptions of the barber, surgeon and barber-surgeon in early modernity by examining the literature, predominantly the drama, from the period. The name ‘barber-surgeon’ is not given formally to any character in extant early modern plays; only within the dialogue or during stage business is a character labelled the barber-surgeon. Barbers and surgeons are simultaneously separate and doubled-up characters. The differences and cross-pollinations between their practices play out across the literature and tell us not just about their cultural, civic and occupational histories but also about how we interpret patterns in language, onomastics, dramaturgy, materiality, acoustics and semiology. Accordingly, the argument in this study is structured thematically and focuses on the elements of performance, moving from discussions of names to discussions of settings and props, disguises, stage directions and semiotics, and from sound effects and music, to voices and rhetorical turns. In doing so, it questions what it means in early modernity to have a developed literary identity, or be deprived of one. The barber-surgeon is a trope in early modern literature because he has a tangible social impact and an historical meaning derived from his barbery and surgery roots, and consequently a richly allusive idiom which exerted attraction for audiences. But the figure of the barber-surgeon can also be a trope in investigating how representation works. An aesthetic of doubleness, which this study finds to be diversely constructed, prevails in barbers’, surgeons’ and barber-surgeons’ literary conception, and the barber-surgeon in the popular imagination is created from opposing cultural stereotypes. The literature from the period demonstrates why a guild union of barbers and surgeons was never harmonious: they are opposing dramaturgical as well as medical figures. This study has a wide-ranging literary corpus, including early modern play texts, ballads, pamphlets, guild records, dictionaries, inventories, medical treatises and archaeological material, and contributes to the critical endeavours of the medical humanities, cultural materialists, theatre historians and linguists.

Thesis--Universität Kiel, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 357-386).

Over the course of the 1830s and 1840s, a professional scientific and medical community was coming into being. Exclusive membership, limits to the definition of science, and separation of the professional from the popular sphere became important elements in the consolidation of scientific authority. Studies exploring Victorian scientific authority have tended to focus on professional journals and organs of middle-class culture; this thesis takes a new approach in exploring how this authority is reflected and negotiated across the content of the popular mass-market periodicals which provided leisure reading for working- and lower-class men and women. It uses as examples Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, Reynolds's Miscellany and the Family Herald. The readers of these publications were consumers of scientific information, participants in popularised science and beneficiaries and subjects of new research, but were increasingly excluded from the formal processes of developing scientific theory and practice. Examining representations of anatomy and of mesmerism, health advice and theories of class and gender, the thesis argues for an expanded understanding of mass-market periodicals as communicators of scientific ideas, showing how such material widely informs the content of these publications from fiction to jokes to full-length factual articles. However, the role of the periodicals is much wider than simply the transmission of received ideas, and the thesis reveals a plurality of positions with regard to science and medicine within the popular press. The periodicals engage with modern science in complex and varied ways, accepting, modifying and challenging scientific theories and methods from different positions. The form of the periodical is key, presenting multiple sources of knowledge and ways in which readers may be invited to respond. Chambers's broad support for scientific progress is informed by its useful knowledge identity but tempered by its founding editor's own ambivalent relationship to the scientific establishment. The Herald, influenced by both the periodical's commercial character and its editor's adherence to a spiritual, anti-materialist view of existence, is strongly resistant to modern science, while Reynolds's incorporates it alongside other forms of knowledge in its aim to educate, entertain and empower readers from a socialist perspective.

This dissertation is intended primarily as a contribution to postcolonial criticism and theory and the rhetorical analysis of epidemic writing as they undergo various crises and sublimations in the geopolitical landscape that has come into focus since the multilateral undertaking of the War on Terror in 2001. I begin with a set of questions about representation: when, how, and why are extra-legal, insurgent, anti-colonial, and terrorist forms of violence figured as epidemics in literature and connected discursive forms? What events in colonial history and scientific practice make such representations possible? And how do these representational patterns and their corollary modes of interpretation both reflect and transform discourse and policy? Although the figure is ubiquitous, it is far from simple. I argue that the discourse of the late colonial era is crucial to an understanding of how epidemiological science arises and converges with colonial management technologies, binding the British response to the 1857 mutiny and a growing Indian nationalism to the development of surveillance and quarantine programs to eradicate the threat of the great nineteenth century epidemic, the so-called Indian or Asiatic cholera. Through a constellation of readings of key texts in the British and French colonial and postcolonial traditions, including selected works of Bram Stoker (Dracula, "The Invisible Giant"), Albert Camus (La Peste, Chronique Algérienne) and Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses, Shalimar the Clown, Joseph Anton), I demonstrate how epidemics have played a complex representational role in relationship to violence, enabling us to imagine specific kinds of actors as absolute, powerful enemies of biological and social life, while also recoding violent political action as an organic affliction in order to efface or suppress the possibility of agency. There are two crucial aspects of this story that run throughout the histories and texts I engage with in this project. The first is that the figure of insurgent violence as epidemic has two opposing, yet interrelated faces. One looks to the promise of scientism, data collection and rational study as a means of eradicating the threat of irregular warfare. This is the function of the figure embedded in the practices and progress of epidemiology. On the other hand, the mythopoetics of infectious disease also point toward the occult and the unknowable, and code natural forces of destruction as sublime and inevitable. This is the function of the figure embedded the literary and political history of the term terror, which encompasses both natural and political events and the structures of feeling to which they give rise. The result of this duality is the persistent epistemic collapse of data-driven rational scientism and irrational sublimity in texts where epidemic and terror are at issue. The second crucial aspect of this story is that the dissolution of a colonial world system changes the shape of thinking about both epidemics and violence by displacing a binary architecture of antinomy in both public health and politics. The broadened view of epidemic since the end of the nineteenth century, in other words, has moved us away from metaphors of bellicosity to a more multi-factorial view of bacteriology and virology in temporal, geographic, and demographic space. One of the main goals of this project is to examine the relationship between these shifting epistemologies, narrative form, and imperial strategy. A connected through-line in the dissertation attempts to map what becomes of the biologistic and organicist conception of the state--which are already a matter of representation and imagination--as the very notions of biotoic life and the purview of the organism undergo no less radical redefinitions than the concept of the nation itself, providing the conceptual underpinnings for a subsequent biomorphic conception of the globe.

Thèse - Fribourg. / Bibliography: p. [153]-154.

Thèse - Fribourg. / Bibliography: p. [153]-154.

Thesis (M.A.)--Trent University, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 149-172).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-227).

Στην εργασία διερευνάται η παρουσία και η πρόσληψης ιατρικών θεμάτων που αφορούν σε αρρώστιες και στη θεραπεία τους στο πρωτότυπο πεζογραφικό έργο του Αλέξανδρου Παπαδιαμάντη. Συγκεντρώνονται στοιχεία και καταγράφονται πρώτα συμπεράσματα, τα οποία θα μπορούσαν να οδηγήσουν στο μέλλον σε μια συστηματικότερη ανάλυση της σχέσης της λογοτεχνίας του Παπαδιαμάντη με την ιατρική. / This paper investigates the presence of medical issues relating to diseases and their treatment in the original prose of Alexander Papadiamantis. There are recorded first conclusions, which could lead to a more systematic analysis of the relationship of Papadiamantis'literature with medicine.