Cruel works of many wheels: Prison treadmills and nineteenth-century sciences of productive labor

Reaching Back: Convict Leasing and the Trusty System in the Nineteenth Century

The origins of cognitive thought.

The relevance of tribal studies

The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability

The Origin of Tears. The Aqueo-serous Component in the XIX and XX Centuries

This introductory article explores the myriad ways in which bodily replication was practised and imagined in the long nineteenth century, from efforts to artificially replicate human and animal bodies through anatomical models and taxidermy to psychological theories of mimicry and its place in human consciousness and evolution. It is contended that representations of bodies as objects and subjects of replication in literature, the arts, and popular culture interacted with wider concerns about authenticity, epistemology, identity, and animal/human, nature/culture binaries. Models, images, and stuffed specimens problematized the dichotomy between original and copy by seeking not only to replicate particular bodies but also to embody imagined ideal types. Such artificial bodily replications could sometimes be characterized by their strange unlikeness to the organic bodies that they referred to on account of their stasis, permanence, and recontextualization in the museum or cabinet. Artificial efforts to mimic organic bodies thus raised broader questions about the nature of representation. At the same time, the human body’s capacity for mimicry complicated notions of personality, suggesting that identities were relational and changeable rather than fixed and essential. Imitation could be seen as, at once, primitive and animal, and a crucial factor of mental development. Mimicry might both prop up the dichotomy between savagery and civilization, and undermine it.

It’s probably in the Air: Medical Meteorology in Denmark, 1810–1875

Sleeping while disabled, disabled while sleeping

The anatomical structure of the human body is a highly complex system for the large amount of components and the relationships and interactions between these. Today there are tools that allow us to deal with this complexity and the network is certainly one of the most used. The use of the network model for the analysis of complex systems has already been used in the nineteenth century by Etienne Geoffrey Saint Hilaire as part of the morphological biology. Recently they have been reconsidered because of the possibilities of analysis and interpretation of mathematics that they offer still nowadays (1,2). The anatomical network presented here consists of 2294 anatomical parts interconnected by 7196 links between bones, muscles, fasciae, joint capsule, ligaments and tendons. Hence, all this structures refers to the biomechanical structure of the locomotor system. The topological analysis of the network allows us to develop new applications in the context of the study and the anatomical evaluation of the locomotor system related to reachability, connectivity and brokerage of the various body parts.

Adolescence, Blackness, and the Politics of Respectability in Monster and The Hate U Give Gabrielle Owen (bio) The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. And the best way I can do this is to be who I am and hope that he will learn from this not how to be me, which is not possible, but how to be himself. And this means how to move to that voice from within himself, rather than to those raucous, persuasive, or threatening voices from outside, pressuring him to be what the world wants him to be. —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider You see, black people, black resistance, and black organizing, has changed the landscape of what is politically possible. Whether or not you call it Black Lives Matter, whether or not you put a hashtag in front of it, whether or not you call it The Movement for Black Lives, all of that is irrelevant. Because there was resistance before Black Lives Matter, and there will be resistance after Black Lives Matter. —Alicia Garza, “Why Black Lives Matter” Though categories of age are often assumed to be universal and shared across multiple categories of difference, they are often conceptually deployed to maintain those very categories of difference. Many scholars have recognized the degree to which black and brown children are excluded from the conditions of dependency, protection, and innocence imagined to belong to the category child.1 Alongside childhood, the category of adolescence presupposes universality even while it does the work of differentiating and naturalizing racial hierarchies. In this sense, adolescence, as it emerged in the late nineteenth century, is a fundamentally racial category. Claudia [End Page 236] Castañeda explains how nineteenth-century racial science posited that white and black children had the same levels of intelligence and capability only to reassert adolescence as the moment of racial differentiation when development presumably stagnated in non-white bodies (37). The so-called father of adolescence, G. Stanley Hall, imagined adolescence as a racial category that replicated the evolutionary development of humankind, one in which the proper environment, guidance, and control were necessary to reach the “higher and more completely human traits” he correlated with the norms of masculinity, whiteness, and wealth (1: xiii). Like Sylvia Wynter’s deconstruction of the universal “Man” of Western thought as a narrow and exclusionary view of being human, the category of adolescence requires scrutiny and disassembling for the ways it works to uphold Western notions of human development foundational to the construction of antiblackness. Categories of age have been central to the formation of racial and hierarchical frameworks since at least the nineteenth century. Castañeda shows how the child in nineteenth-century science was “used to establish hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality as ‘facts’ of the natural human body” (9). Robin Bernstein argues that “childhood figured pivotally in a set of large-scale U.S. racial projects” supporting both white supremacist and antiracist objectives (3). And Crista DeLuzio observes that “in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, notions of gender, race, and class figured into the scientific production of adolescence as a ‘universal,’ ‘developmental’ category that privileged maleness, whiteness, and middle-class status as its normative characteristics” (5). These normative characteristics operate as if they are synonymous with the arrival at adulthood, marking minoritized populations including women, people of color, and those who are queer, trans, neurodiverse, and/or disabled as regressive and subordinate according to a universalized conception of human development. As a normalizing and regulatory concept, adolescence continues to produce the logic of these social hierarchies today. When young people occupy normative categories and roles, they are imagined to be on their way to maturity and thus on their way to social recognition of their personhood and right to civic participation. Legal scholar Patricia J. Williams comments on this phenomenon with regard to Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, young white men who, even after committing mass murder, left the media and the predominantly white community of Littleton, Colorado in disbelief: “Still their teachers and classmates continue to protest that they were...

The essay examines the anthropological, legal, and semiotic implications of a new method for healthcare, precisely, “e-Health.” In many respects, telemedicine constitutes an extraordinary improvement that could solve many of the problems resulting from geographical distance between patients and doctors. Despite the benefits of providing medical assistance through an intensive use of e-Health, however, there are potentially serious pitfalls. These primarily stem from the apparent immediacy of the images transmitted and displayed by IT devices. Seeing the body of the remote patient synchronically represented on the desktop conveys the idea of an actual proximity. In other words, the visual representation could be (mis)taken for a real presence, as if the patient were “here and now” before the doctor’s eyes. However, geographical distance often includes a cultural remoteness between the two sides of the medical relationship. The patient’s body and its disease are not mere empirical data, but rather epitomes of a web of experiences; they are constituted by a multifaceted relationship with life environments. These relations move through experiential landscapes, projected across space and time, and are semiotically summarized and translated in the phenomenon of “disease,” the object of healthcare. Gaining knowledge of the “semiotic clouds” underlying the patient’s bodily conditions is a very difficult task which doctors usually accomplish through their cultural continuity with the universe of sense and experience lived by the people asking for their assistance. While telemedicine can annihilate physical distances through the immediacy of its remote images, unfortunately it is not equally efficacious in bridging cultural distances. On the contrary, its immediacy could lead to a false conviction that what the doctors see on the desktop is all that they need to understand about the patient’s conditions. This assumption could, however, lead to dangerous diagnostic mistakes due to the doctor’s belief that his environmental and cultural imagery is the same as that of the patient.The idea that images, taken in their iconic appearance, can convey a whole empirical reality is to be radically confuted, precisely to enable a positive exploitation of all the possibilities potentially offered by telemedicine. To illustrate the pitfalls encapsulated in the presupposition that seeing is synonymous to understanding, I trace a sort of brief history of the iconization of concepts. My cognitive journey begins with prehistorical cave paintings and unfolds to include contemporary comics. The path of the representative function through the ages demonstrates the relationship between the textual and figurative elements of communication, and at the same time, the human tendency (gradually increasing) to transform the semiotic/graphemic representational sequences into symbolic/conceptual synthetic images. This process accompanied the creation of bounded cultural circuits of communication by Neolithic man, which corresponded to settled agricultural civilization, and the social transmission of implicit semantic basins that people held and used to understand each other.If e-Health is to achieve its goals, an awareness of the landscapes of semantic implicitness that each cultural and spatial circuit of experience provides must be cultivated. Doctors and patients involved in the telemedical relationship will have to consider the body as a sort of border between geo-cultural spaces, to avoid the massive dangers hidden in the overlooking as well as the misinterpreting such implicit landscapes. This means that the empirical visibility of the body should be reinterpreted as an interface of translation between the different spaces of experience and signification which telemedicine puts in proximity, despite their geo-cultural distance. Within this new semiotic and experiential inter-space drawn by the sextant of the human body, different anthropological and legal considerations are to be trans-duced so as to coherently and pragmatically support the representational synchrony supplied by IT devices. Linguistic, experiential, and legal discrepancies could break that apparent conceptual unity of image, and make semantically asynchronous what only appears to be empirically represented in its whole immediacy. The risk is that this asynchronism could fuel deep cognitive biases stemming from the superimposition of the doctor’s implicit knowledge and spatio-temporal framework over the patient’s imaginative and experiential semiotic landscape. Should this occur, an anthropological ignorance of close-and-remote Otherness could induce the ultimate danger: diagnostic errors that poison the waters for Telemedicine.

Human body undergoes the 24-hour daily rhythm in response primarily to light and darkness. The circadian rhythms of biomarkers reflect bodily conditions including the prognosis of some pathologies. As a sensitive index of sympathetic nervous response (SNR), electrodermal activity (EDA) is a recent research topic in healthcare industry as a noninvasive and easy-access biosignal. The EDA response at Ryodoraku points (RPs) is of potential clinical usage in relation to SNR and meridian theory, but still remains in its primitive development stage.In this study, the 24-hour variations of EDA for 14 hospitalized participants were monitored over 3 days using a Ryodoraku device, and a circadian model of EDA was constructed using a cosinor analysis based on the linear mixed effect model.As a result, EDA at every RP showed a circadian cycle with its value the lowest in the morning and increased gradually until the late afternoon, and monotonically decreased again until the next morning. Circadian variations were observed in EDAs of all 12 RPs. However, Ryodoraku-specific features were not detected. Midline estimating statistic of rhythm (MESOR) values in men and young group were higher than in women and old group, and cosinor analysis showed significant circadian rhythms, especially for men and young groups. Especially, circadian variation in EDA in the young group went above 35% of the MESOR value.It implies that the circadian rhythm should be considered for the Ryodoraku analysis to examine bodily conditions or the prognosis of some pathologies.

Mitochondria—Judges and Executioners of Cell Death Sentences

Holistic medicine: A new medical system based on body constitution and functional status

Reviewed by: The Victorian Male Body ed. by Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt Jennifer Fuller Joanne Ella Parsons and Ruth Heholt, eds., The Victorian Male Body Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, pp. ix + 259 $110/£75 cloth. This ambitious collection considers how the male body was examined and judged in Victorian culture. The essays (largely by female authors) concentrate on representations of the body to trace the discourse of ideal masculinity that developed in fiction. While the male body represented a set of complex virtues, it was unable to maintain those ideals under scrutiny. White masculinity, while intended to represent a form of power, was [End Page 423] never "one, unified, complete, (perfect?) construction;" nevertheless, "discourse around this ideal had real and embodied consequences for women, people of color, colonised subjects and white men themselves" (15). Thus, each of the book's three sections examines how masculinity was discussed, debated, and adapted from the ideal and what those digressions help us understand about the coded norms of the Victorian male body. The collection's first section, "Constructed Bodies," focuses on the way men were expected to tailor their masculinity to an idealized body. Alice Crossley opens the section by analyzing the physical abuses suffered by schoolboys in Victorian fiction. Emphasizing a range of acceptable behaviors from sensitivity to assertiveness, these texts reveal the shifting conversation about masculinity in the nineteenth century. The theme of punishing the male body continues in Joanna Begiato's essay, which considers the role of self-denial in manliness. Using records from insane asylums, she demonstrates the contemporary belief that a man's inability to master his passions would produce "beast-like or child-like" behavior (rather than effeminacy) and could lead to penalties including the label of insanity (61). While the first two chapters explore masculinities in flux, Tara MacDonald's essay examines physical perfection in relation to ideas about the New Man in Ménie Murel Dowie's Gallia (1895). With strong eugenic undertones of national identity, constructions of the New Man objectified the male body as a specimen to be judged on its capacity to produce offspring. The next section, "Fractured and Fragmented Bodies," analyzes the disabled and diseased male body. In a lively essay, Ryan Sweet examines pirate fiction and the presumed connection between villainy and prosthesis. Questioning this stereotype, Sweet shows that many pirates exhibit a hypermasculinity in accepting and overcoming physical loss. Meredith Miller focuses on tuberculosis, which is usually coded feminine, as a way to explore an alternate masculinity embodied by John Keats and the "wasting male youth of visionary sensibility" (109). In contrast to hyperphysical imperial masculinity, Miller reads tubercular men in the works of Henry James and George Eliot as a Gothic antithesis that emphasized Romantic sensibility over national identity. Alison Younger also takes up unconventional masculinities in her analysis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). She argues that gents, dandies, and other identities that imitated masculine behavior while flouting traditional rules of breeding and manners were coded as monstrous in literature, "grotesque parod[ies] of a noble idea" (144). From the monstrous, Ruth Heholt takes us to the supernatural with her reading of the male body in ghost stories by Victorian women. As she insightfully notes, criticism of this genre typically focuses on the way women writers used ghost stories as a form of liberation, but little has been said of the male ghost who inhabits a sphere generally associated with weakness and need. Heholt argues that male [End Page 424] ghosts undermine stable ideas of masculinity not only by creating anxiety about healthy male bodies but also positing a hypermasculine mind robust enough to deny death. These stories challenge the link between Victorian masculinity and virile embodiment by asserting that even the most ablebodied men will eventually die. The final section focuses on "Unruly Bodies" that do not fit (sometimes literally) within the restrained notions of ideal masculinity. Of special interest to periodical scholars, Françoise Baillet's chapter considers how George du Maurier's sketches for Punch opened a forum for the discussion of middle-class manliness. The starving male body features in Charlotte Boyce...