Synaptic Scholarship: Nervousness across the Disciplines

Abstract

each of modernity's new inventions or processes delivers an accompanying new sensation, a new pattern of nerve stimulation that ranges from the subtle to the injurious. Hence that epitome of technological modernity, the locomotive, struck Thomas Carlyle not as an engineering wonder, but as the cause of ‘railway headache’ and ‘railway fatigue’ (p. 91), as Hisao Ishizuka details in this volume. Jane Thrailkill too considers the railway, whose disasters were the root of ‘railway spine’ (p. 98), one of the nervous injuries to mark the work of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Other avatars of modernity that made such a nervous impact, as Shelley Trower suggests, include ‘bicycles, sewing-machines and the noise of city life’ (p. 149). Such meetings, the editors suggest, were part of a wider, complex link between modernity and neurology, which were ‘symbiotically related, complexly co-generative’ (p. 1). This volume provides a rich and varied contribution to the growing scholarship on the cultural history of neurology, which includes Anne Stiles's Neurology and Literature, 1860–1920 (2007), L. S. Jacyna's Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain: 1825–1926 (2000), and his biography of the neurologist Henry Head, Medicine and Modernism (2008), by exploring the composition of a number of these links.