Nervous Aging Research Articles

A. P. CHEKHOV AND THE CONCEPT OF “DEGENERATION”: TO THE PROBLEM OF CRYPTOPOETICS OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

The concept of “degeneration” is associated with the fin-de-siècle period and came to Russian soil from Western Europe. First and foremost, it was represented there by Cesare Lombroso and his popularizer, the author of the book Degeneration, Max Nordau. The concept of degeneracy was studied by the scientist using the work of outstanding representatives of European art, including Leo Tolstoy. The book was a scandalous success in Russia and a subject of numerous magazine reviews. Chekhov implicitly participated in this polemic. The writer’s cryptic review of the fashionable problem of degeneracy can be seen in the image of Dr. Dorn, which allows to examine the elements of Chekhov’s cryptopoetics. The surname of this character in The Seagull is considered as a transformation of the surname Nordau. An analysis of Dorn’s behavior and speech suggests that the author of the play uses it to express his position regarding the “nervous age” and the fatigue and degeneration associated with it. The intertextually expressed polemic between Chekhov and Nordau allows to define the role of Dorn as a hidden trickster. This is an additional argument that proves the validity of the author’s definition of The Seagull as a comedy.

PO-241 Effects of Aerobic Exercise on Activation of Neuroglia Cell and Expression of Inflammatory Factors in Aging Rats

Objective In recent years, aerobic exercise has been considered as a method of anti-aging. The aging mechanism in nervous system is closely related to increased activation of neuroglia cells and progressing neuroinflammation with aging.This study tried to shed some light on relationship between chronic inflammation accumulation and aerobic exercise so as to understand how exercise intervened nervous aging through inflammation. In this study, we used D- galactose aging models, applying two intervention ways: aerobic exercise during aging process, after that, to explore the changes of astrocytes, microglia and TNF-α expression. This study aims to provide certain evidence that sport plays a role in anti-aging.
 Methods Fifty male Sprague-Dawley rats at age of eight weeks, are randomly divided into five groups: control group(A), Aging group(S), Aging while exercising group(YS), After aging Quiet group(SA), After aging exercise group(SY). The aging groups were subcutaneously injected with D- galactose 150mg / kg / d for six weeks. Group YS do swimming exercise three times a week,once 60 minutes in the first six weeks. SY had same exercise intervention in the 7-12 week after injection. We took the hippocampus of rats in A, S, YS at the end of the sixth week, and of those in SA, SY at the end of twelfth week. tested the expression of GFAP, CD11b and TNF-α by immunohistochemical staining.
 Results 1.GFAP immunohistochemistry: Compared with group A,The expression of GFAP in group S, YS, SA and SY was significantly increased (P<0.01). Compared with group S, The expression of GFAP in group YS significantly decreased by 20.5% (P<0.01). There is no significant difference between group SA and SY(P > 0.05).
 2.CD11b immunohistochemistry: Compared with group A, The expression of CD11b in group S, YS, SA and SY was significantly increased (P<0.01). Compared with group S, The expression of CD11b in group YS decreased by 18.4% (P < 0.05).There is no significant difference between group SA and SY(P > 0.05).
 3.TNF-α Immunohistochemistry: Compared with group A,The expression of TNF-α in group S, YS, SA and SY was significantly increased (P<0.01). Compared with group S, The expression of TNF-α in group YS decreased by 30.1% (P < 0.01).There is no significant difference between group SA and SY(P > 0.05).
 Conclusions Exercise could effectively delay aging progression through improving neuroinflammation, but hard to reverse it, so the earlier in age to exercise, the better to delay aging.

„Ist nämlich der ganze Spekulationsverkehr erst einmal in einen krankhaft erregten Zustand hineingerathen…“

Abstract The late nineteenth century discourse on stock and commodity exchanges, and especially on the crisis of 1873, made heavy use of metaphors. As a statistical analysis of some key publications in the German language area shows, biological and medical metaphors clearly dominated. They were useful to underscore a number of very different opinions on the frugal or poisonous effects of speculation, capital, etc.; the degree to which exchange reforms (‘medical procedures’) were required or not; and if the exchange needed to be saved at all, or rather to be eradicated for being ‘parasitic’. In contrast to meteorological and mechanistic metaphors, images of health and sickness allowed incorporating a moral dimension in the analysis. The idea of the exchange as a potentially healthy or sick organism became intertwined with notions of speculators themselves, figuratively or literally, developing occasional ‘speculative fever’ (a new variety of the long-established concept of gambling fever) and a constant hysterical condition, as a lifestyle disease of capitalism in the ‘age of nervousness’.

Tolstoyans on a Mountain: From New Practices of Asceticism to the Deconstruction of the Myths of Monte Verità

The decades before the Great War were a period of exciting cultural creativity and great social upheaval. Both men and women cultivated a great range of interests in ethical, feminist, mystical, spiritualist and sexual ideas and practices. Max Weber referred to this diversity as a ‘department store for worldviews’. Recent historiography has dubbed this period ‘the age of nervousness’ or ‘the quest for purity’. New fascinations held many people in their thrall: the culture of the body and, more specifically, the Life Reform movement. Some felt inspired by their ethical hero Count Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian writer and pacifist. Tolstoyan colonies based on his philosophy of back-to-nature simplicity were founded in several European countries. One of the places where Tolstoyans experimented with new practices of asceticism was the Monte Verità near Ascona, a village on the Lago Maggiore in the Swiss region of Ticino. This article deals with the transformation of this Tolstoyan colony into a nature cure sanatorium, inspired by ethical and aesthetic values. As a case study it addresses crucial, but ambivalent, aspects of modernity in the ‘natural’ life of nude sunbathing, vegetarian meals, walking barefoot, living in wooden light-and-air cabins and free love marriages. However, this microcosm of Belle Époque Europe has also been the subject of much mythification. The article argues that these forms of myth-making reveal different narratives and models of identification. Deconstruction of Monte Verità myths reveals their popularity as counter-culture narrative (discourse) in the historiography of the 1970s. During the last decade, a comparison between the elitist, artistic lifestyle experiments on Monte Verità and trends in our modern, mass culture (referring to ‘personal authenticity’ or to Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’) seems to be gaining in influence.

Encountering hysteria: doctors' and patients' perspectives on hysteria in Denmark, 1875—1918

The history of hysteria stretches over several millennia and contains a plethora of different understandings and interpretations. This paper focuses on a central part of its Danish history, from the last decades of the nineteenth-century 'age of nervousness' until the end of World War I. It is argued that the understanding and negotiation of hysteria and its explanations took place in a complex interaction between doctors and their patients. Whereas the psychiatrists during this period moved towards an understanding of hysteria as a functional disorder, the patients, of whom approximately one-third were male, maintained that their illness was of somatic origin, and closely related to social, economic and working conditions.

Neurosis and Modernity: The Age of Nervousness in Sweden (review)

Reviewed by: Neurosis and Modernity: The Age of Nervousness in Sweden Andreas Killen Petteri Pietikainen . Neurosis and Modernity: The Age of Nervousness in Sweden. History of Science and Medicine Library, volume 2. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007. iii + 391 pp. Ill. $129.00, €99.00 (978-90-04-16075-0). Petteri Pietikainen begins his account of how neurosis became a "national malady" in twentieth-century Sweden by citing one turn-of-the-century observer who described Swedes as completely "uninterested in psychology." By mid-century, however, they had become consumed by their own psychology and by the questions—those of sexuality, health, and work—surrounding it. By the 1980s, Sweden ranked second in the world in the number of psychologists per capita. How did this come about? For those readers familiar with the broad outlines of this story as it has been told in other national contexts—those of England, Germany, and the United States—the main interest here will lie in the distinctively Swedish features of this modern "triumph of the therapeutic." Pietikainen emphasizes the emergence of the Swedish welfare state and specifically, the ascension of the Social-Democratic party to power in the 1930s. With Lutheranism in decline as a force of social integration, social democracy, he argues, embraced a new ideology of health. As part of this, psychological adjustment became a central objective of state policy. Leading social scientists like Gunnar and Alma Myrdal helped articulate a vision of enlightened social policy that, despite fears of national degeneration, remained relatively optimistic about the possibility of using the state's resources to manage the problem of modern neurosis and its feared effects on demography and economic vitality. [End Page 220] Yet while Pietikainen claims that Sweden's experience of neurosis "reflects its history of welfare capitalism and social-democratic social engineering" (p. 9), his efforts to substantiate this very promising claim are not entirely convincing. Despite paying some attention to the role of agencies such as the Royal Board of Pensions in helping establish a system of clinics and treatments for nervous invalids, we learn relatively little about the interactions among Pension Board officials, doctors, and patients. Nor do we hear much about the debates surrounding diagnoses, entitlements, and treatments. Though Pietikainen cites some doctors' warnings that welfare would breed a nation of sickly neurotics and thus promote the problem it sought to address, the establishment of what would become the world's model welfare state seems in his telling to have been remarkably free of the sort of bitter conflicts that occurred elsewhere and that made the "malingerer" and the "male hysteric," for instance, intensely stigmatized figures in England and Germany. Was the Swedish path to modernity, and its embrace of this new psychomedical idiom, really so unmarked by contestation? "Modernity" as such remains similarly under-examined in this account. Though he is able to use patient records from a number of clinics and hospitals in Stockholm to document important themes in the lives of nervous invalids—overwork, sexual anxieties, and alcoholism—the author never succeeds in really getting inside the experience of neurosis or examining the way this experience became articulated around some of the key topoi that other scholars have made central to their own analyses of this topic. How exactly did new forms of work, technology, culture, or for that matter, medical advice become woven into the discourse about neurosis? Modernity, Pietikainen suggests, meant among other things a flood of psychological literature that spread the idiom of nerves and neurosis to an increasingly wider public. He notes that: "It would be fascinating to know who actually bought all these psychological books and read them, and what they thought of them" (p. 224). Precisely so. The interaction between doctors and patients, and the active role played by patients in casting the modern era as an "age of nervousness," remain for the most part hidden from view in this otherwise suggestive account. Andreas Killen City College of New York Copyright © 2009 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Neurosis and Modernity: The Age of Nervousness in Sweden by Petteri Pietikainen (Leiden/Boston, MA: Brill, 2007; 391 pp); reviewed by Per Magnus Johansson

Petteri Pietikainen, who presented his thesis, C.G. Jung and the Psychology of Symbolic Forms, at the University of Helsinki in 1999, has published a new book – this time, in English: Neurosis and Modernity: The Age of Nervousness in Sweden. It deals with the development of a society that became increasingly characterized by a psychological way of thinking. He investigates the period spanning from 1890 to 1950. Pietikainen shows how the concept of neurosis became what is known as a ‘contagious diagnosis’, and how the process caused terminology like discontent and stress to be adopted into modern everyday language, and that this process is linked to the development of the concept of neurosis.

Neurosis and Modernity. The Age of Nervousness in Sweden

During his research for this book, the author was struck by the tragedy in the lives of the hysterical, neurasthenic and neurotic patients of old. As he was studying the patients' records from the Nervpoliklinik in Stockholm, the oldest treatment institution (1888) for neurotics in Sweden, he realised that these people were not suffering from existential malaise or a ‘lack of deeper meaning in their lives’ like the self-indulgent neurotics in Woody Allen movies. In these old records, neurosis was a loser's diagnosis. The clients of the Nervpoliklinik were on the receiving end of maltreatment, brutality, terror, poverty. They were often grieving because their child or spouse had died, or because they feared an alcoholic husband. Many were exhausted with financial worries or guilty feelings over masturbation. As a result they had ‘lost their very zest for life’. The neurotics suffered from sleeplessness, headache, tiredness, anxiety, sorrow, disappointment, frustration, anger. Neurosis was an aspect of the human condition, Pietikainen argues, and recent diagnoses such as burn-out, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome are new expressions of the same ‘symptom pool’ that characterised neurotic patients a century ago.

Prometheus Unbound: The Technology of Bodybuilding in the Nervous Age

By emphasizing bodybuilding as the technology of physique transformation, this article sets out to explore the social meaning of bodybuilding as a response to the crisis of masculinity that occurred during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Intimately entangled with issues of class, gender, religion, medicine and consumer culture, the history of bodybuilding and the contemporaneous development of a hyper-muscular aesthetic offers a fascinating window through which to view and examine the construction of masculinity.

Max Weber. Die Leidenschaft des Denkens by Joachim Radkau (review)

[MWS 7.1 (2007) 119-132] ISSN 1470-8078 Book Reviews Joachim Radkau, Max Weber. Die Leidenschaft des Denkens (Munich: Hanser, 2005), pp. 1000. ISBN 3446206752.45€. When Max Weber died in 1920, Karl Jaspers felt as if the German world had lost its heart. This was an emotion particularly felt amongst the younger members in Max Weber's sphere, although he was actually in fact a master without pupils. After being released from teaching duties, he spent most of his remaining lifetime as a private scholar. His worldwide fame started decades after his death. Nonethe less, he became an authority of modern social science, and the international Weber industry continues to grow. Twenty years earlier, Lawrence Scaff predicted that whoever was successful with his own Weber interpretation would determine the further progress of the social sciences. If this is right, one can certainly say that 'Weber is power7. This is also the conclusion of historian Joachim Radkau, who examines the life and work of Max Weber in this voluminous biography. To anticipate the following remarks: this book is the first biography of Weber since 1926 that really may be called a biography. All the other previous attempts were merely extracts of Marianne Weber7s Lebensbild of Max Weber, a hagiographie widow's portrait, first published in 1926. Radkau's book offers new insights even for those who are familiar with Weber7s life and work. He quotes sources from private archive material that have not been accessible up to now, especially Marianne's diaries as well as unpublished letters, including correspondence between Max and Marianne, his mother, and his two lovers. All these sources provide a deeper and more accurate understanding of Weber's life, particularly his affective life. But at the same time, these sources lead the biographer to a voyeuristic attitude that is occasionally embarrassing and detrimental to his performance. Previously, Joachim Radkau had distinguished himself especially in fields such as the history of medicine and the history of technology. He has been an unknown quantity in Weber research up to now. But this should not be a disadvantage, because many things are seen more clearly with distance. Due to this, Radkau is - pleasantly - far from palming his own Weber interpretation off on the reader, and, moreover, he is relatively fair in describing rival interpretations. It was surely a good decision of his, to consult the advice of experts such as Christoph Braun, Stefan Breuer, Wilhelm Hennis, M. Rainer Lepsius, and Günther Roth, although he did not consider much of their advice. Anyway, the 'passion' which appears as the subtitle of Radkau's book, is also to be observed in his consideration of Max Weber. Meticulously, he has got used to Weber's monumental work, following its aspects into their finest ramifications, and putting them into biographical contexts. What he wants to offer to the reader is 'the whole Weber' - from the dissertation and the studies on the stock© Max Weber Studies 2007, Department of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University, Old Castle Street, London El 7NT, UK. 120 Max Weber Studies market, the sociology of domination and the sociology of music, up to and including the love letters. Radkau's biography gives an intimate insight into Weber's life. It starts with the portrait of the scientist as a young man, growing up in a German upper-class family and feeling part of the elite. He then changes into the gruff, corpulent, hard drinking and duelling Heidelberg student, changes then again to become the newly appointed professor of economics demanding powerful imperial German politics in his Freiburg inaugural lecture, changing once more into the desperate workaholic trying to escape from depression, who was treated in mental hospitals year after year without any success. He concentrated later on his famous articles The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, and changed finally into the reconvalescent whose speed of life gained rapidly in the realms of love, science and politics, before he died, unexpectedly, in 1920. In the whole book it is transparent that Radkau's interest in Weber depends on his own field of research, the nerves. The author of a study on The Age of Nervousness has...