Anxious times
medicine and modernity in nineteenth-century Britain
Bände/Inhalt:
- Introduction - 1. "The influence of employments on health": work and medical discourses about occupational health - 2. Technologies of modernity: telegraphs, telephones, and medical practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - 3. Unhealthy economies: illness and infection in British coastal resorts - 4. The woman secret drinker in the late nineteenth-century press - 5. Knocking some sense into them: overpressure debates and the education of mind and body - 6. Bringing them up to speed: nineteenth-century nervous systems and cultural fantasies of adaptation - Conclusion
- Anxious Times explores perceptions of the pressures of modern life and their impact on bodily and mental health in nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on both specialist and popular material, the authors consider anxieties surrounding the potentially detrimental impact of new technologies, changing work and leisure practices, and evolving cultural pressures and expectations. Explorations of these concerns range from developments in occupational and public health to fictional speculations as to what lies ahead for human beings once they become, literally, a bundle of nerves.