Author : Jan Bondeson
Publisher : Amberley Publishing Limited
Page : 439 pages
File Size : 44,17 MB
Release : 2018-03-15
Category : Medical
ISBN : 144567629X
A historian’s research skills combined with a physician’s diagnostic flair, exploring our timeless fascination with the unusual and downright bizarre people, events and theories in the colourful history of medicine.
Author : Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 44,71 MB
Release : 2024-08-27
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0197691137
In Freak Inheritance, both leading authors and emerging voices use cutting-edge disability and cultural theories to expose the operations of eugenicist thought in historical and contemporary culture. It is the follow-up to the field-defining Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (1996).
Author : Simon Young
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 22,2 MB
Release : 2022-07-15
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1496839447
In the last fifty years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including the “Choking Doberman,” the “Eaten Ticket,” and the “Vanishing Hitchhiker.” But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s. Young introduces seventy Victorian urban legends ranging from “Beetle Eyes” to the “Shoplifter’s Dilemma” and from “Hands in the Muff” to the “Suicide Club.” While a handful of these stories are already known, the vast majority have never been identified, and they have certainly never received scholarly treatment. Young begins the volume with a lengthy introduction assessing nineteenth-century media, emphasizing the importance of the written word to the perpetuation and preservation of these myths. He draws on numerous nineteenth-century books, periodicals, and ephemera, including digitized newspaper archives—particularly the British Newspaper Archive, an exciting new hunting ground for folklorists. The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends will appeal to an academic audience as well as to anyone who is interested in urban legends.
Author : Agustí Nieto-Galan
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 26,1 MB
Release : 2023-11-23
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 1009379593
From the 1880s to the 1920s, hunger artists - professional fasters - lived on the fringes of public spectacle and academic experiment. Agustí Nieto-Galan presents the history of this phenomenon as popular urban spectacle and subject of scientific study, showing how hunger artists acted as mediators between the human and the social body. Doctors, journalists, impresarios , artists, and others used them to reinforce their different philosophical views, scientific schools, political ideologies, cultural values, and professional interests. The hunger artists generated heated debates on objectivity and medical pluralism, and fierce struggles over authority, recognition, and prestige. Set on the fringes of the freak show culture of the nineteenth century and the scientific study of physiology laboratories, Nieto-Galan explores the story of the public exhibition of hunger, emaciated bodies, and their enormous impact on the public sphere of their time.
Author : Lyell D. Jr. Henry
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 45,35 MB
Release : 2024-10-30
Category : Sports & Recreation
ISBN : 1609389808
For several decades following the end of the Civil War, the most popular sport in the United States was walking. Professional pedestrians often covered 500 miles or more for up to six grueling days and nights in pursuit of large money prizes. Walking was also a favorite amateur sport; newspapers often noted a “pedestrian mania” or “walking fever” that only began to give way in the mid-1880s to fast-rising crazes for baseball, bicycling, and roller skating. As competitive walking faded, a new kind of spectacle walking, which had also begun in the late 1860s, came to full flower. Between 1890 and 1930, hundreds of men, women, even children and entire families were on the nation’s roads and railroad tracks trekking between widely separated points, sometimes moving in unusual ways such as on roller skates or by walking barefooted, backward, on stilts, or while rolling a hoop. To finance their attention-seeking journeys, many sold souvenir postcards. The public usually found these performers entertaining, but public officials and newspaper editors often denounced them as nuisances or frauds. Tapping vintage postcards and old newspaper articles, this is the first book to bring back to view this once-familiar feature of American life.
Author : Jan Bondeson
Publisher : Cornell University Press
Page : 322 pages
File Size : 45,34 MB
Release : 2004-09
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780801489587
A successor to his popular book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, this new collection of essays by Jan Bondeson illustrates various anomalies of human development, the lives of the remarkable individuals concerned, and social reactions to their extraordinary bodies.Bondeson examines historical cases of dwarfism, extreme corpulence, giantism, conjoined twins, dicephaly, and extreme hairiness; his broader theme, however, is the infinite range of human experience. The dicephalous Tocci brothers and Lazarus Colloredo (from whose belly grew his malformed conjoined twin), the Swedish giant, and the king of Poland's dwarf--Bondeson considers these individuals not as "freaks" but as human beings born with sometimes appalling congenital deformities.He makes full use of original French, German, Dutch, Polish, and Scandinavian sources and explores elements of ethnology, literature, and cultural history in his diagnoses. Heavily illustrated with woodcuts, engravings, oil paintings, and photographs, The Two-Headed Boy and Other Medical Marvels combines a scientist's scrutiny with a humanist's wonder at the endurance of the human spirit. Contents: The Two Inseparable Brothers, and a PrefaceThe Hairy Maid at the HarpsichordThe Stone-childThe Woman Who Laid an EggThe Strangest Miracle in the WorldSome Words about Hog-faced GentlewomenHorned HumansThe Biddenden MaidsThe Tocci Brothers, and Other DicephaliThe King of Poland's CourtDwarf Daniel Cajanus, the Swedish GiantDaniel Lambert, the Human ColossusCat-eating Englishmen and French Frog-swallowers
Author : George Milbry Gould
Publisher :
Page : 1008 pages
File Size : 34,34 MB
Release : 1901
Category : Abnormalities, Human
ISBN :
Author : George M. Gould
Publisher : Good Press
Page : 984 pages
File Size : 26,35 MB
Release : 2019-11-19
Category : Fiction
ISBN :
This is a medical reference book and contains detailed descriptions and illustrations of various medical anomalies and unusual conditions. The book covers topics such as genetic anomalies, prenatal anomalies, obstetric anomalies, surgical anomalies, and anomalous types and instances of diseases. It provides a fascinating glimpse into the history of medical knowledge and serves as a valuable resource for medical professionals and researchers interested in rare and unusual medical conditions.
Author : New York Academy of Medicine
Publisher :
Page : 854 pages
File Size : 38,10 MB
Release : 1948
Category : Medicine
ISBN :
Author : Jonathan Faiers
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 15,47 MB
Release : 2020-01-01
Category : Design
ISBN : 0300227205
A groundbreaking, informative, and thought-provoking exploration of fur's fashionable and controversial history The first and only book of its kind, Fur: A Sensitive History looks at the impact of fur on society, politics, and, of course, fashion. This material has a long, complex, and rich history, culminating in recent and ongoing anti-fur debates. Jonathan Faiers discusses how fur--long praised for its warmth, softness, and connotation of status--became so controversial, at the center of campaigns against animal cruelty and the movement toward ethical fashion. At the same time, fake fur now faces a backlash of its own, given the environmental impact of its manufacture and its links to fast fashion. Divided into five sections--dedicated to hair, pelt, coat, skin, and fleece--the book surveys not only the politics of fur but also its centrality to western fashion, the tactile pleasure it gives, and its use in literature, art, and film. This thoughtfully reasoned, eloquently written, and spectacularly illustrated examination of fur is both timely and essential, filling a gap in fashion scholarship and appealing to a broad audience.
