art, academic and non-fiction books
publishers’ Eastern and Central European representation

Name your list

Log in / Sign in

ta strona jest nieczynna, ale zapraszamy serdecznie na stronę www.obibook.com /// this website is closed but we cordially invite you to visit www.obibook.com

ISBN: PB: 9780226556598

ISBN: HB: 9780226556451

University of Chicago Press

August 2018

416 pp.

22.8x15.2 cm

14 halftones

PB:
£26,50
QTY:
HB:
£79,00
QTY:

Categories:

Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe

Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War

The injuries suffered by soldiers during WWI were as varied as they were brutal. How could the human body suffer and often absorb such disparate traumas? Why might the same wound lead one soldier to die but allow another to recover?

In "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe", Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers uncover a fascinating story of how medical scientists came to conceptualize the body as an integrated yet brittle whole. Responding to the harrowing experience of the Great War, the medical community sought conceptual frameworks to understand bodily shock, brain injury, and the vast differences in patient responses they occasioned. Geroulanos and Meyers carefully trace how this emerging constellation of ideas became essential for thinking about integration, individuality, fragility, and collapse far beyond medicine: in fields as diverse as anthropology, political economy, psychoanalysis, and cybernetics.

Moving effortlessly between the history of medicine and intellectual history, "The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe" is an intriguing look into the conceptual underpinnings of the world the Great War ushered in.

About the Author

Todd Meyers is associate professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Society, Health, and Medicine at New York University-Shanghai.

Stefanos Geroulanos is associate professor of history at New York University.