From sympathetic contagion to animal magnetism, nervous physiology to cell theory and germ theory, nineteenth-century medical theory and practice imagined human embodiment in open relation to the environmental, economic, religious, and political forces that shape historical experience. Often represented in both cultural and physiological terms, disease functioned as both sign and symptom of the irrevocable togetherness of mind and body, something to be combatted morally and technologically by prudence and enlightened reason. In today's age of hyper-globalized speed—in which epidemics, pandemics, and ecological catastrophes threaten to outrun the narrative conventions of historicism—scholars are prompted to reexamine how narrating the afterlives of nineteenth-century medicine can be responsive to the urgent demand for new, multi-perspectival, historically oriented methodologies.

This panel explores nineteenth-century conceptions of disease and the cure cultures generated in response to them in order to open up new approaches to thinking historically about embodiment, science, medicine, and literature. Moving beyond simple oppositions between surface and depth, function and meaning, natural histories and historicisms, we are particularly interested in how dynamic historical accounts of disease and medicine reveal the complex relations between narrative and nature, between nineteenth-century thought and contemporary problems in the medical humanities.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
--Nineteenth-century notions of social pathology
--Theorizing the racial, classed, gendered, and sexual dimensions of medicine
--Pasteur and germ theory in nineteenth-century literature
--Histories of physiology and historical methods
--Representations of medicine in popular culture
--Cell theory, organic form, and nineteenth-century aesthetics
--Precursors to neuroscience and neuropsychology

Please send an abstract of 250 words or less and a brief personal bio to Rachel A. Blumenthal (rablumen@iuk.edu) and Debbie Lelekis (dlelekis@fit.edu) by September 15, 2015 for consideration.