Session 5b: The Language of Bodies

Jayanta Bhattacharya - The Body: Epistemological and Colonial Encounters in India
Tulsitala, P.O: Raiganj, Dist: Uttar Dinajpur, West Bengal, India, PIN: 733134

Dis-placement is an integral element of Eurocentric modernity/colonialism along the lines of a logocentric order-a project for a rational theory of the world made up of knowable things and subjects including the body which can be ordered and controlled.

In Ayurveda, the body (sharira) consists of gross (sthula), subtle( linga) and causal (karma) bodies in perpetual flux with nature with a polysemy of meaning through dense circulation of symbols. Narrative of sickness needs to be negotiated into harmony with the diagnosis of causation lying often beyond the bodily existence of a person, in nature /macrocosm. Its epistemological root was constituted in the legitimizing context of pre-colonial India. So, it's our inevitable immersion in place that has ontological priority in generation of life and the real.

In colonial India, the body became necessarily the place/space where dislocating colonial hegemony is narrativized into logic of care/cure, which can never be fixed in a closed systems of differences but a constant movement of over-determination and displacement through metonymic><metaphoric exchanges of signifiers.

Objectified/anatomo-patho-clinical knowledge of the three-dimensionally owned body of colonizing medicine-legitimized in positivist social ethos-acted as metonym to displace the metaphoric/fluid/context-sensitive knowledge of the body in Ayurveda.. The body became the written surface and writing instrument for the new medical hegemony. Uprooted in indigenous knowledge systems, healing practices were left with no sources of cognitive/epistemological encounters with the west.

A hybrid space was split open between "practical therapeutics" and "ontology of health" connoting being/subjectivity, trying to undermine the colonial authority through ghostly doubling of social body within the interstices of medical body.

With this backdrop, there is a tension between "1st Worldly" health concept of "service" embedded in state-individual-commodity paradigm circulated through metonymic/hyperreal signifiers of health fetishes and "3rd Worldly" concept of social assistance rooted in healer-social body paradigm waiting to be explored.

Marjorie Levine-Clark - It ‘Very Nearly Killed Her': Poor Women and Cultures of Healing in Early Victorian London
Department of History, University of Colorado at Denver

Using the case notes of over 2400 female patient admissions to University College Hospital (UCH) in London, this paper examines the ways poor women expressed their understandings of their bodies to their doctors in the 1830s and 1840s. It focuses on female patients' narratives of their experiences of health and illness, and particularly their efforts to heal themselves before being admitted to the hospital. This analysis opens up the possibility for discussion of historical continuities and changes in patient articulations of bodily experiences, and in patient-practitioner interactions.

The case histories suggest a variety of understandings of the human body. In early nineteenth-century England, professional medicine was undergoing a transformation defined by a gradual acceptance of diseases as specific entities over diseases as humoral or systemic imbalances. Patients were moving from a world in which they spoke a common language with their doctors to a world in which lay and professional medical languages increasingly diverged. While nineteenth-century patients and practitioners did not speak so clearly of humors, humoral categories were still embedded in the explanatory medical frameworks and treatments shared by both. Simultaneously, UCH doctors were adopting a technical language of diagnosis, emphasizing local causes of disease to which their patients had to respond.

While obviously mediated through the practitioner taking the case, patient histories are extremely rich documents for exploring lay understandings of health and disease in the past. Medical history has tended to concentrate on the achievements of individual practitioners, progress in disease prevention and cure, and the development of medical institutions and professionalism. Recently, there has been a growing number of studies on the relationships between patients and practitioners, and patients' perspectives on their health care choices. For the most part, however, this scholarship has centered on well-to-do patients and on men's experiences. My examination of the UCH case histories stresses the perspectives of the poor and of women, expanding our understanding of health, illness, and health care in the early Victorian period.

Louise Penner - Florence Nightingale's Sensational Narratives of Contagion and Contamination
Assistant Professor of English, Transylvania University

Throughout her career as a nurse, and later as an influential figure in English politics, Florence Nightingale held a deep commitment to the field of medical statistics. Through statistical study, she claimed, one could prove the correlation between the poor hygiene and sanitation laws of various regions including England, and the presence of disease. Until very recently historians have agreed that Nightingale was, up to the end of her life, a virulent anticontagionist. This view seems to be supported by her disturbing conclusion in Notes on Hospitals that the theory of contagion was a fiction created by "Southern" and "uneducated" Europeans," invented so that the aforementioned Europeans could avoid having to address issues of sanitation and public hygiene. Hugh Small's recent book, Avenging Angel argues that Nightingale actually abandoned contagion theory shortly after her observation of the devastating loss of life in the Scutari hospital that she ran during the Crimean war.

Though Small's claims appear to overlook some of Nightingale's most passionate anticontagionist arguments, particularly those made in connection with her advocacy for the increased use of medical statistics, I do find some support for his thesis in the rhetoric of Nightingale's addresses to middle-class women on hygiene in the home. The sensational pitch of Nightingale's attack on the poor sanitary quality of "other" regions is matched only by the near-paranoid narrative voice of her 1860 essay Notes on Nursing. I argue that in her account of the average, dirty middle-class home, we see Nightingale applying a similar narrative technique to the one used in her attack on the "Southern Europeans." The narrative she creates of the infiltration of contaminants both from within and outside of the home, shows her applying a clinical eye to diagnose the places of bodily contamination in the home, the curtains, sheets, etc. Her narrative thus raises scientific and narratological questions about the status of the body in narratives of contagion and contamination. Does the body or the products of the body infect the environment? Or, as Nightingale argues elsewhere, is the environment the only force that influences disease? Do these narratives thus invite or eschew discussion of the body? I argue that in her own insistence on the need for the clean home and body, Nightingale may so convincingly and sensationally make her phobia of the body clear, that she may in fact defeat her own anticontagionist argument.