CULTURES OF NEURASTHENIA FROM BEARD TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR.

GIJSWIJT-HOFSTRA, Marijke, Roy Porter (Edits.), Tom Lutz, Mathew Thomson, Chandak Sengoopta, Hilary Marland, Michael Neve, Doris Kaufmann.

ISBN 10: 9042009314 / ISBN 13: 9789042009318

Published by Rudopi, Amsterdam, 2001

About this Item

8vo. pp iv, 407, [14]. Green and cream illustrated dust jacket. Original publisher's tan cloth with gilt lettering at spine. ISBN: 9042009314 Very good in very good dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # C64811

Bibliographic Details

• Title: CULTURES OF NEURASTHENIA FROM BEARD TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR.
• Publisher: Rudopi, Amsterdam
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9042009314
• ISBN 13: 9789042009318
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

About this title

Synopsis

Neurasthenia, meaning nerve weakness, was 'invented' in the United States as a disorder of modernity, caused by the fast pace of urban life. Soon after, from the early 1880s onwards, this modern disease crossed the Atlantic. Neurasthenia became much less 'popular' in Britain or the Netherlands than in Germany. Neurasthenia's heyday continued into the first decade of the twentieth century. The label referred to conditions similar to those currently labelled as chronic fatigue syndrome. Why this rise and fall of neurasthenia, and why these differences in popularity
This book, which emerged out of an Anglo-Dutch-German conference held in June 2000, explores neurasthenia's many-sided history from a comparative perspective.

About the Author

Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra is Professor of Social and Cultural History at the University of Amsterdam. She has published on the granting of asylum in the Dutch Republic, deviance and tolerance (16th-20th centuries), witchcraft and cultures of misfortune (16th-20th centuries), the reception of homoeopathy in the Netherlands (19th-20th centuries), and on women and alternative health care in the Netherlands (20th century). She has recently edited in English, with Hilary Marland and Hans de Waardt, Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 1997), and, with Roy Porter, Cultures of Psychiatry and Mental Health Care in Postwar Britain and the Netherlands (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998).
Roy Porter is Professor of the Social History of Medicine at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London. Recent books include Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late Enlightenment England (London: Routledge, 1991); London: A Social History (Hamish Hamilton, 1994); ‘The Greatest Benefit to Mankind’: A Medical History of Humanity (London: HarperCollins, 1997); and Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2000) and Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and the Doctors in Britain: 1650-1914 (London: Reaktion Books, 2001). He is co-author of The History of Bethlam (London: Routledge, 1997) and of Gout: The Patrician Malady (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998).