Stefanos Geroulanos is associate professor of history at New York University. Todd Meyers is associate professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Society, Health, and Medicine at New York University--Shanghai.
"The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe is a tightly wound,
densely constructed account that will doubtless stimulate further
thinking among historians of medicine as well as the social and
psychological sciences. Geroulanos and Meyers skillfully
demonstrate how the First World War was unique in the means and
extent to which it precipitated a transformation of the popular and
scientific understandings of the human body and its selfhood. The
imaginative leap the authors take from medical to social sciences
is especially noteworthy and persuasive as a model of
interdisciplinary work."-- "Bulletin of the History of
Medicine"
"A shared concept of human individuality lies at the heart of
intellectual traditions as varied as psychoanalysis, cybernetics,
and medical humanism: an individuality knowable only at the moment
of its collapse. This is the remarkable argument of The Human Body
in the Age of Catastrophe, a provocative and poignant book, and one
that will be essential reading for historians of modern science and
medicine. By reconstructing modern neuromedicine's confrontation
with the violence of industrialized warfare, Geroulanos and Meyers
have given us a model for writing intellectual history that is
simultaneously materialized, embodied, and transnational."--
"Deborah Coen, Yale University"
"Geroulanos and Meyers have written a terrifically original book.
In an important sense, it is inventing its own subject--namely, the
emergence of the idea that the body is a self-integrating
entity--in that there has not to date been a clear articulation of
this concept and certainly no comprehensive historical tracking of
its development in modern scientific and medical thought. Engaging
and clearly written, and with vivid examples, The Human Body in the
Age of Catastrophe will certainly attract an eclectic set of
readers, but will have especially strong appeal for specialists in
the history of medicine, psychology, and social sciences."-- "David
W. Bates, University of California, Berkeley"
"Perhaps the most important service that Geroulanos and Meyers have
done for intellectual history is to suggest that
medico-physiologists were, in fact, intellectuals and that their
ideas catalyzed lines of twentieth-century thought well beyond the
clinic or the laboratory. That seems a valuable and necessary first
step in widening the conversation between historians of medicine
and intellectual historians."
--Corinna Treitel "Modern Intellectual History"
"The originality of this volume consists not only in its object,
namely the 'ontology of the body at war', but also in the method
adopted, which makes use of an extremely detailed research based on
the study of medical archives and scientific literature without
losing sight of the overall epistemological argument. . . .
Geroulanos and Meyers' thorough investigation on the medical
concepts of individuality, integration, and organism is an erudite
overview of a wide range of intellectual aspects of western human
culture at the turn of World War I. It is a fascinating and
extremely rich volume, which provides a very broad and updated
overview of the critical literature in English, German and French,
and in which every chapter almost represents an autonomous and
full-fledged study."
-- "Nuncius"
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