Self-Health: The Politics of Care in American Literature, 1793-1873.

Abstract

Self-Health examines the cultural politics of health in the United States in the decades prior to the professionalization of medicine, the microbiological revolution, and the development of federal public health policy. Arguing that early republican and antebellum health discourses located the burden of care not with the state, but with the embodied subject, it traces the ways in which American health was rendered “public” at moments of biopolitical crisis: periods of populational emergency during which individuals’ relations and obligations to the life of the social body were tried and defined. Each chapter considers a nineteenth-century etiological or epidemiological concept—predisposition, miasmatic transmission, racialized immunity, and hereditary degeneration—as an organizing principle that shaped laypeople’s understandings of agency, risk, and responsibility. Specifically, analyzing theories of disease transmission and prevention as they were presented for public consumption in print media—newspapers, periodicals, domestic medical manuals, and novels—Self-Health illustrates the ways in which self-care was understood not only as a civic responsibility, but as a fundamental prerequisite for citizenship. In so doing, it investigates the hygienic investments of nineteenth-century fiction, exploring how American authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Hannah Crafts, and Louisa May Alcott engaged with contemporary discourses of health and hygiene in a range of narrative genres, including the Gothic, the romance, the abolitionist novel, and the sentimental novel. Intervening in American literary history, the history of medicine, and the health humanities, Self-Health seeks to illuminate the historical development of the politics, praxes, and ethics of care that continue to inform American health ideologies in our own historical moment.