Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800-1950

Citizens of the modern era found themselves singularly prone to nervous disorders, while at the same historical moment the nervous system became a privileged model for describing the organization of political and social sphere.

Neurology and Modernity describes and explores this intriguing coincidence, uncovering the centrality of neurological ideas of health, disease, and experience within the medical treatises, popular advice manuals, science fiction, literary fiction, spiritualist tracts, philosophy, government reports and military tribunals of the period 1800–1950. This volume traces and illuminates the cultural ideas and anxieties that informed representations of the nervous body, while showing how many of the most distinctive features of the period known as modernity seem to vibrate in sympathy with neurology's central concerns.

The thirteen new studies in this volume untangle the significant mutual dependencies between scientific neurology and the cultural attitudes of the period, exploring how and why modernity remained such a fundamentally nervous state.