Sexual science constitutes the empirical study of sexual function and behavior in living beings. It originated from natural philosophy and is now characterized by the methods and aims of modern science. This chapter treats the main story of sexual science, starting with conceptual concerns over the body and using examples from Chinese and Islamic medicine. Next, the analysis shifts to the foundations of sexual science in the Western world, examining philosophical and medical traditions that culminated in medieval scholasticism and institutions like universities and hospitals. The chapter then treats the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, in which contemporaries invented the “two-sex” model and pioneered new ideas of “biopolitics.” The analysis turns the nineteenth century’s complex “discovery” of sex and the powerful connections between global imperialism and sexual understanding. The chapter concludes with the dynamics surrounding the body and sexuality in the global twentieth century, as found in evolutionary biology, sexology, and psychoanalysis, and the relation between mass culture and ideals of the sexual revolution. Sexual science appears paradoxical: sometimes, it seemed an agent of discipline and power, supporting entrenched values, or it seemed to help emancipate individuals, debunking prejudices and superstitions and liberating attitudes and behaviors.

This chapter places race and disability in dialogue to highlight the complex, often contradictory, negotiations of exclusionary discourse within sensation narratives of the 1860s. The first half of the chapter discusses Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The ital Octoroon (1861–62), as a sensational text which places issues of race center stage and demonstrates how racial rhetoric is encoded through melodrama. Through exploiting the heightened topicality of racial questions in the midst of public discussions about the American Civil War, the novel exposes contradictory constructions of racial difference in the decade and implicitly displaces and elides British imperial violence. Issues of miscegenation and hybridity are analyzed in relation to the “octoroon fever” of the 1860s, before moving to a consideration of the ways in which contemporary discourses of race and mental disability converge in the slave figure, Tristan. The final part of the chapter extends this analysis of the constitutive relationship of race and disability in two of Wilkie Collins’s major novels of this no quote marks. Ital. all titles decade, Armadale (1866) and The Moonstone (1868).

The Cambridge Edition of Tender Is the Night declares that it “chronicles the rise and fall of Dick Diver, a promising young psychiatrist, and his wife, Nicole, who is one of his patients.” Likewise, Penguin describes the book as “the account of a caring man who disintegrates under the twin strains of his wife’s derangement and [their] lifestyle.” This chapter challenges the androcentric, victim-blaming nature of these long-accepted readings and argues that we have not paid sufficient attention to the sexual violence that permeates Fitzgerald’s novel. More specifically, it explores the conceptual, contextual, and formal ways that the book creates sympathy for Dick Diver, and then it asks readers to consider how our understanding of the text might change if we shift our attention to Nicole, whose adolescent violation is both the inciting event of the novel and occupies its center, literally and figuratively. Taking into consideration Fitzgerald’s literary aspirations alongside the novel’s formal complexity, the chapter argues that Tender Is the Night shares some of the modernist qualities of Fitzgerald’s contemporaries as well as their intensifying anxieties over female sexuality and concludes that by tending to Nicole’s trauma, Tender is as much a novel of recovery and redemption as one of dissipation and decline.

Freud is not the first to have admitted the existence of unconscious psychic processes. Since the discovery of the reflex function of the spinal cord, many researchers had speculated that this reflex action also extended to the higher areas of the nervous system. For these psychophysiologists, reflex action is the very foundation of psychic activity, and consciousness (the ego) emerges from a background of unconscious automatisms that it inhibits, delays, and represses. Freud inherited this notion from Charcot who postulated that hysteria and hypnosis were a regression to this “unconscious cerebration” caused by a “traumatic shock.” This was the starting point of Freud’s initial theorization of the “psychical apparatus” as well of his first attempts at a therapy of the neuroses: psychical activity is governed by unconscious “primary processes” that tend towards an immediate “discharge” but are slowed down by the “secondary processes” of the conscious ego; the psychotherapy of the neuroses aims at bringing the unconscious part of the mind under the control of the conscious by lifting the pathogenic repression that caused the “dissociation” of the traumatic memory.

Quasi-neurological problems can be spurious, the product of the mind or emotions. Distinguishing such conditions from coarse brain disease is accomplished by systematic neurologic analysis. Many of these patients are depressed or malingering. Intense emotions may account for other cases. In a given patient more than one of these terms may be applicable.

This chapter explores the beginning of the end of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility and the origins of surgical scientific modernity. It illuminates this crucial period of transition through the juxtaposition of two distinct but conceptually and ideologically intertwined moments in surgical history. These are, firstly, the debates surrounding the practice of anatomical dissection that came to the fore in the 1820s and culminated in the passage of the Anatomy Act in 1832, and, secondly, the introduction and early use of inhalation anaesthesia in the later 1840s. In both instances it highlights the powerful influence of utilitarian thought in divesting the body, both as object and subject, of emotional meaning and agency. In the former instance it demonstrates how an ultra-rationalist understanding of sentiment was set in opposition to popular ‘sentimentalism’ in order to divest the dead bodies of the poor of emotional value. Meanwhile, in the latter, it considers how the emotional subjectivity of the newly anaesthetised patient was swiftly tamed by the operations of a techno-scientific rationale.

This chapter explores the relationship between medicine and the novel in the long eighteenth century through a reading of the work of medical authority and novelist Jane Barker. Emphasising the rich interplay between eighteenth-century medicine and the novel, I begin with a review of criticism that considers novelistic representations of the body–mind relationship, sensibility, nerve theory, illness, disease as metaphor, and disability. I go on to suggest that Jane Barker deserves a place in the critical discussion of the relationship between the origins of the novel and the world of medicine. She was an innovator, both in her use of fiction to purvey medical knowledge and in her manipulation of such knowledge to narrative ends. In her novel Love Intrigues (1713), Barker displays her familiarity with the most modern and supposedly advanced medical wisdom, and rewrites and challenges such wisdom, sometimes drawing on older, humoural understandings of the body. Barker’s characterisation of her protagonist Galesia is evidence of a nascent psychological realism that effectively captures the heroine’s mental landscape – an effect achieved in part through her curious management of discourses of hysteria.

Chapter 8: This chapter analyzes the legacy and influence of the diagnostic gaze in contemporary British theatre, examining how theatre can offer a site to negotiate the complex dynamic between psychiatric institutions and the experiences of patients. Contemporary psychiatry has overseen a vast expansion in the categorization of mental illness. Mental disorders can be identified and ascribed to individual patients in an act of diagnosis that signals mental illness as a ‘performative malady’. Alongside reflecting shifts in the etiology of mental disorder (increasingly focused upon a biomedical model), the speech-act of diagnosis has implications for the legal status and care of the patient. Analyzing works such as Joe Penhall’s Some Voices and Lucy Prebble’s The Effect, this chapter suggests how theatre can offer a reimagination of diagnosis by situating and troubling the role of the psychiatric user.

No Australian peacekeeping operation has aroused more public opposition than the contribution of helicopters to the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) from 1982 to 1986. The deployment was in effect simply a continuation of Australia’s participation in the second UN Emergency Force (Unef II), described in chapter 20. The deployment of the MFO followed a peace treaty signed by the two parties, Egypt and Israel, in 1979, and was never likely to involve significant danger to Australian personnel. It followed soon after a far more dangerous deployment to Southern Rhodesia (see chapters 24–27), which aroused little criticism.