This chapter charts the ultimate triumph of the emotional regime of scientific modernity in the form of antisepsis, Joseph Lister’s application of germ theory to surgical practice. It begins by exploring the ways in which antisepsis eliminated the patient as an emotional agent in surgery. The 1860s saw profound concern within surgery about the devastating impact of sepsis on post-operative mortality. Many of the explanations provided for this phenomenon rested on long-standing ideas about the role of the patient’s constitution and emotional state in regulating their post-operative health. However, by focusing purely on the condition of the wound, and the need to keep it free of ‘germs’, Lister’s antisepsis effectively overwrote these explanations, rendering patient subjectivity largely meaningless. At the same time, however, if emotions no longer possessed any ontological significance in surgery, the second part of this chapter demonstrates that they nonetheless played a powerful rhetorical function, as this ‘new world of surgery’ was configured in highly sentimentalised terms. This sentimentality not only served to counter widespread popular anxieties about surgery’s moral character, but also constructed Lister, the ultimate scientific surgeon and the emotional template for surgical modernity, as a quasi-divine saviour.

The tropes of bondage that pervade Emily Dickinson’s lyric poems were significant to contemporary American accounts of the lyric and its relation to individual liberty. Dickinson is often held up as the paradigmatic lyric poet: reclusive, but unbounded in her imagination; pure voice, speaking on the other side of the door. Dickinson herself returns endlessly to tropes of the prison, chains and bonds. At times she even expresses a sadistic delight in imagining the torture of others. The chapter argues that, given the convulsions of her time and her family’s direct political engagements with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Fugitive Slave Act and the Civil War, it is surprising that slavery is almost entirely absent from Dickinson’s poetry. The chapter reflects on the tropes of incarceration or bondage in Dickinson’s poetics, to consider what the missing slave means for the model of lyric that she has come to represent.

This chapter uproots the border from the perimeter of the country, from the traditional dyad in which it is embedded and releases it in the urban landscape. The premise is that just as the category of space has been mobilized in the work of geographers such as Doreen Massey, it is possible to transfer this process of destabilization to the concept of the border and the shifting categories of crossers and gatekeepers. Borders are always in the process of being reconfigured, always in the midst of being drawn but also blurred. Through a selection of works by Latinx and Asian American writers the chapter looks at borders not only in their “ordering” dimension but also as sites that allow for reordering strategies of self-definition. These writers occupy a border in process and write from within the border. As a result, the places of resettlement where ethnoracialized and subaltern subjects have been traditionally relocated become repossessed to constitute a privileged standpoint and a self-fashioning from within. This double perspective of urban borders allows both to acknowledge the productivity of boundaries as well as their violation and subversion.

Rather than a possible resolution to the “Marriage Debate,” Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale is a meta-critical poem designed to challenge his readers’ critical acumen and to assist in refining their interpretative skills. One element in the Tale’s instructive program is Aurelius’s little-noticed yet symptomatic love-wound, his sursanure. Outlining and then deploying the techniques of “symptomatic” literary criticism, this essay concentrates on five symptomatic modalities in the Tale—“parataxis,” “surface,” “intention,” “radical cure,” and “dehiscence.” While many readers share an unqualified admiration for the Franklin’s romance, the approach of this study argues for the necessity of reading the Tale symptomatically and “against the grain”—that is, closely, aggressively, unsentimentally, and counter-romantically.

Surgical care for the weapon wounded and sick in conflict and disaster zones is clearly defined with internationally accepted guidelines for clinical care, the provision of resources, and infrastructure. This chapter outlines priorities in the organization and delivery of surgical care, with real-life examples of surgical activity in the field and ICRC experience of field hospital surgery. ICRC hospital programmes and surgical standards are summarized.

The essay explores the ways in which Edith Wharton’s early work, written as facts were emerging about corrupt insurance industry practices, inspired questions that Wharton would raise throughout her oeuvre about the monetization of life and death, the evaluation of pain and suffering, and the larger consequences of a managed and insured society. By the early twentieth century, insurance was a central institution in the organization and management of modern life, although it is rarely recognized as a cultural force or context in Wharton’s work. This essay corrects this neglect by asking how an early twentieth-century insurance scandal inspired Wharton’s exploration of a growing wound culture intent on regulating and managing pain and suffering, life and death, and by examining Wharton’s representations of a managerial society rather than the society of manners for which she is still best known.