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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History

From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History

Koerber, Amy

Hardcover

Series: Rsa Transdisciplinary Rhetoric, Book 7

Medical ReferenceGeneral Reference

ISBN10: 027108085X
ISBN13: 9780271080857
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: Apr 12 2018
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.22
Height: 0.75 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

In From Hysteria to Hormones, Amy Koerber examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women's health.

Shortly after Ernest Henry Starling coined the term hormone in 1905, hormones began to provide a chemical explanation for bodily phenomena that were previously understood in terms of wandering wombs, humors, energies, and balance. In this study, Koerber posits that the discovery of hormones was not so much a revolution as an exigency that required old ways of thinking to be twisted, reshaped, and transformed to fit more scientific turn-of-the-century expectations of medical practices. She engages with texts from a wide array of medical and social scientific subdisciplines; with material from medical archives, including patient charts, handwritten notes, and photographs from the Salpêtrière Hospital, where Dr. Jean Charcot treated hundreds of hysteria patients in the late nineteenth century; and with current rhetorical theoretical approaches to the study of health and medicine. In doing so, Koerber shows that the boundary between older, nonscientific ways of understanding women's bodies and newer, scientific understandings is much murkier than we might expect.

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