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"Bound Alberti, Fay"
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A biography of loneliness : the history of an emotion
Despite 21st-century fears of a modern 'epidemic' of loneliness, its history has been sorely neglected. This book offers a radical new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries, philosophical tracts, political discussions, and medical literature from the eighteenth century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not an ahistorical, universal phenomenon.
Book
Listening to face transplant patients and caregivers: how medical humanities approaches redefine surgical ‘success’
A recent review of face transplants argues that overall, they have been successful. But this verdict is based on surgical measures rather than patient-reported outcomes (PROMs), which for historical reasons are in their infancy. These measures are critical to understanding the nature of success in face transplants, and the evidence from mixed systems of healthcare, as in the USA, reveals that there are significant ethical and social concerns about the well-being of patients. Medical humanities research that focuses on the lived experience of patients and their caregivers can contribute significantly to the discussion by focusing on patient voices and the measures that matter outside of surgical contexts. This article builds on existing work and original interviews with face transplant recipients and their families from an emotion history perspective. It argues that surgical measures used in isolation can be misleading. We need a more holistic understanding of outcomes—financial, psychological and emotional as well as medical—that requires the insights drawn from the humanities and transforms the definition and measurement of ‘success’.
Journal Article
‘A Procedure Without a Problem’, or the face transplant that didn’t happen. The Royal Free, the Royal College of Surgeons and the challenge of surgical firsts
Face transplants are an innovative and unusual form of modern surgery. There have been 47 face transplants around the world to date, but none as yet in the UK. Yet in 2003, the UK was poised to undertake the first face transplant in the world. The reasons why it didn't take place are not straightforward, but largely unexplored by historians. The Royal College of Surgeons, concerned about the media attention given to face transplants and the ethical and surgical issues involved, held a working party and concluded that it could not give approval for face transplants, effectively bringing to a halt the UK’s momentum in the field. This extraordinary episode in medical history has been anecdotally influential in shaping the course of British surgical history. This article explores and explains the lack of a face transplant in the UK and draws attention to the complex emotional, institutional and international issues involved. Its findings have implications beyond the theme of face transplants, into the cultural contexts and practices in which surgical innovation takes place.
Journal Article
Harold Gillies and the battleground of surgical innovation
The damaged faces of soldiers treated by Harold Gillies have become something of a staple of popular culture since the World War 1 centenary. [...]shocking pictures” of “horribly disfigured” servicemen have featured in British tabloids, their faces assembled into a jarring photo-mosaic, showing a damaged mass of missing jaws and blown-away noses before being salvaged, corrected, and filled in by the pioneering New Zealander and so-called father of plastic surgery. Lindsey Fitzharris’ The Facemaker: One Surgeon's Battle to Mend the Disfigured Soldiers of World War I does not shy away from the human experience behind the facial injury. The loss of life in World War 1 was far higher than in any previous war, and so was the degree of physical damage inflicted on soldiers’ bodies by automated machinery combined with trench warfare. Having spent his early years “tottering around the cavernous rooms of a Victorian villa”, as Fitzharris puts it, his background—including being sent from New Zealand to England for preparatory school, before studying medicine at Cambridge University—must have provided Gillies with the necessary cultural capital to thrive in the hierarchical context of fin de siècle British medicine.
Journal Article
Face transplants as surgical acts and psychosocial processes
According to the Cleveland Clinic, it took 11 surgeons and staff from 15 specialties more than 31 hours to transplant Stubblefield's new face, including her jaw, teeth, facial nerves, muscles, and skin. Despite extensive historical work on images of facial surgery—notably, Harold Gillies’ patients in World War 1 and Archibald McIndoe's so-called Guinea Pig Club during World War 2—there has been little theorising of the before and after as a cultural register, although it has been a staple of literary culture since Ovid's Metamorphoses. Since the 1950s, the “improvement” aspects of reconstructive and cosmetic surgery have been realised by civilian populations, along with narratives of psychological, even spiritual, transformation. Held at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, UK, the exhibition included a series of oil on linen portraits entitled Graeme, charting the visual appearance of a man who underwent 30 different treatments for facial cancer. Through the dual lenses of cultural and emotional histories, it brings lived experiences of facial difference and transformation together with insights from artists, writers, philosophers, psychologists, ethicists, and extended surgical teams.
Journal Article
Matters of the Heart
The heart is the most symbolic organ of the human body. Across cultures it is seen as the site of emotions, as well as the origin of life. We feel emotions in the heart, from the heart-stopping sensation of romantic love to the crushing sensation of despair. And yet since the nineteenth century the heart has been redefined in medical terms as a pump, an organ responsible for the circulation of the blood. Emotions have been removed from the heart as an active site of influence and towards the brain. It is the brain that is the organ most commonly associated with emotion in the modern West. So why, then, do the emotional meanings of the heart linger? Why do many transplantation patients believe that the heart, for instance, can transmit memories and emotions and why do we still refer to emotions as ‘heartfelt’? We cannot answer these questions without reference to the history of the heart as both physical organ and emotional symbol. Matters of the Heart traces the ways emotions have been understood between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries as both physical entities and spiritual experiences. With reference to historical interpretations of such key concepts as gender, emotion, subjectivity, and the self, it also addresses the shifting relationship from heart to brain as competing centres of emotion in the West.
eBook
This mortal coil : the human body in history and culture
With wit, insight, and earthy wisdom, a book that explores the nature of the self, the relationship between the brain and the heart, the gendering of our physical and emotional selves, and the struggle to accommodate mind and body, emotions and experience.
eBook
Bodies, Hearts, and Minds: Why Emotions Matter to Historians of Science and Medicine
The histories of emotion address many fundamental themes of science and medicine. These include the ways the body and its workings have been historically observed and measured, the rise of the mind sciences, and the anthropological analyses by which “ways of knowing” are culturally situated. Yet such histories bring their own challenges, not least in how historians of science and medicine view the relationship between bodies, minds, and emotions. This essay explores some of the methodological challenges of emotion history, using the sudden death of the surgeon John Hunter from cardiac disease as a case study. It argues that we need to let go of many of our modern assumptions about the origin of emotions, and “brainhood,” that dominate discussions of identity, in order to explore the historical meanings of emotions as products of the body as well as the mind.
Journal Article
From Face/Off to the face race: the case of Isabelle Dinoire and the future of the face transplant
Isabelle Dinoire, the world's first face transplant recipient has died, 11 years after the procedure that brought her unwanted fame and media attention. While medical debates centre mainly on ethical and medical concerns like immunosuppressant use, the psychological hazards of face transplants are still being overlooked. Using medical and media reports and examining the gendering of clinical and patient narratives, this article argues we need to look again at face transplants and their motivation for individuals as well as society.
Journal Article