Skip to main content
Kent Academic Repository

Exhaustion and the Pathologization of Modernity

Schaffner, Anna Katharina (2014) Exhaustion and the Pathologization of Modernity. Journal of Medical Humanities, 37 (3). pp. 327-341. ISSN 1041-3545. E-ISSN 1573-3645. (doi:10.1007/s10912-014-9299-z) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:36613)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided.
Official URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10912-014-9299-z

Abstract

This essay analyses six case studies of theories of exhaustion-related conditions from the early eighteenth century to the present day. It explores the ways in which George Cheyne, George Beard, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Alain Ehrenberg and Jonathan Crary use medical ideas about exhaustion as a starting point for more wide-ranging cultural critiques related to specific social and technological transformations. In these accounts, physical and psychological symptoms are associated with particular external developments, which are thus not just construed as pathology-generators but also pathologized. The essay challenges some of the persistently repeated claims about exhaustion and its unhappy relationship with modernity.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1007/s10912-014-9299-z
Uncontrolled keywords: Exhaustion, Depression, Fatigue, Neurasthenia, Nervousness, Melancholia, Burnout
Subjects: D History General and Old World
R Medicine
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of Culture and Languages
Depositing User: Anna Schaffner
Date Deposited: 20 Nov 2013 09:12 UTC
Last Modified: 17 Aug 2022 10:56 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/36613 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

Schaffner, Anna Katharina.

Creator's ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7097-2145
CReDIT Contributor Roles:
  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.