The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War

432 Pages·2018·1.819 MB·English

by  Stefanos Geroulanos, Todd Meyers

The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe

The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe:
Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War
Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers
The University of Chicago Press :: Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2018 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in
the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more
information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St.,
Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 55645- 1 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 55659- 8 (paper)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 55662- 8 (e- book)
doi: https:// doi .org/ 10 .7208/ chicago/ 9780226556628 .001 .0001
Names: Geroulanos, Stefanos, 1979– author. | Meyers, Todd, author.
Title: The human body in the age of catastrophe : brittleness, integration,
science, and the Great War / Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifi ers: lccn 2017055602 | isbn 9780226556451 (cloth : alk. paper) |
isbn 9780226556598 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226556628
(e-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Medicine—History—20th century. | Physiology—
History—20th century. | World War, 1914–1918—Infl uence. | Europe—
Intellectual life—20th century. | Human body—Symbolic aspects.
Classifi cation: lcc r149 .g47 2018 | ddc 610.9/04—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017055602
This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992 (Perma-
nence of Paper).
Contents
Prologue: “Why Don’t We Die Daily?” vii
Part One
1 The Whole on the Verge of Collapse:
Physiology’s Test 3
2 The Puzzle of Wounds: Shock and the Body
at War 34
3 The Visible and the Invisible: The Rise and
Operationalization of Case Studies, 1915–1 919 78
Part Two
4 Brain Injury, Patienthood, and Nervous
Integration in Sherrington, Goldstein, and
Head, 1905–1 934 111
5 Physiology Incorporates the Psyche: Digestion,
Emotions, and Homeostasis in Walter Cannon,
1898– 1932 138
6 The Organism and Its Environment: Integration,
Interiority, and Individuality around 1930 161
7 Psychoanalysis and Disintegration: W. H. R.
Rivers’s Endangered Self and Sigmund Freud’s
Death Drive 207
CONTENTS vi
Part Three
8 The Political Economy in Bodily Metaphor and the
Anthropologies of Integrated Communication 247
9 Vis medicatrix, or the Fragmentation of Medical
Humanism 292
10 Closure: The Individual 316
Acknowledgments 323
Abbreviations and Archives 327
Notes 331
Index 409
Prologue: “Why Don’t We Die Daily?”
In a draft of his 1926 lecture “Some Tentative Postu-
lates Regarding the Physiological Regulation of Normal
States,” the American physiologist Walter Bradford Can-
non endeavored to outline how an organism holds itself.
It functions, he contended, not organ by organ or part
by part but as a stable, self- regulating whole. And yet
within his thesis he could not help but contemplate the
fragile complexity of self-r egulation. In the midst of all
the bodily labor to maintain a delicate equilibrium, Can-
non wondered, “Why don’t we die daily?”1
Cannon probably wasn’t trying to be clever. If any-
thing he was being momentarily unselfconscious: having
only recently returned from the study of war-r elated in-
jury, he could not easily ward off a lingering astonishment
that organisms do not constantly fall apart. Eager though
he was to turn attention away from topics of wartime
physio pathol ogy and traumatic injury, perhaps, like many
of his peers he simply could not move out from under
the pall that the war had spread. Physiological normality
had become unimaginable without a clear accounting for
catastrophe. Homeostasis, the concept Cannon invented
to relay his solution to this puzzle, presented the body
as fi rst and foremost a dynamic process of integration
meant to avert the constant danger of collapse in an indif-
ferent or hostile world.
PROLOGUE viii
The path to homeostasis began in earnest for Cannon with the ques-
tions he raised in his 1915 book on the emotions, Bodily Changes in
Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage. The project was as much a discrete sci-
entifi c endeavor concerned with bodies pushed to their limits as it was
a form of social witnessing. Its central claim was that the physiological
production of great emotional states is brought about by confrontation
with particular aggressions and causes the discharge of chemical and
nervous messengers throughout the body, forcing vital actions of sur-
vival. A stimulus from the outside prompts the arousal of overwhelming
emotions that change, in the short and long term, the inner composi-
tion—a change of posture necessary to restore balance even in extreme
circumstances. World War I provided many such circumstances. Despite
having a common physiology, whether a person fought or fl ed in the
face of environmental aggressions was unpredictable. Some men froze
in the face of the unspeakable carnage of battle. Others ran toward the
fi ght. Others ran away. When some soldiers were injured and wounds
ravaged their bodies and minds, life clung to them, while others suc-
cumbed to injuries that seemed minor.
What did physicians and medical researchers make of all this physi-
ological chaos, this inconsistency? In their conceptual and experimen-
tal efforts, medical thinkers repeatedly attempted to measure up to the
confusion produced by the war and to overcome their frustrating in-
ability to develop a lasting semiotics of injuries and behaviors. They
produced a new web of concepts that splintered existing paradigms in
the social sciences and became essential for thinking about integration
and collapse in economics, social organization, psychoanalysis, sym-
bolic representation, and international politics. To show the fi ne detail
of this labor in a conceptual-h istorical and anthropological fashion is
to stage thought and experimentation as they became attuned to, and
tried to anticipate— even outdo—s pecifi c conditions of the lived body in
states of extreme exertion. The ability of researchers to recalibrate their
thinking about this body deployed particular logics, notably of integra-
tion, which led to further engagements, concepts, and theories, but also
to a plethora of unstable or problematic assumptions, assertions, and
systematizations.
Integration, collapse, self-p reservation, crisis, catastrophe, witness-
ing, evidence, unknowing— in this book we pull at a tangled thread of
ideas and problems that spread across the registers of the individual and
the social. In early twentieth-c entury medical science a model emerged
of a body that was both brittle and tightly integrated— integrated be-
cause brittle and vice versa. We write about how Cannon’s question
PROLOGUE ix
and his answer became possible, not just for him but for his colleagues
across a series of related fi elds. We explain how particular kinds of in-
jury emerged during World War I and in its aftermath, and how such in-
juries found their place in the bodies and lifeworlds of wounded soldiers
and doctors, and in the thinking and actions of theorists and policy
makers. We describe how medical care came to be understood, however
tenuously, as care of the whole individual, and how the body and its
medical management stirred various rethinkings of the social role of
clinical medicine. We show how these conceptual threads form around
and through individual, predominantly male, bodies, how they weave
together different medical thinkers and medical problems, and how they
sometimes fray and are replaced by others.
As Paul Veyne once suggested apropos history writing, “In this world,
we do not play chess with eternal fi gures like the king and the fool; the
fi gures are what the successive confi gurations of the chessboard make
of them.”2 Indeed, we are drawn to the arrangements on a chessboard
made up of physiological theory, wartime and postwar therapeutics,
psychiatry, and conceptions of the body; these changed, and the fi gures
made up new groupings over and over, and along with them created
new tangles in the conceptual threads that bind them together. The en-
suing knots became visible to contemporaries across several fi elds, just
as they now are to us.
“Case histories” presented one such knot. Across disciplines cases
proliferated, commanded new directions for doctors, and became both
instructive and fraught. Sometimes the case was an anecdote or narra-
tive to illustrate the effects of disorder on an individual level. For the
American neuropsychiatrist E. E. Southard, cases came from the clinical
accounts of others, and had to be compiled, aggregated, condensed, and
sorted to refi ne the taxonomy of disorder toward clinical and adminis-
trative ends. At other times, as the English neurologist Henry Head and
the German neuropsychiatrist Kurt Goldstein recognized, each case,
male or female, young or old, represented an individual, a damaged
world in need of meticulous care, and even the category “case” needed
to be reinvented almost with each patient they studied.
Another knot to untie was “shock,” a major contributor to mortal-
ity during World War I and perhaps the exemplary whole-b ody injury.
Shock seemed at fi rst to bind together everything from open wounds
and cerebellar lesions to psychic trauma as it ravaged the injured body
that sought to stabilize itself. But this was not so. Cannon, the English
physiologist and pharmacologist Henry Dale, and their counterparts on
the Royal Army Medical Corps Committee on Shock found in it an