Self-Health: The Politics of Care in American Literature, 1793-1873.

Self-Health examines the cultural politics of health in the United States in the decades prior to the professionalization of medicine, the microbiological revolution, and the development of federal public health policy. Arguing that early republican and antebellum health discourses located the burden of care not with the state, but with the embodied subject, it traces the ways in which American health was rendered “public” at moments of biopolitical crisis: periods of populational emergency during which individuals’ relations and obligations to the life of the social body were tried and defined. Each chapter considers a nineteenth-century etiological or epidemiological concept—predisposition, miasmatic transmission, racialized immunity, and hereditary degeneration—as an organizing principle that shaped laypeople’s understandings of agency, risk, and responsibility. Specifically, analyzing theories of disease transmission and prevention as they were presented for public consumption in print media—newspapers, periodicals, domestic medical manuals, and novels—Self-Health illustrates the ways in which self-care was understood not only as a civic responsibility, but as a fundamental prerequisite for citizenship. In so doing, it investigates the hygienic investments of nineteenth-century fiction, exploring how American authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wells Brown, Hannah Crafts, and Louisa May Alcott engaged with contemporary discourses of health and hygiene in a range of narrative genres, including the Gothic, the romance, the abolitionist novel, and the sentimental novel. Intervening in American literary history, the history of medicine, and the health humanities, Self-Health seeks to illuminate the historical development of the politics, praxes, and ethics of care that continue to inform American health ideologies in our own historical moment.PhDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133400/1/emiwap_1.pd

Imperfect Measures: Notes on Humanization

"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres

Exit, pursued by a Shark: A Pandemic in Four or More Acts

"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres

Notes on Grim

"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres

How We Teach How We Die

"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres

Airborne Imaginaries

"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres

Entering the Mystery: The Lady’s Handbook for Her Mysterious Illness

"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres

Jane Austen's Autopsies

"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres

Against Breasts

"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres

Effect of a melanocortin type 2 Receptor (MC2R) antagonist on the corticosterone response to hypoxia and ACTH stimulation in the neonatal rat

The adrenal stress response in the neonatal rat shifts from ACTH-independent to ACTH-dependent between postnatal days 2 (PD2) and 8 (PD8). This may be due to an increase in an endogenous, bioactive, non-immunoreactive ligand to the MC2R. GPS1574 is a newly described MC2R antagonist that we have shown to be effective in vitro. Further experimentation with GPS1574 would allow better insight into this seemingly ACTH-independent steroidogenic response in neonates. We evaluated the acute corticosterone response to hypoxia or ACTH injection following pretreatment with GPS1574 (32 mg/kg) or Vehicle for GPS1574 in PD2, PD8, and PD15 rat pups. Pretreatment with GPS1574 decreased baseline corticosterone in PD2 pups, but increased baseline corticosterone in PD8 and PD15 pups. GPS1574 did not attenuate the corticosterone response to hypoxia in PD2 pups, and augmented the corticosterone response in PD8 and PD15 pups. GPS1574 augmented the corticosterone response to ACTH in PD2 and PD15 pups, but had no significant impact on the response in PD8 pups. Baseline adrenal Mrap and Star mRNA increased from PD2 to PD15, whereas Mrap2 mRNA expression was low and did not change with age. The data suggests that GPS1574 is not a pure MC2R antagonist, but rather acts as a bias agonist/antagonist. Its ability to attenuate or augment the adrenal response may depend on the ambient plasma ACTH concentration and/or developmental changes in early transduction steroidogenic pathway genes