Women’s Experiences in the 19th-Century Sickroom
Hosted by Distinguished Professor Emerita Alice Kuzniar, this workshop brought together historians of medicine and literary scholars to investigate how self-care and nursing of sick family and friends influenced Germany’s 19th-century women writers, in particular Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.
This workshop took place on Wednesday, October 4, 2023.
Researchers
Christiane Arndt (Queen's University), Marion Baschin (Bosch Institute for the History of Medicine), Martha Helfer (Rutgers University), Vanessa Höving (FernUniversität in Hagen), and Thomas Wortmann (Universität Mannheim).
The cross-disciplinary approach of this workshop highlights collaboration in the medical humanities, disability studies, feminist studies, life writing, and 19th-century cultural studies.
This workshop draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Topics addressed
- Relation of soma and psyche
- Self-care, self-discipline, and self-estrangement
- Quotidian dimensions of myopia, fever, exhaustion, and headaches
- Dietetics
- Physical process of writing
- Atmospheric impacts on health
- Posture and Walking
- Homeopathy (since Droste-Hülshoff was an avid proponent)
- How medical texts generate and categorize knowledge and writing about the body
- Mutability and suffering in nature
- Poetics of Micro-perceptions
- Grief and Death
- Vaccine debates
Timestamps
0:00:00 - Welcome
0:09:18 - Marion Baschin, Institute for the History of Medicine, Robert Bosch Foundation, “I am under a great strain...”: Droste-Hülshoff, Homeopathy and Care
0:53:35 - Vanessa Höving, FernUniversität in Hagen, Spheres of Life: Illness, Death, and Survival in Droste-Hülshoff’s early prose
1:50:02 - Alice Kuzniar, University of Waterloo, From Illness to a Poetics of Somatic Micro-Perception
2:43:51 - Thomas Wortmann, Universität Mannheim, Sich krank schreiben: Illness and The Act of Writing in Droste-Hülshoff
3:33:15 - Martha Helfer, Rutgers University, Death Writes: Droste-Hülshoff’s Thanatopoetics
4:18:15 - Christiane Arndt, Queen’s University, Narratives of and by Women in the 19th –century Vaccine and Anti-vaccine Discourses
5:12:25 - Final Discussion
5:35:56 - Closing Remarks