This book explores experiences of illness, broadly construed. It
encompasses the emotional and sensory disruptions that attend disease,
injury, mental illness or trauma, and gives an account of how medical
practitioners, experts, lay authorities and the public have felt about
such disruptions.
Considering all sides of the medical encounter and highlighting the
intersection of intellectual history and medical knowledge, of
institutional atmospheres, built environments and technological
practicalities, and of emotional and sensory experience, Feeling
Dis-ease in Modern History presents a wide-ranging affective account of
feeling well and of feeling ill. Especially occupied with the ways in
which dynamics of power and authority have either validated or
discounted dis-eased feelings, the book's contributors probe at the
intersectional politics of medical expertise and patient experience to
better understand situated expressions of illness, their reception, and
their social, cultural and moral valuation. Drawing on methodologies
from the histories of emotions, senses, science and the medical
humanities, this book gives an account of the complexity of undergoing
illness: of feeling dis-ease.