(Ebook) From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric) by Koerber, Amy ISBN 9780271080864, 0271080868

(Ebook) From Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History (RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric) by Koerber, Amy ISBN 9780271080864, 0271080868

Amy Koerber examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early
twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this
word on expert understandings of women's health.
Shortly after
Ernest Henry Starling coined the term “hormone” in 1905, hormones began
to provide a chemical explanation for bodily phenomena that were
previously understood in terms of “wandering wombs,” humors, energies,
and balance. In this study, Koerber posits that the
discovery of hormones was not so much a revolution as an
exigency that required old ways of thinking to be twisted, reshaped, and
transformed to fit more scientific turn-of-the-century expectations of
medical practices. She engages with texts from a wide array of medical
and social scientific subdisciplines; with material from medical
archives, including patient charts, handwritten notes, and photographs
from the Salpetriere Hospital, where Dr. Jean Charcot treated hundreds
of hysteria patients in the late nineteenth century; and with current
rhetorical theoretical approaches to the study of health and medicine.
In doing so, Koerber shows that the boundary between older,
nonscientific ways of understanding women's bodies and newer, scientific
understandings is much murkier than we might expect.
A
clarifying examination of how the term “hormones” preserves key concepts
that have framed our understanding of women's bodies from ancient times
to the present, this innovative book illuminates the ways in which the
words we use today to discuss female reproductive health aren't nearly
as scientifically accurate or socially progressive as believed. Scholars
of rhetoric, gender studies, and women's health will find Koerber's
work provocative and valuable.