Can history be funny? With this entertaining joke book it sure can be. This hilarious volume is brimming with jokes about the past that will have readers laughing with glee. Each silly joke will amuse readers of many ages and may also help some become more interested in history. An easy-to-follow layout and hysterical illustrations will draw in even reluctant readers. These high-interest, age-appropriate jokes are an excellent way to get young learners interested in reading.
The story of hysteria is a curious one, for it persists as an illness for centuries before disappearing. Andrew Scull gives a fascinating account of this socially constructed disease that came to be strongly associated with women, showing the shifts in social, cultural, and medical perceptions through history.
Readers will enjoy theses tales of eccentric kooks and the many other oddball men and women whose antics made San Diego the superior attraction it is today.
Readers wont believe how humorous history can be. Romans, Vikings, and archaeologists become the subjects of sidesplitting jokes. Creative illustrations add another level to the amusement.
Over the course of several centuries, Western masculinity has successfully established itself as the voice of reason, knowledge, and sanity - he basis for patriarchal rule - in the face of massive testimony to the contrary. This book boldly challenges this triumphant vision of the stable and secure male by examining the central role played by modern science and medicine in constructing and sustaining it.
Paul Lerner traces the intertwined histories of trauma and male hysteria in German society and psychiatry and shows how these concepts were swept up into debates about Germany's national health, economic productivity, and military strength in the years surrounding World War I. From a growing concern with industrial accidents in the 1880s through the shell shock "epidemic" of the war, male hysteria seemed to bespeak the failings of German masculinity. In response, psychiatrists struggled to turn male-hysterical bodies into fit workers and loyal political subjects. Medical approaches to trauma valorized work and productivity as standards of male health, and psychiatric treatment--whether through hypnosis, electric current, or suggestion--concentrated on turning debilitated soldiers into symptom-free workers. These concerns endured through the Weimar period, as "nervous veterans" competed for disability compensation amid the republic's political crises and economic upheavals. Hysterical Men shows how wartime psychiatry furthered the process of medical rationalization. Lerner views this not as a precursor to the brutalities of Nazi-era psychiatry, but rather as characteristic of a more general medicalized modernity. The author asserts, however, that psychiatry's continual skepticism toward trauma resonated powerfully with the radical right's celebration of war and violence and its supposedly salutary effects on men and nations.
Part medical mystery, cultural criticism, and rallying cry, Editor of the Funny Women column at The Rumpus shares her journey to reclaim her authentic voice in a culture that doesn't want to hear or understand women. Throughout the first half of President [BLEEP]'s term, Elissa Bassist saw seventeen medical professionals, joining millions of American women who suffer from indescribable chronic pain. She consulted a psychologist, psychiatrist, ophthalmologist, neurologist, radiologist, psychopharmacologist, allergist, Ear/Nose/Throat specialist, gastroenterologist, orthopedic hand surgeon, occupational therapist, physical therapist, massage therapist, acupuncturist, herbalist, and an obsessive-compulsive disorder specialist. It was the acupuncturist who inquired about caged fury as a contributing factor of the physical maladies, as if the problem had something to do with her voice and what she hadn't expressed. As if treating the voice would treat the problem. Turns out, it did. In sharing her story, Elissa explains how women and girls internalize and perpetuate directives about what to do with their voice, making it hard to "just speak up" and "burn down the patriarchy." Today's mind-body doctors theorize that some physical pain is, in fact, repressed emotional pain finding expression, that emotions pile up in the unconscious, going unarticulated until they hit max capacity and tell the brain to create physical symptoms. When the mind denies itself language, it gives the body pain. If you don't share your story, your pain will tell it for you. Hysterical is inspired by Elissa's own journey to reclaim her authentic voice in a culture that weaponizes silence, noise, and language against women. She offers new ways to think about the female voice and calls on other women to unleash their unheard cry, which was theirs before the world intervened, the one they can learn to hear above all others and use again without regret.
