Department of English Literature, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.
Gerontologist. 2023 Dec 15;63(10):1628-1637. doi: 10.1093/geront/gnad105.
This paper demonstrates what emerges when we undertake a literary reading of a medical text, examining its form and structure as a text. The study of what appears to be a singular publication reveals instead an under-examined moment in medical history that anticipates contemporary health investigations in modern medicine, while reflecting the limitations of medical and gerontological knowledge in the 1880s. I demonstrate this argument by conducting a Foucauldian archeology of the text, with attention to authorship and the concept of textual genre. My primary text is the Life History Album (1884), which I link to a related endeavor, G. M. Humphry's Old Age (1889), a little-known publication that contains medical observations on the resiliency of aging bodies and anticipates ideas associated with early twentieth-century geriatrics. My investigation brings new attention to the work of Dr. Frederick Akbar Mahomed, a pioneer in the study of hypertension, whose story is part of the genealogy of the text. Inviting its creator to keep records of health throughout the life span, the Life History Album anticipates a new kind of modern subject, who participates in co-creating his or her medical and life health history, whereas Humphry's Old Age, which draws on similar methods, is humanistic, includes literary references, and allows for contentment in older age.
本文通过对医学文本进行文学解读，考察其作为文本的形式和结构，展示了我们在研究过程中所获得的成果。这项研究揭示了一个在医学史上尚未被充分研究的时刻，它预示了现代医学中对当代健康问题的调查，同时反映了 19 世纪 80 年代医学和老年医学知识的局限性。我通过对文本进行福柯式考古学分析，关注作者身份和文本体裁概念，来论证这一观点。我的主要文本是《生活史相册》（1884 年），我将其与相关著作《老年》（1889 年）联系起来，后者是一部鲜为人知的著作，其中包含了对衰老身体弹性的医学观察，并预见了与 20 世纪早期老年医学相关的思想。我的研究使弗雷德里克·阿巴德·马哈茂德博士的工作得到了新的关注，他是高血压研究的先驱，他的故事是该文本的一部分。《生活史相册》邀请其创作者在整个生命周期中记录健康状况，这预示着一种新型的现代主体的出现，他参与共同创造自己的医疗和生活健康史，而 Humphry 的《老年》则借鉴了类似的方法，具有人文主义色彩，包含文学参考，并允许人们在老年时感到满足。
