In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Hunger—Herz—Schmerz—Geschlecht: Brüche und Fugen im Bild von Leib und Seele
  • Sander L. Gilman
Esther Fischer-Homberger. Hunger—Herz—Schmerz—Geschlecht: Brüche und Fugen im Bild von Leib und Seele. Bern, Switzerland: eFeF-Verlag, 1997. 223 pp. Ill. Sw. Fr. 34.00 (paperbound).

Esther Fischer-Homberger is one of the most distinguished historians of medicine writing in German. She has worked on the history of the image of women as the object of the medical gaze, the history of mental illness (including books on the history of hypochondria and traumatic neurosis), and the history of forensic psychiatry. Her work remodeled the history of medicine in German along lines certainly better known in the Anglophone and Francophone world long before any other German-language historian of medicine. What she managed to do was to take seriously categories such as gender within the new strictures of the social and intellectual history of medicine. As a psychiatrist, she also brought a level of methodological sophistication to the field that was generally missing in German-language scholarship. Her tenure as a historian of medicine at Zurich lasted from 1970 to 1984, when she retired prematurely at the age of forty-four to enter private psychiatric practice.

This new book by Fischer-Homberger treats the breaks and discontinuities in the history of the body. It consists of four long chapters: on eating disorders as a problem within the history of psychoanalysis; on the psychoanalytic dichotomy of the sexes as paralleled to other such dichotomies (large/small, living/dead, human/animal); on the history of pain; and on the image of the heart as a marker for sexual difference. All of these essays are linked by the belief that the body seems to need a single, continuous image, while the reality is that the image of the body is constructed through a number of often contradictory and confusing juxtapositions, borrowing images and references from across the broadest range of cultural expressions.

To know the world, according to Fischer-Homberger, we need to know the origins of the language through which we represent the world. We also need to explore the limitations and ideological presuppositions of that language. In this volume she undertakes to do this in an exemplary and elegant manner. Clearly the final essay, with its reach from Aristotle to Harvey, defines this problem of constructing ideas of the body in the most complex manner. The “heart of the matter” was Sigmund Freud’s favorite way of marking the passages in his books that he saw as central. The essay on the heart and its function as a metaphor for the emotions, from the period when its anatomical function was only guessed at through the moment in which its “reality” was established, shows how the power of myth colors even the understanding of reality. Do we not still speak of a broken heart (rather than the fluttering of a ventricle) without batting an eye?

This book is a delight to read and an immediate spur to further thinking. One additional direction that could be followed would be to examine the function of other bodily metaphors in the terms of a “primitive” understanding of the body. Cognitive scientists have discovered that even small children possess a sort of “primitive” physics by which they understand the way their universe functions. This system is often “wrong”—that is, at odds with the way that we understand the [End Page 358] basic laws of physics to function within science. We also posses a “primitive” map of the body, a map structured by the world into which we are born as well as by the physical contours of our own bodies. It would be fascinating to take the initial work on the “heart” and begin to map other aspects of our Western, “primitive” anatomy—the skin, the brain, the face, all of those categories which we construct to explain and structure the body, whether they are “correct” anatomically or not. Such a map would provide a sense of who we imagine we are, rather than who we know we are.

Sander L. Gilman
University of Chicago
...

Share