Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England Altered Bodies and Contexts of Identity

Open Access star Unrestricted online access

Offering an innovative perspective on debates concerning embodiment
in the early modern period, Alanna Skuse examines diverse
kinds of surgical alteration, from mastectomy to castration, and
amputation to facial reconstruction. Body-altering surgeries had profound
socio-economic and philosophical consequences. They reached
beyond the physical self, and prompted early modern authors to
develop searching questions about the nature of body integrity and
its relationship to the soul: was the body a part of one’s identity, or a
mere ‘prison’ for the mind? How was the body connected to personal
morality? What happened to the altered body after death? Drawing
on a wide variety of texts including medical treatises, plays, poems,
newspaper reports, and travel writings, this volume will argue that the
answers to these questions were flexible, divergent, and often surprising,
and helped to shape early modern thoughts on philosophy,
literature, and the natural sciences. This title is also available as
Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Wellcome Trust

Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ cc

English