Description
This book traces the origins of using sea journeys to treat mental illness, a practice recommended within the medical community through the nineteenth century. It also explores the profound consequences of such experiences on the health of writers who sought such cures as exemplified in their subsequent works. The use of sea voyages derived from the reception of Hippocratic medical treatises in the early Renaissance period that argued for the benefits of exposure to sea air and salt water for sufferers of depression and nervous disorders. Copestake traces how Western perceptions of the ocean, historically dominated by fear, were impacted by the works of writers, artists, and philosophers who took sea journeys to improve their mental health. Focusing on the Hippocratic medical discourse behind these journeys and the need for the ocean instilled by the mental health concerns of William Cowper, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, William James and Virgina Woolf in particular, he illustrates how the work that resulted from their respective associations of health with the ocean and bodies of water saw them each introduce individual modes of "oceanic thinking." The author also explores how these portrayals have positively impacted Western perceptions of the sea and our understanding of mental health up to the present day.
Chapter 01: Introduction.- Chapter 02: Hippocratic Medical Discourse and the Sea.- Chapter 03: Gestational Sea Therapy Makes its Bow: Ben Jonson and the Staged Cure.- Chapter 04: The Physician s Fiction of Tobias Smollett: A Picaresque Prescription.- Chapter 05: The Melancholy Sublime of Cowper and Coleridge.- Chapter 06: Alcmaeon among the Americans: Emerson s Embrace of the Sea.- Chapter 07: Medical Fact and Literary Symbol: Moby-Dick as Sea-Cure.- Chapter 08: William James and the Stream of Thought.- Chapter 09: Waves of Resistance: Virginia Woolf and Oceanic Liberation.- Chapter 10: Madness and the Sea: A Neglected Visual Iconography.
Ian Copestake received his PhD in American Literature from the University of Leeds, UK. Currently, he lives and works in Germany as an academic editor, proofreader, and translator.
