Suchergebnisse

Bodies of Work examines the transnational development of large-scale national systems, international organizations, technologies, and cultural material aimed at rehabilitating Allied ex-servicemen, disabled in the First World War. When nations mobilised in August 1914, it was thought that casualties would be minimal and the war would be quickly over. Little consideration was given to what ought to be done for those men whose bodies would forever bear the marks of war's destruction. Julie M. Powell charts how rehabilitation emerged as the best means to deal with millions of disabled ex-servicemen. She considers the ways in which rehabilitation was shaped by both durable and discrete influences, including social reformism, paternalist philanthropy, the movement for workers' rights, patriotism, class tensions, cultural ideas about manliness and disability, nationalism, and internationalism. Powell sheds light on the ways in which rehabilitation systems became sites for the contestation and maintenance of boundaries of belonging.

Summary
In 1894, Augustin Cabanès founded La Chronique médicale, a one-of-a-kind medical journal that allowed the doctor to indulge his interest in the practise of médecin historique. Historical medicine used modern forensic knowledge to 'solve' the mysterious deaths of history. Such retrospective diagnoses were communicated to readers in a familiar literary style, that of crime writing. Developed at the intersection of medical professionalisation and specialisation, the rise of forensic medicine, and the popularisation of crime writing, Cabanès's work promoted a clear viewpoint on the role of the medical man in fin-de-siècle French society. Through the practise of historical medicine and the medium of crime writing, Cabanès aimed to bolster faith in forensic medicine, to promote the doctor as moral authority, and, relatedly, to establish scientific, and especially medical, practise as critical to the maintenance of the social order during volatile periods of social dislocation and war.

This article examines the role of facially wounded soldiers and prosthetic masks in the post‐First World War reconstruction of a gendered French nation. In contextualising the work of Anna Coleman Ladd, who sculpted facial prosthetics to 're‐humanise' disfigured French veterans, I aim to shed light on larger post‐war tensions between the accommodation and rejection of social and cultural change. By submitting to Ladd's efforts and donning her devices, the French mutilés who sought her help articulated, through their bodies, a conservative vision for the French nation – highlighting the resonance of the traditional masculine ideal in post‐war France and a desire to reconstruct an idealised past. The exposure of the 'surreal' face, conversely, signalled the futility of a return to the status quo ante and the creation of the Union des Blessés de la face et de la tête allowed veterans to renegotiate the bounds of acceptable masculinity. Collectively, the facially wounded suggest the ways in which the face serves as a site of gender work, a means by which to challenge or reify masculine norms of behaviour and appearance.