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Books > Medicine > General issues > History of medicine
This Open Access book provides a new understanding of the meanings
and motivations behind the wearing of beards, moustaches and
whiskers, and their associated practices and practitioners.
Concerning Beards offers an important new long-term perspective on
health and the male body in British society. It argues that the
male face has long been an important site for the articulation of
bodily health and vigour, as well as masculinity. Through an
exploration of the history of male facial hair in England, Alun
Withey underscores its complex meanings, medical implications and
socio-cultural significance from the mid-17th to the early 20th
century. Herein, he charts the gradual shift in concepts of facial
hair and shaving - away from ‘formal’ medicine and practice -
towards new concepts of hygiene and personal grooming. The ebook
editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND
3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by
the Wellcome Trust. This book is part of the Facialities series,
which explores the social, cultural and political significance of
the face in human history.
Dillon J. Carroll's Invisible Wounds examines the effects of
military service, particularly combat, on the psyches and emotional
well-being of Civil War soldiers-Black and white, North and South.
Soldiers faced harsh military discipline, arduous marches, poor
rations, debilitating diseases, and the terror of battle, all of
which took a severe psychological toll. While mental collapses
sometimes occurred during the war, the emotional damage soldiers
incurred more often became apparent in the postwar years, when it
manifested itself in disturbing and self-destructive behavior.
Carroll explores the dynamic between the families of mentally ill
veterans and the superintendents of insane asylums, as well as
between those superintendents and doctors in the nascent field of
neurology, who increasingly believed the central nervous system or
cultural and social factors caused mental illness. Invisible Wounds
is a sweeping reevaluation of the mental damage inflicted by the
nation's most tragic conflict.
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