Abstract:
This essay argues that scrofula was one of several disorders, including gout, rickets, and venereal disease, that were \'rebranded\' as hereditary in response to broader cultural changes that took place during the Restoration and eighteenth century in England. While the purposes of scrofula\'s recategorisation were more political than medical, they resulted in this heretofore relatively obscure childhood ailment assuming a new prominence within both medical and popular discourses of the period. Scrofula became both emblem and proof of the links between sexual promiscuity, financial profligacy, and physiological degeneration, its symbolic status reinforced by the legal and moral language used to model processes of hereditary transmission. By likening the inheritance of scrofula to the inheritance of original sin-or, more commonly, to the inheritance of a \'docked entail\' or damaged estate-eighteenth-century writers and artists not only made this non-inherited ailment into a sign of catastrophic hereditary decline; they also paved the way for scrofula to be identified as a disease of aristocratic vice, even though its association with crowded, unsanitary living conditions likely made it more common among the poor. By the same token, financial models of disease inheritance facilitated a bias toward paternal transmission, with scrofula often portrayed as passing, like a title or an estate, from father to son rather than from mother to daughter.
摘要:
这篇文章认为,scrofula是几种疾病之一,包括痛风,病,和性病,为了响应英国复兴时期和十八世纪发生的更广泛的文化变化,他们被重新命名为世袭。虽然scrofula重新分类的目的更多的是政治上的,而不是医疗上的,他们导致了这种迄今为止相对模糊的童年疾病,在这一时期的医学和流行话语中都出现了新的突出。Scrofula成为了性滥交之间联系的象征和证明,财务挥霍,和生理退化,它的象征地位被用来模拟遗传传播过程的法律和道德语言所加强。通过将scrofula的继承比作原罪的继承,更常见的是,继承一个“对接必然”或受损的遗产,18世纪的作家和艺术家不仅使这种非继承的疾病成为灾难性的世袭衰落的标志;他们还为scrofula被确定为贵族恶习的疾病铺平了道路,尽管它与拥挤的联系,不卫生的生活条件可能使穷人更加普遍。出于同样的原因,疾病遗传的金融模型促进了对父系传播的偏见,scrofula经常被描绘成路过,比如头衔或遗产,从父亲到儿子,而不是从母亲到女儿。