Faculty and Staff
Mark S. Micale
Associate Professor
Department of History
421 Gregory Hall
1-217-762-3003
msmicale@illinois.edu
Ph.D., Yale University, 1987
B.A., Washington College, Maryland, 1979
Areas of Historical Interest
Comparative European intellectual and cultural history, 1700 to the present; the history of medicine (especially psychiatry, neurology, and psychoanalysis); the history of science (especially the biological sciences); post-revolutionary France; the history of historiography; theoretical and historical gender studies
Publication (Books)
Mind of Modernism: Culture, Medicine, and Psychology in Europe and America, 1880-1930, edited and introduced by Mark S. Micale, (Stanford University Press, 2004), 455 pp.
Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1860-1930, edited and
introduced by Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 316 pp.
Enlightenment, Culture, and Passion: Essays in History in Honor of Peter Gay, edited and introduced by Mark S. Micale and Robert Dielte (Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 507.
Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1994),
327 pp.
Discovering the History of Psychiatry, edited and introduced by Mark S. Micale and Roy Porter
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1994), 466 pp.
Beyond the Unconscious: Essays in the History of Psychiatry by Henri F. Ellenberger, introduced,
edited, and annotated by Mark S. Micale, translated from the French by Françoise Dubor and Mark
S. Micale (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1993), 416 pp.
Encyclopedia of Europe, 1789-1914, four vols., eds., John Merriman, Jay Winter, et al., (New York,
Scribners, forthcoming.) Editor of over 300 entries on culture, thought, science, and medicine.
Publication (Select articles)
"Two Cultures Revisited: The Case of the Fin de siècle," in Roberta Bivans and John Pickstone, eds.,
De Omni Scribili: Historical Essays in Honor of Roy Porter (Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
forthcoming), chapter 19.
"The Mind of Modernism: A Map and a Timeline," in Micale, ed., The Mind of Modernism (2003),
1-68.
"The Psychiatric Body," in John V. Pickstone and Roger Cooter, eds., Medicine in the Twentieth
Century (London, Routledge, 2000), chapter 22.
"Trauma, Psychiatry, and History: A Conceptual and Historiographical Introduction,” (with Paul
Lerner) in Micale and Lerner, eds., Traumatic Pasts (2001), chapter 1.
"Peter Gay: A Life in History," in Micale and Dietle (eds.), Enlightenment, Passion, and Modernity (2000), chap. 1.
"The Decline of Hysteria," Harvard Mental Health Letter (July, 2000), 6-7.
"Paradigm and Ideology in Psychiatric History Writing: The Case of Psychoanalysis," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 184 (1995), 146-152.
"Littérature, Médecine, Hystérie: le cas de Madame Bovary de Gustave Flaubert,” L’Évolution
psychiatrique, 60 (1995), 901-918.
"Charcot and les névroses traumatiques: Scientific and Historical Reflections," Revue neurologique
150 (1994), 498-505.
"Reflections on Psychiatry and Its Histories" (co-authored with Roy Porter), in Micale and Porter,
eds., Discovering the History of Psychiatry (1994), 3-36.
"Henri F. Ellenberger: The History of Psychiatry as the History of the Unconscious," in Micale
and Porter, eds., Discovering the History of Psychiatry (1994), 112-134.
"On the `Disappearance' of Hysteria: A Study in the Clinical Deconstruction of a Diagnosis,”
Isis, 84 (September, 1993), 496-526.
"Hysterical Male/Hysterical Female: Reflections on Comparative Gender Construction
in Nineteenth-Century Medical Science," in Marina Benjamin, ed., Science and Sensibility:
Essays on Gender and the History of Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, Basil
Blackwell, 1991), 200-239.
"Charcot and the Idea of Hysteria in the Male: A Study of Gender, Mental Science, and Medical
Diagnosis in Late Nineteenth-Century France," Medical History, 34 (October, 1990), 363-411.
"Hysteria and Its Historiography--The Future Perspective," History of Psychiatry, 1 (March, 1990), 33-124.
"Hysteria and Its Historiography--A Review of Past and Present Writings," History of Science
two parts, 27 (September; December, 1989), 223-261, 319-51.
"The Salpêtrière in the Age of Charcot: An Institutional Perspective on Medical History in Late
Late Nineteenth Century," Journal of Contemporary History--special issue on Medicine, History
and Society, 20 (October, 1985), 703-731.
Courses Taught
Western Civilization: From 1660 to the Present
The Western Cultural and Intellectual Tradition: From the Enlightenment to Existentialism
Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Europe
European Culture between the Wars
Art, Film, and Literature in the Age of the Dictators
Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution
Readings in the History of Psychiatry
Madness and Society in the Modern Age
Readings in the History of the Neurosciences
Science, Medicine, and Gender in Europe and America, 1870-1920
Masculinity: Theoretical and Historical Readings
Fin-de-siècle France
The French Avant Garde, 1848-1914
Varieties of Cultural History
History of Political Theory: Hobbes to Arendt
Current Project
i) Hysterical Males: Medicine and Masculine Subjectivity from the Renaissance to Freud (Harvard University Press):
Despite the outpouring of scholarship in historical gender studies during the past two decades, no book-length study of medicine and masculinity exists in any language. This book seeks to fill that gap. Moving outward from my earlier researches on the French neurophysician Jean-Martin Charcot and the history of the hysteria diagnosis during the late nineteenth century, Hysterical Males attempts to reconstruct the intertwined histories of masculinity and psychological medicine from the early modern period to the beginnings of the present century. I examine historical episodes in England, Scotland, France, and German-speaking central Europe. What interests me in particular is the medicalization of male emotional distress and the range of ways in which nervous ill-health in adult men has been ignored, described, theorized, and treated by past medical science. I conceptualize the textual tradition of male hysteria--extending from Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) to Sigmund Freud's early writings on hysterical neurosis--as a continuous attempt at individual and collective masculine self-representation within the history of science.
The book consists of six chapters: "Hysterick Women and Hypochondriacal Men," "The Great Victorian Eclipse," "Charcot and the French Idea of Male Hysteria," "Receptions, Revisions, Resistances," "Science, Medicine, and Gender at the Fin de siècle," and "Freud." I have now drafted 450 pages of the work and plan to complete the manuscript during an upcoming fellowship leave.