[Series] Circuses and Snake Oil

NOTE: This page is intended as a thematic overview of the meetups in the series, but is not itself a meetup. To RSVP, please see the individual events as they are announced on the Wisdom and Woe calendar. This page will be updated regularly to reflect changes to the schedule.

Every day, we need to differentiate truth from lies--whether in the news, commercials, or conversation with friends--while hoaxes and hyperbole confound fantasy and reality in all areas of human endeavor. The field of medicine is particularly susceptible to exploitation, contending among theories natural, supernatural, and artificial; where the stakes are life and death, qualitative and quantitative; and an oft-tenuous orthodoxy staggers the line between knowledge and misinformation. In the 19th century, the showy peddlers of traveling medicine shows and traveling circuses were virtually indistinguishable.

And while Melville is best known for his writings on the hunters of whale oil, unduly neglected are his writings on the sellers of snake oil. In fact, Moby-Dick itself opens (and re-opens) with an image of disease, and acknowledges whale oil's medicinal history. It goes on to warn that the entire world (including "you, reader") is prey to usurpation and "fish stories" of all kinds, alleging "tricks of the stage" by sailors, preachers, prophets, and Fate itself. And Ishmael's "soul searching" is both figurative and literal--meditative and medical, psychological and Cetological--where the "objectifying gaze" of the anatomical (whale) theater mingles with deep introspection; while aboard the Pequod, notions of physical and mental health tumble topsy-turvy.

In a world abounding in con-men, carnival barkers, forgers, fraudsters, hoaxers, humbugs, quacks, and chameleons--with motivations fiscal, fanatical, and farcical--where truth sometimes "requires full as much bolstering as error"--this series asks: what can we know and who can we trust? How to heal body, mind, soul, and "madness maddened?"

Schedule:

• Freud and Philosophy - Paul Ricœur - 6/28
• The Melancholy of Resistance - László Krasznahorkai - 7/5, 7/12, 7/19
• [Movie] Werckmeister Harmonies - 7/26
• The Anatomy of Melancholy - Robert Burton - 8/2
• Hamlet - Shakespeare - 8/9
• Bartleby, the Scrivener - Herman Melville - 8/16
• Genoa: A Telling of Wonders - Paul Metcalf - 8/23, 8/30
• [Movie] Freaks - 9/6
• Chang and Eng - Darin Strauss - 9/13
• Religio Medici - Sir Thomas Browne - 9/20
• A Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe - 9/27, 10/4, 10/11
• The Stark Munro Letters - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - 10/18, 10/25
• Tales of the Medical Abyss - Edgar Allan Poe - 11/1
• The Adventures of Roderick Random - Tobias Smollett - 11/8, 11/15, 11/29
• [Movie] The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser - 11/22
• The Sorrows of Young Werther - Goethe - 12/6
• Misery and Madness - Herman Melville - 12/13, 12/20
• Hydropathy; Or, The Cold Water Cure - R. T. Claridge - 12/27
• Elsie Venner - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. - 1/3, 1/10, 1/17
• House Calls - Herman Melville - 1/24
• [Movie] Powder - 1/31
• Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury - 2/7
• [Movie] Take Shelter - 2/14
• The Covenant of Water - Abraham Verghese - 2/21, 2/28, 3/14, 3/28
• [Movie] The Road to Wellville - 3/7
• [Movie] The Elephant Man - 3/21
• The Confidence-Man - Herman Melville - 4/4, 4/11, 4/18
• The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury - 4/25, 5/2
• Doctor Dogbody's Leg - James Hall - 5/9, 5/16
• Phenomenology of Perception - Merleau-Ponty - 5/23
• The Autobiography of a Quack and the Case of George Dedlow - S. Weir Mitchell - 5/27 [Thu]
• The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman - 5/30
• Lincoln's Melancholy - Joshua Shenk - 6/6
• [Movie] Embrace of the Serpent - 6/13
• The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey - Candice Millard - 6/20
• [Movie] The Mad Whale - 6/27
• Hard Cash - Charles Reade - 7/4, 7/18, 7/25, 8/1
• [Movie] Suddenly, Last Summer - 7/11
• On the Nonexistence of Monomania - Jean-Pierre Falret - 8/5 [Thu]
• Ten Days in a Mad-House - Nellie Bly - 8/8
• Organon of the Medical Art - Samuel Hahnemann - 8/15
• Moby-Dick - Herman Melville - 8/22, 8/29, 9/5, 9/12, 9/19, 9/26, 10/3, 10/10, 10/17
• [Movie] Moby-Dick - 10/24
• The Circus of Dr. Lao - Charles G. Finney - 10/31
• [Movie] Wings of Desire - 11/7
• The Confessions - Saint Augustine - x1
• The Sickness Unto Death - Kierkegaard - x2
• Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - De Quincy - x1
• Diary of a Madman - Gogol - x1 [Thu]
• Lunar Caustic - Malcolm Lowry - x1
• Notes from the Underground - Dostoevsky - x1
• The Genealogy of Morals - Nietzsche - x1
• [Movie] Bartleby - x1
• The Varieties of Religious Experience - William James - x1
• Maladies of the Will - Jennifer L. Fleissner - x1
• Asylums - Erving Goffman - x2
• [Movie] Persona - x1
• Madness and Civilization - Foucault - x1
• [Movie] The Book of Vision - x1
• Middlemarch - George Eliot - x7?
• [Movie] A Hidden Life - x1
• Barnum's Own Story - P. T. Barnum - x1
• Human Circus - Herman Melville - x1
• The Apostles - Herman Melville - x1
• [Movie] A Cure for Wellness - x1
• Devil in the White City - Erik Larson - x?
• American Chamber of Horrors - Ruth deForest Lamb - x1
• The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann - x8
• The Whalebone Theater - Joanna Quinn - x3
• [Movie] Hamlet - x1
• [Movie] Fanny and Alexander - x1

Extracts:

• "Begone! You are all alike. The name of doctor, the dream of helper, condemns you. For years I have been but a gallipot for you experimentizers to rinse your experiments into, and now, in this livid skin, partake of the nature of my contents. Begone! I hate ye." (The Confidence-Man, 16)
• "But he who dodges hospitals and jails, and walks fast crossing graveyards... not that man is fitted to sit down on tomb-stones, and break the green damp mould with unfathomably wondrous Solomon." (Moby-Dick, 96)
• "What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish? And what are you, reader, but a Loose-Fish and a Fast-Fish, too?" (Moby-Dick, 89)
• "... so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature..." (1851 review of Moby-Dick)