ABSTRACT
This chapter emphasizes issues of health and illness during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It explores the entanglements of body, mind and self and the most important theories of their historical development. It starts by discussing the relationship between these three elements in humoral theory and its medical successors. In addition to an overview of the most important developments in (medical) thinking about the body and illness, the chapter focuses on the ‘modern self’, its definitions and historical debates about its existence. The chapter particularly discusses Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of the self’, which constituted a shift towards historicizing the concept of the self, and the way in which cultural historians have elaborated on this theme, connecting it with material practices that have shaped the self in daily life.
