Academic literature on the topic 'Bamfield, Thomas, d 1903'

Realizou-se um inventário da fauna de morcegos entre abril e novembro de 2004 no norte de Mato Grosso do Sul, Brasil (Projeto Jauru/MMA). Oito pontos de coleta foram amostrados com redes-neblina em um ambiente de cerrado, sendo capturados 146 indivíduos de 28 espécies, distribuídos em seis famílias. O total de espécies neste estudo, representa apenas 30% da fauna de morcegos do cerrado. A família mais capturada foi a Phyllostomidae, representada por Glossophaga soricina (Pallas, 1766) e Artibeus lituratus (Olfers, 1818). Algumas espécies raras foram capturadas: Lophostoma brasiliense (Peters, 1866), Lonchophylla mordax Thomas, 1903 e Lionycteris spurrelli Thomas, 1913. O local de maior abundância (0,032 indivíduos/m²/h) mostrou um índice de Simpson de D = 3.86 e o de menor abundância (0,003 indivíduos/m²/h) um índice de Simpson de D = 3.03. A preservação dos mananciais de água e a cobertura florestal nestes pontos são discutidas.

“The Greatest Mistake Made in Judging Southern Literature, Even by its Friends, is That We are Apt to Speak of it By Itself as if it were a thing apart and a country apart.” John Bell Henneman made this assessment a century ago, in 1903 (347). Fifty-one years later, Jay B. Hubbell observed, “The literature of the South … cannot be understood and appraised if one neglects its many and complicated relations with the literature of the rest of the nation” ('x“). Not long after Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs published The Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South (1953), a collection of essays by distinguished United States scholars in and beyond the South, the study of southern literature, conceived in the spirit of Henneman and Hubbell, became an academic specialty, with its centers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (where Rubin taught); at Vanderbilt University (the home of Thomas Daniel Young, the New Critics, and, a generation earlier, the Agrarians); and at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge (where Lewis P. Simpson edited the Southern Review). There were outriders: Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren infiltrated Yale. They made such an impression that, today, when people from the Northeast are asked to define southern United States literature, they are likely to channel Brooks in his emphasis on the importance of family, kinship, community, history, and memory in the imagined South. None of this is meant to imply that the literature of the southern United States was not studied before the mid-fifties; it was. Its departures from the broader national tradition were noted, but it did not constitute an academic specialty as it does today. The publication of The Southern Renascence and subsequent work by Rubin, Hubbell, Brooks and Warren, C. Hugh Holman, and many others not only institutionalized southern literature as a specialization in the United States academy but also defined the field in terms of the South's relations with the rest of the nation.

Abstract We present a new assessment of the genetic and morphological variation within Oxymycterus quaestor Thomas, 1903, which currently includes the junior synonyms O. judex Thomas, 1909 and O. misionalis Sanborn, 1931. We integrate distinct lines of evidence, including variation of mitochondrial (Cytochrome b [Cytb]) and nuclear (intron 7 of beta fibrinogen gene [Fgb]) sequences, and the assessment of skull quantitative traits based on geometric morphometrics, throughout the Atlantic Forest of Southeastern-Southern Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Phylogenetic relationships based on Cytb indicate that O. quaestor is structured in four well-supported clades (lineages A–D), one of them (lineage C) including topotypes of a previously associated nominal form (O. judex). However, these Cytb lineages exhibit lower levels of differentiation based on the Fgb locus, and are not recovered in the genealogies of this nuclear marker, representing a case of mitonuclear discordance. The Cytb lineages also broadly overlapped in the morphospace both in skull shape and size, which sustain the current wider concept of O. quaestor as one single young species (0.947 Myr) that is recently expanding, and ultimately branching out, in the Atlantic Forest.

A infecção pelo vírus influenza causa uma doença viral aguda do trato respiratório, com distribuição global, tendência à sazonalidade e maior expressão nos períodos de outono e inverno(1). Os vírus influenza pertencem à família Orthomyxoviridae, possuem genoma de RNA segmentado e basicamente quatro tipos virais catalogados, sendo eles: A, B, C e D. Os vírus influenza A e B possuem potencial epidêmico, sendo que o tipo A possui expressão pandêmica. O vírus tipo C é menos frequente e relacionado a infecções leves, portanto, sem grandes impactos na saúde pública. Já o vírus influenza D é exclusivamente zoonótico(2).A Organização Mundial de Saúde (OMS) estima uma carga global de aproximadamente 3 a 5 milhões de casos graves por ano, destes, cerca de 290.000 a 650.000 pessoas morrem em decorrência de complicações respiratórias. Adicionalmente, as epidemias podem resultar em altos níveis de absenteísmo no trabalho/escola, perdas de produtividade e elevada sobrecarga dos serviços e trabalhadores de saúde(1).No Brasil, a vigilância epidemiológica da influenza iniciou em 2000 com o monitoramento dos casos de síndrome gripal em unidades de saúde sentinela(3). Em 2004, após a ameaça da gripe aviária altamente patogênica, o país aderiu a uma estratégia internacional proposta pelo Centro de Controle e Prevenção de Doenças (CDC) com o objetivo de promover o fortalecimento da rede de diagnóstico laboratorial para detectar o vírus influenza com potencial emergente e sazonal(4).Estas iniciativas não foram capazes de minimizar os impactos deletérios da pandemia pelo vírus influenza A (H1N1)pdm09, que só em 2009, acometeu 50.482 pessoas em todo o país e provocou 2.060 óbitos(5). Entretanto, a presente situação funcionou como um grande laboratório para avaliar e aprimorar a rede nacional de vigilância e assistência relacionada a esse agravo. O monitoramento atual, além de identificar os vírus respiratórios circulantes no Brasil, colabora na adequação da vacina de influenza sazonal para o Hemisfério Sul, garantindo a representatividade mínima da circulação viral em todas as unidades federadas do país(6).Dados do Ministério da Saúde do Brasil, entre 2012 e 2017, mostram uma redução no número de casos por influenza quando comparados com a pandemia ocorrida em 2009. Neste período, 27.674 indivíduos foram identificados com o vírus influenza e 4.605 óbitos foram associados à infecção. Por outro lado, de janeiro a junho de 2018 (semana epidemiológica 25), 3.558 casos foram confirmados por influenza no país. Goiás concentrou cerca de 10,4% e 63,0% do total de casos registrados no Brasil e região Centro-Oeste, respectivamente, apresentando uma taxa de letalidade 18,0%(7).Epidemiologicamente, sabe-se que as principais medidas de prevenção e controle da doença incluem a vacinação anual contra influenza, adoção das medidas de precaução padrão e para gotículas e introdução precoce de terapia medicamentosa para indivíduos com síndrome gripal, classificados como grupos de risco(8).Invariavelmente, a vacinação mostra-se como uma das medidas mais efetivas para a prevenção de casos graves e a diminuição da letalidade(9). Em contrapartida, a discussão sobre o período de disponibilização para o Hemisfério Sul da vacina é controverso. Pesquisadores (10-11) destacam como adequado o início da vacinação em abril, prevendo que o maior risco de infecção por influenza na América do Sul, concentra-se entre os meses de abril a setembro. Entretanto, não há padrão sazonal para a ocorrência de influenza e outras doenças respiratórias no país. Há evidências de que na região Nordeste a imunização contra influenza tem sido realizada após o período de maior circulação do vírus(12).De fato, ao se observar os últimos anos desta infecção no Brasil (2009-2018), verifica-se que entre os meses de janeiro à março não há distribuição uniforme do agravo em todas as regiões do Brasil, apesar de a vacina contra influenza ter sido distribuída rotineiramente entre abril e maio em todo país. Em 2017, nas Regiões Nordeste e Norte o número de casos notificados antes da campanha nacional de vacinação contra influenza foi maior em comparação aos meses subsequentes. Além disso, na Região Centro-Oeste o pico de casos identificados também antecedeu a campanha nacional(7).A partir deste cenário, questiona-se quais medidas poderiam ser tomadas por parte da vigilância em saúde no Brasil que fossem capazes de minimizar a morbimortalidade por esta síndrome. Resultados de uma pesquisa(13) apontam como uma estratégia viável para o Brasil a implementação da vacinação pelo menos três meses antes do que é recomendado atualmente. Outra opção, seria a implementação de um cronograma diferenciado que antecipasse a vacinação para algumas regiões, considerando a situação epidemiológica local. No entanto, a antecipação da vacina envolve um grande desafio logístico para laboratórios internacionais e nacionais. Assim, deve-se investigar e estimular a viabilidade da introdução antecipada da vacina no Brasil.Um outro fator que deve ser levado em consideração durante os períodos de maior expressão deste agravo é o modo indiscriminado da veiculação de informação por parte da mídia e redes sociais, que em proporções distorcidas, nem sempre refletem a situação epidemiológica real. Tais mecanismos levam a uma grande repercussão no comportamento da população em geral e profissionais de saúde, causando uma alta demanda pela vacina e, por vezes, a comercialização na rede privada com valores exorbitantes e com qualidade técnica questionável. Isso ocorre em razão de que as condutas para acondicionamento, transporte e administração da vacina nem sempre seguem as especificações preconizadas por órgãos oficiais. Essa situação pode reduzir a eficácia do imunobiológico, além de causar eventos adversos relacionados à vacinação.Os fatos apresentados não deixam dúvidas que outras epidemias sazonais associadas ao vírus influenza poderão atingir o Brasil em um futuro próximo. Esforços nacionais para a redução da letalidade deste agravo devem ser prioridade para a saúde pública. A mobilização dos pesquisadores, diante das lacunas de conhecimento, seja a respeito da disponibilização da vacina contra influenza, como também da consequência da informação/comunicação sem responsabilidade em momentos de crises, é determinante para o enfrentamento da influenza no Brasil. REFERÊNCIAS1. World Health Organization. Influenza (Seasonal) [Internet]. Genebra (SU): World Health Organization; 31 jan. 2018 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018]. Disponível em: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs211/en/.2. International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses. Taxonomy [Internet]. [Lugar desconhecido]: International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses; c2017 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018]. Disponível em: https://talk.ictvonline.org/taxonomy/.3. Barros FR, Daufenbach LZ, Vicente MG, Soares MS, Siqueira M, Carmo EH. O desafio da influenza: epidemiologia e organização da vigilância no Brasil. Boletim eletrônico epidemiológico [Internet]. 2004 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018];4(1):1-7. Disponível em: http://bvsms.saude.gov.br/bvs/periodicos/boletim_eletronico_epi_ano04_n01.pdf.4. Polansky LS, Outin-Blenman S, Moen AC. Improved Global Capacity for Influenza Surveillance. Emerg Infect Dis. [Internet]. 2016 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018];22(6):993-1001. Disponível em: https://doi.org/10.3201/eid.2206.151521.5. Ministério da Saúde, Secretaria de Vigilância em Saúde. Informe técnico de influenza [Internet]. Brasília: Ministério da Saúde; 2012 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018]. Disponível em: http://portalarquivos2.saude.gov.br/images/pdf/2014/maio/22/informe-influenza-2009-2010-2011-220514.pdf.6. Ministério da Saúde. Guia para a Rede Laboratorial de Vigilância de Influenza no Brasil [Internet]. Brasília: Ministério da Saúde, 2016 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018]. Disponível em: http://bvsms.saude.gov.br/bvs/publicacoes/guia_laboratorial_influenza_vigilancia_influenza_brasil.pdf.7. Ministério da Saúde. Influenza/Gripe. Situação Epidemiológica / Dados [Internet]. Brasília (BR): Ministério da Saúde; c2013-2018 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018]. Disponível em: http://portalms.saude.gov.br/saude-de-a-z/gripe/situacao-epidemiologica-dados.8. Srivastav A, Santibanez TA, Lu PJ, Stringer MC, Dever JA, Bostwick M, et al. Preventive behaviors adults report using to avoid catching or spreading influenza, United States, 2015-16 influenza season. PLoS One [Internet]. 2018 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018];13(3):e0195085. Diponível em: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0195085.9. Demicheli V, Jefferson T, Di Pietrantonj C, Ferroni E, Thorning S, Thomas RE, et al. Vaccines for preventing influenza in the elderly. Cochrane Database Syst Rev [Internet]. 2018 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018];(2):CD004876. Disponível em: https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD004876.pub4.10. Durand LO, Cheng PY, Palekar R, Clara W, Jara J, Cerpa M, et al. Timing of influenza epidemics and vaccines in the American tropics, 2002-2008, 2011-2014. Influenza Other Respir Viruses [Internet]. 2016 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018];10(3):170-5. Disponível em: https://doi.org/10.1111/irv.12371.11. Freitas ARR, Donalisio MR. Excess of Mortality in Adults and Elderly and Circulation of Subtypes of Influenza Virus in Southern Brazil. Front Immunol [Internet]. 2018 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018];8;8:1903. Disponível em: https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2017.01903.12. Raboni SM, Moura FEA, Caetano BC, Avanzi VM, Pereira LA, Nogueira MB, et al. Global Influenza Hospital-based Surveillance Network (GIHSN): results of surveillance of influenza and other respiratory viruses in hospitalised patients in Brazil, 2015. BMJ Open [Internet]. 2018 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018];8(2):e017603. Disponível em: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2017-017603.13. Mello WA, Paiva TM, Ishida MA, Benega MA, Santos MC, Viboud C, et al. The dilemma of influenza vaccine recommendations when applied to the tropics: the Brazilian case examined under alternative scenarios. PLoS One [Internet]. 2009 [acesso em: 20 jul. 2018];4(4):e5095. Disponível em: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0005095.

In January of 1908 H. Addington Bruce, a writer for the North American Review, observed that "On every street, at every corner, we meet the neurasthenics" (qtd. in Lears, 50). "Discovered" by the neurologist George M. Beard in 1880, neurasthenia was a nervous disorder characterized by a "lack of nerve force" and comprised of a host of neuroses clustered around an overall paralysis of the will. Historian Barbara Will notes that there were "thousands of men and women at the turn of the century who claimed to be ‘neurasthenics,’" among them Theodore Roosevelt, Edith Wharton, William and Henry James, and Beard himself. These neurasthenics had free roam over the American psychiatric landscape from the date of Beard’s diagnosis until the 1920s, when more accurate diagnostic tools began to subdivide the nearly uninterpretably wide variety of symptoms falling under the rubric of "neurasthenic." By then, however, nearly every educated American had suffered from (or known someone who had) the debilitating "disease"--including Willa Cather, who in The Professor’s House would challenge her readers to acknowledge and engage with the cultural phenomenon of neurasthenia. Cultural historian T.J. Jackson Lears, long a student of neurasthenia, defines it as an "immobilizing, self-punishing depression" stemming from "endless self-analysis" and "morbid introspection" (47, 49). What is especially interesting about the disease, for Lears and other scholars, is that it is a culture-bound syndrome, predicated not upon individual experience, but upon the cultural and economic forces at play during the late nineteenth century. Barbara Will writes that neurasthenia was "double-edged": "a debilitating disease and [...] the very condition of the modern American subject" (88). Interestingly, George Beard attributed neurasthenia to the changes wracking his culture: Neurasthenia is the direct result of the five great changes of modernity: steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women. (qtd. in Will, 94) For Beard, neurasthenia was a peculiarly modern disease, the result of industrialization and of the ever-quickening pace of commercial and intellectual life. Jackson Lears takes Beard’s attribution a step further, explaining that "as larger frameworks of meaning weakened, introspection focused on the self alone and became ‘morbid’" (49). These frameworks of meaning--religious, political, psychosexual--were under steady assault in Beard’s time from commodifying and secularizing movements in America. Self-scrutiny, formerly yoked to Protestant salvation (and guilt), became more insular and isolating, resulting in the ultimate modern malady, neurasthenia. While Willa Cather may have inherited Beard’s and her culture’s assumptions of illness, it ultimately appears that Cather’s depiction of neurasthenia is a highly vexed one, both sympathetic and troubled, reflecting a deep knowledge of the condition and an ongoing struggle with the rationalization of scientific psychology. As an intellectual, she was uniquely positioned to both suffer from the forces shaping the new disease and to study them with a critical eye. Godfrey St. Peter, the anxious protagonist of The Professor’s House, becomes then a character that readers of Cather’s day would recognize as a neurasthenic: a "brain-worker," hard-charging and introspective, and lacking in what Beard would call "nerve force," the psychological stoutness needed to withstand modernity’s assault on the self. Moreover, St. Peter is not a lone sufferer, but is instead emblematic of a culture-wide affliction--part of a larger polity constantly driven to newer heights of production, consumption, and subsequent affliction. Jackson Lears theorizes that "neurasthenia was a product of overcivilization" (51), of consumer culture and endemic commodification. Beard himself characterized neurasthenia as an "American disease," a malady integral to the rationalizing, industrializing American economy (31). Cather reinforces the neurasthenic’s exhaustion and inadequacy as St. Peter comes across his wife flirting with Louis Marsellus, prompting the professor to wonder, "Beaux-fils, apparently, were meant by Providence to take the husband’s place when husbands had ceased to be lovers" (160). Not only does this point to the sexual inadequacy and listlessness characteristic of neurasthenia, but the diction here reinforces the modus operandi of the commodity culture--when an old model is used up, it is simply replaced by a newer, better model. Interestingly, Cather’s language itself often mirrors Beard’s. St. Peter at one point exclaims to Lillian, in a beatific reverie: "I was thinking [...] about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer, at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him" (156). The Professor’s "symptom of hopelessness," Beard might explain, "appears to be similar to that of morbid fear--an instinctive consciousness of inadequacy for the task before us. We are hopeless because our nerve force is so reduced that the mere holding on to life seems to be a burden too heavy for us" (49). Both Beard and Cather, then, zero in on the crushing weight of modern life for the neurasthenic. The Professor here aches for rest and isolation--he, in Beard’s language, "fears society," prompting Lillian to fear that he is "’becoming lonely and inhuman’" (162). This neurasthenic craving for isolation becomes much more profound in Book III of the novel, when St. Peter is almost completely estranged from his family. Although he feels he loves them, he "could not live with his family again" upon their return from Europe (274). "Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed" (275). St. Peter’s estrangement is not only with his family (an estrangement perhaps rationalized by the grasping or otherwise distasteful St. Peter clan), but with the human family. It is a solipsistic retreat from contact and effort, the neurasthenic’s revulsion for work of any kind. Neurasthenia, if left untreated, can become deadly. Beard explains: "A certain amount of nerve strength is necessary to supply the courage requisite for simple existence. Abstaining from dying demands a degree of force" (49). Compare this to the scene near the end of the narrative in which St. Peter, sleeping on the couch, nearly dies: When St. Peter at last awoke, the room was pitch-black and full of gas. He was cold and numb, felt sick and rather dazed. The long-anticipated coincidence had happened, he realized. The storm had blown the stove out and the window shut. The thing to do was to get up and open the window. But suppose he did not get up--? How far was a man required to exert himself against accident? [...] He hadn’t lifted his hand against himself--was he required to lift it for himself? (276) This classic scene, variously read as a suicide attempt or as an accident, can be understood as the neurasthenic’s complete collapse. The Professor’s decision is made solely in terms of effort; this is not a moral or philosophical decision, but one of physiological capacity. He is unwilling to "exert" the energy necessary to save himself, unwilling to "lift his hand" either for or against himself. Here is the prototypical neurasthenic fatigue--almost suicidal, but ultimately too passive and weak to even take that course of action. Accidental gassing is a supremely logical death for the neurasthenic. This appropriateness is reinforced by the Professor at the end of the narrative, when he remembers his near death: Yet when he was confronted by accidental extinction, he had felt no will to resist, but had let chance take its way, as it had done with him so often. He did not remember springing up from the couch, though he did remember a crisis, a moment of acute, agonized strangulation. (282) Again, the Professor is a passive figure, couch-ridden, subject to the whims of chance and his own lack of nerve. He is saved by Augusta, though, and does somehow manage to carry on with his life, if in a diminished way. We cannot accredit his survival to clinical treatment of neurasthenia, but perhaps his vicarious experience on the mesa with Tom Outland can account for his fortitude. Treatment of neurasthenia, according to Tom Lutz, "aimed at a reconstitution of the subject in terms of gender roles" (32). S. Weir Mitchell, a leading psychiatrist of the day, treated many notable neurasthenics. Female patients, in line with turn-of-the-century models of female decorum, were prescribed bed rest for up to several months, and were prohibited from all activity and visitors. (Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s "The Yellow Wallpaper" has long been considered a critique of Mitchell’s "rest cure" for women. Interestingly, St. Peter’s old study has yellow wall paper.) Treatments for men, again consistent with contemporary gender roles, emphasized vigorous exercise, often in natural settings: Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Eakins, Frederic Remington, and Owen Wister were all sent to the Dakotas for rough-riding exercise cures [...] Henry James was sent to hike in the Alps, and William James continued to prescribe vigorous mountain hikes for himself[.] (32) Depleted of "nerve force," male neurasthenics were admonished to replenish their reserves in rugged, survivalist outdoor settings. Beard documents the treatment of one "Mr. O," whom, worn out by "labor necessitated by scholarly pursuits," is afflicted by a settled melancholia, associated with a morbid and utterly baseless fear of financial ruin...he was as easily exhausted physically as mentally. He possessed no reserve force, and gave out utterly whenever he attempted to overstep the bounds of the most ordinary effort. [As part of his treatment] He journeyed to the West, visited the Yellowstone region, and at San Francisco took steamer for China [...] and returned a well man, nor has he since relapsed into his former condition. (139-41) Beard’s characterization of "Mr. O" is fascinating in several ways. First, he is the prototypical neurasthenic--worn out, depressed, full of "baseless" fears. More interestingly, for the purposes of this study, part of the patient’s cure is effected in the "Yellowstone region," which would ultimately be made a national park by neurasthenic outdoors man Theodore Roosevelt. This natural space, hewn from the wilds of the American frontier, is a prototypical refuge for nervous "brain-workers" in need of rejuvenation. This approach to treatment is especially intriguing given the setting of Book II of The Professor's House: an isolated Mesa in the Southwest. While St. Peter himself doesn’t undertake an exercise cure, "Tom Outland’s Story" does mimic the form and rhetoric of treatment for male neurasthenics, possibly accounting for the odd narrative structure of the novel. Cather, then, not only acknowledges the cultural phenomenon of neurasthenia, but incorporates it in the structure of the text. Outland’s experience on the mesa (mediated, we must remember, by the neurasthenic St. Peter, who relates the tale) is consistent with what Jackson Lears has termed the "cult of strenuousity" prevalent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. According to Lears neurasthenics often sought refuge in "a vitalistic cult of energy and process; and a parallel recovery of the primal, irrational sources in the human psyche, forces which had been obscured by the evasive banality of modern culture" (57). Outland, discovering the mesa valley for the first time, explains that the air there "made my mouth and nostrils smart like charged water, seemed to go to my head a little and produce a kind of exaltation" (200). Like Roosevelt and other devotees of the exercise cure, Outland (and St. Peter, via the mediation) is re-"charged" by the primal essence of the mesa. The Professor later laments, "his great drawback was [...] the fact that he had not spent his youth in the great dazzling South-west country which was the scene of his explorers’ adventures" (258). Interestingly, Outland’s rejuvenation on the mesa is cast by Cather in hyperbolically masculine terms. The notoriously phallic central tower of the cliff city, for instance, may serve as a metaphor for recovered sexual potency: It was beautifully proportioned, that tower, swelling out to a larger girth a little above the base, then growing slender again. There was something symmetrical and powerful about the swell of the masonry. The tower was the fine thing that held all the jumble of houses together and made them mean something. It was red in color, even on that grey day. (201) Neurasthenics embraced "premodern symbols as alternatives to the vagueness of liberal Protestantism or the sterility of nineteenth-century positivism" (Lears xiii). The tower stands in striking contrast to St. Peter’s sexless marriage with Lillian, potentially reviving the Professor’s sagging neurasthenic libido. The tower also serves, in Outland’s mind, to forge meaning out of the seemingly random cluster of houses: "The notion struck me like a rifle ball that this mesa had once been like a bee-hive; it was full of little cluff-hung villages, it had been the home of a powerful tribe" (202). Outland’s discovery, cast in martial terms ("rifle ball"), reinscribes the imperialistic tendencies of the exercise cure and of Tom’s archeological endeavor itself. Tom Lutz notes that the exercise cure, steeped in Rooseveltian rhetoric, exemplified "a polemic for cultural change, a retraining, presented as a ‘return’ to heroic, natural, and manly values...The paternalism of Roosevelt’s appeal made sense against the same understanding of role which informed the cures for neurasthenia" (36). Outland seems to unconsciously concur, reflecting that "Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality, is a sacred spot" (220-1). While Outland does have genuine admiration for the tribe, his language is almost always couched in terms of martial struggle, of striving against implacable odds. On a related note, George Kennan, writing in a 1908 McClure’s Magazine edited by Cather, proposed that rising suicide rates among the educated by cured by a "cultivation of what may be called the heroic spirit" (228). Cather was surely aware of this masculinizing, imperializing response to neurasthenic ennui--her poem, "Prairie Dawn," appears at the end of Kennan’s article! Outland’s excavation of Cliff City and its remains subsequently becomes an imperializing gesture, in spite of his respect for the culture. What does this mean, though, for a neurasthenic reading of The Professor’s House? In part, it acknowledges Cather’s response to and incorporation of a cultural phenomenon into the text in question. Additionally, it serves to clarify Cather’s critique of masculinist American culture and of the gendered treatment of neurasthenia. This critique is exemplified by Cather’s depiction of "Mother Eve": "Her mouth was open as if she were screaming, and her face, through all those years, had kept a look of terrible agony" (214-15). Not only does this harrowing image undermine Outland’s romantic depiction of the tribe, but it points to the moral bankruptcy of the cult of strenuousity. It is easy, Cather seems to argue, for Roosevelt and his ilk to "rough it" in the wilderness to regain their vigor, but the "real-life" wilderness experience is a far harsher and more dangerous prospect. Cather ultimately does not romanticize the mesa--she problematizes it as a site for neurasthenic recovery. More importantly, this vexed reading of the treatment suggests a vexed reading of neurasthenia and of "American Nervousness" itself. Ultimately, in spite of his best efforts to recover the intense experience of his past and of Tom Outland’s, St. Peter fails. As Mathias Schubnell explains, Cather’s "central character is trapped between a modern urban civilization to which he belongs against his will, and a pastoral, earth-bound world he yearns for but cannot regain" (97). This paradox is exemplified by the Professor’s early lament to Lillian, "’it’s been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young’" (94). The reader, of course, recognizes the absurdity of this image--an absurdity strongly reinforced by the image of the deceased "Mother Eve" figure. These overcivilized men, Cather suggests, have no conception of what intense experience might be. That experience has been replaced, the Professor explains, by rationalizing, industrializing forces in American culture: Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures...nor any new sins--not one! Indeed, it has taken our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin...I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance--you impoverish them. (68) St. Peter, the neurasthenic humanist, gets here at the heart of his (and America’s) sickness--it has replaced the numinous and the sacred with the banal and the profane. The disorder he suffers from, once termed a sin, has become "physiological," as has his soul. It is worthwhile to contrast the Professor’s lament with Beard’s supremely rational boast: "It would seem, indeed, that diseases which are here described represent a certain amount of force in the body which, if our knowledge of physiological chemistry were more precise, might be measured in units" (115). The banal, utterly practical measuring of depression, of melancholia, of humanity’s every whim and caprice, Cather suggests, has dulled the luster of human existence. The Professor’s tub, then, becomes an emblem of the relentless stripping away of all that is meaningful and real in Cather’s culture: "Many a night, after blowing out his study lamp, he had leaped into that tub, clad in his pyjamas, to give it another coat of some one of the many paints that were advertised to behave like porcelain, but didn’t" (12). Porcelain here becomes the religion or art which once sustained the race, replaced by the false claims of science. The Professor, though, seems too world-weary, too embittered to actually turn to religious faith. Perhaps God is dead in his world, eliminated by the Faustian quest for scientific knowledge. "His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him" (264). Godfrey St. Peter, like the rest of the neurasthenics, is doomed to an incurable sickness, victim of a spiritual epidemic which, Cather suggests, will not soon run its course. References Beard, George M. A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia). A. D. Rockwell, ed. New York: E.B. Treat & Company, 1905. Cather, Willa. The Professor’s House. London: Virago, 1981. Fisher-Wirth, Ann. "Dispossession and Redemption in the Novels of Willa Cather." Cather Studies 1 (1990): 36-54. Harvey, Sally Peltier. Predefining the American Dream: The Novels of Willa Cather. Toronto: Associated UP, 1995. Hilgart, John. "Death Comes for the Aesthete: Commodity Culture and the Artifact in Cather’s The Professor’s House." Studies in the Novel 30:3 (Fall 1998): 377-404. Kennan, George. McClure’s Magazine 30:2 (June 1908): 218-228. Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation American Culture. New York: Pantheon Books, 1981. Lutz, Tom. American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Schubnell, Matthias. "The Decline of America: Willa Cather’s Spenglerian Vision in The Professor’s House." Cather Studies 2 (1993): 92-117. Stouck, David. "Willa Cather and The Professor’s House: ‘Letting Go with the Heart." Western American Literature 7 (1972): 13-24. Will, Barbara. "Nervous Systems, 1880-1915." American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique. Tim Armstrong, ed. New York: NYUP, 1996. 86-100. Links The Willa Cather Electronic Archive The Mower's Tree (Cather Colloquium Newsletter) George Beard information